What Parents Don’t Know About Bowdoin
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Alumni like to rant, especially conservative alumni. The disgruntled fellows (it’s usually a fellow) seize any chance for a complaint session alleging whatever errors the school is committing are somehow greater than errors it made in the 1980s, or even the raucous 1960s.
A few years ago, an alumnus of Williams College in Massachusetts, Thomas Klingenstein, took the opportunity of a golf game with the president of Bowdoin, a Maine college similar to Williams, to suggest that diversity received too much emphasis at Williams and that Western civilization received too little. “Common American identity,” where race and class matter less, is lost.