Pomona's 47 Fixation Question

I've heard all these legends about Pomona and the number 47.

Any truth to any of them whatsoever?

Claremont Colleges Host (Ex)-Convicts' Theatre Program

Yes, you read that right. I do not make this stuff up. I just report it to you.

Notable nuggets from this article include the following:

Activists say employers will dismiss an applicant immediately, without considering their job skills, when the applicant is an ex-convict.

It's a form of discrimination that activists say is intolerable. But through a theatrical project that started this week, the women's studies program at the Claremont Colleges aims to help.

On Tuesday, students, ex-convicts and business owners held the first of five workshops at Pomona College where participants are working to write and rehearse a play about employment issues faced by female ex-convicts.

...

"I think people are willing to blame individuals for the problem - the individual women who have been incarcerated - and are less willing to look at the forces and the discrimination that has created this system," said Megan Hanley, a Scripps College senior in the course.

"I think what we're hoping to do with this project is to reveal the individual story, and also to debunk the myth that it's one woman's fault."

So now it's not your fault if you're a criminal? If it's discrimination to not want to be around former prisoners, I must be some kind of bigot.

Given that it's not even second semester and we've had one stabbing, several break-ins, and fights, does anyone else think that bringing former convicts to college is a bad idea?

Several weeks ago we were confronted with a proposal by Pomona Student President Elspeth Hilton (Pomona '08) to ban Sodexho for their "practices." One such practice is Sodexho's catering of prisons. Apparently someone missed Ms. Hilton's memo. At Pomona, they not only have convicts' food, but they watch (ex-)convicts play.

Zoom! Zoom! in my School-Funded Honda Civic

Flexcar is finally here, and not without much fanfare. There are, of course, only four of them. So Vroom Vroom, but not so fast. They'll be a waiting list for sure.

The Student Life reports that

Flexcar allows students to use a car for $7 an hour or $49 per day. Included in those fees are the car, gas, insurance, vehicle maintenance, and a parking permit. Additionally, some of the money students pay to use Flexcar may be reimbursed by the Pomona College Internship Program if used to travel to an off-campus internship or job.

To apply for a Flexcar, a student needs to have a valid U.S. driver’s license and a clean driving record if they are under 21. Students age 21 or over may have no more than two moving violations within two years, and may not have an accident or major ticket violation on their record, including driving under the influence. Applications for using a Flexcar can be filled out online, and students under 21 must submit a parental consent form. Flexcars are also available to faculty and staff.

How do we feel about that? College kids getting to drive a car that isn't theirs for under $49.00 a day? Do people treat rental cars as nicely as they do their own cars? Obviously not.

Oh, what I wouldn't give to see the car crash rate for Flexcars!

But, hey all the state schools are doing it, so why shouldn't the 5-C consortium?

The first school to use Flexcars was the University of Washington, which has 13 cars on campus. Portland State University, the University of Florida, Emory University, UC San Diego, and The Ohio State University are also Flexcar users.

Mandatory reading before Bono comes to town

As we approach B-day, I'll blog more about this subject. Until then, it's time to think creatively about how to stop the Bonos of the world. The Bonos of the world actually do more harm than good. See Theroux's article in the International Herald Tribune aptly titled "The Rock Star's Burden."

I hope to convince you, dear readers, that bringing Bono to school as an emissary without someone like a William Easterly to challenge him, is one of the most dangerous things our school has done for it encourages us to see a rock star as a kind of role model for ending the plight of so many. Naturally, I plan on asking some hard hitting questions and maybe even leafleting.

Asian American Student Center Defeated Again!

Hallelujahs all around.

The Student Life reports that...

The Asian American Student Alliance, a politically inclined 5-C organization that has been lobbying the Claremont University Consortium for a campus-wide Asian American Student Center, will shift away from that proposal this semester, a member of the group said this past week. Such a shift will effectively end the third student-led push for such a center in two decades.

One small step for racial justice, one giant step against educational apartheid. The best thing is that the students themselves gave it up.

Former CMC Prof. David W. Berson Joins PMI

News from outside the Claremont McKenna bubble.

Today PMI announced that David W. Berson would be the new Chief Economist and Strategist.

