The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World

David Feith

Wall Street Journal

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The school?s ideological pillars would likely be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to American higher education lately. There?s the obsession with race, class, gender and sexuality as the essential forces of history and markers of political identity. There?s the dedication to ?sustainability,? or saving the planet from its imminent destruction by the forces of capitalism. And there are the paeans to ?global citizenship,? or loving all countries except one?s own.

The Klingenstein report nicely captures the illiberal or fallacious aspects of this campus doctrine, but the paper?s true contribution is in recording some of its absurd manifestations at Bowdoin. For example, the college has ?no curricular requirements that center on the American founding or the history of the nation.? Even history majors aren?t required to take a single course in American history. In the History Department, no course is devoted to American political, military, diplomatic or intellectual history?the only ones available are organized around some aspect of race, class, gender or sexuality.

One of the few requirements is that Bowdoin students take a yearlong freshman seminar. Some of the 37 seminars offered this year: ?Affirmative Action and U.S. Society,? ?Fictions of Freedom,? ?Racism,? ?Queer Gardens? (which ?examines the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and traces how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces?), ?Sexual Life of Colonialism? and ?Modern Western Prostitutes.?

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David Feith: The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World ? WSJ.com.

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