LAREMONT

IVOLUME XIX, NUMBER 1

October 2010

NDEPENDENTC

IS HIGHER EDUCATION BROKEN?internationalism the price ofhow colleges are14

higher educationChristopher Ranger

4& the crisis of liberal arts

Charles Johnson

13failing their students

Evan Lind

EditorHelen Highberger

Managing EditorLinnea Powell

Content EditorsHannah Burak

Chase Gray

Layout EditorsLynsey Chediak

Tess Sewell

PublisherJustine Desmond

Copy EditorsAlice LyonsEvan Lind

Editors EmeritiCharles JohnsonJohn-Clark Levin

Managing Editor EmeritaLaura Sucheski

Publisher EmeritusAditya Bindal

ArtistsHeidi Carlson

Aliza KellermanNoureen Nanjee

Staff WritersEliot Adams, Janet Alexander, Travis

Athougies, John Bedecarre, Joanna Chavez, Ben Daniels, Breanna Deutsch, Aidan

Fahnestock, Patricia Ingrassia, Paul Jeffrey, Abie Katz, Michael Koenig, Brett Mills,

Christina Noriega, Dan O’Toole, Christopher Ranger, Alexander Rhodes, Linden Schult, Julio Sharp, Jason Soll, Robert Stewart, Brittany Taylor, Christopher Wolfe, Eric

Yingling

3 At the Ballot Box

4 Internationalism and the Crisis of Liberal Arts Charles Johnson

6 Claremont Professors Debate War Powers Christopher Wolfe

7 Claremont Colleges Commemorate 9/11 Justine Desmond

8 Disposable Logic: What’s Really Eco-Friendly? Alice Lyons

9 Hill Rat Poison Helen Highberger

10 The Straight Dope on Mexico’s “Drug War” Joanna Chavez

12 Intellectual Elitism of a Campaign Intern Hannah Burak

13 America’s Colleges are Failing Their Students Evan Lind

14 The Price of Higher Education: Is It Worth It? Christopher Ranger

15 Obama’s “Posse”: Politics of Education Funding Charles Johnson

16 Legalization Is Not the Question Ben Daniels

17 The Problem With Occupational Licensure Julio Sharp

18 My New York Odyssey John-Clark Levin

© Friends of the Claremont Independent. All rights reserved.

CNDEPENDENTLAREMONT

I TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Claremont Independent is an independent journal of campus affairs and political thought serving the colleges of the Claremont Consortium. The magazine receives no funding from any of the colleges and is distributed free of charge on campus. All costs of production are covered by the generous support of private foundations and individuals. The Claremont Independent is dedicated to using journalism and reasoned discourse to advance its ongoing mission of Upholding Truth and Excellence at the Claremont Colleges.

2

At the ballot boxhe upcoming election is going to give Republicans the House and perhaps the Senate too (in fact the House has never changed parties without the Senate doing so

also). In the past few decades there has never been a more important time for Republicans to get out the vote. It’s not hard – you won’t go far wrong just voting the Republi-can ticket wherever you’re registered. But what about the eight propositions on the ballot in California? Here are your voting recommendations from the editor of the Clare-mont Independent.

Prop 19: YESNot that it matters, since marijuana possession (even

for medical purposes) is still against federal law. But let’s face it, with bikini-clad doctors advertising marijuana “prescriptions” and walk-in clinics on Venice Beach, it’s as easy to get this medicine as it is to buy tobacco. Might as well be honest and call it what it is: “legal” pot, so long as the feds turn a blind eye.

Prop 20: YESRemember Prop 11 from 2008? We passed it to cre-

ate a citizens’ redistricting commission to un-gerrymander the state. This proposition essentially preserves the power of this commission (which has five Democrats, five Re-publicans, and four unaffiliated voters) and gives it respon-sibility for the 2011 congressional redistricting. Prop 20 also makes permanent a requirement that new district lines satisfy a (not the same) multipartisan commission. See Prop 27 for the opposite.

Prop 21: NOIf you, like me, enjoy visiting state parks, Prop 21

looks at first like a good deal – $18 might be less than you spend on park fees in a year. Unfortunately Prop 21 leaves the door open for new fees within state parks, so don’t go for it in hopes it’ll save you money. Knowing that crucial fact, Prop 21 becomes just another car tax like all the oth-ers that California politicians have been hoping we’d fall for over the years.