[Berson] has held several teaching positions at the University of Michigan, Claremont McKenna College, and Claremont Graduate School. Berson has published more than ten papers on the U.S. housing and mortgage markets.

Looks like we're working real hard to down play that we're now an Economics Trade School.

Can't Pay? Don't Lay!

At the risk of social exclusion and genuine shunning, let me just say that I love birth control, but I hate subsidized drugs. They wildly distort the market.

According to Pomona's Student Life, birth control prescription prices jumped from $10 to $15 a month up to $25 to $50 a month at Student Health Services. What the school is doing providing birth control when there's a Planned Parenthood, a RiteAid and numerous other organizations nearby is any body's guess.

Fortunately, government has stepped in (at least at some schools)!

While student senate presidents from Scripps and Pitzer have also expressed interest in subsidizing the cost of contraceptives, CMC Student Body President Brad Walters ’08 said in a statement that CMC students would probably consider birth control prices “outside the purview of the college” and see “student government involvement with the issue to be inappropriate.”

And it's not already inappropriate that all students already pay for sex supplies for a select few?

Memo to next wealthy donor: Forget about endowing an economics department. It's all about the sex funds.

When government has failed to step in, some have taken to an international trade to fulfill their fix.

Marisa Robertson ’08 was studying abroad in Spain, where the device only costs about $20 and a prescription isn’t required. She stocked up on birth control while she was abroad and has asked a friend who is currently studying there to bring more back.

That's being entrepreneurial in college. It might also be illegal. I guess there are unjust laws just as there are unjust men.

Jeopardy???

So I took the College Jeopardy test today. All and all, I think I did well.

Two things: I think it went well, but I'm definitely going to have to refresh my knowledge of poetry, Latin and roman culture, contemporary music (read: rap) and literature. I was so close to typing in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, but I ran out of time!

Assuming if you answer all the questions, it's still random as to whether or not you'll be on. For shame. A good article on how to break into Jeopardy! is this article.

God willing, I'll bust in by senior year.

CMC John Roth on Forgiveness

Professor John Roth, the soul of CMC and of its Holocaust program, gave a speech at DePauw where he's a visiting professor this academic year, on the nature of forgiveness.

"To forgive means to be merciful, to pardon an offense or an offender, to give up a claim against another individual, to set aside a debt, to relinquish anger or resentment however justifiable those feeling may be, to free a person from the burden of guilt," Roth told his audience. "Thus, forgiveness is what we may call afterward. It has that status partly because of the holocaust and other human catastrophes."

I wonder sometimes if forgiveness must necessarily come afterwards. Might there be preemptive forgiveness in which we acknowledge the shortcomings of others before they fail us?

Giving Back to CMC With Your Word and Your Dollar

With the 200 million dollar grant we're getting from Robert Day, I've been thinking a lot about how our school will join that privileged few, household-name liberal arts college category and what that means for the school.

Ben Casnocha, a fellow student and guy with some real world experience, gave me this pearl of student-centered evangelism: spread the word.

Mission for CMC students: Go out and get ten people who have never heard of Claremont McKenna to apply.

As an East Coast prep school kid, I'm trying to do my part. (Hopefully, if this blog gets read, I'll have done my fair share.) But on a more personal level, the model of Choate School in Connecticut (later stolen by J.F.K.) was "ask not what you can do for yourself, ask what you can do for your school." Helping get your school's name out helps your degree gain value.

Day put it best: "I've been very successful and want to put it back in the system." Good on you, Mr. Day.

Did Robert Day Really Make Our Day? Yes He Did!

Today alumnus Robert A. Day gave Claremont McKenna (CMC) the largest gift in the history of liberal arts colleges. Fully 200 million dollars will be given exclusively to the Economics Department, boosting the reputation of the already strong Economics Department. (We were number one in a recent survey.) The news media buzzes with the story. Here we are on ABC Money. Here we are on BusinessWire. Here we are in The Los Angeles Times. Here we are in the San Francisco Chronicle. Suffice it to say, Day is super rich. He makes the Gates gift of 20 million look like chump change.

I'm going to summarize some of the arguments I've heard surrounding this mammoth sum of mullah. To say that a gift of 200 million dollars won't have an effect on how life is at CMC is pure fiction. But what effect will it have? I believe it will be mostly positive.

