Tea at Trianon: Why I Stopped Donating to My Alma Mater

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, January 1, 2022

Why I Stopped Donating to My Alma Mater

From FEE:

At Harvard, where I attended graduate school, the faculty political imbalance is particularly striking. According to a 2021 survey by The Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper, out of 236 faculty replies only 7 people said they are “somewhat” or “very conservative,” while 183 respondents indicated that they are “somewhat” or “very liberal.” A similar problem plagues my undergraduate college, Bowdoin.

The absence of my meager donations won’t matter to the colleges I attended, each of which has billions of dollars in endowment money. But big alumni donors at some leading universities are using their influence to improve free thought and inquiry on college campuses.

A recent Wall Street Journal article reported on alumni from major universities who are holding back on giving large donations due to frustration over campus culture and policies. For example, Cornell alumnus Carl Neuss withheld his seven-figure donation and helped to create the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, while MIT alumnus, Tom Hafer, withheld his donation and helped to launch the MIT Free Speech Alliance after MIT disinvited a University of Chicago geophysicist who is critical of campus “diversity and inclusion” practices. FEE Hazlitt Fellow Brett Cooper wrote last summer about other alumni organizations that are pushing back against current campus policies.

According to the Journal: “Universities around the country have fired or demoted politically outspoken professors on the right and disinvited conservative speakers who criticize things like the push toward diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Other professors, such as Portland State’s Peter Boghossian, quit over their university’s policies and climate that they have found to be repressive of intellectual inquiry. “But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible,” wrote Boghossian in September. “It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.” (Read more.)