Claremont Conservative on L.A. Times Blog, An Examination of Pomona's Supposedly Racist Past

The Claremont Conservative made it onto The Los Angeles Times's blog today.

The mention is brief. They link to us and cite us as having had a "field day with the alma mater's suspension" without addressing any of the arguments we've made in prior posts. (Ah well, who could blame The Los Angeles Times? They are but a regional newspaper anyways...)

I wonder on the use of the word "field day". Let me get my Merriam-Webster dictionary. I looked for a satisfactory definition for "field day." "A time of extraordinary pleasure or opportunity."

Am I having an extraordinary amount of pleasure? Do I take the decision to ban the alma mater as somehow indicative of a great opportunity?

The only opportunity here is to examine the role of historiography and identity politics and how the two join to create a sanitized version of the history in the hopes of perfecting the present.

You see the argument that Pomona College is making is an insidious one. The argument is that back in the day, Pomona College was racist and that therefore it must atone for it's racist past. Even though the song's text is not racist and even though generations of Pomona students have sung it, it becomes racist because of the context surrounding the song.

Hence, Pomona's administrators must "suspend" the song. In reality, they are just testing the waters to see if it ought to be banned outright. Its their way of saying if alums complain, "hey, we just suspended song."

The problem with Pomona's argument is that it means that each of the students must have knowledge of the institution's past before they make a substantive decision based upon the merits of the work given the context of the time. Allegations of bigotry or racism are enough to justify censorship, which if not official, is meant to be social. God pity the soul who dares sing the song at graduation!

Given that the people who celebrated this song and who were there when the song was song are now long dead, the people who would dig them up must re-bury them as "racist" so as to exculpate their collective sin. Of course I reject any such notions of collective sin and find the song perfectly unobjectionable. Its past is complicated, but not worthy of throwing it out.

I welcome Pomona College's decision to sponsor two summer research opportunities to study songs in the context, but I wonder what would happen if the students come back finding that the song is completely consistent with history or if the students who will be drawn to this research opportunity will be inclined to have the conclusions formed before the research.

Still, I find it awkward that Pomona bends itself over backwards to eliminate a song, but never mentions its very real racist past (and present) treatment of Jews and white males. This kind of racism is all the more insidious because it is official Pomona policy to discriminate against individuals whose only crime was that they were not of a favorable ethnic group.

I've alluded to this racist past before when I mentioned current Claremont McKenna professor, Frederick Lynch, who has written he was discriminated against by the department chairman at Pomona College, who told him that the only sociologist Pomona could hire had to be black.

But I've been digging into Pomona's past and have found another more sinister skeleton in her closet. According to CMC government professor, Ward Elliot, Pomona hired its first Jewish professor, Karl Kohn in 1950, fully four years after Claremont McKenna College. The decision was not without its political problems. Faculty members muttered that hiring Kohn would mean negating their obligations to pay "tribute to Christian Civilization" as mandated by Pomona's motto. It was then that Pomona's president E. Wilson Lyon threatened to resign if Kohn's appointment was blocked. It wasn't.

Should Pomona College have to apologize for the conflicted history during its tenure of professors? Should we suspend its appointment of professors merely because a few had irrational, anti-semitic feelings?

No, we should evaluate the professor on his merit and his merit alone. In much the same way, we should evaluate the song.

Yes, artistic and academic merit will be inherently subjective -- though I'd wager not as much as some might argue -- but I find its much better than digging into a past we cannot control.