Undeniably, this effort will boost our peer school rating, but it will also wed us to financial economics for the conceivable future. CMC's reputation, now virtually non-existent, will be tied to finance and money. Not necessarily bad things if you want to be growing an endowment, but still potentially dangerous for a school that still wants to be seen as a liberal arts college.

Day is no fool. Scholarships will be available for these new Financial Economics majors and yours truly, is even considering dual majoring with Financial Economics and Government. I don't know a damn thing about economics so if anyone wants to give me a few good books, I'd appreciate it. Here's the program summed up by the AP.

The gift will create the Robert Day Scholars Program, which builds upon the best elements of an undergraduate liberal arts education with state-of-the-art curricula in finance, accounting, and organizational leadership, the college said.

The gift creates Claremont McKenna's first graduate program, a one-year master's for 50 students that includes hiring eight professors.

The goal is to create a cadre of young people "who show leadership and who have judgment, which is the hardest thing to find," said Day.

But word on the street is that Day got a C on his senior thesis, which was nothing more than an outline for the billionaire-company he later built, what does that mean for students who do well in the program? Just what kind of judgment did CMC show by giving him a C?

Left-Wing Speakers Again? Where's My Balance?

Many of you chided me for arguing against the rash of left-wing speakers we've had, or will have, on campus. You had your point and that we shouldn't live in an intellectual "echo chamber."

I support and fervently believe in intellectual balance. The only problem is that I haven't been getting any of it at Claremont McKenna. Though these speakers may be good for name recognition, it's profile over substance and it's fundamentally anti-CMC. Granted, we haven't reached the point yet where we invite the point where we invite Ahmadinejad, but that's setting the standard rather low, isn't it?

The standard's been set pretty low already. Instead of left wing thinkers, we're getting left wing entertainers. That's a shame. I want to go head to head with some of the best that the Left has to offer. Instead I get little substance and a whole lot of name recognition. In part, I think this has to do with the whole obsession the Left has with celebrity.

Besides Bono and Gore Vidal, we now have Anderson Cooper rolling into town on Nov. 13. Cooper, whose sole claim to fame is he asked a tough question of already-embattled Lousiana Senator Mary Landrieu, is hardly that interesting. Nobody mentions that he all but ignored the real screw ups: Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanc. Suave, debonair, and altogether uninteresting, he'll no doubt grow our profile appearance in the left-wing blogosphere. That CMC is billing him as someone who has an "honest passion" is laughable.

Anderson Cooper is emblematic of a wider trend towards the Left that Claremont McKenna seems to be experiencing. We've got another discussion on the N-word--an issue I really don't see affecting anyone and that needed not just a speaker, but a panel discussion with none other than CMC Professor Adam Bradley , Samamtha Stecker '08; Natalia Bailey '10; Osie Leon Wood, Jr., director of the Ronald McNair Scholars Program at CGU and pastor and founder of North Long Beach Community Prayer, rapper Warren G, and moderated by Jeff Huang, Vice President of Student Affairs. Yawn. Been there, done that. Hope the dessert's good.

Here's the problem with left winger after left winger at CMC: If the Athenaeum is supposed to be a place where leaders of today come to talk to us about the leaders of tomorrow, what am I suppose to think about what a leader is looks like when I go out into the "real world"?

Pitzer, Now Stanford: New Media's Perils

A few days back CNN featured the Youtube.com class Pitzer College was running. Naturally, it being Pitzer, friend to terrorists and stoners alike, I just rolled my eyes.

But now the Stanford Daily is reporting that Stanford too is joining the new media bandwagon with its latest course on the psychology of Facebook.com and other user interfaces, I've lost all hope in higher education. Ostensibly designed to "study" Facebook's user interface, the course will become nothing more than a Facebook stalker's dream.

The money quotation from the professor himself:

“What is so interesting about Facebook is that nobody really understands it, and we are all still figuring it out. One of the goals of this class is for us to try to figure it out together.”

It ain't rocket science. The most fascinating thing to college students and teens has always been themselves.

Pitzer College: Imagine No Water and Less Energy

Courtesy of the Bulletin.

