Bucknell Babylon

Some of us Pennsylvania Dutchmen have long regarded Bucknell as the Berkeley of the Keystone State. In issue after issue, the crack staff of student reporters at The Counterweight alternative student newspaper shows us how right we are.

Published privately by the Bucknell University Conservatives Club, The Counterweight offers up investigative stories of the underside of college life there that the regular campus newspaper treads lightly upon, that is, if they cover such happenings at all.

“Bucknell currently claims to have 402 faculty members and 392 administrators,” according to the latest issue of The Counterweight. “The university has rightly added more faculty members to its ranks since last November when there were more administrators than faculty.”

“However, it has failed to reduce the redundancy and waste at its upper levels.”

Not a story you are likely to read in The Bucknellian. Nor is this gem by Bucknell sophomore Scott Gosnell:

“Notably, last year the [Bucknell University Conservatives Club] BUCC brought Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers to campus to talk about what she calls ‘equity feminism,’” Gosnell reports. “The Women’s and Gender Studies Department refused to cosponsor the event, questioning the ‘intellectual integrity’ of the bestselling Ph.D.”

“This year, however, the Department gladly funded the Sex Worker’s Art Show—a crude display of erotica that had about the same ‘intellectual integrity’ as St. Catherine’s Street on a Friday night.”

“However, while the BUCC refused to help cover the $1,920 cost of the March 8th Sex Worker’s Art Show, other members of the campus community did,” Lee Markison reported in The Counterweight. “Groups like the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Center for the Study of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Samek Art Gallery, Office of Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Awareness, and others all cosponsored the event (feel free to ask them why they felt your tuition tax dollars and alumni contributions ought to be spent in this manner).”

“On March 8, at 8:00 p.m., a troupe of unrepentant prostitutes came to Bucknell—Uptown to be exact.”

The Counterweight even managed to find a dissident on the faculty. “Why should people be so astounded then when they are asked to intellectually defend the things they believe, even when those things fall safely within the boundaries of campus orthodoxies?,” Bucknell sociologist Alexander Riley asks. “Bucknell could do with a healthy dose of agon, and a little less hypersensitivity and intellectual orthodoxy.”

“How boring.” Boring is something The Counterweight never is in any of its editorial departments.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.