Get to know the candidates for First-Year Class President! Image credit: Claremont McKenna College Now that the fall semester is well and truly in swing, First-Year Class President campaigns are roaring along at full speed. Like any good politician, all of our candidates promise a veritable cornucopia of free stuff: food, especially Canes (a FYCP classic), drinks, and school supplies. They promise glitzy parties and more study spots, and most importantly, they all promise to represent your voice - but only one will prevail.... (the suspense!) The First-Year Class President (FYCP) sits on ASCMC’s Executive Board as a representative and liaison of the Class of 2030. The FYCP manages a budget of $3000, and is responsible for planning a plethora of events, activities, and initiatives geared towards the Class of 2030 or the broader CMC community. Candidates were required to collect 50 signatures to be eligible to run. They will each give a speech at Collins Dining Hall late-night snack (10:30pm) on September 21st. Voting opens at midnight that evening and will remain open for 20 hours, until 8 pm on Tuesday, September 22nd. FYCP Candidates (alphabetical order by last name) Julian Carlile Akemi Kwan Brijesh Chowdry Muparaju Shay Nussbaum David Simionca Ishaan Vasudeva Julian Carlile What makes the difference in a class president? Is it the best idea? Your concern isn’t whether your president has great suggestions; with the whole school and years of ASCMC before us able to provide ample help on that front, your focus should be on whether your candidates will act on it. So here's what I'm offering: someone who truly wants to help you, who will be accountable to their class—their friends—and someone who you'll be proud to have as the face of the Class of 2030. Let’s focus on action! In my first 30 days, you'll see: Pitch It, Vote It!—A feedback forum where you submit ideas and the class votes on instagram for what happens. Food, Drinks, and Movies!—an assortment of great things for our first class-wide event, potentially including further free goods… The Free Food (and Events) Feed, so nobody at the 5Cs misses a free meal or a good night out. Every month, I'll publish a report showing exactly how I used our budget, so you never have to wonder where the money went. Beyond this, your president should be a friend to all, so I offer an Open Table. Any time, about anything, there will be a seat and someone to talk to, whether it's a class concern, a rough week, or a silly idea. You can trust that I’ll always be available to help! As president, my time would be yours. Overall, the greatest thing I could do is have our class leave its mark on CMC history. Let’s build traditions, to not only make the best out of this class, but from all that come after! Choose someone who listens, follows through, and shows up. I'd be honored to be that person for you, and I hope you know it. Akemi Kwan Hi everyone! My name is Akemi, and I'm running to be your first-year class president! Even before we met in person, I connected over 240 students through an Instagram group chat and individually called, FaceTimed, and texted many of you before school started. My eagerness to become friends with you all led to outdoor beach hang-outs and karaoke nights in the Bay Area, and it makes me so happy to see those friendships carry over into CMC! Here are my plans to boost community: I’ll be bringing a masquerade & country-club themed party, with masks and drinks provided! We have yet to get to know all of our classmates, so what better way to strike up a conversation with a stranger than in a mask? Missed the Bay Area beach trip? No worries! Through my planned partnership with the Outdoor Initiative, beach trips, karaoke nights, and other outdoor adventures will be happening. A larger budget! I’ll be contributing 80% of my own $1,400 stipend into the $3,000 ASCMC budget. More money means bigger, better events and resources! Here are my plans to boost the academic life at CMC: Free school supplies and books, plus a stapler in every printing room/dorm lounge. Upperclassmen often struggle to sell their annotated books, so I’ll buy them back for you! Did you forget to bring nontraditional school supplies like sticky notes, folders, and scissors? Expect a free bin of those too! Is it just me, or do the printers never work? Instead of walking to Philips and then all the way to Stark’s, my immediate goal is to create a website showing the status of every printer in the computer labs, saving you time and steps! Brijesh (Brij) Chowdry Muparaju If you’ve met me at CMC, there is a decent chance I was talking. Probably a lot. So yes, the guy who never stops yapping is running for President. But I don’t just want to talk. I want to help build the kind of freshman year we actually want. That means the fun stuff too. A Slip ’n Slide party inspired by my FYG Sunny bringing one to WOA (GO BONELLI!). Pool parties. 5C freshman events. Mixers with food and music people want. Movie nights in Bauer Forum where, for once, the screen is showing a movie instead of Econ slides. And board-game nights that become way too competitive and annoyingly luck-based. I will absolutely argue with the dice. But I’ve also been hearing the smaller things. Not enough study spots. Restrooms without period products. Those white balls near Roberts Pavilion that inconvenience pedestrians while every skateboard and scooter simply goes around them. And then there’s the bigger one. We came into a small freshman class expecting to know everyone, but quickly we’ve found our own circles. That’s normal. I just think we can do more to connect them. One huge party won’t solve that, even though we’re definitely having those. It has to show up in the mixers, games, events, and ideas we build together. So yes, I’ll yap. I’ll bring things up. I’ll probably get way too competitive at board games. But more than anything, I want to keep doing what I’ve loved most since getting here: meeting you, hearing you, and connecting people who otherwise might never have crossed paths. That’s the Brij I want to build. Between our circles. Between your ideas and action. Between all of us and the freshman year we want to create together. The Brij isn’t finished. That’s kind of the point. Shay Nussbaum Hi everyone! I’m Shay Nussbaum, and I’m running to be your freshman class president. I’m from Newport Beach, California, and I’m on the women’s water polo team here at CMC. Before coming here, I played high school water polo and was swim team captain, spent four years in ASB, worked with over 100 club presidents, and was involved in Youth and Government and my city’s Mayor’s Youth Council. But I’m not running because of my résumé. I’m running because I genuinely care about our freshman year and the kind of class we become. I want our class to be fun, connected, and a place where everyone feels heard. I want to create a Google suggestion form that my cabinet and I review every two weeks, along with monthly office hours where anyone can bring me an idea, concern, or criticism. I want a cabinet that actually acts and helps turn your ideas into something real. Your input should create output. I also want us to actually get to know each other. I want to organize freshman-only events, classwide pregames, a movie night on the Green, new freshman traditions, and opportunities to connect with the other 5C freshman classes. Most importantly, I want to be honest with you. I won’t promise things I can’t deliver just to get your vote. I’ll tell you what I can do, what I can’t, and where things stand. I want my presidency to be built around honesty, passion, and empathy. Everyone’s freshman year will look different, and I want us to be a class that looks out for each other through all of it. We only get one freshman year. Let’s make it ours. Shay is the Way! David Simionca There’s a quote I love by Ayn Rand that goes like this: “The world you desire can be won. It exists… it is real… it is possible… it’s yours.” During the first month, semester, and even year of college, you can certainly feel that the world you desire doesn’t exist, isn’t real, isn’t possible, and is definitely not yours. However, I believe we are all here for a reason. Whether you’re here to learn how to change the world or make money, to make your family proud, or just because you have to go to college, that’s fine, and we have to make sure we have plenty of fun during these four years. First, consider the budget. We have $3,000 to work with, plus my $700 stipend, which I will donate in full. My philosophy is that you and you alone should decide where that money goes. I surveyed your preferences, and here are the results: 24% want first-year parties (DJ + a theme we vote on) 22% want late-night food drops (Cane’s, In-N-Out, boba) 22% want a mixer with first-years from the other 5Cs 11% want discounted Class of 2030 merch 7% want a beach day Let me be clear: what you decide happens. That’s how it’ll work until my final day as president. Second, the class cabinet should be open to anyone with an idea and a plan. It shouldn’t be decided before the election or based only on friendships from the first four weeks of college. I want an accessible cabinet where you can choose your own position title. So don’t forget: the world you desire is real, is possible, and is yours. We are, and always will be, winners. I’m David, and tomorrow, cast your vote for me. Ishaan Vasudeva I'm so excited to be your first-year class president!!! Through my platform, I hope to create engaging community activities and bring together the first-year class. Ultimately, I believe that my imperative is to serve you all and to represent the voices of my fellow first-years!! I plan to host events and provide resources, including: Pre-party Fun First-Year Only Parties Events across the 5Cs with other First-Years! Cross Class Mentorship Mixers Late (and I mean actually LATE) night snacks And anything else you guys want. Just hit me up! While I haven't had direct leadership in class office, I've been lucky enough to serve as the president of my investment club, the co-captain of my Lincoln-Douglas team in debate, and am so excited to expand my leadership capabilities. I would love it if you vote for me, but everybody else is awesome, so go with your heart!! 🫶 ok bye Candidates who did not provide a statement will still give speeches!

