Education

What caused the Bowdoin College diversity dustup [VIDEO]

Font Size:

In an exclusive interview with Ginni Thomas,  National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood details how a disagreement over diversity at a small liberal arts college in Maine has brought campus groupthink into the public eye. Following a lengthy report on Bowdoin College’s lack of intellectual diversity, culture warriors on both sides are doing battle over the 219-year-old school. Here’s the Bowdoin story:

It’s been nearly three years since a golf game between a conservative philanthropist and a college president set off a high-profile disagreement over racial preferences and intellectual diversity on campus, but the fight over Bowdoin College continues to make news.

Tom Klingenstein, founder of the investment management firm Cohen, Klingenstein & Marks, and President Barry Mills of Bowdoin College, a liberal arts school in Brunswick, Maine, were hitting the links when they got into a disagreement about the future of liberal arts education and the college’s “diversity efforts” but it continues to make news.

What exactly happened on that golf course is a matter of some dispute — Mills, who accused Klingenstein of interrupting his backswing,  won’t return phone calls from The Daily Caller — but what is not in contention is that Klingenstein and Mills disagreed about the state of modern academia, specifically “diversity efforts” or racial preferences.

Mills fired the first shot in a convocation address that focused, ironically enough, on Bowdoin’s lack of intellectual diversity in 2010 where he mentioned the golf game.  But he did not mention Klingenstein by name, only stating that he was a conservative philanthropist who did not donate to his alma mater, Williams College.

Mills criticized the unnamed philanthropist for not giving money to his alma mater and to American higher education and quoted Klingenstein as saying, “I would never support Bowdoin or Williams (his alma mater) because of all your misplaced and misguided diversity efforts.”

Klingenstein took offense and, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, argued that Mills “by making me a racist (or at the very least a buffoon)…did just what he warned his audience against: he dismissed me.”

Klingenstein didn’t back down or cower to the false charge of racism. He replied by commissioning the first “full-fledged ethnography” of an American liberal arts college.

Eighteen months and hundreds of research hours later, the report What Does Bowdoin Teach examined Bowdoin’s commitment to intellectual diversity, its curriculum, and civic identity. The report found the prestigious Brunswick, Maine school lacking.

Authored by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano of the National Association of Scholars, the 360-page and 1157-footnote scholarly report has touched off a debate about higher education, with Bloomberg, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Rush Limbaugh Show all weighing in.

Wood is careful not to be seen as picking on Bowdoin. While “circumstance gave us Bowdoin,” Wood explained in First Things, “we could have studied Bates or Colby — if we had wanted to stick to Maine. Or Middlebury, Amherst, Williams, Smith, Wellesley, Swarthmore, Haverford, Pomona, Reed, or . . . well, suffice it to say we had a choice of dozens of small colleges that present a similar profile: formally committed to the liberal arts, highly selective in admissions, well-regarded for the quality of their academic programs, and quite openly enthusiastic about a handful of contentious concepts…includ[ing] diversity, multiculturalism, constructivist views of ‘gender,’ and environmental sustainability.”

Bowdoin’s administration, however, is not pleased.

The college’s public relations department is doing damage control while its students are attacking the philanthropist and others calling for ideological diversity.

Mills issued a statement last month—a week after the report was issued—which addressed only a few of the report’s charges. “He doesn’t seem to have taken the report’s larger charges seriously,” Klingenstein told TheDC.

“What makes this report important is its detail and comprehensiveness, which gives it richness and authenticity,” said Klingenstein, who chairs the Claremont Institute.

To name but one example, the college’s freshmen seminar offerings sometimes tend toward the faddish, with titles like “Queer Gardens,” “Beyond Pocahontas: Native American Stereotypes,” “Sexual Life of Colonialism: Modern Western Prostitutes.” The report also detailed radical environmentalism, feminism, and racialism and pointed out its lack of traditional courses and commitment to intellectual diversity.

Bowdoin’s lack of commitment to intellectual diversity may begin with President Mills himself, who declined repeated requests to speak to TheDC, and who continues to maintain that the episode with Klingenstein occurred as he described it.

Mills also criticized assistant professor of economics Steve Meardon after Meardon wrote a letter to Mills encouraging his colleagues to take the report’s charges thrust seriously—only to be told by Mills “to have the guts” to make his views known publicly.

