OPINION: College pushes progressive agenda as other schools scale back
While the Trump administration has done a great job cracking down on civil rights violations in higher education by focusing on high profile and Ivy League schools, other institutions skate by under the radar.
Case in point: Hamilton College. The private liberal arts school in Clinton, New York, is operating business-as-usual with politicized courses, DEI programs, and the deceptive “Common Ground” program, a misnomer if ever there was one.
Consider that students are offered 71 courses in the Department of Africana Studies, in addition to black-themed courses in other departments, such as the History Department’s “Black Metropolis” and “Race, Gender and Empire in US,” and a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion program directed by Sean Bennett, vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion.
“Hamilton welcomes undocumented students,” its website states, offering “travel guidance and counseling.” It also works with Golden Door Scholars, a nonprofit that supports undocumented students.
The Days-Massolo Multicultural Center includes the “Voices of Color” lecture series (featuring Angela Davis in 2023 and 2016), a Center for Intersectional Feminism, the “Multicultural Peer Mentoring Program,” and wild lectures glorifying abortion.
This summer the college is offering “environmental justice workshops,” with such presenters as Sasha Tycko, who has studied the deadly Atlanta “Cop City” “forest occupation.”
Hamilton College has also teamed up with public television by having Common Ground host WCNY “Ivory Tower on the Road.”
Common Ground’s Executive Director is Ty Seidule, a retired Army brigadier general and West Point history professor, and author of “Robert E. Lee and Me,” an account of his “awokening.”
Seidule hosted professors from Colgate University, Utica University, and Onondaga Community College, some from previous “Ivory Tower” segments. In May of this year one that focused on President Trump’s first 100 days was as unilaterally anti-Trump as MSNBC.
While Common Ground was founded to promote “respectful dialogue across political boundaries” and “to explore cross-boundary political thought and complex social issues,” it is decidedly one-sided.
Moreover, as I have witnessed over the years, the dialogue is hardly “respectful” or “cross-boundary.” A panel discussion in February about renaming Department of Defense assets named after Confederates had five participants, all from the Congressional Naming Commission, whose purpose is to remove or rename them.
It’s not surprising. Seidule is vice chair of the Naming Commission and visiting history professor at Hamilton (thanks to the Chamberlain Project by Jonathan Soros and feminist Vivien Labaron). An “initiative of Blue Star Families” (which receives funding from the National Parks Service), the Chamberlain Project places retired progressive military officers on campuses across the country.
In addition to teaching courses on the world wars and the American Civil War, Seidule teaches “Common Ground: A Laboratory for Civil Discourse.”
The real purpose of Common Ground became obvious in 2017 at the first pseudo-debate between Democrat David Axelrod and Republican Trump-hater Karl Rove. Both agreed with moderator, left-wing journalist Susan Page, that with Donald Trump as president, an “adult” was needed in the room. Questions were pre-screened.
The most recent debate, on April 15 of this year on affirmative action, was between Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute and author of well-researched books on such topics as “diversity” and the “war on cops.” She faced off against Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University law and history professor, mentor to the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, and author of two “histories” that claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered his slave Sally Hemings’s children. (This is what students are taught, in spite of the lack of “science” for the claims.)
This debate was also rigged. The moderator, after giving an overview of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action in admissions, turned to Gordon-Reed. As “a historian of slavery,” she understood the “legacy of slavery” and the “compelling state interest” to bring African-Americans into citizenship. To eliminate legacy admissions now, Gordon-Reed replied, is not “fair” because “white people” had already gotten most of the “goodies.”
After citing studies on the harmful effects of affirmative action and being pressed for a solution, Mac Donald suggested a classical curriculum, an orderly school environment, and strong families to combat the achievement gap. Kids had to “do their homework. Take the textbooks home. Don’t run the streets at night. Don’t join a gang. Don’t peddle drugs.”
But the moderator closed by citing Justices Sotomayor and Jackson and stated that he was against the Supreme Court decision. Student reporters took note.
“Affirmative Action Common Ground ends with controversial Q&A” featured student Muhammad Ahmad Rao, class of 2026, who called “Ms. Mac Donald’s prescription that African-American mothers must do a better job at raising families . . . irrelevant at best.”
Sarafin Madden, a junior enrolled in the Common Ground program, revealed that at the post-event luncheon Seidule asked students, “if they had overstepped by inviting a speaker whose political ideology, he insinuated, was not just contradictory but racist.”
Similarly, history professor Celeste Day Moore, recalling Toni Morrison’s claim “that racism’s primary function is to distract, and to force people to continue to explain and justify their history, being and value,” was “grateful to have listened to Annette Gordon-Reed, whose historical perspective is critical to understanding the effect of structural racism on higher education and admissions.”
The student reporters closed with the reminder of an earlier “controversial speaker visiting Hamilton’s campus”—George Lincoln Rockwell, president of the American Nazi Party, in 1967.
The Trump administration has its work cut out.
Mary Grabar, Ph.D., a resident fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, is the author of Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths (2025), Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America (2021), and Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America (2019). She taught college English for 20 years and founded the Dissident Prof Education Project (DissidentProf.com). Her writing can be found at marygrabar.com.