The plan?  Deck the North Dorm courtyard out like the lair of a mad scientist.  With a host of science themed decorations and music provided by perennial favorite DJ, Mixed Reactions, the Mudd Goes Madd Party is slated for this Saturday evening.  But an event of this caliber doesn’t simply invent itself.  For that, much of the task fell to Harvey Mudd freshman Julius Elinson, who along with Jonathan Schwartz and a score of friends navigated the hassles of bureaucracy and fundraising to bring the plan to fruition.

“Mad scientists. It felt so right,” said Elinson, “It was surprising we hadn’t already done something like this.”

Mudders hard at work in preparation for the party. Photo credit: Daniel Crowley

The challenges of preparation can be hard for the uninitiated to appreciate.   Elinson began taking care of the laborious process required to hold an event this elaborate early in December.  There were several stages to the ordeal, beginning with budgeting.  Funds were needed to pay for alcohol, decorations, and music.  The social board had to grant approval, and then came the waiting.  As the 5C student governments gave funding to the event, Elinson had to be patient as his proposals were slowly accepted by all 5 colleges.  ”At Pitzer, I went to three different groups, there was some miscommunication, and I wound up having to go back a second or third time,” he explained, adding that all colleges contributed to the party funding, though some schools were more generous than others.

To help cover the cost of the party, Elinson and his co-conspirators also sold condoms in custom-designed wrappers at the Hoch-Shanahan Dining Hall at Harvey Mudd.  Available in a variety of bundles, the condoms have been wildly successful.  ”The general idea is t-shirts and shot glasses [at most parties], but we thought, ‘What’s cooler than a custom condom?’” said Elinson, who touted the merchandise as both humorous and useful.

The turnout could be fantastically high, with over 1100 students RSVPing as attending on the Facebook event and the party will occur regardless of weather, as the students have plans to cover the courtyard in the case of rain.  It’s comforting to know that regardless of what happens come Saturday night, the Mudders have made arrangements to keep us protected.

It is perhaps a credit to the 5C rumor mill that Gillis, or Girl Talk as the world knows him, is actually playing a Halloween gig at Pomona College.  I first heard the rumor two weeks ago, and it sounded like something that was far-fetched to say the least.  For such a high profile artist to be playing one of the biggest party nights of the year seemed unthinkable for the colleges.  Yet Girl Talk, one of the most sought-after electronic musicians in the country, will be here to preside over the spookiest night on the 5Cs.  [Note: Though Girl Talk has currently yet to list the performance on his own website or Myspace page, the performance has been confirmed through two school-wide emails, one from Director of Student Activities Jim Nauls and another from ASCMC, and representatives from Pomona College's student government, ASPC.] [Update: It's not official until it's Facebook official, check out the event here.]

I’m excited to see Girl Talk in person.  Gillis’s shows, if they can really be called concerts in the traditional sense, are supposed to be things of legend, with audience members dancing on stage and a continuous stream of music combining every sample under the sun.  While CMC hosted another such mash-up artist, E-603, last weekend, Girl Talk is the undisputed master of the trade.  Gillis is responsible for bringing this style of music to the fore.

Night Ripper, the 2006 release that made Gillis an underground sensation, is a remarkable work; bits and pieces of songs come hurling at the listener two and three at a time.  Rap verses enter over familiar rock songs.  To hear it for the first time is a tremendously entertaining romp, with everyone from Twisted Sister, to OutKast, and Rage Against the Machine entering the mix.  All this hovers atop beats primed for dancing, with track flowing into track for the entirety of the album.  The result?  A national following and dates playing both music festivals and clubs across the country.

As enjoyable as this first release was, three years later, numerous other artists have followed in his footsteps.  Perhaps this was to be expected.  Artists such as Super Mash Bros. and Wax Audio (and yes, E-603) jumped on the Girl Talk bandwagon.  Nevermind, of course, that even Gillis was borrowing ideas from a genre formed by predecessors including Danger Mouse, The Kleptones, and the Grammy-winning Jay-Z/Linkin Park collaboration on “Numb/Encore.”

