Going Trayless Article in The New York Times

In today's New York Times on trays,

But while the environmental benefits are real, going trayless is not a panacea. At Skidmore, the all-you-can-eat format and multiple food stations, featuring vegetarian, Italian and classic comfort foods, encourage students to forage, taking a bit of this and a little of that. But this system also leads to congestion as diners return to the lines for seconds (or fourths).

“That’s one of the disadvantages,” said Sam Pope, a junior from Worcester, Mass., referring to an absence of trays. “You have to keep getting up and getting more food. It increases dining hall time because there’s so much traffic.”

That's funny. It's not like I haven't made this argument before. Here's what I wrote, in part, on March 1, with emphasis. 

On the second and final paragraphs, I'm glad to see that the elimination of trays won't be considered until at least the fall, but I see little evidence that eliminating trays would reduce waste. More likely, it would just increase students' time in the cafeteria as they had to wait through numerous lines, meaning you'd have less turnover at the tables in the cafeteria, meaning you'd have more crowding.

In terms of anecdotal evidence I've noticed that this is exactly what happens at Pitzer College where lines, even during non-peak times, can go on and on. But environmentalists don't care about the value of your time and so they'll impose any costs they can on you. 

 

Claremont Independent's Ilan Wurman, Panel Discusses Racial Retreats, Minority Programs

Ilan Wurman CMC '10 and former editor of The Claremont Independent (and sometimes blogger on this site) did an excellent job tonight explaining why The Claremont Independent continues to oppose the existence of and school support for, racially exclusive clubs on campus. The discussion was facilitated by Lauren Ohata CMC '09 and concerned Ilan's article in the last issue of The Claremont Independent in which he cited research by Shana Levin, a CMC psychology professor that looked at how racial groups on campus impede racial harmony on campus. 

This isn't a familiar argument to anyone on campus. Indeed, the founder of the BSU (later became OBSA) made such an argument to me in The Claremont Independent. And I wrote as much in the pages of The Claremont Independent where I talked to students about how racial retreats end up promoting some bigotry against white students.

But apparently, this topic still warrants frank discussion and Ilan and the others did not disappoint tonight. I should have the video up later of his opening remarks. I did not film the rest.

This post will be a bit erratic, so please forgive me, but I'm going to be responding to several things that struck my eye. 

The ironic thing, of course, is that many of these groups concede with Ilan's observation that the diversity groups on campus accentuate differences and celebrate their culture. I would argue, however, that they go far beyond merely celebrating culture and that they both exclude some students and promote an oftentimes radical agenda.

Groups like OBSA and CLSA are inherently discriminatory. Ilan, after all, is the child of Israelis and yet he is never invited to APAM event. Technically, speaking, Ilan can lay greater claim to being "Asian" than many of the students who are third or fourth generation American of Asian descent. Indeed, given that I spent my formative years in Dorchester's Savin Hill, a.k.a. "Little Saigon," I can make the claim of growing up in a majority Asian neighborhood. My grandfather and (ultra far left) grandfather was an officer that helped resettle Vietnamese refugees at Fort Indiantown Gap and so he is often honored in our neighborhood for his contributions. In high school, I wrote several pieces for the Asian cultural magazine and I dated a few Asian girls. (While we're on the topic and contrary to popular perception, I don't have an Asian fetish. I just so happened to have a few Asian girlfriends. Of course, this kind of slander ought to be called out for what it is -- group racism and discomfort with interracial dating. Fortunately, even The Huffington Post agrees with me!)

Despite all this, neither Ilan, nor I are invited to APAM's retreats, despite both having ties to the Asian continent and to Asians generally. 

How can this be? Well, apparently it's because we aren't racially Asian and here is the part that really upset me. 

You see, whenever someone applies to Claremont McKenna and checks what their ethnicity is, that information is then turned over to these racially-based groups. For many students, before they are even on campus, they are contacted with an invitation to join one of these affinity groups. That's right, before some people even step foot on campus, they are encouraged to racially segregate themselves. 

And despite assurances that they stop trying to get students to join up, Sam Corcos, who co-writes this blog with me, still receives emails from CLSA. (He's part Cuban and a second semester sophomore.)

