Rejoice! For we have achieved a great victory, possibly the greatest, milestone of our species. This past week, one of our own, Christina Hendricks, was listed as “the hottest woman ever” by Esquire Magazine.

Christina Hendricks, famous for her portrayal of Joan Holloway in Mad Men, is the hottest woman ever, according to Esquire.

This is a breakthrough of the highest sort and an important step on our path to full civil rights for our people. (To be fair, she is a fake ginger, having dyed her hair since the age of ten, but we will take it!)

Sure enough, it hasn’t been easy for us. We have had precious few role models. Indeed, ask yourself, when was the last time you saw one of us positively depicted. Carrot Top? Chuckie Finster? Ron Weasley? Groundskeeper Willie?

None of these rise to the level of a power role model on par with Ms. Hendricks, but even she is depicted as the buxom, Joan Holloway, the conniving, manipulative office harlot on Mad Men.

Indeed, the greatest show on television depicted our people most recently as terrorists. Sure, it’s fine to libel an entire people soulless, but insult the prophet, and Comedy Central will censor the show. Trey Parker and Matt Stone set our people back 50 years.

This depiction is why we are thought to have no soul. Now, this was elegantly rebutted in a recent viral YouTube video, but it shouldn’t distract us from the cause: the establishment of a separate ginger center on campus where we can stay in a safe space where no one will call us soulless. Which ginger has not been asked if the carpet matches the drapes? If the toppings match the furbelow?

We have long been a marginalized people. You know what it’s like. You see a fellow ginger and you give the nod of shared oppression. You know that our women are desired and thought to be sex freaks; our men thought weak due to freckledom. We must unite now so that we can keep our numbers stronger.

Of course, to guarantee that we have adequate numbers of red heads on campus, we must have preferential treatment.

Simpsons character Groundskeeper Willie: angry, poor, and ginger.

If South Park episodes alone weren’t enough to justify preferential treatment for gingers, allow me to point out several facts:

• We were burned at the stake for being witches. Nothing tops that.
• The Nazis debated whether redheads should be allowed to marry, lest their degenerate offspring hurt the gene pool.
• Others have been forced from their homes, stabbed, beat up, made fun of at Christmastime, or sexually harassed in the workplace.

For these reasons, we must have a support center and a mentor program. It’s just so hard living in multi-haired community.

True, it may not seem as if we need it. After all, some of mankind’s most famous and influential people have been gingers or daywalkers. I refer, of course, to Sir Winston Churchill, Vladimir Lenin, Galileo Galilei, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Calvin Coolidge, Vincent Van Gogh, Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, L. Ron Hubbard, Margaret Sanger, Judas Iscariot, and of course, Squeaky Fromme. Truthfully, we control the world.

Several years ago, Rose Haig engaged in ginger-baiting when she ran for Pomona’s Student Body president. Her slogan? “Red Heads Are Feisty.” I confess to having engaged in a little bit of this ginger-baiting  myself during my campaign speech and some have even questioned my loyalty to the cause for dating Asian women. (Asians, reportedly, also do not have souls, so it works out.)

And so we are. Our toughness comes from years of teasing and an above normal tolerance for pain. In point of fact, researchers at the University of Louisville discovered that, on average, people born with red hair require about 20 percent more anesthesia to be properly sedated. That tolerance for pain is what has kept us strong these years, as we move forward towards our eventual goal of a separate ginger country.

Until that day comes, fair redheads, take a page from one of our greats, Sir Winston Churchill, and “never, never, never surrender.”

First, there was his handling of the banning of David Daleiden CMC ’11 and Kyle Kinneberg CMC ’09 from Pomona College without any due process whatsoever. According to Daleiden, Castro told the boys that they had “no contractual agreement with Pomona College” and that they had “no more rights at Pomona than an individual walking his dog down the street.” (David and Kyle were un-banned from Pomona by President Gann who apologized to the boys for their ordeal.)

And earlier this month, Castro was reportedly among those that wanted to cancel the Thesis Fountain Party.

Now, it seems David “Fid” Castro is at it again. Dozens of students have been trying to meet with Castro over unfair treatment in room draw. They say his handling of room draw speaks volumes about how he thinks students ought to be treated and raises questions of just whether or not Claremont McKenna should retain his employment.

Most of the complaints center on dorm damages, which many of the students say they didn’t know they even had, thanks to what they say is an administrative screw up of failing to send notice of dorm damages. Compounding the problem is yet another administrative screw up: the college’s release of students’ initial room draw numbers before dorm damages have been paid. Students can see just how badly they have fallen in the room draw rankings. All told, there are over sixty students who feel as if they have been “screwed” by room draw, but Dean Castro isn’t budging. “It just seems like he doesn’t care,” says a student who waited for an hour at 8 AM this morning to meet with him. “He’s not even apologetic over the screw up.” (All of the students quoted in this article asked for anonymity until matters are sorted out.)

“He told me that I should have emailed them if I didn’t get a dorm damage notice,” says another. “But why should it be on me for them screwing up? Why can’t they just email my dorm damages to me?” Student accounts and class registration have both gone digital in the last year, why not dorm damages as well? Such proposals would even make us “green.”

