5C activists should not negotiate with terrorists. Image credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne Today, on the the third anniversary of the October 7th massacre, the Claremont Colleges People’s Fund — an unregistered mutual aid group — invited Dr. Mohamed Abdou, a self-described “Muslim anarchist” fired from his position at Columbia University after expressing that he was “with the muqawamah [the resistance] be it Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.” Facing opposition from the 5C administration to organize in-person, the People’s Fund and their audience assembled virtually on Jitsi Meet around 7 p.m. Dr. Abdou delivered a talk on “Re-Igniting Student Organizing against Settler-Colonial Amerika on the 3rd Anniversary of Al Aqsa Flood” — Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 attack. Throughout the talk, Dr. Abdou detailed a sweeping history of settler colonialism, tying resistance against Israel and the United States as part of the same fight against Western constructs: “Human rights, international law — none of these really matter. All of these terms were created in 1492.” With religious praise of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas's architect of the Oct. 7 attack, and Gaza’s mujahideen [holy warriors], Dr. Abdou concluded with gratitude for the People’s Fund. He thanked them for sending fraudulent locations and meeting links to administrators — “Gestapo Nazis” — and student reporters. “You were able to outsmart, you were able to out-organize,” Dr. Abdou said. “I am deeply, deeply proud of you,” comparing the students’ “secretiveness” and “deception” to the mujahideen's. The People’s Fund will mark this event as a success in their books. To 5C progressives and pro-Palestinian activists, I’m here to tell you that Dr. Abdou is not on your side. He detests you. Dr. Abdou’s talk illustrates a more malignant ideology’s presence on campus than in previous years. Consider last year, when we saw a disruption of Claremont Hillel’s memorial with an October 7th survivor. My assumption — and, uncoincidentally, my hope — is that those students were motivated by outrage at the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the devastating amount of life lost. Where they had erred was directing this anger at American Jewish students like myself mourning a tragedy, and at an Israeli civilian who was a victim of terrorism. Although upsetting for those in attendance, this disruption was a familiar case of overzealous student activism, not prompted by malintent. Dr. Abou’s talk is different. He has previously instructed people to “pick up arms where [you] are” and be willing to die in the process: “If we are to meet Muhammad, then our blood serves as a testimony. We do not fear death.” Tonight, he told students, “We are all caretakers of Hamas.” Rejecting what he calls “the scam of non-violence,” Dr. Abdou believes that the only effective form of resistance is to kill and be killed. Just consider Dr. Abdou’s oft-expressed contempt for even the most progressive advocates who opt to work within democratic institutions rather than tearing them down. He refers to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, one of the most outspoken pro-Palestine advocates in Washington and a Palestinian herself, as an “immigrant settler of color on stolen land [the U.S.]” investing in “useless electoralism.” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is yet another “Muslim settler of color” — a line Dr. Abdou repeated at tonight’s talk. Greg Stoker, an Army veteran arrested by the Israeli government for sailing to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid, should be “teaching his tactical weapons skills to wage war against Amerikkka” instead of running as a Green Party candidate. Dr. Abdou’s paradigm of effective resistance is instead Elias Rodriguez, the man who murdered two Israeli embassy employees last year: “G-d bless him, he took action.” This talk is fundamentally different from last year’s demonstrations: It is a less-than-subtle way of encouraging students on American college campuses to use terrorism as the blueprint for their activism. It is an explicit celebration of the massacre of civilians and their murderers. I would like to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and say that their motivation for activism is that they simply don’t want Palestinian children to go hungry. They don’t want to see schools and houses of worship erupt in flames from airstrikes. They don’t want to see mothers sifting through rubble to find their sons and daughters. They want all peoples to live freely and under humane conditions. To these students: Dr. Abdou’s movement is not yours. This is not a more incensed version of your politics; this is its antithesis. Under your banner of liberation, he calls the murder of Israeli children and the rape of Israeli women on October 7th “the quintessential definition of a miracle” that “undresses all performative inconsequential actions and false hopes that merely reaffirm the status quo.” The “status quo” he describes is of “keffiyeh tote bags and dresses, [of] prestige and highbrow jobs. [Of] panel and plenary invites, [of] five-star hotel conference rooms in which you conjure weak demands to merely divest and boycott.” Dr. Abdou has sent a clear message to students whose activism focuses on social justice issues abroad: “Stay in your own lane & focus on destroying Amerika/Canada, there are conversations about our region & Islam that you simply don't have the range to engage on.” In other words, Mohamed Abdou finds you all pathetic. The “status quo” he detests is the sort of activism carried out by students at the 5Cs. This includes the very organization hosting him here; the People’s Fund is a self-described “collective of students and community members who aim to monetarily support people building power (through mutual aid) in Sudan, Gaza, and Eastern Congo.” Though the People’s Fund has raised over $75,000, this is not enough for Dr. Abdou, who would rather the donors put their money where their mouths are and crusade for jihad. But Dr. Abou needs bodies for his movement. You are an audience, and it is clear that this is a man with a flare for the theatrical, as evidenced by his melodramatic praise of martyred terrorist leaders and bizarre declaration that social media influencers without a “militant social movement organizing background” are a sign that the Qur’anic end-times are near. Violent resistance is not just some abstract recommendation to be taken only by oppressed people in desperate conditions; this is his directive for you, the American college student. Endorsement of Dr. Abdou’s worldview without any intent to uphold his directive is hollow and, moreover, repugnant in his view. The violence in question is justified by the idea that fighting oppression leaves no forms of resistance off the table, including massacres. But do you actually intend to cause the destruction Dr. Abdou’s worldview requires of you? A vast chasm separates those who condemn October 7th and yet do not believe Gaza should have been leveled, and those, like Dr. Abdou, who hail the attack as a “miracle.” As activists, it is your role to define your movement — the ideas that guide it and the voices that speak for it. If you value human life and wish to bring a lasting peace, you must vocally reject pro-terrorist sentiment within your ranks. All social movements arrive at the crossroads where they must ask themselves: Who are we? Are you impassioned young people who want just treatment and prosperity for those who suffer, or are you bloodthirsty militants who cheer when the “enemy’s” homes are set ablaze with entire families still inside, their women are violated, and their children are stolen?

Reconstructing a Jewish identity three years on. Image credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne I had always figured that my proper Jewish education had ended when I was 13. After hours of poring over my parsha, practicing cantillation marks until my throat was dry, I assumed that my Jewish identity reached its culmination on the day of my bat mitzvah. Seeing as Judaism has never particularly been interested in leaving questions settled, I should’ve known better. It was fall of my freshman year. I could count on one hand the peers from my graduating high school class who dared venture west of the Mississippi River. My first weeks were lonely, as I figured out the spaces I wanted to occupy during my college career. I attended Shabbat dinners, but amid all the novelty of college, being Jewish felt settled. I was not lying awake wondering whether Jewish life would become a pillar of my college identity. Why would I when I had a Gov20 midterm to study for and inner tube water polo matches to attend? This assumption did not change on October 7, 2023, even after I had heard the news of the attack in Israel. As I put on my makeup and packed my bag for the day, I scrolled through videos of the Nova massacre, of terrorists openly firing on family homes, of bloodied and bruised women forced into vans and kidnapped. This is not to say I wasn’t immediately deeply impacted — there was just no way to comprehend what any of it would mean for me, a girl from Connecticut. An identity that I had never struggled to inhabit was about to become something impossible to ignore. The 7,500-mile distance between the war and my own life began to shrink. At the Motley, I was told that hate symbols weren’t allowed in their “safe and inclusive environment.” The barista was pointing to the yellow hostage ribbon pinned on my bag. While in the bao bun line at McConnell, I was interrogated as to why I would ever wear a “star of Israel” around my neck. When an interview I gave about student protest circulated on Fizz, my peers decided to let me know that I deserved to be sexually violated for my opinions, along with their less creative verdicts that I was ugly, fat, and stupid. As the war intensified, the divide within the student body grew. Students took it upon themselves to crusade around campus, their activism involving public humiliation and the doxing of peers and professors who knew them personally. I stopped going to the handful of Jewish spaces I had begun to frequent — not because I was ashamed, but because I was overwhelmed and confused. I thought detachment could lead to some peace of mind. It did not work. Outwardly, I succeeded in distancing myself from the arguments hurled across campus, but internally I bombarded myself with questions. I began to wonder where my own Judaism ended and everyone else’s assumptions about it began — was the star that I wore around my neck now an accidental political endorsement? I became estranged from a piece of myself that had never previously felt uncomfortable. After making a point of not wanting my Jewish identity to totally consume my college experience, I had now allowed everyone else’s conception of it to eclipse my own. Eventually, I figured that if I was going to keep thinking about being Jewish, I might as well start doing something Jewish. I returned to Shabbat dinners, where for a few hours each week, Judaism was something practiced together rather than something I was expected to explain or consider as the subject of a geopolitical debate. I’d love to say that these were spaces where differing opinions about the war were held, but like many, I first needed to feel secure in my convictions before I could engage with those who thought differently. Without constantly feeling the need to defend my Judaism to others, I felt comfortable enough to deconstruct the definitions I knew and begin rebuilding them. For the first time since I was 13, Judaism was no longer ritualistic. Instead, it evolved with me. Three years later, I look at the corner of Jewish life that I now help shape. I needed this community at my lowest, and it will be here to help Jewish students wrestling with similar questions, long after I graduate. Since becoming secure in my own Judaism, I’ve begun to understand why some Jewish students have found comfort in movements that I haven’t joined — in movements that express the relationship between culture, religion, and politics differently. I did not need to comprehend someone’s answer in order to empathize with the need to find one. Although we might have landed at radically different destinations, many of us asked ourselves similar questions. What does my Judaism ask of me? What do I owe my community? What have I inherited? Ironically, the most Jewish thing we have all done these past years is disagree about what being Jewish is supposed to mean. Very Talmud of us. I wish that it had not taken October 7 to force this self-examination, but this is the catalyst that I was given. I can mourn what dropped these questions into my life while being immensely grateful that I chose to wrestle with them. At 13, I celebrated the culmination of my Jewish education. At 18, I learned just how wrong I was. Now, as I am about to turn 22, I am finally comfortable knowing that I will be a student of myself for the rest of my life.