The Forum sits down with Stanford Law Professor Jud Campbell to discuss the Constitution's history and endurance. Image credit: University of Notre Dame Logan Fang: Welcome to The Forum's interview series. Today, we're interviewing Professor Jud Campbell, a legal historian who explores American Constitutionalism with particular attention to the history of rights. Professor Campbell joined the Stanford Law faculty in 2023. My first question is about the Constitution. Many Americans see it as the basis of their rights, but the Founders saw our rights as consisting not only of these positive rights granted by the government, but of natural rights too. How does recovering this previous historical understanding of rights impact the way that we conceptualize them today? Jud Campbell: It’s a tricky question because you have to think about not just what the history was, but how to use the history today. We have to think about what it is that makes claims about law today true, and that ultimately gets us into questions of jurisprudence, into questions of legal philosophy. I have some thoughts, but they're tentative because I write as a historian not as a jurisprudence scholar. It seems to me that most of the ways that people argue about rights today assume that rights come from the Constitution, and have their force because they were adopted by the people at a particular moment in time. This older way of thinking recognizes the role of the people, but it does so in a way that's less about a particular moment and more about both the gradual accretion of precedent and custom over time. So, a large part of what I'm trying to do in my scholarship is recover an older way of thinking about rights, not just as limits on governmental power, which they were to some extent, but also as a foundation for republican government. If we were to try to recover that way of thinking about rights, we would have to radically change the expectations we have about how to interpret and enforce constitutional rights provisions, because so much of our current way of thinking is animated by a counter-majoritarian conception of rights as limits on legislative power rather than as justifications for having a form of representative government in the first place. It would fundamentally change many aspects of the way that we do things today if we tried to recover that older way of thinking. Logan Fang: I want to take a step back and just talk about the origins of natural rights. English common law tradition has seemed to influence American natural rights principles, but I'm also curious about what else had informed the founding conception of natural rights. Jud Campbell: The idea of natural rights goes back a really long way, and there certainly are folks who are thinking about it in the Roman law tradition. The way that the Founders understand natural rights is influenced largely by two different threads of thinking in the 17th century, coming out of England: the common law tradition that you're talking about; and then also the social contractarian tradition of people like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, drawing on some writers in Europe who ground their analysis of natural law in large part in this kind of thought experiment called social contract theory. Those two different threads are ones that the Founders are merging together. They don't really have a sense that these are two entirely distinct traditions, but rather that we can think about the purposes of government, the limitations of government, both by looking to principles of reason and thought experiments that resemble social contract theory, and also by looking to traditions, to things that we have done for a long time. It's the blend of the practical philosophical reasoning process, and the more on-the-ground custom excavation that gives rise to the way that the Founders are thinking about natural rights. So the the idea of natural rights is framed by a social contractarian, what we often call a liberal way of thinking, but it's also deeply informed by this idea that over the course of English history, people have come to better understand and better know how to protect their natural rights through the process of reasoning about the common law. Logan Fang: I want to move then to a topic that you'll be covering tonight [at the Athenaeum] — unalienable rights. In a previous lecture series, you discussed how the Founders thought that people retained their rights after entering a political society, but gave up the authority to determine the limits of these rights to the government. I'm curious how you see these natural rights as opposed to unalienable rights. What is the distinction that we can make between those two? Jud Campbell: What I'm interested in is different ways of thinking about unalienability. The Founders are using the word unalienability in two different ways, and if we want to understand rights discourse, we need to recover both of those and recognize that they're different. There’s an older notion of unalienability that refers to rights that cannot be transferred to the control of anyone else, including even one's representative. The right of conscience is a quintessential example of that. We can't transfer control over our thoughts to anybody else because it's not within our power to do that, and therefore granting the government any sort of control over our thoughts would be a wrongful transfer of power. Then there's another way of thinking about unalienability, which is much more conducive to allowing for rights to be restricted under law, and that is the idea that we have certain rights that can't be transferred beyond ourselves or our representatives. On that conception, you could have an unalienable right to liberty, or an inalienable right to property, that is subject to restrictions with your own consent, either individually or through your representative. And what that means is that in this second sense of unalienability, preserving the unalienable right entails preserving a representative form of government. The second sense of unalienability is not about limiting governmental power; rather, it's about guaranteeing a form of self-government that allows for people to consent to restrictions of their own rights individually or through their representatives. It’s that second caveat that's so discordant with the way that we think about rights today. Now, to have a right is to have personal control over the way that we decide how to exercise that right, and to allow the legislature to make a choice about how to exercise that right is antithetical to the way we think about what having rights is all about. But, there's this older tradition of unalienable rights that I'm trying to recover. In this older 18th-century culture, there was a large emphasis on rights as pillars of republican government, not just rights as limitations on governmental power. This is especially important for the revolutionary cause, because the revolutionary cause is not about limiting government: the revolutionary cause is all about self-government, justifying claims that a foreign parliament is not capable of rightfully controlling our liberty or rightfully controlling our property. The revolution had nothing to do with trying to prevent representative legislatures from imposing taxes or representative legislatures from imposing restrictions on commerce. It had everything to do with ensuring that those choices were being made by people who represented us. That's the nature of the claim that the colonists are making, and it's why they use this republican idea of natural rights as opposed to the more power limiting conception that prevailed earlier in American history. Logan Fang: If that's the case, then what kind of unalienable rights would you see as belonging to this latter category of rights that legislators can regulate? Jud Campbell: People referred to rights of life, liberty, and property—that sort of category of rights that people beforehand would have called alienable rights. That's the thing that's so weird about this, the way the Founders are recasting the concept is to basically say: ‘Look, we don't need to alienate our rights. We don't need to alienate any of our rights. In fact, we can preserve all of our rights not by creating a minimalist government. Rather, we preserve them by creating a representative government.’ The move that they're making is to recast what had been often thought of as alienable rights as unalienable rights—rights that we don't need to transfer to the control of anyone other than ourselves, and crucially, that ‘ourselves’ includes the idea of a representative legislature restricting the rights on our behalf. Logan Fang: At the time of ratification, Founders like James Wilson feared that enumerating rights would lead to unlisted rights being surrendered over to the government. You argue that the Founders denied that rights came from the text, and that the Bill of Rights served more declaratory purposes. Considering this, in addition to the risks that the Founders foresaw in listing out these rights, what did founders see as sort of the role of text here? Jud Campbell: The Founders experienced the ways that text can help bolster claims to things that came from something other than text. So they think that there is an ancient constitution in the 1770s that undergirds, among other things, their right to representation under British law. But, they also think that it's helpful to them to be able to point to the Magna Carta and to be able to point to the Bill of Rights that was passed in London in 1688 as not creating their right to representation, but as reaffirming their right to representation. So, the text can be really useful, even if it isn't constitutive of the right. It may serve as both a legal and a cultural marker of that right's existence. One of the arguments that Madison makes when proposing the Bill of Rights says these rights, even if not strictly necessary to enumerate, might nonetheless be better protected if we write them down. They will reinforce in the people's minds that these rights exist and that they are worth protecting, and they help reinforce the obligation that judges already have to enforce aspects of our fundamental rights that have legally determinate content. So, this is a way of thinking about the relevance of text that is a reinforcing role rather than a constitutive role. Logan Fang: In that case, how do you see the role of the Ninth Amendment? Jud Campbell: The Ninth Amendment is a really nice piece of evidence that the Federalists who pass the Bill of Rights view rights in exactly this way: that rights don't come from the text, and that it's really important when we write them down not to give rise to the implication that the ones that we don't write down will be presumptively lost. The Ninth Amendment is both reflecting this general attitude that the Federalists have, which is that rights don't come from the text, but it's also answering this problem that the Anti-Federalists had pointed to, that if you write down certain rights like the right to a criminal jury in the Article Three of the Constitution, by implication, you've maybe have taken away the right to a civil jury. The Ninth Amendment I see is doing both of those things: it's reaffirming a way of thinking about rights that reflects the idea that rights don't come from text, and then it's specifically rebutting this argument that one might make about the partial enumeration of rights. The Ninth Amendment, at least, is a really good clue that [the Framers] had a different way of thinking about fundamental rights than the way that we generally have. Logan Fang: I want to turn to a more contemporary question. We see judicial review and judges as the primary interpreters of our rights, but judicial review played much less of a role at the Founding. You claim that our rights were really protected by what you call institutional design in civic culture. How do you look at the decline of civic education, and has that contributed to this reliance on judicial review? Jud Campbell: I think it's right to say that the decline of a civic culture that values a way of thinking about rights that isn't just about judicial enforcement has reinforced the shift towards a jurocentric understanding of rights as being legally enforceable, as being limits on governmental power and so on. It would be really important if we were to try to go back to an older understanding of rights to try to recover some of that older culture. We might be even worse off as a society and as a constitutional system to try to go backwards without recovering that older culture, because the way of thinking about representation and the role of the people themselves in protecting and interpreting aspects of fundamental law presupposed an engaged citizenry. I do worry, though, that when we just assume that judges have this responsibility and that nothing is left, that we kind of do two things that have very significant disadvantages. One is that we tend to view politics then as being totally unconstrained by law. The problem is, it's really difficult to maintain a constitutional system where politicians feel entirely unconstrained by norms. I think a lot of our present difficulties involve the erosion of norms that maintain the sort of civic culture that allowed for politics to function in ways that always were imperfect, but nonetheless generally were oriented towards the good of the political society as a whole. Logan Fang: If that's the case, that we're thinking about politics as distinctly separate from the law, what was the middle ground? How did the Founders think about law and politics as something connected? Jud Campbell: For one thing, they thought that the most important and consequential constitutional debates would be ones that took place in the realm of politics. Think about the bank debate in the early 1790s, or the Sedition Act debates in the late 1790s. Those were debates that did not occur, for the most part, in court. Rather, those were debates that took place in Congress, and then outside of Congress in legislative assemblies at the state level, and in petitions that various communities sent to Congress or to their state legislatures, and then within Washington's cabinet when he decided whether to veto the bank bill. There are other ways that the Founders engaged in constitutional argument that went well beyond just arguing about what the Constitution meant in court cases, and I think that's a big part of what that older culture entailed. More broadly, there was this notion that every aspect of governmental power had to be aimed towards the common good. What that meant was that the people who were in power couldn't use power to try to advance their own ends or the ends of their own friends— they had to use power in a way that always kept the interests of the society as a whole in view, and they tried to do things that were impartial, as Madison puts it in Federalist 10. That's not just about legislation; that's about exercises of executive power as well. And it's a really hard thing to recover because it requires a kind of internally felt norm. It requires a culture that inculcates that sort of value. I think it's really healthy for us that we care as a culture so much about the Constitution, but when we see what the Constitution entails solely in terms of what judges tell us, we lose the ability to be thinking about constitutionalism in that broader way, and I think that's a real loss. Logan Fang: Moving to the present, we've talked about the legal culture of the past and how it exists today. But what direction do you think we should be moving in today as Americans? What should we be thinking about? Jud Campbell: I think part of the problem with our current legal culture is that there's so much confidence in our own position and so much denigration of the way other people think. It's a healthy thing for us to be committed to certain views that we think are right, but when we come to think that those views are so right and that everyone else is so wrong that it's no longer worth having these sorts of conversations, we lose the capacity to engage in this sort of constitutional project that the Founders envisioned, and that I think would be really healthy for a pluralistic society to maintain, which is a way of thinking about constitutionalism that isn't just about trying to get to the right answers, but trying to recognize ways of compromising across disagreement in a very diverse and divided society. I worry that our emphasis on giving so much power to judges and so much power to lawyers who debate these things ad nauseum has a kind of disempowering effect on our politics, and that it leads to a perspective about the Constitution that is often too legalistic; that it's often too guided by the need for clear rules, and not guided enough by the way people actually think in our society and the need for the constitutional principles to reflect those ways of thinking. I'm not proposing that we get rid of judicial review. I think it has a really healthy place in enforcing certain aspects of the Constitution. But I do worry that when we think about the Constitution and about constitutionalism only in this juridical mindset, we really lose out on a lot of aspects of the Founders' constitutionalism that were really healthy for a divided society. Logan Fang: Thank you so much, Professor Campbell.

