The AHI – A Welcoming Community

Before I joined Hamilton College as a bright-eyed, forward-thinking freshman in the fall of 2019, I was informed by the guidance counselor at my high school that graduates who attended the college had spoken highly of the Alexander Hamilton Institute (AHI). It was described as a welcoming community, determined to help supplement a Hamilton College education by sharing perspectives that differ from the left-leaning norm of our community. As an academically-inclined student who appreciated the merits and pitfalls of all parts of the political spectrum, I was excited to explore this opportunity and was even more delighted to be welcomed into a community that fosters personal growth, promotes academic rigor, and accepts dissenting opinions. As a moderate, I often find myself walking the line between left-leaning social policies and right-leaning economic policies. Like what I think is a silent majority of the Hamilton College community, I identify as socially liberal and fiscally conservative on most issues. My political identity is respected and accepted by the AHI.

The AHI has also provided me with opportunities I would be able to find nowhere else. I was fortunate to be accepted to the WAPONS (Washington Program on National Security) program, open to students from across the country but limited to less than twenty per year, attending with two other Hamilton students and a dozen from various institutions across the nation. Led by the sweet and respected Dr. Juliana Pilon, former Professor of Politics and Culture and Director of the Center for Culture and Security at the Institute of World Politics in Washington DC,  the program took us around the city and politically around the world, from dawn to dusk, speaking with influential figures who work in a variety of venues involving national security. I had the unique opportunity to have discussions with Raytheon lobbyists speaking about how defense contracts operate, a Brigadier General of the U.S. Army who operated in Afghanistan and described his personal experience, experts in Middle Eastern politics who offered enlightened perspectives on deteriorating Israeli-Palestinian relations and nuclear proliferation, and representatives from the International Monetary Fund’s Polish delegation who addressed the future of cryptocurrency in regard to national and global economic agendas.

Dr. Pilon radiated expertise, energy, and passion for every trip we took on our two-week journey, and that enthusiasm clearly permeated the program's atmosphere. Even after hours, when she went home after a long day of leading “her children” around the capital, the students often met to discuss the day’s events together with her right-hand man, Mason Goad (a scholar and graduate student pursuing a higher degree in International Security), who assisted in all daily activities. As if Dr. Pilon’s connections allowing her to bring in a variety of high-profile figures weren’t enough, she invited the whole WAPONS delegation to her home outside the city, where we had coffee, hors d'oeuvres, and dinner-table chats about her and her accomplished husband Dr. Roger Pilon’s antics in graduate school and beyond. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had to date.

The WAPONS program was one of the best summer experiences in which I’ve been involved.  Informative and engaging, exhausting but worth every minute, it helped foster new understandings of the meaning of national security, including the importance of collective action and collaboration in finding modern, creative solutions to difficult, timeless problems.  This opportunity was possible only through the coordinated efforts of leaders of the AHI, especially its president Dr. Robert Paquette and Dr. Pilon, one of its Senior Fellows.

My experience with the AHI has been everything I expected and more – accepting, engaging, philosophical, and academic. The opportunities I have had through the AHI are unparalleled in quality and unmatched in perspective. A community that welcomes dissenting opinions and will challenge members and non-members alike with occasions to analyze political and apolitical topics, the AHI takes a facts-based and reasoned approach with which every member of the Hamilton Community should engage. Whether you agree with the right-leaning tendencies of the AHI’s president and staff or not, it is always beneficial to understand and discuss the reasoning and opinions in alternatives to one’s own beliefs, to stray from the spiraling whirlpool of confirmation bias. The AHI offers that, in a safe environment for intellectual discussion and dissent.

What is the Meaning in Life?

Before we discuss the meaning of life, perhaps we should ask why grappling with its meaning even matters. Existential angst -- is it useful? In a chaotic world where iconoclasm vies with conformism, metanarrative is frequently sought after and persecuted. Globalism has added so much mobility in the market of ideas that it has replaced stable dominant teloses -- ultimate values and goals -- with anarchy. We cannot help but scurry aimlessly, hunted by the tide that is time, jumping over hurdles one after another without even a partially formulated telos. What chaos! (i.e., the Greek khaos, meaning abyss). We fear and ponder at this abyss of the unknown, ponder and yet fear more.

In Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, Susan Wolf believes she has found the exit to this cosmic treadmill, or as Nietzsche called it, “eternal return.” She entreats us to ponder the meaning in life rather than the meaning of life. Because only then, fueled by pragmatism, can we tease out the practical from the superfluous. In scrutinizing the motivations behind our actions, we grow and improve. Wolf speaks of two core conditions, subjectivity and objectivity, that are both necessary to human fulfillment. She neatly captures the complementary relationship between them when she explains: “meaning in life arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” Rejecting both “rational egoism” and consequentialism, Wolf sharpens our understanding of worth and justification while steering us away from agonizing misconceptions about value. Her “fitting fulfillment” view clarifies the role of self-interest in our actions without relying exclusively on its explanatory power. But her view doesn’t sufficiently address (although she recognizes) a major point about objective worth, and it doesn’t provide a solution to the lack of an independent arbitrator or relatively impartial judge.

Wolf succeeds in eliminating the false dichotomy between rational egoism and consequentialism. Rational egoists believe that every sound justification for our actions, or the policies we advocate, is a maximization of self-interest. Wolf rejects this school of thought, citing moral duty and “reasons of love.” She later notes situations of apparent selflessness or altruism, such as dedicating time to something we take a passionate interest in or caring for a friend. (Of course, her examples of unexplained “altruisms” can still be morphed into acts of self-interest, if the rational egoist claims such an act includes an expectation of self-benefit.) Wolf offers a conception of meaningfulness that is “neither subsumable under or reducible to either happiness or morality.” In her model, the person “loves” the activity, or is subjectively “gripped, excited, interested, engaged” by and in it. For example, if an emergency room surgeon goes to work every day feeling beat and distraught because she resents the exacting standards of her job and is tired of the crunching pressure -- even though her work is objectively valuable to society, bringing people back from the brink of traumatic death -- her life is not meaningful by Wolf’s standard because the “subjective condition” of meaningfulness, her happiness, is not met.

On the other hand, Wolf’s “objective condition” requires that an activity which a person enjoys must also engage entities independent of him or her, and that it is also recognized as objectively valuable. (For the second of these conditions she uses the term “endoxic,” based on endoxa from Aristotle: commonly accepted by everyone, or at least by the wise.) If someone is an alcoholic who rapturously downs bottles of vodka and has little time or concern for anything else, Wolf considers that a meaningless life. Although he fulfills the condition of “subjective attraction” because he loves what he’s doing, his actions lack even a paltry worth that others would recognize.

Wolf also adds a third requirement: a real connection between the subjective and objective conditions. An action cannot be meaningful, she says, if the link between self-enjoyment and objective worth is accidental. If an alcoholic, in his unstable state, happens to utter words of wisdom that deter another person from committing suicide, he only happens to accomplish this result, saving the individual’s life only passively, without active intention. If that alcoholic did not utter words of wisdom, the person would not have been deterred from committing suicide. But the simple act of uttering words of wisdom is not sufficient for deterrence.

Wolf addresses two main objections to her analysis – elitism and “metaphysics of value.” Elitism involves authority. Who has the legitimate authority to dictate to the rest of us what is valuable? Wolf is keenly aware that she, like others, operates on biases. She admits that her bourgeois or middle-class American values cannot be a certificate of genuine authority, since these are far from universal moral attitudes. But nonetheless, she affirms that we can largely overcome this difficulty if we keep our “fallibility” in mind and regard our judgments as tentative, “pool our information, our experience, and our thoughts,” and test our intellect when we are challenged to justify our judgments. If we remain self-aware and critical of our beliefs, such vigilance acts to a certain extent as a guard against prejudices and partiality. Wolf also clarifies that her endoxic approach should not be misunderstood to mean readily submitting to the judgment of the majority. She admits that adopting John Stuart Mill’s view of “a competent judge” who is “sufficiently rational, perceptive, sensitive, and knowledgeable” doesn’t resolve the issue.

