Please, Don't Tell Us What the "Real World" Is Like

Michael Wilner CMC '11's blog post on alcohol and the school policy quotes our fearless leader, Tammy Phan CMC '11, as saying the following:

“Students here are treated like adults,” Phan stated. “Part of our education is learning how to socialize and network in the real world, and the real world includes alcohol.” 

. . .

“The registrar’s office used to give out champagne to every senior who turned in their thesis, which led to the fountain party,” Phan added. “They stopped doing that. ASCMC stepped in to foot the bill. And Madrigals never started with ASCMC, but with the threat of losing it, Brad Walters revived it when he was president. And we’re doing the same thing now.”

“We try to preserve the culture here,” she continued, “as we know it.”

These are absurd statements. The real world does not reward binge drinking. No office party will ask you how fast you can black out. It's all about moderation. Being a moderate person in your habits and cultivating finer appetites than mere will is what it means to be an adult. With the freedoms of adulthood come the trappings of responsibility. Those who live by boozing often end up loosing. Sure, we all know exceptions to this -- investment bankers and the like -- but they drink to escape the work that they've done and even that culture is more show than substance. You don't have to drink in modern America anymore. This isn't Mad Men.

To read CMC's history is to know that this narrative of alcohol everywhere in the real world is not true. Back in the day, professors lived in the dorms with the students. Nowadays our dorms are worse than Animal House. (We don't even seem to have the charm.) People forget this, but back when the college had a much more laissez-faire attitude to drinking was a different time entirely. It was before lawsuits, before the hook up culture (which absolutely harms the women -- and the men -- on campus), and before the school grew so large that it became tough to know who everyone was. Such a school could socially police its students and their wet campus. Nowadays, it can't do that, which explains all of the emergency room visits. 

Oh, and by the way, some of us came here for the education, not the drunken stupor.

"Inside Job"?: Robbery of CMS Football Team, Referees Raises Important Questions

After narrowly defeating La Verne, CMS football team came back to their locker rooms to find that someone had been rummaging through their affairs and "stolen iPods, iPhones, Blackberries, and a wallet or two" from the winning team. (It is not yet known at this time what was stolen from the referees.)

A police report was filed and inventory of stolen items and their approximate value was taken. Michael Sutton, CMS's athletic director, promised the boys that the school's insurance policy would cover the loss of their stolen property.

Less clear was how the vandals managed to gain access to the locked locker room. An inside job is feared.

It seems the thieves knew right where to look and broke into the coaches offices. Nothing was taken there, despite wallets, keys, and phones there. Instead, the robbers dumped a coach's bag where they found a key chain where a key permitted access to the CMS locker room was found.

The robbers, one student speculated to me, must have known which key to use as the key chain has quite a few keys on it. Those keys later turned up when they were found on the steps of the stairs outside of the entry way to the locker room.

I'll report more on this as I know more. If you know anything, please put it in the comment section or contact Claremont Police.

Michael Wilner Owes Me A Correction In His Forum Article About Alcohol Policy.

Wilner's done it again!  (Hey, thinking two out of three people pictured here are honest, ain't bad, right?)

Michael Wilner CMC '11 has written another post for The Claremont Forum that professes to do responsible journalism. Sadly, it's a bit of flim flam and requires at least one correction in just one sentence. 

Without any real attribution, he writes about yours truly:

"Let me take a step back," Spellman told the Forum. "When I first got here, I did not come with a mandate or an expectation that I would look at alcohol. That was never part of the conversation."

At the time of Spellman's arrival, a conservative student blog linked to a report from the Sadie Lou Standard that implied otherwise.

First of all, in traditional journalism to which Michael aspires, you link or cite the blog in question (or heaven forbid -- actually interview the person making the claim.) Anything other than letting a source speak for himself is dishonest. I never "implied" anything, nor, by the way, did I not just link to anything either. I linked to and I typed up the entire article.

It's not like he had to go very far to find my writings on the topic. I openly speculated in a blog post that Dean Spellman was being brought here to change our alcohol policy -- and I celebrated that move. I was even accurately quoted by the left-wing newspaper on campus, The Claremont Port Side. Here's what they wrote. (Ironic isn't it that a newspaper that's ideologically opposed to me gives me a fairer shake than the newspaper I subsidize through my school fees and that professes to be objective....) Anyways, here it is:

A piece of this speculation came in the form of a Claremont Conservative blog post by Charles Johnson, CMC ‘11, that took large excerpts from an anonymous opinion article in The Sadie Lou Standard, a student publication at Sarah Lawrence College. Though the Standard no longer publishes, the article provides useful insight into Spellman’s approach to alcohol and the campus party culture in her position as Sarah Lawrence Dean of Students. The author of the 2007 piece argued that Spellman gained campus-wide notoriety for her “disdain for sexually-imbued or alcohol-containing events” and that “responsible, periodic, socially-endorsed drinking seems to be a concept that completely eludes” her.

Johnson portrayed Spellman’s appointment as a possible “hope for conservatives” at a time when CMC “lurches still further to the left.” And, if he sought to define conservatives as either the residents of the substance-free Stark Hall or any individual opposed to the typical rowdiness of weekend life at CMC, he had a point. After the March cancellation of Thursday Night Club, and in light of the Alcohol Task Force’s impending conclusions, concern developed that Spellman’s arrival signaled the beginning of profound changes to CMC’s alcohol policy, and therefore, to its social scene as a whole..

The Port Side disagreed with me about my estimation of Dean Spellman and the predictions I had. 

Of course, it doesn't hurt that I was right about nearly everything I predicted. Michael writes as much later in the subsection [emphasis mine].

Spellman does admit to her involvement in the review of alcohol policy at Sarah Lawrence, and even says her “legacy” may very well be a policy that is “perceived as being more stringent.” The college had previously no standard protocol for handling case-by-case drinking indiscretions, and she sat on a committee to organize such a protocol. And while she didn’t chair it, she was responsible for making sure the committee came together – and that it accomplished its aims.

You see Michael, I'm allowed to do that. I called it "speculation" and no one doubts that the views expressed were speculation. I used a question mark in the title and used such words as "might" to signal how I hoped it would be a victory for conservative students on campus who disdain the out of control social atmosphere on campus.

I never pretend to be anything other than an opinion journalist. Anyone who doubts my partisan inclinations can look at the masthead. I am a "Claremont conservative" -- and proud of it.

Wilner likes to flaunt his supposed journalistic ethics, but as we have already noted, he only got into the business of journalism through wheeling and dealing with none other than President Gann, who got him his first entree there because the world of finance had given up paid internships.  His second job -- this time for the Anderson Cooper show at CNN -- came through connections with a CMC alumni. Typically, when you refer to someone making accusations, you actually ask them what the accusations are. Maybe he'll learn that skill when he does real reporting?

I expect -- but doubt I shall receive a correction.