It’s a tactic that recalls Klingenstein’s treatment. “[Mills] didn’t like my views, so he turned me into a backswing interrupting, Bowdoin-hating boor who wants to return to the segregated days of Jim Crow,” explained Klingenstein in the April 2011 issue of The Claremont Review of Books. “I explained my disapproval of ‘diversity’ as it generally has been implemented on college campuses: too much celebration of racial and ethnic difference,” coupled with “not enough celebration of our common American identity.”

President Mills declined repeated requests to speak with TheDC via phone. Instead, press inquiries were sent to Scott Hood, Bowdoin’s vice president for communication, who declined to answer any direct questions about how Mills can purport to support intellectual diversity while also name calling those who disagree with him. Hood repeatedly declined to answer whether or not he thought Mills’ treatment had been appropriate and directed me to their press release.

Hood also directed me to an editorial that had appeared hours earlier by the Bowdoin Orient.

One editorial board member admitted to TheDC that while Klingensten may have had some points, the campus didn’t agree with his views on “sexual liberation, the environment, gay rights, and diversity.” She did, however, concede that there “may be a bias against conservatives” on campus. “Some students really think Bowdoin’s intellectual diversity is lacking.”

The bias may go all the way to the pages of the Bowdoin Orient’s satire issue, which depicted Klingenstein and conservative professor Jean Yarbrough, along with President Mills, engaging in a threesome and gay sex.

Mills came to Bowdoin in 2001. Appointed the head of a search committee to select the next president of the liberal arts college, he ultimately recommended himself and set about implementing his goal of diversity at any costs. And while Mills’s convocation may have put the focus on intellectual diversity at his convocation address, he has called for racial diversity since he was brought to campus.

“The greatest desire you hear here is to make the campus more diverse – racially, geographically, socioeconomically,” Mills told the Boston Globe in 2001. He was instrumental in instituting the Posse program at Bowdoin, a controversial program which sends inner city and largely underqualified students — most of them blacks and Latinos — to campus on full scholarships.”

Although we do not know the statistics for individual Posse students, we do have reason to doubt their academic qualifications as a group. A 1998 evaluation of the Posse program at Vanderbilt University found that athletes entered with an average of 1042 SAT score and maintained an average GPA of 3.13, while Posse students came in with a 900 average SAT and finished with a 2.93 average GPA. Due to the low grades of Posse students in their engineering programs, Rice and Lehigh canceled their involvement with Posse, according to the L.A. Times in 2004.

“I’m not an expert,” Mills told the Globe concerning Posse. “But you have to reach out beyond the typical places, you have to have financial aid to encourage them to be here, and, most importantly, you need to think about ways that, once people get here, they enjoy the experience and find it rewarding.”

Recalling his own time as a student at Bowdoin, Mills said, “There were very turbulent years for Bowdoin and all of higher education.” Mills continued: “Bowdoin was a much more diverse place, in some ways, than it is today. There were more African-American students. Making Bowdoin more diverse now is one of the goals of the college.”

But Bowdoin’s “understanding of diversity is literally no more than skin deep,” explained Bowdoin political science professor Jean Yarbrough in a recent letter to the editor of the Bowdoin Orient. “As a recent chair of the government department, I have seen the lengths to which the administration is willing to go to identify and recruit such candidates,” she wrote.

She continued: “Every faculty search must now include a member of the Diversity Committee, whose main purpose is to ensure that the members of the department give every consideration to diversity hires. These committee members, being drawn from other disciplines, usually have no knowledge of the field, though that does not deter them from weighing in during the selection process, sometimes quite vociferously,” she wrote.

“Where such diversity is concerned, the administration actively pushes departments to cast the net more widely and to be mindful of even unintentional bias. What’s more, it has redefined positions to increase the likelihood of attracting diversity candidates,” a move which, according to Yarbrough, actually changes Bowdoin’s curriculum.

Though she said the report overlooked some areas where Bowdoin does a good job, “much of what the NAS report describes is, I am sorry to say, spot on.”

Bowdoin remains in the crosshairs of conservative groups. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gave Bowdoin an F for a failing core curriculum. ACTA urged Mills and the Bowdoin trustees to improve their offerings for students.