Housing and transit policy afficianodo Nicholas Steinman responds to a "defense of the suburbs." This article originally appeared in The Student Life (TSL) on Oct. 2. TSL production editor Nicholas Steinman writes in response to Arjun Vohra's article, "In Defense of the Suburbs," first published on Sept. 24 in the Claremont Independent. Image credit: Melinda Qerushi / The Student Life Last week, I read an op-ed in the Claremont Independent (CI) titled “In Defense of the Suburbs,” written by a classmate and acquaintance of mine. At first glance, it is hard to say exactly what concept the author defends in his article beyond his own unpopular Reddit comment. It is similarly left to the reader’s imagination what sort of assault he might be defending against, other than people downvoting his Reddit comment. The article does reflect the underappreciated reality that many Americans — myself among them — happily grew up in suburban areas and love their neighborhoods. However, the author’s misleading use of those arguments is a cautionary example of how easily culture-war generalizations can cast neighbors who depend on one another as bitter enemies. ‘City’ and ‘suburb’ are not opposed concepts; one cannot exist without the other. To have any hope of improving either, we must be prepared to have honest discussions about improving both. In ignoring this, the author deprives urbanites and suburbanites alike of the agency they deserve over the communities in which they live. The premise of the article is that urbanism, a broad movement to revitalize and expand human-scale, pedestrian-friendly built environments in city planning, is a political, cultural and personal “assault on American suburbia.” The author objects to what he sees as primarily aesthetic condemnations of his and many Americans’ way of life, arguing that “what they lose in form, they make up for in function.” The article is wrong on the merits — many suburbs can be unhealthy for people, economies and the environment alike — but it also fundamentally misunderstands what a suburb is. The author conflates the suburbs with a very specific type of planned community consisting of nothing but single-family homes on large lots. Of course, there are many lovely neighborhoods of single-family homes, as well as many quite unpleasant ones, but from a practical perspective, no entire community looks like this. Even in the most sprawling areas, residents need groceries, and commuters passing through need places to stop. People want to live at least within easy driving distance of restaurants, hospitals, barbershops and many other types of services. These centers of employment and spending help governments raise tax revenues to maintain services like roads and plumbing. And hopefully, most communities will also provide libraries, parks and schools so that residents can live fulfilling lives and raise families. Suburbs include all these land uses and more, along with single-family homes. Further, many cities have highly suburban areas within them, and many suburbs have urbanized centers featuring commercial strips, offices and even dense housing. It is through abusing these nuances and selectively employing contradictory definitions of ‘suburban’ that the author of the article conjures statistics that allegedly support his claim that building only single-family residential sprawl solves urban problems like crime and even, improbably, long commute times. Living in Claremont, a city about as undeniably suburban as they come, we should all be aware of the nuance inherent in ‘suburban-ness.’ Though the quaint Claremont village and its idyllic surrounding neighborhoods don’t form the sort of obvious suburban skyline seen throughout American metropolitan areas, they do create a compact, dense and walkable area combining many land uses. Like many older suburban areas, they also feature a wide selection of housing types. Not just single-family homes, but duplexes, small apartment buildings and larger mixed-use communities with apartments, townhomes and amenities. Despite my fedora, I may not speak for all the vitriolic urbanist Reddit users referenced in the CI’s article — but I know that real-life urbanists appreciate the nuanced variety of housing options many suburbs already have and only hope to enhance that range of choices, not to destroy the suburbs. However, many urbanists living in the suburbs — including myself — hope that more suburban neighborhoods can take cues from the lively, walkable neighborhoods that already exist in the suburbs and throughout our cities and move away from relying too heavily on car-oriented, single-family residential sprawl. The reasons for this are not merely aesthetic. The design of many single-family residential areas is not just unhealthy and oppressive but financially and environmentally unsustainable. Much of our housing crisis across the United States stems from a lack of housing that accommodates people’s different needs. While some may prioritize quiet and a large backyard, others prefer an apartment within walking distance of where they work. Not everyone is raising a family right now, and not everyone who wants high-quality housing and a secure lifestyle wants to buy a home right now. The CI article strikingly ignores this diversity — for example, by listing “the most important residential considerations Americans have” on the sole basis of a 2021 National Association of Realtors blog post about post-COVID-19 homebuyer demand. In doing so, the author conflates all Americans who want housing with the much smaller group of Americans actively searching to buy a home. Low-density housing is also very expensive in the long term. When homes are far apart, the infrastructure connecting them costs more: for example, roads and sewer lines have to be longer. Likewise, an almost exclusively residential area takes in much less tax revenue from commercial or industrial land use. In this way, certain types of suburbs — the very types praised by the CI article — can actually raise your taxes and create economically fragile communities. This is another reason why so many metropolitan areas are experiencing an affordability crisis. Urbanists hope that, over time, we can address many of these issues by adding more variety to the suburbs. For example, medium-density housing — such as townhouses and small apartment buildings — already exists in the parts of suburbs where land uses transition. We believe more of this ‘missing middle housing’ could be added to greatly increase our supply of units without radically changing the character of existing communities. Additionally, many new suburbs feature lovely paths that make it easier for people to walk or bike through neighborhoods without, as the article notes, spending thirty minutes traversing winding, monotonous streets designed to prevent cars from traveling through. Do urbanists want to replace single-family homes with skyscrapers? In certain very limited areas, many of us do. Before transferring to Claremont McKenna College, I lived in Washington, D.C. for a year; many of the suburbs there were built around Metro stops, and some featured impressive high-rise developments and cosmopolitan commercial districts flanking the station exits. Yet even a fifteen-minute walk from most of these stations, you can find beautiful brick homes with large, verdant lots. In between, you can find many intermediate housing options, all easily accessible by reliable public transportation. As a Los Angeles native, I certainly wouldn’t mind if some parts of my own famously congested and unaffordable city looked more like that. But in most areas, suburban urbanism looks like revitalizing what already exists to create more neighborhoods like Claremont, which lies somewhere in between the concentrated density of a high-rise suburban ‘edge city’ and the dystopian monotony cheered by the CI article. I know there are many suburb defenders out there. Sometimes I count myself among them, and other times I would love to find common cause with them. At the same time, we may earnestly disagree on many policy issues. Nevertheless, I hope we can all acknowledge that there is not one right answer to what makes a great place for an American family to live — and that those committed to making room for diverse communities in the suburbs can begin to count themselves among us urbanists as well. Nicholas Steinman CM ’28 hopes to remake Los Angeles in his own image when he grows up. On his frequent multi-hour walks, he has covered all the ground between Claremont, downtown Los Angeles and the beach and loved every block. His plans to attend the opening of three subway stations near Downtown with the author of “In Defense of the Suburbs” last year fell through.

