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Young men and women are drifting apart politically—CMC students are no different. Across the globe, the data reveal a growing   political   divide  between young men and young women. In the U.S., young men are more likely  to identify with the political right, and young women are more likely  to identify with the political left. Moreover, the political gap is often wider  among college-educated men and women. This year, the Salvatori Center conducted its quadrennial student political attitudes survey . The results show that CMC students exhibit growing political divides along gendered lines. Of the survey respondents, 99 identified as men, 75 identified as women, and 4 identified as nonbinary. For the analysis below, third-party and “undecided” responses were excluded. Among men, 54% identified as Democrat, 20% identified as Independent, and 26% identified as Republican. Among women, 73% identified as Democrat, 14% identified as Independent, and 13% identified as Republican. In other words, the data show a 19-point “gender gap” in Democratic identification and a 13-point gender gap in Republican identification. Among men, 71% preferred Harris, and 29% preferred Trump. Among women, 86% preferred Harris, and 14% preferred Trump. The gender gap in presidential candidate preference was 15 points. Men and women also diverged across a number of specific political issues. Many of the issue-specific gender gaps were larger than the gender gaps in political identification. All differences in proportions described below were significant at a 95% confidence level. Men and women were split over standardized test scores. The majority of men (58%) were in favor of reinstating test scores as an admissions requirement, and the majority of women (63%) were opposed, making for a gender gap of 16 points. Men and women were also split over race-based affirmative action—the majority of men (67%) were opposed, and the majority of women (63%) were in favor. This 30-point gender gap was the third-largest across all issues. The next question asks, “How should the government balance conflict between religious liberty and anti-discrimination legislation that protects traits such as gender and sexual orientation in public accommodations?” Men were 8 points more likely than women to favor prioritizing religious liberty (14% versus 6%), and women were 19 points more likely than men to favor prioritizing anti-discrimination legislation (48% versus 29%). When asked about attitudes towards police, men were 17 points more likely than women to favor increasing police funding (42% versus 25%) and women were 24 points more likely than men to favor decreasing police funding or abolishing the police (48% versus 24%).  Women were also 15 points more likely than men to favor additional restrictions on purchasing guns (94% versus 79%). Men and women were split sharply on the question of whether the U.S. should raise the corporate tax rate. The majority of men (54%) favored lowering or maintaining the corporate tax rate, and the majority of women (83%) favored raising the corporate tax rate. This 37-point gender gap was the second-largest across all issues. Surprisingly, men and women showed the largest divergence in their opinions on the electoral college. The majority of men (61%) opposed replacing the electoral college with a direct popular vote, and the majority of women (79%) favored replacing the electoral college with a direct popular vote. This 40-point gender gap was the largest across all issues. When asked, “How optimistic are you about the future of American democracy?”, men were 16 points more likely than women to be optimistic (39% versus 23%), and women were 12 points more likely than men to be pessimistic (50% versus 38%). The final question of the survey asked respondents to select from a list of options the three issues that mattered most to them. The top five issues for men were the economy, the environment, foreign policy, preserving liberal democracy, and healthcare. The top five issues for women were abortion, the environment, healthcare, preserving liberal democracy, and racial equity. Men’s top issue (the economy) did not make the top five issues for women, and women’s top issue (abortion) did not make the top five issues for men. There were not statistically significant differences between men’s and women’s responses to questions regarding student encampments, abortion, marijuana, border security, amnesty for undocumented immigrants, the environment, global trade, federal spending, Ukraine, and Israel-Palestine.

For Constitution Day, historian and law professor Jonathan Gienapp delivered a critique of originalism at the Athenaeum. Below is his interview with Forum editor Josh Morganstein. Jonathan Gienapp speaks to Stanford students in 2021 (credit: Stanford University via X) Recently, CMC and the Athenaeum hosted Jonathan Gienapp, a Professor History and Law at Stanford University, to discuss constitutional law and originalism. Gienapp is a leading expert on the constitutional history of the Founding-era, and recently finished a new book: Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique . In it, Gienapp marshals an array of historical evidence to critique originalism, a method of constitutional interpretation that seeks to read the Constitution in light of its original public meaning. Gienapp’s talk at the Athenaeum was sponsored by the Salvatori Center, and we were lucky enough to sit down with the Professor earlier that day. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation between Professor Gienapp and Josh Morganstein, one of our editors:  Josh Morganstein: Thanks for coming in and agreeing to chat with me. I’d like to start off by asking you how you got to where you are; I’m curious about how your interests in legal and constitutional history formed.  Jonathan Gienapp: From a pretty young age, I had a deep fascination with the intellectual and political history of the American Revolutionary era: how the United States came to be—particularly the debates that surrounded the American Revolution—and the next phase, after you've declared independence and had a revolution, how it set up a new system of government, almost top to bottom. I remember reading Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution , and then Gordon Wood’s T he Creation of the American Republic . And what was so exhilarating and eye opening about reading those books was they showed how the conceptual world that the founding generation resided in, despite the fact it seemed so familiar to Americans, was actually quite distinct, and that you needed to really climb inside their minds to understand what they were doing. It took something that I thought I knew, and made it seem so much more interesting by showing how much richer and more complicated it was. From then on, I couldn’t get enough, and really never left it.  JM: What are some of the ways that the Founding-era conceptual landscape was distinct from how we think about politics today?  JG: I mean, part of what makes Bailyn’s book so great is that there is this fundamental puzzle to the revolution: it is waged against a British government that doesn’t seem to be doing that much—at least not initially. Taxes on paper goods are not particularly onerous (actually, much smaller than the taxes the people in Britain were already paying). So the usual conclusion had either been that the Americans had really overreacted, or there’s some ulterior motive (control of people, power, or slavery). And Baylin did a marvelous job of showing how, based on living on the periphery of the British Empire and absorbing all this literature that was written in Britain that sounded concern about the state of British society and politics—that the complacency and corruption had set in—American revolutionaries were conditioned to be hypersensitive to British intrusion into their affairs after the Seven Years War (not because the things that the British were doing were particularly onerous, but because they were symptomatic of a deeper set of problems that lay lurking on the horizon). It was an entirely different way of thinking about politics and liberty: then, the revolution becomes a preemptive strike before it’s too late, and it’s precisely because the policies seem to be innocuous that they’re so threatening; that view is fascinating to me. JM: U.S. constitutional history is fraught with certain bumps, but for the most part, many view the Constitution as a successful document that has both lasted and adapted over time. Do you agree with the premise that it has been successful, and if so, what are the factors that contributed to its success? JG: We would want to sort out whether we think the Constitution truly survives the Civil War. Some say: ‘same system of government, same document, same tradition.’ Others, like Thurgood Marshall, say it was destroyed because it’s replaced with this new birth of freedom. So I certainly accept your premise in a general sense; other countries have gone through so many different constitutions, but they haven’t had the same sort of stability and success. Part of this is what Alexis de Tocqueville said about democracy: that it was less a set of institutions and practices than habits of the heart—that you can’t have a democracy without a democratic people, and that the the right to vote or rule of law are actually downstream from a more essential set of democratic requirements. You can say the same thing with the Constitution. Did the Constitution survive because it managed to set up an intricate, well-designed structure, both by dividing powers in a way that always created the right channeling effects and values so that any stress placed on the system could be absorbed? Or is it because there’s something about Americans more generally—in the supporting culture that was nourished—that allows for that system to work. I think it’s probably a combination of habits and institutional design. Once you put the two together, they engage in a feedback; but yeah, it’s a puzzle, and I don’t think there’s a straightforward answer.  JM: Turning to why you’re here tonight—constitutional interpretation—you recently wrote a book arguing against originalism. One of the things that I appreciate about your prior work, such as your 2017 blog in Process , is that you distinguish between ‘Originalism 1.0,’ which you say focused on original intent and evolved as a response to the perceived excesses of the Warren Court, and ‘Originalism 2.0,’ which was a shift to focus more on original public meaning. Why did the shift occur, and what kind of originalism are you cautioning against?  