When I was selected to edit the Forum, I happily agreed with one request: Emily Meinhardt. I couldn’t have done this without her. She has managed our team of thoughtful and dedicated editors — Carl Peaslee, Charlie Sprague, and Wyatt MacKenzie — as the publication has more than doubled in size. That growth would not have been possible without our business staff, headed up by Sarah Orgel. Providing no direction or any resources, we asked them to make the Forum into a business, and they somehow made it a profitable one. I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything less from CMCers. More than anything else about the publication, it’s the team that I’ll miss.

I’m sure that growth will only continue as the next editorial team takes over. I’m pleased to leave the publication in the capable hands of Carl Peaslee and Michael Wilner. Together, they’ll make a strong team with Michael heading up News and Opinion and Carl taking on Life and events. I wish them all the best, and I’m eager to see what they can do — you should be too.

It’s been a thrill — and a privilege. Thanks for that and for everything else.

Yours,
Abhi Nemani
Editor, 2009-2010
CMC Forum

Students are invited to submit papers, projects, or original research for the enjoyment of the CMC community below. Participants and their topics will be selected by a committee of student representatives for uniqueness, interest, and quality. We are looking for interesting arguments on any topic — politics, culture, CMC, etc — and although the content will vary greatly, the form will remain constant: each participant will have 10 minutes, a projector, and a podium.

Presentation skills will be valued equally alongside content. At the end of the event, the audience will be asked to rank the speakers on their interest and persuasiveness, and while everyone will get a token of our appreciation, the winner will get a special prize: Ath VIP Status, including a head table spot at Mitt Romney and your name on the wall. More details regarding the prizes to come.

To get you thinking, here are some ideas (although not necessarily good ones) from our own Carl Peaslee: “Will NASCAR be the sport of the future?” “Who is the bigger nuclear threat, Iran or North Korea?” “Is Ford a better investment than Toyota?” “What does Twilight have to do with the recession?” “How is Star Wars the perfect metaphor for the Obama administration?”

Enter to present your idea using the form below, and be sure to sign up at the Ath for the dinner. Check out who else is going and invite your friends on facebook.

P.S. Everyone who steps up and applies will get a (very CMC) surprise gift.

CMC.edu EDU Checkup Scores

• Visual: 86
• Information: 68
• Code: 60
• Overall: 71% (214/300)
• Grade: C-

He presents his comments in full in the video below, and pointing out a number of problems and making recommendations. His main points of criticism seem, however, like easy fixes:

“Please, please add a title to your page… People just don’t know who you are.” — To see this for yourself, go to the page yourself and look at the top bar of your browser. It won’t say “CMC.edu, Still Below Average «  The Forum” like this page does. It’ll read something like “Mozilla Firefox”. For now, it’s literally a page without a name. This is a simple html fix, which shouldn’t take more than a minute to add, but should help us in both search results and in social networks. (UPDATE: This fix was so easy that now the title has been added. Good start, CMC; now let’s add keywords and a description, so the Google results don’t just pull the text from the last news story.)

Axe the PDFs — DeNardis points out that all the valuable information for majors — the course, the requirements, etc — are in the catalog which must be downloaded as a PDF and opened to view. That information should be available online, if for no other reason than it saves us all 3 or 4 clicks. It would take all of 5 minutes per major to copy + paste the text, but it’ll make the site much more user-friendly.

Don’t truncate the headlines — What if, just after election day, the New York Times homepage only read “Obama W…”? You’d be pissed, and rightly so. Of course, the problem with the trimmed headlines on CMC’s homepage isn’t nearly as serious (see the “In the News” tab), but it’s a silly setting, which only annoys visitors. For example, can you tell what this title is talking about? “Political contributions question part…” Didn’t think so.

Two other issues bother me about the new homepage: unclear organization and just plain bad writing. Why are some stories in the left column and not in the “Features” tab? It’s not clear where you should look first for recent news, nor is it clear that you should expect new content in either of those two locations. This ambiguity then forces you to focus on the big rotating images, which would be fine if all your saw were the large, high quality pictures, but then there are the words… “A Living, Learning Community,” which seems best suited for a retirement home, “The Liberal Arts, Enlarging Perspectives,” which for us just isn’t really true, and the worst, “Leadership Starts Here,” which at once conjures up images of Discovery Zone and means that we share a slogan with LeaderTonic.com:

From Leadertonic:
What is Leadertonic?
- An elixir that when generously applied increases leadership strength.
- To be imbibed over ice for cool leaderfreshment.
- The state induced by over exposure to Jeff’s (the author’s)voice … as in “Doctor, he’s gone leadertonic!”
- The pearls Jeff has collected over 45 years and shares with you each week.
Answer: All 4!

Leadership Starts Here is dedicated to the reality that you, regardless of title, position or role, can lead change in the world around you to the degree you exercise your Passion, tune your Integrity and extend your Influence.

