More On Tray Banning

I frankly don't understand the thinking behind banning trays on campus.

Here are several of the reasons I don't fully think it was well thought through. I suspect that a lot of people now have a less than ideal vision of the dining hall, particularly as they remember the times when there were trays. From a development office point of view, these students are going to be upset that a huge part of their socializing was altered for seemingly ideological reasons. Isn't a huge part of campus socializing around the dinner or lunch table?

I spoke with some students at Pomona College regarding the tray ban at their campus and they inform me that Frary has become just filthy now that students have no trays. Excess food, rather than falling on trays, falls on the table and the dining hall staff has an already limited work force to keep the place clean.

What's more: Pomona College's Frary Dining Hall actually threw out half their trays and deposited them in a landfill. Not so green, when you think about it.

At Scripps, they still use trays, but only to put the dishes on them. Ironically, this means that they still have to be cleaned.

If someone were really sincere about protesting this tray ban, here's my advice: for a full day, campus wide, refuse to clean your place. Apologize profusely to the dining hall people, but make it very clear that it is not a reflection on them, but on the college as a whole.

Ghost Sighting at Scripps College?

Two Scrippsie freshmen in Clark Hall have been complaining about a shadow that has been following them around the dorm and that there are random gusts of wind in their room.

They also say that they saw this girl came scrambling through the bushes and apparently disappeared.

The girls said that this happened on 601. So you'll forgive me if I somewhat doubt it...

Deb Wood Pledges to Find the Drunken Perpetrators!

Silly Dean Deb Wood is at it again. You remember her, right? She's the administrator who made Scripps College a national laughingstock when she called for Scripps to ban the white party. Here she is tonight promising to punish the "perpetrators" of an alleged bias related incident.

Never you mind, of course, that she has no such power to do so under California's Leonard Law and that at most, all the police can do is charge whatever poor student with "vandalism." Still, it should give us a bit of fright that Dean Wood sees this as one of her jobs. I guess she has to justify that enormous salary she takes in...

What's more troubling, though, is that they won't even tell us what was said, only that we have to trust them that it was pretty offensive. Given the track record of administrators -- the "Hillary is a foxy lesbian -- comment anyone -- I'm inclined to reserve judgment until I get the facts. Here's Dean Wood's email to the entire campus. Could somebody please write in and tell me what was said?

As I advised you last week, The Claremont Colleges have a bias protocol that we follow when bias incidents and/or hate crimes occur. I am saddened and disappointed to begin the academic year with both racist and sexist incidents.

Both types of incidents involved a person or persons unknown scrawling racist and sexist epithets on students' write and wipe boards in the residence halls. Given that these incidents occurred following the end of dry week and substantial drinking, many people might shrug off the incidents, saying it was probably stupid drunks. I ask you not to shrug it off and not to give the perpetrators of these incidents an excuse for their behavior.

Regardless of the intent and regardless of the condition in which the perpetrators may have put themselves, they did harm. The students upon whose doors these words were scrawled were hurt. The people who saw it were hurt. It causes one to wonder what steps have any of the colleges made toward building a supportive, inclusive community when acts like this still occur ?

This kind of conduct constitutes a bias incident and anyone with information about the perpetrator(s) of the incidents should contact an RA, DOS staff member or campus safety.

Anyone in need of support or wishing to discuss this incident is welcome and encouraged to contact the resource which best meets their needs. Resources include:

+staff at OBSA- (909) 621-8248
+ staff at CLSA- (909) 621-8044
+ staff on the Asian American Advisory Board
+ Res Life Staff- (909) 621-8277 or (909) 607-4307
+ Chaplains Office- (909) 621-8685
+ SCORE staff (909) 607-8869
+ Scripps Diversity Coordinating Committee- (Amy Marcus- Newhall or Marla Love)
+ staff at MCAPS ( Monsour) - (909) 621-8202
+ DOS (909) 621-8277

We are a supportive, caring community and bias related incidents will not
be tolerated. Any time a community member becomes aware of a racist,
sexist, heterosexist bias incident on our campus, a potential bias
incident or hate crime, or any other type of crime, they are urged to
appropriate action to combat the incident. These actions might include:

calling campus safety,
photographing the incident,
identifying the perpetrator,
intervening in the moment if safe to do so,
writing a letter or article for one of the student news publications,
sponsoring, attending or participating in educational programming,
encouraging your peers to do the same.