Now to be fair, some students don't join these groups, but that isn't because they aren't militant. Students are still trying to figure out who they are and are willing to grasp on to whatever it is that will help them understand it. Along comes the Asian/Hispanic/Black groups to tell them to join up before they have even met the rest of the campus.  I've seen how it works. Oftentimes they make claims like, "we're the only Asian group on campus, don't you want to celebrate your culture? Here have some candy!" Then before the semester is even really underway, they decide to have an exclusive, minority-only retreat. It leaves little doubt in incoming students' minds that APAM, OBSA, and CLSA can lay claim to being the monopoly or repository of all things, "Asian," "black," or "Latino/a." Many, many students have told me that they feel uncomfortable when approached by these groups in the beginning of the school year and that they feel pressured to join them. Maybe these groups should allow freshmen to form their own identities, to take classes, and to get to know their fellow students before they encourage them to join OBSA, CLSA, or APAM. 

Now, Professor Shana Levin is right to argue that those kinds of pressurized situations exist in frat houses and she is probably right. And yet here's the kicker, Claremont McKenna doesn't have frats and it sure isn't UCLA. Its white students are free to join or not join any group and so they mingle and make their own social interactions based upon what they enjoy, not what they look like. It was this point that Ilan made tonight. 

Ilan cited one of the authors of the study that shows that minority groups tend to harm academic performance as saying that colleges shouldn't encourage their formation. But currently, they do just that. They often subsidize them with lavish amounts of attention and funding. To be fair, many of the people that defend these subsidies argue that the clubs benefit students academically. But don't we already have the writing center for that? Ilan Wurman is a writing center tutor! Can students only learn from tutors that "look like them"? In that case, I had better avoid learning stats and macro from Indians....

There are no other clubs on campus where the colleges turn over student data for the purposes of recruitment. Can you imagine the outcry that would occur if the school gave out the zip code data to the Claremont Colleges Democrats or Republicans with the hopes that those students' political preferences could be data mined? 

Moreover, the mandatory racial sensitivity training that every R.A. must complete before becoming an R.A. is an indication of how these diversity groups don't just stay confined to dealing with student groups, but try to impose themselves on everyone else. As you'll see in the next issue of The Claremont Independent, this often means forcing a radical reinterpretation of school history in the promotion of an ideological agenda. 

Which, invariably brings me to my point, I believe that Claremont McKenna should refuse to provide that information to these affinity groups, at least for the first few months of school. As we do with alcohol during dry week, we should have a "cool off" period where we let students settle into campus before they are inundated with calls to join APAM, OBSA, and CLSA. Let OBSA, CLSA, and APAM contend with every group on campus during the activities fairs. Let them recruit all students so that when they go on their retreats, it won't just be the same color faces talking about issues that affect the "community."

One of the leaders of the Cabrones made the claim that he never sees The Claremont Independent at Cabrones parties and to be fair, at least to the members present, few CIers attend Cabrones' parties. I admitted that I just don't dance. But that isn't because we are "self-segregated," it is because we have little in common with groups that like to dance to rap music. It's because we aren't interested in attending them.

 The member of Cabrones was trying to use that example to say that we were self-segregating, but here he falls short. The Claremont Independent segregates itself based upon interest, not race. In fact, just to make a point of historical record, it was The Claremont Independent under Ilan Wurman that was the only Claremont publication that wrote a remembrance piece to honor Atul Vyas, their tragically deceased member. The efforts to portray us as some kind of exclusive, white male club are also without evidence. As I pointed out tonight, several of marriages that have formed from serving on The Claremont Independent staff have been interracial. We love participating in the life of this college and often attend events at Pitzer, Pomona, Scripps and CMC together and we've been known to go to left wing events. 

But the gentleman very much misunderstands the success of the Cabrones and if he thinks that The Claremont Independent or Ilan is arguing against the Cabrones, he sorely misunderstands Ilan's argument. The reason we celebrate the Cabrones is that they are an affinity based group that doesn't use coercion or the school to advance their interests. No one who wants to attend their parties is hounded down before they come here. The school does not give them any data whatsoever on the percentages of the population that like to drink and listen to rap music. Nor should it give data to OBSA, CLSA, and APAM. If it is true that students really want to join their clubs as they say, then they should have no problem recruiting them the old fashioned way: gauging student interest, not assuming that they'll be interested because of some box they check on their application.

