Note: The views expressed in the Opinion pages are those of the writers. They are not necessarily representative of the opinions and values of
The
Spectator
Editorial Board.
Additionally, the author requested that this letter be published verbatim.
The Spectator
did, however, format this submission in accordance with our style guidelines.
Dear
Spectator
Editorial Board,
On 27 Oct., “the full-time members of the Government department” issued a confusing and inconsistent all-campus statement about the appearance on campus of Dr. Paul Gottfried. Shortly thereafter, in immediate response, I emailed Phil Klinkner, the departmental chairman, saying that “I am the one — and I alone — who is responsible for bringing Paul here.” I do not apologize for doing so. His appearances were announced months in advance on AHI’s website. Months before Gottfried appeared at Hamilton, details of his classroom visitations were worked out with the relevant professors. Should anyone like additional information about Gottfried, his credentials, and why he was brought to Hamilton, look to the Alexander Hamilton Institute’s website: theahi.org.
I will repeat what I have told others. No one on Hamilton College’s campus approaches Paul Gottfried, an active scholar for more than fifty years, in range of erudition and mastery of languages. In the 1960s, my mentor, Eugene Genovese, an internationally known Marxist scholar at the time, tried to recruit Gottfried, a Yale Ph.D., to the graduate program in history at the University of Rochester, then one of the best in the country. Genovese said of Gottfried, he is “an American intellectual of superior talent, [who] has been treated abominably by Academia, not only for his conservatism but for his incorruptibility.” Paul, I feel your pain. At Hamilton, Gottfried addressed all the questions raised by Cannavò and many more, and he did so in a way that many students and others present found intellectually stimulating.
Since Cannavò knows full well that I was the one responsible for bringing Gottfried to campus, he targets me, and I will respond to his preening, error-filled letter. Cannavò and I have a history. It is relevant to bring some of it to public attention. In the 16 Feb. 2007 issue of
The Spectator
I took him to task for smiting, hip and thigh, an undergraduate named Ben Noble — as it turned out, one of Cannavò’s former students. What was Noble’s crime? As a reporter for
The Spectator
, Noble had investigated the political donations of Hamilton’s faculty and could find only one who had contributed to the Republican Party. He was concerned about the lack of intellectual diversity on campus. Why the public flogging of a former student? Unlike Cannavò, I cannot read minds, but at the time he was a visiting assistant professor in hopes of landing a tenure-track position. At Hamilton, it never hurts when you’re looking for job security to burnish your left-wing credentials, even if it means whack-a-moling the weak.
On at least two occasions Cannavò has enjoyed the hospitality of AHI with specially prepared meals catered to his vegan preferences. Yet, in 2011, according to an undergraduate of African descent who was being intensively nurtured by AHI, Cannavò and two like-minded professors pressured him into severing his ties to AHI, although, to be fair, Cannovò denied to me evil intention. In 2015, in response to an all-campus email, Cannavò openly declared that whites were “terrified” to talk about race on campus. He called the “silence, awkwardness, or plain disregard” of the issue “cowardly and offensive,” a silence that “perpetuates racism.” Yet, when an undergraduate named Joe Simonson published an article that Cannavo did not like on the Ferguson riots, Cannavo sent him a vicious email and then, as icing on the cake, wrote a damning letter, redolent of innuendo, to
The Spectator
. It is safe to say that when I got wind of it, Cannavo did not like what I had to say.
As I have told Hamilton faculty, administrators, and trustees, I will not stand idly by and allow professors who think conservatism is a pathology to browbeat right-of-center students into silence. On that score, I confess I may be fighting a losing battle. The Hamilton College Republican Club is virtually defunct (Please faculty no standing ovations). Hamilton’s administration had to invent undergraduate Republican leaders to present to Karl Rove at the recent Common Ground gala, a series that will have absolutely no impact on redressing the gross intellectual imbalances and disproportions here. In the 1990s, Hamilton College had a Republican Club with at least sixty active members as well as a conservative club with more than a dozen active members. In the aftermath of the Trump election, the young woman who headed the Republican Club, someone who, by the way, didn’t vote for Trump, was accosted on three occasions, twice by activist students, once by an activist professor. Instead of listening to the canary in the coal mine, the trustees seem bent on congratulating themselves for the very conditions that are causing the poor bird’s demise.
In that regard, Professor Cannavò, who has an advanced degree in political science, seems to think he also has one in theology. In 2008, preaching a sermon on the mount, he summoned every faculty member on campus to turn their classes over on 30 or 31 January to “global warming and its implications in your curriculum.” In 2014, on a panel sponsored by AHI at Hamilton on free speech, Cannavò made perfectly clear that he was a professor who would take certain issues in his classroom off the table for debate. I was in the audience at the time; I corrected him in his discussion of the Ward Churchill affair since for many of us, the matter of Churchill’s appearance at Hamilton was not about speech, but rather about academic fraud. Churchill was fired by the Colorado Board of Regents for multiple acts of academic fraud. To date, I have not heard one apology from the faculty smear merchants who slandered me as a McCarthyite for proving Churchill was a phony Indian and a phony historian.
For students, I have this advice: caveat emptor. The utopian illusion often masks the totalitarian impulse.
Sincerely,
Robert Paquette
Department of History