In accordance with the Communication Protocol for Bias
Related Incidents for The Claremont Colleges a binder of incidents is
kept in the Dean of Students Office, located in Balch Hall, room 112,
SARLO and SCORE.

Persons wishing to review this binder may do so during regular office
hours Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM .

Debra Wood
Vice President & Dean of Students
Scripps College
The Women's College.Claremont
1030 N. Columbia
Claremont, CA 91711
phone:(909)621-8277
fax: (909)607-7081
email:debra.wood@scrippscollege.edu

CMC Alum Named Vice President of California's Largest Foundation

Just in:

CMC alum Joseph M. Pon of Applied Materials was named Vice President of programs for the James Irvine Foundation, which is a California-based, billion dollar foundation.

And before you ask, yes, I did add it to the school's wikipedia page!

I have my criticisms of the James Irvine Foundation, among them their grants to the people of California tend to make more of them doles than true citizens, but that's a conversation for another time. Well done, Mr. Pon.

CGU Prof. Paul J. Zak on Reason.TV

Let me create a short experiment with you:

I strongly dislike California's sales tax hike so I am constantly working on ways to avoid it and/or violate.

One such way is to pay cash for a lot of things on campus. Depending on the teller, you can avoid paying sales tax on most meals, particularly at Pomona College. (In my view, taxing food is immoral and may even be a civil rights issue.)

Still another way to avoid paying the tax is to pay for used appliances via Craigslist, which I turned to to buy nearly all of my cooking ingedrients. (For those who haven't read this masterful piece on Craigslist in Wired, I forcefully recommend it.)

Despite the low price for most appliances on Craigslist, I almost certainly expected to be cheated and even budgeted for that in the amount of money I took out of the bank account. And yet, curiously, I was not. This made me intrigued and then I remembered the thesis of CGU Professor Paul J. Zak's book, Moral Markets -- namely, that trust is built up through markets and that that's what distinguishes our highly social species from others.

Have a look at an interview he did with Reason.TV. It is utterly fascinating.

Obama, Leave the Kids Alone! Professor Pitney Makes a Cameo

Professor John J. Pitney Jr. has a short post up at National Review's Corner about Obama's speech. He writes,

The text of the president’s speech to schoolchildren is largely inoffensive. But it contains at least one political gaffe. If you quit school, he tells the kids, “You’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.” Among Americans between ages 65 and 74, 20.7 percent quit before finishing high school. For those 75 and older, the figure is 27.4 percent. The latter group includes some who quit in order to enlist in the armed forces after Pearl Harbor. And yet the president seems to be calling them unpatriotic.

Pitney's right to criticize Obama for failing to take a nuanced position on drop out rates over time. It would have been very easy to say something like, "while your grandparents might not have had to graduate, times are changing and we need all hands on deck."

On the whole, I thought the speech was lackluster and indicative of the kind of narcissism of we've come to expect from Obama. The speech, really, is about himself. Didn't he write two books about himself and isn't that enough?

He tells students not to drop out so that they can achieve as much as he did, conveniently forgetting the scholarships to private schools that he enjoyed. On the policy side, he gives little comfort in the form of vouchers. His Department of Education even went out of their way to suppress a study that showed that students in the D.C. voucher program had benefited from vouchers.

CMC's Silly Sexual Harassment Policy

Because I'm a masochist and I have a few spare moments between classes, I decided that I would read the sexual harassment policy on campus. Boy, there's enough fodder in there for about ten articles.

For instance, the code of conduct bans "remarks of a sexual nature about a person's clothing or body, whether or not intended to be complimentary", "remarks about sexual activity or speculations about previous sexual experience," or "other comments of a sexual nature, including sexually explicit statements, questions, jokes or anecdotes."

Is there a CMCer who has not violated this? Is Sunday Collins morning brunch designed to violate as much of the code of conduct as possible?