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

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

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

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

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

Beyond satisfying the typical requirements of an elite liberal arts college, CMC deserves a president who thoroughly appreciates and is committed to what makes it special: its unique brand of liberal arts education and the intimate, nurturing atmosphere that it affords.  Crucially, this requires professors and administrators to interact with students at more than a formal level. Yet I don’t know anyone who thinks Pam Gann knows their name, let alone them as a person. Maybe it’s different for the ASCMC crowd or the hyperactive on campus, but it seems that us mere mortals don’t register on her radar.

As a part of being on the football team, I’ve been forced able to go to the IRanWithGann event the past three years at CMC.[i] Besides getting an awesome selection of free t-shirts, this has also illuminated Gann’s relationship with the student body. First of all, this is one of the few times each year that I see her walking around on campus—let alone talk to students. More damningly, at the 5K, her conversations with students always seem to be of the “What’s your name/major?” variety. You’d think at some point she’d run into a student whose name she already knew or whose major she actually remembered. It’s hard to escape the feeling that she’s there to check a box (“See Board of Trustees! I told you I care about the student body!”) rather than have a genuine interaction with students.  Perhaps, though, this is just me being biased.

I suppose that could be forgiven. Over the past four years, my love for CMC has outgrown my demands for what it does for me. But more disappointing, I don’t see that same love of CMC, that wholehearted embrace of what makes the school special, in Pam Gann.  It may sound corny, but when she talks about the school, I don’t see a twinkle in her eye. Gann speaks highly about CMC, but her comments often feel like they would fit any elite liberal arts college. She praises our small classes sizes, our great professors, our selectivity, but always seems to miss the part about things that make CMC special.

In her first convocation, Pam talked about the how CMC fits into the broader higher education landscape and the importance of branding in “outrunning” the competition. This would have been a perfect place to talk about CMC’s unique attributes. Glaringly, though, she doesn’t even allude to the special character of the school. The implication is that we’re a liberal arts school like any other, struggling to (1) to be within the group of “brand name” colleges and universities; and (2) to compete effectively within this “brand name” group for students, faculty, and resources. The same speech would have worked at Amherst, Williams, or even Pomona.

At this point in the conversation, a voice of reason will often say “Yeah, but at least she’s raised a lot of money.” That is true. But money is not raised in a vacuum, and one person is not responsible for all of an institution’s fundraising success. Furthermore, our alumni population is getting older. It seems reasonable to think that older alumni 1) have more money since they’ve been able to work more years and 2) are more likely to donate money because, to put the matter bluntly, they want to have an impact on something they care about before they die. The steady increase in annual donations in the chart below seems to evidence this story. There is more volatility after Pam becomes president, but there isn’t a marked increase in donations over the trend line.

At a personal level, I don’t have any particular problem with President Gann. She hasn’t done anything outrageous or grossly failed in her duties as president. But CMC is much more than a typical liberal arts college and deserves much more than a typical president. At a dinner honoring Gann for her ten years of service to the College this past December, former CMC president Jack Stark thanked her for what she didn’t do: change the character of the school. But I think CMC deserves better. CMC deserves a president that doesn’t make its students question whether the president cares about them. CMC deserves a President that is firmly committed to keeping CMC a special place.

Pam Gann, simply put, fails those standards. For that dinner honoring Gann, the administration tried to film a series of students being asked questions about Pam Gann’s life and what they thought about her. According to Dean Huang, they had to scrap the project, however, because apparently not enough students said nice things. To me, that’s pretty damning. Out of a school of 1200+ students, we couldn’t cobble together enough pro-Gann students to make a two-minute video. Perhaps, I’m going a bit overboard, though, and you feel that Pam Gann actually does a decent job as president. But shouldn’t CMC, as our government department would say, strive for excellence?