Prop 22: This is one of those lovely propositions where one

group of bureaucrats is fighting another group of bureau-crats. The best one can say for the Yes side is that this proposition will help local governments keep their tax rev-enues locally instead of letting the state redistribute them to someplace else. The best one can say for the No side is that the “redevelopment” part of this proposition is a cover for graft to private developers and eminent domain abuse.

Prop 23: YESThis pragmatic proposition would stave off the

economy-killing CO2 restrictions passed by the California Assembly until California’s unemployment rate drops to 5.5% or less for a year. If you have doubts about anthro-pogenic global warming, a Yes on this proposition is obvi-ous. But Prop 23 also makes sense for CO2 haters, since it trades a definite, large help to the economy for a dubious, short-term effect on CO2 levels.

Prop 24: NOThis proposition isn’t all bad, since it makes taxation

a little less complicated. Still, the reduction in complica-tion isn’t worth the increase in taxes that would come with it. A business may need a decent accountant to take advan-tage of the tax breaks that Prop 24 eliminates, but hey, a tax break is a tax break. The fact that the teachers’ unions, so recently and effectively vilified by the movie Waiting for ‘Superman,’ are in favor of this proposition doesn’t hurt.

Prop 25: NOIf you’re serious about cutting spending as well as

taxes, No on Prop 25 is important. Sure it doesn’t hurt to “starve the beast,” but the budget is where the beast is re-ally made. It’s amazing that California, despite its passion for massive government spending, still has a 2/3 vote re-quirement to pass budgets – and if it weren’t for our ger-rymandered districts, this alone would probably have pre-vented our current deepening financial troubles. The 2/3 vote requirement for budgets is our most powerful defense against out-of-control spending, and that’s worth fighting for.

Prop 26: YESAs more limits are imposed on the taxes a govern-

ment can levy, governments find more ways to categorize their takings as fees or charges, making them easier to pass. Prop 26 holds certain fees and charges to the same standards for passage as taxes, namely a 2/3 vote require-ment. Since there’s no reason a fee is morally superior to a tax, there’s no reason one should be easier to pass than the other.

Prop 27: NOIf Prop 27 and Prop 20 both pass (in other words, if

we’re stupid), only the one with more votes goes into ef-fect. Prop 27 directly undoes Prop 11, passed in 2008, and gives redistricting power back to politicians. This proposi-tion will guarantee a gerrymandered California for as long as it’s on the books – and it’s a constitutional amendment, so we would have nothing but safe-for-politician districts for a long time.

3from the editor

CI

by Helen Highberger

t

Internationalism and the crisis of liberal arts

resident Gann now has that most internationalist of credentials—election to the board of the Coun-cil on Foreign Relations. The college’s website

celebrates President Gann’s place on that august board. But what exactly are we celebrating? To be sure, an understanding of the foreign is essen-

tial to a liberal arts education. Indeed, ever since Herodo-tus, we wonder what peoples live beyond the horizon. There have always been savages, but civilization has been the product of serious thought. It prospers, as we know, from commerce, and chief among that commerce is the trafficking of ideas.

Not all ideas are good. (Aztec ritual sacrifice comes to mind, as does Islamic suicide bombing.) And there is grave danger in loving the other for its own sake and not for the true things that it has to teach. This was, alas, one of the chief defects of the Civilizations course, the ill-fated precursor to the more globalist, Freshman Humani-ties Seminar, which had no foundation on which to teach Confucian thought or the Bhaga-vad Gita because students had no idea where to place these ideas in the context of larger thought.

To know others we must first know ourselves – and we are prod-ucts of Western Thought. It is, af-ter all, something we celebrate in our core requirements, one of the last liberal arts schools to avoid jet-tisoning all of it for something a bit trendier. This love of the West gives us something to offer that few other schools have: a steeping in Western culture. It is part of the reason we attract students from all over the world. Our first graduate was, after all, an international student from Hong Kong and the generosity of Claremont donors and thinkers has created something of a Thai intellectual elite. One such member of that elite, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Surin Pitsuwan ‘72, praised the American founding and the classics when he visited campus in 1998. In the wake of the Asian financial crisis, he quoted The Federalist, Aristotle, Plato, and Hume to shed light on developments there. And true to his education in Greek mythology, he compared his task to that of Sisyphus, but assured his audience that once Lockean concepts of property were developed, Thailand would recover.

That was then, though, and we conservatives on campus have become Sisyphean in our own right. In-deed, it seems as if Mr. Pitsuwan, who gave the com-mencement address in 2009, has given up the faith himself, exhorting us, like our president, to be “global citizens,” as if the American founding didn’t matter and the love of country might be reactionary. Meanwhile, Jesse Jackson, Jr., who once led a fight at Stanford to gut the core curriculum with the slogan “Hey hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go,” was an honored guest of our college. Time and again, the administration encour-ages students to study abroad without giving us any real reason to study here.

