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"?