Caption: This graph shows the total amount of alumni giving that went into the operating budget in a given year. It notably excludes large donations that go to things like a new buildings or a new Robert A. Day Master of Finance program. Those large gifts often take multiple years to negotiate and structure and thus are affected differently by factors like the economy, alumni aging, or a new president. The purpose of this graph is not to prove that President Gann fails as a fundraiser. Rather I am merely trying to show that under this basic fundraising metric she does not surpass the trend. Following her inauguration in late 1990s, support from alumni giving has mostly kept with its rising trajectory set by earlier presidents. Thus, deciding whether President Gann is doing an exceptional job fundraising depends on the degree to which she impacted recent large donations. But to answer that, we’d need to look inside Robert Day’s head, which I, unfortunately, do not have the ability to do.

Billed by both the Ath and her own website as “the last protege of Ansel Adams,” Cook is clearly a talented photographer, and her work reflects her studies with Adams. For example, like Adams she shoots in black and white and does some landscape work. Beyond those base similarities, her work echoes the clean style, high contrast, and simple subject matter of Adams. Even if I didn’t think her art was notable — lots of important museums do; her works are part of the permanent collections at the Met, MoMA, and the Smithsonian, to name a few. Her art is not in question here, but rather her (in)ability to reveal something about herself and her work.

For her talk, Cook showed a number of her portraits (most of which, if not all, were readily available on her website) and said a few words on each photograph, sometimes only mentioning the subject’s name and occupation. That was it. Though her commentary revealed some clues as to her methods, working style, and occasionally short anecdotes about her notable subjects, she gave almost nothing of herself to the audience.

Katherine Graham, Jorge Louis Borges, Francis Crick, Merce Cunningham, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jamaica Kincaid, Lillian Hellman, Sidney Janis, Philip Johnson and David Whitney, Francois Mitterrand, Dorothy Norman, Mirium Rothschild, Steven Spielberg, Dorothea Strauss, Maya Lin and Daniel Wolf — do those names mean anything to you? I only knew about 7 out of 17 of those names and I consider myself to be at least moderately culturally literate. How about a little context? A good speaker neither overestimates nor underestimates the audience’s intelligence (or in this case, cultural literacy). For an address to a school with limited theater opportunities, no arts programs, almost complete neglect for creative talents (save Ath events like this one), Cook might have tailored her comments to a more ignorant, but curious crowd.

Her background as a fine art photographer was also unclear. To have had the opportunity to photograph really important, influential individuals, such as the publisher of the Washington Post, a founding member of the Beat movement, the former president of France, and a three-time Academy Award winning director, one must ask– how? why? Cook never addressed how she was able to gain access to these individuals. For example, Cook photographed Michelle and Barack Obama in 1996 as part of her book featuring images of couples– how did the young politician and his wife come across her radar?

These were the only facts I could gather about her:  she had a wealthy background as her parents collected art and owned a De Kooning, she speaks excellent French, she’s well-traveled, and most importantly, she has friends in high places.  Now clearly not all speakers come to the Ath to talk about themselves, but at least they speak at length about their work, their research, their industry, or something, no?

Though Cook admitted that she chose an arbitrary title for her talk (“What is a portrait?”), her insight on what makes a good photograph was pretty unoriginal. “I felt like I revealed something of who he was,”  she said of photograph of a bookstore owner Jacob Zeiltin.  “He thought the portrait looked more like him than he did.”

Maybe I’m a jaded art history major, or maybe, Cook doesn’t have a whole lot to say and should stick to what she does best — taking beautiful portraits.

Alumni tell me CMC has prepared me well for the journey, but have I really learned much since the 5th grade?  I have some plans, but I’ve never been more unsure of where I’ll be in five years.

Despite my personal confusion, I think I have a pretty good idea of where Claremont McKenna will be in five years. There are a lot of good “Decade in Review” articles and posts around the web lately, but I say those are written by people like Kevin Burke who can’t see into the future. Here’s what’s going to happen at CMC in the next decade.

2010:

• CMC amends the science GE requirements to allow computer science courses as an alternative option.
• The music video “That’s So North Quad” drops and takes the school by storm (just wait).
• I graduate.