To students disappointed with room draw, Castro has compared himself to a landlord and claimed that he is trying to “prepare students for the real world,” but that analogy doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, especially from someone who has never really worked in the real world. (Castro graduated from CMC in 1999. He has been a CMC bureaucrat since 2002.)

Perhaps Castro doesn’t remember this from Econ. 50, but the housing market is competitive. If I’m a tenant, a real landlord has every incentive to do whatever he can to help me, and he is constrained by the law that tends to favor tenants over renters. On top of that, if I don’t like how my landlord is treating me – say, neglecting to fix the Stark Elevator, which has broken down six times this semester – I can sue him or ask for reduced rent. Or I can move out. And, less I forget, I’m not obliged to be on a meal plan when I sign my housing contract in the “real world.”

Claremont McKenna is a residential college with more than 95% of its student body living on campus – a fact it touts in its brochures to prospective students. Such students question the wisdom of ruining a student’s entire senior or junior year over five bucks in damages!

Of course, there are all sorts of common sense reforms for dorm damages, but the Dean of Students Office and ASCMC – supposedly designed to help the students – seem totally uninterested in pursuing them. Instead of billing students directly for dorm damages, why not send it to their parents through student accounts? Many parents would police their children’s damaging ways, particularly if they were hit with the bill for their kids’ raging. For those students who don’t cause damage, why not make it easier to report those other students? If anything, the current policy gives incentives to destructive students who know about the extent and level of the damage, and charges those that did not even know damage had occurred.

The college screws sixty of us on the one hand and then prevents us from escaping by capping the number of people permitted to live off-campus at fifty.

Only a bureaucrat could think that that’s a good idea.

At first, the inconvenience was limited to water faucets that barely dispense water at the Athenaeum, Collins, or Claremont Hall. Equipped with motion sensors or touchpads,  these faucets do not dispense enough water to wash their hands for the medically approved 15-20 seconds. This was an annoyance during the school year, but with the much publicized H1N1 virus, it is a public health threat. (I doubt the lost productivity of sickness of students and faculty was factored into the cost-savings.) Unfortunately, this is just one of the many ways in which “sustainability” ruins life on campus.

Contrary to what many of its supporters — among whom I include some members of the Board of Trustees — claim, I find little evidence that its version of sustainability actually saves costs. The most egregious instance of this occurred last year. In the name of sustainability, the school spent between $3100-$3900 each on four solar-powered trash cans. Was this a sustainable purchase? Now that the trashcans have been put in the shade, as if to add insult to injury, they can’t even power their own operation. (Humorously, a representative of Big Belly Solar informs me that the photovoltaic cells used to compact cans will be be a “revenue” stream – which means that it would take 70,000 cans to pay for just one machine, at $3500. I hope we don’t drink that much.)

Along those lines, do the many empty parking spots that remain unused in our parking lots serve our community as well as allowing some freshmen, somewhere to have access to their own vehicles? But Dean Huang, in an email to me, admitted that part of the reason freshmen were banned from having cars on campus was “environmental” and to wait until the college’s master plan was released. Now that it has been, we see that the stated mission of “sustainability” may even harm the environment. In a school with limited funds, why build parking lots that you aren’t going to operate at capacity?

Last Friday night at around 3 AM, I counted twenty empty spots in the South quad lot. Why didn’t the college try to strike some kind of deal with Scripps College, which has a mostly vacant parking lot just a block from our campus? Surely Scrippsies benefit from the parties we throw and would benefit from the money that freshman CMCers would-be drivers would provide. Scripps endowment fell between a quarter and a third last year. Are we really to believe that they wouldn’t sell parking spots?  Even worse, these allegedly “sustainable” policies have unintended and harmful consequences. By curtailing freshmen driving, the colleges make drinking that much more attractive. You don’t need to be an econ. major to understand that the college has changed the price of a night on the town. Instead of driving into LA with fellow freshmen for a night on the town, it’s much easier to buy some booze from a willing upperclassmen and wind up making some poor decisions.

Decisions — there’s that word again. Part of being out on your own and away from your parents is newfound freedom and responsibility. For the most part, you can choose what classes to take, when to eat, whom to sleep with, what clubs to join, and who you want to be. In fact, the college seems to promote more libertine policies — multiple days for free sexual disease testings, free condoms, and a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on alcohol. But part of those choices is whether or not you want to live a supposedly sustainable lifestyle. You’re supposed to be able to choose. From compelling students to install poorly illuminating light bulbs that make it difficult to read and do homework to now monitoring what its students eat, however, the college is overstepping its bounds.

Because a few students have wasted food, the Claremont colleges have decided that we are not responsible enough to decide what to eat. But if the colleges were really insistent that Claremont students waste food, why not allow them to self-police, as other colleges have done? The school could even set targets for the students to reduce their waste, if it were so inclined. Instead, they have undemocratically decided that Claremont students — among whom are some of the smartest students in America — must be treated as animals, incapable of choosing the portions and amount of their own food. As children we learn what to put into our bodies, but as college students, we apparently have lost that most elementary of lessons. While the college used to sell itself on the conversations students had over dinner and on the lessons they learned from each other in the dining room, one wonders how wise a policy it is that makes community that much less enjoyable. Never you mind the fact that eating disorders are apparently a real problem from young women — or so, at least, we are told at freshman orientation.

