Bye Bye, Columbus Day
Pajamas Media.com - April 22, 2009

Several weeks ago the Brown University faculty ratified a student petition demanding that the university abandon its recognition of Columbus Day. The directive was enacted by Brown’s Native American student group, whose spokesmen defend their activism by pointing out the atrocities committed by Christopher Columbus and his men upon the indigenous people of the newly discovered continent. Some have suggested that the holiday be renamed Indigenous Day, but for now Brown has decided to settle for Fall Weekend — a weekend in which Brown students and professors will still enjoy a Monday off from work.

Now that Brown University has set new moral standards for preserving traditional namesakes, some are wondering if Brown students will petition to scratch the name of a slave-trading family from the face of their university.

Or will they look into the misdeeds of Martin Luther King Jr. in an attempt to save the nation from commemorating anyone who may have blemishes on his moral record? Will there now be an academic investigation into the countless atrocities committed by Native Americans, prompting the removal of tribal names from casinos and other landmarks?

Probably not. But nobody expects consistency from liberals anymore anyway.
Of course, academic effort to clarify history is a laudable activity, which is exactly the sort of innocence Brown activists are currently shrouding themselves in. We are merely correcting the record and then asking if it is appropriate to hold Christopher Columbus in such high esteem.

Fine. But more bothersome than whether or not Columbus’ name deserves enshrinement is the driving force behind liberals’ odd propensity to obsess over the transgressions of America’s traditional heroes.

Vilifying the American heritage is what passes as “progressive” and “enlightened” at Brown because it is an intellectual stance that stems from the university’s multicultural lesson — the politically correct teaching that commands students to recognize the worth of every society except their own, to honor and respect people of every race and creed except for whites and conservatism.

As the Brown Daily Herald recently editorialized, “White people, ranging from European colonizers to the government of the United States, have committed innumerable brutal offenses against Native Americans over the past 500 years. Honoring Columbus with a holiday glosses over a racist, blood-stained facet of our history and glamorizes the past as victorious manifest destiny.”

The Brown Daily Herald did not print this passage to be inflammatory. This is commonplace at Brown. This is Tuesday.

Multiculturalism’s most potent message involves America’s oppression of just about everyone — blacks, women, military veterans, Hispanics, Muslims, Native Americans, homosexuals, foreigners, the poor, the disabled, etc.

And the indoctrination begins with history. Columbus was a genocidal colonizer and the nation’s founders were white supremacists. This fixated outlook on America’s past is intended to prove that a legacy of American cruelty continues today — white hatred aimed at blacks, Latinos, gays, and Arabs. The murder of third-world people for first-world profits. War for oil! This is what students learn at Brown University.

Those who were aware of the Ivy League worldview in 2001 were not surprised after 9/11 when members of the Brown community erupted into a frenzy of anti-Americanism, informing everyone that “[America] was founded on racism, genocide, and theft” and that America is “the largest terrorist state in the world.” And they fully expected to hear this gem: “I was cheering when the Pentagon got hit because I know about the brutality of the military. The American flag is nothing but a symbol of hate and should be used for toilet paper for all I care.”

Ah, alma mater.

But what fuels this campus contempt for the United States? In reality, the left’s agenda has nothing to do with issues of racial justice or gender equality. These are merely causes that the left has hijacked in order to pursue a more sinister end, mainly the destruction of individualism and capitalism — also known as “the American way.”

The declaration of Brown’s International Socialist Organization encompasses a popular campus sentiment: “Capitalism produces poverty, racism, famine, environmental catastrophe, and war.”

Or one could listen to the Marxist firebrand (and college professor) Bill Ayers: “Capitalism promotes racism and militarism — turning people into consumers, not citizens.”

Leftists understand that, in order to have freedom-loving people relinquish their liberty, they must rely on the heart-tugging perception of injustice. Brown students don’t have to understand the complexities of economic theory. They just need to be told that someone is being victimized by the dissemination of freedom.

