Men to match my mountains?

(Denver Post, Oct. 7) It was fifty summers ago, at age 13, that I gained admission to Princeton. Soon I was also attending Harvard, Yale, and Columbia (long before its Ahmadinejad disgrace). Later, with mentors who insisted nothing is impossible, I matriculated at Oxford. Not to brag, but readers of this column deserve to know the heights I began ascending in boyhood and continue scaling as a grandfather. My son enrolled with me in these demanding courses decades ago. We’ll enroll his son one of these days. Okay, the joke is obvious. I’m referring to Colorado’s Collegiate Peaks, not the towers of academe. Since 1957 I’ve seldom missed a summer to climb one of these or another of the magnificent 14ers. The steep trails have taught me as many lessons as my college days at Principia or my years in the Navy and Washington.

If you’ve spent any time on the high ridges, hiking or even ascending by car as one can do on Mount Evans and Pike’s Peak, you will relate. But as more and more Coloradans are transplants, living in laps from subdivision to mall to office park, too few now taste the joy of a day above timberline – the bracing air, infinite skyscapes, keen risk and sweet reward.

Do yourself a favor by enrolling soon at this unique wilderness campus and returning often: so advises an old Princeton undergrad. Hiking season on the 14ers pretty much ended with September, of course, though my friend Matt did Quandary Peak last winter on skis. However this is a good time to get in shape and read up, ahead of next spring.

Along with the Colorado mountain guidebooks, there’s a great shelf of naturalists and historians. John Muir’s writings, though set in the Sierras, resonate powerfully in the Rockies. His paean to “these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, opening a thousand windows to show us God,” was a watchword to my father and mother, who introduced me to the Collegiate Peaks.

Men to Match My Mountains, Irving Stone’s stirring account of the opening of the Far West before 1900, was another favorite in our family. Its title comes from a Sam Foss poem of 1894: “Bring me men to match my mountains, bring me men to match my plains, men with freedom in their visions and creation in their veins.”

The two authors, as everybody understood until recently, weren’t talking about males. They meant human beings capable of nobility and heroism, men and women of character “whose thoughts shall pave a highway up to ampler destinies,” as Foss wrote. In this inclusive sense the quote long held an honored place at the Air Force Academy. But in 2003, feminists forced its removal; too bad.

Writing just a year after Katherine Bates penned “America the Beautiful” atop Pike’s Peak, Foss entitled his verses, “The Coming American.” Americans worthy of these plains and mountains, Colorado heroes, did come as she and he both prayed. Many are enshrined at our state capitol, but you wonder if we still have the spirit they did.

The war monuments outside, like the water engineers glorified on rotunda murals inside, are politically incorrect today. So are some of the Senate’s stained-glass memorials: Otto Mears who relocated the Utes, Gov. Edwin Johnson who stood against unrestricted Mexican immigration and the wartime danger of a Japanese fifth column, Sen. Charles Hughes who fought federal land policy, the mining and railroad magnate David Moffatt.

Though neither defense nor development is fashionable now, where would we be without them? Modern as we are, summits remain to be climbed with sacrifice and daring – or our civilization will not endure. Men and women of spine are still needed, here on the backbone of the continent. The high trails still have much to teach.

GOP must pivot to win

(Townhall.com 9/15 & Denver Post 9/16)Victory Memo for the Candidate:

Sir, as a Republican seeking the presidency, you obviously would never consider a plan that risks losing the war in Iraq or the wider war against radical Islam, in pursuit of winning the 2008 election. Unlike the Democrats bent on taking the White House at any cost, you wouldn’t calculate (as Rep. James Clyburn did) that political success requires military failure. So our double goal must be victory for your candidacy and for this country against its jihadist enemy.

“To protect this country… is the ultimate responsibility of the President of the United States. All his other powers pale in comparison,” said Tom Tancredo in the latest debate. Your chance at being nominated over him and the rest, then defeating Clinton or Obama, lies in convincing a war-weary electorate that you best understand this supreme duty.

America is now in its seventh year of fighting back against the Islamist fanatics who attacked our homeland on September 11, 2001. Hostilities in Iraq have lasted longer than the Civil War or World Wars I and II. We are not a warlike or imperialist nation. Our people want this over. But we’re too smart to ignore a coiled snake, and too tough to accept defeat. We’ll see the struggle through.

