"Bowdoin president defends school after report" by Jenna Russell | Globe Staff, April 11, 2013
The president of Bowdoin College responded forcefully Wednesday to a scathing, 360-page critique of the small, selective Maine college released last week by a conservative-leaning higher education advocacy group.
“Let me be clear and direct: The report by the National Association of Scholars is mean-spirited and personal,” Bowdoin president Barry Mills wrote in a statement posted online at the college and e-mailed to nearly 20,000 alumni and parents of current students. “It exaggerates its claims and misrepresents both what we do at Bowdoin and what we stand for.”
The response from Mills lagged a week behind the report, titled “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” The report is being championed by the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
A college spokesman said that officials needed time to review the lengthy document but grew concerned as misrepresentations of the school pulled from the report gained traction on talk radio and in the blogosphere this week, prompting some angry calls to college offices from anonymous critics.
The goal of the report, say its authors, was not to single out Bowdoin for criticism but to use the school as an example....
The origins of the report have raised questions about its intent.
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Its funder, New York money manager Thomas Klingenstein, has a contentious history with Mills dating to 2010, when the two men first met on a golf course in Maine.
Some personal spat is front page news in my Metro section?
A few weeks later, Mills briefly described their encounter in a speech at Bowdoin. Without naming Klingenstein, the college president said his golf opponent had told him he would not donate to Bowdoin — or to Williams College, Klingenstein’s alma mater, for that matter — because of their “misguided diversity efforts,” a pronouncement Mills said left him with “despair and deep concern.”
Word of the speech got back to Klingenstein, who disputed Mills’s account, which he felt wrongly portrayed him as a racist. He wrote his own essay about their conversation, explaining his concerns with the promotion of diversity on campus: “Too much celebration of racial and ethnic difference . . . and not enough celebration of our common American identity.” Published in a conservative journal, his piece attracted the attention of Bowdoin students, who invited him to campus in 2011....
Related: Sunday Globe Special: Offensive Oz
Of course, you may be racist and not even know it.
Also see: Karl Rove draws protest at UMass
Speaking of such s***ts:
A foreword by William Bennett, a former US secretary of Education, goes further: The college “effectively promotes sexual promiscuity,” he writes, and even “fosters . . . a disregard for America.”
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Around the country, specialists said the uproar at Bowdoin comes amid renewed criticism of the liberal arts....
Many of the report’s conclusions echo longstanding criticism of liberal arts schools....
The only problem is it is a worthless degree. I know because I have one.
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