To be sure many students take this “study abroad” thing a bit too literally and prefer to study broads. Such students treat study abroad as something of a booze cruise vacation. For others, it is time for doing secular good works, for volunteering for NGOs, and for extir-pating white guilt. It is not uncommon to hear of stu-

dents spending their tuition mon-ey for the privilege of living in a hut. Few think that maybe the West, long detested for imperial-ism – as if their projects weren’t imperial in some form – might actually have something to offer the darkest, most miserable cor-ners of the earth. Instead, they are guided by compassion, not reason, the cultivation of the later being the purpose of education, while compassion leads to excesses. The ancients for good reason regard-ed compassion as a passion that

was all too easily confused with justice, which requires knowledge of the good or superior. Not that you will find much serious consideration of the good on your voy-ages abroad. And so it is that many Honors senior theses in international studies merely rehash students’ travels abroad. The college hopes to archive all of these theses online, but few deserve to be read.

In fairness, college itself has become something of a vacation, too, where your parents (or scholarships or the government, if you are lucky) foot the $50,000 cover charge to the yearlong party. As on any vacation, we have gotten complacent, comfortable and entitled. How else to explain the rash reactions to the Dean of Students office

pby Charles Johnson

College itself has become some-thing of a vacation, where your parents ...foot the $50,000 cover charge to the yearlong party.

4campus news

campus news5asking that our student government kindly obey the rules and the law? Students have threatened that they won’t donate because the college won’t violate the law. Is their access to a keg on Thursday nights the sole reason that they would give back to this institution?

That decision by the Dean of Students is a welcome indication that this year might well be different. Such a decision seeks to minister to the body and bodies of our campus – it is true that binge drinking is a problem – but what of its soul?

In recent years, that has been neglected because our president does not know what our mission really is. She has no real sense of what makes Claremont McKenna exceptional. President Gann oddly sug-gested at convocation last year that we needed new founding documents - as if she could write them. She ignores the rich his-tory of our founding presi-dent, George C. S. Benson, who wrote eloquently and often about the institution he was building. This insti-tution would stand apart from the other colleges, which had failed to educate their students. Their biggest fail-ure, he wrote, was failing to “present a positive view of American civilization.” He would make little of Presi-dent Gann’s exhortation at commencement 2009 to be a “global citizen.”

Global citizen that Gann is, she’s been planning to increase our brand abroad and the number of foreign faces in classrooms. This later part makes logistical sense – foreign students pay full freight – but the second is an exercise in forgetting what Claremont McKenna is all about. Such forgetfulness explains how President Gann could justify a Singaporean liberal arts college to her press agent and sometimes CMC Forum editor, Michael Wilner CMC ‘11. That college contract reportedly went to Yale, which, since it accepted the Taliban’s spokes-man, has long given up its motto of “light and truth,” be-lieving as they do in neither. Much luck to them starting a liberal arts college in a dictatorship.

Meanwhile, at a board meeting in spring of this year, President Gann was chastened by Claremont McK-enna’s board to tune down her adventuring abroad. As one observer noted when Gann presented a proposal for a program in Korea, one board member stated emphati-

cally that, “We are not the University of Phoenix.” The vote over this proposal and other initiatives “wasn’t even close.”

President Gann remains undaunted. She has planned a new program modeled on the DC program and headed by Professor Bassam Frangieh (Arabic) in the Middle East after going on a junket this past spring. It is unclear where the money for such a program will come from, but it is very clear who will be instructing the new scholars of Arabic. Professor Bassam Frangieh, as this newspaper broke, is a supporter of the terrorist group, Hezbollah, but

President Gann is perfectly fine with his instructing the next generation of leaders. She compares his advocacy with that of Ken Miller, who supported the people’s right to define marriage.

This support for Frangieh is part of a larger slothfulness in our think-ing, more indicative of institutional laziness than malice. It’s why Amrita Basu, a potential candidate for full professorship, was

allowed to get so close to be-ing hired, even after arguing, among other foolish things, about “so-called terrorists.”

All of this is not to say that there are not good Middle Eastern programs - only that we aren’t official-ly involved with them. Professors Constance Rossum (Government) and Manfred Keil (Economics) recently visited the American University of Iraq in Sulaimaniyah, a liberal arts college that seeks to teach the new Iraqi stu-dents Shakespeare and the classics of the West. To those students serious about studying abroad, I dare them to study there. Go see and see if the liberation of the souls of Kurdish kids was worth the blood and treasure we paid and report back. That, for once, will be a Forum article worth reading.

