There is an expression in French that says, “Autumn is the hush before winter.” It is a lovely way to describe the tranquility of the fall, and there is no better place to experience it than the East Coast of the United States. I had the opportunity to experience the Fall colors on a trip to Wilmington, Delaware, to speak at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). It was a truly rejuvenating experience.
The ISI was founded in 1953 by Frank Chodorov, who was an influential writer on classical liberal values. The first president was conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. It has been a force for decades on college campuses, fighting to preserve diversity of viewpoints despite the purging of academic departments of conservatives and libertarians.
I met with some ISI students, and it was truly restorative. These are passionate young people who deeply believe in the core values of free speech and our constitutional system. ISI has also played a critical role in supporting independent student newspapers like The Chicago Thinker, which just broke the story on Sen. Elissa Slotkin. Notably, that speech must have had other reporters present, but it was this student publication that posted her admission that she wanted to intimidate young conservatives to deter them from supporting the Administration out of fear of investigation under the Democrats.
ISI has never been more important to higher education and the country in fighting for greater intellectual diversity and viewpoints.
The ISI campus in Wilmington is perfectly stunning with buildings once owned by the DuPont family overlooking a lake.
I stayed at the lovely and historic Inn at Montchanin Village (est. 1799), which has a small number of quaint houses and rooms.
I went for a long walk in the area, which has stately homes, including many related to the DuPont family. The entire village and its surroundings are dripping with history and, in the Fall, aflame with brilliant colors.
Thank you for sharing the beautiful photos! We live in the Midwest where fall is even more colorful! We invite you to experience the beauty of a Midwest fall–& winter & spring & summer!!! Every season is beautiful in the Midwest!
What a nice setting for reflection. Autumn there and the purpose of ISI. It made me think of the value of completeness. And with that, the reach of that idea. Across time and distance. After WWl a man in Turkie was driven by the desire to bring the Ottoman Empire into the 20th Century. We know him as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Yes, he made a lot of choices that history calls wrong. Some very wrong. Yet he couched his efforts to include women in a whole of population effort to make the journey to modernity when he said “We shall not catch up with the modern world if we only modernize half the population”. The point here is that skewing a learning system to include only one of two bodies of thought and calling it complete shorts us all in the quest for completeness. More to the point, completeness begs the question how best to keep the covenant of forming a more perfect Union.
The duPonts were Huguenots who came to America to practice their religion and to prosper through hard work. They succeeded. But we have different “refugees” now, who come to this country to defraud the government and become rich by cheating their fellow citizens.
Lovely. Never been, and probably never will go, so thank you for sharing.