…soon, and all eyes should be on how Hamilton College’s Board of Trustees resolve it.

In a nutshell, as reported in the campus Spectator, the trustees are working on an amendment of the charter of this new center for the study of freedom, democracy and capitalism within the broader context of Western culture. The key issue is whether the change will consist in an assertion by the board of its right to exert fiduciary oversight over the center or in an attempt to undo the center’s governance structure that now protects against interference by faculty who disagree with its mission.

In a pending statement (and email to me), the founder of the center, professor of American history Robert Paquette, notes that the faculty handbook does not “say that the faculty formulates educational policies by vote of the majority of the faculty.” “Nor,” he adds, “have the faculty opponents of the AHC expressed concern about the governance of any other programmatic initiative of a faculty member.” That is, “the ‘principled’ dissent pursues a single target.”

Inside Higher Ed earlier reported (citing the Spectator) uninformed reactions against the AHC by some on campus – reactions against the purported “’conservative views’” of the center’s founders which some found “’offensive.’” Thus the motive for the present push to change the AHC’s charter might be to prevent the advance of traditional scholarly work on Western thought. Perhaps the campus left just viscerally dislikes the kinds of badly neglected topics the center intends to address, such as (according to Paquette) how “the abolitionist understanding of freedom…contributed to the elaboration of a capitalist system,” how “property rights…were understood by the founders” and “the importance of private property rights as a guardian of other rights,” and “the relationship between [the] hallowed Declaration of Independence [and] the Constitution.”

The college trustees must not permit this distinguished scholarly project, very much to the benefit of Hamilton and the nation, to be derailed.