The New Criterion on The Occident: “Too edgy, scatological and pornographic to qualify as sophomoric”
Literary magazine The New Criterion somehow found an old (2011) copy of The Bowdoin Occident, and does not think it bodes well for “the civilizing tenets of Western culture” and “the texture of social life as a whole”.
What sparked these thoughts was our encounter with a student parody newspaper from Bowdoin College, the moderately trendy, B-level college in Brunswick, Maine. Bowdoin—current tuition, room, and board $56,128—was the college of Longfellow and Hawthorne. They’ve come a long way, baby, from those decorous, intellectually fastidious souls. Not that Bowdoin is to be distinguished from the general run of overpriced, formerly liberal-arts institutions. It’s not. Scratch any of those institutions and you’ll find the same congeries of left-liberal clichés, the same “sex and gender” agenda in the Women’s Studies fiefdom, the same “commitment to diversity” fueling intolerance for anything recognizably conservative.
You also find repellent student enterprises like The Bowdoin Occident, the annual parody issue of the student newspaper The Bowdoin Orient (“dedicated to providing news and information relevant to the College community,” “following professional journalistic standards in writing and reporting”). The issue spuriously dated December 12, 2012, is remarkable for its vulgarity, profanity, and utter lack of decorum… You might be tempted to dismiss The Occident as a sophomoric joke, lamentable, in poor taste, but essentially harmless. It is too edgy, too scatological and crudely pornographic to qualify as sophomoric, exactly.
Full story: “Inducation” (as in, the opposite of “education”). —TT