Your challenge is to balance listening and leadership in a way that connects with both the voters’ impatience for peace and their gritty realism in a dangerous world. Statesmen have done it before at crucial moments in our history, forging victory for the nation and themselves. Why not you?

General Petraeus bringing his Iraq surge report to Congress held the high drama of a soldier eyeball to eyeball with civil government. One recalled Douglas MacArthur before Congress in 1951 after Truman fired him, or George Washington rejecting a kingship in 1783. One remembered why we have a chief executive who is constitutionally elected and limited, yet broadly empowered to protect the country.

The Petraeus report’s significance, unfortunately, is in the eye of the beholder according to party. To most Republicans it signals “Push on,” to most Democrats, “Get out.” Alone among our candidates, Ron Paul favors a quick exit from Iraq, a disavowal of military options toward Iran, and a disengagement from that whole region. The others are sticking pretty close to President Bush on war issues.

We as your strategists, however, agree with Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute, who has warned: “If Republicans mean to win in 2008, they will have to separate themselves… from the Bush Doctrine… to find new language in which to cast the war against the jihadists.” No one in the GOP field is doing that, and the success of the surge now makes it even less likely.

Kesler isn’t advocating Ron Paul’s isolationism or Joe Biden’s “surrender slower” formula; just the opposite. As he said last week on Backbone Radio, now is the time to articulate a Plan B for after the surge, by which the U.S. would pressure Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well as Iraq, Iran, and Syria to move internally against the virus of Islamism that caused Sept. 11 and will cause more like it.

Your models are Eisenhower on Korea in 1952, and Nixon on Vietnam in 1968. Without running as anti-war, each won by pivoting toward a new approach, away from the status quo. Though the military outcomes were imperfect, both Republicans avoided the surrender temptation. Your counter-examples are Humphrey in 1968 and Gore in 2000; neither distanced himself enough from a flawed incumbent. Be bold, sir, and victory is yours.

Note: It’s not clear which campaign the above was leaked from. While the pivot would be easiest for Fred Thompson or Newt Gingrich, any Republican could do it. Who will?

Who you gonna quote?

(Denver Post, Sep. 2) As an editor hiring a food critic, what would you look for? Not someone who has never cooked a meal, and who disdains American cooking in general. Nor would you let your culinary expert pan a restaurant he’d never eaten in. If only such common sense guided the newspapers’ choice of gurus to add gravitas in political stories. CSU political scientist John Straayer has been Mr. Quotable in reporters’ rolodexes for years. Yet he told Post columnist Diane Carman on Aug. 20 we need a “resurrection of interest in politics in America.” Huh? Amid all the intense focus on campaigns, Straayer’s weird comment can only mean that what’s dead is his own interest in the process.

Carman’s column confirms this. The way Americans do democracy is beneath Straayer. Our presidential primaries and conventions are to him (apparently no sports fan) as boring as “a hockey game that goes into 14 overtimes.” The party conventions are dismissed by the blasé prof (no lover of spectacle either) as mere “show time.” He knows that – despite having never been to one.

Embarrassing; but redemption awaits. If Straayer daringly attends the Democratic convention here next August, maybe his stock will rise with CSU students. If Bob Loevy, the Colorado College political scientist who runs a close second in newspaper mentions, watches more O’Reilly, maybe he’ll get saltier. “My feeling is that he misspoke,” Loevy said emptily in an Aug. 23 Post story about Senate candidate Bob Schaffer’s supposed hesitancy.

Reportedly both men are good teachers and competent scholars. But these two stuffy academics, along with a couple of consultants who’ve never run for office, the endlessly-quoted Republican Katy Atkinson and Democrat Eric Sonderman, can’t by themselves provide the varied insights Coloradans need. Journalists should showcase a wider range of experts.

Our two parties’ shortcomings also bother Vince McGuire, but they certainly don’t bore him. “Weak and wishy-washy, both of them,” growls the animated McGuire, who teaches politics at CU-Boulder. Divisive primaries, like those looming for three Colorado congressional seats, hurt representative democracy by blurring the voters’ expressed will, he argues. Party leaders should exert discipline, “rub some noses in the mud.”

