So if you could, take a couple of seconds and leave a comment below with a couple of your favorite things to do at CMC and about town– must-eat restaurants, secret spots on campus, party traditions– all the things that you will remember fondly and lust for in a few years.

This can be as simple as seeing a CMS-Pomona basketball game in Ducey, or eating at Leks’s personal favorite  Red Hill BBQ on Foothill Blvd. We’ll put them together and send out a official list of 50 (or 100) things to add to your Leader’s To Do List.

Brad Johnston, struck by a sudden revelation, realized that this was the way that the Lord intended it to be. Johnston, who foolishly had believed that the plan was for his plane to arrive on time for him to catch his connection and start his three-day weekend skiing in the Rockies, became aware that destiny had other arrangements. He started the day with Delta’s flight plan and ended up with the Lord’s itinerary instead.

“I never realized or appreciate that everything DOES happen for a reason and the Lord works in mysterious ways,” Johnston remarked. “But once I figured it out, the signs were everywhere.” As Johnston walked off his plane, which arrived nearly two hours late because the first mate was unable to make it to the airport in time, he was initially disgusted and angry. He talked to the airline workers assigned to find him a hotel room for the night, silently cursing the pilot who had brought him here and delayed him from spending time with his family.

“I’m sure glad I held my tongue, because right after I left the counter, that’s when the magic happened,” Johnston beamed. As he walked towards the baggage claim, he decided to stop in the bathroom, an experience he vows never to forget. “I was minding my own business,” Johnston describes, “when I saw the Virgin Mary’s outline in the stray paper towels scattered around an overflowing trash bin.” Johnston added that the image also had a halo formed by a stray urinal cake and the sight completely turned around his night, maybe his life.

“I really think that God’s will brought me here and to Salt Lake City in particular,” Johnston noted. Salt Lake City, with its infamous restrictions on alcohol and famous lack of anything actually fun to do, is the city of the chosen people and offers very few tourist stops outside of Mormon temples and historical sites. “What else was I going to do other than check out this God stuff?” Johnston chuckled.

Unsure if he was going to be able to secure a flight the next day, Johnston wouldn’t be upset if he got to stick around a little longer. Johnston doesn’t even know if he’d take a seat if he’s offered by another passenger. “Before, all I could think of was being through all this travel stuff and arriving at our vacation house,” Johnston said. “But I realized that God made that pilot late for work so that I could see his divine plan. The journey really is the destination in this crazy life of ours, who cares if the journey takes an unnecessarily long time? Plus, the hotel room they put me up in is really nice for a airport hotel.”

Johnston hopes that his new found relationship with the Lord doesn’t end here. “It’d be really cool if God would stick around,” Johnston ponders. “The next time I’m in an insanely long line at the bank, watching senseless acts of violence and destruction on the news, or stuck in rush hour traffic, I’ll know that I’m just acting out part of God’s plan and play my role with a smile on my face.” To Johnston, traffic is no longer an inconvenience, but some kind of cosmic ballet eloquently orchestrated from up above.

In the end, Johnston can only smile and know that it was all worthwhile. “All these years, I had no idea what God was or what role he played in my life,” he somberly considers. “But now, I’m just thrilled to be a part of it all and I’m glad God is focusing on this kind of stuff and not remedying horrible injustices or stopping evil atrocities from occurring in other parts of the globe.” For one traveler, the Lord’s ways aren’t so mysterious anymore.

The first box shows the poor performance of the Google Voice transcription service (click on the image to see a larger version). The second box plays the actual voice mail he left me. As you can see, we checked the “X” in the lower right corner to indicate that the transcript was NOT useful.

Right now, Google Voice’s main functions are call-forwarding and voice mail. But how many phone lines do each of us have? One, our cell phones, and we can access voice mail with at most two buttons. Our primary use of phones is for texting and calling, so Google Voice for college students? Not terribly useful.

Possible flaws with college-age users aside, Google Voice may soon become infinitely cooler for all audiences as a result of Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5. As reported in TechCrunch by TechCrunch founder and 1992 CMC alum Michael Arrington,  the acquisition could mean that Google Voice would look something more like Skype or Google Talk, adding the all-important calling function.

#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 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.

Gross generalizations to be made after reading? Our alums are successful, content, enjoy lots of leisure time, and still know how to party. None of this is surprising, but still reassuring to hear. Here’s a few highlights from the most recent issues of the magazine:

One gentleman from the class of ‘51 seems to be making the most out of the financial crisis, writing that he’s planning a 6-month cruise aboard his friend’s 38-foot cruiser.

This note from the class of ‘52 brings big sappy pathetic tears to the eyes of any hopeless romantic:

“A campus courtship with a beautiful Pomona girl– Patricia Dunlap, who married me after my sophomore year, who drilled me on how to prepare for a test, and who later brought four beautiful children into our lives– made my life even better.

