Environmentalists Won't Clean Up Their Mess

Kevin Callahan cleans up the waste.

Charles has already written about the silliness behind the recent trayless day, in which a bunch of self-righteous students decided to making dining difficult for everyone.

In the picture, you'll see the ugly display they used for their cheap political stunt. The crusaders, of course, were too good to take it down themselves. That's why we pay people! (Hey wait, don't we pay for trays as well?)

Now the college students have been weighing our food waste for years, but they never measure the change over a long period of time. The only measure the change after one day of harassment--then they congradulate themselves for saving the world. And every year they do the same old ritual.

Another question that no one seems to ask is whether or not food waste is actually a problem, let alone if a handful of college students eating less will ever make a difference. And if it is a problem, would they consider a solution that actually might have an effect--like charging people for what they buy? Wait, but you can't do this because then people make bad choices, liking eating cheese and beef. Better for Emily and friends to make the decision for them.

And then you have the problem that actually occurs--no one comes to the dining hall! Did you notice how sparse it was inside? (Probably not, because you avoided the dining hall that night.) According to the numbers, the two nights saw a drop in people from 656 to 501. That's a 24% loss!

In terms of pounds of food per person wasted, the drop was entirely negligible (about 5%--which means the average person spared about an eighth of a chicken bone). So it's hard to say this was a success, unless you judge success in terms of chasing people away so they don't eat at all. Unfortunately for the crusaders, I suspect they just went to the other dining halls to avoid them.

Oh, well there is one way in which they were successful. They felt a lot better. And after all isn't that why we do good things. To make ourselves righteous and pure of heart. And we feel better when we make others follow along. It's okay, it's for your own good. You don't know better. We do. Trust us, the pizza is better without cheese.

Claremont Conservative on L.A. Times Blog, An Examination of Pomona's Supposedly Racist Past

The Claremont Conservative made it onto The Los Angeles Times's blog today.

The mention is brief. They link to us and cite us as having had a "field day with the alma mater's suspension" without addressing any of the arguments we've made in prior posts. (Ah well, who could blame The Los Angeles Times? They are but a regional newspaper anyways...)

I wonder on the use of the word "field day". Let me get my Merriam-Webster dictionary. I looked for a satisfactory definition for "field day." "A time of extraordinary pleasure or opportunity."

Am I having an extraordinary amount of pleasure? Do I take the decision to ban the alma mater as somehow indicative of a great opportunity?

The only opportunity here is to examine the role of historiography and identity politics and how the two join to create a sanitized version of the history in the hopes of perfecting the present.

You see the argument that Pomona College is making is an insidious one. The argument is that back in the day, Pomona College was racist and that therefore it must atone for it's racist past. Even though the song's text is not racist and even though generations of Pomona students have sung it, it becomes racist because of the context surrounding the song.

Hence, Pomona's administrators must "suspend" the song. In reality, they are just testing the waters to see if it ought to be banned outright. Its their way of saying if alums complain, "hey, we just suspended song."

The problem with Pomona's argument is that it means that each of the students must have knowledge of the institution's past before they make a substantive decision based upon the merits of the work given the context of the time. Allegations of bigotry or racism are enough to justify censorship, which if not official, is meant to be social. God pity the soul who dares sing the song at graduation!

Given that the people who celebrated this song and who were there when the song was song are now long dead, the people who would dig them up must re-bury them as "racist" so as to exculpate their collective sin. Of course I reject any such notions of collective sin and find the song perfectly unobjectionable. Its past is complicated, but not worthy of throwing it out.

I welcome Pomona College's decision to sponsor two summer research opportunities to study songs in the context, but I wonder what would happen if the students come back finding that the song is completely consistent with history or if the students who will be drawn to this research opportunity will be inclined to have the conclusions formed before the research.

Still, I find it awkward that Pomona bends itself over backwards to eliminate a song, but never mentions its very real racist past (and present) treatment of Jews and white males. This kind of racism is all the more insidious because it is official Pomona policy to discriminate against individuals whose only crime was that they were not of a favorable ethnic group.

I've alluded to this racist past before when I mentioned current Claremont McKenna professor, Frederick Lynch, who has written he was discriminated against by the department chairman at Pomona College, who told him that the only sociologist Pomona could hire had to be black.

But I've been digging into Pomona's past and have found another more sinister skeleton in her closet. According to CMC government professor, Ward Elliot, Pomona hired its first Jewish professor, Karl Kohn in 1950, fully four years after Claremont McKenna College. The decision was not without its political problems. Faculty members muttered that hiring Kohn would mean negating their obligations to pay "tribute to Christian Civilization" as mandated by Pomona's motto. It was then that Pomona's president E. Wilson Lyon threatened to resign if Kohn's appointment was blocked. It wasn't.

Should Pomona College have to apologize for the conflicted history during its tenure of professors? Should we suspend its appointment of professors merely because a few had irrational, anti-semitic feelings?

No, we should evaluate the professor on his merit and his merit alone. In much the same way, we should evaluate the song.

Yes, artistic and academic merit will be inherently subjective -- though I'd wager not as much as some might argue -- but I find its much better than digging into a past we cannot control.

Thomas Sowell Explains Rising Costs of College

Thomas Sowell has been running around explaining why the cost of college seems to rise so exponentially. His latest column on college costs examines why colleges have no incentive to reduce costs with all the lavish subsidies government throws their way and how research downgrades the quality of education undergraduates receive.

The criteria used by most accrediting agencies are based on inputs -- essentially spending -- rather than results for students.

Competition among academic institutions therefore seldom takes the form of lowering their costs of operation, in order to lower tuition. The incentives are all the other way.

Competition often takes the form of offering more upscale amenities -- posh lounges, bowling alleys, wi-fi, finer dorms.

Ah yes, the increasing country clubification of American campuses and how it leads to a vicious cycle of increasing student debt by increasing the cost of tuition to pay for things that have nothing to do with education.

My friend at U.Chicago put it best: Paying for college is like going to buy a fish and being told you have to buy a car and a lampshade.

Still, there are many who say that if we got rid of all those country club amenities, that we would somehow make ourselves less competitive at getting top notch students.

You've seen this argument before on this blog from many in the comment section. Many such students argue that if we somehow decrease the $230,000 plus dollars collected per annum for student activities students will be less inclined to come to Claremont McKenna. (One wonders what motivated their parents and all the alums who routinely give back...) Patrick Weisman, a friend of this blog on many issues, is quick to make this argument. I find it totally unpersuasive. Now as student fees rise again to pay for security for parties, we're seeing just another way that college is being more and more difficult for average folks to afford.

Yes, there will be a percentage of students who expect more amenities than colleges have erstwhile been unable to provide, but I would wager that those people will be in a small minority and will still come to college for the expected value of the degree alone, even if we were to do away with the parties and club funds entirely.

What should be the function of colleges after all, but education? Harvey Mudd seems to have understand this fact intuitively and world class thinkers are beginning to take note.

Sowell has written about how Harvey Mudd prepares more students for graduate work, an indication that supports the conclusion that Harvey Mudd gives its students a great education.

He mentioned this fact on NRO TV and wrote that,

You may never have heard of Harvey Mudd College but a higher percentage of its graduates go on to get Ph.D.s than do the graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or M.I.T. So do the graduates of Grinnell, Reed, and various other small colleges.

Harvey Mudd is no Claremont McKenna, to be sure, but Claremont McKenna can rank its students by other means: number of applicants to law school, business school, or dare I say? number of dollars in bank account 5 years after graduation.