Wesleyan President is Former Scripps College and C.G.S. Professor

Michael Roth, a former Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School prof, took the job of Wesleyan's presidency. According to his official bio, he was the founding director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute. He was a student (and radical) at Wesleyan during the 1970s who at one point took over the President's office that he now occupies over the Administration's connections with apartheid South Africa. And now the chickens have come home to roost. Let this be a lesson to any of us who would pressure the school to do anything political.

The Hartford Courant has the story and I have the Claremont College connection:

He earned a doctorate in history from Princeton University in 1984 and took a teaching job at Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School in California. He received tenure three years later, and he was promoted to full professor in 1990.

Thomas Sowell Mentions Harvey Mudd College in The National Review

The magnificient and prolific Thomas Sowell discussed the problem of the best fit today at Townhall.com and The National Review Online. Here the economist is in all his glory talking about the essentials of encouraging foundational education and would you believe it, Harvey Mudd is mentioned again:

By contrast, at a small college without the prestige of big-name research universities, the introductory courses which provide a foundation for higher courses are more likely to be taught by experienced professors who are teachers more so than researchers.

Maybe that is why graduates of such colleges often go on to do better than the graduates of big-name research universities.

You may never have heard of Harvey Mudd College but a higher percentage of its graduates go on to get Ph.D.s than do the graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or M.I.T. So do the graduates of Grinnell, Reed, and various other small colleges.

What? Dr. Sowell, why no Claremont McKenna mention? You let me down! Of course, Dr. Sowell made me so happy when he discussed the increasing irrelevance of the Ivy league. We can only hope.

Of the chief executive officers of the 50 largest American corporations surveyed in 2006, only four had Ivy League degrees. Some — including Michael Dell of Dell computers and Bill Gates of Microsoft — had no degree at all.

His title, "Prestige versus Education" says it all.

Honolulu Advertiser Mentions Claremont Debate Union

The Claremont Debate Union is going to have a showdown in the Aloha state, according to The Honolulu Advertiser, Hawaii's number one newspaper (and all of my friends who are going.):

Teams from O'ahu and the Mainland will compete in a World Parliamentary Debate tournament at Hawai'i Pacific University's Hawai'i Loa Campus on Saturday and Sunday. HPU will host debate competitors from the California State University system, Portland State University, the Claremont Colleges, Northwestern University, and the University of Hawai'i, among others.

World Parliamentary Debate involves teams of two students arguing about topics that are announced just fifteen minutes before the debate round begins. Debaters are expected to be informed, logical, critical, and persuasive. All while maintaining the composure necessary to answer questions from other competitors and deal with audience participation. Hecklers and audience feedback are not unusual occurrences in World Parliamentary Debate competitions.

With your shields or on them, my fellow forensics lovers.

(This is a shout out to all you fellow debaters, even if you are in the British format -- and why, yes, I am jealous.)