Wolf rightly notes that many people would criticize her “endorsement of the idea of non-subjective value,” and that many more would be “frustrated or annoyed” by her “reluctance to make substantive judgments.” But her argument falters when she claims that a truly valuable and thus meaningful act must always engage beyond one’s self. If someone likes to drink coffee, for example, Wolf would regard that as benefiting only one’s self and thus not meaningful. Yet really, the network resulting from this taste or passion runs far and wide, all the way to the farmer whose livelihood depends on our purchases and so on, in a sort of infinite causal regression. In this case, Wolf’s view marginalizes the connectivity of global markets. From the truck driver who delivers the coffee to your doorstep to the manufacturer that made your container, from its lumber supplier to your waste collection service, a supply chain links manufacturers and consumers, buyers and sellers, together. The Ethiopian farmer might not have benefited very much from an individual purchase, since only a fraction of the ultimate price filters back to him. But the coffee drinker has contributed to the farmer’s life, however slightly. When we spend even one dollar, that dollar is used to pay for operating costs and salaries, ending up in savings and other spending. The government uses the tariff and tax we pay on coffee to provide infrastructure and public goods. So indeed, the coffee consumer is engaged with more than himself, and generally knows that he is. Isn’t that enough to fulfill Wolf’s condition of “engagement”?

Furthermore, Wolf’s view seems to inadequately reflect human psychology. Suppose that one’s happiness is not isolated, but contagious. Or that freedom from stress significantly improves one’s productivity. What then of the claim that actions which aren’t obviously consequential for others are therefore too internal, disconnected from anything else? Wolf’s analysis and arguments take little account of the complexity of our interactions.

Finally, a few comments on what might in philosophical language be called her “preemptions.” Overall, Wolf’s acknowledgement of her elitist framing regrettably does little to absolve it of this criticism. Since she has decided to retain her values, and implicitly disbelieves in the wholly objective person, she fails to set up any concrete safeguards against prejudice. Since people are often unaware of their fallacies, just reminding them to mind their fallacies isn't sufficient.

In summary, readers of this useful book are ultimately left disappointed. As with many such works, readers will see pearls of wisdom in it, and may feel a fuzzy warmness in their hearts. But Wolf’s account is inadequate in answering the question she aims to solve: the meaning in life, a question that provokes some of our dearest existential crises. Her meta-awareness of her potential bias, and her optimism about the benefit of pondering, are nonetheless laudable. But the main bulk of the argument, regrettably, is overly simplistic.

Babble On: Language and the Ivory Tower

I didn’t think stone could scream until I saw an image of Laocoön and His Sons, a sculpture depicting a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid. Troy’s priest of Neptune had implored his countrymen to refuse the Greek gift of a wooden horse, believing it was full of armed men. The Trojans dismissed Laocoön’s warning and hauled the horse within their walls.

As Laocoön attempted to sacrifice a bull to Neptune for the city’s protection, twin serpents, eyes suffused with blood and fire, emerged from Neptune’s chaotic sea and coiled around the throats of him and his sons. From Laocoön’s lungs came a “bellowing like some wounded bull struggling to shrug loose from his neck an axe that’s struck awry.” His own throat uttering the very cry of the animal he sought to slaughter, Laocoön becomes the sacrifice for a god less concerned with truth than with power, for a kingdom less concerned with prudence than with greed.

            On the postmodern campus, words are often Trojan horses that drain discourse of its lifeblood. Today, students at most colleges seem to learn to obfuscate, equivocate, and manipulate language more than to communicate. Language, once considered the most inspired means of pursuing mutual improvement between human beings, becomes a means of deception and compulsion. Educational conversation once bound students together toward the pursuit of truth. Now, with the dissolution of belief in absolute truth, verbal expression by the deconstructionists on our campuses has increasingly aimed at conquest, at seizing and maintaining ideological control. Here questions warp into “questionings,” interactions into interrogations, articulations into accusations, and sentences into sentencings.

