The Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform [HCAGR]

The HCAGR are (is?) really pissed off. Here's why. And here are the first three paragraphs of their public declaration [thanks to BenS for the pointer]:

In recent years the reputation of Hamilton College has been hurt by a series of events that have resulted in severely negative press in the national media. The College hired a professor who was a member of the Raelian cult that claimed to be pursuing the cloning of human beings. Former college president Gene Tobin engaged in plagiarism and resigned. The College Honor Code specifies that academic dishonesty is a serious offense that “will often result in removal from the course, assignment of an XF for the course, or separation from the College community, or some combination of these.”

Nonetheless, Tobin received a generous severance package and an endowed professorship in his name. In recent months, the Director of the Kirkland Project unilaterally appointed to the faculty Susan Rosenberg, a convicted felon whose sentence was commuted by Bill Clinton during the last days of his administration and then selected and paid an honorarium to Ward Churchill who has written and spoken that the victims of 9/11 deserved their fate as “little Eichmanns.” This Director’s acts have created an unprecedented wave of negative publicity that damaged the integrity and scholarly reputation of the school.

These events and the College’s response to them share a common thread: a failure of the school’s internal controls, policies and procedures. To our knowledge, the College has made only minor changes to the way it conducts business. We believe that more fundamental changes are necessary if the College wishes to prevent the mistakes of the recent past from being repeated. To support this goal we have formed Hamilton College Alumni For Governance Reform. Our goal is to establish that Hamilton’s primary mission is to educate its students by focusing all its energy and resources to scholarly research and pedagogical application.