CLAREMONT - Actor Robert Redford spoke at Pitzer College during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the college's new environmentally friendly dorms Monday. The dorms, with living space for 318 students, use less energy and water than traditional dorms and include features such as solar panels and ultra-low-flush toilets.

Less water? God forbid we had them shower.

I wonder how they feel about the coming flexcars, global warming and all. (More on that in the coming days...)

CMC Professor Frederick Lynch on Sensitivity Training

Claremont McKenna Associate Professor of Government Dr. Frederick Lynch on racial sensitive training:

Certain kinds of diversity training can actually exacerbate the problem by breeding resentment, according to Frederick Lynch, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., and the author of The Diversity Machine: The Drive to Change the 'White Male Workplace.' "If it's in-your-face, people -- particularly Americans -- don't like that," he says. In addition, if people feel they have to "walk on eggshells" to avoid offending people, "that reinforces group barriers."

Pity the leaders of the racial retreats don't listen to one of our professors.

Charles Murray: Abolish the SAT

Over at the NYtimes.com, Charles Murray says that we ought to abolish the SAT in favor of the subject tests.

I took a lot of Advance Placement tests and a fair number of subject tests back at Milton Academy. On average, I did better on the subject tests because I was much more passionate about the material. I liked reading the history texts or the French texts, much more than the dull English texts. (There's only so much I can take of reading Native American poetry or some other multicultural text.)

The reason people's test scores on the subject tests tend to be greater predictors of college success would seem to a no-brainer: people do well in the subject matters they love. Hopefully, more focus on the subject tests will mean more subject tests and more students learning about wider topics.

I've always stood opposed to the monopoly and the stranglehold of ideas that the College Board maintains. With more tests, we get to test the many different kind of intelligences out there and can help better sort the rich intellectual diversity we're only beginning to tap.

Thinking About Identity

Many of you will remember the fake hate crime at CMC several years back. This past weekend I came across that old article written by Steve Sailer and in the wake of these retreats, I thought it a good way of framing the discussion.

With all the thinking I've been doing around issues of identity, I wonder if there's moral responsibility on the part of educators to cease creating divisons and in the case of the Asian American Advisory Board retreat to stop creating the paternalistic impression that non-white students have "special needs." No one has explained to me what those special needs are, but maybe the term itself is something designed to be overbroad.

I wonder if Steve Sailer, writing several years ago in The American Conservative was right.

He wrote:

The university's main concern appears to be to make students feel "comfortable," a word that reappears constantly in Claremont publications despite the obvious hopelessness of the project. The only way to make 19-year-olds feel comfortable is to wait 30 years while they sag into their well-padded maturities. Right now, they are teenagers and their surging hormones have far more important emotions for them to feel than comfort. Adults, however, who make careers out of encouraging kids to mold permanently self-pitying identities around their transient social discomforts have much to answer for.

Encourage Everyone

Yesterday's Science Friday 50-minute segment talks about encouraging women in mathematics. You can listen to it here.

One of the panelists is none other than Harvey Mudd President Dr. Maria Klawe, and good for her and Mudders everywhere, she relentlessly plugged Harvey Mudd's unicycles and genuine love of math. They all talked about some of my favorite movies and television shows: Proof, Good Willing Hunting, A Beautiful Mind and Numb3rs.

While I'm generally skeptical about the role model theory when applied to racial groups, I must confess that efforts to promote math to women have me intrigued, even if I find them flawed. Namely, this whole theory goes something like this: women can only learn math from other women, [insert random ethnic minority] can only learn [insert academic discipline] from other [insert random ethnic minority]. I reject those arguments at face-value.

If educational facilities have finite resources do we, by encouraging other students, necessarily exclude others? How might we design programs that encourage all students?

My math and science interest got out of the way of my twin loves of French and political science when I entered high school. Like every kid with a sick parent, I wanted to be a doctor, but in 7th grade, I applied to a school-funded science program. Without really considering anything about the politics that go into such programs, I filled out the application -- only to be told that the program was only for women! There wasn't a complementary program for men in science and so I wasn't allowed to participate, even though there were vacancies in the program.