2011:

• The Kravis Center opens.
• In his final act of bravery before graduation, the ASCMC Social Activities Chair will throw the largest CMC party ever in the middle of North Quad. There will be strippers, midgets, fifths, handcuffs, clowns on stilts, clowns on goats, Kanye West, and a 40-foot crane hanging a roasting pig over a spit. Epic. The next morning, a townie tied to a chair, gagged and missing his two front teeth, will wake up in the Appleby laundry room. Nobody will know how he got there. A Claremont McKenna water polo player will find the missing teeth days later at the bottom of the CMS pool. The townie will sue CMC for a few milli. In response and retaliation, the administration will cancel all ASCMC parties for the following three weeks.

2012:

• CMC announces a plan to tear down Ducey Gym and build a new gym in the “pit” across Claremont Boulevard. They have been doing this annually for years, but this time they “mean it.”

2013:

• The company that owns the College Park Apartments tries to found the sixth “Claremont” college, Upland College. The Consortium decides not to admit the school, so the company founds their own consortium — The Upland Colleges.  Holla.  The Upland Colleges will become renowned for their strict alcohol policies, degree in ergonomics, and loose women.

2014:

• An ambitious CMCer will hear about this thing called Claremont Confessions. “Sounds cool,” he says, so he brings it back. This time the site implements an anonymous video and hidden camera feature. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
• Chipotle adds a store to the Claremont village. In-N-Out Burger takes over for Bon Appetit at the Hub.

2015:

• A few weeks ago I said to President Gann, “Tear down whatever buildings you want and rebuild them, but don’t try to tear down North Quad.”  She laughed.  ”That’s what everyone tells me!” she said.  In 2015, she draws up plans to tear down North Quad as part of what she dubs “Ganny-Gann’s Masta Plan.”

2016:

• Facebook groups remain a vehicle to achieving powerful institutional change.  President Gann mysteriously retires following the creation of the Facebook group, “WE LOVE YOU NORTH QUAD – DON’T LEAVE CMC!” The Board of Trustees hires an Economics Professor (finally!), Brock Blomberg, to take her place.  The plans to tear down North Quad are dropped.
• ASCMC gets audited by the Internal Revenue Service. Uh oh. As the ASCMC CFO shreds files associated with line items for “Tropical Lei Expense,” “Cigars for Meetings,” and “Income from Extraordinary Sources,” a CMC alumnus who was appointed head of the IRS in 2015 calls off the audit.

2017:

• Newly appointed Athenaeum Director Ward Elliot reinstates the Madrigals tradition as his first order of business. The wassail will flow once again.

2018:

• Moose Halpern (CMC ‘10), running on a campaign of “What up, chief?” is elected the youngest US Senator in California history.
• Scripps goes coed and quickly becomes the most competitive 5C school to get into. Mudders will cry. The Motley will stop serving “feminista” coffee.

2019:

• Henry Kravis bequeaths a large amount of cash money to CMC under the condition that we buy, restructure, and annex Pitzer with it, renaming the school “Claremont McKravis College” (see image).
• CMC will have the largest liberal arts college endowment in the world.

________________

I can’t predict what will happen beyond 2019 — CMC might open a water park in Montclair, the senior class might take over the Children’s School playground, the consortium might kick out Pomona College — only time will tell.  Who knows what’s coming?

As usual, campus security was riding around in golf carts, sprinklers were watering the grass and sidewalks, and sketchy black cats were scurrying through the bushes by the Athenaeum and Heggblade. The weather was 65 degrees and sunny by day and as cold as 40 degrees at night. And it was really, really quiet.

On Saturday around 5 PM, a few stranded East Coasters at the senior apartments grilled chicken and steaks, played Beirut, and blasted really loud music. Nobody complained.

As our freedoms reached the peak levels of our college years and we started making some poor choices, we thought, what if more people were here? What if instead of a couple dozen students who have no choice but to be here, 1200 CMCers stayed on campus for a day or two before going home?