Victimization is highlighted on campus because it is a lesson that demands national shame rather than patriotism; it instructs Americans to scoff at their country rather than marvel at its miracles, to hold it in contempt rather than be willing to die for it.

And off the students go, embarking on activist quests to denigrate men like Jefferson, Washington, and Columbus — never realizing that they are doing the dirty work of a radical campus network.

What recently occurred at Brown University was more than just a simple case of a few naive kids who will someday grow up. Rather, the university is the place where students become the people they will be for the rest of their lives. Their newly adopted anti-American philosophy becomes their perpetual operational assumption, from which they make all their final determinations.

The radicals know this all too well. As Professor Ayers once informed an adoring Venezuelan crowd, “Education is the motor-force of revolution.”

The campus condition is dire. Brown University elites have presented us with the latest example of the left’s incremental attack on the United States. The multicultural mindset found at Brown is the exact intellectual basis from which State Representative Joseph Almeida (D) calls for the removal of the word “plantations” from Rhode Island’s official name (The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations). It is the same mentality that has the Congressional Black Caucus coming home from Cuba gushing over a murderous dictator. It is the same moral and cultural relativity that seduces President Obama when he heads overseas to apologize for American “arrogance,” prostrates himself before a Saudi King, and then vows to “spread the wealth around.”

This is not about Christopher Columbus. This is culture war. And the left will never stop.



Undressing Brown University
Providence Journal - November 23, 2005

Sayles Hall "shall be exclusively and forever devoted to lectures and recitations, and to meetings on academic occasions." - William F. Sayles, June 14, 1878

LAST WEEK, Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor delivered to the nation disturbing footage of Brown University's annual Sex, Power, God party. Images of half-naked students and reports of public sex within the party did little to maintain the prestigious image of Sayles Hall, where the festivity took place.

However, as a record number of students in one night required the use of emergency medical services, it gave the university's suddenly humiliated administration the opportunity to frame this incident in the unalarming and simple context of college students' just having a little too much drunken fun on a Saturday night. But there is much more to this story hidden behind the Ivy curtain.

The Brown administration has declared that it is "reviewing" its alcohol policies by "analyzing" last weekend's mischief. And Ruth Simmons, the university's president, would love the discussion to end right there. As administrators tell us that they are "consider[ing] policy changes," they hope that we accept the impression that everything is now under control. Go on with your daily routines; the administration will take it from here.

Thus, the liberal dominion at Brown -- absolute student autonomy, and an administration that is detached from student affairs.

Sex, Power, God is hosted each year by Brown's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual Alliance, otherwise known as the Queer Alliance. You will notice that the LGBTA, one of the campus left's most potent activist organizations, has received only a slap on the wrist for its ineffectiveness in keeping alcohol out of its party. In turn, Sex, Power, God has been wrongfully equated with the average fraternity shindig, while the scapegoat has become the university's alcohol policies. This has let Brown and the LGBTA escape the harsh critique that they both deserve.

Let me tell you a little bit about the sponsor of Sex, Power, God.

The LGBTA is a thunderous and well-organized association of radical students. If they weren't so repugnant, I'd say that they were a very impressive activist group. Any College Hill veteran will tell you of this organization's in-your-face practices. But not too many will reveal to you the LGBTA's top priority: to convert every Brown student into a sexual heathen, with eyes numbed to the sight of anything hypersexual. Any words that the Queer Alliance speaks, any lectures it sponsors, and any project it takes part in -- including a party -- is a step toward that goal.

A frat party? Not even close.

First off, fraternity events are held in -- you guessed it -- fraternity houses. Not historic Sayles Hall, where portraits of U.S. and Brown luminaries adorn the walls, and prominent national figures are invited to address the Ivy League school. And, last I checked, wearing clothes is the norm. So is privatizing any sex that may result from a party's debauchery.