The Forum sits down with Washington Post columnist and CMC alumnus Henry Olsen. Image credit: Discovery Institute Shiv Parihar: Hello, I'm Shiv Parihar. Sarah McPeek: I'm Sarah McPeek. Shiv Parihar: And you're here with The Forum, sponsored by the Salvatori Center. We're honored today to be joined by Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a columnist for The Washington Post. Henry Olsen: Thank you all for having me here, particularly with Mr. Salvatori, who was absolutely instrumental in the election and the recruitment of Ronald Reagan in 1964 through 1966, that helped launch his career and hence save America. Sarah McPeek: Your election forecasts have been unusually accurate. What is one indicator that you trust that others seem to undervalue? Henry Olsen: I ask the questions that most people don't. I try to ask the question: How could things be different? And I rely not on looking at aggregate patterns, but at granular patterns. So I predicted that Romney would lose rather comfortably when every other Republican analyst said he was going to win comfortably, and that was based on a granular assessment of polling data. I predicted that Trump was not going to lose the popular vote by three to six percent when everybody else was saying he would in 2016. I said he would at best lose by a point or two, and that meant he had a very good chance to win the election. Same thing in 2024, I look very carefully at data, and I try to ask the question: What is different here? What would have to be different? That usually lets me see things that more mainstream analysts or media types miss. Shiv Parihar: One of your areas of expertise has been populist movements across the world. How do you define populism, and what do you think Americans are missing in our understanding of it? Henry Olsen: I wrote a quasi-academic piece defining populism back in 2010 or 2011 as an attitude that had four attributes. It defines itself as being with the mass of the people who have been unjustly deprived of something that is their due as citizens by a definable elite, that the restoration of rule by the just people and the unseating of the unjust elite will redress that balance, and that the unjust elite are treated as adversaries rather than enemies. What you've been seeing essentially is the rise of both left and right populism. Occasionally, you'll see center populism, but that usually fades pretty quickly. [Left and right populism] differ in their definition of what is just, what has been deprived, and who is doing the depriving. So, if you look at left populists around the world, they tend to ascribe the ill as being a deprivation of material equality, and the unjust elite as being billionaires, multinational corporations, globalist trading systems. On the right you tend to see the argument being that they have been unjustly deprived of their worth as citizens, which includes a cultural dynamic as well as an economic dynamic, that it is a cabal of elites, academic, media, and economic that combine to take a set of viewpoints across the span of issues. Most Americans don't know what's going on elsewhere: They tend to say what is going on in America is unique to America. It's not. It's going on throughout the developed world. What you need to do is put yourself in the perspective and ask why are the same types of people in 50 different countries that hold regularly scheduled elections acting in the same way, and when you ask that question, you see things much differently than if you ask the country-specific question or the personality-specific question. You've got the question: Is there Trumpism after Trump? And I say, of course there is. The only reason Trump won was not because of Trump. It's because he identified himself with pre-existing positions. I always point to a 2010 poll that showed that the group of people who largely were blue-collar whites didn't like wars in Afghanistan, thought that trade was bad for America, and didn't like immigration, and supported social welfare policies like Social Security and Medicare. What did Donald Trump say when he came down the escalator? If Donald Trump had come down and said, “I'm a billionaire, and I think the problem is we didn't move too much in favor of neoliberal economics,” he would have gone nowhere. He combined his personality with a preset of issues that represented a worldview that people already have. So of course, there's going to be Trumpism after Trump. There was Trumpism before Trump. Sarah McPeek: What else do you think American politicians and American voters are — or aren't — learning when they look at populism abroad? Henry Olsen: They're not learning the right things in general. American voters on the left or right tend to view the European populists through their own lens. On the left, they'll say, “they're all neo-fascists who want to destroy democracy,” which is not true. On the right they tend to say “they don't like immigration and they support Christian culture, therefore they're just like us,” and they overlook the fact that many of them actually don't like the United States very much. The AfD in Germany, for example, is very pro Russia, and would prefer to actually withdraw Germany from NATO. So they see what they want to see, and they don't look deeply enough. That's at the voter level, and at the elite level, I would say there's still some of that same myopia that elites on the left and elites on the right see, similarly to their voter bases. What they also have is a sense that the elites tend to be distinctly anti-populist, both right and left, because they are the ones who have benefited from the global order that was constructed after 1989. I wrote an article for Unherd in 2017, saying it's not left versus right, it's ins versus outs. Most elites are, whether they're left or right, in the 'ins.' So they look at populism as something that is still temporary, that is controllable, that is reversible. It is not controllable; it is reversible only by adopting the policy prescriptions that the populists support, because there are actually legitimate reasons for them to hold their viewpoints. The consensus that was promised after 1989, particularly after the Chinese entered the WTO in 2001 and the unipolar moment of American global supremacy, did not produce peace in the globe, did not produce prosperity for all in the developed world, and did not produce a lessening of social tensions at home. And in fact, it presided over an increase in global instability and hostility and an increase of social tensions at home. The elites will continue to not understand populism until they are displaced by the populists. Shiv Parihar: Sarah asked about Europe's populist movements. Brazil has an election in just a few weeks, and up until now, Donald Trump has a 100 percent record of endorsing candidates in Latin America since he's been elected to his second term, and having them win their elections, usually populist right-wing candidates aligned with him. You wrote about the last Brazilian election. Do you have any thoughts on the relationship between American populism and the populace to the south of us, especially how it might connect with Hispanic voters, oftentimes, the most in contestation group in America? Henry Olsen: The thing that's driving populism in Latin America is related to, but not identical to, the things that are [driving populism in the United States]. The consensus is a problem down there, like with Argentina. Argentina has been ruled by a left populist movement for most of the last 80 years. Peronism and the right populism there essentially would like Argentina to join some form of neoliberalism because it would benefit a low income country like Argentina. In Chile, populism is largely driven over cultural concerns. We get a lot of the immigrants from Colombia and particularly Venezuela, but they get them there too, and so you've got the concern about illegal immigration and cultural issues driving people to the more extreme right. Of course, in Colombia, you have the ongoing question of genuine narco-terrorism that has bedeviled that country for decades and has not been put to rest, and certainly was not put to rest under the country's first genuine left populist president. But of course there is also a cultural sense that Brazil, in particular, has a strong Protestant population. A biblical Protestant worldview sees itself as threatened [in the United States] and in Costa Rica, where there's also a large number of biblical Protestants who are actively involved in politics. Of course, you saw a right-wing populist decisively win the Costa Rican elections earlier this year. So that adds a more American-esque element to it. Shiv Parihar: You oppose attempts to ban populist insurgent parties like the AfD, which have been discussed, you know, particularly the German left. Can you tell us about why you think that doesn't work? Henry Olsen: It doesn't work because of voters. You can ban an entity, but you can't ban a voter. You can only ban a voter by banning their viewpoints, and you can only ban their viewpoints by eliminating free speech and imprisoning people who violate that. Even Germany, if they want to ban the AfD, are not going to do that. So what they'll simply do is find a new vehicle. The example I like to give is in Belgium. In 2004, there was a group called the Vlaams Blok, an ultranationalist Flemish right populist party. It was accused of racism, and the government was about to shut it down for some violation of campaign finance rules or something. They decided to shut down the Vlaams Blok, and they started a new group called Vlaams Belong, and Vlaams Belong is now one of the strongest parties in Flanders. The only way to stop the viewpoints of voters is to imprison or kill their leaders and make it illegal to express their viewpoints. In other words, what Putin does, and I don't think Germany is going to be there. Sarah McPeek: Moving back to America and onto the midterms. You've recently described a lack of unity among Republicans following primaries. I'm wondering why, when you've seen such contentious Democratic primaries — thinking about Michigan and Maine — Democrats have united in a way that Republicans have failed to. Henry Olsen: They've united because they hate Donald Trump. There will be people who will battle in 2028 for the future of their party. But when it comes to defeating a candidate of the Republican Party that will largely support Donald Trump, they are united in that, and so they're overlooking the differences in the sake of beating a common enemy. Of course, once you no longer have that common enemy, then these differences matter again, and you will see a very very difficult fight between a center to center left establishment and a left of center to far left insurgent populist wing, one that's not capable of being predicted this far out. One can easily see it arising simply because we've been seeing it arise in primaries throughout the year, and we've seen both sides have their share of victories. Shiv Parihar: Turning to a more theoretical question, you're a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which focuses on the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. I'm curious where you see the boundaries of that tradition lying within American civic life and how you see the growing demographics of, say, American atheists, or as they usually are in surveys, nones, or even Muslims or Buddhists, as fitting in. Henry Olsen: When I talk to my colleagues at Ethics and Public Policy Center from a political standpoint, I say that the thing you have to understand is that the median American voter is a Christian who never attends services. So, from a political standpoint, any sort of attempt to apply a broad Judeo-Christian ethic has to appeal to that voter. That voter is often not attending services because they disagree with more traditional aspects of the Judeo-Christian practiced religions, and so consequently are not amenable to being appealed to on the very grounds that would activate people who are most attached to the propagation and installment of a Judeo-Christian worldview — abortion is a perfect example of that. There are people who attend Jewish services or Christian services who are strongly anti-abortion. There are many people who attend who are strongly pro-abortion, but there are even more who are in the non-attending group that support abortion rights. You have to be very careful in the modern political world to decide what are the aspects of a traditional Judeo-Christian worldview that are politically possible at this moment. I think what you have to understand in America is that modern America remains more traditionally religious than most Western democracies, but it remains and is becoming much less traditionally religious than it has ever been before. If you want a return to tradition, that's not a political battle. That's a battle to be fought by talking on the campuses. You should be going to people who say they're Christian but don't attend church anymore and ask why don't you come back. When I was young, close to 50% of Americans were attending services at least on a monthly basis, Jewish or Christian services. There were virtually no non-Christian religions of note. This was the world Ronald Reagan was elected in. You can't ever look and say that there was an American political leader that said, “give up your religious beliefs, stop going to church, it's all a lie.” This is stuff that was happening in the culture, and so people gradually decided they didn't believe anymore. The 'nones' are very different, according to Ryan Burge, an interesting political scientist who writes on religion. They may not be Christian, but some of them actually go to church. Many of them pray and believe in a higher power, but they don't adhere to the traditional Christian church hierarchy or organization, so they're between the atheists and the agnostics and people who still declare