A listen to E-603’s debut, the unfortunately titled Something for Everyone, continues in the vein of these hyperactive mash-ups, with little progress being made on his followup Torn Up.  The formula, which was originally exciting on Girl Talk’s debut, now feels stale and dull.  Step 1: choose rap verse by anyone.  Step 2: pair it with ironic instruments from well-known rock and pop albums.  Step 3: repeat for the entirety of the disc.  Some combinations inevitably work better than others, and to be fair there is a particularly inspired moment buried in the middle of the disc featuring Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles.” Yet every time the music hits a stride, building up to some Frankenstein-esque climax, the adhesion to the formula requires that new samples enter the mix, with a new ironic pairing of rap and pop/rock.  Lather.  Rinse.  Tour around the country.

Of course, this isn’t music that one is supposed to listen to intently.  Mashups are intended to go on the speakers and blast mindlessly; music for dancing and huge parties and people with short attention spans.  To be fair, it does this very well.  Also to be fair, the LA area is full of disc jockeys who were creating energetic dance music long before Gillis and his contemporaries were working on their craft.

While the dance atmosphere was certainly present in Mckenna Auditorium last Saturday, despite a blown speaker and a technical malfunction, the persona of the so-called performer was all but absent.  With a local, no-name DJ opening up the set, virtually no identifiable features of E-603’s performance differentiated him from those on stage before him.  There were samples and clips of famous songs and nothing that represented any sort of artistic development of music.  If his methodology is congruent with other mashup artists in the field, then the samples were all copied and pasted prior to the moment he entered Mckenna, each activated by the mind-blowingly precise task of clicking a mouse.

This whole thing reeks of an unsustainable fad.  Even Girl Talk himself changed virtually nothing of the formula on the 2008 release Feed the Animals.  Perhaps this is understandable.  Artists like Girl Talk and E-603 are merely glorified DJs, and now that the idea of cramming samples together has become so mainstream, anyone willing to take the time to cut and paste other people’s music together can come up with something at least in the ball park of Night Ripper.  The music provided by amateurs who don’t carry the national name recognition (and higher costs of bringing to a place like CMC) has already become identical to the stars they emulate.

It’s heartening that the 5Cs are still bringing some original artists to play on campus.  The upcoming performance by the Cool Kids at the 5C music festival will showcase original music and carry the high energy environment of a true live performance.  Still, the next time that ASCMC or ASPC want to host a campus-wide party, I would strongly suggest they take a page from the highly successful Mudd Suds party: an original concept combined with with great music.  And great music sometimes means professional DJ services as opposed to glorified amateurs.

President Gann, Dean Hess, Esteemed Trustees and Faculty Members and Staff, Fellow Students – It’s an honor and a great pleasure to speak to you this morning.  The idea of Convocation is to call us together, to mark the end of summer recess and the beginning of the school year.  My mother, who taught elementary school for more than four decades, used to say that her three favorite things about being a teacher were June, July, and August.  But that was also her way of saying that teachers and students aren’t so different, after all.  For there are few occasions so invigorating to old teachers as the beginning of the school year, when we’re reminded not only of our own beginnings as unimaginably young freshmen, but of our continual re-beginnings in those studies which always outrun us, yet whose pursuit seldom fails to delight us.  That’s why I hailed my fellow students.  Doctors are different from  patients, lawyers have little in common with their clients, but teachers, by which I mean good ones, always remain students, though admittedly with some bottle age.  Not for nothing did Chaucer say of his Scholar, “Gladly did he learn, and gladly teach.”

From the beginning, Claremont McKenna College directed young and old scholars alike to the meeting ground of public affairs and liberal arts.  In its short history, the College has employed different terms to describe this special focus.  In the early days it extolled “political economy” as a wide-ranging study that would prepare students for a world shaken and shaped by crisis – the Great Depression, World War II, the nascent Cold War.  Nowadays we are prone to speak of our special niche, at least in shorthand terms, as involving the study of leadership or at least the cultivation of would-be leaders in economics, politics, and other arts and sciences.  We describe our students – we describe YOU – as “leaders in the making,” which by most indices of our graduates’ achievements would seem to be a safe prediction.