Worse yet, now that the college has done away with trays, it has simply makes life harder for the already overworked dining hall staff, whose pay has been frozen and whose hours have been artificially elongated by the extra cleaning they must do. The food that once fell onto trays now falls on the floor, on the table, and on chairs and must be washed. According to some of the dining hall women I interviewed at three of the dining halls, they spend an average additional 30 minutes each day cleaning the floors.

Pitzer and Claremont McKenna College have now offered a “reusable” container. The Claremont Portside and the Forum reported that the containers will be purchased by our Dean of Students, Dean Huang, for an untold sum of money. Now it appears as if Collins will be providing these containers gratis to each student on a meal plan. But this raises more questions than it answers: If the school — or Collins– is going to go to the effort of buying a whole bunch of takeout containers, why can’t they spare $1.75 for each student to have their own tray, weigh the remaining food refuse, and then charge the students who waste the food more? Remember, the supposedly environmentally friendly containers at the other colleges cost between $3 and $6. This cast doubts on the supposed savings that trayless dining is supposed to bring. Anyone who has worked as a dishwasher knows that it is a lot easier to wash a flat tray than a weirdly shaped takeout container. So not only will the college have to pay the initial costs of purchasing these containers, the perpetual costs of their cleaning will have to be sustained as well. How sustainable.

But “sustainability” was never really about the environment, after all. It’s about signaling. Gann signals to the Board of Trustees that she’s reducing costs and to the campus what values she thinks we ought to be promoting.

And the rest of the campus signals its apathy by going on its merry way.

In part, this was brought about by the rather distracting text message board placed up on the projection screen in the back room, which I confess to having had some (but not nearly enough) fun distorting for the sake of a few cheap laughs. But even was I was able to pay attention to the speakers, I wasn’t hearing what would have made the discussion worthwhile.

Claremont Men's College Commencement 1969

In such debates, I find it instructive to ground our understanding of what CMC is in its history. What did President George C. S. Benson have to say on the matter of what kind of college Claremont McKenna should be? Here I direct you once again to his masterful assessment presented in a speech entitled, “How Pink Are Our Colleges”? I recommend the reading as it is pretty clear that Benson did not see a distinction between teaching “practical affairs” and the liberal arts. Instead, this division, constantly cultivated, produced solid and effective custodians of the American system. “We are going to see that the graduates of one college in the country have a clear-cut conception of the values of American economic heritage,” Benson told Colonel J. G. Boswell.

And he saw the liberal arts widely enough to encompass Peter Drucker, a healthy appreciation for the American founding, Lincoln, Goethe, Tocqueville, and others as encouraging a kind of liberalization of American business elites. Most of Claremont’s graduates he reasoned would be men of “public affairs” or businessmen and so familiarity with these great thinkers would serve to both enrich their lives and form the basis for the corporations or polities that the graduates would one day lead. It was leadership, as we are found of saying, but it had a direction and a purpose: namely, the preservation of the American way of life — a way of life that was accessible to all peoples.

But at the same time that Benson stressed the virtues of the Declaration of Independence and individualism, he fought for a professor of real estate and counseled students to take accounting — a required course. So the technical balanced appropriately the liberal arts.

If there is any problem with our current existence of Claremont McKenna, it is that much violence has been done to this harmony between both the technical and the humanities. The reason so many majored in both government and economics (or accounting) was that practical and ethereal could and indeed, should exist in one man’s mind, operating simultaneously.

In our present times, many fear that the financial tail of $200 million dollars will wag the liberal arts dog. But this reaction is terribly shortsighted. Claremont ought to be grateful that its alums — many of whom are in finance — feel compelled to generosity to their alma mater. It is doubtful that the rather posh lifestyles of academics could long endure were it not for that benevolence.

Instead, I encourage my friends in the humanities department to dig deep in the history of the college and find some kind of accommodation between the liberal arts and finance side the college. And I encourage my friends in the finance department to make a more substantive argument in favor of why finance and management ought to be properly understood as a liberal art.

Otherwise our current problem seems intractable. This approach of balancing the practical with the mental is frayed. It is that both of them have gotten too out of whack.

(Photo: Commencement at Claremont Mens College 1969, LIFE Magazine)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about why it is that so few people at the Claremont Colleges go on dates. It has always struck me as odd that I’ve searched far and wide for an answer, and so far, I have turned up empty with an explanation. And so, I’ve donned my Crocodile Hunter outfit – watch the Stag stalk his Scrippsie prey – to seek out some answers. But, as usual, I’ve come away with more questions.

The consensus seems to be that, on the whole, we’re too busy drinking and hooking up to wander down to the sleepy Claremont Village for dinner and a movie. Or, as one football player alum put it less charitably, CMC is a “drunken orgy country club that puts the collapsing Roman Empire to shame” – something that he, by the way, didn’t mind when he attended. Everyone seems to favor dating, in theory, and yet, few seem to be dating in practice. It seems that even Professor Charles Kesler has thrown his hat into the ring when he suggested that freeing up everyone equally turns out to be bad for women.

But surely not everyone is hooking up. And, not entirely clear that everyone wants to, either.