themselves to be Christian. But, you probably now have six to ten percent of religious people who are not Judeo-Christian in there. That gets to the last thing that I emphasize to my colleagues, which is that there are similarities in worldview across these religions, particularly with respect to things like the nuclear family, as being a primary order or organizing force of society. In a political sense, what you have to do is appeal to that, as opposed to a theological underpinning of that. I cannot speak for any of my colleagues at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, but you are owed an honest answer from me as to what I do, and you have received. Shiv Parihar: How do you see this changing coalition form? There was a Sikh prayer at the Republican National Convention, James Talarico is sort of bringing a new Christian-left thing, Vivek Ramaswamy has tried to appeal to evangelical voters — do you think this could have any impact at all, or do you think it's mostly just fluff? Henry Olsen: Look, there's always been a Christian-left, James Talarico, and an evangelical left. Even today, probably one-sixth to one-fifth of regular church-going evangelicals vote Democratic, and these are people who interpret the evangelical tradition in a way that is more consistent with a center left to left wing viewpoint. As they might say, they're ‘Matthew 5’ Christians, people who focus on the beatitudes rather than other aspects of theology. “Blessed are the poor” is more important to them than other aspects. That's a perfectly legitimate way to interpret Scripture. What is happening is the American political system is dealing with not just sect diversity, which has been present in America from its founding: you're now dealing with the question of a large electorally significant group of non-Jewish Christian religious diversity. I think the American political system is trying to determine through its actions where this fits, and different people will try different things. I think that the American political tradition will find a way to speak to people of varying religious traditions in a way that brings them into the American mainstream. And there'll probably be many ways to do that. Vivek's is one, and J.D. and Usha Vance's is another. Nikki Haley chose another path, as somebody who was raised as a Sikh who named her children after Sikh names, but converted to being a Christian herself. There are going to be many different paths in trying to do this, but as long as we have freedom of religion, I see no way that that is in any way restricted in a way that would be impactful for non-Christian religious minorities. They will be brought into the American cultural and political mainstream. Catholicism was once thought to be inconsistent with American democracy: It no longer is. We have a way of bringing people outside of once dominant faith traditions into an American civic political tradition, and I have no doubt that we will do so with non-Christians as they become more numerous among the American citizenship class. Sarah McPeek: You wrote about factions in the Republican Party. Looking three years into the future post-Trump, what do you see as being the factions in the Republican Party? Henry Olsen: Factions change over time in determination and in reaction to political questions of the day, but I think we can safely say that things don't change so dramatically absent a massive intervening event. You have economic populists, people whose primary concern is: “You've closed my factory down, what are you going to do about my community, what are you going to do about my standard of living.” These people are people who are economically out of sync with the post-1989, post-2001 neoliberal internationalist group. You have religious conservatives who have always been a part of the modern Republican Party, and they are concerned with things like religious liberty, traditional sexual archeology: “Biological women are biological women, and biological men are biological men.” Abortion is less important to this group than it was 20 years ago. You have kind of a nationalist wing, which sees it around an assertion of American patriotism, hard line on immigration, and a restrictionist view on foreign policy. These are the people who really don't want America involved in the Middle East. They're not a majority of this faction, but they are part of this faction. Then you have the non-MAGA Republicans, and those consist of a small number. It used to be that 20 to 25 percent of primary voters in the Republican Party would say they're moderate — most of those have left the Republican Party, but some are still there, you have five to 10 percent who are still moderate. They don't like any form of conservatism, but they really don't like the liberalism that they see in the Democratic Party, so they remain dissatisfied Republicans. There's one other group that has aligned with MAGA, and that is people who prioritize tax cuts. The people who prioritize tax cuts are with the Trump administration and with MAGA because they continue to prioritize tax cuts. The ones who prioritize spending cuts, like former Vice President Pence, are dissatisfied. They are part of what I now call the old guard. The old guard is essentially the people who [want to] go back to the arguments we had before Donald Trump within the Republican Party. I wrote a whole book about those arguments, called the Four Faces of the Republican Party. But, there’s no reason to think that in the next three years that there will be an event that forces people to redefine themselves, or that any MAGA-oriented presidential candidate will so define themselves in a way as to alienate part of the four-part MAGA coalition. Shiv Parihar: Thank you, Mr. Olsen, for joining The Forum!

By taking low-wage, high-impact jobs, wealthy students at top colleges can help the neediest while making room for others to climb the ladder. Image credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne Claremont McKenna College is known for many things: sunny SoCal weather, a tight-knit community, the Athenaeum, and a top free speech ranking. But what perhaps best distinguishes CMC, as with most elite US colleges, is its ability to take rich kids and make them even richer. As my reader is likely aware, CMC has stellar outcomes. Nearly two-thirds of employed graduates enter the fields of tech, accounting/finance, business, and consulting, where base starting salaries can exceed $100,000. These strong earnings figures reflect, in part, the wealth of Claremont McKenna’s student body: As of around 2015, one-in-five students came from families in the top one percent, and one-in-twenty from the top 0.1 percent (incomes over $800,000). Similar levels of income inequality exist across nearly all selective universities in the US. The most striking fact is that even among graduates of elite colleges, those from wealthy backgrounds earn more post-grad. Consider 30-somethings who graduated from Ivy-plus or other elite colleges, and focus on two groups: Those whose parents earned in the top five percent (“rich”), and whose parents earned in the bottom 40 percent (“working-class”). Data indicates that those who grew up rich are 18 percent less likely than their working-class peers to earn a bottom 40 percent salary. Wealthy-born elite-college graduates are also far more likely to earn top one percent salaries themselves. Given that these students graduated from the exact same selective colleges, it’s hard to imagine that differences in skill or life circumstance could account for all disparities in outcome. Rather, this effect is driven by rich students at elite universities passing over lower-paying careers for more lucrative positions. Image credit: Opportunity Insights Mobility Report Cards, Online Data Table 6 / Caleb Rasor. For a full breakdown, see here. Earnings collected between ages 32-34 for the 1980-1982 birth cohort. None of this is surprising, so why does it matter? First, wealthy students at elite colleges are the best suited to enter careers in public service and research that may not compensate well. While not universally true, affluent young people tend to receive substantial family financial support to cover the costs of low-paying internships and jobs. For a working-class student penny-pinching to afford a top college education, taking a $40,000 paycheck in San Francisco or New York may not be justifiable; for someone with generational wealth, it might be. I’m not referring to just any low-paying jobs. Fields such as teaching, social work, nonprofit administration, and scientific research are critical to advancing the American Dream and improving the lives of the less fortunate. For disadvantaged students, having a “high value” teacher for even one year can significantly raise college attendance and lifetime earnings. College grads at AmeriCorps have supported millions of Americans through disaster recovery, environmental restoration, and public health programs despite being paid just $18,000 annually. Public defense lawyers carry out the critical work of upholding our Sixth Amendment right to counsel, yet accept salaries less than half of comparable private trial attorneys. STEM research labs, which demand large quantities of low-wage predoctoral assistants, generate vast innovation and billions in economic activity. Another reason well-off graduates should enter lower-paying fields is to allow middle-class and low-income young people to climb the ladder. As Brookings researchers Richard Reeves and Kimberly Howard highlight, America has a “glass floor” problem: Those born into affluent families are unlikely to fall, even after accounting for their skills and drive as measured by child aptitude tests. This is a prime reason for declining belief in the American Dream. Exploding inequality has meant that even if children become “better off” than their parents, they are increasingly unlikely to climb the ladder on a relative scale, a signifier of intergenerational progress. To put it plainly, only one percent of people can be in the top one percent. A rich child that remains rich is preventing upward relative mobility. I want to be clear that there is nothing inherently wrong with anyone, even the ultrawealthy, pursuing a high-paying career. In fact, rich students at top colleges help open the door for their working-class peers to enter lucrative professions. Research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty demonstrated that having cross-socioeconomic class friendships raised lifetime earnings for poor children, and the same could well be said for those of college age. Perhaps it’s no wonder that CMC has one of the nation’s highest rates of income mobility for students from the bottom 20 percent. I’ll admit that there is a balance to be struck here. But that balance is one where rich college students are at least as likely as low-income classmates to enter public service professions, if not more. Some well-off students argue that earning large sums and donating — or “effective altruism” — better maximizes their social impact. While this approach is well-intentioned, consider two counterarguments. First, mentally committing in your twenties to make large charitable donations throughout life is flimsy. A 2019 survey of self-professed effective altruists (EAs) found that the median donation was just three percent of income, and even EAs earning in the millions rarely donated more than 10 percent. In other words, it’s just too easy to chicken out of charity when the paychecks roll in and the Lamborghini lot looks enticing. Second, effective spending by deep-pocketed individuals requires that they know where dollars should be allocated for maximum value. To achieve this, it is critical that intelligent, motivated individuals with the best educations enter academia and grassroots advocacy, debating and determining where resources would make the greatest difference. This is exemplified by the philanthropic organization Coefficient Giving, which draws on academic research from philosophy, epidemiology, economics, biology, and psychology to inform $6 billion in grantmaking to date. The group has funded Chemistry Nobel Prize-winning vaccine research, saved 100,000 human lives through global health interventions, and improved living conditions for 3 billion farm animals. Yet again, the various university and nonprofit research roles necessary for this impact are best filled by financially comfortable college graduates. With the enormous personal and societal benefits of rich students entering mission-driven work, why do so many neglect this path? One reason is family expectations: In upper-class households, entering a prestigious career path is often considered compulsory. The biggest culprit, however, is peer pressure. At schools like CMC, where finance and consulting are considered the default, wealthy students going into advocacy or service work are quietly judged by their peers for leaning on “daddy’s money.” Instead, these individuals should be celebrated for using their position of privilege to make the world a better place. Higher education must look to colleges such as Pitzer, Oberlin, Wesleyan, and Carleton as examples of producing impact-minded graduates despite having well-heeled student bodies. Ultimately, sending more affluent students into service-oriented professions will require a change of culture at elite colleges. Career service offices will need to direct more students towards nonprofits, social enterprise, and PhD tracks, actively connecting them with alumni in these fields. Affluent students themselves must be willing to sacrifice McKinsey and Goldman Sachs salaries, and instead join purpose-driven organizations desperate for talent. Most importantly, it will require all of us at Claremont McKenna and colleges around the country to demonstrate through our words and actions that lower salaried careers are not only acceptable, but venerable for top graduates.

