As you recall, Professor Alexander Riley spoke to us in September regarding 9/11. What follows is an update from him on upcoming activities I would strongly encourage all of you to consider, thanks. Jim Persing
Friends:
We are in a special period at Bucknell for the next few months, and I want to share with you some information on a few events that I hope you will consider attending.
Beginning next week, on November 8, and extending through January. a new faculty group (the Bucknell Project for American Leadership and Citizenship) has organized visits to campus by three nationally-known conservative intellectuals as part of a series on the consequences of the 1960s (the three conservative speakers are flanked by three speakers on the left–one of whom already visited campus, the other two of whom will be here in February and March 2019). Here is the webpage for the series with all the details.
The next three speakers are, in order:
Mark Bauerlein (November 8), a professor of English at Emory University and an editor at the journal of religious culture and American life, First Things. Bauerlein will be talking about the damage done by the ’60s to our educational culture, and especially to our colleges and universities. You can get an idea of his thinking by listening to a bit of his podcast here.
Mark Moyar (November 27), who works for USAID and has a Ph D in History from Cambridge University. Moyar has written several books about the Vietnam War that argue against the now widespread belief among America’s cultural elites that the US role in Vietnam was destructive and that the war could not have been won. He charges that government officials did not accurately understand Vietnam in historical and cultural terms, and significant figures in the American media misrepresented the situation on the battlefield in such a way as to massively fuel anti-war sentiment even while South Vietnamese and American troops were successfully combating the communist forces. He will be talking about how the anti-war left came to dominate important American cultural institutions, including much of journalism and most History departments. Moyar’s webpage is here.
Charles Kesler (January 31), a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books. Kesler has written one of the best books about the Obama administration (read a short interview on the Obama presidency here). He will talk to us about the Lyndon Johnson presidency and the utopian Great Society programs it put in place. These programs, in Kesler’s view, marked a massive retreat from the founding principles of the country and have universally failed to produce what they claimed they would produce while wasting many billions if not trillions of dollars. Here is Kesler talking about the Trump presidency and the future of conservatism.
I urge you to support all of these talks by attending them and telling your friends to attend them. We need to show the administration and the rest of the faculty that there is significant community support for events like this, and if we cannot show them that, it is very unlikely that we’ll get the opportunity to do more of this kind of stuff. So this is an important moment for those who want to hear a wider array of voices and viewpoints at Bucknell. You can help us make the case that viewpoint diversity is essential to the life of a university and that Bucknell must do much better on this issue.
If you would like more information on any of these events, the BPALC, or any other related matters, please don’t hesitate to write me directly at atriley@bucknell.edu.
cheers,
ATR