Unfortunately, CMC closes all residence halls at 8 PM on the Friday at the end of finals week. My guess is it would be expensive to keep the dorms open an extra day — energy costs, liability insurance, cleanup costs, etc. would all add up. I think it’s worth it. Dorms should stay open until Sunday at 8 PM, not Friday at 8 PM.  And here’s what we could do with the extra time:

An All-Campus Game of Capture the Flag

Each dorm puts their flag in their main lounge (or dunk hoops) and receives a target.  If you capture a dorm’s flag, they are out of the game and your dorm gets that dorm’s target.  Every student is equipped with either laser tag guns, paintball guns, nerf guns, or water guns.  Obviously, each potential weapon has its trade-offs and would need to be laboriously debated at the Athenaeum before any decision is made.  There might be problems with 1,000+ students running around campus with fake automatic weapons, but let’s ignore that for now. Other possibility: North Quad vs South Quad.  Blowout After-party: Senior Apartments.

A Community Service Project/Day

I don’t really know what this would entail, but I’m sure we could figure it out.  Some companies have a policy that requires employees to take a day off from work to do community service.  Some companies do it together and all on one day — that’s the idea here, but with CMCers instead of a company. Instead of the townies coming to us, we’ll go to them for once. Blowout after-party: Scripps Pool.

Color Wars

If you went to camp, you know what this is. If you didn’t, read here. Dean Deb Wood will not be happy about this one; I doubt she went to camp. Blowout after-party: Green Beach.

Ski Beach Day

This year, the weather was perfect on the Saturday in question. It was 80 degrees and sunny mid-day. We would take buses up to Mt. Baldy, ski, then go to the beach. We’d probably have freshmen and sophomores go to the beach, then ski, and vice versa for seniors and juniors. Maybe we’d meet in the middle and rent out some huge restaurant/hall in LA for lunch for everyone. Pomona does this to a lesser extent already, why don’t we? Blowout after-party: Mt. Baldy

Camp-Out on Green Beach

We get like 500 tents and put them all over Parents Field in a circle. In the middle, we build a giant bonfire (the environment be damned). At midnight, everyone gathers around in pajamas and passes around a megaphone, giving toasts to the semester and throwing in symbolic pieces of the semester (my Business Law textbook, for example) into the flames. In between some of the tents, we’d have fires for marshmallows, etc. Blowout after-party: Parents Field

The Longest Boat Race in the History of Claremont McKenna College and the Entire World and the Galaxy and the Universe

From the Senior Apartments to President Gann’s front doorstep. It’s an idea that’s been thrown around a lot… let’s do it. Blowout after-party: Pam Gann’s Backyard

Runners-up: Huge snowball fight, carnival day, Joshua Tree trip, Mock Wedding, Hula Hoop Day, Rodeo Day, Catalina wine mixer, Cross the Border Day (AKA Tijuana Day), Dig a Tunnel to Scripps Day, Hug a Townie Day

Sure, institutional changes don’t happen overnight, and they don’t happen easily. Usually it takes a $200 million gift or a 25 percent decline in our endowment for things to change. Regardless, I’m graduating in the spring and plan on enjoying senior week while you all take finals. But if I were a younger man, I might fight for the right to capture the flag.

Earlier today, we published a post hinting that author Michael Pollan might be an Ath speaker and have since learned that though the Ath would be happy to host the author, but no plans have been made.   We hope, though, that you enjoyed the opportunity to learn a little bit about the unusual world of culinary ethics.

As for Romney’s designation as a Res Publica speaker, these guests often address a general audience at the Athenaeum and then sometimes also address a smaller group of select students, faculty, alumni, and friends of the College at a separate event.  According to the CMC website, “the Res Publica Society is a dedicated group of leaders of the CMC community who make an annual contribution of $1,500 to $3,499. These leadership gifts allow CMC to offer students Alumni Fund Scholarships, athletic travel, engaging Athenaeum speakers, exceptional visiting faculty, and a wide range of other co-curricular opportunities.”

Romney’s Athenaeum appearance makes sense as part of series of events with Claremont-based organizations, as he is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at Claremont Institute’s California Public Policy Conference in Newport Beach on Dec. 5, 2009 to discuss state and local government policies and their future impact. The Claremont Institute, while independent of the Claremont Colleges, hosts a number of faculty members from the CMC government on its board. This connection to CMC could well yield other fruitful interactions with Romney for the College.

