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.

The first Freakonomics book grew out of a series of articles Levitt and Dubner wrote for New York Times Magazine. As Dubner says in a promo video, “Economics is about inflation, interest rates and the stock market. Freakonomics is about prostitutes, crack dealers and corrupt sumo wrestlers.” The book covered Levitt’s academic work on crime, child mortality, and cheating in a story form suitable for the lay reader. Their brand of pop social science turned out to be wildly popular; soon after, many other economists wrote their own books about popular economics. In the sequel to Freaknomics, the authors cover a wider range of topics, with mixed results; one Washington Post blogger wrote,

Super Freakonomics is really two books in one: Some of the chapters are based on a deep data set that reveals interesting insights about the underlying subject. Half of the chapters are not based on any data set at all, and are more of an effort to invent interesting insights about subject matter the authors don’t know that well. The chapters of the book that fit the first description are quite good. The chapters of the book that fit the second — drunk driving, say, or global warming — are quite bad.

Some parts of the book, particularly the profile of John List, Levitt’s critiques of laboratory experiments, a story about Ignaz Semmelweiss’s research into hand washing, and a re-telling of the Kitty Genovese story, have garnered high praise. Other parts, specifically the chapter of the book discussing global warming, have been met with scorn. Levitt and Dubner argue that we have neither the political will, nor the desire, to implement any tough solution to the global warming problem. After some discussion of how difficult it is to predict our climate future, the authors discuss the merits of several possible approaches to geoengineering, or large man-made changes in the Earth’s climate (here’s an example of a geoengineering scheme that the scientists claim can eliminate the rise in global temperatures for a few billion dollars).

This chapter has provoked a series of arguments in the blogosphere. First, Joseph Romm, a liberal blogger for Climate Progress, found several factual errors in the chapter, most notably the book’s claim that solar panels are black, which limits their heat-gathering ability (most are blue), and accused the authors of anti-climate change bias. The authors’ reply on the Freakonomics blog addressed some of the concerns with the chapter, and also presented evidence that Romm had asked Ken Caldeira, one of the book’s sources, to tell Romm that the Freakonomics authors misrepresented Caldeira’s views – in other words, that Romm had tried to put words in Caldeira’s mouth.

Asking a source to feed you a quote is a journalistic faux pas, but the cat had been let out of the bag; other bloggers started finding problems with the global warming chapter as well. Fall 2004 Ath speaker Paul Krugman, fall 2008 Ath speaker Matt Yglesias, spring 2009 Ath speaker Andrew Sullivan, and others noted problems and factual errors in the global warming chapter. In their search for counterintuitive social science arguments, the detractors said, the authors had gone too far and presented a questionable scientific and political argument in a cocksure way.

Together, these criticisms echo the truism that nowadays, it’s almost always in a writer’s self interest to be more interesting than factually accurate. Under the catchy headline “Freakonomics: the intellectual’s Glenn Beck?” Mark Liberman labels this trend the “Pundit’s Dilemma.” The media tends to latch on to newsworthy stories, which gives analysts an incentive to hype their arguments in the interest of coverage while the unvarnished truth falls by the wayside. There’s a risk to being caught (like the Balloon Boy), so while sources don’t exaggerate to the point of lying outright, everyone expects some embroidery. In this case, the authors may have overstated the case for geoengineering. It’s counterintuitive to think that we could fix our global warming headache for a relatively small amount. The Pundit’s Dilemma, in this case, is that the commotion over the global warming chapter will probably induce more people to buy the book.

This debate also brings into sharp focus the merits of the blogosphere as a feedback mechanism, and the problems with books in print. Before the book even came out, prominent econ bloggers were dissecting the claims in the book, and Levitt and Dubner were forced to backtrack. But the book will get published in its current form, factual errors and all; if the authors decide to rewrite the chapter, the earliest the revised version will hit bookstores is a few months from now, eons in blog time. If their book was published electronically they could make the changes today. But in the blogosphere, if someone makes an inaccurate claim, it usually gets corrected or rebutted within a matter of hours. Every post by Levitt and Dubner gets read by tens of thousands of people; their book chapter was reviewed by a few editors and climate scientists. The truth has a higher chance of coming through online.

