FREE....217-acre campus

Attention Hillsdale College: Why not you?

 From BostonGlobe.com

Billionaire family offers Mass. campus for free

By Jay Lindsay Associated Press Writer

NORTHFIELD, Mass.—A billionaire family from Oklahoma has turned a no-stoplight town in Massachusetts into an essential destination for Christian institutions nationwide with one extraordinary promise.

They've pledged to give away a 217-acre campus there for free.

Free, it turns out, is an appealing price for the campus founded by famed evangelist D.L. Moody and estimated by its owner to be worth $20 million.

In recent months, the western Massachusetts property has drawn a stream of secret and not-so-secret visitors.

Each suitor must commit to offer an education founded on traditional Christian beliefs and prove they have the money to maintain this sprawling, classic New England campus.

"It's spectacular. It's spectacular. That's all I can say," said Tracy Davis, academic dean of California-based Olivet University, as she walked the grounds last Thursday.

Locals are ready to welcome new neighbors. But there's concern about who's moving in, including how a conservative Christian institution will mesh in a town of about 3,000 in this notably liberal state.

"We hope that whatever's here can bring people together and not divide," said Alexander Stewart, chair of a town committee monitoring the sale.

The campus was once home to the Northfield Mount Hermon prep school, which was founded as a girls' school by Moody in 1879. The rolling property lines the Connecticut River Valley to the east and climbs high enough to offer views into neighboring New Hampshire and Vermont.

But in 2005, Northfield Mount Hermon left to consolidate at another nearby campus, escaping more than $1 million in annual utility costs and the deferred maintenance on a century's worth of august, but aging, stone and brick buildings.

The campus now belongs to the Green family, who own the Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby craft store chain. They bought it for $100,000 in 2009, intending to give it to a new college named for Christian scholar C.S. Lewis.

That venture stalled in December amid fundraising woes. The C.S. Lewis Foundation, which is starting the college, says it hasn't given up on establishing a school at the Northfield campus, but the uncertainty prompted the Greens to begin a search for another owner. The market to resell the campus doesn't currently exist, said Hobby Lobby president Steve Green. So the family made the campus and its 43 buildings available to select institutions that can meet their criteria.

After $5 million in renovations, the campus is now move-in ready, but expensive to keep that way. Green said he'd like to transfer the grounds to the new owners by at least the end of the year.

But he added the priority is finding the right tenant, and spoke of restoring Moody's original intent to create a place to teach and train people to share Biblical truth. That legacy remains part of even the vacant campus. Busloads of Christians from South Korea, where Moody's ministry had a deep impact, still climb to join hands and pray around Moody's hilltop grave.

"We would love to see the property be used for a great Christian ministry, and if we help somebody to get that started without a lot of heartburn ... and be a light in the area, that would be our primary goal," Green said.

The Greens, through Jerry Pattengale, a college administrator they hired to help find a new owner, originally invited 15 top Christian institutions to take a look, and 11 have visited. About nine others have been allowed to inspect the grounds as news of the offer has spread, and more requests are coming daily, Pattengale said. So far, Olivet, Azusa Pacific University and Liberty University are among the schools whose names have gone public.

Any institution whose interest in the property survives an initial vetting of their plans and finances will be required to provide a detailed proposal, Pattengale said.

Liberty's interest prompted some Northfield Mount Hermon alumni to petition the school's board of trustees to protest any sale to the university, citing what they called the "divisive and hateful" views of its founder, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. Residents have also met to discuss concerns about Virginia-based Liberty and the fate of the campus.

But Northfield Mount Hermon has no say over what the Greens decide to do with the property, and Liberty is not likely a top contender, anyway. To make the transaction as simple as possible, the family prefers to give the campus to someone who will take it all, and Liberty has discussed assuming control of only a portion of it.

Green added such protests would matter "very little" to the family if it felt it had found a good suitor who would also be a good neighbor. "You'll never please everybody and we understand that," he said.

Northfield itself is scenic and sleepy, with no traffic lights or even gas stations to slow down a trip to somewhere else. The campus, right off the main road, has a new shine, but its emptiness gives it the air of an exclusive boarding school on eternal spring break.

Corinne Allen, owner of Rooster's Bistro on Main Street in Northfield, said Hobby Lobby's decision can't come soon enough. She bought her restaurant shortly before Northfield Mount Hermon decided to pull out and is anxious to serve the customer base of students, their families and alumni she thought she was inheriting.

Many are pleased a Christian institution is coming and want to make things work, said Allen.

"I do believe the town loves the campus; nobody wants to see it go to waste," she said. "In the end, the campus is the town, and it always has been."

Note from Storm'n Norm'n...in my humble opinion.
This location would be an excellent (additional) campus for Hillsdale College

Boycott Hyatt... Why not all of them? Your freedom of speech is in grave jeopardy!