This Constitution Day, we need to reaffirm a politics of civic virtue Image credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne Both the right and left agree that individual conduct is essential to the success of the public enterprise. On the left, personal responsibility is lauded in the fight against climate change: One must be the caretaker of their own carbon footprint by recycling, composting, and thrifting. On the right, one’s choice to marry and start a family are treated with equal reverence: Values begin at home, traditional gender roles are… well, engendered, and these rituals are key to constructing a moral community. So why can neither party universalize their own conclusions? In this article, I examine philosopher Harry Clor’s forthright pronouncement in his book Public Morality and Liberal Society that: “Individuals who cannot govern themselves are unsuitable for political self-government.” It is undeniable that I’m returning to a common theme, and if this is a polemic that I too often champion, it is only because I think it is a conclusion of consummate importance. So, simply put: Democratic self-government requires individual self-government. To be a citizen of a democratic republic demands certain things of us, not only in our capacity to act as voters, but in our private lives as well. Clor argues that “what finally counts the most for our social well-being is who we are; that is our possession in sufficient degree of those moderating and civilizing qualities called character.” The American founders were well aware of the importance of individual character, from Benjamin Franklin’s sardonic quip “A republic, if you can keep it,” to Madison’s pronouncement that a government “without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” What Clor and the Founding Fathers approach is a portrait of civic virtue. The natural response to the Founders’ argument is that, perhaps, individuals shouldn’t have to worry about their individual conduct. Government is opaque and complex, a far larger concern than it was in Athens, Sparta, or 18th-century Europe. Benjamin Constant warns in The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns that “ask[ing] the peoples of our day to sacrifice… their individual liberty to political liberty” is a doomed proposition. This is why, Constant argues, we have a legislature, “an organization by means of which a nation charges a few individuals to do what it cannot or does not wish to do herself. Poor men look after their own business; rich men hire stewards.” However, what the absolute defense of individual liberty misses is that their outcome — representatives in the legislature — is contingent on a democratic process which is inextricably tied to the conduct of individuals. The average voter in California need not know all the standing rules of the Senate, but they should have the modicum of spirit and integrity necessary to elect someone who will govern justly within them. Moreover, legislators do not simply emerge from some primordial swamp in DC and trudge on over to the Capitol (despite Trump’s experiments with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool). Our representative body draws on its own citizenry to fill its ranks; good, moderate citizens become good, moderate legislators. Finally, a rash and distrusting public is in no position to police their delegated leaders. Modern individual liberty is certainly important to protect, but to abandon any attention to personal conduct is to invite the kinds of social infirmities that plague our nation today. Constant finds that in the modern state “each individual, occupied with his speculations, his enterprises, the pleasures he obtains or hopes for, does not wish to be distracted from them other than momentarily, and as little as possible.” Ironically, in our age of technological modernity, we are distracted from even these especial pursuits. I hesitate to subscribe to the ‘smartphone theory of everything,’ believing the technology snuggled in our pockets is the root cause of everything from political polarization to declining testosterone levels. Nonetheless, I believe that some modern technologies do impair our ability to moderate our behavior in a way conducive to healthy democratic life. Most Americans have a smartphone handed to them by age 11 — for many, even earlier. For the over half of the population who interact with these mediums everyday, their attention spans are shorter. They are angrier, sadder, and psychologically stunted. Nearly half of American men have an online sports betting account, a habit associated with gambling addiction (the obvious), but also credit delinquency, bankruptcy, and binge drinking. All of this is likely familiar for the reader. What I want to get at is this: The modern American cannot transition from social media addict, sports-gambler, analphabetic, pornographer, zealot, to citizen so neatly. When our private lives are shunted toward the diffuse, irrational, and addictive, we should expect our political lives to suffer as a result. These technological products function best when we indulge in them immoderately. It is no surprise, then, that our cultural maxims have also shifted to stress individual pleasure, comfort, and safety, often at the expense of those around us. With ‘high agency’ and ‘authenticity’ as our watchwords, we can soothe our ever-present anxieties with retail therapy and psychoactive chemicals. An environment geared towards the immediate satisfaction of fleeting emotions entices them to bleed into political life. Cults of personality and populism, politics as identity and entertainment and absolution. These uglier forms of democratic politics emerge when our attention spans are shorter, when our rage is running hot, and our expectations are chastened beneath the iron collars of despair. A countervailing force is needed, quite a simple one, I argue: moderation. Reject the lodestone draw and electrome hum of the digital crowd. Be as skeptical of those who crow that we’ve never had it this good as those who harangue us that we’ve never had it this bad. Forgo those technologies that strip us of our human capacity to attend to the world with kindness and humility. What I believe in is a politics of individual responsibility. It is a politics of reasoned, well-intentioned action. It is not a politics of vituperation. It is not a politics of jealousy. Contemporary political culture is obsessed with the notion that we need some candidate to save us. Trump claims he will save us from the denuded swamp of the ‘establishment.’ Democratic front runners proclaim their stand against the Trump administration which is, in fact, the establishment. Socialists avow their aim to slay the dragon of capitalism in its Manhattan lair; red-blooded capitalists quest to thin the ranks of conniving socialists in our midst. Yet, our constitution is predicated on the idea that we can save ourselves. Searching for a heroic figure is easy and natural. But it’s not how a democratic republic survives, nor thrives. ~ Postscript: Harry Clor is likely worthy of an article himself. An ardent liberal educator who received muted acclaim in life, in death certain obituary articles glitter with effusive praise, like sapphires on the sea floor amidst the wreck of an old and stately galleon. I am sad that I did not have the chance to meet him.

In a good-faith attempt to address the Kravis Leadership Institute's concerns, the "KLI's 'Responsible Leadership' is a Charade" article is down temporarily while the author adds additional material to supplement his original argument. Though the opinion of Mr. Goldstein does not represent that of The Forum's nor of the Salvatori Center's, The Forum editorial board continues to stand by Mr. Goldstein's piece as factually accurate and free of misstatements. Image credit: Bruce Damonte / Jasper Langley-Hawthorne

Standing athwart the Soll Center roof, yelling Stop. Image credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne Dear First-Years, Welcome to CMC! Let’s make one thing clear, this isn’t a clickbait title. The first of 128 weeks is over. That’s about $3,000 in tuition. Plenty of writers in The Forum have waxed poetic on the importance of using this brief, pricey time wisely: Embrace the liberal arts and spurn the pre-professionalism found on every corner of CMC’s unduly geometric buildings. But quite candidly, it’s a struggle to persuade you all. Despite our best efforts, about 45 percent of you will enter post-grad jobs in finance and consulting. Many of you will donate back to CMC initiatives such as the Integrated Sciences program, which prioritizes scientific skill-building over scientific understanding. All of you risk experiencing CMC as a “white-collar trade school,” as one professor has called it, and nothing else. The reason why persuasion is so difficult is because there are no clean “Just look what happened to him” cautionary tales. Few who cut corners in their classes, going on to pursue that “passion” for M&A law or that “interesting” investment banking career, are doomed to a fate of overwork and a miserable family life. In fact, many might end up content. Consider former editor-in-chief Henry Long’s discussion of eros, the Greek concept of longing. Modern man doesn’t have an excess of eros, Mr. Long argues. Instead, the manifold depths of our desires have ebbed. They’re weak. Our wants and ambitions are too easily satiated by the instant gratification of LinkedIn likes, new credentials, and prestigious job placements. If contentment means fulfilling your desires, you can do that — and perhaps more easily — if you’ve abased your desires. If you condition yourself to be satisfied by wealth, acclaim, and the applause for your white picket fence, you can live a perfectly fine life. But as the saying goes: “It’s better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” Knowing Mr. Long, he’d abhor our use of J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism, but his Plato’s Symposium suggests something similar. A typical CMC “outcome” may settle you comfortably on the first few rungs of Plato’s “ladder of love,” but there are richer, fuller objects of desire that lay higher up, whether you’re cognizant of them or not. This ignorance isn’t bliss. Even if FOMO never hits, you will have nevertheless missed out — and that is yet another form of suffering, even if it’s of the beige, muted variety. So what should we desire? That’s the unsatisfying part. We can’t exactly tell you. In good liberal fashion, we can’t force upon you any one “life of the mind,” certainly not when day-to-day realities affect everyone differently. For instance, a corporate wage might mitigate the very real fact that college is expensive and familial obligations persist. We also recognize that no institution or career can ever fully detach from politicking; even the most cloistered college relies on alums who line their pockets and then donate back. This isn’t a hit piece on any one life path. It’s a hit piece on a life path that’s unexamined, one motivated by shallow desires that its traveler can barely justify to others, let alone himself. What we can tell you is that self-examination can begin at this very moment in college. We’ll draw our parallel with the Laches, a Platonic dialogue that begins with an investigation on the education of youth. Socrates’s first two interlocutors are deciding how best to rear their sons, though they’re unable to determine what an education should entail. Prodded along by Socrates, they soon discover that an education in techne — skill within a particular industry — requires a more comprehensive knowledge of which “particular” you ought to pursue at all. There are plenty of opportunities at CMC to learn the particulars, from abiding by Strunk and White’s grammar rules (we’re looking at you, Professor Pitney) to evaluating investments with discounted cash flow analysis. CMC can also offer an architectonic education, or guidance governing the appropriate use of your techne. As everyone has certain capacities, to be of benefit to others, you must understand the right calling. With CMC’s general education requirements, you’ll read historians, philosophers, scientists, and social scientists who debated the notions of right and wrong, true and false. You’ll read about statesmen and public servants — perhaps even meet them at the Ath — who adapted these scholarly answers for public life in better and worse ways. As a senior, you’ll submit a thesis, your own small declaration of the truth (that itself will be contested by those who come after you). It may not seem like it, but these exercises will help you scrutinize yourself and everything you’re attached to, from your friendships to your five-year plans. These are methods of stepping outside of yourself, a break from the constant self-enhancement of vocational skills and elevator pitches. You’re at a liberal arts college to think about big ideas, abstractions that’ve been imprinted in those who came before you and those who’ll follow. If that doesn’t get you thinking about your own legacy — how you fit into this order — well, we don’t know what will. You can use your education to enrich your appetites, aspiring to nothing more than the ranks of the bourgeois-bohemians, the professional managerial class, the yuppies — name the epithet and some of our alums have most certainly earned it. But CMC’s academic experiences, if pursued earnestly, demand that you climb the ladder of love and learn what you should desire. And yes, you’ll probably come to see that what you’ve wanted and worked for is vacuous. That’s okay. Climbing the ladder of love is frightening, but trust that this ascent will be a little easier when you lift your gaze from your LinkedIn page and level it on the vast landscape of knowledge and experience here at CMC.