But the most significant difference between LGBTA-sponsored parties and "Animal Houses" is simply the objective. Most student organizations coordinate events to have a good time. However, like all events organized by the Queer Alliance, the Sex, Power, God party seeks to advance the gay agenda by desensitizing Ivy League students to sexual deviance. The Ivy League then sends those graduates off to sit in Congress and other important offices. Any person who equates an LGBTA event with the usual fraternity bash is utterly out of touch with the radicalism of Ivy League student groups.

Over the years, the LGBTA has discovered the effectiveness of liberal activism; that is, not to bring ideas to the table for discussion and debate, but rather to effortlessly label its political opposition as bigoted, and spend most of its time turning Brown's campus into one big Hustler magazine, promoting acts that traditional values would see as moral depravity, and that mock Judeo-Christian values.

The LGBTA makes the public claim that it exists to provide a safe space for "people of all identities." Its members organize and rally for "marriage equality," and they combat "homophobia" and other "forms of discrimination."

Fine. But here's something you may not know about the Queer Alliance: Each year it sponsors lectures by famous pornographers and "sex educators." It conducts oral-sex and anal-sex "workshops." It hosts "porn parties" and "drag shows."

So how could anyone flinch when it tastelessly names its parties Sex, Power, God and [sexual obscenity], and advertises the events with pornographic posters that decorate university halls and courtyards? These advertisements always cross the decency line, and are often beyond justifiable. One poster in my junior year portrayed four naked men performing some sort of sex conga line in a shower room. And now the administration wonders how Sex, Power, God got so out of control.

Bill O'Reilly got one thing right: This was the "party Brown University doesn't want you to know about!"

President Simmons's hesitation to publicly denounce Sex, Power, God and ban any further LGBTA events from university buildings is nothing but disgraceful. But that's the way it has been for decades at Brown. Radical student groups have been given control of the campus, and they savagely silence any dissenters.

For a student to speak out against the indecency of the LGBTA would take John Wayne-type bravery. And if any news organization ever catches wind of campus injustice, the administration has an easy out: Hey, we didn't know what was going on. But we'll be sure to take care of this right away.

In 1878, William F. Sayles, in memory of his late son, gave $50,000 to Brown University for a building that "shall be exclusively and forever devoted to lectures and recitations, and to meetings on academic occasions." They call themselves "progressives" up there on College Hill. Just look how far they've come.

All Is Not Well—More Brown Backwardness
Brown Alumni Magazine - March 2008

I am making this submission in order to save the souls of the children of a fellow Brown alum recently profiled in the BAM. David Klinghoffer ‘87 missed the point when he declared, “An atmosphere of provocation and challenge does not necessarily lead to one political or religious end” (How Brown Turned Me Into a Right-Wing Religious Conservative, Jan/Feb BAM).

As co-founder of the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity, a Brown alumni organization that seeks to restore our alma mater’s academic integrity, I found Mr. Klinghoffer’s notion profound and certainly accurate. But it does not apply to Brown University. It is from this argumentative platform that I warn Mr. Klinghoffer of his proclivity to “[send] my own kids to such a college.”

Brown University is not a place worthy of any credit for fostering intellectual provocation, but rather a campus that has been compromised for the sake of personal creed, and at the expense of academic principles. We are, after all, speaking of the University that denies an ROTC presence on its campus, sponsors homosexual sex-binges within its most prestigious buildings, and whose faculty is marked by a political composition of  94% Democrat.

For those who have not been paying attention, Brown has morphed over the years into a campus that harbors intellectual laziness, and appeals to humanity’s lowest common denominators, sinfully wasting the tuition and intellect of thousands of innocently by-standing students. Like the Christendom of Europe, Brown is a skeleton of academia—a beautiful and convenient façade, but not much more.

