CAMPUS

Clough Center Comes Under Fire at BC

The Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy was recently created at Boston College for the purposes of developing constitutional thought through undergraduate events, internships, and conferences. For the purposes of full disclosure, I will tell you that I was recently received as one of the first junior fellows by the center, but will strive to remain as objective as possible in relating the following controversial events to you. The center, which has come under fire for attempting to cosponsor an event featuring Bill Ayers, recently cosponsored an event on the Establishment Clause at Princeton, which was most definitely on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

A few weeks ago, the Clough Center came under intense criticism for trying to help bring Bill Ayers to campus in collusion with the Lynch School of Education, the College Democrats, and Americans for an Informed Democracy. The Clough Center was the last of these groups to agree to cosponsor the event, and never initiated the original idea. It is important to understand that the event was already in motion by the time the Clough Center signed on. I have come to believe that the Clough Center only had the best of intentions at heart. While some student groups certainly were superficially looking to provoke a response from the administration with this event, I believe that many people at the Clough Center were simply interested in listening to someone who fundamentally does not believe in the Constitution of the United States and actively sought to overthrow it.

In contrast, the Center cosponsored an event with the Madison Foundation and the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton this weekend which discussed the Establishment Clause. The event, I can safely say, was clearly right of center, with professors citing gay marriage as an unjust law, and Roe versus Wade as a prime example of judicial fiat. That being said, the conference was deeply intellectual, interesting, and presented some compelling arguments for rethinking the implications of the First Amendment.

I fail to see how either event is truly indicative of the Clough Center. I, instead, believe that both events must be taken together in order to understand how the center will work in the future. The center is interested more with dialogue, both conservative and liberal, than with ideological hit jobs. Professor Kersch has come under a ton of unwarranted fire over the past few weeks and will probably never see the credit he deserves for pulling off two ideologically opposed events in the span of less than a month. Dialogue without a predetermined end is becoming increasingly rare in our universities and it is wonderful to see that Professor Kersch subscribes to the idea of walking into events with an open mind.