Liberal education once stood for something grand and good: the study of the arts, humanities and sciences with the aim of improving the mind through the acquisition of knowledge and the pursuit of truth. But some of America’s most elite colleges and universities have all but abandoned this goal. Instead, many selective schools favor the faddish, the politically correct and the dogmatic, all the while proclaiming their devotion to promoting “critical thinking” and tolerance.
Conservatives have complained of this for decades, with little effect. A slew of books over the past 25 years have exposed what goes on in the ivory towers, from Allan Bloom’s treatise “The Closing of the American Mind” to Dinesh D’Souza’s polemic “Illiberal Education.” But none had provided a careful, in-depth study of a single school until the National Association of Scholars (NAS) this week released its 360-page report “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” (www.nas.org/projects/the_bowdoin_project).
