The Robinson-Zywicki Agenda

Cons, no need to read this one; most of you are already well aware of what, behind all the distorted rhetoric, you were fighting for in the last Dartmouth Trustee election. Whom I hope this post reaches are a few fairly moderate Dartmouth students and alumni out there who might not understand that there is indeed a battle being waged for American universities, that the only thing preventing it from being an all-out war is a strategic quietness by the aggressor in this war, the intellectual Right. For example, I once had a conversation with Colin Barry, president of The Dartmouth, about the petition candidates while the contest was still in its early stages. Though the D's editorials made it clear that Colin and the other editors at the D did not support Zywicki and Robinson, Colin was very skeptical when I explained how Dartmouth was target # 1 in the crosshairs of the cons' War on Liberal Thought. I could tell he thought I was being a little tooo conspiratorial.

What will it take for people to realize just how subtly ruthless the Right is in its quest for domination of this nation at all levels and in all forms, and how a movement like the Robinson-Zywicki petition campaign -- cloaked in empty language of "Intellectual Diversity," "Liberal Bias," and " of "Free Speech" -- is in reality the culminating action of a massive operation focused on gaining power and wiping out most of the progressive gains this country has made in the 20th century?

Don't believe me? Go read this NYT article about the Olin Foundation (Notice the eerily uninformative website), perhaps the driving force behind the intellectual operations branch of the neo-conservative army. They are the "philanthropists" behind the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the New Criterion, the Federalist Society, the economics departments at Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, The Closing of the American Mind, The End of History, the Dartmouth Review, and, essentially, the Robinson-Zywicki Trustee victory:

As for ideas, Mr. Piereson has a new one. He is hoping to start an initiative to counter liberal influence in academia. Liberal academics "don't like American capitalism, American culture, and they don't like American history - they see it as a history of oppression," he said. "There are some people who are prepared to spend large sums of money to address this problem."

The Olin Foundation, about to close down and make way for newer foundations of its kind, has provided $380 million dollars to fund the grass-roots Con Revolution of our time. And now we at Dartmouth can say we're reaping the benefits.