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

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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.