Oh, and while we're at it, I'd love to be invited to any APAM, CLSA, or OBSA retreat or dinner. And as anyone knows after someone once called me "pudgy," I don't discriminate on the basis of food. I love it all. 

There Is No Swine Flu in Claremont.. Thank God

I've been away from the computer for most of the day and at the risk that I descend into Matt Drudge levels of hyping things, let me just say that the supposed cases of swine flu in Claremont have been shown to be utterly without evidence. In Pasadena Stars-News, 

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health on Tuesday announced that a Claremont daughter and motherS suspected to have contracted swine flu have tested negative for the disease.

On Monday, officials at Our Lady of the Assumption School in Claremont notified parents that a student at the school possibly had swine flu. Some parents took their children out of school, and the school was closed Tuesday.

Classes at the school are scheduled to resume Wednesday.

From a Claremont Conservative Reader

I have respected her/his wishes and not made any alterations. The Claremont Conservative will host opinions of students if you write in to me. This was written by LeShawinqua Jenkins, which is a pseudonym.

Thoughts on Trayless Dining-

I don’t usually use a tray when I eat at the Claremont Colleges. When I do, I do because I need more than two hands to carry everything I have with me. It is not unusual for me to show up to lunch with a notebook, all before picking up a salad, and some soup. Sadly, I have but two hands.
I would love to reduce our environmental impact. I try not to take more food than I need. I try not to shower longer than I need to. I wonder why we have so much grass on our campus, despite being in a desert. As a fiscal conservative, I think that the maintenance costs (labor and resources) are a waste of money.

I believe global warming is happening, and worry about what will happen if it goes unnoticed. I think Al Gore is a nice guy, and I think he would have made a better president than George W. Bush.
We don’t need to go trayless in order to have a more sustainable campus. I want to keep trays in our dining halls. After reading the above, you might ask why. You might tell me that going trayless saves thousands of gallons of water. You might tell me about how it reduces food waste, and how wasted food used fossil fuels to be trucked to Claremont, all for naught. You might present the argument entirely in economic terms, arguing that the cafeterias need to do some belt tightening, and that not having to replace trays, or make as much food would be good for them.

However, the savings on the water bill would be negligible. At the highest water rate in the Claremont area, the cafeterias pay 3.007 dollars per 748 gallons of water used. When NC State went trayless, they estimated water savings of about 6000 gallons/week. NC State’s dining services probably serve many more students than ours do, but even assuming we saved as much water as NC State did, the savings would come out to a whopping 24 dollars and change per week. That comes out to about 1000 dollars per 9 month academic year. And we are about one tenth the size of NC State.

As for the reduced food waste, I agree that people should not take more than they need, but I paid for an all-inclusive meal plan, and I don’t think it is right for the dining hall to impair my ability to avail myself of that service. I know that extra helping of mashed potatoes make lead to my being called “pudgy”, and I do sometimes try a dish that I end up not liking, and that it goes to waste. But that is a choice I want to be able to make, and not have made for me, as Nirant Gupta of the Portside would have it. I already avoid getting take-out from Frary, because their take-out boxes are so small as to make it impossible to fit a hamburger, fries, and ketchup comfortably. It is unpleasant, and it results in my not getting to eat everything I want to eat.
As for the economic terms, I do see why it would be in the dining halls’ interest to remove trays, as it saves them money. But it doesn’t benefit me, the customer, and so I am befuddled as to why I should support such a change. Why would I ask a business to provide less while charging me as much (and probably more) than they did before? If this were purely about the environmental issues I have discussed (and the others that I am sure are out there), the solution would not be going absolutely trayless. There is a more comprehensive approach that would benefit everybody, from the Dining Halls, to the students, to whomever it is who pays our dining tab, as opposed to a one-sized fits all approach that limits people’s options, irrespective of whether they want them.

My proposal has two parts, an immediate part and a long term part. Part one would involve doing a 24 hour online survey on SurveyMonkey. Based on that survey, each dining hall would maintain a sufficient number of trays behind the check in desk at each dining hall, that anybody who asked for a tray, would be given one, just as is done with take-out boxes. This would not be something new. If we went trayless, trays would have to be kept on hand for individuals covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, it would just call for slightly more trays to be kept on hand. Most people wouldn’t go through the trouble of asking for trays, but for those of us who may have a lot to carry, or plan on eating a lot, we would have the option.

