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...