JG: Yeah, so ‘Originalism 1.0,’ as I describe it, talked about recovering the framers’ original intent, but it was speaking in pretty general terms. It was saying that we shouldn’t be living constitutionalists. We should instead try to figure out what was fixed at the time of the making. But in talking about intent, two big issues emerged among many, the first being the problem of multiple intents. What do you do with the fact that there’s no original intent? There are original intents. There were 55 framers at the Constitutional Convention, around 1700 ratifiers in the state ratifying conventions, and way more people in the political community; they didn’t all agree on what was intended by the constitution. So what do you do? You have to pick and choose, and that seems to be problematic. The second issue is the problem of moral taint: that the original intent was of people who did not share our moral values. Many of them supported or practiced slavery. They clearly disenfranchised all women. So why would we be beholden to an intent that has failed so dramatically by our standard of normative democracy?  Originalism, 2.0—public meaning originalism—emerged and did a really good job of neutralizing these problems by saying that the value of looking at just the words of the Constitution is to find the public meaning, regardless of intent. Where there had been plural meanings, you could now find a unitary meaning. And then you were also less beholden to their bad morality; even if slaveholders wrote the First Amendment or set up Article Two, it doesn’t mean that slavery is codified there. For some 30 years plus now, public meaning originalism has been the dominant form of originalism. But in moving to public meaning originalism, originalists have been really eager to bracket, ignore, and minimize certain kinds of historical context, claiming that it is evidence of original intent, expected application, or political theory, but none of that is the original public meaning of the Constitution. The public meaning of the Constitution, rightfully understood, is entangled with a much wider network of historical contexts, beliefs, and evidence than they allow. And I’m trying to bring that back into focus. There was a desire to kind of remove history from originalism, in a way, and I’m trying to bring it back. JM: It seems like there are multiple uses of history, and some are more accurate or in depth than others. Sometimes, these uses of history appear to conflict. In D.C. v. Heller , for example, you have perhaps what the framers intended around using a firearm conflict with a tradition of possessing a gun for self defense. When ‘history’ conflicts, what would you say the Court should be prioritizing to most faithfully read the Constitution? JG: Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it. At a minimum, you need to start with an appropriate understanding of what a provision implies, what fundamental assumptions it rests on, and what people in the past thought about those things. So if it’s—let’s say—an eminent domain case, there are underlying assumptions people have about property rights and the relationship between rights and government intrusion. I think it’s really difficult to just pull out a dictionary and start looking at words without ever thinking more broadly. I mean, property is property. But clearly you can conceptualize the nature of property and what it means to have a right to it in very different ways. And that is not going to be answered by a dictionary. We’re not talking about a world of easy questions. We’re talking about the hardest questions. Genre matters. The President, Article Two says, is vested with the executive power of the United States. What does that mean? It’s not surprising that such a question requires a much deeper form of analysis to try to sort out. If you want to understand the public meaning of executive power, you can try to look at usage at the time. Not surprisingly, most of the usage was in the context of reading the Constitution and supporting legal documents. So, you end up looking at much of the same evidence that original intent originalists look at. So, I think public meaning originalism didn’t tend to provide the escape from deeper historical analysis. JM: Yet you have originalists—for example,   Justice Scalia in “Originalism: The Lesser Evil”—admit that originalism is a task better suited for historians than lawyers, but that at the end of the day, the ability of the Supreme Court to engage in judicial review is based on reading the Constitution like a legal document, which necessitates us to read it with a fixed meaning. So, while the work of historians may be important, when you’re deciding a court case, you need a final legal answer. How would you respond to that type of challenge from originalists? Also, along those lines, is it possible to both believe that the Court is the ultimate arbiter of Constitutional disputes and that we must go beyond originalism as a matter of interpretation?  JG: Well, I would want those originalists to explain very clearly why some kinds of context would matter for figuring out original meaning, but not original legal meaning. I think there’s a way in which the rhetoric takes place a few 100 feet in the sky, and I’m not convinced that when you get down to it, the kinds of things that historians are trying to emphasize would not be relevant to true original meaning. I don’t see originalists choosing law over history; I see them choosing modern law over past law. They are choosing to read the Constitution as though it’s a modern legal history—the kind that they’re familiar with being modern lawyers, socialized in modern jurisprudential assumptions, and having gone to modern law school. But none of that describes James Wilson, John Jay, John Marshall, and Joseph Story, who were socialized in a very different legal world, understood law to be something very different, and therefore did law differently.  A lot of people think that the Constitution is a legal document, but it’s not obvious why reading the Constitution like a legal document means being an originalist. Other lawyers who are less hospitable to originalism first consider existing precedents, because that’s what lawyers do. So, while I do think judicial review is linked to originalism, in that there’s a lot of logic linking judicial review to a written constitution with a fixed meaning, they’re not logically linked in the way originalists would claim. Part of the problem is people who were resistant to originalism were not emphasizing judicial restraint. Originalism grew up in the face of living constitutionalism on steroids, in a system of judicial supremacy. It’s fair to ask about that and to think that the Warren Court, which did not exercise judicial minimalism of any kind, was problematic. So maybe the solution is then to eliminate both, or to try to fuse the two somehow—to say, we’re not going to do either originalism or living constitutionalism; rather, because we’re going to do less judge-made interpretation, we’re going to bring back something like departmentalism.  JM: With the way that originalism is currently playing out on the Court, many people view originalism as a conservative ideology, and believe that decisions like Dobbs  are activist in a way that originalists themselves should critique. For originalists, how should they balance precedent and tradition that’s existed over time with original meaning? Do you think originalists currently on the Court are doing a good job of that? JG: It’s a big, good question that the answer to which is not quite clear. People have always complained that originalism is just living constitutionalism dressed up as something more noble, and they would point to the kind of pick-and-choose style of some originalist jurists to prove it. Whether that means the broader proposition is true, however, is an open matter. Whether we’re seeing it now is also an open matter. Justice Kavanaugh, for instance, said that stare decisis  is really important, and you have to go through an extended analysis to explain why you’re reversing precedent. He would certainly argue that the Court met that burden in Dobbs . Others would say, ‘no, not at all.’ But what you would want to see from an originalist is analysis of the original means—a demonstration of how a right was not protected under the Privileges or Immunities Clause, Equal Protection Clause, or Due Process Clause in the 14th Amendment. Instead, what the Court did was to look at how abortion was criminalized throughout the 19th century. And that, to me, was a bit strange. Justice Amy Coney Barrett is by far the best here. She was really thinking through how these different ideas fit together, and is taking them very seriously. You see this in her concurrences in Bruen  and Rahimi , saying tradition can only matter if it’s serving the broader purposes of originalism—that it’s either reasonable evidence of original meaning, or something like that. It can’t just be that there’s some tradition. I think she’s right to hammer that, and I think hopefully the other justices who agree with her on originalism will follow.  JM: To wrap up, if you could give one takeaway from your book what would it be? What should readers be on the lookout for and come out with? JG: When we’re talking about the Constitution itself—not its meaning, but the Constitution itself as an object, and constitutionalism more generally—we need to appreciate that it was different back at the Founding. It was different, and that difference makes a difference. If you want to be an originalist, it’s not the kind of thing you can hand wave or explain away. If you want to be committed to this project of recovering an original meaning, you have to take very seriously the different way that people at the Founding thought about constitutions and how that breathed life into the one they made. What the Constitution originally meant was embedded in a way of thinking about constitutionalism that was essential to it. JM: I think it’s a good message, and I look forward to reading the book. Thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate it.