Yet leadership is in some respects an elusive, even morally ambiguous quality.  There are good leaders and bad leaders, to be sure, but I want to make a slightly different point.  You cannot have leaders without followers, and especially in a democratic country this inescapable inequality galls.  The desire to be a leader, even for the noblest purposes, is a desire to have followers.  The wish to have a leader (often heard in modern politics) is a wish to be yourself a follower.  Of course, if everyone could be a leader simultaneously, and no one ever a follower, that would solve the problem, but such magic is impossible even in America, where, as Allan Bloom once remarked, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals would likely have been titled, The Categorical Imperative – and Ten Ways to Make It Work for You! Another way out of the dilemma, taking turns at being leader, doesn’t sound much like leadership.  Maybe at Pitzer….

Leaders and followers are not new phenomena, to be sure.  The ancient Greeks spoke of the leader (hegemon) and the Romans had a word for it, too (dux).  But these terms were often connected to military command; and politically, they pointed to accounts of civic life that were highly illiberal, at least insofar as they conceived of politics itself as a form of ruling.  This understanding persists, at least in a sedimentary way, in our terms monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, the rule of one, few, and many.  But leadership of this sort, pointing to the asserted right to rule over others often without their consent, is not what CMCers or our fellow citizens have in mind when they admire leadership.  But it does help explain the little-known fact that the founders of the American republic were not keen on leadership.  We think of them, generally speaking, as great leaders, but they didn’t usually call themselves that, and not merely out of modesty.  There was something about leadership they distrusted.

To take an example:  In The Federalist, the famous defense of the Constitution beloved of every student in Gov 20, the terms “leader” and “leaders” are used 14 times, all but two pejoratively.  A dozen times the book criticizes “factious leaders,” “favorite leaders,” “artful leaders,” and so forth for their demagogic excesses.  In short, the word is almost a synonym for dangerous knaves who rouse the people’s passions in order to lead them to vicious and illegal acts, which the people themselves would later regret.  The exceptions in The Federalist prove the rule:  the authors refer twice to the Patriot leaders of the Revolution.  That is, leaders can be respectable when operating in the kind of crisis in which tyranny can be avoided only by throwing off the existing law, using military force to defeat the oppressor’s might, and substituting new laws and constitutions.  In such an emergency, the people may and must be directly led in a quasi-military way, but with the goal of sheathing the sword and restoring civilian, legal rule as fast as prudently possible.

To the potentially boundless sway of leaders, and the intoxicated and degraded obedience of followers, the founders preferred the equality of fellow citizens under the sober rule of law, crowned by the kind of statesmanship that is the servant of good laws and constitutional order.  They admired George Washington precisely because he never turned into a leader.   He became a founder and an office-holder who gladly surrendered his offices and who sedulously labored to enhance the people’s capacity to govern themselves – the father, not the Fuehrer, of his country.  They sought a government that would represent the people, not lead them, because they feared leadership’s unrepublican tendencies.

Today, by contrast, we tend to regard leadership ability as a prime qualification for high and even low office.  What happened?  With the rise by the late 19^th century of large democracies with tens of millions of citizens, and the need for mass political parties to organize these millions, the stage was set for the rehabilitation of leadership.  The people needed parties, more to engineer than refine their will, and the parties needed leaders.  This perilous logic led to two disastrous experiments in leadership theory:  the Leninist version, in which the Central Committee of the Communist Party became the unelected vanguard of the proletariat,  and the Committee’s head the effective dictator; and the Fascist version, in which il Duce or  (they liked to be called Leader!) summed up and commanded the nation, the Volk, as its incarnation.  The United States was saved from these horrors by its republican institutions and mores, but also by the democratic version of leadership articulated by its leading theorist and practitioner, Woodrow Wilson.

