to promoting “excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism as these ideas were developed and institutionalized in the United States and within the larger tradition of Western culture.”

It would be paltering with the truth to say that we were not surprised by the birth of a center dedicated to the legacy of Alexander Hamilton at the college that bears his name. After all, this was a place that had made itself into a poster child for academic irresponsibility in recent years. Its former president, Eugene Tobin, had to resign a few years ago when it was revealed that he was in the habit of publishing other people’s work as his own. On the basis of that distinction, Mr. Tobin promptly ascended to a plumpplace at the Andrew Mellon Foundation, but that is a scandal for another day. Back at Hamilton, the college-funded Kirkland Project, a bastion of sclerotic left-wing activism, was busy bringing porn stars to campus to demonstrate the proper use of sex toys to students. In the autumn of 2004, the Kirkland Project announced it was bringing Susan Rosenberg, a former member of the Weather Underground, one of the most violent of the radical anti-American groups of the 1960s, to Hamilton to be an “artist- and activist-in-residence” and teach a seminar called “Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity and Change.” Rosenberg had only recently become available for such pedagogical adventures: she had served sixteen years in a federal penitentiary when Bill Clinton, in one of his last acts as President, commuted