In September, ASCMC launched an initiative providing free menstrual products across CMC. Aunt Flow’s products are provided in women’s and gender-inclusive bathrooms across CMC. Last month, after more than a year of advocacy, the Associated Students of Claremont McKenna College (ASCMC) began providing free menstrual pads and tampons for students ‘caught short’ in women’s and gender-inclusive bathrooms in residential lounges, the Hub, the Ath, Kravis, Bauer, Adams, Collins, and Roberts.    This academic year, ASCMC acquired $3,000 for this initiative from alumni, parents, and leftover dormitory budgets from the previous school year. The menstrual products are from the brand Aunt  Flow , which partners with schools and businesses for similar initiatives. Kirby Kimball, a senior at CMC who spearheaded the initiative, chose Aunt Flow because of its 100% organic cotton products, inclusive language, discreetness, and charitable efforts towards alleviating period poverty.   Kimball was inspired to start the initiative on her orientation trip, when a student told her how they had to leave the Athenaeum early due to an unexpected period. “ I found this story pretty upsetting and confusing, considering the myriad of resources CMC offers to its students...” Kimball wrote in an email to The Forum .   “I did hear [opposition] mostly from people who don’t have periods,” said ASCMC student-body president Ava Kopp. “I said ‘period’ a lot of times in Board of Trustees meetings, and I think some of the older male trustees were a little bit uncomfortable. But it was a positive conversation because we were being honest about de-stigmatizing general discussions on menstrual health.” Questions from trustees included:  “Why does this need to be a campus-wide initiative?”, “Do you people really have trouble getting access to tampons?”, “Don’t you know when your period is going to start?”   ASCMC clarified that the initiative is not intended to replace students’ personal supplies of tampons and pads. “Please be mindful not to take more than necessary,” Kopp wrote in an email on September 25th when announcing the initiative to CMC students.     Each basket of menstrual products includes a QR code through which students can report low supply. Kopp is working with the college’s facilities team to ensure supplies are replenished weekly.    The initiative aimed to stock 60 bathrooms but due to budgetary constraints, stocks only 32. Next year, ASCMC plans to propose folding costs into the operating budget of the school (rather than through ASCMC), to expand locations with supplies and increase options in tampon absorbency.    In a national   survey   from Intimina, a reusable menstrual product company, 19% of female college students reported that they have “felt forced to decide between purchasing menstrual products and meeting other personal costs (paying bills, buying food, or any other mandatory expense).” Similarly, 48%   of respondents struggled to access menstrual products for financial or other reasons. In an interview with The Forum , Kopp explained that low-income students at CMC face similar financial constraints.   When announcing the initiative, Kopp wrote to the student body that “providing period products near lounges and classes is about more than just convenience; it’s about fairness and health equity.”

Salvatori Center research assistants wrote profiles of overlooked American political thinkers in the areas of conservatism, federalism, gender, and journalism. Conservatism Thinker: William F. Buckley Jr. Author: Jaxson Sharpe Born: 1925 Died: 2008 Spouse: Patricia Buckley Occupation: Editor, author, pundit Education: Yale University (BA) Read about the life and thought of William F. Buckley Jr. here . Thinker:  Harry Jaffa Author:  Henry Fina Born:  1918 Died:  2015 Spouse: Marjorie Etta Butler Occupation:  Professor (Claremont McKenna College) Education:  Yale University (BA), The New School (PhD) Read about the life and thought of Harry Jaffa in forthcoming weeks. Federalism Thinker: Mercy Otis Warren Author: Maribella Muñoz-Jiménez Born:  1728 Died:  1814 Spouse:  James Warren Occupation:  Poet, political writer Education:  Self-educated Read about the life and thought of Mercy Otis Warren here . Thinker: Frances Perkins Author: Gabriel Goldstein Born: 1880 Died:  1965 Spouse:  Paul Wilson Occupation:  United States Secretary of Labor Education:  Mount Holyoke College (BS), Columbia University (MA), University of Pennsylvania Read about the life and thought of Frances Perkins in forthcoming weeks. Thinker: Lysander Spooner Author: Andrew Rizko Born: 1808 Died:  1887 Spouse:  None Occupation:  Lawyer, writer, entrepreneur Education:  Self-educated Read about the life and thought of Lysander Spooner in forthcoming weeks. Gender Thinker: Patsy Mink Author: Nicole Jonassen Born:  1927 Died:  2002 Spouse:  John Mink Occupation:  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Hawaii Education:  Wilson College, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (BS), University of Chicago (JD) Read about the life and thought of Patsy Mink here . Thinker: Alice Paul Author: Caren Ensing Born:  1885 Died:  1997 Spouse:  None Occupation:  Suffragist Education:  Swarthmore College (BS), Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, London School of Economics, University of Pennsylvania (MA, PhD), American University (LLB, LLM, DCL) Read about the life and thought of Alice Paul in forthcoming weeks. Journalism Thinker: Herbert Croly Author: Sophia Lakhani Born:  1869 Died:  1930 Spouse:  Louise Emory Occupation:  Journalist, editor, author Education:  City College of New York, Harvard University Read about the life and thought of Herbert Croly here . Thinker: Walter Lippmann Author: Henry Long Born:  1889 Died:  1974 Spouse:  Faye Albertson, Helen Byrne Occupation:  Journalist, author Education:  Harvard University (AB) Read about the life and thought of Walter Lippmann in forthcoming weeks.

Patsy Takemoto Mink (1927-2002) Mink and colleagues pose in front of “Members Only” sign at the congressional health club, which was interpreted to mean “Men Only” following the election of female members (credit: New-York Historical Society ) Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink is often cited as the architect behind Title IX protections for women’s rights. While that version of Mink’s history is less fact than fiction, Mink’s understanding of women’s rights is worth reexamining in the context of current debates about the Constitution’s relationship to women’s rights. It is no mystery why the public associates Mink with Title IX. After all, prominent media outlets like TIME Magazine   refer  to Title IX as Mink’s “brainchild,” and a 2002 act of Congress dubbed  Title IX the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act. In reality, however, the legislative history of Title IX demonstrates that its passage was the culmination of interest group efforts led by feminist activist Bernice Sandler. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued an executive order  that “ gave  women a firm legal basis for filing complaints” of discrimination in educational settings. As a member of the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), Sandler helped  overwhelm the Department of Labor and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare with formal complaints that the departments were not enforcing Johnson’s executive order.  Working alongside Sandler and seeking to codify the ban on discrimination against women in educational contexts, Representative Edith Green (D-OR) introduced  the Omnibus Postsecondary Education Act of 1970, a precursor to Title IX. As chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor’s Special Subcommittee on Education, Green held several hearings regarding the bill.  During these historic hearings, Mink, a close political ally of Green’s, testified that the carveout for education in the Civil Rights Act was harmful for women, many of whom worked in educational institutions at the time. “The most unfortunate thing of all is that education is the very process we rely upon to make the changes and advances we need and yet,” she lamented , “we find that even education is not imparted on a fair and equitable basis.” Ultimately, the bill did not advance past the committee. The Title IX we know today emerged due to Green’s continued efforts. In April of 1971, Green introduced  a bill to amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 and other laws related to higher education. Title IX of the bill prohibited sex discrimination in higher education.  Mink was instrumental to Title IX’s survival after its passage. The Senate proposed an amendment to Title IX that would exempt any revenue-generating college athletic groups from the law’s provisions. Mink led  a coalition of women’s rights organizations to fight the proposal. Her work to spearhead this effort enabled women’s participation in collegiate sports, one of the most significant impacts of Title IX’s enactment.  The public may also mistake Mink for Title IX’s author because Mink authored other bills that promoted equality for women seeking education and for educated women in the workforce. She authored  the Women’s Educational Equity Act to fund the development of nonsexist curricula, professional and vocational programs for women, women’s studies departments, and community-based educational programs for women seeking to return to work after having children. The bill also called for a federal study of sex discrimination in education. Mink also introduced  the first child care bill ever considered by Congress to help working mothers stay in the labor force, and fought for measures to grant working women more financial independence through equal access to credit. Alongside her lauded legislative legacy, Mink’s legal acumen, developed at the University of Chicago School of Law, produced many notable moments throughout her career.   