Of course these Kurdish students aren’t likely to get the attention of President Gann. After all, they have no junkets to offer her. She won’t get to wine (yes, Muslims still do that) and dine with royalty. Nor will she get to meet bigwigs and ambassadors. But she might just learn what the liberal arts really are. Near where poisoned gas once rained, Kurdish students study what we are sup-posed to be studying here – the conditions that make men free. It’s time to put down our cups, crack open our books and have another look. CI

President Gann in Korea with officials of Korea Uni-versity, on one of her recent overseas visits.

6 campus newsClaremont professors debate war powers

n 2004, Senator Robert Byrd added a provision to a spending bill requiring all public educational in-stitutions to recognize Constitution Day (September

17th). The Claremont Consortium fulfilled this year’s ob-ligation by sponsoring a panel discussion on the Consti-tutional power to make war. The discussion took place in the Founders Room at Honnold Library, and involved four Claremont professors: Joseph Bessette of Claremont McKenna’s Government Dept., Leo Flynn of Pomona’s Politics Dept. (Emeritus), Stuart McConnell of Pitzer’s History Dept., and Victor Silverman of Pomona’s His-tory Dept.

The panelists were arrayed left to right facing the audience, with Professor Silverman on the far left and Bessette on the right; the moderator made a brazen com-ment that this arrangement would likely “mirror the po-litical views expressed,” and so it did. However, by the end of the discussion, the middle panelists – Flynn and McConnell – appeared to shift away from Mr. Silver-man’s categorically anti-war, anti-presidentialist position and toward the opposite side.

Mr. McConnell opened the discussion with a quote from Robert Byrd’s March 2003 speech against Presi-dent Bush’s commencement of the Iraq War. McConnell highlighted a section in which Byrd criticises his fellow congressmen for being “paralyzed” in not exercising their Constitutional power to “declare war” or not to.

Following McConnell, Bessette added that although the Congress has the power to “declare war” (transitioning the nation into a full scale state of war), the President also has the power to “make war” (as commander in chief). Of the 300 or so armed conflicts that the U.S. has taken part in, almost none ever received Congressional approval. The cases where there is “gray area” between Congressional and Presidential power should be determined by the length and size of conflict, in addition to the qualities inherent in the branch of government (such as energy for the ex-ecutive). Bessette added that political scientists universally sided with the President’s prerogative to initiate conflicts until Nixon and the Vietnam era. Professor Flynn largely agreed with Bessette’s analysis, elaborating the changes since Vietnam such as the 1973 War Powers Resolution. McConnell replied that the War Powers Resolution has in fact not played as big a role as it has been reported to, since if the Act were ever brought before the Supreme Court it would probably be ruled unconstitutional.

Last (and least), Professor Silverman of Pomona’s History department delivered an ideological analysis of

what he called different “traditions” that have determined when the U.S. has or has not gone to war. Silverman loose-ly glued together several generalizations to make roughly the following point: that the founders of our Constitution did not want a standing army, but America progressed in-creasingly toward an imperialistic “tradition” with Presi-dent leading the charge into bloody misunderstandings.

Bessette, a government professor, pointed out to Sil-verman, a history professor, that in fact it was the anti-federalists who were against a standing army and not the federalists. After this rebuttal, Silverman scrambled to change his story, delivering this argument: that there is a connection between states-rights antifederalism and anti-war resistance to presidents, explaining Robert Byrd’s in-volvement in the Klu Klux Klan. This time Mr. McConnell shot down Silverman, saying that it is really inconsistent to connect the racism of Byrd and anti-war resistance; Wood-row Wilson was racist and very in favor of robust presiden-tial exercise of war powers.

Claremont’s panel on war powers was both informa-tive and entertaining. The surprise of the night was Pitzer’s Stuart McConnell, whose depth of knowledge on the sub-ject became more evident as the discussion went on. To be frank, Pomona’s Silverman was a disaster, painting un-justified and sentimental appeals with an enormous brush-stroke. If this discussion had been a formal debate between defenders of Congresssionalist and Presidentialist claims to war powers, the Presidentialists would certainly have won on points – and substance for that matter.

by Christopher Wolfe

Robert Byrd gets passionate over schools’ recognition of Constitution Day.

i

CI

7campus news

Claremont Colleges commemorate 9/11

ave you forgotten how it felt that day? To see your homeland under fire and her people blown away?”