So it was an odd conclusion to reach. That is, for Klinghoffer, a self-avowed religious conservative, to seemingly comply with the accusation that Brown has become an anathema to the Western academic tradition—yet, somehow, decided that this is a good thing. Klinghoffer would even be willing to give Brown a crack at debasing his children. “I’d still send my kids to college there,” screamed the subtitle to Klinghoffer’s BAM piece, thereby celebrating and enabling the philosophical sealing-off of a renowned institution of higher learning.

I would have expected a religious conservative to not only object to the lessons of relativity reverberating throughout Brown’s campus, but also to understand the tragedy of such conditions. It is a blessing that Brown’s rabid liberalism kick-started Klinghoffer’s traditionalism. But exceptions do not disprove rules. And just because a man may discover grace through a prison term, it does not mean he should wish incarceration upon his offspring.

“Educators may wish to plant certain ideas in their students, but what happens, in fact, is unpredictable. Ideas can grow in the most fantastically unexpected directions,” Klinghoffer informed us, revealing just how astute Brown has become in masking from its displaced alumni just how dismal things have become on College Hill. Polling the political attitudes of the Brown student body is always a good method of showcasing just how “predictable” the Ivy mind has become.  

Brown does not employ a campus that is merely secular and liberal, as Mr. Klinghoffer believes, but exercises a wretchedly backward culture of conformity that is not just as likely to produce quality graduates, as it is likely to produce a perverted form of American citizenry—graduates who believe they know it all, rather than ones who come to the humble realization that they know nothing at all; graduates who find it their civic duty to be empty vessels of multiculturalism and bipartisanship, rather than champions of confrontation; graduates who become sexually radicalized, rather than sexually responsible; graduates who sneer at America, rather than marvel at its miracles.

By revealing his willingness to subject his children to the rotting bowels of the academy Mr. Klinghoffer likely made most Brown alumni feel warm, fuzzy, and proud (most BAM articles do). But his lauding article effectively helped to dispel the warnings about Brown’s intellectual lopsidedness—warnings that already struggle to gain footing in the minds of, what could be, a powerful alumni base.

While it probably seems counter-intuitive, Klinghoffer’s article could only be discouraging to those conservative alumni who aim to rectify a damaged institution. The portrayal of an institutional flaw as an academic asset was reminiscent of what President Bush once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It felt like a cheap table scrap thrown at those who know better—thrown with the intent to convince the alumni community that all is well at their alma mater.

We are left to wonder what motivation compels a leftist-controlled university to correct itself if its alumni engage in willful blindness, refuse to hold the University to higher standards, and promise their children’s future enrollment. And now we must suspect that even those graduates who object the most to the University’s intellectually violent state of political correctness will also remain loyal to Brown—star-struck by Ivy League prestige and overwhelmed by the nostalgia afforded to them at the reunions. I disagree with almost everything that goes on here. But how great would it be to see my daughter march through the Van Wickle Gates!

It is difficult not to suspect that such fatuous self-celebration by Brown alumni only contributes to our alma mater’s moral and academic decay. Is the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity out-gunned within the alumni community as well?

Meet the Brown Spectator

Pajamas Media.com - March 9, 2008

“The Brown Spectator is a journal of conservative and libertarian thought and opinion committed to the dissemination and discussion of the ideas and values of Western Culture…Above all, we seek to foster a culture of rational, intelligent debate at Brown, too often the victim of censorship and political correctness.”


One frustrating aspect of the fight against the political indoctrination campaigns conducted by most American universities is the often-quick demise of the numerous promising uprisings pioneered by right-wing students. Especially in recent years, conservative students have initiated countless insurrections against rabidly liberal campuses, only to see their efforts dwindle in the face of overwhelming scenarios of theoretical imbalance.

The failure to embed traditional theory into the academic fabric is heavily due to the four-year term-limits imposed upon scattered conservative activists. The college experience has a rapid current, and by the time right-leaning students realize the bias of the waters in which they have been submerged, they are already wearing caps and gowns. Dissenting students rarely develop beyond the status of one-time polemical instigators. They are then processed into the real world, leaving behind the same environment they had once encountered—a radicalized campus void of any Republican resources.