To truly honor CMC’s 50th anniversary of coeducation, we must recommit to that same spirit — finding excellence in previously overlooked places. Image credit: Oscar Ponteri, made with Claremont McKenna's 50 Years of Co-education and Photo Archives Dear President Dudley, Welcome to Claremont McKenna College. Speaking on behalf of many, we are very excited for you to join us as president. We hope you and your family are adjusting well to California. Yes, the August heat can be a bit much the first time around, but the 70-degree days in December will more than make up for it, we promise. Our names are Shiraz, Aria, Oscar, and Praise. As seniors at CMC, we’ve had the privilege of both witnessing and contributing to a college that pushes the bounds of higher education — from opening the RDSC and Sports Bowl to producing Rhodes Scholars and leaders who continue to shape the world for the better. With the Roberts Campus on the horizon, CMC is an institution with extraordinary momentum behind its attempt to become America’s premier liberal arts college. But in this moment of ascendancy we must pause and ask ourselves, how will Claremont McKenna College distinguish itself from other elite undergraduate institutions? Our campus and its budding infrastructure are only as valuable as the people who bring it to life. To be the best liberal arts college in the country, CMC must attract and develop the best students from every zip code, every background, and every income bracket. … Let us be clear: CMC already does a great job building a student body that exemplifies the spirit of responsible leadership. Our admissions counselors take a holistic approach and invest in outreach like the Preview program; we are need-blind and meet 100 percent of demonstrated need; and we foster spaces like the CARE and Soll Centers where students can find community and purpose. The groundwork is laid, but becoming the best liberal arts college in the country means having the courage to go even further. That starts with recognizing that there is still a pool of brilliant talent we have yet to welcome — students who don’t know what CMC has to offer, who worry about its cost, and who aren’t sure they’d be accepted in an ‘elite’ setting. The challenge begins before a student even applies. For those outside traditional college-prepatory circles, CMC often isn’t on their radar. Our recruiting patterns don’t help: 58 percent of CMC’s in-person visits are at private schools, even though roughly 90 percent of Americans attend public schools. And for students who do encounter CMC, the price alone can be a turn-off: Half of high school seniors say they would not even apply to a college costing more than $40,000 a year — a striking reality when CMC’s annual cost of attendance has now surpassed $100,000. These barriers are reflected in the makeup of our student body. Among high schoolers with the same test scores, those from the top one percent of American families are 2.7 times more likely to attend CMC — a higher rate than that at any of the Ivies. Meanwhile, students from predominantly urban states far outnumber those from rural states, and, in 2024-25, CMC only enrolled nine Black students. That is just 2.7 percent of the class of 2030 when Black Americans make up 13.5 percent of the U.S. population. We don’t cite these numbers to argue for quotas or preferential treatment. We cite them because they suggest something practical: Our search for talent is incomplete. The best students come from everywhere. Drive, intellectual curiosity, and care for the world — the qualities we value highest in a student — should not skew toward any socioeconomic, geographic, or racial background. There are government nerds, finance lovers, and genius scientists in every corner of this country. Some attend college preparatory schools; others attend public schools; some come from families where college has always been expected; others come from those where it has hardly seemed possible. If our student body doesn’t exemplify the full breadth of American talent, it means that either our definition of excellence is too narrow or our search for it is. Institutions of higher education are often defined by their ability to transform students’ potential into societal impact; but to be the best in the country, a college must be just as adept at finding that potential in the places others overlook. That future of educational excellence is within CMC’s reach. Today, we ask that you join us in making it a reality. Real growth requires strong community, hard conversations and a willingness to hold one another accountable. We will hold ourselves — and CMC — to those standards. It starts with two core commitments: Find Talent Everywhere: The majority of American high schoolers don’t even know CMC exists. Most of our recruiting is targeted at schools that already send us the most applicants. Let's get out there and find those brilliant students who are often overlooked. Specifically… Our recruiting time should mirror national demographics: 90 percent of high schoolers attend public schools and a significant amount are Title I — our recruiting efforts should reflect that Create a ‘Student Corps’: Pay CMC students to visit (virtually or in-person) schools and communities that have been previously overlooked Make CMC Possible: How can we justify another $160,000,000 building when the difference between losing or gaining a highly qualified student could be as little as $10,000? Our $100,000 price tag is terrifying and turns families off even if we promise to cover their demonstrated need. We need clear, historic commitments to financial aid — The Ivies are already there. Specifically… Cover 100 percent of the cost of attendance for families earning less than $100,000 per year Convene a student-faculty-staff committee to find and recommend other financial aid policies that broaden the socioeconomic range of students CMC attracts CMC already has the resources to help every student — regardless of their background — find purpose and belonging here. We have world-class faculty, a Dean of Students office and CARE Center that show up for students, and a Soll Center team that helps everyone find their calling through programs like SIE and the Appel Fellowship. What we’re missing isn’t infrastructure, it’s the breadth of viewpoints, backgrounds, and life experiences that would not only put these resources to full use, but sharpen them, making discussion richer, mentorship more meaningful, and our community more energized. President Dudley, 2026 marks not only your arrival at Claremont McKenna College, but our 50th anniversary as a co-educational institution. In 1976, CMC saw an opportunity to further its mission by opening its doors to a previously overlooked community of students. 50 years later, we’re asking you to embrace that same spirit of institutional courage — not just for the benefit of those who’d be newly welcomed, but for every student here and the future of our college. We did it once and it defined a new era for CMC. There’s no better time to do it again. - Shiraz, Aria, Oscar, and Praise Co-signed by: Amrit Dhaliwal ‘27 — ASCMC President Dhamar Ramirez Gomez ’27 — ASCMC Executive Vice President Ibukun Owolabi ’28 — Junior Class President Meera Jhakar ’29 — Sophomore Class President Ava Kopp ’25 — Former ASCMC President (2024–25) Kylee Tevis ’26 — Former ASCMC President (2025–26) Georgia Alford ’28 — Student Manager, Mgrublian Center for Human Rights Millian Bailey ’28 — CARE Fellow; Open Academy Fellow; First-Year Guide; Kravis Scholar Nicolas Burlinson ’27 — Vice President of Exploratory Programming, College Programming Board Dahar Plair ‘28 — BSA's Co-Director of Identity and Personal Experience Fallyn Buckner ’26 — Resident Assistant Callum Dhanda ‘27 — CMC Advocates President Gabriel Corleto-Muniz ’28 — PPE; CARE Fellow Daniel Fernández ’26 — Mi Gente Community Outreach Coordinator Alahna Gainer ’28 — Research Assistant, Government Department Tanveer Grewal ’27 — Vice President, Claremont Marketing Group; Associate Consultant, CWPD Ambika Gupta ’27 — Student Manager, Mgrublian Center for Human Rights Kaitlin Ip ’27 — Research Associate, Berger Institute; President, International Connect; Captain, 5C Club Women’s Basketball Josephine Jett ’27 — CMS Athlete; Student Manager, Gould Center for Humanistic Studies Eli Jobrack Lundy ’27 — President, 5C College Democrats Maxwell Johnson ’27 — CMC Mock Trial Board Member Naima Joseph ’28 — CARE Lead Malu Junco ’27 — Integrated Sciences Scholar Zubin Khera ’27 — Member, REC Rachel Kindler ’27 — First-Year Guide Emre Kocer ’27 — Research Assistant, KLI Kendall Kozlowski ’27 — Resident Advisor Jim Lam ’28 — Founder, Claremont Urbanists Jaida McCullough ’27 — Source Associate Consultant; Black Student Association Executive Board Member Ellie Leiter ‘27 — Claremont Women in Business Co-President Jenna McComas ’28 — Research Assistant, Keck Center; CIRS Board Member Sophia Prosper ’27 — Research Assistant, KLI Pallavi Raju ’26 — Resident Assistant Francesca Rossi ’27 — Resident Assistant; Handley Leadership Fellow, Kravis Center; ASCMC Mental Health and Wellness Liaison; EcoRep, Roberts Environmental Center Floribert Rugambage ’27 — President, CMC African Student Club Katherine Schwab ’26 — Resident Assistant, Crown Hall; Athenaeum Fellow Jessica Sloan-Cooper ’26 — Women’s Lacrosse Player Hailey Stuben ’27 — Co-President, Outdoor Initiative Yessica Ventura Morales ’28 — Member, AMPLIFY Lab Samuel Wang ’28 — Co-President, CMC Real Estate Finance Association Michael Grigorian ‘27 — Robert Day Scholar, MUN Del Eliot Advani ’27 Deborah Aguirre ’28 Mia Balonick ’27 Miguel Barrios ’27 Asia Best ’27 Riya Bhasin ’26 Daniela Brun ’26 Tlalnantzin Carlos ’28 Luke Carfaro ’26 Kaitlyn Chang ’27 Ivy Cheluget ’28 Riley Cooper ’27 Camille D ’25 Lily Drye ’27 Theo Evison ’27 Imani Ferris ’28 Gabriel Goldstein ’27 Riley Green ’24 Georgia Rogers ’27 Anya Gupta ’28 Luci Hanstedt ’27 Erika Hayashigatani ’25 Vickie Hayashigatani ’91 Riley Hester ’27 Devarshi (Charvi) Irava ’28 Dani Ip ’29 Enya Kamadolli ’26 Jinho Austin Kim ’29 Alex Knight ’27 Cooper Lahti ’27 Eleanor Larson ’27 Jesus Lara ’28 Louis Layman ’26 AJ Matheson-Lieber ’27 Tyler Mitic ’29 Aadil Mohamed ’26 Lele Murer ’26 Anthony Northington ’29 Gev Nweke ’25 Aidan O'Connell ’27 Ashley Orton ’91 Anika Passi ’27 Jacob Pippel ’28 Tamoy Pitt ’26 Jim Sangsvang ’26 Norah Shipley ’26 Jamie Smith ’27 Maile Stoutemyer ’27 Ellen Stearns ’91 Blake Suttner ’26 Isabel Yau-Weeks ’25 Kaavya Narayan ‘25 Yuji Jones ‘27 Jennifer Florencio ‘26 Nripesh Agarwal ‘27 Kevin Chen ‘27 Ezra Mengesha ‘28 Adarsh Srinivasan ‘24 Dmytro Nyz ‘29 Chad McElroy ‘26 Caren Ensing ‘27 Timi Balogun ‘24

Meet The Forum's team for the year. Name: Dhriti Jagadish Role: Editor-in-Chief Hometown: Rocklin, California Major: Government Class: 2027 From Dhriti: I'm grateful to lead The Forum this year. So far, I've enjoyed formalizing our policies and reviving honorariums, but I most look forward to meeting new writers! Outside of Forum duties, my favorite activity is distracting friends from their studying in the Rose and Salvatori workrooms. Name: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne Role: Managing Editor Hometown: Denver, Colorado Major: Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE) Class: 2027 From Jasper: I’m thrilled to join the editorial staff of The Forum this year, and I look forward to helping expand the publication’s reach while remaining committed to our mission to deliver incisive commentary on U.S. politics and culture. When I’m not writing for The Forum, I like to hike, telemark ski, and bake. Name: Sarah McPeek Role: Interview Coordinator Hometown: Winchester, Massachusetts Major: Government Class: 2029 From Sarah: I am honored to be The Forum’s interview coordinator this year! Alongside researching at the Salvatori Center, I look forward to sitting down with its guest scholars and producing engaging interviews for our readers. Outside of The Forum, I enjoy cooking and exploring Los Angeles.