Furthermore, I would suggest that those who are seeking the change to trayless dining, initiate an education program. If the trays were to have information on them about how not using a tray saves water, it could have a similar effect as European cigarette packs, which warn in very graphic terms about the dangers of smoking. Between the extra effort to procure a tray, and the social stigma that asking for one might come with as a result of the education program, I suspect that the savings sought by the dining halls and environmental groups would be realized, without curtailing the desires of those who prefer to use trays.

The second step would be to take a broader look at waste on campus. The most obvious savings on the dining hall front would be to go to a la carte dining, where each student paid for exactly what they ate, which would encourage students to waste less, and allow students greater control over how much they spent at dining halls. More broadly, we could look at more ridiculous uses of resources, like the amount of money spent on landscaping on campus. A more pragmatic approach based on the realities on the ground, as opposed to political statements, would leave everybody on campus happier, with more money in their wallets, and a better feeling about their impact on the environment.

$7000 For Televisions?! ASCMC Blows Your Money

During Senate tonight, I learned that ASCMC's 2009 budget includes $7000 for televisions in Collins. This is a colossal waste of money, but as always, little will be done to curtail these excesses.

Josh Siegel, the VP of ASCMC, says that ASCMC will get to control whatever content is on the televisions. According to Siegel, Huang wanted to get the televisions, but was denied funding due to some fiscal prudence on the part of the administration, which is currently trying to cut back in a recession.

Did Siegel take that as his cue that maybe the televisions were of dubious use to the student body? No, he decided to bail Huang out of a boondoggle expenditure by offering ASCMC money instead.

Maybe he wants this television to be like that huge, big screen in the Coop that Associate Students of Pomona College has wasted its money on. What does that television do? Why, it just reads the headlines from the BBC and carries information that anyone could have gotten via email.

Outbreak in the Town of Claremont?

Those of you who thought Dean Jeff Huang may have overstated the case would do well to read what's going on in the Town of Claremont where a possible outbreak of swine flu occurred earlier today. 

I quote from one media report. [Emphasis mine.]

Although Los Angeles County has no confirmed cases of the potentially deadly virus, a student at Our Lady of the Assumption School in Claremont, who became ill after returning from a spring break trip to Mexico, was being tested for swine flu.

Huang's email is down below. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear CMC Students, Faculty, and Staff,

As you have probably read, Swine Flu has infected several people in the United States and Mexico. A small team of people at CMC began monitoring the situation on Saturday morning, and we will continue to monitor the situation as it evolves over the next several days.

The message below is from Student Health Services at the Claremont Colleges. It contains information about the symptoms to watch for, a list of preventative measures, and five additional resources on Swine Flu from the Centers for Disease Control. Please take a moment to review this information.

Sincerely,

Jeff Huang

VP & Dean 

Ben Casnocha on the Role of Side Projects in Innovation

My friend and erstwhile (and perhaps future) CMC student, Ben Casnocha CMC '11(?), has written an interesting take on the 20 percent time phenomenon that seems to be all the rage in Silicon Valley for what has rapidly become my favorite website, The American. 

On balance, the piece is strong, aside from some meandering references to the Founding Fathers that distract, but could have done well to mention the very first serious people to experiment with so-called "success on the side." He's right to mention 3M, but there were other companies that did similar kinds of things much earlier. One such person was Thomas Alva Edison who created Menlo Park, which history might record as really the first idea factor. Edison's experiences with Tesla might have been useful to Casnocha when studying what happens when a manager mistreats their workers' creativity or innovations. 

It was Edison who initially hired Nikola Tesla, the man who would eventually vie with him in the War of Currents. Tesla was promised $50,000 for working to improve Edison's dynamo, which he did after a year's worth of work. Edison purportedly cheated Tesla out of the money. (For more see, this Wikipedia footnote.) Tesla never forgave Edison for this slight, which Edison came to rue, as Tesla's alternating current motor replaced Edison's direct current. I bet Edison wishes he could take back his statement that Tesla's "ideas are splendid, but they are utterly impractical." I wonder just how many managers dismiss what Casnocha probably charitably calls the office "crackpot."

