Vanderbilt Goes PC; I Go to AEI

This morning's Washington Times carries an op-ed that I wrote titled "Vanderbilt Goes PC." It charges the Nashville school with attempting to re-write history through its plans -- now thwarted -- to sand blast the word "Confederate" from the frieze of Confederate Memorial Hall. The University was sued by the original donors, the subversive United Daughters of the Confederacy, which, during the Depression, donated $50,000 toward the building's construction. The Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled that Vanderbilt could proceed with plans, announced in 2002, to remove the offending word, but only if it repaid the UDC in 2005 dollars. Since that amounted to a cool $1 million, the school dropped their plans. However, in campus literature and maps, the C-word is no longer used.

If you read the essay, you'll note that my by-line is "managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine, a publication of the American Enterprise Institute." I'm very excited to report that, indeed, I've accepted that position with the magazine and will begin my duties full-time this fall. Already I'm engaged in a variety of projects for TAE, a very fine magazine with which I'm proud to be associated. The magazine's long-time editor-in-chief is Karl Zinsmeister, a prolific journalist who's written on, among other things, his experiences as an embedded reporter with US forces in Iraq.

For the immediate future, nothing will change here at the Democracy Project blog, except perhaps for the addition of some new bloggers (more on that as it happens). So I hope you'll continue to stop by often for daily commentary and analysis. And, as always, I thank you for making us part of your reading material.