President Hiram Chodosh sits down to answer tough questions in a final exit interview. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Image credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne President Hiram Chodosh is Claremont McKenna College’s fifth president, assuming the position after serving as Dean of the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. After thirteen years in the role, President Chodosh will be succeeded by former Washington & Lee president William C. Dudley. President Chodosh’s wife, Priya Junnar, will also depart as Director of the Athenaeum. In December 2012, the editors in chief of the Claremont Independent, The Forum, and the now-defunct Claremont Portside published an entrance interview with then president-elect Chodosh. Today’s exit interview was coordinated by the Independent and conducted by the 2026-27 editors in chief of the Independent and The Forum. Dhriti Jagadish: Thank you so much for sitting down with us. First question: What is your fondest memory at CMC? President Chodosh: These fondest memory questions are really hard because there are so many. So let's see. There are a number of moments that flash before my eyes. My very first semester, in late September, I was ponded by students. That's probably the first one that comes to mind. The second is the dedication of the [Robert Day Science Center] building and just standing there, looking up at everybody and just taking it all in, like, “How did this possibly happen?” But the reason that's such a hard question is that my favorite moments are the quiet ones — sometimes in this room with students who are trying to get over some big challenge or have some new opportunity that they're trying to think through. It's that moment of both finding within them some capability that maybe they didn't think they had, or a solution to the problem that they didn't think they could create, and at the same time heightening their own expectations of what they thought they could do. Those are the moments that matter to me most, and in some ways are the most memorable. Kendall White: The school has changed a lot over your tenure, and a lot of those changes have been positive. But what is one worrying or negative trend that you've noticed and how do you think the school should address that moving forward? President Chodosh: I think that there are a number of external pressures, specifically, that bear on your generation that are of continuous concern. The first is the ways in which, as precocious young people, you try to decode what success is. Sometimes that leads to benchmarking that then gets internalized as an instrumental and linear strategy of working back from a result. People call this hyper-credentialism, but my way of thinking about it [is that] it's a kind of linear instrumentalism, of feeling that “I have to do this today in order to get there tomorrow.” The problem with that thinking is that the world is way too complex to lay out such a neat linear plan. Often, the people that follow those linear plans don't have as much to contribute to opportunities to lead and have impact. The understandable pressure and stress that's reinforced by parents and employers — and accelerated interview schedules and tracking of early internships — has a corrosive impact on openness, curiosity, exploration, [and] mastery of disciplines that broaden the base of your learning capabilities. In the end, [these] are the most important long-term sustaining assets you can develop. Now, I think we do a pretty good job in our highly dynamic and aspirational environment, mitigating that [linear instrumentalism] with a very strong community ethos of mutual support, friendship, and social warmth. When I had seniors over the other night, no one was talking first about their future plans — I had to kind of tease that out of them. They were talking about the special experiences that they had here, the relationships, [and] the special inflection points [when] taking on big challenges. That [linear instrumentalism] is an exogenous force that bears on all of you in a very significant way, particularly at a time where everyone's telling you that the job that you've been preparing for won't exist — that there's going to be this huge disruption, and that the pressures on the entry-level job market are the canary in the mine. Of course, I want each of you to be fluent in the decoding of the world. I want you to be completely fluent in how the world thinks conventionally about you, so that you can manage and navigate those conventions. But I never want you to substitute that for your own inner values framework and the honoring of your own emotional, intellectual resources. Dhriti Jagadish: Thank you for that response. But just to complicate it a little bit, this hyper-credentialism you speak of — CMC is partly responsible, right? We have 11 research institutes that freshmen, from the get-go, feel like they need to apply to. We have the Soll Center, which emails you throughout the semester saying, “Meet with us, meet with us.” Perhaps the seniors are reflective and maybe a bit wistful, but freshmen, sophomores, and even juniors, are still stuck in this rat race. And of course, CMC’s mission is explicitly forward-looking, professional[ly]-oriented. CMC says that this complements the liberal arts education, but over the past 13 years, have you seen this ethos [of] pre-professionalism detract from the liberal arts? President Chodosh: First of all, the massive opportunities that we provide are not responsible for the rat race that you call it. I think there are aspects of the culture, [such as] when people arrive they're trying to decode what the high-prestige opportunities are. Sometimes they look very narrowly at those and so there's a bit of a feeding frenzy. Then after a while, that kind of calms down [as] people hit a wall here and a wall there. In fact, the second phase of this is that [students] settle down into, “Okay, I'm doing way too much. Where should I focus?” And then they get into a much deeper set of focal points. That's not altogether a rat race in that negative way — that is actually a way of discovering what your inner purpose is. There are things that we still need to work on in terms of making sure that entry points into [CMC’s] channels of opportunity are not too early and that [they’re] not foreclosed. That's something that we've been working on institutionally, but it's hard because a lot of [CMC’s] programs have their own autonomy, which is a good thing. I think that the way that you framed it is inconsistent with my own conception of what we've always been trying to do. We're trying to create a virtuous cycle of liberal arts and leadership experience—not as a balance, not as a competition, even though, in a given moment, things might compete. What we've really tried to do is to create a virtuous cycle in which, yes, you're learning through experience, but then reflecting on [this] experience: “I need to now get deeper into my studies so that the next time I go around this block, I've got more sophistication, more knowledge, more capabilities to offer to that experiential opportunity.” I would say that the research institutes [and] the student organizations — particularly those that are very simulation-oriented — whether it's Mock Trial, Model UN, or the consulting firms that we have — are all laboratories in which students are not just building up their credentials, but they're actually building up their learning capabilities. By the time they graduate, they've had a massive amount of experience and they've also had a level of deep learning through things like a thesis requirement — which far too many universities have relaxed and very few actually take seriously. At the end of that, what I see are students who are deeply and broadly educated, who have a good sense of what gives them joy and what their strengths are, and who are understandably nervous and insecure about what that's going to mean in this future. But [they] are as well prepared as any student body in the country to take those things on without losing themselves in the next stage of competition, [in] the attempt to not only make a living but make a life. Kendall White: CMC has a great reputation for preparing students for fruitful careers, as you just spoke about. Another thing that CMC has a reputation for is its free speech climate. Aside from a couple of blemishes over the past couple of years, the school still maintains a high profile in the world of free speech and open expression on campus. But I guess this leads to a potential contradiction. Does CMC’s desire to maintain this free speech reputation come at the expense of not taking riskier moves, [such as] bringing in more controversial speakers to campus, someone like [Republican gubernatorial candidate] Chad Bianco? Or for speakers on the Israel-Palestine conflict, does the bar for security or ID checks at the door close down opportunities for conversation or prevent those speakers from coming to campus in the first place? President Chodosh: First of all, when you take into account the Athenaeum, Open Academy salons, and the total gamut of guest speakers in classes, I do think we have an extremely wide gamut of voices here. I think that there are limitations to some of the figures that people ask about. One, of course, is whether they're here for educational purposes and whether the programs are designed for educational purposes. That's a really important set of values we have to keep in mind: not just to create controversy or to provoke, but to actually make sure that whatever event we've designed is one that's educational in purpose. The second thing is that security matters. There is this very important relationship between security and safety on the one hand and freedom on the other. I mean, you don't have to think very hard to understand the profound nature of that relationship. If I'm insecure as a person, I'm much less likely to speak up. I'm much less likely to learn from someone else. I'm much less likely to walk across the street if I'm scared of what might occur to me. If I create some level of safety, both physical safety and emotional safety, I have a much better chance of challenging the assumptions that I have, my worldview, [and] my opinions about certain issues. When we have people coming to campus that pose safety or security concerns, we have a very rigorous approach to that. A lot of that you never see; we make [it] as stealth as we possibly can, so there isn't that visibility, always, of the security. And then there are other times where that visibility is very important, and then we take that very seriously. And so I don't see these [values] as contradictory. I see them as integral and in their interrelationships and interdependencies. Some of my colleagues and I wrote a piece years ago on how universities and colleges were responding to sexual assault, and it was called “Safety and Freedom: Let's Get It Together” and you can look back at some of the language in that as evidence of this underlying theory of the relationship between these two things. Dhriti Jagadish: You have spearheaded the college's dialogue programs, namely Open Academy [OA] and the CARE Center. Yet, some believe that the Open Academy's events are catered to conservatives, while others believe the CARE Center is a kind of safe space away from the rest of campus discourse. Are these institutions at odds with each other? And if these are just misconceptions, how do we address these institutional silos in the areas of dialogue? President Chodosh: I think that these are misconceptions [regarding] the origins of both of these institutional efforts. I think that at times, from a sociological or cultural point of view, you can see that people project into these institutions either what they want out of them or a negative view of what they don't want. Sometimes institutions like this are [a] Rorschach test for the community. You'll see someone who's not very well-informed making a projection about a certain political angle of something that's completely uninformed because they're just seeing what they want to see. It's a kind of implicit bias or salience problem. If you actually look at Open Academy programming — if you actually look at the full extent of it — I defy anyone to evidence a political bias in it. If you actually look at what's done in the CARE Center and the difficult conversations that they have, I defy anyone to identify a political, you know, an explicit political bias, in what they're doing. Obviously, everything that we do has a political aspect to it. I'm not saying everything's apolitical. I'm just saying that it's not in that design. This year, I know that there was a very strong attempt to bring OA and the CARE Center together, so let's just reflect on that: To actually have a dialogue about that problem — or that perceived problem — and then also to recognize that the CARE Center is actually leading peer to peer dialogue sessions throughout the community. The first experience that students have when they come [is] dialogue training run by [CARE Center Director] Vince Greer, and Vince Greer and [Open Academy Director] Ioannis Evrigenis are working hand-in-hand in terms of advancing our Open Academy and CARE goals. I would draw your attention back to the fall of 2013 when I started the very first initiative that was the genesis for this: conversations