There are worse outcomes to a golf game than a bad score. Based on the proceedings of this past weekend’s conference of the National Association of Scholars, Bowdoin College’s president, Barry Mills, may be regretting his day on a course three years ago with Thomas D. Klingenstein, a Manhattan investment banker who did not see eye to eye with him on the subject of how liberal-arts colleges should operate.
Mr. Klingenstein, who also is chairman of the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, went on to bankroll a major study by the National Association of Scholars of Bowdoin College’s curriculum, student activities, and campus values. Although the association does not plan to release a full report on the Bowdoin study’s findings until April, comments made by several panelists at the group’s conference suggest that the private Maine college has been teed up for the verbal equivalent of a beating with a nine iron.
Michael T. Toscano, director of research projects for the traditionalist scholars’ association, told an audience at the weekend gathering here that the forthcoming Bowdoin report will show that the college has replaced general-education requirements with “curricular incoherence,” setting students “loose to find themselves.”
He said the report also will show how Bowdoin has become “moralistic but not moral,” with the administration being “aggressively intolerant of dissenting voices” on the campus while, at the same time, having policies on student sexual conduct that promote the casual sexual encounters associated with “hook-up culture.”
Other speakers on the same panel mocked a video of a Bowdoin student rally, staged in respond to a racist incident on the campus, at which students stood up and said things like, “I am black, I am gay, and I am Bowdoin.” Ashley Thorne, director of the NAS’s Center for the Study of the Curriculum, made a point of introducing herself to the audience as “a redhead.”
For his part, Mr. Klingenstein praised the association’s forthcoming report on Bowdoin as “a very detailed ethnographic study” in which “we name names.” Introducing himself to the audience as a businessman, rather than a scholar, he said that “90 percent of everything is marketing” and encouraged the audience to offer him suggestions for marketing the Bowdoin report to the public.
“What matters here,” he said, “is how we can sell this product—great buzz, great pressure. We want Bowdoin to respond.”
‘A Vibrant Organization’
Scott Hood, a spokesman for Bowdoin, said in an e-mail on Saturday that the college had no comment on the report because only portions of it have been released. Mr. Toscano and Peter W. Wood, president of the scholars’ association, have said that Bowdoin’s faculty and administration “have not endorsed, participated in, or cooperated with our research.”
Mr. Wood has said that the report on Bowdoin is intended as a broader critique of the state of the nation’s nearly 230 selective liberal-arts colleges. Much of the weekend conference, which ran from Friday afternoon through Saturday, was devoted to lamenting the state of liberal education at the nation’s colleges. It included sessions in which colleges were accused of prodding students to advance liberal concepts of social justice and of neglecting instruction about Western civilization in favor of multiculturalism.
Other sessions focused on accusing colleges of lowering their standards to enroll racially and ethnically diverse student bodies, or warnings that colleges’ costs and their enrollments have risen to unsustainably high levels, considering increased competition from other higher-education providers and the small economic returns many students derive from getting a college degree.
The association’s production of the Bowdoin study with financing from Mr. Klingenstein is in keeping with its increased reliance on grants awarded for specific research projects. Especially since the 2008 economic downturn, the group has found major donors less willing to give it funds with no strings attached simply to finance its operations.
In both his opening and closing remarks at the conference, Mr. Wood took issue with a recent Chronicle article’s characterization of the NAS as struggling, especially when it comes to attracting new members and philanthropic support. He called the NAS “a vibrant organization” and described last weekend’s conference, which drew about 150 participants to the Harvard Club of New York City, as the best attended in the group’s history. The NAS has not held an annual conference in recent years.
Tiff on a Golf Course
Exactly what happened on the Maine golf course to cause the rift between Mr. Klingenstein and President Mills of Bowdoin is a matter of dispute.
Mr. Mills is the first to have spoken of the incident publicly, in a convocation speech he delivered at his college at the beginning of the 2010-11 academic year. Although he did not mention Mr. Klingenstein by name, he described how an opponent in a golf foursome a few weeks earlier, a Williams College graduate, had twice interrupted his backswing with criticisms of Bowdoin.
The first time, he said, the opponent had said he would never support Bowdoin because it is “a ridiculous liberal school that brings all the wrong students to campus for all the wrong reasons.” The second time, he said, his opponent had said he would not donate to Bowdoin—or Williams, for that matter—"because of all your misplaced and misguided diversity efforts.”
“We won the match and the money. But I walked off the course in despair and with deep concern,” said Mr. Mills, who used the anecdote as a jumping-off point to describe how he had reflected on and countered various criticisms of liberal-arts colleges such as his own.
In an essay published in April 2011 in The Claremont Review of Books, Mr. Klingenstein said he had recognized himself in a transcript of President Mills’s speech, but had a different recollection of what transpired that day. He said that he had never interrupted Mr. Mills’s backswing and had never specifically mentioned Bowdoin, and that his comments on diversity that day had been limited to a disagreement with Mr. Mills in which he told the college president he sees colleges as engaged in “too much celebration of racial and ethnic difference (particularly as it applies to blacks), and not enough celebration of our common American identity.”
“He 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,” Mr. Klingenstein wrote.
Mr. Klingenstein said reading the transcript of the college president’s speech had inspired him to examine Bowdoin’s American-history courses and to conclude that every such course offered there “is social or cultural history that looks at the world through the prism of race, class, and gender.”
At last week’s conference he recalled subsequently meeting Mr. Wood at Bowdoin, where both were speaking an event sponsored by a Republican students’ club, and reaching agreement with the NAS president to join in producing the Bowdoin report.