As a Progressive, Wilson embraced history as the story of man’s gradual ascent towards greater rationality and freedom.  To him, leadership was mostly the story of incremental adjustments between the present and the future; the leader helped negotiate the transitions.  Occasionally, however, the leader had to appear not in the harness of compromise but as the leader of a cause (like, say, Barack Obama today).  The leader saw further into the future than the people could, and had to persuade them not only that change was possible but that he knew which changes were ripe.  Wilson insisted, however, that such a leader be only slightly ahead of his time.  His function was not to impose an untimely theory on an unready people, as Robespierre had tried to do, but to help the people see the future before their very eyes, as it were.  The Wilsonian leader had therefore to attend very carefully to the people’s incipient desires or will, to sympathize with them in order to sum up the demands the people themselves were yet unconscious of.  He had to offer them a vision of the near future, to inspire them to take the next step in the nation’s progress.

As I say, Wilson’s account of leadership helped to shape our own views.  Nowadays, we shy away from politicians like poor George H. W. Bush, who confessed he had a problem with “the vision thing.”  But it’s unclear whether our enthusiasm for visionary leaders has led to better public policy and sounder statesmanship. Competing visions of the future are so many idols of the imagination, in effect, competing promises of a better future, and a political system based more and more on such projections will find its appetites increasingly out of line with reality, not to mention dignity.  Need I mention that the U.S. has had 43 deficits in the past 48 years?

By keeping the leader close to his followers, Wilson hoped to tame the demagogic potential in leadership, but at the expense of some of the grandeur that made it attractive in the first place.  If the leader must commune with the people in order to determine where to lead them, who is leading whom, exactly?  Modern leadership – especially as the art of polling has become ubiquitous – often consists in telling voters, and perhaps even students, what they want to hear, reducing this supposedly charismatic gift to a scramble merely to stay in front, to be in the lead.  How then to tell “leaders in the making” from “leaders on the make”?  Happily, in the best cases, the desire to be “a leader” is merely the unlovely contemporary idiom for a healthy love of honor and natural attraction to excellence.  CMC can help you put these strivings into a larger, longer, and higher perspective.  For there is, or at least should be, no greater balm for such noble desires than the serious study of the liberal arts and of the excellent men and women, across the ages, who nailed their lives to the cross of thought or of action.

So hi, hello there — it’s nice to meet you. We’re the Forum. Which is odd to say, sure, since it’s a website, not even a newspaper, let alone a person. Nonetheless, it’s a pleasure to meet you, since, well, we’re here to do pretty much whatever you want:

Deliver the news you need? Check.
Give you the hipster cred irony you want? Check.
Offer the political banter you should want? Check.
Do your laundry? Sorry, no.

Ok we’re here for some things. Mostly, we try to be an useful tool for life at CMC — a way for you to answer “what’s going on.” We’ll let you know about upcoming events, alert you to pressing issues, and even clue you into what’s happening outside the Claremont bubble.

This all may sound cool and impressive — probably not — so just in case, we should clarify one thing: all this stuff we say we do, you actually do. The Forum is built, produced, and developed by CMC students, and most importantly, its content — from the links and tips to the posts and comments — is completely user-driven. So get involved: send us something or comment on something else. When you stop participating, the site stops functioning, and Cara Daley gets very sad. Don’t let that happen.

By the way, we’re a bit proactive in that discussion too. We will be teaming up with the Ath to host two events this semester — Debate Night and Idea Night. At the first, students will debate a campus issue, and at the second, you’ll hear about interesting work happening on campus. Consider the events an opportunity to say what you have been saying online in the real world. Again, you’ll be deciding on the topics and speakers, so if you’re interested, stayed tuned.

Other than that, we have a few options for addicts — those of you who can’t get enough. Follow us on Twitter.  Buy and sell stuff with Yard Sale.  Check out our photostream.  Read up on CMC students studying abroad. Or do something crazy: go outside and hang out with actual people.

Yours always and forever,
Abhi and Emily

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.