Returning back to Casnocha's piece, it also dodged a serious issue within companies that decide to create side project time: that of ownership. While it may be beneficial for a company's bottom line, there are serious issues associated with ownership of the ideas. Among these are: How should a company respond to someone who wants to create many different companies or side projects? Should it give him stock options? How about cash? Or is it merely enough to let someone be innovative? Every entrepreneur within a company will have a different incentive that will get them to produce still more and it is an important question for managers to know what that those incentives are so as to fully develop the company's human resources. 

The issue is of particular interest to me as my namesake and great grandfather, Charles Centinnel Carlisle, was an inventor.  (My full name is Charles Carlisle Johnson.)  My great grandfather,  despite his brilliance (or is it connivance?) did not make the most of his patents as they were owned by the company for which he worked. In fact, they still are. (He was also something of a scam artist, always looking for a quick buck, but that's another story.) My family history might have been somewhat different had my great grandfather been given an opportunity to innovate within a company that respected his intelligence. Instead, he spent most of his life trying to figure out ways to make money quick to support his family, rather than develop his full intellectual potential. (He arrived penniless from Scotland.)

His life story is a cautionary tale and Ben Casnocha deserves credit for bringing up some of the issues associated with innovation, but the real question is how do Google and other companies that practice side project time ward off the Edison-Tesla conflicts of the world, reward entrepreneurs, and foster innovation? 

Are We Due For an Anonymous Donation?

There's an interesting game afoot where thirteen university presidents have accepted a combined $68 million over the past two months, with the stipulation that they cannot go looking for the donor(s) and that the majority of the money go towards scholarships for women and minorities. (Put aside, for the moment, the ethics of just such a scholarship, especially for women when they currently outnumber men in college.)

What do the thirteen colleges and universities have in common? They are all led by women.

As such, some bloggers have been asking what college might be next and given that more than one criteria are shared by Claremont McKenna -- obscurity, more likely private than public, led by women, existence of other minority/women scholarships -- it would seem to me that Claremont McKenna is a natural choice.

I love mysteries. Here's to hoping this one gets uncovered sooner, rather than later.

Supreme Court to Decide Racial Preferences, Special CMC Professor Cameo

I'm an opponent of racial preferences. Somebody once asked me if there was any issue that I felt was just manifestly RIGHT that I believe in one hundred percent. Without batting an eye, I answered racial preferences.

Oftentimes, to be opposed to racial preferences is to be a racist. Witness one of the questions one of my co-judges asked me about interracial dating. She said, "Wow, given all I have heard about you, I thought you wouldn't believe in that kind of thing."

"Believe in them? I've even practiced them," I responded. 

It has never struck me as sound thinking that race matters. If race is a construct, then it can be deconstructed and a better construct, based upon better values like individualism, can be left in its place. Will we finally make the transition that Henry Maine once wrote about, a change from status to contracts? 

Just such a question is before the Supreme Court in the case, Ricci v. DeStefano. The long and short of it is that some white firefighters took an exam, the exam didn't give the results that the diversocrats wanted (read: not enough blacks got a high enough score), and so they threw the results out. The firefighters are unhappy and so they sued. It has no worked its way up to the Supreme Court. 

The media hasn't really been covering this case, which I suppose is a good thing, given that the media would try this case on CNN, rather than in the court, with predictably ugly constitution results. In any event, John Derbyshire of National Review has written "The Husks of Dead Theories," which insofar as I can tell is the best discussion of what the whole case is about and why it is important.  He mentions two books from Frederick Lynch, a CMC government professor, whose class "Inequality and Public Policy" I am currently taking. Here are the some of the books Derbyshire lists by Lynch: 

1989

Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action

Frederick Lynch

1997

The Diversity Machine: The Drive to Change the “White Male Workplace”

Frederick Lynch

And here are the essential graffs from Derbyshire's article: 

On this (I’ll admit not-very-solid) basis, I put forward a hypothesis: From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, having got rid of unjust laws, we were patiently waiting for things to equal out via education and the workings of the meritocracy. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, baffled that things werenot equaling out, we devoted ourselves to cooking up theories about why this was so, and what might be done about it. From the mid-2000s onward, confronted at last with the emptiness of all the theories, and with our inability to move any of the needles even a millimeter on their dials, we gave up. We still clapped along to the happy-face rhetoric, but in our hearts we no longer believed any of it.