Despite lacking membership on the Senate Committee on Judiciary, Mink participated in the committee’s hearing regarding G. Harrold Carswell’s 1970 nomination for the United States Supreme Court. In her statement, she asserted  the “self-evident” fact that “the Constitution does in fact afford [women] full and equal employment opportunities.” She expressed  a clear belief that the Constitution had guaranteed these equal rights for women since the success of the women’s suffrage movement 50 years earlier. She railed against Carswell’s appointment to the nation’s highest court, citing his role in Ida Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corporation  as a disqualifying factor for his nomination. Mink described  the case as having “enormous importance to the equal rights for women” as it involved a private employer’s ability to refuse to hire a female candidate (but not a male one) on the sole grounds of having young children. Carswell’s vote to deny appeal in the case demonstrated , in Mink’s view, “a total lack of understanding of the concept of equality” and “a vote against the right of women to be treated equally and fairly under the law.” Mink also leveraged her legal background to publish law review articles during her time in office, including one entitled “Federal Legislation to End Discrimination Against Women.” In the piece, she reiterated  her understanding of the Constitution as it existed in the 1970s as already protecting gender equality rights. She criticized  the repeated “ failure  of the [federal] courts to apply the existing equal protection clause of the Constitution to women,” highlighting “numerous instances… in which lower courts answered the question of applicability [of the fourteenth amendment to women] in the affirmative.” These documents demonstrate Mink’s understanding of the Constitution throughout the early 1970s as a gender equality document. She believed that the Constitution afforded women the right to gender equality on the basis of its existing commitment to equal protection under the law, and she believed that the 19th amendment solidified women’s status as full and equal recipients of constitutional rights. Despite her understanding of the Constitution as a gender equality document, she refused to depend on constitutional protections alone for the protection of women’s rights, especially in critical spheres like education and employment. She foresaw that, even if the Supreme Court were to affirm her belief in a gender equality Constitution, that decision could not effectively protect women’s rights.  She worried  that case-by-case adjudication through the judiciary would lead to inconsistent or piecemeal protections for women, and she highlighted that “the judicial approach has the inherent problems of delay” as cases pile up on court dockets. While she supported the Equal Rights Amendment, she recognized the practical need for federal legislation to be implemented to protect women’s rights immediately, as she “ realiz[ed]  the length of time it would take for a constitutional amendment to become reality.”  Mink was a thought leader who devoted her life to understanding and mitigating the barriers that women faced as they sought to use educational and employment opportunities to improve their stations in life in the United States. She combined her legal background with her own experiences as a member of Congress to reach insights about women’s rights that speak to today’s legal and political battles. While she believed that the Constitution demanded that women receive equal protection under the law without exception, her inside view of Washington showed her the practical impossibilities of relying on that view of the Constitution to protect women in the short term.  Today’s feminist activists face the daunting task of advocating for women’s reproductive rights in a world where one Supreme Court decision can topple decades of what was considered by many to be settled law. Perhaps, by taking a cue from Mink’s tireless legislative efforts, champions of women’s rights may need to be pragmatic and pursue legislative steps despite their own belief that the Constitution is a gender equality document.

Survey results show that 59% of CMC students identify as Democrats, and 19% identify as Republicans. In the fall semester of each election year, the Henry Salvatori Center for Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World conducts a survey to ascertain the political attitudes of students at Claremont McKenna College (CMC). The survey was originally conducted in the fall of 2016 by Melanie Wolfe and Joe Noss. While the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the Salvatori Center from conducting the survey in 2020, a replacement survey was conducted in the spring of 2022 by Hannah Reilly and Kimi Adler.  2024 marks the third time the survey has been conducted and the first time the Salvatori Center has published the results in collaboration with The Forum . On November 5th, Salvatori Center research assistants will present the results of the survey to the CMC student body for the Kravis Lab for Civic Engagement ’s election night programming. This year’s survey was organized, conducted, and published by Henry Long . Respondent Demographics The survey was sent to a sample of 300 CMC students. 178 students responded, making for a response rate of 59.3% and a margin of error of ±7% at a 95% confidence level. 25.3% of respondents were freshmen, 18.5% were sophomores, 23.0% were juniors, and 33.1% were seniors. In response to the question, “Where do you call home?”, 43.3% replied California, 14.6% replied the American Northeast, 12.4% replied the American Northwest, 9.6% replied the American Midwest, 8.4% replied the American Southwest, 5.6% replied the American Southeast, 3.4% replied outside of the U.S., and 2.8% replied otherwise. In regards to gender, 55.6% identified as men, 42.1% identified as women, and 2.2% identified as nonbinary. Comparing these proportions to CMC’s fact sheet  indicates that men are overrepresented in the survey. This difference may skew the results to the political right, especially given the growing   political   divide  between young men and young women. In terms of race, 58.2% identified as white non-Hispanic, 14.7% identified as asian, 11.3% identified as two or more races, 10.2% identified as white Hispanic, 2.8% identified as black, and 2.8% identified as some other race. Comparing these proportions to CMC’s fact sheet  indicates that white students are overrepresented in the survey. Given data  on racial political affiliation, the overrepresentation of white students may skew the results towards the political right. Of respondents, 39.3% majored in the social sciences, 26.4% majored in STEM, 18.5% majored in the Humanities, and 15.7% had some other major. Political Affiliation When asked about political party preferences, 58.5% identified as Democrats, 18.8% identified as Republicans, 16.5% identified as Independent, and 6.3% identified as some other party (i.e., Libertarian, Green, etc.). This makes for a Democrat-to-Republican ratio of about 3:1. When compared to historical data, 2024 marks a decline in Democratic party affiliation from its 2022 high of 68%. 2024 also marks a rebound in Republican identification from its 2022 low of 6%, making for the first time in survey history that Republicans have outnumbered Independents. When asked about their own political outlook, 6.2% identified as Far left, 27.1% identified as Left, 26.6% identified as Center left, 13% identified as Center, 17.5% identified as Center right, 6.2% identified as Right, and 3.4% identified with some other political outlook. No respondents identified as Far right. This makes for a left-to-right ratio of about 2.5:1. Starting in 2024, the survey categorized political outlook using a left-right scale rather than a liberal-conservative scale. Over the past 8 years, left-of-center/liberal identification has remained relatively steady at just over 60%. 2024 marks a rebound in right-of-center/conservative identification from its 2022 low of 6%, which is the first time in survey history that right-of-center/conservatives have outnumbered centrists. When asked “How would you describe the political outlook of your campus?”, 2.3% replied Far left, 19.2% replied Left, 39% replied Center left, 20.3% replied  Center, 9.6% replied Center right, 5.7% replied Right, 0.6% replied Far right, and 2.8% replied with some other political outlook. Views on campus political outlook have become more polarized since 2016 and 2022. Fewer students believe the campus political outlook is centrist, and more students believe the campus political outlook is either left-of-center/liberal or right-of-center/conservative. Even though the number of left-of-center/liberal students has declined since 2022, more students view the campus political outlook as left-of-center/liberal. When asked their Presidential candidate preferences in 2024, 70.9% replied Kamala Harris (Democrat), 20% replied Donald Trump (Republican), 2.3% replied Cornel West (Independent), 1.1% replied Chase Oliver (Libertarian), and 5.7% replied some other candidate. Educational Issues When asked, “Should CMC reinstate standardized testing requirements in its admissions process?”, students were evenly split on the issue—38% replied yes, and 38% replied no. 23.9% were undecided on this question. The next question was added in 2024 after pro-Palestine encampments , occupations , and protests overtook college campuses across the U.S., with students and faculty passing referenda opposing administrative disciplinary action. When asked, “Should college administrators prevent students from constructing encampments as a form of protest?”, 47.5% replied yes, and 38.9% replied no. 13.6% were undecided on this question. Of those who replied yes, 32.4% said that college administrators should discipline students who construct encampments. When asked, “Do you support race-based affirmative action programs?”, 35.8% replied yes, and 43.8% replied no. 20.4% were undecided on this question. Of those who replied no, 56.4% indicated support for other affirmative action programs like class-based affirmative action. Social Issues When asked, “What is your stance on abortion?”, 79.8% replied pro-choice, and 19.6% replied pro-life. 0.6% were undecided on this question. Of those who said pro-choice, 9.3% said they were only pro-choice up until the first trimester. Of those who said pro-life, 65.8% said that we should allow abortion in special cases, such as rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is at risk. 2024 is a high-water mark for pro-life identification, up from its 2022 low of 8%. The next question asks “How should the government balance conflict between religious liberty and anti-discrimination legislation that protects traits such as gender and sexual orientation in public accommodations?” This question was added in 2022 to gauge student opinions on important  Supreme Court cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission . 31.4% replied to prioritize anti-discrimination laws, 8.8% replied to prioritize religious liberty, and 44.7% replied to attempt to balance the two. 15.1% were undecided on the question. The next question asks “What are your attitudes towards the American police?” This question was added in 2022 in the wake of nationwide protests against police brutality after the death of George Floyd. 27.8% replied that we should put more money into police forces, 24.1% replied that police forces should not be changed, 24.7% replied that we should put less money into police forces, and 3.1% replied that we should abolish police forces. 20.4% were undecided on the question. When asked, “Should there be more restrictions on purchasing guns?”, 82.1% replied yes, and 14.2% replied no. Of those who replied yes, 24.8% replied that there should only be more restrictions on assault weapons, and 6% replied that guns should be banned from civilian use. 3.7% were undecided on the question. Rates of respondents who want to restrict gun purchases are roughly similar between 2016 and 2024, with 2022 as the high water mark of 91%. When asked, “Do you support marijuana legalization?”, 69.4% replied yes, 7.5% replied yes and that most other drugs should be legalized, 6.9% replied no, and 8.1% replied that marijuana should only be legalized for medical purposes. 8.1% were undecided on the question. Rates of respondents who favor marijuana legalization are roughly similar between 2016 and 2024, with 2022 as the high water mark of 90%. When asked, “Should the U.S. increase border security?”, 67.1% replied yes, and 16.7% replied no. Of those who replied yes, 87% favored increases in legal immigration. Of those who replied no, 96.4% favored increases in legal immigration. 16.1% were undecided on the question. When asked, “Should the government grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants currently living in the US?” 13% replied yes, 45.3% replied yes and that the government should implement a path to citizenship, 17.4% replied no, and 3.7% replied no and that the government should deport all undocumented immigrants. 20.5% were undecided on the issue. 2024 marks the lowest support for undocumented immigrant amnesty in survey history, down from its 2022 high of 86%. Economic Issues When asked, “Should the government increase environmental regulations to prevent climate change?”, 25.5% replied yes, 62.1% replied yes and favored alternative energy incentives, 6.8% replied no, and 1.2% replied no and that global warming is a natural occurrence. 4.3% were undecided on the issue. Since 2016, opposition to increased environmental regulation has remained below 15%. When asked, “Would you say that increased global trade has been a net benefit for the U.S.?”, 60.6% replied yes, 3.1% replied no, and 7.5% replied that increased global trade has been net neutral. 28.8% were undecided on the issue, the second-greatest share of undecided respondents on any question. When asked, “Should the U.S. raise or lower the tax rate for corporations?”, 46.8% replied raise, 12% replied lower, and 17.7% replied to maintain the current level of taxation. 23.4% were undecided on the issue. When asked, “Should the federal government make cuts to public spending in order to reduce the national debt?”, 28.9% replied yes, and 40.3% replied no. 30.8% were undecided on the issue, the greatest share of undecided respondents on any question. Foreign Policy Issues When asked, “Should the United States provide funding and military supplies to Ukraine?”, 76.5% replied yes, and 11.4% replied no. Of those who replied yes, 20.7% said the U.S. should provide more funding and weapons, 45.5% said the U.S. should keep current levels of funding and weapons, and 33.9% said the U.S. should provide less funding and weapons. 12% were undecided on the issue. When asked, “From what you know about the situation in the Middle East, do you support the Israelis or the Palestinians?”, 29.6% replied Palestinians, 22% replied Israelis, 18.9% replied both equally, and 16.4% replied neither. 13.2% were undecided on the issue. Democracy When asked, “Should the electoral college system be removed and be replaced with a direct popular vote for the presidency?”, 40.3% replied yes, and 32.7% replied no. 27% were undecided on the issue, the third-greatest share of undecided respondents on any question. While a majority of students favored retaining the electoral college in 2016, support for the electoral college has fallen precipitously since, with a majority of students now favoring its removal. That said, 2024 also marks a rebound in electoral college support from its 2022 nadir of 32%. When asked, “How optimistic are you about the future of American democracy?”, 7.5% replied that they were very pessimistic, 34.6% replied somewhat pessimistic, 25.2% replied neutral, 29.6% replied somewhat optimistic, and 2.5% replied very optimistic. 0.6% were undecided on the issue. The final question of the survey asked respondents to select from a list of options the 3 issues that mattered most to them. The most important issues for respondents were the economy, the environment, abortion, preserving liberal democracy, and healthcare. After a brief dive to fourth place in 2022, the economy regained its 2016 position as respondents’ most important issue. Foreign policy, gun control, immigration, racial equity have disappeared from the top five issues relative to 2016 and 2022. Abortion rose from a non-top-five issue in 2016 to the fifth most important issue in 2022 and the third most important issue in 2024. While the 2022 survey was taken before the bombshell Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization  Supreme Court leak, abortion’s increased importance for respondents may be partially due to its increased political salience. Preserving liberal democracy appears as a new item in the top five in 2024, perhaps related to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Acknowledgements Thank you to Professor George Thomas for his continued support throughout the course of the survey. Thanks also to the guidance of Annie Deckey, Hannah Reilly, Jessie Miller, and Kimiko Adler when this survey was conducted my freshman year.

The Henry County local ’ s campaign focuses on improving infrastructure and education. Mishael White, candidate for Georgia’s 81st district, campaigns door to door in Henry County (credit: @mishaelwhiteforgeorgia) CLAREMONT, Calif. — Mishael White, a veteran truck driver from Henry County, Georgia,   now running for the state legislature, says he plans to tackle a mounting problem for drivers:  finding a place to park. Truck drivers in Georgia and across the United States increasingly lack adequate parking and rest   areas, a result of growing consumer demand for e-commerce. White’s political campaign, run   from his home, provides a window into a perplexing issue for Georgia voters.   Henry County , 33 miles south of Atlanta , saw its population rise   27% between 2010 and 2024.   That growth, coupled with the soaring e-commerce market, has exacerbated traffic congestion.   According to a 2024 report   by Rough Draft Atlanta, a   local media organization,   Georgia’s retail sales, including online shopping, have grown 470% over the last two decades,   leading to more trucks on the road. The 43-year-old White, a Democrat who garnered  3,212 votes in the primary, faces Republican  N oelle Kahaian, 50, a consultant from Locust Grove. “Henry County is ready for a representative  who truly embodies our conservative values,” Kahaian said in a press release after   the primary.  With 23 years of trucking experience, White seeks to represent  working-class individuals. “I know what families in District 81 care about because I'm one of them,” White said in a phone   interview. “My experience as a truck driver has solidified my understanding of getting up every   day and doing the job right.”   The issue, White said, is “that our infrastructure isn't robust enough to handle the sheer   volume of commuters on the roadway at any given time.”   The lack of infrastructure has contributed to a parking mess. White said truckers driving on   Interstate Highway 75, a major thoroughfare in Henry County, spend as much as 40 miles trying   to find adequate parking.   White believes that solving the parking problem could alleviate traffic congestion.   “If we can give truckers a place to park, get their supplies for the night…and take their off-duty  breaks, we’d see less trucks on the roadway during daytime driving,” White said.  Georgia’s budget surplus could be a source of funding. The state surplus was $16 billio n in the  fiscal year end ing 2023, according to a report  released by Georgia Budget & Policy Institute.  Parking shortages affect urban centers nationwide. City planners have implemented  “curb   management strategies” to tackle the issue . Washington, D.C., has increased designated pick up/drop-off zones for truckers, while New York City authorized the first use of e-cargo bikes in  April. These efforts mirror White’s campaign initiatives.  White is running in a new political landscape. District 81 was created in 2023 by legislatures   aiming to increase majority-Black voting districts. Although the area has historically leaned  Republican, it is now considered a toss-up , with the population 50% white and 42% Black.  In addition to infrastructure, White announced intentions to improve public education. Kahaian, White’s Republican opponent, is running on a different slate of issues. As an   ambassador for Veterans for Trump, Kahaian aims to increase awareness for veterans in the   county, according to her campaign website . Kahaian is also president of Protect Student Health Georgia,   an organization that fights to protect “children from the potential harms of gender identity  ideology,” according to the website. The Kahaian campaign did not return requests for comment.