Indeed, sometimes it seems as if CMC, in the political economy of female attention, has reverted to a kind polygamy. On the one hand, there seem to be men who get far too much female attention. (Heaven help those lucky fools.) On the other, there seem to be beta males that cannot get any female attention. And women it seems must either play the game with the alpha males or risk falling out of the ranks of beautiful people. The dating equilibrium seems hopelessly out of whack.

And those couples that do form, by accident or by careful planning, seem more like arranged marriages than healthy, college couples. Some couples move in together and seem so tightly bound together that it is tough to consider them as separate entities. It’s all too short a jump from being Facebook official to sharing that utterly small twin size bed. Still other couples seem to be apologizing for their success. How often have you heard those who are in serious relationships say, “Oh, we don’t want to label it”? Why not? Is there a fear that, once labeled, others will try to get involved and ruin it?

I’m not suggesting that we have some kind of Fiddler on the Roof scenario with a matchmaker sitting in judgment of who should date who, but really, couldn’t we do better than the hot or not scale? Nor am I suggesting that we return to the days when the CMC yearbook ranked the prettiest Scripps girls– although I volunteer myself for such a job should it present itself. And the days when the CMC guys boorishly sang dirty songs on Scripps’s campus are thankfully long behind us.

There’s simply got to be a better way out there than people drunkenly and sloppily having sex, stalking each other on Facebook and then texting for booty calls late at night? And maybe – just maybe – the pinnacle of social activity on a Friday night isn’t a game of beirut with Natty Ice. This stuff, before long, grows tiresome. If college is supposed to be a place where you grow in maturity and wisdom, why does our social life seem more likely to cultivate cave men than the future leaders of tomorrow?

Perhaps our dating behaviors aren’t our conscious decisions at all, but rather product of a market where selfishness is allowed to reign supreme. Why bother dedicating time to knowing somebody and developing a companionship when you can compartmentalize your orgasms to the end of a night after you are done drinking and partying?

There might be a better way, but first we must change the campus culture. But it will require real risks, like rejection, than what we currently have embraced. We should ask ourselves the following questions.

Do we know so much about one another that we have already dismissed a priori the idea that a guy or gal might be more fun (or more interesting) off campus? Has Facebook and the rumor mill given us so much of a window into each other that we dare not go off campus for dining and conversation?

Over at Arizona State University, the Network of Enlightened Women hosts a contest that honors gentlemanly behavior on campus. Women are encouraged to nominate men who were gentlemanly and then a panel makes decisions. Such a contest would seem welcome at CMC, where every year the Mr. Stag competition seems more fit for a Cougars’ Night at the Bar than for a college whose motto boasts at least a tangential connection to “civilization.” (Imagine, for a moment the ire if some enterprising CMCer wanted to create a Ms. Athena and that it culminated in a strip show. Oh wait, we don’t have to imagine that…)

Now I suspect that there will be quite a few people that argue that the men here are boorish or that women are teases, but the truth is that you won’t know that until you’ve gone on a date or two.

Yours,

Charles Johnson

In many respects, it could be said that Claremont helped launch the Friedmans’ ideas into the mainstream. In 1958, Milton Friedman, along with F.A. Hayek and Bruno Leoni, gave a series of lectures at the Fifth Institute on Freedom and Competitive Enterprise at what is now Claremont McKenna. According to Professor Arthur Kemp, the lectures from this meeting were profoundly influential. Those lectures became Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, (which Professor Pitney recommends), Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law. With Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman established himself as the intellectual advocate of economic and political freedom, with Rose, being very much behind and supportive of every thing he wrote. Where Milton went, so went Rose. In awarding Milton Friedman the Presidential Medal of Honor, President George W. Bush joked that the only person who had ever beat him in an argument was his wife.

The Friedmans’ influence on the national culture began at another time of mass unemployment and American pessimism — during the late 1970s. In 1980, Rose and Milton co-wrote a book and a PBS series Free to Choose, that became one of the most influential television shows of a generation. The book sold some 400,000 copies that year alone and the television program average 3 million viewers per episode. (You can watch it all – legally – for free here.) Unsurprisingly, for a school whose motto is that civilization prospers with commerce, Claremont, too, got in on the act. In 1986, the Economics Department screened and discussed four episodes at the Ath. Since the publication of Free to Choose, the Friedmans visited the Ath twice – in 1986 and 1996 – at Claremont. (Unfortunately, the Ath has lost the videos.) They warmly mention Claremont McKenna in both of Two Lucky People and Free to Choose.

The Friedmans’ message of real hope – of maximizing human liberty in all things — resounded with a country struggling with the depths of economic malaise of the 1970s and rings true today in the midst of one of the worst economic recessions in recent decades. Together, the Friedmans imagined a different future for America and the world—a future we sorely need to work for under an Obama presidency where the only thing we seem free to choose is more government and less freedom. Such a vision of America would have struck the Friedmans as profoundly un-American (to borrow a phrase from our Speaker of the House).

But despite their passing, the Friedmans’ work should live on with the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, which has scored countless victories on behalf of liberty and more specifically school choice – an idea that was virtually unthinkable when they began their public advocacy. Indeed, a testament to their success can be seen in how much school choice’s opponents are willing to do to defeat it.