If a mathematician or a scientist can come from anywhere as these panelists and others attest, why not test the hypothesis? Why design programs that deliberately exclude the other sex?

The real question is what can we do to increase success across the board and here, at least, they provide a good answer: encourage people who love math to teach math. But that doesn't really fit with the role model theory, now does it? A good teacher is a good teacher.

Pitzer Professor's View on "Racial Equality"

Quote of the day from the Jena Six protest (courtesty of the DailyBulletin.com):

"We need to make sure the system treats everyone equal and not go back to the days when people were treated differently within the justice system simply because of the color of their skin." --Jose Calderon, Pitzer professor of sociology and Chicano studies, who joined Thursday's silent march in Claremont.

I agree with you one hundred percent, Professor Calderon. But why is that you support racial discrimination in academia, specifically in your own writings? Why, in 2001, did you write a pro-racial discrimination article in Newsday?

You wrote the following (and if anyone can find a link to this article , it would be greatly appreciated):

Critics also argue that we need "class-based" solutions such as full employment, national health care and quality education that can pull everyone up simultaneously. What they fail to point out is how people of color, even if they reach middle-class status, confront unequal resources and a glass ceiling that prevents them from moving into managerial positions.

Critics are hiding behind the argument that we need to strive for a "color blind" society, arguing that affirmative action only serves to divide working people by allowing one group to benefit at the expense of another. This logic leaves out that specific groups, because of racism and sexism, have been historically excluded or left at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
(Jose Calderon, "Suits Peril Last of Affirmative Action in Education," Newsday, March 21, 2001)

Perhaps, Professor Calderon could explain how some racial discrimination is good and while others are bad. That, after all, is his position. We know that colleges still use racial discrimination to keep out Asians, Indians, and Jews. A 2005 study by two Princeton researchers definitively showed that if racial discrimination were eliminated at the university level, Asian enrollment in college would grow.

We also know, from research Richard E. Sander, that racial discrimination (or affirmative action) also hurts black and Latino law students. So why do so many still support it?

Pomona Student Pres. Wants To Ban Sodexho?

I won't confess to liking Pomona's Frary Dining Hall. Besides the whole Hogwarts vibe, it's just plain creepy that Prometheus watches over us as we eat.

But, flipping through the pages of Pomona's The Student Life, I came across an article about a proposal from none other than the President of the Pomona student body.

Here she is quoted in the newspaper:

The ASPC President, Elspeth Hilton ’08, addressed sustainability by providing an example of a company supported by the College whose ideals may not align with those of the students, faculty, and administration.

“The impact of our contract and support of Sodexho goes far beyond our food quality,” read Hilton’s speech, which was delivered on September 4. “While there is little emphasis on locally grown food products, we must also look at the political impact of Sodexho’s policies, their history of employee rights and their stock holdings. By giving money to Sodexho, we are supporting their policies and actions, many of which go against the intentions of the students on campus.”

Her solution is less than democratic. She wants the task force:

...some of Sodexho’s policies have been questioned by Pomona students and the ASPC. ASPC’s Environmental Affairs Commissioner Kyle Edgerton ’08 and Community Affairs Commissioner Mollie Ruskin ’08 are putting together a task force that will lay out the policies with which the ASPC disagrees.

The task force is exploring several aspects of Sodexho’s practices and Pomona’s contract with them. They will be looking to quantify specific effects of Sodexho’s policies and determine the positive or negative impact of those policies. Also being studied is how these policies conform to student beliefs and the College’s ideals.

First off, if the issue is as important as we've been led to believe, why not put it to a vote?

Putting aside the bad journalism of the article in which the author never gets an answer for what measures the Pomona student president is prepared to do. Given the history of going after Sodexho by leftist activists, I'm assuming that they are hoping for a boycott or an early termination of a contract. It seems to be all the rage these days.

Don't like Sodexho at Frary?

Here's a thought. Don't eat there. Vote with your feet. There are four other dining halls to choose from. After all, Scripps College got 19th best food from the national survey, The Princeton Review.

I'm reminded of a quotation from one of my favorite movies: Ten Things I Hate About You.
It's from the black teacher, Mr. Morgan, and though I don't necessarily agree with his view vis a vis black authors, it's still a point worth considering. Here it is, taken from the transcript of the movie.