Meet the five staff members of The Forum . Name: Henry Long Role: Editor-in-Chief Hometown:  Eden Prairie, Minnesota Major:  Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE) Class:  2025 From Henry:  I am excited to edit and direct The Forum this year! Last year, I wrote about the liberal arts, student protest, and free speech. This year, I look forward to publishing our political attitudes survey and our profiles in American political thought. I also hope to publish pieces from students across a wide range of viewpoints.  Name: Henry Fina Role: Editor Hometown:  Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania Major:  Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE) Class:  2025 From Henry:  Hi! I am from Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, where I enjoy roaming around Appalachian forests with my dog. When I’m on-campus working you can find me editing The Forum and reading for my seminars. I spend my free time skiing, diving into American classics, discovering new music, coaching lacrosse, and (poorly) tending to my plants.  Name: Josh Morganstein Role: Editor Hometown:  Orinda, California Major:  International Relations + Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE) Class:  2025 From Josh:  Editing The Forum this year is an honor, and will certainly become a highlight of senior year. I’m looking forward to writing about campus news, constitutional law, and international issues, amongst other topics! Besides being a news-junkie, I love to read classics, grab coffee with friends, and play chess and soccer. Name: Julia Mehlman Role: Staff Writer Hometown:  Bethesda, Maryland Major:  Philosophy & Public Affairs (PPA) Class:  2025 From Julia:  I am excited to be at The Forum again this year! Beyond The Forum , I like to hang out with friends, go sailing, play tennis, do the crossword, and cook. On campus, I work at KLI, am a member of CMCSA, and do a cappella, but you can usually find me in Poppa. This year, I hope to write about changing campus culture, the election and its consequences, and politics more generally. Name: Sara Arjomand Role: Staff Writer Hometown:  Los Angeles, California Major:  Philosophy Class:  2026 From Sara:  I like writing about people, going for walks, reading, and watching Tottenham (lose). Although writing for The Forum is a job, it doesn’t feel like one—it’s a chance to do what I’d want to do anyway, and to do it with friends.

Last admissions cycle, Claremont McKenna College gave preferential status to 15 legacy applicants. Governor Gavin Newsom signing a bill into law (credit: Armenian American Museum) On Monday, September 30, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB1780 , which prohibits private colleges and universities from offering admissions preferences to applicants who have a relationship to alumni of the schools. The new law, which was supported by a host of civil rights groups and the Associated Students of Stanford University, will take effect September 1 of next year. This means that the ban is expected to be reflected in the class of 2030 at the earliest.  In signing the bill, Gov. Newsom stated that he was “opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.”  An earlier version of the law required violating colleges to pay fines equal to state support in Cal Grants. However, the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities (AICCU), an organization that represents all of the Claremont Colleges and over 85 institutions in total, fought successfully to have the provision removed. Those who refuse to comply will have their names published on a California Department of Justice website.  The public University of California system eliminated legacy admissions in 1998. Such preferences are rare at public institutions but are still very much the norm at selective private ones—California is only the second state after Maryland to ban the practice at private colleges.  In doing so, the state government joins a nationwide backlash against legacy policies following the Supreme Court’s ruling  against considering race  as a factor in admissions. In contrast to race-based preferences, legacy policies mainly benefit  white and wealthy students.  According to the 2024 AICCU report  on admissions practices, Claremont McKenna College (CMC) gave 15 applicants, or 2.3 percent of its fall 2023 admitted class, “preferential treatment” for legacy applicants. It is one of only six AICCU undergraduate-serving institutions, along with the University of Southern California (USC), Stanford University, and Harvey Mudd College, that admitted to the practice in the report, although the 2023-2024 Common Data Set  for Scripps College indicates that it too considered alumni relations as a factor in admissions for the class of 2027.  Colleges have argued that legacy preferences increase student campus engagement and help sustain alumni donations, though there is mixed evidence regarding the latter. Despite having steadily reduced the number of legacy students it has admitted in recent years, CMC had its most successful fundraising campaign just last fall, raising $1.1 billion  and being the first liberal arts college to surpass $1 billion in a single campaign. While USC stated that it will comply with the ban, Stanford did not comment on its compliance plans. In a statement to the Stanford Daily , it noted that it will “continue to review its admissions policies.” CMC spokesperson Gilien Silsby declined The Forum ’s request for comment.