. . . yet we were still stuck with all that accumulated jurisprudence, the husks and dried shells of false hopes and abandoned theories. That’s the law we live with today.

Jose Calderon: Professor or Activist? You Be The Judge

If you haven't followed the tiff between the Mountain View Republicans and Pitzer activist and (sometimes) professor, Jose Calderon, you've missed a golden opportunity to see the politics of the Left in full display. 

In the spirit of full disclosure, I've attended events hosted by the Mountain View Republicans and plan to become a rank-and-file member next semester. And so, I was particularly disappointed that I couldn't make it Monday night when they hosted Jim Gilchrist. (I had class at the time.)  As you know, I don't really agree with Jim Gilchrist about the supposed threat faced by Hispanic illegal immigration, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't have the ability to speak to he's blue in the face about whatever it is that interests him. Responsible people will make their own judgments as to whether or not his words hold true. But Pitzer Professor Jose Calderon -- the same professor who organized the Karl Rove protests -- doesn't want us to have a dialogue. Instead, he has pressured Buca di Beppo into forcing the Mountain View Republicans to hold the event elsewhere. 

There are a lot of students who have been writing me and contacting the Claremont Courier about how Donna Lowe of the Mountain View Republicans had suggested that Pitzer College. Many students have feigned worry that this comment will reflect poorly on the college and on the five colleges as a whole. While I hear their complaints, I disagree. I think it is far more likely that the remarks will reflect upon Professor Calderon. And to prove that point, I'll use the admittedly unscientific and yet still revealing comments that were left up on ratemyprofessor.com. As I haven't taken a class with him, I cannot comment. I leave it up to you to be the judge and remember, that these are Pitzer students when they say someone is too much of an activist, well, you get the point. 

Date	Class	E	H	C	RI				User Comments	Professors add your rebuttal here
7/30/06	Race & Eth nic R	4	5	4	2				He inspired me to change my major. Students either LOVE him or are put off by his politics. I thought he was terrific, and I learned a lot.
8/15/05	Race & Eth nic	4	4	4	5				Class was very unstructured and he went off on many tangents, very good community organizer too bad I cant say that about his teaching skills
1/26/05	race and e thnic	5	3	4	1				waste of time- teaches to the LCD- he may be intelligent but it doesnt show. Methods rival those of a kindergarden teacher. Be prepared to make posters!
4/30/04	SOC	3	1	1					This guy's a joke. He has an agenda and shoves it down your throat. The breadth of his knowledge is extremely limited. He doesn't know much outside of labor and chicano issues.
4/22/04	SOC	3	1	1

Date	Class	E	H	C	RI				User Comments	Professors add your rebuttal here
4/15/09	SOC35	5	2	3	1				Calderon is a very nice guy, and clearly cares about what he's teaching. However, he does not know how to lecture, and often times just talks about whatever he feels like talking about at the moment. He's often repetitive and unorganized and the class was not structured well.
3/25/09	Soc145	4	3	3	2				Biased and unorganized. Very repetitive lectures.
11/18/08	SOC145	5	5	4	4				Jose is a wonderful professor. You really get hands on experience rather than spending most of the semester in a classroom theorizing about things that are actually happening. Highly recommended.
5/1/08	Soc155	4	5	5	3				Readings are interesting, class is engaging, and he's pretty amazing!
10/24/07	raceethn	4	2	2	4				Jose is an inspirational guy, someone whose classes I keep taking just because I enjoy having a prof who is not caught up in all the politics. He sucks at teaching. He doesn't know how to lecture or lead discussions, and talks forever about whatever. Still, he is more passionate about social change than any other prof i have met.

Another Hero of the Vietnam War Deserves His Due

The other day I asked the organizer of the Hub Quiz about whether or not the total number of casualties included those who died during non-combat exercises. This question was in response to the trivia question about how many CMC alums died in the Vietnam War. The reason I asked this question was that the death of Lt. Charles H. Rudd '64 makes that number four. But who was he? 