Just this past year, Obama suppressed a Department of Education study that showed vouchers boosted educational outcomes while saving money in D.C, one of America’s worst performing school districts. A young Obama, at least, was free to choose. He attended some of America’s best private schools and currently sends his daughters to one of the finest – and most expensive – D.C. public schools.  (Watch this video to see just how tragic gutting that scholarship is for some of the lucky few to have been selected for it.)

It was just this kind of hypocrisy — that the liberal elite stifled freedom while enjoying their own — that the Friedmans fought against. They believed that America’s success stemmed from her constitution and culture of liberty – a liberty they sought to preserve and nourish. They dared to believe that people need private options, not public ones. And that is a message we need now more than ever. As the Friedmans write in their memoir, Two Lucky People:

Our central theme in public advocacy has been the promotion of human freedom….it underlies our opposition to rent control and general wage and price controls, our support for educational choice, privatizing radio and television channels, an all-volunteer army, limitation of government spending, legalization of drugs, privatizing Social Security, free trade, and the deregulation of industry and private life to the fullest extent possible.

We are all Lucky People for having had the Friedmans among us.

And what a voice Walter Cronkite had. It was all things at once – authoritative, pleasant, and exuded Midwestern charm. In the age of Watergate, polling indicated that Americans trusted Cronkite more than their politicians. He was bestowed with the moniker, “the most trusted man in America.” We are already starting to hear much about how he harkens back to some mythical time when news was news.

But there lies the problem.

Unfortunately, by refusing to focus on the words he said, rather than the symbol he represented, we risk lionizing someone whose simplifying of national events did our culture a tremendous disservice.

For many, Cronkite was the embodiment of a time when the news really was “fair and balanced.” We mistake the simple comments of newspaperman and believe that there really was a time when things could be neatly boiled down into a simple evening broadcast. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that uttering the phrase, “And That’s the Way It Was,” must make everyone agree.

Don’t believe the hype. Cronkite died a crotchety old man whose politics finally shown through during the final years of his life when he went off on a speaking tour against the President. It was a fitting end for a man who was part of the Big Three – when only three networks that controlled the flow of information into our homes and thus how we lived our lives. Pundits like to trumpet Cronkite as some kind of purer Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann, who was a just-the-facts Middle America newspapermen, dontcha know. But really, the news culture of spin was just a logical extension of his cultivated public persona.

Nowhere is that politicization of information more clear than in a commencement speech at Pomona College in 2004 where he looked at the coming presidential campaign between John F. Kerry and George W. Bush. (For those interested, the introduction of that speech was delivered by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor and blogger at Pomona College and well worth a read.)

Here is what Cronkite had to say about the Bush Administration and the challenges that face our nation going forward after the 1960s.

Well, here we are at Pomona, almost a half century later. And as we look around the world into which you folks will be moving so shortly, I can’t really say things look much brighter.

We are plagued with the Iraq war, a possibility of an improving economy—but still a tragically large number of unemployed and underemployed—and an environmental crisis that literally threatens our planet. Here at home, we have a collapsing infrastructure of failing bridges, failing dams, a highway system that needs immediate attention. And worst of all, an inadequate educational system. … And all of this as we face a national deficit that will hobble us through your generation—and through your children’s generation and very possibly, so desperate is it, that it may follow us through your grandchildren’s period of years.

… We have an administration in Washington that has brought on this condition, and we have a Democratic candidate presumptive who so far has proposed few remedies that offer any specifics that, to this observer, at least, promise the necessary New Deal in Washington.

To borrow a phrase from the leftist academia, let’s deconstruct this paragraph. The New Deal that Obama ushered in and that Cronkite called for has been just as disastrous as the first New Deal. Far from reducing unemployment, unemployment has exploded, growing faster than the Obama administration most pessimistic numbers forecast, with no signs of slowing. That Bush-created debt that Cronkite despises later in the speech, mushroomed under President Obama and the Democratic congress. With his failed stimulus bill, Obama quadruppled the national debt at the stroke of a pen, meaning that you and I are going to be paying and paying and paying for the experiments that Obama is starting to let loose on all of us. Try as Obama’s economic advisors do, 2004 looks like the salad days compared to 2009. Meanwhile, the so-called “environmental crisis” threatens to become a legislative economy killer, with its latest incarnation, cap and trade.

John F. Kerry failed to get elected in 2004, despite Cronkite’s wishes. But with Obama, Cronkite has now gotten his New Deal now that we’ve elected a Democratic candidate who promised to fix all that and more. The war in Iraq, misguided though it may have been, has been won, or at the very least wasn’t the debacle that Vietnam had been. (Much though the leftish commentariot, Cronkite included, would have us believe otherwise, Iraq was no Vietnam, though that doesn’t mean it won’t be rehashed and reexamined by aging baby boomers.)

But now that Obama shows signs of being less than the messiah we were promised, mustn’t we ask where are the seemingly objective journalists – like Cronkite and who at the very least ape his style – to question him as harshly as they criticized President Bush? Don’t count on it.

Before Pomona College’s Class of 2004, Cronkite lamented our infrastructure and education, but fails to draw the proper lessons: it’s that big government he loves that has so failed to build the roads adequately or train the next generation’s minds properly because, self-flagellate as we so often do, the government has no incentives to provide either. Why else would there be such a need for a private college, like Pomona College, if the government schools really did so well?

