More On “‘Hunting Terrorists’ At Bucknell”:

The other day I posted on Evan Coyne Maloney’s report of students being called on the carpet at Bucknell for inviting a speaker to campus who was advertised as “Hunting Terrorists” at Bucknell. Maloney has an update on subsequent developments and now it appears that Bucknell is backpedaling rapidly.

The new post has the entirety of the “fairly unfortunate language” of the email in question that triggered the meeting (this seems to be the entire text):

Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 00:04:14 -0400
To: “Bucknell Faculty Staff and Students”
From: Matt Gabler
Subject: [CAMPUS:8789] The Real Story from the Frontlines
Where were you during the months following September 11?
Major John Krenson was hunting terrorists.

The Real Story from the Frontlines: Major John Krenson details his experiences as the Chief Intelligence Liaison Officer between the US Coalition and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Gardner lecture Hall (Dana Engineering)
September 6
7:00 PM

This event is brought to you by the BUCC, Dean Ferraro, and Young America’s Foundation.
www.bucknellconservatives.org
www.thecounterweight.org

Bucknell contends that the “hunting terrorists” issue was just “one small segment” of the conversation in question and has been blown out of proportion. As Maloney suggests, not only does this appear to be inconsistent with the email correspondence surrounding the situation, but does not seem very plausible. Perhaps Bucknell’s senior leadership just randomly calls in leaders of student groups to talk to them about their programming on a periodic basis, although thus would be a strange custom based on the various places I have attended and taught. And perhaps this meeting coincidentally occurred right after the “hunting terrorists” event and the College President taking personal note of it. But that story strains credulity to me.

Update:

I hadn’t been following the Comments on this post closely, but in looking back at the original post, I see that one of the Bucknell students involved actually posted the text of the email in our Comments the other day here (it is the same thing I posted above).