  MR. MORGAN
       (continuing)
I know how difficult it must be for you to overcome
all those years of upper middle class suburban oppression. 
It must be tough.

She deflates and becomes bitter again.

MR. MORGAN
(continuing)
But the next time you storm around the PTA 
crusading for better lunch meat,
or whatever it is you white girls complain about,
ask them why they can't buy a book written by a black man!

Exit questions: What is with those who want to imposing their own views on the rest of us? Whatever happened to using choice? More importantly, whatever happened to debate?

Spot on Quotation about Gore Vidal

In case you hadn't heard, Gore Vidal came to speak at Claremont McKenna College's Athenaeum. Unfortunately, I did not have the "pleasure" of hearing him speak, I'm waiting for the video!

If this kind of rhetoric is what passes for serious Athenaeum speakers, I'm glad I missed it. The priceless quotation is found below. The article is courtesy of the DailyBulletin.com.

"It's no accident the Europeans consider us the idiots of the Western World. We're off the map," Vidal said.

He imitated Bush's fast Texas twang: "`If we don't fight 'em over there, we'll have to fight 'em over here.' When I heard that, and people believed it, I washed my hands of this country.

"How are `they' going to get here? Greyhound bus?"

Vidal, who will turn 82 next month, spoke in patrician tones, quietly but devastatingly.

With the administration arguing that even American citizens can be detained indefinitely as enemy combatants, Vidal said, "we have no country, we have no legal system."

The country is in deep decline on virtually all fronts, in Vidal's view, yet Americans don't want to hear it: "We're perfect, you know. No low cloud obscures our horizon."

He decried today's poor state of affairs compared to the "golden age" of America's influence and culture, which he identified as 1945 to 1955. While he may be right, he also sounded like a more eloquent version of the cranky neighbor down the street shaking his rake.

In the question and answer portion, students were respectful and a trifle awed, even in the face of Vidal's overwhelming gloom.

One asked which leaders Vidal admired "besides Aristotle," whom he had invoked earlier.

"Pericles," Vidal responded dryly. "Hope he's not too modern for you."

With speakers like Vidal, Asim, and the ever magnificient, Bono, I keep asking myself if this school is truly the conservative outpost I thought it was.

Former CMC Professor Joins Giuliani Campaign

Courtesy of the Rudy Giuliani campaign website:

Kenneth R. Weinstein, Ph.D., Foreign Policy Advisor

Weinstein is Chief Executive Officer of Hudson Institute. He oversees the institute’s research, project management, external affairs, marketing and government relations efforts.

Weinstein taught at Claremont McKenna College and Georgetown University and has written widely on international affairs for leading publications in the United States, Europe and Asia. He has been decorated with a knighthood in Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Weinstein serves by presidential appointment and Senate confirmation as a member of the National Humanities Council, the governing body of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Weinstein’s articles and book reviews on public policy topics have appeared in more than 100 publications, including the New Republic, The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. He graduated from the University of Chicago, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris and Harvard University.

Now if Giuliani would only appoint Giuliani girl, he'd win this conservative's vote.

What Are We Marching For?

UPDATED (9/21/2007): Video and photos added. (Courtesy of the DailyBulletin.com) The protest was front page news.

I've been invited to half a dozen Facebook groups demanding that we "free" the Jena Six. In fact, today, some 300 or so of my fellow Claremont students marched across the campus to protest an event some 2,000 miles away.

This whole black shirt attire is definitely an act of a racial solidarity -- the very likes of which true fighters for equality and justice should stand against-- and as Claremont McKenna Professor John J. Pitney writes the wearing of black shirts recalls a very racist history indeed. Apparently, all irony is lost on the marchers.

Now the incident in Jena, LA probably has racist underpinnings. I don't know. I wasn't there. But I do know that a march some 2,000 miles away smacks of overkill. (After all, there are only 3000 people in the town.) Maybe this overkill matches the subject matter: why was anyone sentenced in the first place and why was this bad behavior allowed to persist for so long on all sides? Why was a student assaulted? Why are students behaving like prisoners hardened by the racism of prison?