These first few lines of Darryl Worley’s song “Have you forgotten?” echo a reoccurring question that everyone from members of the CMS football team to Rush Limbaugh have been vocalizing. Now with 5,140 more casualties than when Worley’s song was written in 2003, don’t we have even more to commemorate?

Nine years after the attacks, we have not only fami-lies of victims on that fateful day to remember, but also the families of 5,735 Americans lost in Operation Endur-ing Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Free-dom. This year alone 418 American servicemen and ser-vicewomen died in combat and many more were injured. Wor-ley’s song goes on to say, “I’ve been there with the soldiers who’ve gone away to war. And you can bet that they remember just what they’re fighting for.”

So as a consortium with one of the oldest ROTC pro-grams in the nation, which be-gan at Pomona in 1912, one would think that the Claremont colleges might take the day with more gravity than they did.

CMC arguably did more to commemorate the event than other schools, although there was still little recognition of the armed forces. An email sent out to the student body read “Come this Saturday morning, 10 AM, to honor the lives lost on Sep-tember 11th. There will be 3,000 miniature flags, one for every life lost. Show your support by coming to the big windows behind Collins and grab a flag

Skyler Grossman, who choose to participate in the event, adds, “I think CMC did an OK job commemorat-ing it, especially in comparison to the other Claremont Schools. That being said, they didn›t go out of their way to recognize the day or put any serious effort or resources into the commemoration.”

A few members of the football team decided to take it upon themselves to do something to set this day apart from

most other Saturdays at North Quad.Ross Sevy (’12), comments, “We hung an American

flag off the balcony, despite the fact that the school told us last year we couldn’t, because we wanted to show our support to those who were affected by the terrorist attacks. Also we wanted to show our support for those in the mili-tary fighting to preserve our freedom abroad, even to our friends in ROTC on campus. 9/11 is an important date in American history, and we should not forget our duty to continue the war on terror.”

One might argue that this lack of commemoration of 9/11 at Claremont, especially of Americans lost at war

post-9/11, is mirrored in other parts of the country as well.Recently, Limbaugh on his talk show described the

contrast between the large payouts for the families of those who fell on September 11 compared with the small sums given to families of those who gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Families affected directly by the disaster would receive an average of $1,1850,000 while family members of those fighting and dying on their behalf

by Justine Desmond

h

CMC students commemorated 9/11 by planting flags by Collins Dining Hall.

continued on pg. 9

8 campus news

Disposable logic: what’s really eco-friendly?

ne of the purposes of a liberal arts education (ar-guably, the only purpose) is to teach you how to think for yourself. Presumably, you come to one of

the 5-Cs to learn to question conventions, to investigate supposed truths, and even to prove things wrong. This is hard to do. It’s a lot easier to grab onto someone else’s ideology and run with it than it is to search for yourself and find out that what you’ve been taught to believe is just plain wrong.

The environmen-talist movement is one of the biggest offend-ers when it comes to latching onto an ideal rather than investigat-ing whether it’s right. Unfortunately, the en-vironmentalist move-ment is also one of the biggest offenders when it comes to guilting and/or forcing others to ascribe to those per-haps unfounded ideals. People who are big on “saving the planet” of-ten are only really “be-ing green” in a standard, rhetorically dictated way, which may not always be the most environmentally friendly way.

And that’s where the Motley comes in. I arrived back from a year abroad to find that the Motley is now charging an extra dollar if you get a to-go cup. When I brought in my own disposable cup last week, I was in-formed that I would be charged a dollar for the privilege of putting Motley coffee in such an item, since dispos-able cups are incongruent with the Motley’s “philoso-phy.” Whatever that means. I suppose using capitalism to impose your own ethical stance on others is not new or particularly alarming; what gets to me is that it is, for the sake of environmentalism, doing something that may actually be bad for the environment.

There are not a lot of studies or statistics on dispos-able versus reusable cups, but the few studies that are

out there suggest that the environmental friendliness of hot beverage cups depends on how often they are used. The thing is, disposable cups may not be used repeatedly, but they require far less energy and material to make—it shouldn’t take a study to prove that to you. The studies generally say that, out of disposable paper, ceramic, and stainless steel, disposable cups have the lowest embodied

energy (i.e. energy/re-sources used to make it), followed by reusable ce-ramic mugs, and stain-less steel to-go mugs require the most energy. In order to make your energy-heavy reusable mug environmentally friendly, you have to use it; every time you use it instead of a dispos-able cup, you can make up for its energy ineffi-ciency. So how do paper cups stack up, materi-ally speaking, against reusable cups? Not too well against ceramic: a ceramic cup only needs to be used 28-46 times before it evens out its embodied energy with equivalent paper cups.