Built to serve the community, Henry Kravis’s flagship institute now trains students for the corporate ladder Image credit: Bruce Damonte / Jasper Langley-Hawthorne Henry Kravis ‘67 founded the Kravis Leadership Institute in 1993 to fill a gap he saw in higher education: “There isn’t really a leadership institute in not-for-profit [service].” This past spring, that institute sent its student employees to Las Vegas to shadow a slot machine manufacturer. Between those two dates, CMC accomplished a billion-dollar fundraising campaign in the name of “responsible leadership,” but has yet to answer the question: responsible to whom? Part 1: Our Obligation CMC touts responsible leadership as one of its core values. What does responsible leadership mean for CMC? In the first case, “responsible leadership” is the title of a massively successful fundraising campaign, through which CMC has been able to raise over one billion dollars in the past decade — the first liberal arts college in history to do so. With this money, CMC has invested in campus expansion and overhauled student programs, promising to develop responsible leaders in their academic and career journeys. In this same timeframe, CMC has moved from forty-ninth to sixth in the Wall Street Journal college rankings, which are based on post-graduate outcomes. Like any college, CMC is a business, and we, as its students, are both product and consumer. As in any market, successful businesses must have a competitive advantage. CMC has carved its place among prestigious institutions with the promise that students graduating from this college will be responsible leaders, and no part of the college is more poised to fulfill that promise than CMC’s flagship Kravis Leadership Institute. When a product does not fit consumer expectations, the consumer and business both suffer. We must then critically scrutinize the “responsible leadership” concept CMC, and KLI in particular, is selling us. In order to form a reasonable expectation from which we can scrutinize our product, we need a clear understanding of what responsible leadership means. You might expect to find an operative definition on CMC’s fundraising website, but you won’t. The mission statement of the Kravis Leadership Institute (KLI), which also includes the term, does not provide a definition either: “Our Institute’s mission is to be a premier academic center for the promotion and understanding of responsible, innovative leadership and to provide unique opportunities for CMC students to develop as outstanding real-world leaders in the public, private and social sectors [emphasis added].” The opacity of the term works in both CMC’s and KLI’s favor. It is more useful, from the perspective of education-as-business, to hold the concept in a hazy, goal-oriented future tense. It is less important to create an actionable capacity for responsible leadership than to attach an abstract goal to an educational identity. This, in turn, makes it difficult for the student consumer to judge the nature of CMC’s product. After all, what student doesn’t want to be a “responsible leader”? Thankfully, KLI’s eponymous founder Henry Kravis, does provide an operative definition of responsible leadership: “We set up the leadership institute… to get more and more students to understand that there is a lot they can do, and in fact build a real career in the not-for-profit world. [Students] should, as an obligation, give back to help their community, to help the less fortunate [emphasis added].” Kravis provides us with a solid foundation for defining this term. It’s the capacity for this obligatory form of responsible leadership that KLI should instill in its students — the capacity to use one’s position and skills for the betterment of the community in which they are situated, even when doing so offers no material reward. For example, responsible leadership in business entails minimizing negative externalities, such as pollution or job loss, from impacting the community. It also asks that businesses go further than their bottom line by, for example, creating and sustaining dignified, well-paying jobs. Responsible leadership does not require all of us to be obligated to full-time charity work, but it does demand that we invest pro bono time or raise funds for our communities. In KLI’s years before CMC’s responsible leadership campaign, Kravis’s definition was front-and-center. KLI’s 2005 Business Plan Competition led to the founding and funding of SOURCE Nonprofit Consulting. SOURCE is a student-run organization founded to connect CMC with the Claremont community, “offering students and nonprofit leaders the opportunity to work collaboratively to solve real community challenges.” SOURCE still operates today with funding and administrative support from KLI, providing wide-ranging technical, media, and strategy expertise to nonprofit organizations in the city of Claremont and the greater Pomona Valley. SOURCE helps students fulfill their obligation to our Claremont community, teaching their members technical skills and business acumen, and using those skills to solve problems local organizations bring to them. How effectively SOURCE operates to cultivate responsible leadership is beside our current point; the fact that they correctly aim at CMC’s core value is laudable. Responsible leadership is a capacity, and capacities are built by sustained, frequent practice. Henry Kravis carries this understanding as well. He wanted service to be required of every student. When that requirement failed, KLI was built to habituate responsible leadership: “And I kept hearing from college presidents ‘It's a nice idea but we can't make them do that.’ I said, ‘Well, if they go to Harvard they gotta be in Cambridge. They come to Claremont, they gotta be in Claremont,’ so forth. That's a choice, so just list that as one of the things that's required here. I didn't get very far, and so then we set up the leadership institute.” Just as CMC teaches us to become great writers by writing, great athletes by training, or great researchers by doing research, SOURCE aims to create responsible leaders by practicing responsible leadership in the four years we’re here. While we students answer to professors or coaches, SOURCE students also answer to the needs a local organization has expressed to them — their effectiveness in meeting these needs measured by the organization itself. The First Year Frontier is another example of KLI adhering to Kravis’s definition of responsible leadership. If you’ve never heard of the First Year Frontier, that’s because it no longer exists. A 2012 collaboration between KLI and ASCMC, First Year Frontier was a two day off-campus excursion of leadership programming, workshops, and activities. Taking place in Frank G. Bonelli Park in San Dimas, up to one hundred freshmen joined upperclassmen, trained staff, and Claremont graduates from Pomona Hope, “a community-driven, faith-based non-profit… empower[ing] people of all backgrounds… to work together toward personal and community transformation.” This program set students off on the right foot, reminding them, as Kravis noted, that when they come to Claremont McKenna College, they are situated within and reliant upon Claremont. In both aiming students at that obligation and equipping them to fulfill it, the KLI of the recent past clearly took steps in line with Henry Kravis’s definition. Our modern KLI, however, fails the legacy of its predecessor. Part 2: Leadership Without Responsibility Over the past decade, KLI has lost its community-facing, not-for-profit pursuit. It fails its staff by focusing their research on technical and psychological abstractions of leadership and by tasking them to host events and activities that aim to improve individual personality traits and bolster career development without answering to the community. KLI’s research teams — which staff about half of its student employees — are entirely focused on data and literature analyses, attempting to reconstruct the concept of leadership from ideal speech patterns, motivational techniques, and statistically positive correlations. Of the six research teams this past spring, all of them prioritized technical and psychological abstractions of leadership; they focus on some component of leadership and study it in isolation from the people it is for, the ends it ought to serve. Research team descriptions, from the Fall 2025 & Spring 2026 Illumine KLI’s research — its findings the same year after year — hardly ever reach the broader student body, much less our Claremont community. Of course, not all programs have to immediately interface with the community. For example, SOURCE trains its students in web design, but uses this technical skill in service of the community. The question then turns on whether KLI students employ the understanding gained from their research on how to speak, how to write, and how to organize oneself in an actual practice of responsible leadership. Only one of KLI’s 44 student employees is a member of SOURCE, supposedly KLI’s flagship for not-for-profit service. If responsible leadership is not exercised through SOURCE, where is it applied? In an interview with KLI director Professor David Day, Day argued that KLI does habituate responsible leadership — as KLI defines it, rather than as Kravis does. Day pointed to KLI’s Leadership Competency Model, a map of specific, concrete actions KLI students can take to foster their core competencies of “Courage,” “Creativity,” and “Collaboration.” Under the monikers of “D-Crew” and “Mentorship,” KLI tracks these practice activities, allowing students to bill hours toward their completion and funding any expenses accrued along the way. On each of these maps, it is immediately clear that there is a chasmal difference between responsible leadership as Kravis and the modern KLI understand it. For Kravis, responsible leadership is relational: to someone, for something. Responsible leadership isn’t about success, it’s about seeking out, and then addressing, what your community needs. When you fail, your community holds you accountable and you try again. For the modern KLI, leadership is individualistic. It is a trait profile to optimize. Look at the codes beside some of the activities: “Make a list of commitments or responsibilities and schedule a time for each of those needs (C-7)”; “Ask a friend about their opinion on a controversial topic. Honestly try to understand their perspective without worrying about who is right or wrong (O-9)”; “When you disagree with someone, try to take their perspective and understand why they feel how they do (A-8).” However, let’s take these activities — as elementary as they may sound — seriously. For example, understanding a friend’s view on a controversial question is difficult and a student who attempts this activity in earnest is better for it. But notice how the activity begins. It starts with a student who decides they want to be more open. Observe, too, that the friend is interchangeable. In fact, the practice activity works just the same with any friend and any topic. Finally, notice who decides whether the practice succeeded: it’s the student, whose honest effort is the only measure of success. That friend may be better off for having been listened to, but this good is incidental. This good is the byproduct of an individualistic personality development exercise that was never for that friend. The student is accountable to no one. Furthermore, the Competency Model is like a tree, the activities connected to a branch fostering that branch’s “competency.” On the branch for being “supportive,” “if someone asks you for a favor, do it,” and “give money or volunteer time at a nonprofit organization,” sit side by side. One nonprofit service activity is where Henry Kravis’s definition of responsible leadership has ended up: a single action item among dozens. His definition is absent even from the branch labeled “responsible action,” in which no activity points to a community. The model does not make a value judgment on which of these activities a leader ought to choose, “development” measured as checked boxes, accountable to no one who would benefit from their activities. As Day put it, that choice is left to a student’s “self-selection,” so that each student is “the architect for [their] own bespoke developmental system.” But when CMC students are inevitably confronted with glittering career prospects and outsized financial gains, the Competency Model’s atomic habits will not prepare a student to regularly commit their time and money to serve the community as responsible leaders after graduation, let alone in these four years. Just look at the activities the Leadership Competency Map has encouraged. This past spring, in an effort to be “courageous,” KLI students “tr[ied] new food” at the Chinese restaurant Din Tai Fung, billing the expense and logging work hours for the time it took. Similar motivations have led to the funding and billing of Topgolf trips and retreats to Airbnb mansions in Malibu. Asked whether students had ever proposed an