On Mandatory Tolerance, Marching, and Manipulating Events To Suit Your Ends

I’ve always found it pretty interesting that you can get college students animated over things that happened miles and miles away from where they are, but that they tend to clam up when you confront them with actual restrictions on their liberties close to home.

As exhibit A, take the protest against the Jena Six in which Claremont Students marched for justice or…something.

Tonight we’ve found a new cause du jour: that of Lawrence King. King, 15, was brutally gunned down inside a junior high school computer lab. Prosecutors are calling his murder a “hate crime” as many of the students who taunted King allegedly did so because they thought he was "gay."

To raise awareness, students are marching by a candlelight vigil from McKenna Auditorium through the Claremont Colleges.

As someone who was also called “gay” in middle school, I can empathize with the kind of torture he went through, but I can, of course, never know the kind of sorrow his family is going through right now.

But that doesn’t mean we need hate-crime legislation or prosecution. After all, as South Park has elucidated for us, all violent crimes are hate crimes.

But by calling it a hate crime, politicians can do their typical grandstanding and student groups can do their typical activism. California Assemblyman Mike Eng feels its now an appropriate time to have a re-education program for tolerance.

"We need to teach young people that there's a curriculum called tolerance education that should be in every school. We should teach young people that diversity is not something to be assaulted, but diversity is something that needs to be embraced because diversity makes California the great state that it is," Eng said.

At the Claremont Colleges we’re very used to these kinds of sensitivity trainings and the threats that happen when we speak out of line.

At Pomona College, several weeks ago, four students were given a talking to by Marcelle Holmes, Acting Associate Dean of Students and Dean of Women– yes that really is her title – after they had a lunchtime conversation about a supposed attack on the QRC.

The gentlemen were talking about an alleged hate crime – the QRC “attack” – and they were giving their opinion. It wasn’t a hate crime, they said.

And why wasn’t it? Well, for starters, they say the alleged attack occurred next to the QRC and involved drunken kids messing about with a fire extinguisher. There were no messages left, no property permanently damaged, and no typical M/O for a hate crime.

But that didn’t stop The Student Life’s Lindsay Mullen from treating it as one. How very responsible journalism post-Kerri Dunn!

I called Ms. Mullen afterwards to see if she had spoken with anyone other than the QRC and the administration about the incident. She seemed puzzled and encouraged me to go to the QRC. I asked if she had spoken with the firemen who arrived on the scene or anyone involved in the incident. She hadn't. Maybe next time she could have done a little leg work and found someone willing to talk about the incident.

Back to the students...

Those four students saw Ms. Mullen's article in TSL and mocked it ceaselessly. Little did they know, someone sitting down table from them was listening in on their every word. She reported the students for their conversation. She felt threatened.

In fact, Dean Holmes met with all the students to intimidate them. She, along with a campus safety officer, ambushed one of the students right outside of the dining hall and forced all of them to come in and give their statements.

I asked Dean Holmes for a statement about those statements. No comment. She does not comment on private conversations she has with students.

That didn’t stop the student who reported the incident, who by the way still hasn’t put her name on record about the incident, from blagging about it to TSL.

In a tucked away corner of the Security Briefs (p. 2, February 22, 2008 issue), the incident made its way into TSL. (link not available)

Let me reproduce it for you here.

SADLY, NOT A JOKE

2.15.08 10:05

A student reports overhearing the following discussion among three male student at a dining hall: "If I want to take out my frustrations, I would go to the QRC, and if I want to kill someone, I would go to the QRC." Officers respond along with a dean. They identify one of the students, who identifies the others.

Now is this a concocted statement or what?

I spoke with one of the students. He confirmed it. Definitely a concocted statement.

"No one said that. It's not even possible. We actually make fun of the statement. It sounds like something a robot would say," said the student who asked that his name be withheld.

Remember folks, the Terminator is governor, not a student at Pomona College.

The threat to liberty is to borrow a phrase, "sadly, not a joke."

