To the Editor:
Whenever possible I try to avoid looking at the Wabash website in the morning, since its relentlessly liberal bias makes me begin the day with elevated blood pressure. But the time has come when something public has to be said and those in control of the page be called to account.
Harvey Mansfield has been a major scholar of political theory at Harvard for some forty years, and his academic accomplishments tower over those of the average Wabash professor like, as Virgil says, the lofty cypress over the humble viburnum. The notice of his lecture on the concept of manliness is the only piece I see currently on the site that was assigned to an undergraduate — and a freshman at that — presumably so that the negative tone of the article could not be attributed to the people who wanted a negative tone from the start.
Being on sabbatical and out of town I was not present at the talk, but must say I laughed out loud when a language intern was quoted as saying that she was “freaked out” at what she had heard. Those who freak out that easily had better toughen up, since the assumptions that gender feminists so easily make about men and women will be constantly, and if necessary, bitterly challenged in the near future at Wabash. This I can promise with no fear of anyone thinking my prediction an idle one.
But to return to the question of the College website. I recall vividly the gushing prose about Eve Ender and her vile play “The Vagina Monologues” that was inflicted on our community not long ago, and I remember how many students wrote to me to say that this encomium did not in any way reflect their highly negative evaluation of the event. The most liberal Wabash professors are treated like sages on the site, and something approaching a strange cult of personality now surrounds one of them in official College writing. I think we all deserve to know who is responsible for this blatant liberal bias, and we need to know why such a distorted view of Wabash is the one that powerful people want the world to see.