Our failing educational system, which Cronkite calls the worst challenge of them all, languishes because of politicians like Barack Obama, who elect to send their children to the best of the best private schools. And one option that we had to make those schools better -– school choice –- was cut off when Democrats cut funding for the D.C. vouchers program. Worst of all, the Obama administration suppressed a Department of Education report that showed that the children who attended private schools through the vouchers did better academically. (They released the report after the Democrats had cut the funding.)

Despite covering some of the most abusive government actions, Cronkite never stopped thinking that the government knows best. Cronkite supported a failed amendment to the (hopefully soon to be ruled unconstitutional) McCain-Feingold bill that would have forced TV broadcast companies to provide free airtime to candidates. That doesn’t sound very free speech-y to me. He demonized Christian fundamentalists and anyone who criticized his dream of a more forceful U.N.

But what’s so egregious about using the perch Cronkite got from years of media exposure is how he managed to make his big government dreams sound as if they were the latest reform, rather than the trite, failed policies of yesteryear. Small wonder then, that he called one-termer, President Jimmy Carter one of our smartest presidents ever.

And as our president praises Cronkite as an “icon” that “was the news,” I’m left wondering whether Obama’s and the collective nostalgia might have real costs. Do we really want to return to a world where we all sat around waiting to be told what to think? Do we really want to take at face value the slogan, “And that’s the way it is”? Wishing, and a bit of gravitas, won’t make utopian dreams come true.

But we rarely question the positions in government they go on and take up.  More often than not, we congratulate our own for their achievements without considering the implications of their jobs. We assume that they’ll be men of action and thought, rather than cogs in the government bureaucracy in which they serve.

So it is with CMC alum, Jordan Barab, CMC ‘75, who is acting head the Office Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). But with Barab, we have the opportunity to not only examine the implication of his appointment but also surmise what he will do in office by carefully considering his and OSHA’s history.

During the past eight years, Barab spent his time excoriating the Bush administration’s laissez faire labor policies from his blog, Confined Space. Left unexamined, of course, is whether those same labor policies account for us having one of the lowest unemployment level in U.S. history during the Bush years.

Among other things, Barab argued that the Bush administration was refusing to enforce OSHA regulations and statutes that allegedly would have helped workplace safety. He published scary (and utterly unfounded) statistics printed by organized labor.

More than 15 workers are killed every day on the job in this country and a worker becomes injured or ill on the job every 2.5 seconds. The overwhelming majority of deaths, injuries and illnesses could have been easily prevented had the employers simply provided a safe workplace and complied with well-recognized OSHA regulations or other safe practices.

Assuming that the figure is accurate, which it is probably not, there are many questions that just this paragraph leaves unanswered such as whether this figure is high or low relative to all time standards, and whether or not OSHA regulations have any effect, positive or negative, in decreasing workplace accidents. In fact, as the U.S. moves from an agricultural to industrial to knowledge based economy, the number of deaths have been declining every single year.

Like the minimum wage laws that lead to unemployment about lower level workers, the outcome of all these OSHA regulations is to drive up the cost of hiring workers, a policy which gives more power to the union members that have already been hired. If companies are mandated to spend millions to improve the workplace environment, they’ll be less likely to hire the workforce they need. People often price their lives differently and are willing to work dangerous, humiliating jobs for the pay off. Shouldn’t they be allowed to make choices about what they deem precious and valuable? (Just ask Carl Peaslee, illegal immigrants, or anyone who has ever worked a job from Craigslist.)

Barab is critical of the “president’s cronies” in his final blog post – a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, given that Barab worked for some of the most radical unions in the country, the AFL-CIO.  He decries the Bush Administration and the Republican congress’s efforts to repeal a costly, hastily imposed Clinton-era regulation that would have forced employers to cover the cost of employees’ carpal tunnel. (Just how do you tell if the secretary got her stiff hand from working on the job or surfing the internet at home?) The costs were estimated by some to be as high as $100 billion and earned the dishonor of being what U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO, Tom J. Donahue, called, “the most costly, burdensome, and far-reaching government regulation in U.S. history.” Even unions estimated that the cost of compliance would be in excess of $8 billion.

Don’t expect Barab to be persuaded that OSHA is a waste of money and beholden to the unions he formerly worked for. Barab, in the days since he became acting OSHA head, has promised that “OSHA is back.”

Back from where? And just what kind of OSHA can we expect from Barab? Here it is instructive to look at his record, but before we do that, it’s worth pointing out his Facebook (publicly accessible from here) where he lists himself as a fan of the so-called “Employee Free Choice Act” and George Orwell. I guess that I read 1984 as a warning and that he read it as an instruction manual. Ah, sometimes you cannot make this stuff up. Given that even the liberal, left-leaning, former presidential candidate, George McGovern has come out against an effort to eliminate the secret ballot from America’s workplaces.

Either Barab hasn’t looked into the actual track record of OSHA — or worse, he just doesn’t care. Had he, he would see OSHA’s record of utter and abysmal failure which he should have recognized when he worked with it from 1998 to 2001 when he served as special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA until 2001.

