By Bill Robbins | February 02, 2015 at 02:39 PM EST |
No Comments
New Hampshire's state motto is "Live free or die." The Granite State has a proud history of Yankee self-reliance (even though New Hampshire baseball fans tend to root for the Red Sox). Dartmouth College is faced with a progressive liberal government edict: Comply or die. Well, not die, but, suffer from progressive liberal hissy fits over gender differences, free speech, free association, and due process. Progressive liberals cannot tolerate such things.
Following is a copy of my online comment to the 2/2/15 Wall Street Journal Opinion piece about Dartmouth's newly announced efforts to "comply or die."
As a Dartmouth alumnus, I am glad that President Hanlon did not call for the elimination of frats and sororities on campus. However, I feel that the WSJ opinion piece glosses over what is really happening at Dartmouth, as a microcosm for excessive federal government influence on U.S. university and college campuses.
Let's be clear: every step taken by Dartmouth is politically motivated and driven by the Obama Administration's progressive liberal agenda. As with all top schools, Dartmouth, with its hospital and engineering school, in particular, depends on federal grants to fund research, as well as to fund post-graduate positions. Faculty depend on federal grants. Dartmouth's faculty is overwhelmingly Democratic: A recent study, cited in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, found that 88% of political donations by Dartmouth faculty went to Democratic candidates. Progressive liberal academics have driven policy making in Washington since 2008. All federal grant programs require strict compliance with federal regulations. Thus, as with Title IX regulations, colleges across the U.S. are scurrying to bring their policies into compliance with federal regulations that are the result of a progressive liberal agenda that is obsessed with matters of gender, diversity, political correctness, and top-down social engineering on a grand scale.
The boldest step President Hanlon could have taken would have been to renounce federal funding at Dartmouth, at least symbolically, to send an unambiguous message to Washington to butt-out. Just imagine the impact of such a pronouncement.
William L. Robbins, Class of 1983