My article on the collapse of the Alexander Hamilton Center at Hamilton College appears in the hot-off-the-presses issue of NR — available now to digital subscribers.

Here’s how it starts:

On August 24, 2006, Hamilton College president Joan Stewart, one of her top deans, and three professors toasted the birth of the Alexander Hamilton Center. They poured champagne, clinked glasses, and anticipated a bright future for their new project. “We drank from a bottle of Dom Pérignon that I had purchased for the occasion,” says Robert Paquette, a history professor who was to become the center’s first director. The group was in a festive mood — and a couple of them even joked that they should go light on the bubbly because they were supposed to meet with parents of incoming students later in the day. …
By the time the trees started changing colors, however, the center had collided with left-wing professors who couldn’t abide the concept of a campus program whose resources were placed beyond their grasp. And before the fall semester was over, the college’s board of trustees had shot down the Hamilton Center. The debacle is a study in political correctness gone haywire — and it offers a cautionary tale for conservatives as they struggle to establish small beachheads on hostile campuses.