excursion to volunteer in his nearly decade-long tenure, Day replied, “not that I’m aware of.” KLI’s Leadership Competency Model invites students to ask, what does this do for me? rather than what does it do for others? This failure does not fall on the students. They choose from what KLI puts in front of them. Consider the activities put on by KLI’s institute assistants for the larger student body, such as the Leadership Coaching Summit hosted last spring. For this event, KLI partnered with LLM Consulting Group, which “create[s] custom solutions for critical organizational issues including leadership, management, strategy, organizational design, talent management, and team efficacy.” If the aims of this KLI partner organization sound quite different from the endeavors of earlier KLI partner Pomona Hope, that’s because they are. LLM Consulting Group understands leadership much in the same way as the modern KLI; its coaches work from the Leadership Competency Model and KLI research output, Day said. This is not to say that LLM’s coaching discourages non-profit and philanthropic work. Students could very well apply these lessons to service, but what was the student takeaway printed on the Illumine? “It was inspiring to hear from leaders and professionals about how leadership coaching has shaped them and helped them grow as leaders in their careers.” This past spring, we also saw KLI’s most glaring disregard for responsible leadership. KLI piloted its Inside Leadership Initiative, through which KLI student employees shadow corporate leaders. For its first visit, the team went to the International Game Technology (IGT) headquarters in Las Vegas. IGT is a multinational corporation that produces slot machines and other gambling technology. This initiative takes its student employees, who have thus far studied leadership as abstractions, and sets them to shadow a company that builds machines designed to encourage gambling addiction. Recall the first half of responsible leadership in business: preventing one’s negative externalities from affecting the community. IGT’s business model is the negative externality. Of all the corporate leaders KLI might have chosen for its pilot program, it chose the one which profits when communities lose. What kind of behavior does that inculcate in students? The most disheartening part of this programming is that an “Inside Leadership Initiative” could bolster our collective capacity for responsible leadership on campus. In its current form, however, this initiative is emblematic of the misalignment between Henry Kravis’s definition and the modern practice of KLI. The Competency Model is KLI’s chosen method of operationalizing “responsible leadership.” But it can do better — for its students and the community. Part 3: Toward Responsible Leadership Imagine if KLI championed a different vision. Instead of partnering with consulting firms and multinational corporations, KLI can partner with local community and student-run organizations. Instead of reporting on data analyses and literature reviews to closed-door board meetings, research assistants could engage with the local community to present research and solutions to the residents and organizations who ask for it. As a student body, we would work collectively to truly foster Henry Kravis’s vision of responsible leadership. We all stand to gain. Student employees at KLI will, for one, engage in the tangible experiences which cultivate the kinds of skills and habits associated with responsible leadership, properly understood. As that work becomes visible, it draws in students otherwise uninterested, who then build the capacity themselves. This would, in turn, foster CMC’s competitive advantage in the market, measured not as one’s ability to secure a high place in a corporate hierarchy, but as the capacity to serve others. Second, students may come to recognize the sense of personal fulfillment associated with habitually building the capacity to answer the needs of a community. As CMC has risen to sixth in terms of job placement outcomes, it has displaced pursuits that do not further that end. The result is that — much in the same way as KLI research assistants — we amass technical skills without the necessary application toward responsible ends, or, in many cases, any ends at all. With proper aim and effort, fulfillment of one’s obligation to their community, a lifelong pursuit, can begin here at CMC. There are already some promising starts. KLI’s Leadership Dialogues provide a space for KLI student employees to share in open discussion with the larger student body; last spring, its topics were “Privilege & Leadership,” “Leadership During Crisis,” and a senior panel on “Leadership Journeys.” KLI is also widening the membership of its advisory board. Professor Day has confirmed that a 2004 alumnus and vice president of the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation will join KLI’s board. If we aim to reorient KLI toward its original mission of promoting responsible leadership, events such as these are the first step down that path. With leadership properly understood, KLI student employees may share the findings of their research and engagement with the student body and surrounding community. But this is only the first step. These conversations must manifest as concrete actions taken, information shared, and relationships built. However, as we see from SOURCE and the First Year Frontier, this direction is possible. And it is necessary. KLI’s current identity is the result of flawed institutional choices backed by tremendous financial investment, all pointing inward to aimless work and self-congratulation. If these resources were instead directed toward responsible leadership, CMC could begin to fulfill its promise to students, donors, and the Claremont community. This process starts with KLI, and it ends with all of us. ~ Editor's note: In a good-faith attempt to address the Kravis Leadership Institute's concerns, this article was temporarily hidden on September 13, 2026 while the author supplemented his argument with additional information. Though the opinion of Mr. Goldstein does not represent that of The Forum nor of the Salvatori Center, The Forum editorial board stands by Mr. Goldstein's original piece as factually accurate and free of misstatements. The original piece can be found here.

You've heard a lot about CMC's 50 years of coeducation. Where did it all begin? Image credit: Claremont McKenna College Archives / Jasper Langley-Hawthorne Half a century ago, in 1976, just under 60 women arrived on campus as the first class of female students admitted to Claremont Men’s College. If the name didn’t make it obvious, one of CMC’s earliest defining features was its prominent male student culture. Of the 86 students and seven faculty members who constituted its first cohort in 1946, many were veterans returning from service during the Second World War. With the early campus’s military aesthetic and single-sex student body, it isn’t hard to see why former CMC First Lady and Scripps alumna Jil Stark ‘58 GP’11 described the school as a “male’s world” when I asked her about her experiences on campus. Why, then, did Claremont Men’s College decide to admit women? According to Jack L. Stark ‘57 GP’11, CMC’s third and longest-serving president (under whom the college received its first female students), coeducation was a sign of the times. “We weren’t the first to go co-ed, but we certainly weren’t the last,” President Stark told me over the phone. Indeed, the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s brought about a societal shift that made denying higher education to women seem archaic. Many schools that had previously been all-male opened their doors to women students in the 1970s. The Equal Rights Amendment, passed by Congress in 1972 and sent to the states with a seven-year ratification deadline, was another key consideration for universities. Though Title IX allowed single-sex exemptions for private schools, administrators feared the ERA would override this safety net, making continued operation as an all-male institution potentially difficult. To President Stark, it was clear CMC needed to change with the times; not doing so would have immensely disadvantaged the young institution. Although President Stark believed coeducation was the right decision for the college’s future, he felt careful consideration within the CMC community was the smartest approach to ensure a smooth transition. The Board of Trustees began discussing the prospect of CMC becoming coeducational in mid-1972, coinciding with the passing of Title IX. Shortly after, the school formed a coeducation committee—composed primarily of trustees, but also students and faculty members—which evaluated three options for the college’s future: remaining men-only, admitting women as well as men, or forming a collaborative program with Scripps College, according to President Stark. The third option was ruled out almost immediately, he told me, as Scripps trustees were not interested in this arrangement. While tracking the progression of the women’s rights movement, the committee sought input from other institutions on multiple sides of the coeducation debate. In 1974, they consulted representatives from three colleges: one that had recently voted to become coeducational; one that was still men-only; and one that was still deciding whether to admit women, according to President Stark. They also gathered opinions from faculty, donors, and students to assess the major arguments for and against allowing women to attend CMC. Now-public documents shed light on this discourse. Specifically, those opposed to coeducation worried that admitting women, who seemed to “increasingly prefer the other social sciences and humanities”—that is, non-public affairs disciplines—would change the character of the college into “merely another liberal arts institution,” thereby compromising the intent of the founding trustees to keep the CMC curriculum centered around public affairs. They also wondered whether the trend of women moving into law offices and executive suites would be “of minor importance” compared to their male peers’ career prospects. On the messaging side, opponents felt that the college could distinguish itself by remaining all-male, which would enhance its public image. They also argued that women would not lose the benefits of the college, since female students could already take courses at CMC through the other Claremont Colleges. (Later that year, parents and wives of students were also permitted to audit CMC courses free of charge.) On the other hand, supporters of admitting women questioned why CMC should limit access to the curriculum on the basis of sex, especially as more women began seeking professional careers in public affairs and business. They highlighted the “social and extracurricular” benefits that women’s added perspectives could bring to campus. They also recognized that admitting women would allow CMC to affirm its support of equal opportunity, and that permitting female students to enroll would bring both a larger pool of qualified applicants and more women donors. One of the exact reasons the dissenters thought the school should remain men-only justified the proponents’ support: Unlike other men’s institutions, it was “easier for CMC to go co-ed because there had always been women on the campus,” said President Stark. Indeed, Jil Stark told me that she took classes at CMC when she attended Scripps in 1954. Despite some opposition to coeducation, student and faculty polls largely supported the change. The Trustees’ decision to go co-ed required a two-thirds majority, which ultimately passed with one vote over that threshold on April 24, 1975. Still, the college’s name was the elephant in the room. President Stark believed it was important to separate changing the name from the coeducation issue, so “Claremont Men’s College” remained for another half-decade after coeducation began. However, keeping that name was “clumsy,” “misleading,” and “even absurd.” It was in October 1981 that the school decided to adopt “Claremont McKenna” to honor founder Donald McKenna, which also allowed CMC to keep its initials. Although President Stark told me that the overwhelming majority of male graduates changed their diplomas to read “Claremont McKenna College,” the female graduates kept “Claremont Men’s College” in commemoration of the glass ceiling they’d broken. President Stark remembers the trailblazers fondly, pointing out Meredith (Uhlmann) Brenalvirez ‘80 P’22—the senior class president and a member of the first co-ed class—as an example of the resolve of early female CMC students. “Those women were really tough,” he told me. “They were pioneers, and they were terrific.” ~ Georgia Evrigenis '27 studies History and researched the impact of coeducation on CMC's curriculum this summer. This article is the culmination of her findings and its production was overseen by CMC officials. She moderated the "Coeducation and the Curriculum" panel at ImpactCMC on Friday, September 25.