Lt. Charles H. Rudd, ’64, U.S.N.R. son of Mr. & Mrs. Rudolph C. Rudd, 7130 Echo Ridge Drive.  B. Sacramento 4 May 1942, BS Political Science CMC 1964, entered service 21 Oct. 1964.  . . .  His F8 Crusader plunged into the ocean on training mission while approaching the carrier U.S.S. Hancock (CVA 19) for landing off San Diego the Friday before 8 Dec. 1971 =  3 Dec. 1971

Although he probably doesn't count in the official books as a Vietnam War hero, he counts in mine. Fortunately, he's on CMC's wall, but not on the Vietnam War memorial wall. 

Thanks go to Professor Ward Elliott for sending along this paragraph and for answering my questions about Lt. Rudd. 

Hub Quiz Trivia, Ward Elliott, and Vietnam

My team -- Bryce Gerard CMC '11, Riley Lewis CMC '11, and newcomer, Alex Berman CMC '12 -- won Hub Quiz again last night and got our $25 Visa gift cards (read: In & Out money). Our team name was "We Like 'Em Sober" and contrary to what Elizabeth Morgan (EM), this was not a commentary on her. 

 Each one of us shown in our respective categories. For Riley, it was famous buildings (he got 9 out ten). For Alex, it was accounting/economics/finance. And as I quipped last night, Bryce seems to know Disney movies surprisingly well for a heterosexual man. He assures me he hasn't seen a Disney movie in the last ten years.  

For me, it was CMC facts. This was a particularly fun event as Ward Elliott was on another team. I was something of Professor Elliott's (and to a certain extent, Professor Lofgren's) protegee when it comes to CMC history and so it is that every book -- there are only three of any worth --  and every document I can get my hands on that is about CMC, I have read. 

The head of Hub Quiz took her questions from Ken Starks' book, Commerce and Civilization, about the history of CMC. It is from that book that I knew that the first CMC graduate was a transfer from Hong Kong. It is also from that book that I knew that three CMC alums were killed in the Vietnam war. But I do not want you only to remember the number of three alums killed, you should remember who they were and what they lived and died for. Given that I learned about that fact from Ward Elliott's magnificent forty pages on the history of CMC, I thought it only fitting that I leave you with the words he wrote about those brave men. 

Many of CMC's returning Vietnam veterans were spat upon by angry protesters, who made a special trip to the airport for the purpose. Three CMC alumni, all officers and two of them ROTC graduates, were spared this indignity because they did not come back. Army First Lieutenant Jesse Clark III, '65 hit a mine on patrol in Vietnam, April 12, 1966, and died the next day. He received the Bronze Star for gallantry and the Purple Heart. Captain Stewart R. Moody '67 was a second-generation Army officer who had been a "Berger [Hall] Boy" at CMC on an ROTC scholarship. He too served in the First Air Cavalry Division and went down with his helicopter January 3, 1970, at the age of 24. His friends describe him as "friendly, a straight-shooter, tough as nails." Navy lieutenant (j.g.) William A. Pedersen '68 also went down with his helicopter. Pedersen had volunteered for service in Vietnam, served his full tour of duty, and won the Navy's Air Medal with strike/flight number "25," indicating 25 strike-flight awards. He also received the Navy Commendation Medal, with Combat "V." When his tour was over, his replacement was not expected for ten days. Rather than subject the men with whom he had served to extra duty, he volunteered once more, to serve until his replacement arrived. On the second day after answering this final call, he was killed in action. Pedersen was a student and fellow cycling enthusiast of Harry Jaffa, who had pedalled the San Gabriel foothills with him many times on pre-dawn rides. Jaffa dedicated his book The Conditions of Freedom (1975), to Pedersen with these words:

Billy Pedersen was a scholar, an athlete, an officer, and a gentleman. He was one of those "golden lads" of whom A.E. Housman wrote, who went to war, not gaily, but without a doubt that freedom and duty spoke with a single voice.... His patriotism was so natural to him that I think he was hardly aware of it.

CMC Professor, Jon A. Shields's Book Reviewed by the New York Times

---

April 25, 2009

BELIEFS

A Provocative Work About the Christian Right

By PETER STEINFELS

If you wanted a book title to speed the pulse of liberal academics, journalists and politicians, you couldn’t do much better than “The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.” For many people that’s a title akin to “The Winning Ways of Serial Killers.”

The two leading arguments of the book, written by Jon A. Shields and published last month by Princeton University Press, are no less provocative.

