The objectivity and effectiveness of The Bowdoin Project produced by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) should be determined by assessing the methods by which the authors arrived at their conclusions. Such a determination has not yet been made by most commentators. 

Yet, an analysis of these methods reveals the severe limitations of the report. Peter Wood and Michael Toscano, the authors of the report, only relied on internal documents and make no in-depth inquiry of current educational content to determine what Bowdoin teaches. These major weaknesses neutralize the report’s usefulness.

The most serious weakness is revealed in a preliminary document, not included in the final report, which explains that the authors’ information is based entirely on internal Bowdoin documents. While Wood and Toscano reviewed a substantial amount of printed material and produced a total of over 400 pages, they did not broadly review course syllabi, reading lists and assignments. They made comments about first-year seminars without an in-depth understanding of the options. 

I was pleased to read Professor Patrick Rael’s article in the Orient responding to “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” Professor Rael and I disagree about many things but I welcome his comments as at least an effort to reckon with some of the substance of our critique of liberal arts education at Bowdoin.  

As to the disagreement: Rael draws a colorful picture of what the National Association of Scholars (NAS) report “presupposes,” and then spends his time knocking the stuffing out of the presuppositions. 

If I were to declare that the Bowdoin history department presupposes the existence of unicorns, I could with similar enthusiasm debunk the history department. But the history department doesn’t presuppose unicorns, and the NAS doesn’t presuppose, as Rael would have it, a time “when scholarship was both apolitical and non-ideological.” Nor do we call for a form of history that ignores black people, Native Americans and women. Nor we do believe history should exclude “the marginalized.” Unicorns, unicorns. Rael has offered a whole herd of unicorns. 

The discipline of history has become the subject of much attention in discussions of the National Association of Scholars report, “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” While President Mills has rebutted some of the most egregious errors recently made regarding history at Bowdoin, a deeper response seems fitting. What follows are my personal views, which do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my colleagues in the Department of History or the College.

As the controversy has shown, many self-described conservatives have objected to the intrusion of “multiculturalism” into the academy, and particularly into the teaching of our nation’s past. Their concern seems to presuppose a time—a point before we took seriously the historical plight of people of color, or addressed the neglected histories of women or workers—when scholarship was both apolitical and non-ideological.

Of course, no such time ever existed. The neglect of women as social actors, of differences in social class, or of the role people of color have played in our national story—these topics have never been ideologically or politically neutral. Such neglect, in fact, buttressed structures of power that denied marginalized social groups the right to participate equally in the promise and benefits of American life: black people and Native Americans had no claim on the nation because they had no history, gender did not matter because the public forum was assumed to be male, and considerations of class were unnecessary because class did not exist in America.

“It’s time to respond.” 

So wrote President Barry Mills in “Setting the Record Straight,” a letter addressing the National Association of Scholars’ (NAS) “attack” on the College, which was posted to the Bowdoin Daily Sun (BDS) on Wednesday morning. Mills had remained conspicuously silent on the subject of “The Bowdoin Project,” a 360-page report funded by Mills’ one-time golf partner, investor Thomas Klingenstein, in the week following the report’s release last Wednesday.  

Mills began his letter by explaining that it had taken him a week to respond to the report, which vehemently criticizes the College’s curriculum, student life, and diversity initiatives, because he wanted time to review the document in its entirety. 

We are pleased to see that Bowdoin College president Barry Mills has responded to "What Does Bowdoin Teach?" In an essay, “Setting the Record Straight,” published in the college’s official news outlet, the Bowdoin Daily Sun, April 10, Mills cites the college’s openness to criticism and commitment to academic freedom as reasons to “answer the charges” in our report. 