After spending two years on a request from an employer about complying with OSHA from at home — now that’s speedy regulation! — OSHA finally responded and told the employer community that OSHA standards applied to those working at home as well as those working at the office. Public outcry forced them to reconsider, but that was after employers wasted an estimated $1000 dollars per home getting them up to OSHA standards and after it took OSHA two years to respond. All of this stopped more flexible work arrangements by forcing employers and employees to bear the cost of a stupid regulation. Many of those who were adversely affected were women, who wanted to stay at home with their kids and still have a career from their home office.

Not egregious enough for you? Let’s look at what happened in 2000, when Barab was also working for OSHA. Many CMCers will go on to work in the for-profit sector and like me, have aspirations of working on your own start up. At first, many of your employees will be paid hourly wages if they work on a new firm, that is, of course, until you all make serious bank when the company goes public, thanks to your diligence and hardwork. But thanks to OSHA’s unclear and silly regulations in 2000 which mandated that stock options be included in overtime pay, many firms just turned around and refused to award stock options to their hourly employees. It was simply too complex and not worth the legal hassle. It wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to argue that some of the early programmers who were denied those stock options might not have been too incentivized to work their hardest on the new firms that had hired them. In the free lance economy of Silicon Valley, this couldn’t have been good for start ups looking for people to move through the ranks.

Of course, OSHA, being a government entity, doesn’t regulate one of the most unsafe workplace environments in the entire federal government, the totally wasteful, U.S. Postal service, which according to Reason Magazine, “accounted for 29 percent of all federal agency workers’ compensation claims in fiscal 1994. In the same year, it paid out over $521 million in workers’ comp, death benefits, and medical expenses.” Putting it simply, we’re not only paying for the 750,000 employees of the Postal service’s generous government benefits and subsidizing the whole government-run business, we’re ignoring the very real human costs that it puts on the workers out there who would undoubtedly be safer in competitive firms that had to compete on safety, wages, etc. for the best workers.

Now to be fair, Mr. Barab wasn’t around in 1994, but that policy is still in effect. Will he change it? I doubt it. To his credit, Barab was critical of the lavish display of attention when the shuttle Columbia exploded, decrying the double standard between the attention spent on astronauts and dead industrial workers who often get ignored by the mainstream media. He missed the lesson from this, of course. Space exploration is simply too dangerous to be left up to governments, and so, apparently is delivering the U.S. mail.

By forcing companies to pay more and more money to solve a problem that has been declining every year, OSHA harms the very U.S. workers it is supposed to help. The effects of not being able to receive a job due to regulation are difficult to measure, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t real. So you’ll forgive me if I wish Barab were just like all those other CMC alums right now – out on the market looking for a job.

Sometimes the Ath can have a truly big influence on your life. After chatting up Ath speakers, some students have landed summer jobs or even full-time jobs. Indeed, for many students, the Ath will be one of those most memorable experiences of their time at Claremont McKenna. Small wonder then that when the Development Office calls you — and they will — they almost always mention the Ath and the speakers that the school had brought to campus during the past semester.

So in the spirit of my Forum blog posts, please allow me to skewer and burn a sacred cow or two.

Keep out the riff raff. You know how it is. You show up and then some townie asks a really odd, really embarrassing question of the speaker and everyone grimaces. Can’t there be something we can do to at least profit off of these odd experiences? Fortunately, there is! We could actually charge these people for coming into the Athenaeum after dinner. At the very least we could do is have an Ath waiter offer around a collection plate. To some this might be seen as tacky, but isn’t that what is done when you go to concerts or the theatre? Oftentimes there’s a very small donations box in the corner where people can give what their conscience dictates.

The townies aren’t the only offenders. So please, all of you, no questions of the speaker that could be answered by skimming Wikipedia. Also avoid sycophantic questions: When a girl asked the ambassador of Syria how the U.S. could help Syria, a sponsor of terrorism, promote peace, the audience rightly laughed at her. This kind of guarantee of public humiliation would help preserve our image as intellectually serious students.

Voting on art. If we had had a discussion or voted on the art before it came to the Athenaeum, we might have prevented some of the hideous art work currently on display. Frankly, it’s disgusting and I know I hope I’m not alone in wanting a pubic hair free dining hall.

Stop subsidizing seniors. An Ath meal is free for people off the meal plan. During palmier times, we might have been able to afford this extravagant expenditure, but now it really is time to ask ourselves whether or not that money is really worth it. Can’t seniors pay some percentage of their meal? There is, after all, no such thing as a free Ath lunch.

Auctioning off head table spots. My last post I elicited some discussion of auction markets. The current cap on head tables doesn’t work. Many times this past semester, the Ath fellows upgraded some students to the head table. A better system would be to figure out a way to guarantee that the students who had at least a passing knowledge of the speaker sat at the head table.

Vote on who the Ath fellows are. At the very least, it’s time to expand the ranks of students that speak publicly on behalf of the college. One of the Ath fellows called Herodotus, “Hairy do tus.” Yeah, I know. Students have a better knowledge of who is a good speaker and who is not, who had good connections to potential speakers and who does not, than some committee.

Have students invite speakers. Having Bonnie Snortum invite speakers to the Ath almost certainly means that a prospective speaker will be upping his fee. The thinking goes like this, “If a paid representative of the college is the person who is inviting me, they must have a lot of funds earmarked for these purposes.” But if we had a committee of students calling we could at the very least feign interest or poverty. Who knows? It may even help students negotiate fees when they move into the working world.