The demonstration occurred on the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israeli civilians. Protesters arrive at the intersection of 6th St. and N. College Ave. On Monday, October 7, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s 2023 attacks on Israeli civilians, hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters blocked the intersection of 6th St. and N. College Ave. Later, a subset of the protesters occupied and vandalized Pomona College’s Carnegie Building. The protest began at 10:07 a.m., when groups of protesters from each of the Claremont Colleges, donning masks, hats, sunglasses, and keffiyehs, congregated at meeting points across the five campuses. One group met at the plaza just north of Smith Tower and began their march around 10:10 a.m. As the protesters marched past several academic buildings including Edmunds Hall and the Estella Laboratory, they chanted, “Claremont students walk outside, 5Cs fund genocide!” The route taken by one group of protesters from (1) the plaza just north of Smith Tower to (2) the intersection of 6th St. and N College Ave. and ending at (3) the Carnegie Building At 10:18 a.m., protesters began to congregate at the southwest corner of the intersection of 6th St. and N. College Ave. Groups of protesters coming from the other colleges arrived shortly thereafter. At 10:26 a.m., protesters moved into the intersection, blocking the way for several vehicles. A small group of protesters helped a car move around the intersection via the sidewalk. Hundreds of protesters block the intersection of 6th St. and N. College Ave. As protesters from the several colleges arrived, the crowd swelled to several hundreds. Shortly after 10:30 a.m., a news helicopter and a crew from ABC7 were on the scene. News media for Claremont Undercurrents , wearing masks, keffiyehs, and orange “News Media” vests, were also present. Several masked non-students, wearing neon green “National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer” baseball caps, watched the protesters. Protesters circulated a pamphlet with guidelines for how to remain anonymous. Throughout the day, protesters delivered a constant barrage of call-and-response chants. Chants included “Free free Palestine, Free free free Palestine!”, “1, 2, 3, 4, occupation no more! 5, 6, 7, 8, Israel is a terror state!”, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever!”, “Down, down with occupation! Up, up with liberation!”, “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!”, “No peace on stolen land! Divestment is our demand!”, “In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians!”, “What do we want? Divestment! When do we want it? Now!”, “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime!”, “Hey hey! Ho ho! The occupation has got to go!”, “Israel bombs Pomona pays! How many kids have you killed today?”, and “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” At 10:51 a.m. protesters produced a circle around the intersection, and one protester began delivering remarks via a megaphone. The speaker commended martyred Palestinians, condemning the “genocide” in Gaza, and lambasted the destruction of Gazan universities. The speaker also addressed school administrators, claiming Pomona College is “complicit” in Israel’s actions, denouncing Pomona’s arrest  of students for unlawful assembly, and decrying Scripps College’s closure  of the Motley coffeehouse. Many protesters responded with cries of “Shame!” The speaker also demanded that the Claremont Colleges divest from all companies with ties to Israel. A speaker delivers remarks as a news camera captures the moment The speaker ended at 11:04 a.m., asking protesters to begin moving south. At 11:12 a.m., protesters arrived at the Carnegie Building, an academic building housing several classes and professorial offices. At 11:13 a.m., the protesters breached the eastern entrance and began to stream past Pomona College administrators and campus safety officers and through the doorway. Protesters push past a campus safety officer into the Carnegie Building Inside, protesters announced via megaphones that the protest was “not an occupation” and that anyone was “welcome to leave at any time” but that protesters were planning on staying “until 4.” At 11:27 a.m., protesters inside began to sit down and take out their laptops. Students inside of the building for classes like Statistics and Macroeconomics began to depart via the east and west exits. Some high-school students, present for the Perspectives on Pomona preview program, also departed the building. Several students departed the building via the windows to avoid the protesters. Protesters line the hallways of the Carnegie Building Shortly after 11:30 a.m., protesters announced that nobody else would be allowed into the building. Non-protesters who attempted to enter the building were forcefully blocked. Entrances were sealed with zip ties and vice grips. When asked whether anybody could enter, one protester responded by shaking his head. He also shook his head when asked whether students would be let in for afternoon classes. “Classes are canceled,” he remarked. Protesters also blocked the entrance for Pomona economics Professor Eleanor Brown, who was trying to access her office. Protesters claimed this measure was “for the safety of everyone inside.” Upon departure, Professor Brown remarked, “we teach about settler colonialism, but apparently we’re not allowed to do our job.” Protesters block the east entrance to the Carnegie Building One Pomona College administrator approached protesters at the west entrance. She claimed that people on the second floor could not get out of the building, and pleaded with protesters to let that person out. “If you could, I would be really grateful,” she remarked. Throughout the afternoon, protesters spray painted “INTIFADA” on the walls of the basement, destroyed AV equipment, and left signage splayed across the floor. As the hours progressed, protesters departed the building, with about a dozen remaining at 3:30 p.m. At about 3:38 p.m., campus safety officials entered the building, asking students to show identification, and the remaining protesters dispersed. Protestors spray painted “INTIFADA” on the walls of the Carnegie Building Pomona Economics Professor Bowman Cutter explained that he had left his phone in his office, but protesters had prevented him from retrieving it. He said that he remained in the stairwell for several hours alongside a campus safety officer until he was allowed to retrieve his property. At 5:21 p.m., Pomona College administrators sent an email to all students regarding the protests. They wrote that the “violation of our community is disgraceful, especially on this day of mourning.” Administrators also explained that protesters would face consequences: We have initial identification of several people involved, including a number of individuals from other campuses. As we identify others, disciplinary letters will be sent on a rolling basis. The individuals responsible face sanctions that may include restitution, suspension, expulsion, as well as being banned from campus. We will not, however, be commenting on individual cases. Administrators said that “due to extensive damage, Carnegie Hall will remain closed until further notice.”

In the age of the boundaries arms-race, here’s a call for disarmament.  (Credit: Psych Central) If you’ve known another person recently, you might’ve come into contact with their HR Department. Not all people have one. Increasingly, though, it’s common to find yourself called before another person’s one-man committee, and sternly told just what’s what. Usually, you’re reprimanded (by friend, partner, or relative) without explanation or apology. You’re made aware of the rules of proper engagement. You’re advised to stop what you’ve been doing, or begin doing something you’ve failed to do, effective immediately. A boundary  has just been set, and boundaries aren’t up for discussion. You’re dismissed.   Psychologists invented the “boundary,” a therapeutic term, to help people-pleasers advocate for themselves. But then, something happened. Just as the first soft-hearted person raised their quivering voice, the collective voice of TikTok interrupted: “Actually, we’ve all  got a few demands.” And so began the indiscriminate encouragement of boundaries-implementation. Everyone , apparently, needs their own set of associational regulations and prescriptions. It’s now conventional wisdom that boundary-setting is right, good, and useful. You’re unlikely to hear about mental wellbeing without hearing about boundaries, too—they’re thought to be an indispensable feature of healthy relationships. Take TimelyCare, Claremont McKenna’s third-party mental health provider. One self-care module, entitled “Boundaries Yoga,” begins with a warning: as difficult as boundary setting might be, it’s necessary to protect the mind and body. Don’t you want  to “strengthen your center and radiate truth?” Well, sure, maybe—maybe if the meaning of “strengthen your center and radiate truth” was clear, it’d be clear that it’s the sort of thing I’m likely to go in for. You know what? Let’s take a stab at it. While we’re all radiating truth, here’s one: there’s something fundamentally odd  about boundaries, about this new way of relating to one another. In the age of the boundaries arms-race, here’s a call for disarmament.  When you’re laying down your arms, it’s useful to start by explaining what you’re not  doing, because it’s natural for others to feel a bit spooked, like you’re plotting something sinister. Two disclaimers, then. You shouldn’t let people walk all over you, and you shouldn’t walk all over other people. As far as other people are concerned, walking is the sort of thing to be done side-by-side, hand-in-hand.  Boundaries, though, prevent that—instead, it’s: “Step back! Hands up where I can see them.” In assuming their defensive posture, the boundaries-peddlers miss what’s valuable about relationships. What are relationships about, after all, if not knowing and being known by other people? About banishing human loneliness? About “intertwining souls?” Erecting emotional walls will cheat you of connection and deprive your relationships of depth. It’s hard to be known by another person when you’re wearing a hazmat suit because you’re terrified that they’re toxic.  Relationships aren’t supposed  to be sterile environments. Relationships are inherently messy and high-risk. Don’t be too precious about your “emotional safety.” There’s none to be had, anyway—not really. Expect to be hurt, even by well-intentioned people who love you. Expect to come face to face with their insanities (you’ve got plenty of your own). You won’t escape unscathed, and that’s alright. Relationships aren’t about maximizing your personal utility function. You’ll have to compromise. You’ll have to sacrifice. That’s not evidence that you’ve gotten a “bad deal.” You haven’t gotten a “deal” at all —relationships aren’t business transactions.  Besides, not every hurt is evidence of a wrong. The language of boundaries obscures this fundamental principle by making our silly, petty, petulant requests appear  legitimate. When you employ therapy-speak to complain about your pet-peeves and peculiar sensitivities, you transform your desires into dictates, into laws which can’t be questioned. Of course, your requests look  “valid,” dressed-up as the tenets of some moral code, and bearing the (dubious) “stamp of approval” of the psych-world. But the word “boundary” can’t make your boundary actually  valid. A tool, meant to help us get more of what we rightly deserve, has become a cudgel, used to help us get more of what we happen to want.  Legitimate requests receive the inverse treatment. When you communicate something serious or common-sense through the laying down of “your” boundary, others believe that you’re expressing a personal preference, instead of an ethical no-brainer. What could’ve been a restatement of the Golden Rule—“Treat me as you’d like to be treated”—becomes “Here’s how I’d  like to be treated...I don’t know about you.” You could’ve appealed to the strongest possible justification: the universal standard for proper human interaction. You could’ve looked reasonable—you were  reasonable. Instead, you looked whiny and dramatic.  We don’t want to look whiny and dramatic. We definitely don’t want to be  whiny and dramatic. We want relationship tools which really are good (for the depth and quality of our connections), right (in their treatment of other people), and useful (for us, in communicating with them). Boundaries aren’t that tool. It’s time to fire your personal HR Department.