Given Romney’s economic background, his opinions on the financial crisis would be especially invaluable to CMCers with economic-driven aspirations, but would also likely attract members of CMC’s vibrant political community.

Dead Man Walking chronicles Sister Helen’s role as a spiritual advisor to various prisoners on death row in Louisiana and offers insight into the corruption and bureaucracy surrounding capital punishment. In 1982, Sister Helen began corresponding with a prisoner on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary named Elmo Patrick Sonnier, and after several letters became his spiritual advisor. This relationship enabled Sister Helen to closely examine the injustices of the capital punishment system and led her to conclude that race and class serve to seal prisoners’ fates. Though she only describes two executions in her book, Sister Helen has witnessed five executions in Louisiana.

Since her first encounter with the death penalty Sister Helen has worked to raise awareness for her cause, and she continues to advocate for death row prisoners’ rights through lectures, rallies, and her books. Currently, Sister Helen is working on a third book entitled River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey to Death Row.

Both the book Dead Man Walking and the similarly titled film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn are available to be checked out at Honnold Mudd Library.

Sign up on facebook here, and be sure to RSVP with the Ath, as well.

There will be three 20-minute debates, with each relying on two student debaters and one moderator from the faculty or administration. The student debaters will go head to head while moderators provide insight into the issue and give legitimacy to the discussion. It’ll be serious but entertaining debate.

The first debate will cover the expansion of the College to 1400 students. With the addition of Claremont Hall and other building projects in the works, the Board of Trustees is considering plans to make the student body bigger, possibly part of a larger effort to raise the visibility of CMC within the national rankings. But is this the best choice for CMC? Will the fundamental nature of the college change with a population increase? What elements of CMC’s character would be lost? Or improved? What’s the best way to proceed with the expansion?

The second debate will switch focus to current campus life: Should CMC change its alcohol policy? The role of alcohol in campus culture has been a long time issue for the college, since CMC remains a wet-campus. This policy, however, has come under fire in light of recent alcohol-related incidents, and the Dean of Students office has stated that “things have to change.” Do they? If so, how?

And for the final debate we will turn to a question that often goes overlooked, but seems to merit consideration: Is CMC male-dominated? The college abandoned its single sex admissions decades ago, and the name Claremont Men’s College only a few years later. But the college continues to be majority male, while outside CMC, women make up 57 percent of college students. Does this mean that CMC has a bias towards males? Do women have a different role on campus? Even if they do, does it even matter?

A full roster of debaters and moderators will be announced shortly. Stay tuned for updates, previews, and more.

Sign up here: http://bit.ly/athdebate2

This is sad for many reasons.  The most obvious reason is that CMC, a college only 63 years old, has few historic traditions as it is.  CMC has no geographic or architectural significance, no statues of our founders on campus, and now, almost no significant annual events.  Maybe the closest we come to a tradition is the Foam Party, and that isn’t even at CMC.  Madrigals were rare in that they not only involved students, but they were about holiday cheer, food, and song.  For 26 years, alumni, faculty, and students came together on a few nights in early December for a five-course meal, medieval-themed skits, and choir performance.

So what caused the Athenaeum to end the tradition?  According to Ms. Snortum, a few things made it difficult to keep the event going.

First, live traditional Madrigal music was hard to come by.  The Scripps Chamber Choir that performed at Madrigals for 24 years refused to do so two years ago when the new Director of Choirs, Charles Kamm, decided it wasn’t worth a week of preparation for Madrigals if CMCers weren’t respectful of the performance.  In addition, Dean Debra Woods at Scripps College, who was in attendance that year, wrote a letter to President Gann complaining about the drinking she saw at the event. Given all of this, the Athenaeum Advisory Committee — a group of faculty, staff and students — decided that Madrigals was going to be difficult if not impossible to continue.

