Santomauro-Stenzel ’24 is the former Editor-in-Chief of The Monitor, and previously served as Hamilton’sstudent body president. He is currently earning his Master’s in Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he has reported on ongoing protests and restrictions on free speech. The online version of this article contains hyperlinks for sources.
Dear Editor,
I write in response to your March 6th coverage, “Environmental protections vs. economic growth discussed at inaugural campus-wide debate.” I’ll get to the wholly faulty premise of the heavily-attended debate’s framing in a moment.
For now, why is Hamilton College going out of its way to collaborate with a Project 2025 Advisory Board member, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, to host a campus debate? Should we expect more of this, Board Chair David Solomon, President Steven Tepper, and Common Ground Director Ty Seidule? Perhaps some spunky student journalists or rabble rousers at the next faculty meeting can raise these public interest questions, on the record. It’s also worth looking into where the funding for Common Ground and similar programming comes from.
As the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a “conservative” presidency (in effect, the current Trump administration), Project 2025’s education policies include, among much more: the abolition of the Department of Education, denying the existence of transgender people in all data and programs and eliminating billions of dollars in education funding.
Hamilton’s Common Ground program has partnered with the “College Debates & Discourse Alliance,” a coalition of which the “American Council of Trustees and Alumni” (ACTA) is a member. As reported by Inside Higher Ed, Hamilton has been collaborating with the coalition since at least August 2024. A Common Ground Instagram post says the debate program “teaches students to honor ideological diversity and civil discourse.”
Founded 30 years ago, ACTA has long attempted to promote its very specific vision for higher education. Despite what its name may sound like, and mission commitments to “support liberal arts education” or “safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus,” ACTA is not a non-ideological trade association for college trustees and alumni.
Recent ACTA Twitter highlights include its president, Michael Poliakoff, calling diversity, equity, and inclusion “discrimination” and a “virulent cancer that can eat away at the very essence of higher education,” as well as saying it “has no place” at military academies. Of note: Professor Seidule’s claim to fame is his work to undo the “Lost Cause” myth, in part by removing Confederate names from military bases. Talk about the call coming from within the house.
Now, ACTA is running a “unique event series” at Hamilton with the coalition, per Spec’s reporting. Common Ground’s Instagram includes posts with ACTA’s logo, which depicts an ancient column, on official materials. The College Discourse and Debate Alliance has no website of its own at the time of this article’s writing; its LinkedIn links to a page on ACTA’s own website. According to that page, ACTA brings to the program, “myriad connections to college leadership and faculty, as well as project management and media expertise.”
One must ask, what does ACTA see for itself in this project? It’s not the first time ACTA has attempted to insert itself into Hamilton’s affairs.
ACTA was a main character in my senior thesis: they fervently supported the proposed “Alexander Hamilton Center” in 2006 and Hamilton Aligns With Project 2025 Advisor 2007. Trustee Carl Menges ’51 offered $3.6 million to Hamilton to start the center, which was spearheaded by Hamilton professors Bob Paquette, Doug Ambrose, and James Bradfield. Rationales for the center included similar support for “diverse views” and emphasizing the “Hamilton” part a lot.
In the pages of National Review, the new center was received as penance for how none of the founding fathers, “perhaps excepting [Thomas] Paine,” would have endorsed Hamilton College’s “fervent multiculturalism.” The author said the center would be one of an “expanding number of new academic programs that are bringing ‘diverse perspectives’ [Their scare quotes!] to colleges.”
In an announcement, then-President Joan Hinde Stewart said students would “benefit now and in future years from the programming and resources resulting from Carl’s gift.”
Citing its explicit political mission and lack of full accountability to Hamilton’s governance—despite using the school’s name and resources—the faculty overwhelmingly voted against the center. Unable to resolve governance concerns with President Stewart and Dean of Faculty Joe Urgo, the center would not have a home at Hamilton College. When announcing the split in November 2006, Hamilton wrote that, “even in the absence of a formal center structure,” they hoped some of the programming could continue.
In response, ACTA, in its own words, “launched a national public exposure campaign” that landed numerous negative and poorly reported press hits about Hamilton. Aside from frantically telling alumni and the press that they actually really supported the center but had a disagreement on structure, Hamilton did take one small step. In what could be seen as a brief, miniscule act of resistance, Hamilton filed a trademark application for “Alexander Hamilton Center” in April 2007.
Menges had resigned from Hamilton’s Board of Trustees in February. Along with ACTA’s then-president Anne Neal, he joined the board of the newly-founded Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, based in that yellow house next to the Clinton Fire Department, in the fall.