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008) William F. Buckley Jr. with his magazine, National Review (credit: The Intercept) William Buckley’s rise to stardom in postwar conservatism demonstrates the continued relevance of the old adage “it’s not what you say but how you say it.”  In The Fire Is Upon Us , Claremont McKenna College (CMC) Professor Nicolas Buccola observes that Buckley achieved prominence as a “communicator and popularizer of conservative ideas. According to Buccola, Buckley wove together “a combination of devout religiosity, strident antiegalitarianism, and deep opposition to the welfare state” into a pithy argument that convinced many that the greatness of the United States required the recognition of “certain immutable truths.”  But as much as Buckley is lauded as a pioneer of contemporary American conservatism, his rise and fall as a conservative icon provides a cautionary tale for today’s political commentators. Although publicity made Buckley, it would ultimately burn him. Buckley’s Rise: Challenge with Charm In Buckley’s first issue  of National Review magazine, he positions his conservative project against a liberal intellectual class that “runs just about everything . There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’.” The consequences of this social-intellectual monopoly were significant: “Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas—not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word. A vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is—dare we say it?—as necessary to better living as Chemistry.” National Review , November 19, 1955.  Core to William Buckley’s conservative ethos was an understanding that political ideology was driven by the press. In order to effectively challenge the dominant liberal order, Buckley’s National Review  needed to distinguish itself: “Especially during NR ’s early years,” observes historian David Farber , “Buckley crafted an ironic tone that made conservatives appear dashing and clever and calls for Christian virtue in the public square sound hip and rebellious.”  Equality: The Solution to Academic (Un)Freedom In 1951, four years prior to the first issue of the National Review , William Buckley published God and Man at Yale  as an undergraduate. The ideas in Buckley’s debut political salvo should sound familiar to the contemporary college student. Buckley alleged that the Yale faculty prompted students to abandon their religious and free market fidelities, rendering them nothing less than “atheistic socialists.” Buckley couched his argument in appeals to “academic freedom.” If it is unacceptable to pontificate on the “anthropological superiority of the Aryan,” Buckley reasoned, then it should also be unacceptable to preach communism and atheism: “My task becomes, then, not so much as to argue that the limits should be imposed  but that existing limits should be narrowed, ” wrote Buckley.  Ironically, since academic open-mindedness was hostile to traditionalism, Buckley charged the university with a sort of close-minded relativism. The problem was not that the collegiate mind needed to be freed, exactly, but rather that the limits imposed needed to be politically equal . Even today, conservative efforts toward rebalancing political perspectives on college campuses are shaped by the arguments pioneered by Buckley in God and Man at Yale . This is especially true in Claremont. In a piece  published by the Duke University Press, Ellen Messer-Davidow explained that Buckley’s National Review  “laid the foundations for everything that followed” by creating “a recognized forum for conservative ideas” and a model of conservative cultural production on college campuses.  In the 1980s , the Institute for Educational Affairs, a conservative tax-exempt group, began a program to fund conservative student newspapers across the country, dubbed the Collegiate Network, in an effort to bust the liberal trust on higher education that Buckley first described in 1951. In 1988, CMC’s own Claremont Independent  was listed  among the 53 original newspaper grant recipients. In 1995, the operation of the Collegiate Network was taken over by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI)—an organization where Buckley served as the inaugural president in 1953. Binder and Wood, in Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives , saw the ISI’s mission as relatively straight-forward: to promote conservative values on college campuses and create opportunities for “the best and the brightest” conservative minds to “redress the widespread image of conservatives.” While it could seem ironic that the self-avowed Claremont Independent  is dependent, at least in part, on a conservative-aligned influence network, this relationship is well within the bounds of Buckley’s conception of academic freedom first articulated 75 years ago: Academic freedom is not a matter of eliminating all  ideological constraints, but rather a matter of making them equal .  Resolving the Tension: Capitalism and Conservatism Whereas Buckley began his career confronting “atheistic socialism,” it soon became necessary to establish an ordering of conservative values. Buckley appealed to a new conservative tent under a banner of moral authority. Only with the right moral virtues would capitalist economic freedom be worthwhile.  Not all on the Right responded positively to Ayn Rand’s 1957 bestseller defense of capitalism, Atlas Shrugged —among the detractors was William Buckley. “For William Buckely,” writes Professor Farber , “conservatism without the traditional religious faith that placed individual acts, even those of the finest capitalists, in God’s mighty hands, was an empty and even vile thing.” Rather than shrink from the tension between capitalism and conservatism—which would have been easy given that Rand’s primary target was the socialist Left and not the conservative Right—one of Buckley’s best National Review  writers, Whittaker Chambers, sought to confront it head-on . Rand’s sin was the prioritization of materialism, “productive achievement”, over all other values, which Chambers readily admitted “scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left.” Materialism on the Right would lead to the domination of America by the technocratic “industrial-financial-engineering caste.”  The picture of a laissez-faire capitalist system painted by the National Review  was surprisingly dystopian: A society built on “technological achievement, supervised by … a managerial political bureau,” argued Chambers, “can only head into a dictatorship.” While dictatorships fly different banners, Chambers observes “embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism”. By centering the “Randian man” in the same manner as Marx centered the “Marxist man”, the society endorsed by Rand’s rebuke of socialism would make the same moral mistake as the Communists: without the checks and balances of religion, man will build a self-centered dictatorship in a Godless world. The ordering of religious morality before economic freedom would ultimately pay off. Farber explains , that while not all  conservatives bought into Buckley’s “religiously transcendent, intellectually demanding ethos”, for “those who wanted a morally potent, spiritually engaging, intellectually rigorous conservatism, without any hint of backwater Bible-thumping, the National Review  provided the goods.” The Descent: Burned by the Spotlight While Buckley kept appealing to populist sentiments at an arm’s length, Buccola explains  that much of his success was “accelerated by the fact that he proved to be a compelling presence on television.” Often, these appearances would take the form of debates with liberal intellectuals and writers — “Conservatives loved seeing such an articulate defense of their views.” In this period, Buckley’s relentless advocacy paired with a restraint from personal attacks often led his ideological opponents to begrudgingly admire him. He was sharp but cool and collected. In 1962, Buckley began one of his most popular rivalries with the famous Left-leaning writer Gore Vidal by writing a column defending conservatism next to a column where Vidal was attacking it.  During the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, Buckley and Vidal were to spend ten nights debating each other on live television on the merits and demerits of liberal and conservative political tracks. This was a showdown of two, sharp-tongued political juggernauts which had been building in the public sphere of television and newspaper columns for years. But as Robert Gordon explained in Politico , “Within minutes of their first conversation, these high-minded individuals took the low road”— instead of a dialogue, they sought to make each other bleed.  William F. Buckley Jr. mid-debate with Gore Vidal (credit: Vox) It wasn’t until the penultimate debate that this feud had finally boiled over. After Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi”, Buckley — in a surprising moment of disinhibition — responded with venom: “Now listen, you queer , stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face”. Since this moment, Gordon argues , “it’s been downhill.” This highly televised event served as a model for the intellectual bloodsport we see across today’s media landscape. This was not lost on Buckley. In the 2015 documentary about the Buckley-Vidal debates,  Best of Enemies , one person close to Buckley remarked that this moment changed him — his outburst undermined his sense of uprightness and he felt ashamed by his actions. When asked about the debates with Vidal in an interview, Buckley simply responded, “Does TV run America? There is an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable and that which is highly illuminating….” In an age characterized by a dizzying fusion of information and entertainment, we would be wise to keep Buckley’s admonition in mind.