Harvey Mansfield on the Bowdoin Study

Here’s his piece from the CRB now available on Real Clear Politics.

Read the whole thing, especially for its Bloomian characterization of Bowdoin’s openness, and its wonderful paragraph on the banning of the alcohol-free dorm, but make sure you study the second sentence here. Maybe we should make it part of some genuine liberal arts catechism:

Bowdoin’s curriculum lacks the academic standards of excellence that conservatives mostly and mainly defend in academia with little or no help these days from liberals. It is conservatives who deplore and resist the brazen politicization of the classroom, the loss of the great books, indeed the disregard of greatness in general, the corruption of grade inflation, the cheap satisfactions of trendiness, the mess of sexual license, the distractions of ideology, the aggrandizement and servility of administrators, the pretense and dissembling of affirmative action, the unmanly advice of psychologists, the partisan nonsense of professional associations, and the unseemly subservience everywhere to student opinion.

Hear, hear!

But notice in particular the condemned item at the center of the series, which is the only one that seems innocuous at first: “the distractions of ideology.”