A Free Market Solution At Pomona's Dining Hall? No, Try Scare Tactics

It seems like just yesterday that I blogged about the intolerance at Pomona's dining halls. Elspeth Hilton '08 threatened to ban the chain because they disagree with her politics. She never offered a vote to see whether or not Pomona's student body agrees. Bless her. She's got a long political career ahead of her, telling people to do what she wants.

Fortunately Sodexho has responded by bringing the farmer's market to Pomona's dining halls. Environmental Affairs Commissioner Kyle Edgerton ‘08, said that the dining hall changed its policies at the moment ASPC President Elspeth Hilton ’08 “put the challenge to Sodexho.” He added that though the local produce has been added there has yet to be “some hard discussions about what Sodexho represents.”

So basically Pomona's President scares Sodexho into compliance with her policies. The not-so-subtle hint for Sodexho is comply with our demands or else. How unappetizing.

Fighting Pomona's Nanny State

I have always hated the nanny state. Those who advocate for it must be confronted. I do not recognize the authority of others to tell me what to do. Just as I ask no man to live for me, so too do I l refuse to recognize his force over me.

I'm a vegetarian but I don't force others to eat vegan. I don't drink but I don't force others around me not to drink. I don't gamble but I don't force others around me not to gamble. I don't smoke but I don't force others not to smoke. I believe in individual autonomy.

Amanda, a blogger at Pomona College, has the usual nanny state argument against Pomona's Coop store's selling of cigarettes.

Smoking is gross and polluting and it smells bad, and most importantly, Pomona students are not supposed to be idiots, and-I’m just going to say it-

People who smoke are idiots. (emphasis hers)

I’m not including people who started smoking before they knew it was a slow form of suicide in this. But if you’re a college student, you knew. You did it anyway. This makes you an idiot (or, perhaps, suicidally depressed, in which case it simply makes you in need of counseling).

Those who smoke do not require counseling. That is deeply offensive to anyone who has known someone who is suicidally depressed. Smokers are smokers. Nothing else.

But lest we call her on her intolerance. She tries to paint herself as a moderate.

I’m an equal-opportunity hater. I also think that people whose diets consist solely of potato chips and slabs of red meat are idiots. I think that people who have unprotected sex outside of long-term relationships are idiots. I think that people who drink themselves into a stupor five nights a week are idiots. I think that people who drink and drive are idiots (and criminals, but that’s a rant for another post). So no worries, smokers, you’re not the only target of my ire.

Talk about a straw man! Just how many students do you know who drink every night? Yes, we North quadders take Monday night off. Also, drunk drivers are infringing on the liberty of others. They are using force by driving drunk and potentially killing people.

But here's the scary part. She wants to use force to stop those who disagree with her. I'll let her opinions speak for itself. They are troubling, to say the least.

The Coop Store doesn’t sell knives, or asbestos, or other things that have no real purpose other than killing people. Why on earth are we endorsing cigarette smoking? If there are enough addicts on this campus to justify selling cigarettes in the Coop Store, then we should be offering support groups and counseling sessions much more frequently and prominently. Selling cyanide pills wouldn’t be considered a student service, so this really shouldn’t be either. We should not sell them. If you really want to keep being an idiot, we ought to make it hard for you-make you take a bus to the grocery store, make you beg your friends with cars who don’t want you to die to pick up a pack the next time they stop for gas. Frankly, I think we have an obligation to make it exceptionally difficult for you to kill yourself.

We’ll call it “education.”

No, we call it FORCE. We call it MANIPULATION. It's not the role of Pomona College to offer non-smoking courses or counseling. It isn't your obligation to provide a service someone doesn't want. It's not your obligation to ban the market from providing a service. By forcing people to go elsewhere to buy cigarettes, we may discourage them, but why can't Pomona's Cooperative Society make a few bucks?

Why not sell cigarettes? Why not sell knives? Knives are for cutting, not exclusively for killing. Is she really comparing cyanide pills to cigarettes? How disturbing... That doesn't even warrant a response.

Whatever happened to tolerance for different life styles?
She says she judges people for smoking. I judge her for being intolerant.

Origins of Stark Hall's No Drinking Policy

A few nights ago I heard accounting professor and guru, Marc Massoud talk about life, his life, his work, and why we are all his children. He's a good man and from what I'm told, a wonderful teacher.

Along the way, he told us that he was one of the big people behind the push to make Stark Hall of Claremont McKenna College substance-free.

As Massoud tells it, one Mormon student was planning to transfer because of how rowdy (read: perpetually drunk) his floor mates are. When he told Professor Massoud, Professor Massoud met with the students' parents and encouraged him to stay in the school. He did.

At that time, Stark Hall was being built and finished. He convinced President Stark that if the dorm was going to have his name, wouldn't he want it also be substance-free?

Stark agreed and they began implementing the Stark policy, though it wasn't easy. Apparently, many people didn't want Stark to be substance-free because by making it that way, they were openly admitting that Claremont McKenna had a drinking problem. Fortunately Professor Massoud won that fight. From (hopefully) a four-year resident of Stark Hall, Professor Massoud, I thank you.

Rumor has it that a wing of the new dorm will also be substance-free. More in the coming weeks...

Claremont Graduate Study Says Bias Against Mormons is Bigger Than Bias Against Blacks, Women

The study, co-authored by several Vanderbilt faculty members, has several key findings.

