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Monday, May 15, 2006
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PATRICK HENRY I've defended Patrick Henry College - a Christian college in Purcellville, Virginia, near the Holy Cross monastery where UD and her family sometimes like to go to hear the monks do their Gregorian chants - against people who dismissed its students and faculty as robotic propagandists for the Christian right. But maybe I was wrong. Or maybe I was right. A significant number of faculty and students are leaving Patrick Henry in protest. One student sums it up: "I didn’t come here to go to Bible school. I came here for a liberal arts education from a Christian perspective." The school has begun banning certain books and points of view in the classroom, and as a result it's putting itself through the sort of education schools in free countries routinely get when they become repressive. “[T]he administration did not anticipate the amount of disagreement that would occur in this community they set up,” a campus dissident says, remarking the school's "unrealistic expectation of conformity.” One of the professors who's leaving says: "If there is a de-emphasis on the liberal arts here, it will profoundly affect the college's ability to place people in high office." (The school's well-connected in the Bush administration.) So... early critics were right that Patrick Henry was heading toward know-nothingism; but they were wrong about its absence of internal integrity. |