“Many Christian-right organizations,” Mr. Shields writes, “have helped create a more participatory democracy by successfully mobilizing conservative evangelicals, one of the most politically alienated constituencies in 20th-century America.”

Well, actually that thesis, which the book supports with all the requisite tables and data about party identification, voter turnout, and political knowledge and activity, might be accepted by many of Mr. Shields’s fellow political scientists.

It is his second argument that is sure to stir cries of “No, no, no; impossible.”

“The vast majority of Christian-right leaders,” he writes, “have long labored to inculcate deliberative norms in their rank-and-file activists — especially the practice of civility and respect; the cultivation of dialogue by listening and asking questions; the rejection of appeals to theology; and the practice of careful moral reasoning.”

Mr. Shields, a 34-year-old assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, reached this conclusion after interviewing leaders of 30 Christian-right organizations, attending training seminars and surveying the materials used to instruct the rank and file.

Again and again he encountered the same injunctions: Remain civil. Engage others in conversation by inquiring into their viewpoints. Eschew arguments based on religion or the Bible in favor of facts and reasoning that might persuade people regardless of their religious convictions.

In one of the most compelling sections of his book, he describes a Christian-right group’s three-day anti-abortion campaign on a Colorado campus to engage in discussions with the thousands of students who were drawn to an exhibit featuring images of embryos and aborted fetuses as well as scientific information about fetal development.

He recounts the insistence by the group’s staff that volunteers remain civil, even in the face of epithets ranging from obscenities to “Nazi scum.” Volunteers were instructed to offer secular arguments about the moral status of the fetus, rather than cite Scripture or theological reasons for it. Several volunteers even helped counterdemonstrators erect their own display.

Groups opposed to abortion have solid pragmatic grounds for emphasizing civility and respect, Mr. Shields writes; they are well aware of public hostility and negative news coverage arising from Operation Rescue’s blockades of abortion clinics in the late 1980s, to say nothing of the killing of a half-dozen abortion providers in the 1990s. But many activists also told him that their commitment to respect and dialogue had arisen directly from their religious beliefs.

Mr. Shields does not pretend that this is the whole story. In his research, he observed a gamut of anti-abortion activities. Discipline typically prevails at the annual March for Life in Washington, but contrary to the experience on the Colorado campus, religious appeals are ubiquitous. Sidewalk counseling outside abortion clinics is often loosely organized and mixes the aggressive with the compassionate.

Demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, by abortion opponents and supporters of abortion rights alike, strike him as bringing out the worst in everybody. But he believes that those he calls “radical” Christian anti-abortion activists, like Randall Terry, now leading the charge against President Obama’s commencement talk next month at the University of Notre Dame, are not the representative figures that coverage in the news media often suggests.

It could be argued that “The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right” actually comprises three books. One is about the Christian right. One is about the anti-abortion movement. One is about democratic theory.

The fit is not perfect. The Christian right addresses issues as varied as displaying the Ten Commandments and teaching about evolution, draws on a strongly evangelical base and often celebrates family and nation in strident ways. It is not identical with the anti-abortion movement, which often draws on a significantly different, especially Roman Catholic, ethos.

And questions about participation, mobilization and deliberation in democratic life stretch well beyond either of these contemporary phenomena.

In an interview this week, Mr. Shields explained how these topics had converged for him. He began his work with an interest in political theory and social movements, but “no special interest in religion.” Indeed, he writes in the book that “my liberal Protestant upbringing initially made me feel out of place hanging out with conservative Christians.”

His desire to do fieldwork led him to focus on anti-abortion activists, who, he said, are constantly engaged in grass-roots activities, unlike many in Christian-right ranks, who occasionally write letters to Congress and send checks to support their causes and candidates.

At that point, “I was probably pro-choice, in a soft way,” he said.

Over time, Mr. Shields said, he grew more interested in Christianity, eventually converting to Catholicism, and became opposed to abortion. But he said he had “not at all approached this work as an apologist.”

Still, critics will pit his account against negative reporting on the Christian right and the anti-abortion movement. And his book recognizes the tension in his ideal of a democratic politics at once participatory and deliberative: “Social movements will never cultivate deliberation in the fullest sense, because they are ultimately driven and maintained by strong moral convictions.”

It would be a failure of democratic virtue, however, if these shortcomings kept this provocative book from getting a hearing.