            We are virtually willed into compliance under the grand narrative that no grand narratives are true, and the absolute truth that there is no absolute truth. No longer believing our breath is carried on the wind of divine consciousness, we feel only the Nietzschean breath of empty space. With the entire horizon wiped away, we drown in our own air. Our tongues reduced to mere muscle, we learn not the art of argument but the homogeneous, droning, artless regurgitation of accusations that brand us with a perpetually redefined sense of “virtue.” Together, yet utterly alone, we recite these empty prayers to the reigning cultural authorities, sacrificing intellectual dissidents on the altars of our own egos. Logos -- the reasoning word -- is dying, and we are killing it.

            Our destruction of objective definition grows from the underlying belief that no one can adequately convey a reality to another through speech, that no one can truly reach another’s mind or heart. This amounts to a disbelief in the very definition of education, and if education is lost, what knowledge are we to acquire? That we are all “lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation,” as David Foster Wallace says in his address to a graduating class of Kenyon College on the value of a liberal arts education. A bit of Hebrew wisdom once warned that from such a pursuit of knowledge, rooted in pride and power, stems every ripe horror of the human experience. Do we not taste some of that horror? Do we not feel exiled from each other? Are we not out of breath?

            The attempted elevation of our souls to infinite capacities for new definition and creation has proved to be dehumanizing, not deifying. The endless deconstruction of language generates disbelief in the ability of conversation and debate to sharpen a fellow human being. We have lost too much of our faith in mutual improvement and refinement, in good will and therefore friendship, in our capacity to gain strength through challenge. The extreme erosion of language illustrates a dying love for the human spirit. Losing this reverence strips us of our very humanity by blinding us to the humanity of others.

In our attempts to attain and advertise the heights of our own perceived virtue, we increasingly reduce our interactions to mere force. When persuasion is erased, only compulsion remains. Denying the existence of common ground, we stand in utter isolation. Our elimination of absolutes has wrenched away from us any true aspiration, while shrinking our sense of moral obligation to each other. Without a standard of meaning outside our own teetering mental constructions, we rob our pasts of redemption, our presents of hope, and our futures of achievement. With such a dismal interpretation of the nature of man, conversation regresses into a barbaric cacophony baying for sacrificial blood. 

            I fear that when at last we realize that our tyrannous butchery of dictionaries has caused our own kingdoms to crumble, we will look at the bleeding ink on our hands and wonder who will wipe it off us. We will not have the language to construct an answer. We will babble on. Only the rocks will be left to cry out.

“Antigone” was recently a student at Hamilton College.

Recommended Reading

One way to spend discretionary reading time – which you have, during vacations – is with our specialties. Or we can just seek entertainment. But I like to read slightly outside of my usual focus. Knowing what our intellectual neighbors have written is a healthy corrective to preoccupation with our intellectual families. May I suggest that students, in the social sciences and history especially, consider the following books?

The Righteous Mind  by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is brilliant and often fun. Although fairly long, it could have gone even deeper and still held readers’ interest. Its subtitle, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, has a non-academic tone but makes a measurable claim. Does the author succeed in showing us “why”? Largely, yes. In conversational yet careful prose, he makes a seemingly major addition to our understanding of the Red-Blue divide. Haidt—an active defender of intellectual diversity who has since co-founded worthy projects called Heterodox Academy and OpenMind Platform—made his widespread reputation in political psychology with this 2012 book, which draws partly upon his own research on the differing “moral foundations” people have.

Haidt says our political convictions are rooted in emotion far more than reason, but that emotion results from natural evolution and is ultimately functional, not dysfunctional. And that we can, realistically, commit ourselves somewhat more to reason than we normally do. The convictions associated with the Left and the Right are based to a great extent on differing moral foundations in our minds. Liberals, i.e. “progressives,” focus very largely on Care or preventing Harm (in the term’s basic humanitarian meaning) and on maintaining or establishing Fairness or Equality. Libertarians, Haidt shows, are quite another breed than Conservatives because they have their own moral foundation, obviously Liberty, that greatly overshadows all other foundations despite some concern among them for Fairness/Equality. Conservatives have by far the broadest range of seriously felt moral foundations. To concerns about harm and fairness, they add strong attachments to Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity (which need not be religious in the usual sense). Far from dismissing these distinctive features of conservative public morality, Haidt is quite respectful of them from his own slightly left-of-center perspective.

Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon could, perhaps, be read with special profit in conjunction with The Righteous Mind. Published a full generation ago in 1991, it shows, from what might be called a compassionate-conservative perspective, that the concept of absolute or nearly absolute rights can be a cold and sickly thing. Glendon argues effectively, with a good range of examples, that its long-growing dominance tends to impoverish our communication with others, including empathy for their inconvenient concerns—thus, too, inhibiting and flattening deliberation in government about the public good.

Sadly, the excessive “rights talk” and the closely-associated aggrandizement of legalism—relying on the law for everything—have resulted, she says, in a “law-saturated society.” They have become simplistic, selfish substitutes for moral reasoning in our public life. Truer words were never spoken, and they’re even truer today.

The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office (2017) can be read as a counterpart to an even more recent book, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency. The latter’s author, Stephen Knott, a professor of national security affairs, tries to show that the office has sunk into demagoguery during our republic’s odyssey and how it might be healthily renewed. The problem, he preaches, is “not … the ‘imperial presidency’ but the populist presidency.” Historian Jeremi Suri is troubled by popular pressures on the presidency too, and he can’t stand Donald Trump either. But The Impossible Presidency follows in the non-philosophical tradition of political scientist Richard Neustadt, who argued plausibly in 1960 that the presidency is a fundamentally “weak” office—strong only, or sometimes strong, when a president assiduously exercises the complicated skills needed to make it so.

Suri differs most significantly from Neustadt in stressing not the limits our system puts on our chief executive, and the virtually limitless modern demands on the office, but what he considers our presidents’ runaway agendas and their unproductive compulsion to deal with crises as extensively as they do. The Impossible Presidency can, among other things, help explain to people who vehemently oppose Trump why they needn’t have been so fearful of him—and, to his staunch supporters, why they shouldn’t have expected so much.

The ten presidents whom Suri discusses, concisely but not superficially in this notably well-written book, are given chapter titles with varying degrees of creativity. One of the better ones is Poet at War, for Lincoln. The book also analyzes the National Healer (Franklin Roosevelt), the Frustrated Frontiersmen (Kennedy and Johnson), the Leading Actor (Reagan), and the Magicians of Possibility (Clinton and Obama).

Finally, I recommend a tome published in 2013 by political scientist and historian Ira Katznelson. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time is commendable, first of all, for its theme: the New Deal plus World War II plus the early Cold War – periods that Katznelson plausibly insists should be viewed as a single era, defined by a series of radically new, disorienting challenges and thus by fear.

Katznelson is thought-provokingly critical of the New Deal enactments and America’s rise to superpower status. But he views them as a success story, and indeed a democratic success story, while stressing their moral complications and compromises – including, prominently, certain New Deal compromises with racism. Although it’s heavy reading, Fear Itself is very intelligent, excellently researched by a truly independent mind, and a good investment of time.

David Frisk is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the author of  If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement (ISI Books, 2012). A longer version of this piece was published at the Law & Liberty website last year.

Opinion: Salem on the Hill

On August 19, 1692, my first cousin, Martha Ingalls Allen Carrier, was hanged as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. Today, more than 300 years later, we still seek to understand the Salem Witch Trials. Based on wild accusations, unsupported assertions, unreliable hearsay, mere anecdotes, and flawed surmises, more than 200 Puritans were accused of witchcraft and 20 of them were convicted and executed. Why were the accused chosen? Why were the accusers believed? Why were the accused convicted? What happened in Salem in 1692, and why? We may never be able to fully answer these questions, but we must endeavor to learn from history so as not to repeat its mistakes. This has never been truer in America than it is today.

Martha was the daughter of Andrew Allen, a founder of Andover, and Faith Ingalls, a daughter of the founder of Lynn, both in Massachusetts. In 1674, Martha married an immigrant by the name of Thomas Carrier. They settled in nearby Billerica, but during the 1680s, Martha returned with her husband and four children (two had died from smallpox) to Andover. In 1690, an outbreak of smallpox occurred. While afflicted, Martha nursed her father, two brothers, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, two nephews, husband, and four children. Only she, her husband, and their children survived. Upon the death of the male members of the Allen family, Martha became a landowner. Thirteen people in Andover, seven of them in the Allen family, perished. The people of Andover blamed Martha for having brought smallpox from Billerica, but since the smallpox epidemic began in Boston in late 1689, new settlers in the colony might have done so.