President William Dudley discusses his use of Washington & Lee’s institutional voice, artificial intelligence in classrooms, and Claremont McKenna's tuition prices. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Image credit: Washington & Lee / Jasper Langley-Hawthorne President William C. Dudley is Claremont McKenna College’s sixth president, assuming the position after serving as president of Washington & Lee University for nearly a decade. He was preceded by Hiram Chodosh, who helmed Claremont McKenna for 13 years. Dudley graduated from Williams College in 1989, returning as professor of philosophy in 1998. He served as Williams’ provost from 2011-2016, where he oversaw admissions, financial aid and other operations. In 2017, he left Williams to become Washington & Lee’s president. The editors in chief of the Claremont Independent and The Forum conducted an exit interview with then-president Chodosh last spring, which you can read here. Today’s entrance interview was coordinated by The Forum and conducted by the 2026-27 editors in chief. Kendall White (Claremont Independent): You began your academic career at Williams College as a student. What's a piece of advice that you’d give to someone who's beginning their liberal arts journey? President Dudley: One piece of advice that I’ve given to first-years here, is to explore widely. I think one of the best things about a liberal arts education is discovering things you didn't know you were interested in. And it happened to me. I went to a public high school, had no familiarity with philosophy, stumbled into a philosophy class, got really interested, and now I'm a philosophy professor. So I encourage people to continue taking the things that you know that you love, but also explore. And great teachers can get you really excited about things that you don't know. That's one piece of advice. If you want a bonus piece of advice: Don't spread yourself too thin. There's so much going on, and it's exciting. But it's really easy, if you're trying to do six different things, to not do any of them well, not sleep well, and not take care of yourself. So find one or two things you're really passionate about and do that. Dhriti Jagadish (The Forum): How does your background as an academic, specifically as a philosophy professor, shape your approach to CMC's “learn-by-doing” approach, which we described in our interview with former President Chodosh as “pre-professionalism.” President Dudley: One of the things that attracted me to CMC was its founding intellectual framework — the idea that a great liberal arts education is, in fact, terrific and really flexible professional preparation. It's not job training. We're not training you for a specific first job. If you look at alumni over decades, a liberal arts education will enable you to succeed in almost any professional arena. People who are liberally educated will feel called to put that potential to work and be more likely to succeed and lead. To me, those are almost like self-evident truths and it's a big part of what drew me here. Kendall White: Let’s switch tracks to your time at Washington & Lee. During your tenure, you released statements on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville; Executive Order 13679, commonly referred to as the Muslim Ban; thrice on the death of George Floyd; and the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision. Last year you declined to comment on Charlie Kirk's assassination, and you also didn't sign onto a letter condemning the Trump Administration's incursions into higher education — which was endorsed by every Claremont College president but Claremont McKenna’s. How did your approach to speaking with Washington & Lee's institutional voice change over time, and how will you use it here at CMC? President Dudley: One of the really interesting and challenging parts of this job is that you are the living face and voice of a whole institution, right? And you have to be mindful of that every single day. Wherever I am, I am the president of Claremont McKenna College, and I'm representing it. And I don't have the luxury of speaking as Will Dudley, private citizen, because everything that comes out of my mouth is also coming out of the mouth of Claremont McKenna College. So it's a feature of the job, and it takes some getting used to. And I will say, what I tried to do at Washington & Lee was even from the beginning to comment on issues that I thought were pretty tightly related to the mission of the College and its ability to fulfill its mission. For example, very early on with the ban on immigration from certain countries, well, that affected the ability of some of our students and our faculty to get to campus, or travel to and from campus, or go to study abroad programs. That went right to the heart of our ability to do our work. So that was kind of my guiding principle. Another example would be the Supreme Court decision on race and admissions, right? Obviously, goes directly to our ability to do our work, and over time, I tried to stick to that principle. Even at the beginning, I probably didn't issue statements as frequently as some presidents do because I did have a principle guiding when I thought that was a good idea, and also because I think that statements — while I understand why people want them — often don't actually make a practical difference. I'm a fan of trying to intervene in ways that make a positive difference for the school. So over time, I probably got more selective about what I thought it made sense to issue a presidential proclamation on at Washington & Lee. Unlike Claremont McKenna, Washington & Lee doesn't have a formal endorsement of institutional neutrality, but the college and its board kind of operate that way even though they haven't formally endorsed it. I think that helps explain our reluctance to sign on to the statement that you mentioned. One of the things I talked about at the time was that the biggest threat to our mission right then was the threat in the congressional budget bill to tax our endowments at an even higher rate than they were already taxing them. Claremont McKenna, Pomona, Washington & Lee — all of these schools rely heavily on their endowments to run the place and provide an education, and so that really mattered. What I needed to do was whatever would reduce the likelihood of that coming about. So rather than issue a statement, what I did was go up to Washington, D.C. and go to every Republican senator's office that would let me in the door to talk to them about what a bad idea that was. And we came out actually much better off on the endowment tax. I'm not taking personal credit for that by any means, but that was my approach. Kendall White: Washington & Lee has a controversial history and namesake, which was drawn into the spotlight during the racial and social unrest that happened around 2020. The College made some concessions in 2021, changing the name of Lee Chapel and discontinuing the celebratory “Founders Day” on Robert E. Lee's birthday. How did you weigh student and alumni protest against the history and traditions of the college, and how do you plan to keep or adapt those lessons for CMC? President Dudley: Another feature of the job is that you have numerous constituencies — students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, trustees, and to some extent, the wider public — all of whom care about the college, all of whom have overlapping but not identical perspectives on what they want the college to be and how they want it to be run. That was quite a moment, and it was also during the COVID year, so we’d sent everybody home in March of 2020. George Floyd was murdered a few months later, and shortly after that, the board and I received a petition signed by quite a lot of faculty and students requesting that Robert E. Lee's name be taken off of the school. One thing that’s important to know is the historical context of why those names are on the school. George Washington gave a significant personal gift to what was then Liberty Hall Academy, when he was still president of the United States, to help it get off the ground and become the institution that it did. So his name has been on the University since around 1800 in recognition of his personal donation to it, and then Lee served as its president right after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, Lee had been the president — which they called the “superintendent” — of West Point, so he'd already run a higher education institution. After the war, the trustees of what was then Washington College recruited him to come run the school. At the end of the Civil War, it was nominally open, but it had very few students, very few faculty, very little money. It could have easily gone out of business, and he actually did a really good job of attracting students and faculty and funding. Now it is a great national liberal arts institution, and obviously a lot of people have made it that, but those two individuals contributed a lot. So that's why their names are on there. And Lee's name went on in 1870, it didn't go on in the Jim Crow era. So the trustees and I had to ask ourselves a question: Should we change the name of the school or not? And I think again, similar to the way I think about statements, we came back to the mission. Our responsibility was to make sure that the school was as successful as it could be on behalf of its students, now and for hopefully another 100 or 200 years. And was that more likely if we changed the name or kept it? That's honestly how we had to think about it, as opposed to it being a popularity contest, like you know, how many people were sending us letters, pro or con.It was a binary decision: You either keep the name or you don't. There were a lot of people on both sides of that issue. But we weren't tallying up the mail. We were trying to ask that mission-driven question, and we didn't have evidence that the name was hurting the school in terms of applications, or ability to raise money, or ability to recruit good faculty, or ability to recruit an increasingly diverse student body. Actually, the reputation of the school was quite strong and seemed to be getting stronger. We concluded that it was really important to make sure that our increasingly diverse community felt really well supported and included, and like they belonged and it was their school. And so we did the things that you mentioned. We changed the name of the chapel, which Lee had actually built when he was the president, but he didn't name it for himself and he didn't ask to be buried there. And he would have hated the fact that people put up a sculpture of him in there. He was quite clear about not wanting that kind of thing. A lot of people after his death sort of used him in a way that I think he personally would have really resented. Anyway, that chapel had taken on a kind of symbolic significance and association with the Confederacy that we wanted to make sure the school didn't have, and so we changed the name of that chapel and did some other things, but we made what we thought was a principled decision on the name of the school. There's lots that people can and do disagree with about the package of decisions that we made. But I think we did the best we could in a really tough situation, and I think it's turned out pretty well. Dhriti Jagadish: How do you plan to bring that ethos over to CMC, particularly when there are lots of non-CMC students that you don't have direct oversight over, right? Those students might disapprove of CMC's actions, or perhaps there may be a group of CMC students that go over and protest at a different Claremont College. So how will you transition to being a consortium leader? President Dudley: To be perfectly