Or maybe all of these reasons have to do with the very people marching, with the black t-shirts, and with the themes of black solidarity that the Jena protesters seek to broadcast all the way to sunny California. Maybe the students are behaving like prisoners because we have allowed them to see race as a prison, as an "us versus them" narrative with victims, the Jena Six, and the racists, the school administrators of Jena, LA. Maybe the racialists and the racists who have told us that we're all so different and that blacks and whites can't sit under the same tree-- have let us erect our own racial barriers again and again. We allow ethnic retreats and ethnic solidarity sessions without questioning whether these efforts to "celebrate culture" necessarily create a hierarchy of citizenry, a cult of victimhood, and the beginnings of seeing our fellow schoolmates, our friends, as "other". Soon, to justify our self-imposed barriers, we look for these perceived racial slights everywhere and anywhere we can find them.

If history teaches us anything, it's that the formation of an identity presupposes an other and if we allow ourselves to see our fellow human beings as others, maybe we steal something altogether human from them. Maybe this very hyper-conscious racialism tears at the social fabric of humanity and puts us into multiple racial camps from which we dare not venture. The racialists ask the most dangerous of questions: are you with us or are you against us? So we don a black shirt and march and for what we do not know.

I blame the racialist groups who seek to lionize the Jena Six to suit their own partisan agenda. I doubt that the NAACP care sincerely about the parties affected. Instead, they are seizing on this issue to drive home their message: The NAACP, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton are still relevant. The story goes something like this: If they're in Jena, they are in your classroom, in your dorm, under your bed. It's a paranoid world that these racialists want and I want no part of it.

I didn't march for Imus, for the Lacrosse players, or for any other group because I believe that justice exists outside of these racialized, politicized news reports . I believe that if we just listen to everyone's honest story, without their lawyers present, we can hear justice's rhythm and cadence all the way in Claremont, CA and we can act accordingly. The just response is waiting for all the facts to be heard and maybe instead of marching, we can do our homework, go to school, and go about our lives. But that doesn't seem to be what the marchers want. School will be canceled tomorrow so that everyone can think about that awful legacy of institutional racism as the students comfortably enjoy the day off. The lesson's been learned once more: If Jesse comes to town, classes are dismissed, life is interrupted, and justice is politicized. We balkanize once more.

Kick Your Kids Out!

Today's New York Times ran with the headlines "Refeathering The Empty Nest" and purported to show some great problem affecting the psychological well being of countless college students. Boo freakin' hoo.

In case you missed it:

Tom Crady, vice president for student services at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, is sympathetic about the anxieties of homesick freshmen, particularly those who “come home Thanksgiving and realize their room is gone.” Parents, he said, “should probably include their son or daughter in a decision like that.”

Neil Gerard, the associate dean of students at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., warned that students “are going through enough changes” in the fall of their freshman year.

Parents of Kenyon freshmen are warned at an orientation seminar against stopping at Ikea on the way home. “Honor that space at least through Christmas break, and then make some decisions as a family,” said Alicia Dugas, Kenyon’s assistant dean of students. “Every year, inevitably you have a student come back during spring break and say: You’ll never guess what my parents did.”

At the risk of sounding heartless, let me just say one thing: Parents, get over it. Do what you have to do. Put all of your kids' stuff in boxes, send those boxes to off site storage, and if your kids come back because they can't finish college, charge them rent. It might sound harsh, but it'll do your kids a world of good. Nobody messes around in college when they've got no safety net and no real home to come back to.

Back in Boston, my parents are doing God knows what with my room as well they should. If you think about it this way, I was a tenant for those eighteen years and now they've got every right to do with it what they want. Parents when you keep your kid's room they aren't able to make the break they so need to make. They keep two identities -- one at college and one at home -- and when your kid is miles away, he feels like there's some world back home that's waiting for him, that he's missing out on. It's best if that world is destroyed.

The Baby Boomers are raising a general of mollycoddled, Milquetoasts who haven't gotten the stones to make it on their own. They think they can go home, but like going to war, you can never truly go back home.

College, believe it or not, is actually not that much of a rough place. Sure, you're doing your own laundry and hooking up with random people, but otherwise you probably eat better than you ever did in high school.

So in a nutshell: Rent your kid's room. After all, you're paying the bills...