But a relatively small band of Brown University students have managed to achieve organizational longevity amidst a neighborhood of ideological adversaries. Upon arrival, Brown freshmen have always been able to join the Brown Democrats, the Queer Alliance, the Brown Feminists, the International Socialist Organization, the Young Communist League, or any number of radical, minority student-groups. But for the past several years, they have been afforded the opportunity to join the ranks of the Brown Spectator.

The Spectator was originally founded by several students in the late 1980s in response to a repressive intellectual climate on Brown’s campus. Like so many other attempts at rectifying such conditions, the Spectator only published a few issues before perishing upon the graduation of the students who fueled its publication.

More than a decade passed before the Spectator was revived, this time in response to specific campus controversies regarding Brown’s philosophical boundaries. In the Spring of 2001 conservative author David Horowitz penned an advertisement criticizing the idea of slavery reparations, prompting Brown’s minority activists—abetted by other radical students and professors—to steal an entire press-run of the campus newspaper that brazenly ran the ad. Brown’s anti-intellectualism made national headlines, shaming the University by exposing its dumbed-down campus, and verifying the worst of what was suspected of the modern academy.

But out of Brown’s embarrassment was the rebirth of the Spectator, this time institutionalizing itself into campus life by drafting a constitution and an editorial hierarchy. The magazine was revived in 2003, but in subsequent years went through a growth spurt, exploding from an original squadron of four editors to a staff of thirty. The Spectator is now a monthly publication, managing its own blog-website and mailing issues to subscribers nationwide.

Having developed into premier reading material for Brown students, Spectator staffers are invited to participate in campus debates, bringing clarity of conservative perspectives to Ivy League students and establishing themselves as not just a magazine, but also as an actively pulsating community. The Spectator constitutes an astounding political presence within a university that intellectual maverick Camille Paglia once called—“The most viciously intolerant campus that I ever visited as a lecturer.”

Paglia may be interested to know that for several years the Spectator has been contributing to an ongoing cultural transformation upon College Hill. In 2005 conservative author Dinesh D’Souza came to Brown to promote his new book, What’s So Great About America. Realizing full-well that defending the United States has a tendency to invoke liberal wrath, D’Souza expected his visit to be accompanied by protest. But when his lecture wrapped up without incident, D’Souza remarked, “The kind of hard left that I usually encounter at Brown has declined, was absent, or in a post-election funk.”

D’Souza’s observation was accurate. Brown’s campus left is hardly the tyrannical entity it once was. It was humiliated by the Horowitz incident, deflated even further by some of Brown’s own institutional reform, and perhaps crushed for good by the ever-presence of the Spectator.

However, a fluid student body combined with a liberal faculty framework keeps Brown’s campus continuously primed to return to a state of leftist militancy. His awareness of this cycle is why former president of the College Republicans Christopher McAuliffe once advised hopeful campus reformers to “proceed with cautious optimism.” Trust, but verify.

After all, the Spectator still remains an ideological minority amongst a politically passionate community, and therefore still experiences—let us say—a lack of appreciation. The Spectator is often referred to as “toilet paper” on Brown’s on-line discussion forums, and a Brown Daily Herald columnist disdainfully called it the University’s “premier humor magazine” marked by a “hilarious mix of bad writing, bad arguments and other crimes against journalism.”

Spectator staffers have also acquiesced to the reality that entire stacks of issues risk a short shelf-life upon their distribution. “It occurs almost every issue. But the December 2006 issue was especially grievous, with about 200 copies destroyed,” says current editor-in-chief Andrew Kurtzman.

Yet, these independent-minded students remain obstinate, never hesitating to criticize—or even mock—Brown’s most potent leftist activists. The most recent example of their bravado was senior Josh Unseth’s derisive commentary on Brown’s sexual radicals and their latest shenanigans, which included a program called “FemSex” that distributed pornographic pictures of female genitalia throughout the campus. Invoking the University’s own sexual harassment policy that forbids “sexually suggestive…pictures…that may embarrass or offend individuals,” Unseth concluded, “It seemed pretty clear to me, FemSex sexually harassed me.”

