Black Hills State University is trying to resurrect Representative Scott Odenbach’s (R-31/Spearfish) bad and failed idea of a Hillsdaley “Center for American Exceptionalism” with a perhaps toned-down center for civic education:
Black Hills State University President Laurie Nichols requested $3 million in base funding for BHSU, and support for a new Center for Civic Engagement and Leadership. She explained that the idea for the new Center came from House Bill 1070, which failed this past legislative session, to “create the Center for American Exceptionalism at Black Hills State University,” and will be loosely modeled after Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership [Morgan Matzen, “Political Activism Is Not ‘Seeping’ into SD Universities, Regents Say,” Sioux Falls Argus Leader via Yahoo, 2023.06.22].
The Arizona project to which Nichols points is a Koch-sponsored conservative project that new Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs sought to defund. Three of its six advisory board members are members of the conservative Hoover Institution. Another is freshly-retired Harvard conservative Harvey Mansfield. Arizona’s SCETL uses the words “inclusive” and “intellectual diversity” on its homepage, but that may just be the specious codewording Republicans use when they want to rig schools to prop up their failing right-wing worldview. SCETL focuses on classical education—and I find nothing wrong with reading Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Plato, Marx and de Tocqueville. If SCETL is biased toward the Republican worldview, it at least gets Professor Mansfield to describe its mission in somewhat less blatantly and delusively American-exceptionalist terms than Representative Odenbach:
In sum, our new school looks outward to humanity and inward to America. Its ambition is to teach critical minds and to puncture complacency – and it tries to be both proud of genuine greatness and humble about human imperfection [Harvey Mansfield, SCETL founding mission statement, retrieved 2023.06.26].
Nichols’s budget request, like the others presented last Thursday at the Regents meeting at DSU, was informal; the Regents evidently will consider that request and others for its final budget proposal to the 2024 Legislature.
Exactly. Good eye, Cory. President Nichols is leaving BHSU so a legacy beyond a Trump Conference Room had to happen. Recall she was run out of Laramie.
https://www.wyofile.com/trustees-quietly-investigated-nichols-before-unexplained-dismissal/
Arizona is another state where the far white wing of the Republican Party is a threat to American democracy and a Democratic governor at risk to violence. Scary times.
Recent scholarship blows the American exceptionalism myth, legend, and folklore out of the water as capitalist dogma.
1619 Project shows much of the early nation was built with slave labor. Recall Lincoln said that between labor and capital that labor is far more important.
Born in Blackness is a historical survey begins 150 years earlier and spans 6 centuries. The study shows that North American colonies were a tertiary economic interest to the colonizers who made far more money in Caribbean, Central, and South America.
The Rediscovery of America shows the enduring fact of US and American (both hemispheres) history is Indians; yet that history focuses almost exclusively on European settlers.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Those settlers actions, by today’s standards were genocide and war crimes.
The Accidental Superpower shows how the hard rules of geography, and in some cases, happenstance, created the modern US.
It’s ironic that when rightwing American exceptionalist zealots are tasked with challenges to make the US a more perfect union or to live up to its rhetoric in the Declaration and Constitution – they flee from attempts to make the US exceptional.
What John said…
As a keen observer of the human condition, I find myself continually disillusioned by the persistent myth of American exceptionalism. This notion that we are uniquely predestined for greatness smacks of arrogance and spiritual poverty.
We are but flawed mortals, stumbling through life with our weaknesses and follies. To pretend otherwise is to mock the very essence of our humanity.
It is a dangerous delusion, one that blinds us to the “beauty of diversity” and the richness of other cultures. Instead of striving to be the best, let us strive to be better.
Let us embrace our imperfections and work together to create a world that celebrates the fullness of the human experience.
Scott Odenbach makes Gordon Howie and Tonchi Weaver look like Marxists. These people are convinced divine law trumps the US Constitution especially when there are Democrats in the White House and controlling the Senate.
If America is so exceptional, how did we elect Donald Trump, a complete failure as a human being and as a businessman, as President? I guess you could say that the Koch Family, who are behind this brand of educational propaganda, at least are almost as appalled by the Trumpista movement as most progressives. Maybe this project will shake up the conservative world and get them out of their mindless worship of idiots (Trump, Noem). Even though the Kochs are a bit less criminal than the Trump Crime Family, they still have a lot to answer for, even in South Dakota. Williams Pipeline Company was (maybe still is) a Koch-owned entity. Governor Mickelson had to turn that company over to the federal Superfund Program because it refused to clean up its leaking tank farm near Sioux Falls.
There’s a lot of history that doesn’t get told in South Dakota. They would rather concentrate on “exceptionalism.” It takes the mind off reality.
“Political Activism Is Not ‘Seeping’ into SD Universities, Regents Say. ”
3 million if appropriated for this “center” will give lie to these words.
Will Joe Donnel be on the faculty???
Segue, what could be more exceptional than the electric school bus? Coming to a bus barn near you. Finally.
3 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwhfZvTmCqI
Now: https://news.yahoo.com/company-sets-solve-major-student-210000207.html
Odenbach is weird. He is a good friend of Taffy and Donnell. Freedom Caucus members.
Much of Spearditch was swept into the Redwater yesterday and again today but Rapid got pounded minutes ago because Gaia hates Republicans.