Martha was a Puritan who didn’t live a Puritan life. Before she was accused of witchcraft in 1692, she was guilty of four great sins according to the New England mind. First, she was a woman in a society with a hierarchy that placed God at the top, men just below God, livestock at the bottom, and women just above livestock. Second, she was an independent woman in a society where women didn’t own property in their own right. Third, she was a free-thinking woman in a society where the congregational leaders believed women were the weaker gender, more easily subject to possession by the Devil. Fourth, she was an outspoken woman in a society in which men controlled women’s speech and more. Martha may have been the first American feminist.

In 1692, there was another smallpox outbreak in Salem. Joseph Houlton and John Walcott filed a complaint against Martha accusing her of acts of witchcraft against Abigail Williams, Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam Jr., and others who became known as “the Salem Girls.” My distant cousin, Magistrate John Hathorne, and Magistrates Jonathan Corwin and Bartholomew Gedney examined Martha. During the proceeding, the Salem Girls accused Martha of having tried to force them to sign the “Devil’s book.” Martha denied their accusations. Yet the cries and agonies of the girls, from the tortures allegedly inflicted upon them by Martha without her laying a hand on them, were so great that the magistrates had Martha bound hand and foot, taken to Salem Prison.

On August 2, 1692, the trial began. A neighbor, Benjamin Abbott, testified that after a land dispute with Martha about a year earlier, he’d developed a pain in his side that later had become a sore which, when lanced, had given way to gallons of corruption, and that after her arrest, his health had improved and his sore healed. Another neighbor, Samuel Preston, testified that he had a quarrel with Martha and afterward his cow had died mysteriously. Her nephew, Allen Toothaker, testified that after a disagreement with Martha, some of his farm animals had died mysteriously. He also said Martha had told him a four-inch-deep wound he’d received in combat would never heal, and that after her arrest, his wound had begun to do so.

On and on it went. The magistrates admitted into evidence unreliable hearsay, unsupported assertions, mere anecdotes, and flawed surmises to prove wild accusations, none of which would be permitted today. In the courtroom, the Salem Girls screamed out that they could see the ghosts of Andover’s thirteen smallpox victims, and one accused Martha of murdering them all. Several local ministers voiced their concerns about the proceeding, but the magistrates wouldn’t be swayed by them, or by logic and reasoning. The magistrates could see nothing beyond their ultimate goal: the conviction and execution of Martha for witchcraft.

Martha had no legal counsel, couldn’t have witnesses testify on her behalf, and had no formal avenues of appeal. But she could speak for herself, and did. She remained defiant, refused to confess to witchcraft, accused her accusers of being out of their wits, accused the magistrates of conspiring and plotting against her, and otherwise challenged the male authority of the magistrates and others. On August 5, Martha was convicted and sentenced to death. Two weeks later, she was transported through the streets of Salem. No reason, no logic, no justice would prevail to save Martha from the gallows. She was hanged and buried in a shallow grave in unconsecrated ground.

Today, the witches of Salem are no more, but the witch hunt in America continues. On September 20, 2021, the ghosts of Salem came to Hamilton College. The wrongfully accused was a student nominated to the Judicial Board of the Student Assembly. The examination of the accused was a questionnaire different in substance for this one of the ten nominees. The indictment came in the form of an agenda with a pre-determined denial for this one of the ten nominees. The evidence of witchcraft came in the form of defamatory statements driven by discriminatory intent, including a demonstrably false characterization of the Alexander Hamilton Institute. An equivalent of Salem’s concerned ministers were two brave Student Assembly officers who abstained from the confirmation vote. And the self-righteous magistrates were the Assembly officers who voted not to confirm the nominee, even though the confirmation of Judicial Board nominees had been a mere formality in the past.

