My advice as a departing senior is to make friends at other colleges, take advantage of the resources at all the colleges, and appreciate that you aren’t at a tiny liberal arts college stranded by itself in the middle of nowhere.

Yes, certain members of the colleges do stupid things from time to time. Two years ago, Debra Wood, the Scripps College Dean of Students, sent an e-mail to the Scripps College student body complaining about a “racist party theme” at CMC held by the class of 2010. This party, hosted by Class President Isayas Theodros, encouraged students to wear white clothing because there would be a blacklight. Earlier that year, (mostly) Pitzer students engaged in a ridiculous protest of Karl Rove.  During that same year, Harvey Mudd’s Dean of Students made the bizarre decision to report to Campus Safety writing on a whiteboard that said “Hillary is a foxy lesbian.” Just recently, Pomona’s The Student Life published the wrong commencement speaker for CMC’s graduation this year.  For its part, CMC’s administration recently decided to ban non-CMC students, except for a guest list, from Thursday Night Club.

As unfortunate as these incidents are, they are clearly the exception and not the rule.  The reality, however, is that most of the people who attend the Claremont Colleges are good people. Sure there are jerks everywhere, but stereotyping across campuses is way too common at all of the 5Cs. Furthermore, almost all the stereotypes reflect the different colleges of 5-10 years ago much better than they reflect those institutions today. All of the 5Cs have similar values and fairly similar students and we cooperate in tons of academic, extracurricular, and social activities. There are important reasons a good percentage of Claremont Colleges students applied to multiple colleges, transferred between colleges, or take a lot of classes with mixed student populations.

The Claremont Colleges are excellent institutions, but we would all be even better if we integrated more and were less hostile towards one another. In my experience, most people at the end of the day seem to understand this and treat the rivalries as a fun tradition that amuses us. There are some people, however, who take these pointless rivalries way too far. They vandalize property, harass peers, or get in petty disputes with people from other colleges for really dumb reasons. Don’t be these people and don’t let your friends be these people.

Or consider Proposition 8, another blood boiling political issue. Facebook status updates were a stream of reactions (“Really California?”, “[blank] is so disappointed in California,” etc.) all converging on the idea that voting “yes” on Prop. 8 is unthinkable. It is not just that Californians voted against these Facebookers’ political preference. California screwed up. The state as a whole failed to make the right choice.

What these examples epitomize is a certain type of politics: the politics of outrage. In this politics, the overriding impetus is the perceived outrageousness the opposition’s view and the inability of others to realize the obvious clarity of the situation. Using outrage as the emotive impetus for engaging in politics lends to harsh posturing and screaming rhetoric.

Both sides in the politics of outrage betray a severe disdain for the other. It’s not just that the opposition is wrong—and oh they are—but that they are so irrevocably twisted by their ideology that they are blind to reason. Sad isn’t it? Lost among all this cursory antagonism is the fact that both sides betray the same ideological functionings: “I am right; you are pitifully deluded.” They are so certain in their view that they cannot imagine any reasonable basis for opposition, so they get outraged.

The two opposed camps in this empty debate exist in the same space, the politics of outrage. To attach a metaphor, they are two sides to the same coin. Yet just as the two sides of a coin do not represent the full range of possibility when there are many coins, the two opposed camps in the politics of outrage present a false dichotomy. They give us a false choice: “Yell with us or yell with them,” when in reality we don’t always need to yell.

Thus, the self-proclaimed champions of progressivism on our campus need a figure like Charles Johnson. (Put on the national level, what is the Daily Kos going to do with itself now that they don’t have President Bush to puff and pout about? Or remember how only a year or two ago conservative talk radio still felt the need to still talk about Clinton?) Without a clearly defined opposite, both sides are Don Quixote without windmills: just a sad old Spanish knight riding aimlessly across the Spanish countryside. But with him they are gallant, dashing, and the slayer of evil, conservative giants! So, paradoxically, Claremont’s progressive champions should be thanking Charles (ever so quietly) as they deride him.

That is not to say that some things do not deserve outrage.  It is outrageous that students interrupted the Karl Rove speech and damaged the CMC fountain while our administration watched. But who really still cares about the Karl Rove Protest? I’m going to go out on a limb and say there are bigger and more interesting issues for us to talk about. It is outrageous that we claim to be a pluralistic society and yet we incorporate particular views of the good when we demarcate fundamental liberties. But we live in a republic with a clear legal structure, and people get to vote how they like within that structure. We do not get to impose our view of the liberal state simply because we think it works perfectly in the abstract. We should, however, hesitate when unleashing the power of that outrage to make pronouncements totalizing particulars as bad and/or wrong. Such statements lend themselves more to bomb-throwing than profitable discourse, and in the extreme can lead to fundamentalism. Furthermore, like the boy who cried wolf, constant use of these totalizing pronouncements weakens our ability to deal with real, deserving outrages. I realize that perhaps this is inevitable, that maybe people are always going to yell needlessly about nonsense, but I will hold on to hope.

I will offer a humble suggestion about what this hope entails so that it is not just another empty (and reminiscent) slogan. Maybe this semester, rather than picking a new Karl Rove protest to get red in the face about, we can expend our political energies arguing productively about the proper role of the state in society and how to actualize that conception in reality.

CMC Government Professor Jack Pitney was also recently quoted in some major papers.  The San Francisco Chronicle quoted him in an article about Gov. Schwarzenegger’s vow to veto the California state budget.

But there are potential downsides, said John J. Pitney Jr., a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College.

“This is the governor who was going to grab the budget and control it through his sheer power and that hasn’t happened,” Pitney said. “So by walking away, he’s confirming that he has not been able to master the events in Sacramento.”

Reuters News also quoted his words on the same issue.

“We’re going to be back to a budget stalemate next summer,” said Jack Pitney, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. He expects lawmakers put off difficult decisions about either raising revenues or restraining spending.

“The legislature really hasn’t done much to address the structural imbalance of the budget and the state’s unstable revenue sources will persist until the legislature fixes it,” he said.

Although the Fall 2008 Athenaeum schedule has not been finalized, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd will be coming to CMC this semester.  Karl Rove is slated to speak September 15 as a Res Publica Speaker; Maureen Dowd will speak November 17 as a President’s Office Speaker, according to information posted on the Athenaeum website.

Living up to its reputation, the Athenaeum is bringing us two very ideologically opposed speakers.  In a recent column of Dowd’s, she criticizes Rove’s tactics:

“Actually, that sounds more like W.

The cheap populism is really rich coming from Karl Rove. When was the last time he kicked back with a corncob pipe to watch professional wrestling?

Rove is trying to spin his myths, as he used to do with such devastating effect, but it won’t work this time. The absurd spectacle of rich white conservatives trying to paint Obama as a watercress sandwich with the crust cut off seems ugly and fake.”

In the past, the Athenaeum has featured speakers as politically diverse as President Bill Clinton and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.   As always, seats to see these speakers will be free to CMC students and open to others on a space available basis.

Other speakers this fall include leaders of industry from the Robert Day School Distinguished Speaker program, professors, authors, musicians, and scholars from all disciplines.  The full Athenaeum schedule should be available within 1-2 weeks.