honest, I have a lot to learn about that, right? I mean, I've been here for just under three months, and the consortium is unique in higher education. It's kind of an amazing thing, really, that people dreamed this whole thing up and brought it into being. I think what you've heard me say a couple times about how I approached Washington & Lee, which will definitely inform how I approach CMC, is that at the end of the day, you come back to the mission and you have to ask, why are we here? Why is this institution here? You have to do your best to discern in any situation, especially difficult ones, what best serves the College’s mission, and that's what's hard. Sometimes that may not be the most popular thing, and of course, I don't have perfect insight into what the mission demands. But that's my north star: our institutional purpose and how we can best fulfill it. The Consortium, as I said, is super interesting. I have just begun getting my toe in the water — there's a council of the presidents and we had an August retreat, which we do every year. So I spent a couple days in a room with the other presidents. Because I've been a president for the last 10 years, I was already personally acquainted with Gabi [Pomona] and Strom [Pitzer], but had not met Harriet [Harvey Mudd], Amy [Scripps] and the presidents of the graduate institutions in person until I got this job. As far as I can tell, it's a very collegial group. You guys know better than I do, honestly, how the Consortium functions on the ground and how it works for students. And I've been hearing about it from CMC students. It seems like one of the first things they want to talk to me about is their preferred dining hall. I’ve only eaten at Collins and Daybreak, so I haven’t yet ventured off campus for food, and have a lot to learn. I am not super well-versed in the details of flashpoints and challenging moments here, but I know something about them, and clearly we need to collaborate as well as we can. That's sometimes easier than other times, and collaboration is not only at the level of the presidents, but also includes the deans of students and the deans of faculty. There's a lot of layers to working together. On the whole, I hope it's the case that the administrative complexity of running a consortium is, in the end, worth it and makes all of these institutions better than they would be on their own. I mean, that's obviously the goal. So I hope that's the case. I will always try to make that the case. Dhriti Jagadish: Pivoting to a more specific challenge in higher education: AI. The Artificial Intelligence Committee at CMC has been meeting for several months, and recently The Claremont Colleges Services has announced their “AI in Teaching & Learning” symposium, which features CMC voices. What are the factors and stakeholders CMC is considering when deciding on the appropriate use of AI, and when do you expect to see this policy rolled out? President Dudley: I mean, to be honest, I don't know that a single and universal policy will be an outcome. I mean, it might be. I just honestly don't know. Let me say a few things. One is, I don't think anybody knows the answers to AI in higher education, so I'm not going to pretend that I do. It's clear that there's a lot to think through, and there are many dimensions to it. There are academic implications for sure, right? And those range from how can we preserve academic integrity when AI is pervasive, to how we can help interested faculty learn how to use new AI tools and become even better teachers and scholars, to how can we help students? Hopefully, all of our students will be fluent enough in emerging AI tools that you all can go out and succeed in the world, no matter what it is that you want to do. Those are academic questions. And then there's a bunch of technological questions about which tools are best suited for those purposes. How do we ensure that the tools that we make available protect people's privacy and data security? Of course there are financial implications of providing technologies as well, and administrative implications and questions about the parts of our work that we can do better with emerging tools. That's a whole lot to think through. A lot of those conversations are already happening. They're not waiting for me to say, “Okay, everybody start talking about this stuff.” People are already talking about AI, and they have been for a number of years now. The faculty at CMC created an AI committee last year — the committee you're referring to — and that has gotten started this school year. I'm going to make sure that that committee and the dean of the faculty are talking to the technology security committee that we also have, and the head of IT. We'll also be asking DT [Dianna Graves] in her role as vice president of student affairs to be thinking about the implications of AI for student life and student experience, and making sure that all of those conversations are connected to each other, so that people are learning from each other. I honestly don't know where that will lead. I wouldn't assume that there will be a grand policy that gets rolled out. As a teacher, I feel there are a lot of different ways to teach, and a lot of different fields in which people teach. I've done a fair amount of teaching as president, including last year. I teach very old school classes. We read hard books. We talk about them around a table, and then I ask students to write about them. I still think that's a really worthwhile endeavor. And I was clear on my syllabus: We're not using AI in any way in this class. And I think as long as every teacher is clear with his or her students about what the expectations are, that's the important thing. But I want our faculty to be experimenting as they see fit. We're not going to impose a single kind of policy on how people do or don't use AI, I don't think. Dhriti Jagadish: Recently, a group of CMC seniors wrote an open letter to you expressing their desire for CMC to increase diversity, namely socioeconomic diversity. And President Chodosh, in his exit interview, also expressed interest in a “more sensible way of pricing education against the actual ability to pay.” How will CMC tackle rising costs as one of the country's most expensive institutions? President Dudley: It's an issue really close to my heart, and one I've spent 20-something years working on. Actually, at the top of my list of things I managed to accomplish at Washington & Lee would be raising the most money in the school's history for financial aid, so that we became significantly more socioeconomically diverse and were able to support our student body much better than we were able to at the beginning of my time there. I've met with some of the students who sent that letter, which was an excellent letter, by the way, and really well done. And basically, I agree with them. This place can and should have a more socioeconomically diverse student body than it has. The pricing of higher education is really hard. It's complicated, and therefore it's difficult to communicate in a way that your average non-specialist can get their head around because nothing else in the world is priced this way. We have a published tuition and room and board, but we also provide financial aid to families that can't afford to pay that, which of course is most families in the world. And we scale that need-based aid to what people can afford to contribute. One way to simplify the goal for me would be first of all to recruit an increasingly socioeconomically diverse applicant pool to make sure that we are effectively reaching really talented young people from every background in this country, and to some extent around the world. And then it's going to be hard to get in here. This is a really competitive academic institution, but I want it to be the case that if you get in, you can truly afford to come here. The price should not be the barrier to you coming and taking advantage of the opportunities at CMC. And I want that to be true at the high end — if we're expecting your family to pay full sticker price, that even if that is somewhat of a stretch, it's not too much to ask of you. And I want that to be the case across the whole income spectrum. So, what you need to do is make it an institutional priority, which it is of mine, and that's demonstrable over the last 20 years of work that I've done. And then you need to raise a lot of money to support it, and that's part of my job. You can't do that overnight, but it's at the top of my list. And then you need to have really smart tactics in admissions and figure out how we can identify, recruit, and yield amazing kids who are not currently looking at CMC as an option. That's the plan. Kendall White: Looking ahead, President Chodosh had some plans that were greenlighted by the Board, namely the campus expansion. Do you plan to modify those plans in any way? And what do you hope to accomplish during your tenure here? President Dudley: When you step into this job at any institution, there's already a lot in progress, right? So it's not like a startup, although this place is only 80 years old, which is kind of amazing because the other places I've been are like 270 years old. So actually, this attracted me to CMC too — its youthful energy and aspiration and forward-looking nature. I was very clear with the board when I was a candidate for the job that I don't have a list of, you know, six hot priorities that I want them to immediately adopt, because I don't know the place well enough, right? And so my first order of business is to get to know the place and listen to people and figure out how I think it can be better. One way that I'm confident it can be better is by raising additional resources for financial aid. I don't have any doubt about that. If you land at a school that's in a very strong position, which CMC is, there's nothing on fire. There's nothing fundamentally broken. There's not a crisis that I have to come in and solve, and so I have the luxury of some time to keep working on the things that are already in progress, like finishing the Sports Bowl, which a whole bunch of people worked really hard to get done by this fall. I visited in February right after I got announced, and at that point, the Science Center was open. Those two things are brand new, amazing additions to this campus. It's my job to maintain the momentum of the priorities that are already in place, and then work with the board and faculty and students to figure out what’s next. I hope that however many years from now, when I'm done doing this, Claremont McKenna is a better version of itself than it is today. That's the basic goal, and there are a number of different dimensions to that. That could be having been successful in supporting a more socioeconomically diverse student body. It could be having enhanced the curriculum in ways that make sense for this place. It could be that we have created new and better dorm space or classroom space. Those are all possibilities. But the whole point is to provide the best undergraduate education on the planet, and that requires having the best student body we can have, the best faculty that we can have, and providing the facilities for our students and our faculty to live and work and play. And so that's my job, and it's fun to figure out. It's exciting. One of the exciting parts of coming to a new place is the complexity of the puzzle and trying to learn it well enough that you can figure out the things that can make it even better. Dhriti Jagadish: Thank you for sitting down with us. This article was published in conjunction with the Claremont Independent.

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.

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.