Like it or not, the success of Freakonomics has made Levitt a spokesman for the economics profession, a sort of interpreter for the common man. People will listen if he says we don’t need to worry so much about global warming because we can make a cheap fix down the line. His books may be leading more students (like myself) into economics, which will make them read more economics and learn about the basic principles like comparative advantage, opportunity cost and marginal analysis. However, if his books are the only economics books a layperson will touch, they may lead those people to think that all economists do is exploit arbitrary differences/mistakes in policy administration to glean some counterintuitive insight about how we behave. But perhaps I am being too harsh – if his book hadn’t made me interested in reading economics blogs and learning economic analysis, would I be in a position to write this review?

Levitt is slated to go on Good Morning America on Friday morning, so I expect that his prepared remarks on Thursday night will be entirely bland (“Isn’t it interesting that terrorists don’t buy life insurance?”). Perhaps we can make a dedicated effort, in the pre-dinner chat, the head table and the Q&A to get him to address some of the counter-arguments to the book’s global warming chapter. Levitt made his reputation by presenting results that contradicted received social wisdom; let’s see if any CMC students will do the same on Thursday night.

Steve Bullock is certainly that.  An accomplished lawyer, Bullock’s passion for “helping people” was the impetus that he says initially motivated him to pursue his profession. This passion has led him to advocate for labor in his private practice, and also is what eventually led him to his current position as State Attorney General.  A true CMCer, Bullock delivered his speech “Can a Single Lawyer Make a Difference? The State Attorney General’s Role in Human Rights and Social Change” with a mix of personal aplomb, professional competence, and a clear passion for bringing positive change to the world around him.  He weighed in on a number of issues throughout the evening.

Bullock addressed professional responsibilty and social change.  In discussing his role as Attorney General of Montana, Bullock emphasized the sometimes contradictory nature of his position.  Citing the history of attorneys general as legal advocates for the people, he highlighted the power of his office in taking initiative against injustice.  Conversely, the attorney general’s ability to bring personal philosophy to the job is limited by the key purpose of the position- upholding the laws created by the state legislature.  This dichotomy, he remarked, can result in an attorney general being forced to uphold laws that he personally might find problematic, a position which hopefully is avoided by a reasonable and effective legislative branch.

He also discussed whether activist attorney generals are the new activist judges.  Making reference to both ends of the political spectrum via John McCain and Robert Reich, Bullock brought up the concern held in some circles regarding activist attorneys general.  The concern that the authority wielded by attorneys general constitutes “an end-run on democracy”, as Bullock put it, is not unfounded.  Although elected, these officials have the ability to impose regulations through legal actions that have wideranging effects on society and commerce that might normally be the purview of legislators.  The last ten to fifteen years have seen an increase in attorneys general taking initiative, especially collectively, in situations like the landmark case against tobacco companies in 1998.  Bullock spoke compellingly about the balance between pursuing social justice on the part of the public and respecting the powers of the legislative branch.

Of interest to many students, Bullock talked about how his academic and professional development has resulted in the position he holds today.  Although he did cite an interest in law that dated back to “the third grade,” he also laughingly referred to the missteps and hurdles that characterized much of his career path.  A PPE major at CMC, he prepared for the LSAT most of his senior year.  His poor results, however, initially led him to a path other than law.  He thus pursued a journey that led from Philadelphia, to “Jimmy Buffet’s Bar” in Florida, back to law school, through a big New York law firm, and ultimately back to his native state and the office he now holds.  Seniors, Steve Bullock is better looking than you, but there is hope.

Bullock described how he honed his campaign skills by learning the ropes here at CMC.  He ran for Freshman Class President and won on a platform that involved “borrowing” livestock from Cal Poly Pomona.  Although he had much to say about campaigning in Montana, one point he particularly emphasized was the importance of his fellow alumni.  His classmates were the ones who received his first fundraising letter, and the enthusiastic response of Democrats and Republicans alike was instrumental in helping him win the position he now holds.

Above all else, Attorney General Bullock’s speech at the Athenaeum was a powerful reminder of the important role that CMC plays in empowering bright students to become powerful social and professional agents.