Junior Kristina Kelleher can be just as cutting: “Gun control legislation doesn’t stop murders; it enables them by making [criminals] secure in their knowledge that their victims have no means to protect themselves…Has anyone ever heard of a multiple shooting at an NRA meeting or a gun club?” Ann Coulter would be impressed.

Sophomore Anish Mitra titled his latest piece “Jimmy Carter Needs to Shut Up,” while Linda Zang argued, “If [the US] chooses not to do what it takes to win the War in Iraq today, the geo-political realities of the global war on terror will force us back to the deserts of the Middle East in the not-so-distant future.”

The Spectator’s most scorching opinions come from sophomore Sean Quigley, who often aims his attacks at the highest echelons of the University. “I sincerely hope that every alumnus or alumna of this University realizes that, in almost every way possible, the administrators of this University are enemies of decent society, and subsequently refuses to donate money so that they cannot fund the further degradation of that which this nation and her people hold most dear.” And last year, when Brown president Ruth Simmons denigrated the moral character of George Washington for his absence from the abolitionist movement at the time of the nation’s founding, Quigley lambasted Simmons for her “revisionist history,” and her failure to recognize that the “Father of Liberty…came to detest slavery…[but] understood the need for a type of prudent change that was commensurate with practicality.” Quigley finished his rebuke by advising Simmons to “shelve her moral hubris.”

The Spectator community has obtained the renegade identity, a reputation that the left most often claims, rather than earns. Campus liberals still think it takes guts to stand up for minorities and pierce their ears.

But Spectator staffers are your classical liberals, upholding liberty and defying the establishment—all while defending supply-side economics, neo-con foreign policy, and Christianity. They do more than anyone to sustain the academic tradition, and to avoid Brown University’s inevitable return to intellectual stagnation.




The Case for a Core Curriculum
Brown Spectator - October 20, 2006

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free…it expects what never was and never will be.” - Thomas Jefferson

From the nation’s capital on September 26th the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) released the findings of an unprecedented review of higher education’s efficiency in increasing student knowledge of America’s history and crucial institutions.

The study, conducted by the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy (UCDPP), asked more than 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities 60 multiple-choice questions. The test determined student knowledge in four subjects:  (1) American history; (2) government; (3) American and the world; (4) the market economy.

The results of the inquiry are embarrassingly disappointing—especially for those schools unfortunate enough to have been assessed within the study. Brown University was not just one of those schools, but also received a bottom-ranking among them.

ISI’s report presents four primary findings, all of which pertain directly to Brown’s educational methods.

The first key finding reiterates the title of ISI’s report—The Coming Crisis In Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions. “America’s colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge about America’s history and institutions,” ISI confidently testifies. Evidence for this pronouncement is found within the results of the test scores. Seniors, on average, scored a mere 1.5 percent higher than freshmen. That average score was 53.2 percent. Even with a most generous grading curve, this is an F.

Worse than a failing grade, however, are the particulars. For instance, only 47.9 percent of seniors knew that the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” is found within the Declaration of Independence. And 72.8 percent failed to name the source of the idea of “a wall of separation” between church and state.

Within the second central discovery we see Brown University’s unique role within UCDPP’s probe into higher education. A school’s “prestige doesn’t pay off,” the report screams. “Colleges that rank high in the U.S. News and World Report 2006 ranking were ranked low in the ISI ranking of learning in these key fields.” While seniors at schools such as Rhodes College and Calvin College were found to have increased their knowledge of American history and institutions by 11.6% and 9.5% respectively, this study discovered that students attending more prestigious universities experience a moribund concern for civic literacy during their college years. According to the test results, 16 schools exhibited an educational phenomenon that the report refers to as “negative learning,” a term that describes a situation where freshmen demonstrated more civic knowledge than the seniors. Among the 50 schools surveyed, Yale ranked 44th with a –1.5 percent change in civic literacy. Brown ranked 47th with a –2.7 percent change. And Cornell ranked 48th with a –3.3 percent change. “Our ‘best’ colleges and universities are the worst offenders when it comes to a failure to teach America’s history and institutions,” ISI reports.

