Petropoulous Plays the Roth Card: Should He Have?

The Claremont Independent quotes Jonathan Petropoulous on the ethical implications of his dealings with a former Nazi and his attempted -- but apparently legal -- extortion of a Holocaust survivor.

I quote

In his March 11 email, Petropoulos responded to questions of ethics. "I have thought a great deal about ethics," he wrote. "In this particular instance, [I] discussed the matter at length with long-time CMC Professor John Roth, a world-renown expert on the ethical implications of the Holocaust."

Petropoulous might want to reconsider playing the Roth card. Twenty years ago John Roth was embroiled in a scandal of his own when he compared the Nazis to the Israelis. Eight years prior he compared the election of Ronald Reagan to the climate of fear and economic turmoil that surrounded pre-World War II Germany.

George Will has more on this story in his masterful With a Happy Eye But... America and the World 1997-2002 in a section entitled "The Hijacking of the Holocaust."

I quote Will on p. 106-107.

John Roth, philosophy professor at Claremont McKenna College and designated director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, apologizes for a 1988 essay he says "created the impression" that he considered Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in Israel comparable to the Nazis' treatment of Jews. Here is what he said on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazis' 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom: "Kristallnacht happened because a political state decided to be rid of people unwanted within its borders. It seems increasingly clear that Israel would prefer to rid itself of Palestinians if it could do so.... As much as any other people today, [the Palestinians] are being forced into a tragic part too much like the one played by the European Jews fifty years ago."
Roth did rather more than just "create the impression" he now regrets. He is not wicked; he loves Israel, where he has taught. However, his careless writings reflect the slovenly thinking of a drearily familiar kind. It is the thinking of someone who has been too much marinated in the flaccid leftist consensus of the campuses, where reckless rhetoric enhances prestige.
He exploited the Holocaust for vulgar rhetorical effect when the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan moved him to remember "how forty years ago economic turmoil has conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism . . . to send the world reeling into catastrophe that virtually annihilated the Jews of Europe." Then, after coyly denying "clear parallels" between America in 1980s and Germany in the 1930s, he slyly implied parallels: "Still, it is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our postelection state with fear and trembling."
In an interview with USA Today during the 1988 campaign, he complained that the candidates were not addressing the problems of the poor and asserted a similarity to Nazi persecutions: In Nazi Germany, he reportedly said, education professionals allowed themselves to ignore what was happening to the Jews.

Maybe Petropoulous should think twice before suggesting John Roth is "a world-renown expert on the ethical implications of the Holocaust. John Roth has a thing or two to answer for with his ready use of the Nazi analogy.

As a side question, isn't it interesting that we're asking questions of judgment of both directors of the Holocaust Center?

Karen Sisson, Pomona Alum and City Government Official, Named Pomona VP and Treasurer

Pomona has released a press release naming Karen Sisson, formerly L.A.'s Chief Administrative Officer, as VP and Treasurer effective July 1, 2008.

Here's a paragraph examining what she'll be doing at Pomona.

A 1979 Pomona graduate, Sisson will become the College's chief financial and investment officer, responsible for managing an annual operating budget of more than $130 million and an endowment of more than $1.7 billion, as well as overseeing such functions as human resources, campus planning/construction and property management. She will take on the role at a time when Pomona, one of the nation's top liberal arts colleges, is preparing to carry out an ambitious strategic plan involving major capital projects, including a new arts district and dormitories.

Pomona is quite pleased with its former student and has given her an ambitious task.

My main question: God knows I'm no finance guru, but does Pomona really want to entrust that task to someone who managed the City of Los Angeles into a $155 million deficit?

(I guess when you're jugging around with a $7 billion dollar budget, $155mil is chump change.)

Naturally Sisson had a series of recommendations to reduce the shortfall by $117 million, "including the sale of three former animal shelters and a delay in the construction of police and fire stations."

Police and fire stations!?!!

Well if California ever catches ablaze again and Los Angeles ever riots, we can count on the Terminator to save us. Of course we Los Angeles County dwellers never have to worry about fire or riots.

Cheer up. At least maybe the dogs might find good homes now.

Claremont McKenna's Founders Would Bristle at Month-Long Chavez Celebration

I'm not a fan of Cesar Chavez Day. I think it's one of those days that we celebrate to appease certain powerful minority and political lobbies and has no place being honored at Claremont McKenna. (We don't get a day off for Veterans' Day or Presidents' Day.)

Despite several days of hunting around, I still can't figure out what that is. Claremont McKenna's history is full of military heroes and professors who worked alongside the president, so you'd think we'd get the days off. Instead we're stuck with Chavez and his not-so-merry band of unionized fruit workers. (Chavez effectively unionized them out of a job and paved the way for the mechanization of the farm industry. Hey, maybe that is worth celebrating?)

I wondered how these traditions developed and if our founders would be pleased.

One founder and big time contributor, J.G. Boswell, whose family controls the biggest farming empire in America, would take especial umbrage that we take a day off to honor a socialist. A Cold warrior, Boswell believed that campuses were being hijacked by leftists.

According to the book, The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, Boswell connections to Claremont McKenna run thick and deep.

As the authors, Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman make clear, Boswell had a special affinity for Claremont McKenna. (See p. 221-222, bolding mine)

As the 1940s would down and the era of McCarthyism dawned, the Colonel [J.G. Boswell] worried that the nation's academic institutions were at risk of being "contaminated" with faculty members promoting "Communism, socialism, and so forth." ...

No academy, though, was more in step with the Colonel's free-market thinking--and his concerns--than Claremont McKenna College, which was established in 1946... The school was led by George S. Benson, a former army officer and North Carolina University professor whose best-known book, The New Centralization, questioned the concentration of power in the federal government. Benson and the Colonel talked frequently about the need, as Boswell put it, to "clean out the 'pinkos'" from university lecture halls. And in 1948, the Colonel pledged to give Claremont McKenna $50,000 for a James G. Boswell Professorship of American Economic Institutions. The holder of the post was to be someone "in sympathy with the fundamental principles of the American system" of constitutional governance and capitalism. By 1950, Benson was revising the college curriculum so that all seniors would be required to take a course from the Boswell professor. "We are going to see that the graduates of one college in the country have a clear-cut conception of the values of American economic heritage," Benson told the Colonel.

..... An $85,000 gift funded a new dormitory -- Boswell Hall -- on the Claremont McKenna campus, though the Colonel agonized that having his name on the building might attract the one thing that the Boswells have always reflexively resisted: the public eye. Benson tried to calm him, informing the Colonel that the college publicity director who, conveniently, was "also the Times correspondent for Claremont ... feels we can carry out your desires to the letter. We will not announce the name of the dormitory when we announce construction ... We will then simply call it Boswell Hall in the fall when the students are assigned to it. The only paper which is likely to inquire closely as to who the Boswells are is the Claremont Courier, and I think they can be satisfied with a very brief story."

Although the book tries to make it seem like its a bad thing to have a free market philosophy and is riddled with untrue statements, I can find no reason to doubt some of the stories it tells about the relationship between then Claremont Men's President George Benson and J.G. Boswell.

I guess when you have a college president that boasts her "international teaching" on her curriculum vitae you are more likely to get days off for Cesar Chavez than for the American presidents or the veterans.

It's a pity that our commitments change in so short a time span.

Exit question: Is Gann going to pull a Benson and announce the name of the dorm during the fall so as to hide the donors' name?