The liberal-leaning Norman Provizer of Metro State’s poli sci faculty has the same zest for politics as McGuire, my fellow conservative. The White House in 2008 “is the Democrats’ to lose,” he chuckles, “but they’re quite able to do that.” Winning Congress last year complicated things, Provizer says: “They’re now measured by reality, not just rhetoric.” Yet popular discontent remains deep, “so change is enormously attractive.”

Reagan scholar and former DU political scientist Andrew Busch, now at Claremont in California, mirrored this analysis from the Republican side. GOP losses in 2006 will let the defeated party “redefine its message and run against the Dems as insiders” in 2008, the Colorado native observes. But he warns that widespread Bush fatigue may hurt whoever is nominated.

As for that Senate race between Mark Udall and Bob Schaffer, I asked two former legislators to pose as campaign strategists – crosswise. Ex-Rep. Rob Fairbank (R-Littleton) advises Udall, the Dem, to “discard his Boulder liberal voting record, move right, talk pro-environment AND pro-business.” Ex-Sen. Dan Grossman (D-Denver) says if Schaffer runs as “more mainstream than Mark” and plays up his “image of integrity” for keeping a 2002 term-limit promise, he can hold the Republican seat.

So for political analysis that’s thoughtful but not pompous, who you gonna quote? An afternoon of phoning turned up all of the above -- and none of the usual suspects. Charles Kesler, Andrew Busch’s poli sci colleague at Claremont, even titillated me with talk of Condi Rice’s “Plan B for Iraq after the surge;” but that’s another column. Tomorrow is Labor Day, after which politics get even hotter. Think Prof. Straayer will notice?

Who killed Western civ?

(Denver Post, Aug. 19) “Is it Western hemisphere? Is it Western hemisphere north of the equator?” The inquiry sounded like a game-show contestant trying to buy a clue. Or like your boss going on offense to cover an embarrassment. Unfortunately the questioner was CU Regent Paul Schauer. The mysterious “it” was Western civilization, recognizable to most people as 2500 years of unparalleled achievement from Greece and Rome to the present. But apparently not to Schauer, Mr. Education since entering the legislature decades ago.

When asked to join four other Republican regents in establishing a university department to teach about our civilizational heritage, according to a story in the Colorado Daily last Dec. 6, “Schauer questioned what ‘Western civilization’ even means.” After his GOP colleague Pat Hayes opined similarly that “this resolution makes no sense,” the proposal died for lack of a fifth supporter on the 9-member board.

Paula Pant’s piece in the Daily not only documents this pair’s scorn for the plan. It also says the resolution was “co-authored” by Tom Lucero, Steve Bosley, Jerry Rutledge, and Pete Steinhauer. So Schauer and Hayes (now the board chairman) are the reason CU turned its back on the Western Civ idea. That’s clear, despite their letter to the Post last Sunday blaming Lucero for poor preparation and scolding me for naming them in my Aug. 5 column.

Why not focus their skepticism on asking what ethnic studies “even means,” or on venturing that women’s and gender studies “make no sense” – to name two of the numerous flimsy subjects that do have departments at CU? Then we’d know which team they’re actually on: the Republicans, conservers of liberty and learning, or the Democrats, progressively junking the tried for the untried.

Do those teams matter? Absolutely. Chairman Hayes, in a friendly note before her letter to the editor appeared, assured me all regents’ devotion to what’s best for the university “crosses party and ideological lines.” Steve Bosley, who lost to her for chairman and now heads the presidential search to replace Hank Brown, wrote me the same. No doubt they mean it.

But good intentions are not enough when university governance is debated. At stake are the life preparation of countless young citizens, vast budgets and economic impact, and Colorado’s very understanding of itself as a free society. “Politics assumes that the contest for importance is important,” as the Harvard political scientist and eminent conservative Harvey Mansfield said in Boulder last week. Depoliticizing education is impossible and undesirable; the politics must be fought out.

Prof. Mansfield lectured on campus as the joint guest of CU’s fledgling Center for Western Civilization (no department but a worthy start) and the Delaware-based Jack Miller Center for the Teaching of America’s Founding Principles. The latter’s mission speaks of equipping “future leaders…to defend [us]… against ideologies that seek to destroy the nation.” This was refreshing in leftist Boulder, as was Mansfield’s classical wisdom about reason and the soul. President Brown couldn’t attend but sent official greetings. Too bad Chairman Hayes didn’t.