The wife of a ‘52 alum appears on TV ad ” to hawk Dr. Frank’s Miracle Pain Cure…if you see the ad, you will be impressed with her poise and acting ability. We might be seeing the rise of a star on the small screen.”

A ‘53 gentleman was referred to as “our secret government airplane driver from the Vietnam era,” had also recently completed the Iditarod, and his excuse for not climbing Mt. Everest is that his Depends kept freezing so he opted to do the Matterhorn instead.

Another member of ‘53 “enjoys the open spaces, the smell of horses, and maybe an adult beverage or two.”

[...apparently anyone who graduated in the 60s, 70s, and 80s is too boring or, more likely, too busy and apathetic to share interesting news of themselves...]

A group from the class of ‘96 went to Phoenix, Arizona for “a Spring Training weekend of baseball and beer:”

The following things may or may not have happened but probably sound familiar to readers of this column– Aaron annoyed a family of five staying at the same hotel with the crew, Nick successfully rode a mechanical bull, the Cubs had more errors than runs against the Angels, Terry got lost in Scottsdale, Jerry was very late, Kramer fell asleep somewhere besides his own bed, Ravi spoke spoke publicly of his knowledge of the Kama Sutra (including footnotes), Greger explained the evolutionary theory of how beer saved humanity, things were set on fire, and Cowley got really mad about something, yet nobody knew why, including him the next day. Make sure you also ask one of the participants about our proposal to add the following onto the CMC motto: “vicis est viaticus!”

Some ‘96 graduates have become more obscure than wild– one guy wrote wrote an encyclopedia chapter on the history of American black contributions in Maine. Another is working for the company that discovered the cutie/clementine, a cross between an orange and a mandarin.

Others seem to have resigned themselves to the utterly average. One alum has been “brokering a large plot of land in the San Diego area and putting the miles on his Ford Explorer and his Facebook friends know well that he continues to enjoy large amounts of tea.” Real estate+San Diego+Ford Explorer+Facebook+Tea=Boring?

The creme de la creme, however, comes from one of our recent grads: Harsha Kodali ‘08 says he’s having a mimosa on Mars. We lift our glasses to you, dear sir.

Note: Names mostly withheld because you can look them up yourselves in CMC magazine.

Full disclosure: I work for CMC magazine.

It all ended with a box of bisquick, a bottle of teriyaki and a can of corn.

I just read some of the many memories from CMC alumni and they are all too true! Certainly there have been mentions of ASCMC funds paying for parties and trips to LA and Vegas, but what happens on campus…..does it stay on campus?

After coming home from a very long debate tournament at 3AM and needing to be rested and ready to return at 6AM, I found my bed short sheeted with flour in it. I knew who did it. They lived next door. They were very cute and good natured, but I got pretty mad.

At 3:01AM I peaked in on them, their window open to the cool, fall evening air and noticed the hose next to my foot. I completely soaked the boys, their sheets and mattresses and it was game on. Once they dried out, they found the time to find 100’s of snails and put them in our refrigerator. Our respective houses were locked up pretty tight after that, but both sides waited for another opportunity.

One of my roommates was able to fit in the narrow window above their shower. I think she landed on her head, but we were in! We did everything we could: salt/sugar exchanges, dye in the shampoo, vaseline on the phone, cellophane wrap, rewiring the stereo….it was bad. We had about an hour to wreck havoc in their house.

The silence for days after was ominous. The boys did nothing to acknowledge the horrible antics. That was really the scariest part. Our bathroom window lock was broken so we nailed a 2×6 board over it to keep them out, but there was some space for light and moisture.

Then one of them came over, needing to use our bathroom. He claimed that his roommate was “having an episode” and he really needed to use ours. He agreed to be frisked, seemed to be without the tools or equipment to do any damage, so we let him in. When he left, he smirked. We knew they did something.

The sculpture made from bisquick, teriyaki sauce and a can of corn is AMAZINGLY realistic, especially in the bathroom setting. The imagination, creativity and overall hilariousness ended the prank feud. The whole thing is one of my best college memories. In fact, I am having breakfast with the Mastermind next week.

Carol Hartman graduated in 1986 with a degree in Government. She is founder and principal of The Hartman Group, a retained executive search firm.

Every year since 2005, a group of about a dozen Claremont McKenna students spend a week in San Jose where they have the opportunity to visit and network with various Silicon Valley executives at leading companies in the area. This year, students brushed shoulders with CEOs, partners, and other top management at nine companies in the Silicon Valley area. The trip, which costs ITAB over $1,800 per student, is provided free to participants.