It is also notable that some Student Assembly officers had initially sought an in-person proceeding to make the confirmation more of a show trial than the standard livestream. This is yet more evidence of discriminatory intent against the nominee — a fellow Hamiltonian who, let us consider, they might expect to see as a student and alumnus on the Hill, now and perhaps in the future: at graduation in 2022, a 25th-year reunion in 2047, or a 50th-year reunion in 2072. In the aftermath, one of the Student Assembly officers was heard proposing to threaten the nominee with further defamation in order to intimidate him. But the nominee refused, and still refuses, to be silenced. If this student can be silenced on campus, any student can be.

According to the college’s Mission Statement: “[T]he College emphasizes intellectual growth, flexibility, and collaboration in a residential academic community. Hamilton students learn to think independently, embrace difference, write and speak persuasively, and engage issues ethically and creatively. One of America’s first liberal arts colleges, Hamilton enables its students to effect positive change in the world.” So where were the intellectual growth, flexibility, and collaboration among Student Assembly officers and members? Except for the two brave students who abstained, where was anyone else who has learned “to think independently, embrace difference, write and speak persuasively, and engage issues ethically and creatively”? Apparently, they were nowhere in sight on September 20.

And what of Hamilton’s Harassment and Discrimination Policy and Code of Conduct? Under the policy, “[a]ll members of the Hamilton College community are expected to conduct themselves in a manner that does not infringe upon the rights of others … The College prohibits harassment and discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, veteran status, or any other characteristics protected by law, in its programs and activities. In addition to being antithetical to Hamilton's community values, harassment and discrimination are prohibited by this Policy … and by state and federal laws.” Under this code, “[p]rohibited student actions” include a “[v]iolation of published College policies, rules, or regulations.” Further, according to the Hamilton Student Handbook: “All student organizations [including the Assembly] are subject to Hamilton’s policies, including but not limited to the … Harassment/Discrimination … policy.” Are the Assembly officers so unknowledgeable, or obtuse, that they think the protections of these policies apply to them but not to everyone? If so, what kind of representation do they provide for the Hamilton student body? Seemingly, they believe in no freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, or freedom of religion, and no principle of diversity, inclusion, or justice, for disfavored students. 

About a week later, certain Assembly officers published a sanitized transcript of the September 20 minutes on the Hamilton website. Apparently they’d been keen to publish the full transcript, but the administration warned them of potential liability if they did. So, willing to further defame the student, and chafing against the relevant Hamilton policy and code, they published a sanitized transcript of the minutes along with a self-serving statement claiming the Assembly had been silenced. But freedom of speech doesn’t include a right to make slanderous or libelous statements, doesn’t shield one from the consequences of making such statements (especially when done with discriminatory intent), and doesn’t exempt one from Hamilton’s Harassment and Discrimination Policy and Code of Conduct.

In this day and age, due to the reach of the internet, wrongdoers’ acts last forever and the harm is often exponential to a wronged individual. No wonder the livestream of the September 20 meeting was taken down. No wonder the unsanitized transcript wasn’t published on the Hamilton website. No wonder a sanitized transcript was ultimately published. No wonder the nominee has lawyers. No wonder Assembly officers might have to engage lawyers. No wonder some Assembly officers have resigned. No wonder other Assembly officers have approached the nominee to ask whether they might be named in a complaint.

The nominee is an Undergraduate Fellow of AHI and an editor of Enquiry. Hamilton students affiliated with AHI or Enquiry are, and have been for years, under attack in violation of Hamilton’s Harassment and Discrimination Policy, Hamilton’s Code of Conduct, and Hamilton’s Student Handbook. The defamatory statements made with discriminatory intent against the nominee at the Assembly meeting, and the retaliatory conduct proposed by one of its officers against the nominee in the aftermath, will be a permanent and indelible stain upon Hamilton, its history, and its mission … and further, perhaps will become a cold and cruel portent of the failure of a nation, its future, and its promise.

Rest in peace, Martha Ingalls Allen Carrier. Stay strong, nominee.

Note: Margaret Wright is a friend of Hamilton College who is not affiliated with either the Alexander Hamilton Institute or Enquiry.