But here’s the math just in case…

On the meal plan, you can choose from the 16, 12, or 8 meals per week options. The prices have risen ~4-5% per year in recent years, and in 2009-2010 the pricing schedule is as follows:

16 meal plan = $6055
12 meal plan = $5560
8 meal plan = $5185

Each plan comes with a little “flex money” that you can use at the school store on candy, snacks, soda, toothpaste, etc.  Let’s count that as cash back because many students use it on stuff they would have otherwise spent cash on.

So we’ll subtract flex money:

16 = $6055 – 160 = 5895
12 = $5560 – 120 = 5440
8 = $5185 – 80 = 5105

Based on these amounts and a 16 week semester, if you use all your meals (that’s a big “if”), each meal would cost:

16 meal plan = $5895 / 16 meals / 32 weeks = $11.51 per meal
12 meal plan = $5440 / 12 meals / 32 weeks = $14.17 per meal
8 meal plan = $5105 / 8 meals / 32 weeks = $19.94 per meal

Keep in mind that nobody actually uses 16 meals a week except Sean Wasserman, the CMS Water Polo starting goalie, because he is “The Body.” In fact, rumor has it that the dining hall discovered that almost nobody uses all 16 meals (those under that plan use 14 on average), which is why the price difference between the 16 and 12 plans is so low.

Alternatively, there’s the option to pay per meal as an outsider every time you go to the dining hall.  Those prices are:

Breakfast: $7.50
Lunch: $10.50
Dinner: $13.50

Bottom Line: It’s cheaper to just pay in cash (a la carte) every time you go to the dining halls than to get the 8 meal plan, 12 meal plan, or in some cases, any meal plan.

Forbes, who worked with the Center for College Affordability and Productivity to compile the rankings,  explains the methodology:

To answer these questions, the staff at CCAP gathered data from a variety of sources. They based 25% of the rankings on 4 million student evaluations of courses and instructors, as recorded on the Web site RateMyProfessors.com. Another 25% is based on post-graduate success, equally determined by enrollment-adjusted entries in Who’s Who in America, and by a new metric, the average salaries of graduates reported by Payscale.com. An additional 20% is based on the estimated average student debt after four years. One-sixth of the rankings are based on four-year college graduation rates–half of that is the actual graduation rate, the other half the gap between the average rate and a predicted rate based on characteristics of the school. The last component is based on the number of students or faculty, adjusted for enrollment, who have won nationally competitive awards like Rhodes Scholarships or Nobel Prizes.

It’s easy to see how the emphasis on faculty prestige could have affected our ranking– not that CMC professors aren’t notable and award-winning, but because the school places more emphasis on a professor’s classroom responsibilities than their research pursuits.

Even more interesting is that Forbes cites Who’s Who in America as an influencing factor. Wasn’t it Forbes that published Tucker Carlson’s tongue-lashing on Who’s Who? Of course, it’s ridiculous to say that because Forbes published Carlson’s piece, they have to follow his decrees.  But I have to concur with Carlson — Who’s Who is kind of a joke.  And therefore probably shouldn’t be a factor in college rankings.

I was most surprised, though, by the school winning the top spot. Yes, West Point, otherwise known as the US Military Academy, came in at #1. Forbes offered a snapshot of life there: “The best college in America has an 11:30 p.m. curfew. It doesn’t allow alcohol in the dorms, which must be kept meticulously clean. Students have to keep their hair neat, their shoes shined, their clothes crisply pressed…” Now no question that West Point is a top notch and important institution, but that does not sound to me like my #1 college. And so the real takeaway from the Forbes rating is this: rankings are not always the best indicator of where one should apply to college.

Get smart. Read the New York Times or some other reputable news source daily. Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, whatever… learn to be an informed human being.  Professors will expect this from you, and general campus conversation will demand it.  Bonus points for Real Clear Politics, which pulls the best editorial and opinion content (from both sides) daily. Or even better, start using Google Reader.