ITAB, the Information Technology Advisory Board, is an organization of CMC-affiliated executives in the technology industry working to advance the role of technology at CMC. Since 2005, the organization has sponsored a week-long trip to Silicon Valley. The trip was started in 2005 by ITAB Chair Bart Evans ‘70.

Mr. Evans started the ITAB trip to help establish Silicon Valley as one of CMC’s “centers of gravity.” “The current centers of gravity for CMC alumni are LA, New York, DC, San Francisco,” Mr. Evans explained to the group of 15 students who attended this year’s trip. That is, CMC alumni are concentrated in a few industries and geographic areas. “The world is getting smaller—much of our country’s business is being exported, but Silicon Valley is one of the few places [in the US] where people are still creating and innovating.” Mr. Evans wants to add the technology industry, specifically Silicon Valley, to CMC’s radar.

During the trip, ITAB pays for all student expenses—a week-long stay at the Fairmont Hotel San Jose, transportation, food, and miscellaneous costs. ITAB also provides each student with calling cards (business cards), a leather-bound portfolio, and tote bags to carry the “shwag” we pick up throughout the week—an “I’m Feeling Lucky” t-shirt from Google, a chunk of Silicon rock from Applied Materials, a bottle-opener that plays the “Yahoo!” jingle, etc.

Throughout the week, students are shuttled to various companies in Silicon Valley from Apple Headquarters in Cupertino to Google Headquarters in Mountain View (plug for Google: free Naked Juices and food everywhere!). CMC Chief Technology Officer, Professor Cynthia Humes accompanies the students on the trip, as her office is responsible for planning the trip.

“It’s a lot of work to plan the trip, but we get better at it each year the program is in operation,” said Dr. Humes. “For example, we hope to visit a gaming company like Electronic Arts next year in addition to this year’s lineup of companies.”

ITAB is also actively recruiting new members to help defray the costs of the trip. “The current cost is about $1,800-$2,000 per student, with students paying for their own transportation to San Jose. We want to expand our resources to be able to pay for each student’s transportation as well,” said Humes.

The ITAB trip (and the similar Financial Economics Institute-sponsored Networking Trip) is an underutilized gem at CMC. Within days after the trip was over, students had landed interviews and even jobs at the companies visited. What one learns in an economics or computer science class makes for useful technical skills, but only opportunities like these prepare students for the real world.

My highlights from the 2008 ITAB trip:

-Presentation by Scott Mauvais ’90 at Microsoft. Mr. Mauvais gave us the down low on why Microsoft isn’t threatened by Apple and a few other “do not repeat this outside of this room” remarks. I will not repeat them. We also got to raid the company store.

-Julie Cox ’07 gave an informative presentation about what consultants, especially IT consultants, do on a day to day basis.

-Listening to John Volk ’70, Partner in the Venture Capital Group at PricewaterhouseCoopers recount his decision to go to law school (“This was nearly 40 years ago… we didn’t know what was what… Duke was the best [law school] I got into, so I jumped in a car and drove across the country.”)

-Ashwin Navin ’99, President and Co-Founder of BitTorrent delivering the keynote address at the Alumni Association-hosted ITAB Reception at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. In a chat with students after his speech, Ashwin recalled how cool he felt living in Auen Hall when it was the only dorm with high speed internet hookups in every room.

-Weston Presidio, a venture capital firm located on a pier in San Francisco. Jim McElwee ’74, a partner at Weston Presidio, talked about the hardships and benefits of venture capital firms.

-Todd Teresi ’94, Senior VP at Yahoo!, brought in legal and marketing experts from the company to talk to us about censorship in China, redefining Yahoo!’s brand, and other topics. I was pretty unconvinced that Yahoo! would grow or survive much longer after our visit until recently.

-Discussion with Bill MacGowan ’79, Executive Vice President, and Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystem. Mr. Schwartz is a legend in Silicon Valley and his blog is one of the most widely read in the industry.

-Apple presentation by Scott Gilfoil, head of campus recruiting. Mr. Gilfoil gave us an entertaining pitch to work for Apple (and buy Apple products).

-Joe Pon ’89 and George Davis ’80 at Applied Materials. Joe Pon gave us a tour of Applied’s labs, including chip manufacturing and research clean rooms where we had to take off our shoes and wear booties. Mr. Pon also discussed our country’s energy crisis and gave me a clearer view of solar panel technology and alternative energy sources.

-A visit to Infosys in Fremont, CA convinced me to apply for an internship in Bangalore, India this summer. I guess I’ll see how that one turns out…

-Jonathan Rosenberg ’83, Senior Vice President at Google, first fanned out 15 business cards, smiled, and said “E-mail me. I WILL help you.” Mr. Rosenberg also recounted some of his favorite CMC stories and advice for success in business.