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I am perhaps the world's most easily
amused person. As an old marketing researcher who enjoys looking for
patterns in daily life, I'm almost never bored. Yet, while wandering the
flowery campuses of Southern California's Claremont Colleges, I found
the soft spring afternoon so placid that I was ready to curl up under a
tree for a snooze. The most exciting moment during my exploration came
when a Frisbee golf foursome politely waited for me to walk by before
playing through.
Perhaps all this genteel serenity
explains the psychodramas that a sizable fraction of the staff and
students seem compelled to concoct for themselves. Just the month
before, a long-festering mass hysteria over white racist student-thugs
supposedly infesting the campus had culminated in a huge night rally in
which thousands of blackshirted students had chanted their hatred of
"hate," while the administration stood by silently, despite
knowing that there had been no hate crime, just a leftist professor's
hoax.
In 1887, New Englanders founded Pomona College, now ranked fourth among
liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News. With the population
of the San Gabriel Valley's posh orange grove belt booming in the 1920s,
the trustees chose a clever way to expand. To preserve small college
intimacy while exploiting the economies of scale of the mid-sized
university, they created a collegiate consortium modeled on Oxford and
Cambridge. Eventually, four more undergraduate colleges of about a
thousand students each sprang up on adjacent campuses sharing a single
massive library.
Claremont fostered institutional diversity while other universities were
homogenizing themselves in their attempts to be all things to all
people. Claremont's Harvey Mudd is sometimes derided as an imitation Cal
Tech, but, then, Cal Tech is well worth emulating. In contrast, Pitzer,
the least prestigious school, is a Sixties relic stressing social
activism.
Opened in 1946, Claremont Men's College taught economics and government
from a conservative perspective rare during that era of liberal
dominance of intellectual life. Political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa,
still energetic today in his mid-80s, made CMC a hub for his idealistic,
Lincoln-lionizing interpretation of his mentor Leo Strauss' theories.
In 1976, Claremont Men's College went co-ed, although its neighbor
Scripps remains all-female, changing its name in 1982 to Claremont
McKenna College to keep its CMC initials. It is quite exclusive today,
with an average SAT score around 1380.
In 1999, Pamela Gann became CMC's first president who was a registered
Democrat. She didn't seem happy heading a college with a moderately
conservative reputation, and tried to use "diversity" to make
CMC less diverse and more like every other college. Gann and the
conservative professors fought bitter battles over affirmative action
hiring.
Gann's frustration with her rightist holdovers seemed to feed into the
growing paranoia at some of the other Claremont colleges, where the
staffs nurture an obsession among its "diverse" students
(i.e., everybody except non-Hispanic heterosexual gentile white males)
to navel-gaze over whether or not they feel "comfortable with the
climate."
It was 72 degrees with a gentle breeze blowing, so the climate seemed
okay to me, but a flier on Pitzer bulletin boards made the local idée
fixe a little clearer: "Diversity and Campus Climate: You are
invited to participate in a discussion about campus climate."
Another advertised: "Queer Dreams and Nightmares: What is it like
to be a student at the Claremont Colleges? Student panel discussion
addressing the current climate at the 5-Cs, both academically and
socially." This was part of a conference entitled, with that
profusion of punctuation that is the secret fraternity handshake of
post-modern academics, "[Re]Defining a Queer Space at the Claremont
Colleges."
The university's main concern appears to be to make students feel
"comfortable," a word that reappears constantly in Claremont
publications despite the obvious hopelessness of the project. The only
way to make 19-year-olds feel comfortable is to wait 30 years while they
sag into their well-padded maturities. Right now, they are teenagers and
their surging hormones have far more important emotions for them to feel
than comfort. Adults, however, who make careers out of encouraging kids
to mold permanently self-pitying identities around their transient
social discomforts have much to answer for.
A series of semi-nonexistent "racial incidents," such as
liberal Scripps students advertising a racial sensitivity seminar with
posters featuring the N-word, were parlayed by activists into a mood of
dread. Kerri F. Dunn, a 39-year-old academic prole, a visiting professor
of social psychology at CMC whose contract was up in June, repeatedly
harangued her students about the racists and sexists lurking in the
shadows. On March 9th, she gave a fiery speech at a campus event on
"Hate Speech Versus Free Speech." She then walked to her 1992
Honda Civic and returned some time later, claiming she had found it
spray-painted with anti-black, anti-female, and anti-Semitic slurs. The
Irish-American Dunn pointed the finger at her own students, arguing that
only they had heard she was considering converting to Judaism: "How
else would they believe I was Jewish unless they were in my class?"
Dunn's allegation triggered a frenzy of fear and loathing.
Although faked hate crimes have become routine in the years since the
Tawana Brawley hoax, the college presidents immediately canceled the
next day's classes (costing parents paying the full $37,000 per year
list price for 150 days of education about $250 each, or close to two
million dollars in total at list price). At the mass rally the next
night, Dunn announced, to rapturous applause: "This was a well
planned out act of terrorism. And I don't believe for one second it was
one person. I think that there's a group here, a small group, but I do
believe that there is a group here that perpetuates this in all
different kinds of ways."
Dunn's image of a secret goon squad of marauding junior Straussians was
as memorable as it was preposterous, but the administration had already
been apprised of the unsurprising truth. Earlier that day, two
eyewitnesses had told the Dean of Students that Professor Dunn had
slashed her own tires. The FBI and local police quickly found
inconsistencies in Dunn's story. A week later, they announced publicly
that Dunn had done it. (They also found that during her mid-30s, Dunn
had been arrested three times, twice for shoplifting, once for driving
with a fake license.)
University officials suspended Dunn, but with pay, and continued to rent
her a replacement car. A suddenly indecisive Gann ruminated, "One
has to learn to perhaps live with ambiguity here, and never know the
answer and reach a closure because the likelihood of actual prosecution
… is very small."
One Claremont college president told me that my comparing the reaction
to the Reichstag fire was not the "least bit appropriate." He
informed me, "The full campus community felt that this was a very
positive day for everyone involved. If you had been here you would have
felt the positive energy in the student body, as well as a commitment to
change that I share."
Apparently, having your entire university jerked around by a criminal
professor who tries to frame her white male students for her own hate
crime is a "very positive day.".
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