Good intentions: Martin Luther King knew all about them. His powerful 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” challenges white clergymen to give more than lipservice to equality and justice. King’s letter, bound with selections from Socrates and Plato, was the summer reading assignment from CU-Colorado Springs chancellor Pam Shockley to her 850 freshmen who arrived Wednesday. Hank Brown penned an introduction.

What a great way to start college. Thankfully the grand sweep and noble meaning of Western civilization are understood by at least a few CU decision-makers. Boulder chancellor Bud Peterson, however, set no such high bar for his Class of 2011. Indeed his was among the voices raised against Lucero’s departmental plan last year. Republican regents passed over two real stars to hire Peterson. Why?

Radicals still plentiful at CU

(Denver Post, Aug. 5) The easy part of the Ward Churchill affair is over. The faux scholar and ethnic imposter was fired from the CU faculty for dishonesty in his academic profession, not for honesty in his radical politics. Colorado citizens and taxpayers, acting through their elected regents, rightly rid themselves of a corrupt and treacherous employee. Churchill may sue all the way to the Supreme Court, but Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues will finally uphold the board’s action. Now comes the hard part: thinking through what we the people mean by a great university in a free society, then finding the political will to reform our academic institutions accordingly.

“How Many Ward Churchills?,” a 2006 report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, concluded that abuse of the professor’s podium to undermine the ideal of higher learning itself is common nationwide. Wild Ward appears to have many soulmates among the Boulder faculty. Elizabeth Hoffman, Hank Brown’s predecessor as CU president, validated them with absurd talk of McCarthyism. Churchill’s departure will do little to cure the wider intellectual rot you can sense on campus.

His former fiefdom, the Department of Ethnic Studies, proclaims online that it “empowers students to move beyond existing social, cultural and political paradigms to more inclusive paradigms in which they are the subjects of their own reality.” Relying on “critical race theory, critical class theory, feminist theory, liberation theology, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory,” say these shapers of tomorrow’s radicals, “we engage emergent epistemologies of racial/ethnic communities to critically question established disciplinary canons.”

Loosely translated, this means America should be ashamed of itself, needs reinventing (or even, as Churchill has suggested, erasing), and in the process, a hard rain’s gonna fall. Fine, go ahead and think that. It’s a free country. But alongside this bizarre sideshow of our tax dollars at work, why not provide equal time for a CU Department of Western Civilization academically devoted to “advancing the ideals of freedom (with) loyalty to the past (and) responsibility to the future”? Talk about radical.

But Boulder wouldn’t dare, would it? Sadly, no. Those words are from the brochure of a tiny Center for Western Civilization begun at the university as a solo effort by classics professor Christian Kopff. “The permanent things, embedded in tradition, are good things for human life,” his defiant prospectus continues. He invites students to join “in the fruitful exploration of the benefits and significance of Western Culture, from the ancient Greeks to the American Founding.”

For perspective on the center’s pathetic $86,000 budget (just increased by Brown, with touching gratitude from Kopff), consider that CU spends $22 million annually on diversity programs. This includes nearly 100 activities so tangled and varied – but none addressing intellectual or political diversity, of course – that administrators conceded to an Independence Institute researcher there’s no complete list.

For a reality check on who runs the asylum, consider that when Regent Tom Lucero brought a resolution last December that would have directed administrators and faculty to start a Department of Western Civilization, Republicans Pat Hayes and Paul Schauer sided with the three Democratic regents to defeat it, 5-4.

Were the GOP dissenters swayed by the inner voice of multiculturalism, or pressured by faculty postmodernists? They haven’t said, but you have to wonder if the same five votes were what elected Hayes as chairman in June, edging out conservative Republican Steve Bosley.

Bosley at least heads the search committee seeking a successor for the departing Hank Brown. But will CU’s new president be chosen by the 8-1 bloc that fired Ward Churchill, or by the 5-4 alliance that squashed Western Civ? That’s the next big showdown between “critical class theory” and “the permanent things.”