1ST AMENDMENT UNDER FIRE

Speak out against Islamic terror? Not at this U.S. hotel

Author warns future of constitutional republic is in serious jeopardy

By Bob Unruh © 2011 WND

A Hyatt hotel in Sugar Land, Texas, has abruptly canceled a previously scheduled tea-party event at which author and Atlas Shrugs founder Pamela Geller was scheduled to speak on the dangers of Islam.
Geller said the decision came about because the hotel was "intimidated" into censoring her planned speech by "CAIR thugs," referring to the controversial Islamic advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations.
She accused the Hyatt Place of enforcing Islamic law, or Shariah, under which no criticism of Islam is allowed. In Muslim nations, it can be a death penalty offense, Geller noted.   Story continues here.

 

Will The Free Market Ever Return To The U.S.? or has China taken it away?

The following from : The Aspen Times
Melanie Sturm: Think Again
The last best hope of Earth
Melanie Sturm
The Aspen Times
Aspen, CO Colorado

Is the free market the best system for the world's future? So asked GlobeScan in its annual survey of 25 countries, conducted since 2002. Then, American confidence in the free market topped the poll at 80 percent.

If you assume that Americans are still first, Think Again. The 2010 survey reveals faith in the free market is at a low (59 percent) in the world's biggest economy placing the U.S. fifth behind Germany (68 percent), China and Brazil (both 67 percent), and Italy (62 percent). Intriguingly, American support for free markets dropped 15 points in just the last year resulting in an astonishing nine-point advantage for the Chinese.

Undoubtedly, Chinese confidence in free markets is high because 450 million Chinese were lifted out of poverty as the government liberalized the economy. However, because the Chinese do not enjoy the inalienable rights accorded Americans, China materially lags behind the U.S. in other living standard metrics including civil liberties, life expectancy, infant mortality, child labor and a clean environment. Meanwhile, according to the World Bank, China's national wealth trails America's in terms of GDP per capita ($7,570 versus $47,020).

The real conundrum is why did American support for the free markets survive the tumultuousness of the early 2000s — the bursting tech bubble, plummeting stock indices and corporate scandals that eliminated companies like WorldCom and Enron — only to drop last year?

Perhaps Americans are frustrated that the private sector isn't pulling the economy out of its doldrums, as with past recessions. We've become accustomed to economic cycles in which demand eventually increases as businesses replenish inventory and new construction replaces old. To meet increasing demand, companies hire employees and invest in equipment — this is the free market at work.

However, as the Chinese economy has grown freer, the U.S. economy has become less free. Most Americans are unaware that over the last decade, the government sector has grown five times faster than the private sector, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Moreover, politicians more interested in political power and rewarding allies from Wall Street to Main Street have undermined the free market with policies (health care, Internet, labor, environment and financial) that drive up costs on businesses and consumers, and create massive uncertainty for investors.

If Americans are down on the free market, they're gradually realizing it was the government that sabotaged it. Thanks to the new book “Reckless Endangerment” by New York Times business reporter Gretchen Morgenson and housing finance analyst Joshua Rosner, Americans are learning the true causes of the financial crisis: Government intervention in the private housing market and influence peddling among political insiders produced the weakest economy since the Great Depression.

The sad truth is that the financial crisis would never have occurred were it not for government policies that encouraged weak underwriting standards resulting in the creation of 27 million risky loans (half of all U.S. mortgages). Furthermore, politicians ignored rampant corruption at the government-sponsored entities (GSEs called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), wouldn't regulate them even after accounting scandals, and cost taxpayers more than $150 billion so far. Additionally, if politicians had performed their duties, the GSEs couldn't have spawned the seemingly profitable business in loans to people with bad credit that ultimately attracted Wall Street banks.

However, you won't hear politicians Think Again, never mind declare mea culpas. They're busy promoting fallacies, mis-assigning blame, denying responsibility and enacting “reforms” that do nothing to address the government policies primarily responsible for the crisis. Furthermore, by seizing even more governmental authority over the U.S. economy, politicians have further weakened the free markets prompting one regulator, Acting Comptroller of the Currency John Walsh, to warn that when regulations are “carried too far, the economy suffers” because higher costs impede the economic activity necessary for growth and job creation.

Consequently, confidence in politicians is as low today as it was during Watergate. Opportunistic politicians who wage class warfare and who demonize the successful, industrious and productive actually weaken public confidence in the very free-enterprise system that “incentivized” millions of Americans (native and immigrants) to take risks, compete, innovate, and achieve in the “land of opportunity.” Our free-enterprise system is the reason Americans have historically been among the richest and happiest nationalities and why, in a competitive global economy, the U.S. still produces one-quarter of the world's goods and services despite being only 3.4 percent of the world's population.

To preserve the system that is the source of our flourishing and the bedrock of our culture, we must choose leaders committed to expanding liberty and increasing individual opportunity. In doing so, we'll recover our confidence in free markets, and realize Abraham Lincoln's aspiration spoken in the darkest moments of the Civil War: “My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.”

Think Again. You won't hear that said about China!

Melanie Sturm lives in Aspen. Her column runs every other Thursday in The Aspen Times.