in my living room. I had young alums come back just two weekends ago, say[ing], “Oh, Hiram, we were there at the beginning of both CARE and Open Academy at your living room table.” And these were conversations over race. These were conversations over the Middle East with Muslim students and Jewish students, separately and then together. That created the very first initiative called Personal and Social Responsibility. If you look back at one of the prongs of that initiative, it was free expression and diversity, in one prong. I've always seen these things as vitally interconnected. And so even if there's sometimes drift [in these programs], or if there's a kind of sociological or cultural or political offset, you're always trying to bring them back to that singular lane and common root system. Kendall White: Another thing we were wondering is how CMC, and you, under your tenure, have approached the issue of administrative bloat, which, over the past two decades, has really taken off, and the numbers on this are a little hard to find, but it seems that CMC has experienced some of this, but not to the same degree as the neighboring Claremont Colleges. So— President Chodosh: What's your evidence of bloat? Kendall White: The numbers of administrators have grown, especially, you know, at— President Chodosh: In proportion to what? Kendall White: Pomona and Scripps, in proportion to faculty— President Chodosh: Do you have the data on it? Kendall White: and students growing— President Chodosh: Do you have the data on it? Kendall White: I mean, we've looked through the websites and Internet Archive-d how many administrators were here. It's absolutely the case that Pomona, Scripps, Pitzer, they hire more and more administrators and— President Chodosh: Are you talking about their bloat, or are you talking about our bloat? Kendall White: I'm talking about it as an endemic issue in higher education, so I’m asking how have you approached this as an issue— President Chodosh: Okay. Fair enough. Kendall White: and do you think CMC has bucked the trend or— President Chodosh: I just don't accept the characterization of us as bloat. Kendall White: Yeah, I understand that, I— President Chodosh: That's where you started, though. Kendall White: I said in higher education. President Chodosh: We've managed this very, very rigorously. If you look at the proportion of staff to faculty, the proportion of staff to students as our student body has grown — as our faculty has grown — I think you'll find a proportionate increase of staff. Second, we don't increase staff until we actually have a business model and the resources to increase staff. Third though, I would just bring attention to some of the underlying reasons why staff in higher ed has grown. One, it used to be that faculty, in part, took on a much greater set of responsibilities for student support. We went into an era where we wanted faculty to focus a lot more on their research, their teaching, and their self-governance. As student services increased, [staff] helped faculty alleviate some of those burdens. I think our faculty do an excellent job here in terms of student engagement, care, relationships, and mentoring. But I'm just saying generally in higher ed, that has been one of the factors. The second is that there are a lot of upstream reasons for the need for student services. We have generations of students that have much greater needs in terms of disability accommodation, in terms of support for what has been a pandemic of mental health difficulties, and also a kind of parenting culture, if you will, that I think has in some ways disabled or disempowered [young people’s] self-regulation, self-efficacy, [and] ability to take care of themselves. And so there are some upstream factors that have contributed to what you describe as the growth of the staff burden that that schools have taken on. In comparison to our peers, given the kind of challenges that we've taken on [and] the massive projects we've accomplished, I think that our staff-to-product ratio is extremely favorable. Just in the area of advancement, which includes our development group, our alumni and parent relations group, and our communications group, we were spending three cents on every dollar raised. Three cents — probably the lowest mark in higher education you'd find. Compared to that would be something between six and eight cents. In the nonprofit sector, 20 cents on the dollar is considered still good. If you looked at what we've been able to do — if you looked at our facilities team, and what we're actually spending in terms of managing the Robert Day Sciences Center and the Sports Bowl, and our public art program, [and] the constant improvement of our facilities — I think you'd find that very favorable. If you look at the Soll Center, the internship programs and student experience programs are funded almost entirely by philanthropy, and those staff positions [are] funded through philanthropy. If you look at the support for our research institutes, it's incredibly minimal staff support for the amount of product, the amount of opportunities for advanced research that we support. So I think, yes, there's some upstream drivers for this. We've managed this very carefully in terms of ratios. We've also been very careful to [ensure] that we're not funding staff positions through short-term philanthropy, but through long, sustained philanthropy. Then when you look at what we're producing, what we're contributing, I put our staff investments up against anyone in the country. Dhriti Jagadish: And as we're winding down here, the penultimate question, what's next for you? President Chodosh: I will keep [a] very strong connection here. I have a faculty position that will allow me to teach in the future. I have to take some time off from here next year, but we'll come back — and that is still an open question exactly how I'm going to use that [position]. I have a long-term, multi-year visiting fellowship at Oxford to spread out a little bit and to enjoy the benefits of another learning community. [There are] some projects to potentially do with [Oxford] in connection to an emerging partnership with CMC. Second, I have a number of projects that I want to continue working on. We have a big higher ed collaboration through the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. I will continue to be involved with peers across the country to disseminate a lot of the programmatic investments that we've made here through the Open Academy and other programs. I have some of my three-decade old projects in institutional justice reform, judicial independence, and South Asian mediation that I'll continue to work on. But then, to drive through those projects, I have one idea that I've been cultivating to see if I can attack two pretty significant problems at once in our civic sector. The first is to recognize that our civic sector is very fragmented. We have between 1.6 million and 2 million nonprofit organizations in the United States. They do tremendous work [and] benefit a lot of people, but they also are siloed, fragmented and, [to] some degree, in zero-sum competition with one another for the same financial, human, and reputational resources. The competition is good, but there's tremendous opportunity cost in the lack of collaboration. It's very rare that, given a social or civic problem, an organization that's really good at response collaborates with one that's really good at prevention. It's rare that one that's very good at deep impact collaborates with one that's very good at scaling, and very few have agentic or strong evaluation capabilities. So the first part is to see if I can elevate the very best of those civic leaders or nonprofits to create a fabric of comparative strengths at a higher level of vision, strategy, resources, evaluation, and execution. To do that, there are two major adjustments in the incentive structure that have to be addressed. The first is just ego. You have to convince people that they can have a much greater impact through other organizations than on their own. But second, you have to address the bottom-line financial limitations of each organization and its budgetary responsibilities to itself. And to do that, you need an integrated bargain to come in from some other philanthropic source [and] invest in the collaboration itself rather than in individual institutions. So that's the first problem. The second related problem is that we have a very high accumulation of wealth in society that's not entering the philanthropic sector in proportion. If you look at philanthropy over the last half century on a real dollar per annum basis, we've seen increases in philanthropic contributions of only 2.6 percent. Over the last decade, it's been even less: 2.3 percent. Why? Well, one of the many reasons is that a lot of people in control of this wealth don't see good options in the civic sector. They see the same fragmentation and silo effect and lack of good, common, uniform evaluation methodologies and metrics that I do. The thesis is to offer the potential of bringing that wealth to new models of collaboration in the civic sector as a way of putting it to best use — to actually move the wheel, rather than to just improve some little tread on the tire of the wheel. That idea is something I'm going to try to drive into these ongoing projects and possibly some others that develop, to see if I can actually tackle those two problems with what I call a chicken and egg solution. Kendall White: All right, our last question is, what's next for CMC? What are you optimistic about looking to the future? What's on the horizon? President Chodosh: The first — already baked in and green-lighted — are some very exciting plans for the campus. The Sports Bowl will be done this summer. The next economics building for the Robert Day School, [Records Hall], will be built probably within the next few years. When that's built, we'll probably be able to take down Bauer South and extend the North Mall all the way from Kravis Center to the Robert Day Sciences Center. When the football field, track, and lacrosse fields are built, football will go across, soccer will move down to the football field, the track will go away, the stadium features will go away, and then we'll also be able to build our diagonal mall running from the Robert Day Sciences Center down to Roberts Pavilion. There's a lot more that becomes possible with those infrastructural changes. Second, what I see is growing interest in our humanities programs, political economy and policy groups, our finance and economics cluster for surfacing in more explicit and formal ways: the most cutting-edge pedagogies and experiences for students, project-based learning, [and] collaborative leadership. [We want to] double down in the humanities, on the imagination, on intuition, on creativity, on the things that I think are even more important than ever before, those traditional liberal arts, [to give students the] ability to frame a really good question in a world where knowledge and information, to some extent, is being commodified through AI. And I see this sort of elevation of those laboratories, [that] project-based learning [in] what we've done with the Integrated Sciences curriculum and the Kravis Department. [It’s] just an amazing opportunity for the college, and I can see this in the leadership of our faculty, the interests of our students, and the draw of the attractiveness of these programs to donors. Third, I hope the school will continue to work on some really creative structural thinking about the way we price our education. We've started modeling different approaches that would create a much less asymmetric signal to potential applicants about what [CMC] actually costs and a much more transparent way of pricing out the education — and in my view, a much more sensible way of pricing it against the actual ability to pay, in ways that counter the national perversion of pricing against family income. For Americans making $100,000 or less, the price of education for four-year college programs runs about 77 percent of their income. That's just unsustainable. We have a very generous financial aid program, the Kravis Opportunity Fund, and tremendous social support to make sure that we are continuing to be the best in social mobility for students who are coming from families with fewer resources, to be able to, if they choose, earn a very generous living. But I think we have to face the big challenges with how higher ed has created this system of financial aid. That said, the college is in this extraordinary position to tell the story that [CMC] can do many things that other institutions think you have to make tough choices about. In particular, we can establish an environment that is very strong on free expression [with] a politically engaged and sophisticated student body, and also have a student body that's committed to social warmth and connection. Friendships should be regarded as not the cost of a difficult conversation, but the foundation for one. Telling that story and drawing new and more expansive audiences to that story is going to be an ongoing opportunity and an ongoing dividend for the kinds of investments that we've all made. Kendall White: All right, thank you so much for sitting down with us. President Chodosh: Thank you. This article was published in conjunction with the Claremont Independent.