So at this point, I’m not sure what’s worse: that it’s hard for people to find us or what they think when they do. Nonetheless, here’s to hoping that the next steps in the website redesign process address the cosmetic, structural, and messaging problems.

In terms of total cost — tuition plus room and board — all Claremont Colleges fall into their 2009-2010 ranking of the “Top 100 Highest Cost” colleges with Harvey Mudd (#9, $51,037), Claremont McKenna (#13, $50,800), and Scripps (#24, $50,336) coming in the top 25. With costs under $50K, Pomona (#60, $49,361) and Pitzer (#93, $47,278) fared better. Campus Grotto notes that overall tuition at private college increased 4.3 percent across the board, the smallest rise in 37 years. CMC nonetheless inched up two spots on the list from #15 last year, with only a 4.2 percent increase ( + $2,045). It is important to note, however, that these rankings reflect sticker price costs only and do not take into account additional student fees or financial aids. The top 25 and some explanation of their methodology is available below.

Highest Total Cost 2009-2010

College	Total Cost
1. Sarah Lawrence College	$54,410
2. New York University	$51,991
3. The George Washington University	$51,730
4. Bates College	$51,300
5. Skidmore College	$51,196
6. Johns Hopkins University	$51,190
7. Georgetown University	$51,122
8. Connecticut College	$51,115
9. Harvey Mudd College	$51,037
10. Vassar College	$50,875
11. Wesleyan University	$50,862
12. Dickinson College	$50,860
13. Claremont McKenna College	$50,800
14. Colgate University	$50,660
15. Carnegie Mellon University	$50,640
16. Haverford College	$50,625
17. Bowdoin College	$50,485
18. Middlebury College	$50,400
19. Mount Holyoke College	$50,390
20. Bard College	$50,380
21. Boston College	$50,370
22. Franklin & Marshall College	$50,360
23. Bard College at Simon’s Rock	$50,340
24. Scripps College	$50,336
25. Babson College	$50,324

Notes:
Total cost is taken by adding tuition + room and board. We do not include fees when figuring the total cost. This is because many fees can be optional and can vary per student. A Student Health Insurance Fee, for example, is obviously not going to be required for a student already on their parents’ insurance plan. Some colleges also charge fees to certain majors. Including fees in the ‘Total Cost’ would have led to too many ‘What Ifs’.

These numbers were taken directly from the college’s website in October of 2009. In the case that the University does not provide an estimated cost of room and board (because some dorms on campus are priced differently), we took the price of a dorm a typical freshman would find themselves in.

Some colleges like Bates College, Colby College, Middlebury College, and Union College have a comprehensive fee (tuition + room/board). Their tuition numbers were taken by taking their total comprehensive fee and subtracting by the amount of rebate the college gives to students who choose to live off campus.

If you missed the event, we’re tracking down video, and some reviews will be up shortly. Till then, you can get a taste of the commentary below. Unfortunately, the comments from the first half of the debate were lost (“technical difficulties”), but there’s enough here, we hope, for you to either appreciate or wonder, “what the hell happened in the Ath?”

This was the first time we’ve tried anything like this, so we look forward to hearing what you all thought about it. Useful? Helpful? Annoying? Distracting? (Yes, we know: we are asking for comments on the commenting system.)

More information will be published as it becomes available; in the meantime, we look forward to hearing what you think about the screenshots and the redesign in the comments.

Dear CMC Community,

Changes to the CMC website are coming!

Over the course of the past several months, we have met with many individuals and groups of faculty, staff, students, alumni and trustees to understand both the short and long-term needs for CMC’s web presence.  This not only relates to our own website, but the web at-large with many other aspects of social media.  The Office of Public Affairs and Communications, in collaboration with ITS, will be responsible for developing, updating and redesigning the CMC website.  Our primary goals for the CMC website are to:

• Enhance CMC’s website to be more visually dynamic, relevant and engaging
• Make the Website easier and more interesting to navigate
• Showcase the excitement of CMC
• Showcase our faculty, students & alumni
• Employ multi-media features and functionality
• Ensure we are communicating key brand messages along with a consistent visual identity
• Target top-flight prospective students
• Update site architecture

We are approaching this in two phases.  Phase one is an opportunity to make improvements, on an interim basis, to the navigation and visual impact within the current structure of the website.  This includes a new navigation orientation embedded throughout the entire site, and a new look for the CMC homepage and the Robert Day School website.

The website’s global navigation (previously running down the left margin) and gateways will now all be located on the top header of each page with mouse roll-over drop down menu guides.  (See screen shot below)

Each page’s local (or custom) navigation (previously running down the right margin) will now appear on the left margin thus opening up the right side of each web page giving the site a more open and less cluttered look.

