I live near Dartmouth and graduated from Yale: in other words, I'm between an Ivy League rock on the one hand and a Ivy League hard place on the other.

However Ms. Kim's reference (see her opinion piece in today's Dartmouth, below) to Chris Hedges' The Empire of Illusion and its claim that "a true liberal arts education fosters in its students a seed of honest intellectual inquiry, which is fiercely independent and naturally distrustful of authority and the status-quo." makes me wonder.

I have observed in my own lifetime that 'challenging of the status-quo' in two Yale graduates ,both former editors of The Yale Daily News, who founded journalistic, and some would say, political, empires: Henry Luce (Time Magazine;Life Magazine) and William F. Buckley, Jr. (The National Review ; Firing Line).

Over time those journalistic entities transmogrified into the new status-quo of anti-communist red-baiting for 30 years which few dared question and which held the country in a kind of perpetual fear of the bogey-man in the closet or the commie-under -the bed.

I'm afraid the noble cry of Ms. Woo to either"stand for ourselves" or for someone or something "else" amounts in Henry Luce and William F.Buckley to this cautionary lament:

Oh!
What a tangled web
we wove

When world
we set out
to
improve.

And when
our empires crumbled
too

Others
built
a world
anew

A
world which
too
will fold
and crumble

As mortals never cease
this
bumble.

Kim: Whither the Liberal Arts?

"We neither stand for ourselves nor for anyone else."

The Dartmouth

By Yoo Jung Kim, Staff Columnist

Published on Tuesday, August 2, 2011

. . . Pulitzer Prize journalist Chris Hedges wrote in his 2009 book, “The Empire of Illusion,” that a true liberal arts education fosters in its students a seed of honest intellectual inquiry, which is fiercely independent and naturally distrustful of authority and the status-quo."

Dartmouth, however, demonstrates none of these characteristics. We are even reluctant to fix the social ills of our own immediate social microcosm, which is seeped in dangerous behavior (binge drinking) and misogyny (Dartmouth X). These problems are shielded from criticism by claims of “good fun” and “tradition.”

Even the all-too-rare student demonstrations on this campus often quickly fizzle out due to lack of participation and in the worst of cases, peer ridicule.

We neither stand for ourselves nor for anyone else...