So let’s hold a candlelight vigil for having private conversations without being reported! Dean Holmes can lead the way.

Pomona Lets in Illegal Immigrants, But Throws Out Students for Partying?

Sometimes things are just plain hilarious. So it is with Pomona's TSL's latest piece, "Smiley '80s Sells Out Tickets; Students Retaliate," (link not yet available) which shed light on the fact that as many as thirty students are facing disciplinary action after they created fake wristbands using craft store supplies to get into the party.

According to one anonymous student, the fakes were "pretty flawless." But of course, Pomona still busted most of the students anyways. The article further reports that those students will be "required to attend a meeting with Dean Gerard to discuss these consequences."

(On a side note, I am informed that the Dean who emailed the students forgot to bcc them all and so, they all know who is getting punished. One student, apparently, emailed all the others and invited them all to get beers and work together on figuring out a way to get out of their rather sticky situation. Never underestimate the power of )

But why, oh why, were these these rules are established in the first place? Let's look at the article again.

"The reason we need to limit the party is based on the fire code of the building," said Kayleigh Kaneshiro '10 Co-chair of the Annual Events Subcommittee.

Well, I think fire codes are silly laws: They restrict the movement of the people! Down with fire codes! Party on, baby! Disco inferno! (Yes I know that's a song from the Trammps and written in 1976, but I'm trying to stay close to the 80s theme.)

But wait. Why is Pomona following the law this time but not others?

I've found a parallel situation. (I know some Pomona readers of this blog are such a fan of analogies, so I hope they'll permit me to indulge myself.)

I guess I'll draw the parallel with immigration: Pomona makes a habit of admitting illegal immigrants and then giving them copious amounts of aid. If that weren't bad enough, Pomona gives almost no aid to legal immigrants. (To be sure, it picks six poor students to admit and give money to, but this policy has the net effect of saying, as Kelvin Lee, "Let only the eager, thoughtful, reverent, and rich internationals enter here.")

Putting aside the whole incentivizing-people-to-come-to-America-illegally-argument, I've got something of a moral problem with paying to educate people who come to America illegally and then giving nothing to people who come to America legally. Pomona effectively calls the legal international students suckers and proceeds to take all their money from them, while giving the ones who hopped the fence or overstayed their visa carte blanche. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that's wrong.

Will Dean Gerard or any other member of Pomona get a talking to for this behavior? I somehow doubt it.

Pomona restricts access to some of the most qualified applicants in the world. They just happen to have non-U.S. passports and play by the rules. Like the people who made fake wristbands to go to the dance, all they want to do was get in.

--Charles Johnson

P.S. (I am informed that one of the authors of the piece, Travis Kaya, also wrote about "undocumented citizen" in a news piece in The Student Life several months ago.)

Claremont Conservative's 301st Post! A Bit of Housekeeping..

Heavens!

I never thought I would get this far, this quickly.

Let's have a bit of a recap over the last three hundred postings or so.

Since September this little blog has been punching well above its weight.

• We've been cited in the local press over the White Party.
  
• We've been photographed for the school website.
• I've gotten job offers with several publications and institutes through some of the er.. provocative... questions I've asked at the Ath.
  
• One such job, RedBlueAmerica.com, has offered me the chance to work on an international web start up. Here's my blog feed for that one. (I also help come up with the topics.) RedBlueAmerica.com is a subsidiary of E.W. Scripps Media company. You ought to all check it out. It's going to be big.
  
• We're a contender for a national college conservative blog contest through the America's Future Foundation. It's a ten thousand dollar cash prize.
• We've held some of the more colorful characters on our 5-C campus to account and in the process, we've no doubt helped them refine their arguments.
  
• Most importantly of all, we've provided another voice to the Claremont Colleges -- a voice that probably always existed, but never spoke up. It's this
  

Not bad, not bad at all.

Sure, there have been bloopers. I've misspelled things and I've probably been meaner than some folks deserved. But all in all, I'm proud of what we've done together.

So where do we go from here?