Given its name, AHI has often been perceived by outsiders as part and parcel of Hamilton College. AHI has proudly hosted groups like Moms for Liberty that call for restrictions on academic freedom. In front of one such gathering, Dr. Mary Grabar, an AHI fellow, equated the absence of “Eurocentrism” with “knocking each other on the head” and “primitivism.” AHI invited Dr. Paul Gottfried to speak on campus, who once wrote that “blacks almost always are found at the bottom of this list in terms of their real cultural accomplishments.” That’s just a tiny slice of their offerings. A 2015 report by a partner organization of ACTA described AHI and “objective” organizations of a similar model at other colleges as, among other things, confronting “dogmatic philosophies of multiculturalism.”
AHI’s affiliates and allies have often participated in the “internet outrage machine,” ginning up continued culture war controversies about Hamilton’s campus over the years (at times leading to targeted harassment of community members). These tactics are the same being prominently used against Columbia University, from the doxxing of pro-Palestine students to seeding false narratives about campus life. The tactics have, at times, been effective in shaping Hamilton’s institutional behavior.
They even predate, and are the progenitor for, AHI’s founding. Professor Paquette, AHI’s only president, was also a key player in stirring national controversies around a left-wing lecturer in 2003 and a left-wing speaker in 2005. According to Hamilton’s official history book, On the Hill, “The experience was chastening and not one the College would ever wish to repeat.”
Hundreds of students protested against AHI in 2022, as one example of opposition. Despite a Big Lie becoming a Massive Lie and my and others’ repeated requests for comment on AHI, spanning years, Hamilton’s administration has yet to publicly criticize them to my knowledge.
I’ve come to learn something here at Columbia’s journalism school: outside media usually sucks at covering campuses, often getting facts and framing wrong if leaders don’t offer clear counternarratives. It already happened to Hamilton in May, when the Utica Observer-Dispatch platformed unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitism against student protesters, in part levied by an AHI writer.
How are timid responses working out for Columbia? We shall see if Hamilton’s leaders have anything public to say about ACTA or, indeed, Columbia—founded in 1754, the alma mater of our own College’s namesake, and a school that is now prone to becoming synonymous with the death of American higher education, and perhaps, democracy.
President Tepper and Dean of Faculty Ngoni Munemo recently said they will be “resolute and unswerving” in defending “core values that are the lifeblood of Hamilton.” Let us hope so, given that Hamilton’s historical practice has been to avoid naming the assailants and threats it faces for what they are. The two say they’re being regularly briefed by school lawyers; in my personal experience, those lawyers have been pivotal in Hamilton’s prior non-response to bad-faith right-wing attacks. Perhaps in this new era, Bond, Schoeneck & King will turn their aggression towards student employees, denying their rights to unionize and along with the college drafting a wide array of anti-union literature, against the federal government.
It’s unclear what behind the scenes discussions looked like during the planning of Common Ground. But former President David Wippman, who started the program nearly a year into the first Trump administration, rhetorically positioned it as a response to allegations that Hamilton was engaged in “cancel culture,” et cetera et cetera.
Common Ground has also long trafficked in pedagogically irresponsible, anti-intellectual false equivalencies that lend themselves to weakly-substantiated and reactionary conclusions. It has offered credibility to figures who are anything but credible, describing all its invited speakers, including a GOP operative who implied the CIA censored the press from covering how Covid-19 was merely a “bad flu virus,” as “highly respected thought leaders.”
Looking at the most recent event, it’s unusual to begin a debate at an academic institution with explicit calls to deprioritize facts. Positioning “economic growth” against “environmental protections” as the terms of the debate is a perfect microcosm of Common Ground’s issues. Whose interests does it serve to frame a debate like this?
What is “the economy,” so to speak? Do raw materials extracted from the Earth exist outside of “economic growth,” in perpetuity? Do the negative externalities of production not impact it? When, as a result of the climate crisis, global crop yields crater, coastal cities disappear, and prehistoric pathogens are unleashed without antidote, what will that do to precious “economic growth”? What is the environment if not the root of all material conditions? Let’s try ecology rather than economics for a moment.
“The environment” is not separate or apart from humans and our systems, as the residents of Flint, MI, or Utica, NY know all too well, and to some students’ credit, was mentioned during the debate. But that’s not an opinion or value judgement; it is a scientific fact. The environment encompasses us all, whether we like it or not, and whether we choose to treat it as such. Bafflingly, I learned just that, repeatedly, in my Environmental Studies minor here at Hamilton.
That ACTA was allowed a role in running Hamilton’s flagship speaking program indicates, at least, that their prior record wasn’t a prohibitive issue to Hamilton, or that those involved in the collaboration did not conduct basic background research. Either way, the result is clear.
Unlike my new institution, Vichy Columbia, Hamilton College apparently needs no active bad-faith national scrutiny or federal diktat to bring outside far-right political actors hostile to higher education into determining its academic programming. Instead, it welcomes them with open arms, obeying in advance, under a decades-old guise of open debate. On so many agonizingly ironic levels, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Yours everlasting,
Eric Santomauro-Stenzel H-K’24