BY CLAREMONT STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE “If you want to stop Netenyahuism from growing, you have to fight to liberate the Palestinians. You have to fight to emancipate the Palestinians… As long as the Palestinians are occupied, Netenyahuism is the most adequate form of government in Israel.” Dr. Vjiay Prashad’s observation expresses Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine’s essential understanding: there can be no democracy in Israel until Palestine is liberated. The current objections held by liberal Israelis are misplaced. Netanyahu is a product of the occupation of Palestine, not a historical anomaly. Because the occupation itself systematically impedes civil and human rights, the author’s claims that the University of Haifa is “liberal” and “opposed to the Netanyahu government” have no relevance to our campaign, which specifically asks for Pitzer to suspend this study abroad program until: 1) the Israeli state ends its restrictions on entry to Israel based on ancestry and/or political speech and 2) the Israeli state adopts policies granting visas for exchanges to Palestinian universities on a fully equal basis as it does to Israeli universities. The implication that Israeli universities are “natural allies” to SJP’s cause is a gross inaccuracy. As detailed in SJP’s campaign website, the University of Haifa directly opposes Palestinian liberation. Teddy Katz, former Israeli graduate student, interviewed over 135 Palestinians and Israelis to investigate the Tantura massacre for his graduate thesis. Despite receiving glowing academic reviews, the University of Haifa revoked his degree and accused him of libel. Allies to whom, then? One can only assume the author once again means “liberal” Israelis. The author also claims that a boycott eliminates the educational “opportunity” to study abroad in “the West Bank” or “in the Gaza Strip.” First, this begs the question of who exactly this “opportunity” is for, considering there are Palestinian students at the Claremont Colleges who would not be allowed to participate. There are over 7 million Palestinian refugees today, and many of them cannot enter the entirety of occupied Palestine because the Israeli government denies their right to return. An academic institution, such as the University of Haifa, that resides in this inaccessible territory is not an institution that values all students equally. Without all students being able to study abroad at the University, the institution is antithetical to academic freedom. Further, the University of Haifa is located about 100 miles North of Gaza and 20 miles Northwest of the West Bank. Mentions of both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are inaccurate and misguided, as the Israeli military consistently controls who enters these areas, including the passing of new restrictions in September 2022. Between 1947 and 1948, more than 40,000 Palestinian citizens of Haifa were forced from their homes. The University of Haifa was founded 15 years later, in 1963, on this stolen land. Next, the author falsely uses “Arab” and “Palestinian” interchangeably. The fact that the University of Haifa is “more than 40% Arab” has no bearing in reference to how many Palestinian students attend the University and, more importantly, obscures the racist reality of the occupation that undoubtedly influences their education. As stated by historian and activist Ilan Pappé: Half of the Palestinian students at the University of Haifa suffered from racist policies by the universities and attitudes by their lectures. Even during Ramadan, the university and the lectures did not allow any concessions as they would for Jewish students for their holidays. These are not marginal actions, but integral parts of the university policy. The author’s claim that the University is the “most diverse school in the Middle East” - a source for this would be nice - demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what diversity and equity actually mean. Palestinian students that make up this “diversity” are subject to racist policies and an inequitable education. Further, traveling to occupied Palestine to speak to these students and “learn first-hand” from them prioritizes non-Palestinian students’ desire to reach their own “conclusions” above the lived experiences of Palestinian students at the University, as well as negating the decades of work of Palestinian activists and scholars. The author then, randomly, invokes anti-Arab stereotypes, seemingly aiming to portray the state of Israel as a beacon of equity while painting a brush over the rest of the MENA region, citing discrimination against women, migrants, and LGBTQ communities. While there is truth to the claim that these marginalized communities face discrimination in Lebanon, these complex socio-political structures cannot be summarized in a single sentence. For further reading on the experiences of sexual minorities in Lebanon, we recommend Disruptive Situations by Ghassan Moussawi, as well as this response to the ethnography and how it connects to pinkwashing. The author, along with many students learning about SJP’s campaign, then asks, “Why Israel?” Firstly, the US funnels billions of dollars in military aid to Israel annually, amounting to a total of about $260 billion given to Israel by the US since 1946. The University of Haifa itself is home to Israeli army cadet programs, demonstrating a direct relationship between the University and the Israeli Occupation Forces that the US government funds. As discussed in “Why Israel?” by Pitzer Professor Daniel Segal, Israel relies on US military aid to continue the occupation of Palestine. Pitzer College, therefore, has a responsibility to withdraw any relationship it has with the state of Israel that contributes to the ongoing occupation. The second reason discussed by Professor Segal is that Palestinians themselves are asking for US support through BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) campaigns. Palestinian students at the University of Haifa have voiced support for academic boycotts, stating: We the Palestinian students in Haifa University refuse to be used as ‘the diversity’ pretension to whitewash its racist policies towards Palestinian students…Since we the Palestinian students in Haifa University are banned from supporting or calling for the boycott of Israeli universities and Israeli academia in general, we thank the rallying students for rising the Palestinian cause in American universities. Supporting the current call to suspend Pitzer’s study abroad to Haifa is one way that we, as students in the US, can support Palestinian liberation. The Pitzer student body and faculty of 2018-19 understood the importance of this boycott when they voted to suspend the program then. We hope the current student body will once again heed the call of Palestinians and reaffirm Pitzer’s support for this boycott. To learn more about Suspend Pitzer Haifa, visit SJP’s website. In solidarity, Claremont SJP

Meet the five staff members of The Forum. Name: Henry Long Role: Editor-in-Chief Hometown: Eden Prairie, Minnesota Major: Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE) Class: 2025 From Henry: I am excited to edit and direct The Forum this year! Last year, I wrote about the liberal arts, student protest, and free speech. This year, I look forward to publishing our political attitudes survey and our profiles in American political thought. I also hope to publish pieces from students across a wide range of viewpoints. Name: Henry Fina Role: Editor Hometown: Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania Major: Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE) Class: 2025 From Henry: Hi! I am from Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, where I enjoy roaming around Appalachian forests with my dog. When I’m on-campus working you can find me editing The Forum and reading for my seminars. I spend my free time skiing, diving into American classics, discovering new music, coaching lacrosse, and (poorly) tending to my plants. Name: Josh Morganstein Role: Editor Hometown: Orinda, California Major: International Relations + Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE) Class: 2025 From Josh: Editing The Forum this year is an honor, and will certainly become a highlight of senior year. I’m looking forward to writing about campus news, constitutional law, and international issues, amongst other topics! Besides being a news-junkie, I love to read classics, grab coffee with friends, and play chess and soccer. Name: Julia Mehlman Role: Staff Writer Hometown: Bethesda, Maryland Major: Philosophy & Public Affairs (PPA) Class: 2025 From Julia: I am excited to be at The Forum again this year! Beyond The Forum, I like to hang out with friends, go sailing, play tennis, do the crossword, and cook. On campus, I work at KLI, am a member of CMCSA, and do a cappella, but you can usually find me in Poppa. This year, I hope to write about changing campus culture, the election and its consequences, and politics more generally. Name: Sara Arjomand Role: Staff Writer Hometown: Los Angeles, California Major: Philosophy Class: 2026 From Sara: I like writing about people, going for walks, reading, and watching Tottenham (lose). Although writing for The Forum is a job, it doesn’t feel like one—it’s a chance to do what I’d want to do anyway, and to do it with friends.

Read The Forum's interview with Glenn Loury—economist and professor emeritus at Brown University. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Image Credit: Brown University Deborah Aguirre: Today we're interviewing economist and public intellectual Dr. Glenn Loury. Dr. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Brown University, as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution. For decades, his work has bridged the gap between complex econometric theory and the immediate realities of public policy. But beyond the data, he is also a model of philosophical exploration. He is the author of numerous influential works, including his highly acclaimed 2024 memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, where he opens up about his most personal milestones and mistakes through life, as well as his newly released 2025 book, Self-Censorship, which dissects the social pressures that stifle free expression. Dr. Loury, thank you for joining us. Glenn Loury: You're welcome. Caleb Rasor: For starters, much of your academic work over the years has blurred the line between fields such as economics, history, sociology. What are the limits to using economic reasoning itself to solve some of the most pressing issues facing America today? Glenn Loury: Well, I think the most important thing to recognize is that the economic dimension of the problem is important, but it's not the only thing going on. Allocating scarce resources amongst competing ends is what economics is about—it tells us how to make use of the resources, but it doesn't tell us what to value. And the value part of the social decision problem is important, but it's also philosophy and ethics, the humanistic aspect of scholarly inquiry. So I see economics as essential, but it’s also essential to keep economics in its place. Deborah Aguirre: In your 2019 piece for the Manhattan Institute, you argued that [racial] disparities in [economic] performance could be in part because of social networks and racial stigma. You specifically noted that a lack of intimate social relations with the broader population can hinder economic development. Given your more recent calls for Black Americans to stand together, develop internal agency, and embrace a distinct communal identity, how do you reconcile the need for solidarity with the economic necessity of interracial integration and the social capital that comes from those outside networks. Glenn Loury: That's a good question. My main point is that if we want to understand disparities, we need to understand human development. People acquire the skills and the value traits that get rewarded in the marketplace through socialization. Race figures into this because racial identity influences how people interact with each other. It's only by the selective decisions that people make about how to bond with each other that the phenotypic substratum, which is race—color of skin, hair, texture, shape of bones in the face—get produced and reproduced in society. So if we're talking about racial disparities, we're talking both about human development and disparities in its dynamics. I think the question you raised is important—on how I reconcile the need for integration with the need for African Americans to attend to their communal dynamic—because there really is no resolution of those two things. You could argue that the long term vision should be to transcend race altogether [so] superficial differences were not even relevant to how people interacted. We can imagine such a society, but I don't think we've ever encountered one. The fact of segregated social interactions leaves people like African Americans with the need to attend to the character of their own internal communal dynamic. That doesn't mean discouraging integration, but it does mean emphasizing the activities which encourage and reinforce positive developmental dynamics within the community. You want your kids to work hard, to love their country, to respect their elders, to not be discouraged by setbacks, to honor each other. You get these things in part through formal institutions, but you also get them through families, communities, churches and other non-governmental connections that are organized in part along racial lines, and are an essential part of the picture when you talk about perpetuating racial disparities. Caleb Rasor: You recently argued in First Things that the conservative movement, and America more broadly, must honor both the dignity of every person and the particular heritage of its people—a simultaneous universalism and nationalism. Black Americans have adopted this civic nationalism. They protected their particular identity by appealing to a universal promise of equality. How can immigrants to America do the same? At what point is there enough assimilation without cultural deindividuation? Glenn Loury: That's related to the previous question, I think. And there is a tension there. What do we want from newcomers? We want them to affirm the civic project that we're all engaged in. We want them to speak English. We want them to get America. But we don't necessarily ask them to become homogenized [and] without their own traditions and cultures. We don't want them, necessarily, to worship in the same way that we worship. We don't begrudge them keeping their linguistic heritage and cultural inheritance alive, but we want them to do that within a framework that is collaborative. I think there's a balance that has to be maintained. It's incumbent upon newcomers to get America, but it also behooves us incumbent Americans to be magnanimous—not strict in our requirement that people live, in every respect, as we are used to seeing. Deborah Aguirre: My next question was related to something you said earlier about the importance of church. You've been candid about your own regeneration through faith and sobriety in the ‘80s, and how that was your practical lever that allowed you to escape the illicit activities of your youth. Black Americans remain one of the most religious demographics in the country. Yet the social pathologies that you critique, like family instability and violence, still persist despite that high level of faith. Since you've personally moved towards agnosticism, I'm curious if you think that the practicality of faith that worked for you can still be used as a tool for communal prosperity in Black communities, or has the modern religiosity become form without substance? Should the Black community be looking for a new secular form of solidarity, or should they return to these traditional forms of faith? Glenn Loury: The character of belief in the transcendent is under the pressures of modernity—and not just in African American society. There is a role for religion as an effective response to the challenges of modern life. But I don't think there's a panacea here. I don't look to religion as "the answer." But I think mobilizing people in whatever form that you can get them around the table, supporting each other and affirming the values of decent living and productive social intercourse—I think that's a good thing. I know I'm dodging the question. I'm aware of the fact that I'm not being responsive, because I think