• Bias against Mormons is significantly more intense among the public compared to bias against women and blacks. The bias against Mormons is even more pronounced among conservative Evangelicals. Their bias against Mormons rivals their bias against atheists.
• Only about half the nation claims to even know a Mormon or to know that Romney is Mormon.
• The extent of the bias against Romney is moderated if the individual already knows that he is Mormon. That information seems to demystify the Mormon religion, making people more tolerant of the religion. Those who do not know Romney is Mormon exhibit much greater bias upon learning of his religion.
• When participants in the survey are provided information that stereotypes Mormons, such as ‘Mormons are part of a non-Christian cult” or “Mormons are polygamists,” they react negatively to Romney’s candidacy.
• Participants react favorably to messages that dispel the negative stereotypes about Mormons. Examples would be “about a hundred years ago the Mormon Church banned polygamy,” or “the Church of Jesus Chris of Latter-day Saints stresses traditional family values.” However, simple appeals for religious tolerance do not win over support for Romney from the respondents.

The authors encourage Romney to demystify his religion. The Boston Herald (my local paper) mentions the study in the context of Governor Romney's speech on religion, which he will give tomorrow.

I readily confess to knowing very little about Mormonism and I'm not sure how it relates to the whole election thing. But that's the point, really. In America, you are free to believe whatever you want.

Fortunately Claremont School of Theology has answered my ignorance. They have brought one of America's most preeminent religious and Mormon scholars to Claremont: Professor Richard Lyman Bushman. Anyone want to sign up and take the class with me?

Exit question: Now that we know there's such ongoing discrimination against Mormons in society and I have heard some discrimination against Mormons here at Claremont McKenna, will the Claremont Colleges begin recruiting Mormons to dispel the myths surrounding them? We know that they aren't opposed to recruiting other minorities. Why not Mormons?

Though I'm opposed to recruiting any minority for diversity, the Jeopardy addict in me makes me point out that it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to recruit Mormons after all.

Priorities, Priorities: This is What Pitzer Bought for $29 million?

Read it and weep. The whole design is classic Pitzer. Spend lots of money to make the world a marginally better place.

Here's Jim Marchant, dean of students at Pitzer.

Jim Marchant, dean of students, says Pitzer wanted rooms in the new complex to be comfortable, but not so comfortable that students hole up there. Besides the balconies, students can socialize on the complex’s patios and in its living rooms—to say nothing of the pool and adjoining cafe. Students’ rooms have windows on both sides, allowing cross-ventilation, but sensors turn off the air conditioning if the windows are open. “We try to discourage students from using the air conditioning” when it’s not needed, Mr. Marchant says. Most of the rooms are set up to house two students, with each pair of double rooms sharing a bathroom.

With low flow showers, I wonder what else they are discouraging students from using...

The new buildings constitute a move from the Soviet-block cinder blocks to the unnecessarily costly utopia that Pitzer hopes to build.

But Pitzer, remember. If you build green, the greens will come.

Pomona Professor on Chavez's Failed Proposals

Here's Pomona Professor Miguel Tinker-Salas talking on The News Hours with Jim Lehrer. He's the author of Hugo Chavez and the Decline of an Exceptional Social Democracy. (The video is linked up.)

Professor Tinker-Salas makes the case that this vote was really about economic issues and how the social programs didn't go far enough. The other, Professor Moises Naim, talks about how those very programs have been very ineffective and how Chavez isn't so much a Socialist, but a Putin-like crook.

In principle, I don't share Professor Tinker-Salas's view that the social programs will ever really achieve anything other than political support in the short-term. Subsidies just aren't effective at solving serious social programs. Sure, gasoline is 7 cents a gallon and food and medical services are subsidizes, but Chavez isn't building an ownership society in which people, through their taxes, are vested in the society. He's making the same errors that the Saudis and others with oil have been making -- trying to buy everyone off to maintain power. He's hoping that if he pays for everything in the society that he can sure up support. But eventually, the oil will dry out and when it does, I fear for the Venezuelans. Of course, I hope I'm wrong. I hope that the social programs can create the democracy that Venezuela needs.

Patrick Chamorel is Coming to the Ath!

Though I haven't seen it on the Athenaeum calendar yet, I'm told by Ms. Huerta of the Salvatori Center that Mr. Patrick Chamorel is coming to speak next Wednesday, December the 12th. I'll update when I have the exact times.

Many of you may remember that Mr. Chamorel was a visiting professor here at Claremont McKenna.

As one person who knows him here put it, he has the distinction of being one of the few Frenchmen that is both exceptionally polite and pro-America. Now that's my kind of Frenchmen! I'm also told that he is an adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Mr. Chamorel has written extensively on the needs of France to transform itself in the global age. You can hear an interview with him at the Woodrow Wilson Center immediately after Sarkozy's victory. You can also read an article he wrote for The Concord Monitor during Sarkozy's vacation in New Hampshire. It would be fascinating to get his take on the strikes -- strikes he predicted last year.

I may lose my conservative bona fides for saying this, but I love France and French culture. I always have and always will. Does it have it's problems? Sure it does, but in much the same way you tolerate the eccentricities of an uncle without forgetting he's family, so too do I feel we must treat France. What bad can you say about a culture that gave us the words bon vivant, connoisseur, and gourmand?

Though we often point out the debt France owes us for World War I and World War II, never forget the words said in 1917 at the tomb of one of France's greatest patriots: "Lafayette, we are here." Nor should we ever forget the soil that French patriot asked to be entombed in. (He also named his son, George Washington.)

(As many of you know, I learned French as a boy when I was part of a French government funded immersion program in Milton, Massachusetts. Grades 1 - 5 were in French. The best part was that the school was public.)

In any event, the major question is why hasn't France retaken its rightful place as a leader in the world. It might have something to do with the way politics is played in France where public sector unions, group-identity politics, and rampant taxation is the lay of the land. (Read: France is run by politicians worse than the protectionist Democrats!)

Hopefully, Sarkozy can make some of the necessary reforms. I can't wait to ask Chamorel questions. J'ai beaucoups!