Why I started MACALESTER ALUMNI OF MODERATION

I started Macalester Alumni of Moderation because our college has drawn a one-sided leftist line in the sand on socio-political issues. The college is consumed with silliness and politically correct reactions to benign or unimportant things.

Students have told me that it is commonplace for professors to criticize students who offers a moderate or conservative observation on issues. Professors have told me that they feel the pressure to follow the liberal/leftist line.

But that is not what a liberal arts college does. The liberal part of that phrase refers to broad exposure and wide analysis, not tired leftist rants.

I attended Macalester in the days of Ted Mitau, a professor who was adamant about open discourse. I was a state Y-DFL vice chairman at the time, and spent summers working for the DFL. Most of my fellow political science majors were Y-GOP members. But we all got along. No one was put down for thinking differently.

Macalester has hired professors concerned chiefly with pet leftist causes rather than the cause of broadening student minds. Why must a four-year school have a Dean for the Study of Race and Ethnicity? Mac’s History Department has a curriculum filled with course titles that are more polemic and narrow than broad and open.

The result? Students who blindly believe they must stop drinking Cokes because of alleged employee relations problems among Latin American bottlers, regardless of evidence to the contrary. More recently, students demanded that restrooms be liberated from worldly sexism by being made unisex. And, of course, all corporations are evil regardless of their charities and community outreach.

To prove how knee-jerk the college has become, look at the letter to the editor I sent to The Mac Weekly earlier in 2008. In it I called for Mac students and high school students to embrace child molesters and protest how society has oppressed them. The letter was crafted with all the buzzwords of the left and filled with all the guilt-trips of the age. The editors, thinking it was serious, published the letter. Need I say more?

I can’t be the only Macalester grad who has occasionally pondered moderate or conservative observations on social and political issues. Who else is out there? I know some alums are concerned about Mac’s religious life, but I have restricted my concern to socio-political issues. I am a moderate who detests the right wing religious nuts who have captured the Republican Party as much as I detest the teachers unions, trial lawyers, and wacko environmentalists who have captured the Democratic Party.

Your turn.

Roger S. Peterson
Class of 1967
Founder, Macalester Alumni of Moderation
peterson@sacramentowriters.com
916-624-1894