it's just too easy to say "the church" is a solution to the problems of Black America. The Civil Rights Movement was nested within the cultural embrace of African American Christian practice—it was a historical inheritance of the 19th- and 20th-century. The country has changed. African American society has changed. And while I see a role for the church, I don't see anything like a recapitulation of the kind of formative influence that religious institutions had in the early- and mid-20th century. Deborah Aguirre: What do you think about movements like MAGA that have roots in these Christian values and present themselves as [working] alongside faith? Glenn Loury: What do I think about the Christian right and their influence within the Republican Party and the Trump-led Make America Great Again movement? I think it's the chickens coming home to roost. [The] secular progressive left ignored this dimension of American social life and offended the values that were embraced by tens of millions of Americans. Whether we talk about some of the cultural conflict issues like gay rights, transgender rights, [and] abortion, [these are] deep differences that people have based on their religious faith. I think it goes way back, at least to the 1970s [with] the Moral Majority. The Tea Party Movement, which we see in the early 21st-Century, is partly a reflection of this alienation from modernistic progressive political leadership. And I think it's ironic, because the leader of the MAGA movement is not an especially inspiring figure in terms of his ethical, religious example. On the other hand, he does, to some degree, speak for that corner of society and they have his back. I think the progressives have some part of the blame for that. [As] President Obama famously said, "They cling to their guns, their religion and so forth, because the economy has failed them and they're feeling that they're losing in life"—that kind of [talk] wasn't especially helpful. Caleb Rasor: For the most part, Professor Loury, you comment on domestic policy, but at times you have also spoken on American foreign policy and even gotten yourself into a bit of trouble. But nonetheless, I'd like to ask you about your take on the current situation in Iran. The past month or so since has been characterized by a rocky ceasefire with the US and Iran constantly vacillating between opening up ports and then reneging on their agreements. What is your current take on the state of the conflict and do you believe it will come to an end soon as President Trump claims? Glenn Loury: I certainly hope so, and I think there's a good chance of it. No, I'm not an expert on these matters. [I’ve been known] to say in the months and years prior to the onset of this conflict, we must not—we cannot—go to war with Iran, because I thought the stakes are enormously high. What happens if Turkey gets involved. What happens if the Saudis decide that they need to arm themselves? What happens to the world economy if the Strait of Hormuz is indeed disrupted for an extended period of time? And we can already see that's not a consummation devoutly to be wished, I think is the way Shakespeare put it. Keeping this under wraps is the most important thing that we can do. I appreciate that the United States and the Iranian government are in negotiation with one another. I think it has been demonstrated that the ability to dominate Iran was overestimated. A decapitation of the leadership, a destruction of their air force and their naval resources—that's been pretty well advanced. But nevertheless, we're talking about traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Now the Gulf states are deeply concerned about their own future, given the spillover consequences of the conflict. We want to get out as soon as we possibly can, and I'm hopeful about that, but I don't have any real wisdom about how to accomplish that. Caleb Rasor: A few months back, you interviewed Mark Dunkelman, the author of Why Nothing Works, and a prominent intellectual within the Abundance movement, which is a relatively new movement on the political left emphasizing the need for effective government and positive sum thinking in our culture, rather than artificial scarcity. I'm interested in if you found any appeal in this so-called supply side progressivism, and whether you believe it could bring any benefits to marginalized communities? Glenn Loury: I think you've got to build stuff. I think you need a robust public sector that invests in the future [with] highways, bridges, tunnels, electric, [and] internet. I think Dunkelman gets it largely right in his diagnosis of the conflict between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian views about government. Jefferson worried about government excess. Hamilton wanted to have a robust public sector that could actually take on the challenges of producing public goods and financing their production. The reaction to the Great Depression, the foundation of the modern welfare state, the mobilization that allowed us to emerge victorious in The Second World War, the long period of prosperity and relative equal shared economic growth that we saw in the decades after the Second World War rested upon the ability to get things done. I think Not-In-My-Backyard is a real phenomenon. I think it's easier in our system to block something than it is to actually build something. And the diagnosis that Dunkleman puts forward, I think, has a great deal of merit to it. Deborah Aguirre: On the subject of the welfare state and welfare networks: In years past, you've made clear that you're supportive of a welfare state, but believe that our current systems are inadequate replacements for civil society safety nets such as churches, extended families and [institutions] based in community. In your view, could there be a better way to design America's welfare system, such that local institutions are complemented rather than overshadowed by federal programs? Glenn Loury: I have a friend named Lawrence Kotlikoff. He's an economist, and he tells me that the marginal tax rate is highest on income for people who are at the bottom of the income distribution. The reason that's so is that if they earn another dollar, they reduce their eligibility for transfer programs, which means that the net gain is 32 cents or, [I’m making] the number up, but you get the idea; another dollar of gross income, but another 70 cents lost on eligibility for housing, medical care, aid to families, or income supplements. We should be thinking about the extent to which our transfer programs discourage the kind of behavior that we want people to engage in, whether it's marriage and family, work and self-reliance. There's no free lunch, we economists like to say. You want to help somebody? Well, that's going to come at a cost at the margin to raising the funds that you're distributing or the disincentives that you might give to beneficiaries through your programmatic endeavors. I don't think that it's practical or desirable to anticipate that voluntary mutual aid could take the place of the role that the burgeoning welfare state has come to play in sustaining decent lives for part of the population. I think it's a theoretical argument. You could say this about Social Security, for example: "Well, children should help to take care of their aging parents if they don't have income." And of course, in an ideal world, that would be the case. But to envision that income support for seniors could be managed by voluntary transfers is pie in the sky. The amount of suffering that would ensue were you to withdraw public support at this late date would be quite substantial. The same kind of thing could be said about health care. I'm not an expert in this field, but I can see the big role in our socioeconomic life that medical service provision and drug service provision is playing. Medicare and Medicaid are playing an indispensable role, allowing people to respond to their needs for healthcare in a manner that's consistent with their economic means. So no, I don't think privatization is the answer, but I do think prudence in the program design—being aware of incentives—is what's called for. Deborah Aguirre: On [the] note of incentives: Recently, Trump and the administration have started to place work requirements on [programs] like SNAP. Do you think that's a step in the right direction [regarding] prudence? Glenn Loury: I'm in favor of work requirements, actually. For able-bodied people who are able to contribute to their own support, I think work is a good thing for people. It's not just that they should be paying their own way. It's that their own development is affirmed and advanced through the extent that they can be encouraged to find work. Now, the administration of this is important. People will, I assume—I don't know the details—be allowed if they have reasonable grounds to be exempted from requirements. Again, I'd have to look into it to be sure that I'm accurate in my characterization. But I think a humane administration, where the expectation is that if you get the benefit and you are able to contribute to your own support, you would be expected to do so as a qualification requirement for remaining eligible for the benefit. I think that pushes in the right direction. Deborah Aguirre: A lot of opponents to work requirements refer to the outcomes of having these work requirements—it turns into an issue of income mobility. Even if you implement work requirements a lot of people find low-income jobs, so in your ideal welfare state how do you suppose that we help these people build their human capital so they actually move into decent paying jobs and not just be stuck working at fast food and [other] low-income jobs? Glenn Loury: Okay, I’m going to sound like a mean-spirited economist. Deborah Aguirre: It's okay. Go for it. Glenn Loury: Well, did you envision a world in which there were no low-income jobs? If they're going to be low-income jobs, someone's going to be doing them. I [can either] have a person sitting at home collecting a check or I have a person collecting a check who is getting up out of bed in the morning and going to a low-paying job without a future in that job, but they're still getting up and going. And these jobs are not lifetime sentences. They can be viewed as a stepping stone into broader society. And I answer the question, how do I expect someone to outgrow a low-income job by saying working until they are able to find something better. And I just don't think the answer to, “I hate to see so many people flipping burgers,” is to write them checks. Caleb Rasor: To close up, Professor, you have gone through many transitions in your life, such as from being solely an academic economist to also a public intellectual, from a drug addict to sober, and from being more apathetic to religion to becoming a Christian and now being agnostic. I'm curious whether at this point in your life, you've reached a point of settling on your beliefs or if there is still more exploration to be done. Glenn Loury: The latter, more exploration, not yet settled. No, I don't intend to go back to using cocaine, which was a plague in my life decades ago. And I am, as you say, an agnostic—okay, I'll go with that. I think that's probably the most accurate explanation. But I'm still questing, trying to understand, trying to come to terms with my existential condition here in this world as a reflective, more or less thoughtful human being. What are my responsibilities? What then must I do? What is the good life? What's the meaning of it? Why bother? These questions haunt me even now. On politics, I think keeping an open mind is the best way to go. I've moved from left to right to left—back to right. And as you heard in our discussion about the current administration, [I’m] not entirely happy on the right. That's okay. It ain't over until it's over. I think we have to keep asking questions and we have to keep trying. Being able to say “I think I got that one wrong,” is really important. Epistemic humility is a virtue. So that's how I'm looking at things and I don't feel in no ways tired. Caleb Rasor: Well, Professor Loury, thank you very much for your time. Glenn Loury: Caleb, Deborah, good to be with you.

What Aesop was really teaching us. The Crow and the Pitcher by Milo Winter I’m sitting in a literature seminar talking about…a crow. A crow dropping pebbles into a jar. Someone else brings up a fox. Someone mentions an ant. At some point a tortoise shows up. Which is slightly strange, because the world these animals belong to feels far more juvenile than the college literature seminar we’re sitting in. A tortoise and a hare. A crow with a jar. The kinds of stories most of us had read to us before the age of ten. When most people think about what is discussed in a college literature seminar, they think of Homer or Shakespeare. But instead, we are sitting in a circle discussing Aesop’s Fables. It feels like our intellectual journeys have progressed backwards. We’ve somehow taken a wrong turn in the syllabus and ended up back in elementary school. Why are we reading “children’s literature”? Perhaps because these stories were never just children’s stories to begin with. None of these stories are new. We already know how “the tortoise and the hare” ends. I don’t remember the first time I heard it, or who told it to me. It just feels known. Almost too obvious to think about. Certainly explaining it felt like a ridiculous proposition. But that might be the point: they feel so obvious that we never stop to question them. There’s a reason that these seemingly-simple stories persisted over centuries. Historically, fables were part of how people learned to read and write. They were taught, recited, and memorized. Not in a formal, “this is what learning looks like” way, but as part of the learning process. Similarly, for a lot of us, they were some of the first stories that actually stuck—that we internalized. Why are these stories so uniquely compelling? Because they don’t just tell you what the moral is. They show you what it looks like in practice. Who gets rewarded. Who gets punished. What feels fair. What doesn’t. The fables are teaching you to be a good citizen in a world where the power structure was established, and continues to be manipulated, by some higher authority. The people who succeed in the fables aren’t always the ones who are the most obedient. Nor are they the ones who have the most authority and control. They are the ones who learn something. They see something that the other characters in the story don’t see. They adapt to the situation. The smaller, meeker animals don’t try to overpower the stronger characters; they find work-arounds. These fables, as Professor Lerer points out, are often tales about overcoming obstacles through ingenuity, not strength. These might be stories primarily for children, but the lesson of them isn’t “know your place.” Fables encourage their readers to figure out how the system works so that they will not be trapped by it. Indeed, many feature characters who outsmart the authorities. They are tales of rebellion. Not of a guillotine or throwing tea in the ocean kind, but of a rebellion of the mind. In this way, fables grapple with major themes, questions which adults must wrestle with: how much are you supposed to comply with the system, and how much are you supposed to work against it? The voice that narrates these stories struggled with such questions himself. Aesop is said to have been an outsider, a slave with no power or authority. And yet, he subverted the system by exerting influence through his storytelling—stories not merely with messages of how to follow, how to break free, or how to exist under someone’s rule, but how to recognize that you have a voice within it, even when you were not supposed to have one at all. Professor Lerer explained that we are living in incredibly fraught times. Many of us are trying to find our place in a world where the authorities around us don’t feel legitimate. Fables are a guide for what to do when you don’t have control over the situation. When you have to work with what’s in front of you. Like the crow, you don’t break the jar. You figure out how to use it. Professor Lerer is not trying to re-teach us the morals we learned in youth. Rather, he wants us to see that we were never merely learning morals in the first place. We are learning how to read situations, understand power, and respond when we don’t have it. And sitting there, talking about a crow dropping pebbles into a jar, I think we’re finally seeing what the story was doing all along.