While we welcome President Mills’s decision to engage the report, we are disappointed with the very limited approach he has taken. He offers a broad emotional response and then picks a handful of topics in which he erroneously thinks we got ours facts wrong. Our larger disappointment, however, is that President Mills leaves unaddressed the central themes of the report: unnoticed bias against views that differ from prevailing progressive ideas; curricular incoherence which results from a vision of the students as autonomous consumers, compounded by an ever-increasing narrowness of faculty specialization; the contradictions between the college’s vaunted commitments to openness and critical thinking, on the one hand, and its overriding ideological commitments, on the other; the displacement of intellectual standards by appeals to social justice; the college’s willingness to flatter students to the point of compromising educational desiderata; the erosion of intellectual community and its gradual replacement by popular enthusiasms; and the college’s retreat from positive efforts to foster self-restraint and other qualities of good character that are intrinsic to liberal arts education. On each and every one of these, President Mills is silent.

President Mills does make clear that his willingness to answer us at all required him to overcome considerable distaste. The report, he says, is “mean-spirited and personal.” It “exaggerates” and “misrepresents” and this is “the considered opinion of many members of our community.” 

Bowdoin students spend too much time talking about identity, don’t know enough about the founding fathers, and have way too much sex.

It took the National Association of Scholars 19 months to reach those conclusions, which, among others, are detailed in “The Bowdoin Project,” the organization’s report on the College.

Totaling 360 pages, the report applies conservative ideology of the past three decades to virtually every aspect of Bowdoin policy, academic affairs, and student life. The report assails Bowdoin on topics as wide-ranging as sustainability and climate change, gay marriage, and affirmative action.

The National Association of Scholars defines itself as “an independent membership association of academics and others working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debated in America’s colleges and universities.” The organization “advocates for excellence by encouraging commitment to high intellectual standards, individual merit, institutional integrity, good governance, and sound public policy.”

Dr. Stephen Balch founded the NAS in 1987 and served as its president until 2009. He currently serves as the director for the Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Peter W. Wood, who received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Rochester in 1987, succeeded Balch as president of the NAS. Prior to joining the staff of the NAS, he taught at Boston University in the anthropology department.

The report by the National Association of Scholars on Bowdoin, “What Does Bowdoin Teach?”, did not include an index, so the Orient has assembled one.

In many respects, the NAS report “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” is not news. Few, if any, would dispute that there is a liberal bias on campus and that our community celebrates and privileges certain views over others. Peter Wood and Michael Toscano explore the College’s politics in part by labeling concepts such as “sustainability,” “multiculturalism,” and “global citizenship” as dirty words and phrases, ideas that do injustice to what the report calls “the American miracle.” Clearly, there are fundamental differences of opinion between the writers of the report and Bowdoin’s educational mission, but to ignore the report because it is predictable or contrary to our own beliefs is to confirm the report’s central finding: that Bowdoin is a close-minded, partisan place.

The report reads like a plea to the good old “sons of Bowdoin,” whom perhaps the writers hope will keep President Mills’ phone ringing off the hook for the foreseeable future. Yet it is true that both alumni and students have the responsibility to consider how—and what—Bowdoin is teaching.

I doubt anyone would argue that nothing about Bowdoin should be changed. The report should be considered not only to test the very critical thinking skills brought into question, but also because, frankly, it contains some useful ideas. For one, I have often been disappointed by the lack of survey courses in the curriculum, and in some way, Bowdoin has limited my ability to explore new disciplines by not offering easier access.

Reading the NAS report, I found that Toscano and Wood had a very deliberate agenda with two main points. Firstly, they wanted to portray President Mills as a villain. Secondly, they expressed dissatisfaction with changes to Bowdoin’s curriculum and culture that favor multiculturalism over Eurocentrism and American history. While the article was extremely well written and attentive, parts were deliberately misleading, especially the sections on sex and tolerance.

President Mills is portrayed as a leader with numerous faults. The report cites his plea to Bowdoin and Maine to vote “Yes on 1” to legalize gay marriage as the administration dictating political policy. Though Mills made this plea as a private citizen, Wood and Toscano see this as an abuse of power and as evidence that President Mills is instructing students how to vote. Any reader of Mills’ letter would see that President Mills presents a simple, polite argument that acknowledges the opposite point of view numerous times while still holding fast to his belief. It is not a manipulative piece and does nothing to convince all readers to vote “Yes” or be ostracized at Bowdoin. 