The third key finding is a shocker:  “Students don’t learn what colleges don’t teach.” Despite the obvious (and properly smug) nature of this declaration, it should also catch the ears of Brown affiliates, as it refers to a loose curriculum structure. ISI’s report actually reiterates what many conservatives have been saying for years—“Civic learning is significantly greater at schools with comparatively traditional core curricula.” This “discovery” reinforces a popular criticism of open curriculums, that failing to require the study of traditional subjects will deteriorate a nation’s memory, and therefore its meaning and purpose.

Proponents of open curriculums often argue that universities such as Brown, that don’t require the study of core subjects, still offer a wide variety of voluntary courses in American history, political science, and economics. But with the freedom to stray from traditional subjects, UCDPP found that students tend to do so (perhaps as a result of what is portrayed as more relevant and stylish topics on these campuses). The ISI tells us, “Students at colleges and universities that make courses related to America’s history, ideals, and the Constitution more available, attractive, and even required showed significant gains in civic learning,” and “even when controlling for numerous variables that influence learning, seniors at schools with reasonably strong core curricula…had double the gain in civic learning compared with those seniors at schools without a coherent core curriculum—for example, Brown, Cornell, and Stanford.”

ISI’s fourth and final verdict pertains to the civic involvement of college students. “Greater civic learning goes hand-in-hand with more active citizenship. Students who demonstrated greater learning of America’s history and its institutions were more engaged in citizenship activities such as voting, volunteer community service, and political campaigns.”

To many members of the Brown community this finding may cause confusion. A campus as politically charged as Brown’s is certainly made up of many students with a healthy tendency to participate in their civic responsibilities, even if the University is failing to educate them on such matters. But according to UCDPP’s study, it was discovered that a high degree of civic involvement was highly dependent on a high degree of civic knowledge. “And the factor most strongly correlated with students registering to vote and voting is the amount of civic learning that takes place during college.”

ISI’s report concludes by providing important recommendations that could help improve higher education’s dire. These proposals include measuring student learning, holding colleges and universities accountable for educational output, implementing required courses, building academic centers on campus that focus on topics deprived of attention, and informing as many people as possible of this looming condition of ignorance.

One troubling assessment of UCDPP’s study is that the results come as no surprise to many educators. To many it seems that a blind eye has been turned to the alarming reality that higher education has become something of a failure, an unprincipled world thinly veiled by a smokescreen of prestige—a place where students now go to be sensitized to multicultural theory, and graduate perhaps having learned absolutely nothing relevant to living within a constitutional republic. Brown University’s late Frank Newman once testified to the lack of integrity found within the ranks of higher education:

“The real reason we don’t test is, we would rather not know…If we start measuring, we will start finding out that you didn’t learn…about the great traditions of Western thought. Then we have a nasty little problem on our hands.”

The question now is: Does Brown University care? Will the results of UCDPP’s study be sneered at in the fashion so common of university elites? Will the Ivy establishment continue to believe in the infallibility of Ira Magaziner’s New Curriculum? Or will Brown view these findings as the maximum point of the pendulum, pulling what was once liberal back from the left, with the hopes that the University may settle in a place comfortably distant from reckless radicalism?

Offering credence to years of warnings over a coming generation of citizens disinterested in, or incapable of, functioning within their own democratic nation, ISI’s assessment now provides evidence of a civic catastrophe that is not merely imminent, but already upon us. Brown University should recognize its contribution to this crisis, and do something about it.

The full ISI report can be found at isi.org