Sinister suspicions are afoot concerning the nascent Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civiliation at Hamilton College, Inside Higher Education notes in a piece today.
The chair of the Faculty Assembly, John O’Neil, in an interview prior to the faculty resolution’s adoption, said that “there are people on the faculty who think this center has an explicit, right tendency.”
Descriptions of the center’s values for its programming (lectures, seminars and conferences, among other things) are full of the kind of language that many on the right say is lacking in much of American academe, and that some professors see as an indication that the center will have an ideological agenda.
Read a bit of the mission statement:
The Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization (AHC) proceeds under the premise that the reasoned study of Western civilization, its distinctive achievements as well as its distinctive failures, will further the search for truth and provide the ethical basis necessary for civilized life. The AHC aspires to create an educational environment of the highest standards in which evidence and argument prevail over ideology and cant.
Nefarious!