Brad Walters ‘08, ASCMC President at the time, fought to keep the tradition alive by reviving the event with 5C a capella groups instead of the traditional choir.  It worked for the first year, but it was not comparable to a real chamber choir.  Brad also e-mailed the school to ask them to be on their best behavior at the event. It worked; the tradition lasted another year.

The next year, ASCMC again hired some a capella groups to perform, but some dropped out at the last minute.  The music was pretty bad.  The alcohol problem got worse.  Many students decided to pre-game the event, showing up blacked out or worse.  Students were disrespectful to the Madrigal-themed servers, singers, and CMC staff.  A CMCer got so sick at his table that the table cloth had to be thrown away. After the event, glass bottles and handles were found under tables. Maintenance workers had to clean up the bathroom while wearing hazmat suits.

Personally, I had a great time at Madrigals last year and didn’t realize any of this was going on.  The description above describes a small minority of the audience, but a visible minority to the Ath staff.  While it’s one thing to have a good time, it’s pretty unbelievable that CMCers can’t even keep it together at a formal holiday dinner with alumni, faculty and staff.

That said, I don’t think students are entirely to blame for this. After all, I doubt incoming CMCers have changed that dramatically over the past 26 years — we didn’t come here as raging, disrespectful alcoholics. More likely, the controls that had been in place — the formality of actual Madrigal events and the self-policing by students that came along with it — left with the Scripps Choir. What is needed, then, (and what was attempted this year) is a joint effort by the students and the Athenaeum to bring Madrigals back and to maintain it as an annual tradition, before it escapes college memory:

• Make it clear to the students from the outset, as Brad did in 2008, that this isn’t another TNC. It requires the decency, if not more, that other Ath events receive.
• Then, at the event itself, just don’t let in students who can barely stand up and kick out those who are being disruptive. As we have seen this is a case where a few people can ruin it for everyone.
• Get a real madrigals choir to perform. In October, when ASCMC heard the Athenaeum actually canceled Madrigals this year, we offered to find outside groups to perform a real madrigal concert (we set aside $7,500 last spring for this purpose).  Willing to listen, David Edwards asked us to get some options ready.  We did, but by the time we did (two weeks later), he told us it was too late.
• Hold the Athenaeum responsible for hosting the event.  An issue was the Athenaeum made absolutely no effort to find an outside group.  When I asked Bonnie Snortum why the Ath didn’t try to find a group to keep the tradition alive, she told me they “aren’t really set up for that.”  But isn’t that what the Athenaum does — find outside speakers and performers to come to CMC? Her suggestion was that students should be responsible for that. No, the students are here to learn. That’s why our families are paying $50k+ to employ people like the Athenaeum staff, Dean of Students office, etc. to take care of student life and extracurricular matters. ASCMC plans parties*, and the Ath has made it clear Madrigals isn’t one. For more than two decades, it had been planned and executed in no small part by their staff, and it’s unfair to students to drop that responsibility now. If we’re willing to step up, so should they.

___________
*ASCMC does not just plan parties, of course. It does much, much more, but if the Ath wants us to take Madrigals as seriously as a regular Ath event, maybe they should as well.

I gave a talk not too long ago on a college campus. The event was sold out, so the administration started a waiting list for seats.

CMC Dean of Faculty Gregg Hess

The daughter of a good friend found herself on the waiting list. When I heard she still hadn’t gotten a ticket the day before the event, with just a touch of guilt for trying to bend the rules, I emailed a Dean at the college whom I know:

Dear G—-,

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. There is a young woman named B——- who is on the wait list. Is there any chance you can get her in?

Steve

The Dean called me back almost immediately, asking whether B—— had applied early-action or was going through the January admissions process.

Confused, I told him I had no idea and all I knew was that she was a freshman. Only then did he realize that I was just trying to get her a seat in the auditorium, and I realized that he thought I was trying to get her accepted into the college!

Could this anonymous Dean G— be none other than our own Greg Hess, Dean of the Faculty?  From their personal rapport and Levitt’s mention of going “way back” with Hess at the Ath talk, it’s likely the case.  If so, it’s the second time this week Hess and SuperFreakonomics have been linked in the national press; his review of Levitt’s book appears in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times.