Privatizing the extraction of the video. When Anderson Cooper or Karl Rove comes to town, we should immediately ship the video out to C-Span to get attention for our up and coming Claremont McKenna. Why don’t we already? Everything we can do to build Claremont McKenna’s brand will benefit us in the long run.

Part of the problem is that those who video tape the events put them up on a clunky and difficult to use website. A fellow student and I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to retrieve a video of Milton Friedman’s lecture to Claremont students, only to be told that it had been lost, which raises a very important question: why film it at all? Fortunately, we have an example of a successful Ath YouTube event in the Ath talks of Jonathan Rosenberg CMC ’83. One one of those videos, he’s gotten over 57,000 views since Google put it up the videos on YouTube. And he’s just some guy from Google. Imagine if we put up some of the star-studded cast of the past. Something as simple as a Athenaeum YouTube Channel would open up access to CMCers who couldn’t make it and even attract future CMCers to apply just be sharing the talks already happening on campus.

Add in some transparency–just some. Regardless of how you feel about Bono politically (and in the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that I’m not a fan), you have to admit that that was a pretty big waste of money. Allegedly, Claremont McKenna spent $100,000 for a little over twenty minutes of Bono’s time. Maybe it’s time for some transparency on the fees that Ath speakers get, if only to ask whether or not the college’s money might be better spent elsewhere.

We all like it in the Ath, but with these reforms and others, we might just like it harder.

Here are a few ideas that I have been kicking around that might make Claremont McKenna a lot more efficient and fully utilize the creativity of our students.

One such idea would be to use auction markets and web 2.0 tech to allocate housing, classes, and even library books. More precisely, what if we used the opportunity of the loss of Ethan Andyshak, CMC’s housing czar, to design a software system that allocated housing? What would such a system look like?

The current system has more in common with a Soviet-style, planned economy than with a school whose motto is civilization prospers with commerce. There is no commerce, just the credit-based rationing of time slots. But why not level the playing field and let preference, not AP-credits dictate housing?  Why not auction off some or all dorm rooms ahead of time, offering students the opporunity to buy the rooms they want, and enjoy the financial benefit? At George Washington University, they did just that and raised thousands for a scholarship fund. CMC could use this to cover the shortfall in financial aid (aid, as I explained in my last post, that will be cut $600,000).

But if you all are repulsed at the idea of money being used, then we could adopt a non-monetary auction.

Wharton, or as I like to call it, the CMC of the East, employs such program for class selection. (Here’s a brief description. And here’s the demo of how the software operates.)

Graduate students at Wharton choose their elective classes using an auction system.  Each student is given 5,000 points at the beginning of their career at Wharton which they then use to begin bidding on electives. The most popular classes and professors therefore command the most points.  Once a student has “won” a place in a class, they can then auction that place in the class off to other students as a way to get more points for other classes.  In essence, getting the classes you want to take at Wharton requires business acumen right from the start.

That sounds all well and good, but how does it live out in the everyday? Here’s how an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article, jokingly called, “Class Warfare,” describes the process.

Wharton auctions spots to its M.B.A. students, allowing them to bid for their classes. They don’t use real money; instead, students are each given 5,000 points when they enroll and 1,000 more for every credit they earn. An average course might sell for a few hundred points while the most sought-after ones can top 10,000….
But Wharton takes it one step further, allowing students to sell their courses (for points) to other students. It’s all done through a Web site. Buyers and sellers are anonymous, so buddies can’t make deals. Wharton also uses a second-price auction in which the highest bidder wins, but he or she pays the amount of the second-highest bid. Economists like the second-price auction because they think it encourages more honest bidding.
In other words, Wharton has what may be the most sophisticated, and most confusing, course-registration system ever devised.
And, arguably, the fairest. “It’s capitalism gone nuts, but it’s also absolute socialism because everyone is born with the same number of points,” says Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy.

This hybrid model serves as a perfect template for CMC’s housing process. Dean Fid Castro, the new housing dean, could issue the same number of points to all students, and additional points could be issued for seniority, credits, or even GPA. Like the current system, this system would probably reward older students, but the room assignment process for each year would be very different than the status quo. In the auction, some students would buy up sure bets and hold onto them early on. Others would buy dorm rooms only to sell them later when the demand for those dorms picks up as the days near to the closing of the auction, taking the points for use in future years. And there could be massive rewards for saving points. Students who save could conceivably give or trade their points to other students or wait until their senior year when the odds that they will get their preferred room would be much higher.

But the real fascinating thing would be watching how the market actually plays out. Who wins and who loses? What’s the best play to get the room you want? At least in this system, there would be some strategy and fairness in the housing process, and both could be closely measured by the aspiring finance or economics majors. Moreover, an auction would be able to send signals to CMC’s administration about which dorms are valued and by how much. Future dorms could incorporate features that CMC students like. Thus, this process would help current students, the administration, and even future students.

CMC could be the first school to experiment with auctioning in the Claremont Consortium, but in time, it could be expanded out. Such a system would discourage the students who kiss up to get into classes and give the rest of us a chance at getting the courses we want.

We already know civilization prospers with commerce; we might just prosper with auctions.