The emphasis of these interim changes is to provide bolder images, messaging and distinctiveness to our website.  For the “new look” homepage, we have created several new sections that will include timely and ongoing features, daily updates of CMC in the News, highlights of upcoming events, and a Point of View area that showcases the intellectual capital of our distinguished faculty.  (See sample screen shot below.)

Also in this first phase, we will be working on enhancing other sub-sites, such as has been done with the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance as a model.  (See sample screen shot below.)

To accomplish this, I am pleased to announce that Anthony Fisher is returning to CMC as our new director of interactive design and new media production.  Along with Anthony and our new creative services graphic designer, Andrea Brake, and our talented ITS group, we have a solid team in place to implement these objectives.

Phase two of this process will be a longer-term intensive effort to rethink and redesign the entire CMC website.  This phase will involve the collaboration of many college constituents and users to engage in discussion and identification of a whole array of issues, guiding principles, features and applications, and new methods of experiencing CMC on the web as well as integrating mobile capabilities.

We look forward to beginning the planning for phase two within the next several weeks.  In the meantime, look for CMC’s new navigation, RDS site and homepage coming soon.

Richard Rodner
Associate Vice President
Public Affairs and Communications

Forum Fellows
Lewis Corson
Alex Mitchell
Alex Nazari
E. Madison Shimoda
Dan Evans
Max Mullen
Patrick Atwater
Nathan Bengtsson
Marcelo Andrade

Also, do me a favor. Stop reading for a second and look around your monitor. Notice anything different? Yeah, I didn’t sleep much this weekend, but I put together a redesign (that’ll hopefully be around for a while) to give more visibility to featured content and to open up some space on the homepage for some useful tools. Have a look there too at the tabs on the left-hand side. “Events” features an interactive calendar for campus orgs to post happenings;  “Food” lists dining halls hours and (more importantly) links to a spreadsheet with side-by-side menus; “Places” lets you know if important spots such as the library, the writing center, and the Hub are open; “Tweets” give you, well, our tweets; and “Reads” compiles the Forum‘s recommendations on worthwhile articles across the net.  These features should either make your life a little easier or a little less boring. Which is kind of all we’re doing here. Hopefully.

The CMC Forum is currently accepting applications for writers and editors for the 2009-2010 academic year. You can write on topics ranging from Thursday night’s debauchery to Sunday morning’s talkshows, from craigslist safety to indie rock, from what you ate yesterday to what to want to eat tomorrow. What’s important to CMCers? That’s up to you.

This year, only hired students will receive compensation, so if you are interested in working with the Forum and getting paid, apply. Two positions are available:

• Forum Fellow: Writes one post a week in a designated section.
• Section Editor: Manages assigned Fellows, edits articles, ensures consistent posting, and sits on editorial board.

Compensation will vary depending on focus, quality, and consistency of writing. Fellows can earn up to $150 a semester, editors up to $200 (plus a title bump).

Applications are due September 1, 2009 by 5pm (the first day of school), and positions will be announced on September 4. If you have any questions or if you’re interested in helping in other ways — web development, business, photography, mascot — drop us a line: forum@ascmc.org.

CMC is joining with Pitzer College and Pomona College in restricting freshmen from bringing cars to campus next year. It’s my understanding that HMC is also considering a similar decision for the future, but no decisions have been made for the coming year.

Each of the Claremont Colleges has a slightly different set of circumstances for their decisions, and I cannot speak for the others.

In CMC’s case, the construction of the Kravis Center and the re-routing of traffic around the College have caused us to become concerned about the supply and location of parking for students, faculty, staff, and visitors. There are also environmental and community reasons why we think a restriction on freshman (not transfer students) cars will be beneficial. But the supply and location of parking is a concern.

Of course, there may be a few new students who have exceptional situations that request a waiver to the parking restriction. A few already have. We’ll review them on a case-by-case basis.

To help mitigate the situation, we have a couple of things we’re working on this summer. First, we’re building a small bike shop in the basement of Wohlford Hall. Students will be able to sign out “loaner” bikes for free, as well as get tires inflated, minor repairs, and things like that. It will be staffed by students. Of course, bikes aren’t helpful for every situation, but you can take one to run an errand in the Village.

Second, the Claremont University Consortium is in discussions with a national bank to add an ATM machine and/or branch bank in the Honnold-Mudd Library. There will also be a new coffeeshop opening in the Honnold-Mudd Library this year. These services may cut down the number of off-campus trips students need to make.

Finally, all of these issues are going to be more comprehensively addressed through the master planning process, which will be completed in the next one to two years.

Jeff Huang

When asked to elaborate on the “exceptional situations” that may justify a waiver on the parking restriction, Dean Huang offer this:

If you’re wondering what an “exceptional circumstance” is for the sake of an exemption to the parking rule, I cannot possibly define all of them. As a general rule, I would think that family and medical matters would be two important categories. An example might be that a student lives in Southern California and has a family member with an ongoing illness. Of course, we would verify this and then approve it.

More information will be posted as it is made available.