Big fish in a little sea. So you were a hotshot at your hometown high school.  If you started a company, were student body president, or directed a Broadway play at the age of 6– that is awesome and you clearly have your stuff together, but it can easily rub your new peers the wrong way.  Be proud of your accomplishments, but leave them behind in Akron/Modesto/Westchester. We were all pretty impressive during high school, otherwise we wouldn’t be at CMC. Use those experiences; don’t talk about them. You’ll be more productive and probably even have more friends.

Love your WOA trip. I met my best friend and she met her boyfriend on our trip to Yosemite. If you attend a WOA trip (some don’t), this an automatic set of friends for you doing your first few weeks.  You’re not bound to this group of people (like Pomona students are to their Sponsor Groups), but it’s a nice safety net. While you’re hiking, canoeing, or playing beirut (with water, of course), just remember that first impressions make all the difference.

Free T-shirt Week. Otherwise known as Orientation Week and Dry Week.  The aforementioned best friend and I made it our goal to collect as many free t-shirts as possible during this week.  With all the budget cuts at CMC, the swag-factor may be slightly reduced at these events, but get ready to expand your t-shirt collection by at least 25 percent. To round out the week, there’s 6:01– the party to celebrate the precise end of Dry Week.  It really is as glorious as everyone says it is.

Overachievers anonymous. There’s a club fair in early September where all the clubs and organizations will try to convince you to join their cause.  The greatest part is not how many clubs there are –but the opportunity for leadership positions. A sophomore can be the Editor-in-Chief of a publication. A freshman can be a delegate to a national environmental conference. Get involved and stay committed, your resume will thank you.

Chill out with the Target runs. You really don’t need that much stuff at school. Every superstore — and your mother — will be trying to get you to buy dorm room stuff that you don’t need.  Think about it this way when you’re standing in line with two shopping carts full of stuff: the hottest weeks of the year are during move-in and move-out.  Do you really need that striped area rug that matches your bedspread?

What you guys should most look forward to is that you won’t be treated like the scum-of-the-earth freshmen that you are.  When I started at CMC, I was terrified to venture out to the Senior Apartments during my first week, but the upperclassmen were overwhelmingly friendly and welcoming.  It is our duty to spread goodwill and pay it forward to you guys. Good luck!

#16 Best Campus Food (+1)
#7 Best Career Services (-5)
#11 Dorms Like Palaces (no change)
#3 Happiest Students (+1)
#15 Lots of Race/Class Interaction (+3)
#11 Most Popular Study Abroad Program (not ranked last year)
#10 Most Politically Active Students (+1)
#13 Professors Get High Marks (not ranked last year)
#10 Most Accessible Professors (+1)
#3 School Runs Like Butter (+2)
#13 Great Financial Aid (-3)
#1 Easiest Campus to Get Around (not ranked last year)
#3 Best Quality of Life (+2)

And lastly, the ranking that CMC Public Affairs left off in their annual self-congratulatory mass e-mail…
Lots of Beer #5 (+8)

You can bet your Icehouse keg that President Gann is getting angry phone calls from alumni and parents about that one.  It’s not surprising that Public Affairs left it out in the e-mail, but it is strange that the e-mail is from “Public Affairs Office,” as if someone (Richard Rodner?) doesn’t want to stand behind it.

Anyway, expect to see some backlash against ASCMC in the form of increased security at parties, RA narc-ing, and difficulty when registering kegs.  In addition, Dean of Students will get some heat, and Trustee committee meetings will dwell on the issue for far too long.  Last year I wrote a post on the topic of beer at CMC, but it goes without saying that this ranking is based on widely-held misconceptions about CMC parties.  (On a side note, Preston Waserman ‘11 thinks we can do better: “I really think with the right attitude we can get to top three,” Waserman said in his most recent Twitter.)

As for the rankings as a whole, they seem to indicate that not only did we drink more, but we admitted three or four more minorities and international students, got rejected from lots of jobs, fired a housing coordinator, and had slightly better weather.  Not a bad year.