The authors ridiculously criticize President Mills’ comments after September 11 arguing the fact that he did not mention the effects of the attack on America as a whole and instead focused on the Bowdoin community and the need to support each other is problematic. This characterization is banal, meaningless and insulting. That President Mills chose to focus on supporting the College does not put him at fault in any way. Deigning to mention this vignette only detracts from this work as a whole.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS), a conservative organization that aims to “foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship” in America, will release its complete report on the intellectual diversity of the College next Wednesday, according to NAS President Peter Wood.

“The Bowdoin Project,” as the study is titled, is a critique of Bowdoin’s liberal arts curriculum, and has been in the works since fall 2011. Wood explained that the report addresses the curriculum, “core concepts,” faculty, and student life at the College. The report’s preface contains its lone recommendation for future action: “that Bowdoin form a commission to examine some of the problems that we think we’ve brought to light,” according to Wood.  

Funded by investment manager Thomas Klingenstein, the study has been the subject of much controversy on and off campus, which began shortly after President Barry Mills anecdotally cited Klingenstein’s dismissal of Bowdoin’s liberal arts model in his September 2010 convocation address. Klingenstein responded to Mills’ remarks with a harsh essay in the Claremont Review of Books that spring, and announced the NAS study—then titled “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” the following October.

Michael Toscano, the primary researcher of the Klingenstein-funded study on Bowoin's intellectual diversity, will be on campus until Monday, speaking to professors and students at the College in an effort to answer the essential question of the survey: what does Bowdoin teach? The study was launched by the National Association of Scholars in September at the behest of Thomas Klingenstein, who criticized Bowdoin last year for its lack of intellectual diversity. Klingenstein had a bone to pick with President Barry Mills last year when he claimed that Mills misquoted him in his 2010 Convocation address.

In its October 14 editorial ("Klingenstein's Study"), The Bowdoin Orient questioned the validity of the Bowdoin College study that I am conducting. You say that the study cannot be "objective" because it is funded by Tom Klingenstein and it "appears to be driven by a clear agenda."

Your editorial also notes that the National Association of Scholars (NAS) has "never conducted a study on only a single college before" and that "the motive for this study is not genuine intellectual curiosity."

The editorial finally and "most importantly" faults the study as something that "does not recognize the critical thinking abilities of Bowdoin students."

A study that will examine intellectual diversity at Bowdoin began three weeks ago under the direction of the National Association of Scholars (NAS). Funded by Thomas Klingenstein, the study is the latest demonstration of the investment manager's personal interest in Bowdoin's academic climate.

In "A Golf Story," which appeared recently in the Claremont Review of Books, I questioned whether President Barry Mills is serious about wanting more intellectual diversity at Bowdoin. The essay generated mostly smoke, but amid the smoke there lie important questions.

How intellectually diverse is Bowdoin today? Not very, if political party affiliation is any indication. Only Professor of Social Sciences Jean Yarbrough in her April 22 op-ed "Bowdoin should examine its lack of diversity" challenged my claim that no more than 4 percent of the Bowdoin faculty is Republican. She thinks my figure is probably too high.

But perhaps there is no need to count Republican noses, for, as a number of my critics pointed out, party affiliation may not be the best measure of what I am calling "intellectual diversity." OK. So what then do we mean by the term and how might it be measured?

In the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books, President Barry Mills receives something of a tongue lashing for his September convocation address dealing with intellectual diversity at the College. A little background: Mills, who has a fondness for telling golf stories, described in his address an interaction which occurred during a golf match this summer.

As Mills told the story, an opponent said to him mid-swing, "I would never support Bowdoin—you are a ridiculous liberal school that brings all the wrong students to campus for all the wrong reasons." Mills added that his interlocutor aggressively opined that he would support neither Bowdoin nor his own alma mater "because of all your misplaced and misguided diversity efforts."

This anecdote launched the larger theme of Mills' address, which posed the question of whether the College's generally liberal persuasion detracts from intellectual diversity on campus. The speech was well-received, and the school year proceeded.