GUTLESS U-M CAVES ON BRONZES

For nearly sixty years the bronze sculptures of "Dream of the Young Man" and "Dream of the Young Girl" graced the entrance of the Literature, Science, and the Arts Building at the center of the University of Michigan campus.  They were the work of Marshall Fredericks who also produced the famous two-story high "Spirit of Detroit" sculpture in downtown Detroit.

However, the bronzes offend the pieties of the modern college campus, which today resembles something closer to a police state than a sanctuary for free thinking.  The sculptures have vexed campus feminists for some time now, and the pusillanimous U-M President Mary Sue Coleman has caved in to them.  The sin of Fredericks's work:  The male figure dreams of a ship at sea while the female figure dreams of taming the wilderness as a pioneer mother.  You'd think Coleman gets paid enough (she is the highest paid state official at three-quarters of million dollars a year) to tell the P.C. police to take a hike, but I guess not.

But give the gutless wonder some credit.  Coleman could've gone Taliban on the bronzes and blasted them to smithereens like the Islamists did to the Buddha figures carved into an Afghan mountainside.  Instead she had the dreamers carted off to a remote corner of the campus.  So art endures, if obscured, in her grotty little fiefdom of intellectual poseurs and petty inquisitions.