Claremont Insider Weights in Bingham and Underaged Drinking

Our friends at The Claremont Insider, the best local blog around, covered the recent brouhaha between Teddy Bingham PO '11 and Eric Yingling CMC '12 that I've already reported on ad nauseam. 

The post is generally right on the facts, but says that Bingham is 18. He's actually 19. 

When one of the professors asked Bingham if he had been drinking, Bingham replied yes. The professor then asked him his age. According to people who were present, Bingham waited for what seemed a long moment and then replied, "nineteen."

And yes, for drinking underage at Pomona and stealing stones from our dedication area, he got no punishment. In fact, they chaulked it up to "campus mischief."

 

Colleges Pay Attention to the Wrong Kind of Green

In today's San Gabriel Valley Tribune, three of the Claremont Colleges touted their greenness at the same time when all three colleges are trying to cut costs during an economic downturn. 

First, let's discuss Harvey Mudd.

At Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, they've turned energy conservation into a competition among dorms.

The idea came from a 2007 sustainability audit conducted by students and faculty at The Claremont Colleges that found the schools could save as much as $250,000 a year.

In October, the top three dorms at Harvey Mudd College saw energy consumption drop 33percent, 22percent and 20percent.

The college's eight dorms used a variety of ways to cut energy, including setting computers to sleep mode, turning off lights, washing clothes in cold water and unplugging cell phones when not in use.

I have a theory for why energy consumption may be done in October. It tends to be a cooler month and so students with air condition may not feel the need to run their appliances. 

Now, Claremont McKenna College.

Claremont McKenna College spokeswoman Dorothy Buchanan said the college proudly posts its green efforts on its Web site.

The college is switching to compact fluorescent bulbs, installing more efficient underground moisture sensors that make irrigation more efficient, promoting recycling and using pesticides and herbicides sparingly.

Sam already did the legwork on the kind of hardwork it is to dispose of fluorescent light bulbs and how they are hazardous to your health, in addition to being a poor source of light. In my room, the minimal light emitted from the overheads has meant that I've had to borrow another lamp. Apparently, I'm not alone. Several of my friends in the new dorm have done just that! 

I can't speak to the irrigation or to the pesticides/herbicides, but I am told that there's a many million dollar effort to promote recycling by sorting through all the cans and paper put into our waste bins. 

I think it's rather curious though, that Ms. Buchanan didn't mention the $3100-3900 solar trash bins. Insofar as I can tell, there are only three on campus (One in the shadow of Gannville, one in the shadow of the Hub, and the other in the shadow of Marks. Something tells me that they might not work so well, being solar and all, in the shade.)

Finally, Scripps College

At Scripps College, going green means compacting trash to take up less space in landfills and expanding recycling efforts.

Scripps College is also looking into reusing pool water for a future soccer field and using gray water for irrigation, as well as teaming with the other Claremont Colleges to compost food scraps from dining halls.

Does it not strike anyone else as weird that they'll be reusing pool water? 

And what of this 5C effort to compost food scraps? Don't colleges know that these release methane, one of the principle gases believed to cause so-called global warming? 

Unfortunately, not all of these efforts are cheap. In fact, as the current debate over the Bernard Field Station is indicating, greenness can come with real human costs, like denying others the ability to park their cars and fully participate in their educational environment. Why would a college want to build a parking lot in the first place, if not for increased demand? Some students, after all, depend on off campus jobs in order to continue affording this college and other colleges. More to the point, few students seem to be advocating increasing the fees for cars -- which would drastically reduce their number. Such compromises are tough-headed, rather than symbolic and therefore unlikely to elicit the kind of emotional reaction of "activism."

So while their friends and fellow students have trouble making that extra payment for college -- as I and many others do -- at least they'll be able to assuage their capitalist guilt as their friends fall further into debt. 

We must check ourselves though, jealousy, is after all, the green-eyed monster. 

Ninety-Nine Years of Peter Drucker

Today is Peter Drucker's Ninety-ninth birthday. Here's how his colleague, Gordon Bjork describes his legacy.

From the Wall Street Journal's November 25, 2005 letters to the editor:

The pages of the Wall Street Journal have been graced by the wisdom of Peter Drucker for more than 30 years ("An American Sage," editorial page, Nov. 14; "Drucker on Everything," Review & Outlook, Nov. 14; and "A Tribute to Peter Drucker" by Steve Forbes, editorial page, Nov. 15). I had the privilege of being his colleague at Claremont over the same period. He came to Claremont because his previous university would not give him the assurance that he could teach past 65. He was intellectually and professionally active for another 30 years and his work continued to evolve and deepen.

The public man was brilliant. The private man was an exemplar of personal concern for the welfare of others. Peter and Doris, his accomplished wife, frequently offered personal support to friends and colleagues, especially in times of stress.

Unlike many other academic "stars," Peter never shortchanged his own colleagues, students, or institution. Peter never demanded special consideration or compensation and taught a disproportionate number of students -- particularly in the Executive MBA program that he was instrumental in founding. He served insightfully on faculty committees. He had no teaching assistants and he read his students' papers himself. He had a standing offer to students to reread their reworked papers for a higher grade -- and he demanded the same high quality of exposition in their work that he exhibited in his own.

Because Peter's work focused on management, his published work did not extend as much to macroeconomics. But he was equally brilliant and prescient in this area. He rejected the mechanistic approaches of Keynes, the Monetarists, and the New Classical economists as useful ways of thinking about the dynamics of a market economy. He started the use of biological analogies for understanding the behavior of economic systems in the mid-1970s, before it was fashionable to do so. As others have noted in his approach to management, his genius was in asking the right questions and changing the conceptual framework for explaining the world. Peter was a polymath in an age of specialists and a wonderful human being.

Gordon Bjork

Professor of Economics, Emeritus

Claremont McKenna College

Claremont Graduate University

Claremont, Calif.