Did St. Barack's Friends Use Our Money To Fund Their Campaign?

February 17, 2008

Although Ms. Shen is more clear in the email than she is on the flier about "in house," she makes clear that St. Barack's friends did not use our money to fund their campaign. Other members of the group concede that it is unethical to use all of our money for their campaign.

Charles,

I am the current chapter coordinator of the Claremont Colleges Students for Barack Obama. I was informed recently of one of your blog postings on Feb. 2nd titled "Did St. Barack's Friends Use Our Money To Fund Their Campaign?" in which you suggest that our organization's flyers were paid for with school money and thus imposed a cost to other students. This is completely untrue. There is no "ethical quandary" as you raise because our organization bore all of the expenses internally (aka "In-House"). This fact was stated explicitly on every flyer.

Also, the stamps from Pomona and Scripps College are in no way a political endorsement, but are a standard administrative part of allowing any flyer to be posted across the 5Cs. Officially, every 5C flyer is required to have at least one stamp and are generally only rejected if the flyers advertise alcohol. The same stamps were also present on flyers advocating other presidential candidates.

I would appreciate a correction of the original post so that the truth of the matter is made unmistakable and these speculations you now know to be false are explicitly rejected or disposed of.

-Valerie Shen

Readers of this blog will no doubt know that St. Barack sometimes plays dirty politics. But his supporters might be engaged in something closer to home. They apparently printed fliers
in house" and distributed them all over the 5 Cs to rally support for the great Barack Obama.

Now given that they printed them here and no doubt used Claremont college printers, does this not present an ethical quandary? They, after all, used school facilities and school money to endorse a candidate. If Pomona College and Scripps College approved their content, as the seals indicate, does this not constitute an endorsement of St. Barack?

Colleges need to stay non-partisan, even if their members do not.

Hat tip: ConfusedMinority

More Racism At CMC!

This time in the laundry room... Note the clear separation of "whites" and "colors". There are more photos of this incident, but I won't justify them with going into specifics. Suffice it to say, you should be outraged.


By the way, this post is a joke. But so is a series of recent statements made by a certain dean of students.

Ten bucks says we get an email about this one.

The Pomona Gay Attack That Didn't Happen

Earlier on Thursday, Dean Huang sent out an email to the students detailing a supposed attack on the 5 C gay community. The story is further explored in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin by Wil Bigham with the misleading headline of "Gay Help Center Target of Vandals."

Here's what happened. Somebody used a "most of a [fire] extinguisher" in the kitchen of the Queer Resource Center of the Claremont Colleges.

This isn't a case of vandalism.

Cynthia Peters, a spokesman for Pomona College, did not even have details on what specific items were damaged or vandalized.

Is there any reason to think that the user of a fire extinguisher "targeted" the gay community?

Only at the end of the article do we discover that no, there isn't.
There have been no confirmed hate crime incidents this academic year at Pomona College toward gay students, Peters said.

Me thinks some people are disappointed that there hasn't been an attack. Keri Dunn, anyone?

The Day Gift Explored by Inside Higher Ed.

Inside Higher Ed. sort of launches into this whole dichotomy of how liberal arts colleges seem to be losing their soul to business school mentalities. Nothing you haven't heard before, but here's the article in all its glory. The real question is where the heck was this article several months ago.

Here are the paragraphs mentioning our dear school.

Other new programs launched and launching at Claremont McKenna and Oberlin Colleges in recent months – also, like Spelman’s, made possible by significant infusions of external funding — appropriate various aspects of the four approaches, although in these cases eschewing the “business major” or minor for other curricular and co-curricular emphases on business and financial skills.

Claremont McKenna, for instance, received a landmark $200 million gift in September to start the Robert Day Scholars program. Day scholars, who will be selected as juniors, will receive scholarship support and complete an undergraduate course of study involving two semesters each in accounting, finance and organizational leadership, as well as participate in co-curricular activities like internships, workshops and networking opportunities. (Students, however, will major in other fields, be they economics or philosophy.) After graduating, the scholars will have the option of completing a planned master of finance degree — the combination billed by Claremont as “a compelling alternative to the traditional M.B.A. framework.”

“We’ll build on what we consider to be the important aspects of liberal arts education and yet give them training that’s really valuable,” says Janet Kiholm Smith, an economics professor chairing the transition/implementation committee for the program and director of the Financial Economics Institute at Claremont McKenna.