Upwards on onwards, friends. Upwards and onwards.

Let's keep it going,
Charles Johnson

P.S. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to make this blog better. I look forward to hearing from you. Oh and please keep the hate mail creative.

voice's Greer Grenley Recyles A Fabricated Statistic On Campus Rapes

Greer Grenley, the News Editor of voice, Scripps's student newspaper, has written an editorial about apathy on campus. She tries to link "feminism," the right to be offended, the White party speaking out on campus, and you guessed it, campus rape.

In the process, she doesn't check her facts. She writes that Harvey Mudd statement was "Hillary is a sexy lesbian." The statement was actually "Hillary is a foxy lesbian."

But that isn't really what caught my eye. In her paragraph about rape, Ms. Grenley cites statistics that are downright disturbing. Fortunately, they aren't accurate in the slightest!

Here's the paragraph in question. (I have bolded the especially relevant sections.)

"Being too afraid to speak out against something you do not believe is right can lead to terrifying results. One extreme example is rape. One in six American women are victims of sexual assault, and more than half of these assaults go unreported. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, in 2006 there were 272, 350 victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assaults -- and these are just the ones that are reported. On college campuses alone, one in four women surveyed are victims of rape or attempted rape. Some of the biggest reasons for not reporting rape are that victims are afraid of reprisal from the assailant and that they feel like it's a personal matter or that's their own fault."

Ms. Grenley is probably unaware that the statistics she just cited has been throughly debunked.

Fortunately, I'm not the first to recognize how ridiculous those statistics are.

1. First, the National Crime Victimization Survey. Robert VerBruggen of Phi Beta Cons has done the leg work for me. Here's his analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey.
   

Also, on the number itself, I took the time to look it up in the National Crime Victimization Survey (PDF). Note that this is not a measure of reported crime — it's a survey of a cross-section of Americans about crimes they've experienced, whether or not they reported them to police. Per 1,000 women 12 and older, 1.4 said they'd suffered rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault in 2005. Looking at the age of the victims, those in the 16-19 group had it worst, with 3.2 2005 rape victims in every 1,000 respondents. (The latter includes men and women, so the female rate is probably around 6 per 1,000.) The 20-24 group's rate isn't statistically reliable, but for what it's worth, it's 1.1.

These numbers aren't directly comparable to the one-in-four number, which purports to tally rape incidence over many years. But if, in a group of 1,000 women, six different ones were assaulted each year, it would take 33 years for 20 percent of them to have been victimized, and almost 42 years for a quarter of them to suffer.

Yikes! Numbers certainly are tricky beasts.

The one-in-four statistic (from the feminist and throughly criticized researcher Mary Koss) that Grenley cites has also been torn to pieces by Heather Mac Donald, who cites a study that just devastates Koss's statistic by looking at those same women that Koss classified as "raped."

The 2000 Department of Justice study of campus rape found that those women whom the researchers characterized as rape victims “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries.” . . . Moreover, 65 percent of those whom the researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report”—a judgment inconceivable from a real rape victim.

Like the carelessly with which she cites the Mudd incident (and the White Party), Grenley probably doesn't know the number she cites actually represent. Maybe she also doesn't understand that the reason most choose to attend college isn't the activism, but the academics.

Let's end on a statement from Grenley.

Women's colleges like Scripps are supposed to help teach women to feel empowered, yet how are we going to feel this way if everyone else around us, and even those among us at Scripps, aren't demonstrating a tolerant and supportive environment?

That's funny. I thought the purpose of college was to be educated, not feel empowered. But of course being educated doesn't necessarily lead to a "tolerant and supportive" environment. It can sometimes be deemed subversive. Just ask Socrates.

Good News About Claremont McKenna's Fund Raising

According to Claremont McKenna College Magazine, the college's 60th anniversary year fund raising drive was the most successful ever, "topping $57.8 million: more money per capita than was raised at any other small U.S. college."

It would appear that Claremont McKenna prospers with generosity.