Overall, I would say that Princeton Review does a good job of ranking the Claremont Colleges within the Claremont Colleges.  Yes, CMCers might drink more than Pitzer and the other 5Cs, but we’re pretty comparable to Pomona and pale in comparison to most state schools.  And yes, Pitzer has lot more “Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians” who happen to smoke pot than the other 5Cs.  But I wouldn’t say Harvey Mudd is truly among the least beautiful campuses in the country or that CMC’s beer consumption per capita is anywhere close to that of some Ivy League schools.

Here’s how the other 5Cs fared:

Scripps:
#4 Dorms Like Palaces
#4 Most Beautiful Campus
#19 Easiest Campus to Get Around

Pomona:
#14 Dorms Like Palaces
#7 School Runs Like Butter
#5 Great Financial Aid
#13 Least Religious Students
#1 Best Classroom Experience
#19 Best Quality of Life

Pitzer:
#10 Most Popular Study Abroad Program
#12 Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians
#19 Gay Community Accepted
#7 Lots of Race/Class Interaction
#14 Reefer Madness
#11 Least Religious Students
#11 Most Liberal Students

Harvey Mudd:
#7 Least Beautiful Campus
#17 Intercollegiate Sports Unpopular or Nonexistent
#15 Professors Get High Marks
#12 Most Accessible Professors
#18 Students Study the Most

But before I continue with my allegations, let me put forth a few examples that illustrate my opinion. The following are actual experiences from my own visits to The Hub:

Exhibit A:
11:30pm on a Friday night:

Drunk Girl: Hey, can I get some chicken fingers?
Shady Hub Employee: Nah, how about one of these sandwiches by the register?
Drunk Girl: Mmm. I really want chicken fingers.
Shady Hub Employee: We’re all out. Have a sandwich.
Drunk Girl: Um…looks at kid walking away with chicken fingers … I guess that’s ok.
Shady Hub Employee: Takes girls card, that will be 16.05.
Drunk Girl: …Hmmm… trying to compute that doesn’t sound right…
Shady Hub Employee: Next!
___________

Exhibit B:
8:25pm on a Wednesday evening:

Me: Hi, I’d like to get a meal replacement.
Shady Hub Employee: Sorry, that ended at 8:30.
Me: Well, it’s 8:25, so this is perfect.
Shady Hub Employee: No, it’s not.
Me: Um… the clock on the cash register and the one above your head say 8:26… and my phone says 8:26.
Shady Hub Employee: Uh… The clocks are fast. We’re not doing no more replacements. walks into back room
Me: thinks about “the clocks are fast” …Um …ok…
___________

Exhibit C:
Some weeknight, during listed Hub hours.

The Hub gate is closed but the lights are on. The Hub Employees are playing pool. They say they will open up again in about fifteen minutes.
___________

Now I’d like to juxtapose the Hub’s business practices with those of The Coop and The Mudd Hole. Sure, I don’t think anyone would say the workers at The Coop are exactly zealous in their work ethic — in fact, I have to admit I’m pretty sure I’ve seen cashiers stoned to the point of being incapable of speech. But still, the workers at The Coop have never been rude to me. They’ve never blatantly lied to me. So maybe they are occasionally debilitatingly high, no biggie. Some would say that makes them a bit more empathetic to their often inebriated customers.

I like the idea of the Hub being student run but I don’t think it’s a necessity. The Mudd Hole is obviously not run by students yet I’ve never been anything less than delighted with my sandwiches there. The guy who works at the cashier, although protective of his pool table, at least never bullies me.

It’s too bad I can’t say the same at our own campus eatery. I appreciate CMC having its own place to eat and I do like the meal replacement (whether or not a meal swipe is really worth a hot dog and a coke is another discussion) but it frustrates me that The Hub doesn’t make the extra effort to improve customer service.

The ability to grab a burger at 12:30pm, only feet from North Quad, is in principle, incredible, but in practice, unnecessarily sleazy. Must our campus grill resemble a dilapidated church basement? Must its employees act as if they’re slinging mini-donuts behind the “Barf-a-Whirl?”

I’d like to hear what others feel about our local restaurant. Have others had similar experiences?