NRO's Jonah Goldberg on Claremont McKenna Students and Professors from Jonah Goldberg on Down

Funny quotations about Claremont McKenna students and professors from Jonah Goldberg of National Review

From his visit to Claremont McKenna's Athenaeum in February of 2006,

I checked out the campus a bit yesterday and talked with various and sundry students. Very nice bunch, quite sharp. I never really realized how good a school Claremont is and didn't know that it ranks so highly in the various lists. Seems like a good place to send your kids. And, since the West Coast Straussians are so prevelant here, if you get straight As they will teach the esoteric knowledge which gave Abe Lincoln and Winston Churchill laser vision and the ability to fly.

From his visit to Birmingham with his significant other in 1999 and on her love of Harry V. Jaffa. Goldberg describes some of the people who hate Lincoln.

It was particularly difficult for me because my significant other is not simply a student of the Jaffa School, but she is also prone to wolverine-like rages. If you don’t know who Harry Jaffa is, it’s probably because you have your priorities straight. Jaffa is a fairly obscure but brilliant scholar who currently teaches at Claremont-McKenna. His biggest brush with fame was his reputed authorship of Barry Goldwater’s “extremism in the defense of liberty” line. Jaffa is the leader of what are known as the West Coast Straussians. (Named after Leo Strauss — another obscure and even more brilliant scholar who inspired a generation of conservatives to see the world in a very complicated way). And a core tenet of the West Coast Straussians is that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t simply a great president in the tradition of Washington and Jefferson, but a great figure along the lines of Moses or Aristotle.