Hamilton College has changed its mind and turned down plans for a $3.6 million center studying the achievements and failures of Western civilization.
The proposed Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization, funded by a gift from an alumnus, was announced in October, but in late November the college reversed course. According to a statement from the college, “Hamilton College has announced that the Alexander Hamilton Center will not be established at this time due to a lack of consensus about institutional oversight of the Center as a Hamilton program.”
Robert Paquette, a professor of American history at Hamilton, would have led the center. As Paquette indicated in a recent Clarion Call, there had been disagreement at the Clinton, N.Y., campus among faculty and Paquette. Faculty members claimed objected to what they called the “unprecedented and unacceptable autonomy” of the center.
But Paquette and others have plenty of doubt about the faculty’s true goals. In his column, Paquette asked whether any faculty member has ever expressed concerns about the “autonomy of any other faculty programmatic initiative in the last 25 years.” He doubted it.
Writing on Phi Beta Cons, a higher education blog, National Association of Scholars president Steven Balch said the troubles illustrate the problems of breaking ideological monopolies at small liberal arts colleges. “In the wake of the red carpet earlier rolled out [at Hamilton] for the likes of Susan Rosenberg and Ward Churchill, the administration’s spinelessness will surely exact a price in alumni support. But, for the time being, the college’s radical faculty have demonstrated who’s really in charge.”
Commenting after the decision, Paquette said the center was a “noble experiment that would have added immeasurably to the academic life of the college and to the education of the undergraduates.” He also said that the administration’s line in the statement was different from the level of support he had previously received from the institution.
“Please know that I regard the recent events as end of chapter, not end of story,” Paquette wrote. “The administration’s backpedaling was not unanticipated by the founders of the AHC. The center continues to exist; it has financial backing; it is an attractive scholarly product that may well attract interest from others.”
The center was going to start in 2007 with a focus an abolitionist, Gerrit Smith, who graduated from Hamilton, and in the second year was going to investigate property rights, including how the Founders understood them. The center’s charter said that the center would be devoted to “reasoned study of Western civilization, its distinctive achievements as well as its distinctive failures” and would foster “an educational environment of the highest standard in which evidence and argument prevail over ideology and cant.”
In its statement, Hamilton College said, “The College administration and trustees believed the Alexander Hamilton Center to have significant potential to enhance the educational experience of Hamilton Students and regret that it is not going forward.”