So, yeah, drinking your coffee in the shop is the best thing you can do, since, even with dishwashing energy, those mugs are used and reused. But we’re a generation always on the run, so I wonder how many uses I would get out of a ceramic cup if I were carrying it to-go? Prob-ably about eight, since I’d either spill all over myself, ruin my clothes (which have a higher embodied energy even than a thermos) and switch back to disposable, or I’d drop it and break it all over the pavement. So that’s impractical. But stainless steel mugs are easy to take to-go, right? Sure. But they also have up to 200 times the embodied energy of disposable cups. Which means, in my remaining school year, I’d have to get coffee to-go every day to make up for the embodied energy of my stainless steel mug. And I love coffee, (and okay, okay, I drink it every day), but I drink most of it in cafeterias or

by Alice Lyons

o

9world newsin my room; I only get it to go two or three times a week. It would be wasteful for me to buy a stainless steel cup that does not get used more than two hundred times, rath-er than just using disposable cups. An environmentalist may point out that disposable cups get disposed and thus take up landfill space; a compelling argument until you consider that my 200 paper cups will be long biodegraded before that stainless steel mug rusts away.

Of course, every time you factor something in, the statistics change. What about the water used to wash re-usable cups? What if I reuse my disposable cups a few times? What if… etc., etc., etc… But the Motley does not provide information or statistics on any of this; they just assume everyone should be on board with the whole reusable thing, without allowing for the fact that different people have different lifestyles. One size does not fit all when it comes to coffee. Heck, there must be some science majors at Scripps - maybe they could even do their own study on reusable versus disposable. But they haven’t. The Motley’s administration has merely capitalistically forced others into their own un-researched (or at least un-explained) ideology. By potentially inspiring someone to buy an aluminum mug she’ll use sixteen times, the Mot-ley’s obnoxious policy could actually cause a waste of resources.

But you know what’s a bigger waste of resources? Spending thousands of dollars on an education that does not even teach you to ask, “Really?” CI

H.R.5088 - America’s Commitment to Clean Water ActSpecifically designed to grab powers denied to the feder-al government by the Supreme Court, this bill takes land use restrictions out of the hands of local governments – and expands them too. Not content with controlling all navigable waterways, James Oberstar wants to add ev-eryplace that’s underwater for any part of the year, plus the groundwater. Just remember to look over your shoul-der before drunkenly ralphing in the bushes, because if Big Brother sees you affecting the groundwater there’ll be hell to pay.

S.3804 - Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits ActEver visited China or Iran? If so, this bill will be ee-rily familiar as it empowers courts to put websites on a blacklist and require all ISPs to block these sites from everyone in the U.S. What’s required to qualify for the list? Too bad for any sites where counterfeiting or copy-right infringement are “central to the activity of the Inter-net site.” That’s right – the site itself doesn’t have to do anything. If its users are sailing too close to the winds of piracy, one day the government will board, take it by force, and sail off into the sunset.

S.2847 - Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation ActThis crucial legislation defends every American’s right to enjoy a serene and calming commercial break. Since TV networks are of course incapable of moderating the volume of their commercials in their own self-interest, the U.S. Congress has bravely stepped in to do it for them with another mandate. How the rest of us would describe the precedent this sets for government interfer-ence – well, let’s just say that wouldn’t make it past the FCC censors either.

Upcoming - Internet WiretappingNext year the Obama administration will send legislation to Congress that would require all websites, cell phone companies, and peer-to-peer software to provide the gov-ernment with a “back door” into all encrypted informa-tion. The good news is that this proposal is shocking even liberals out of their “when Obama spied, nobody cried” stupor. The bad news is that we are only seeing the beginning of the powers Obama believes the executive branch should wield.

Hill rat poison

receive only a $6,000 check, half of which is taxed. This small sum is followed by a small payout for burial costs and a montly payment of $833 dollars for the widowed spouse and $211 for each child until they turn eighteen.

Furthermore, lower federal courts recently threw out a lawsuit in which families of September 11 victims asked that rubble in lower Mahattan, estimated to con-Mahattan, estimated to con-tain the remains some 1,100 people, not be placed in a landfill. These families were not given the opportunity for an honorable burial of their loved ones, and will have to visit a Staten Island landfill to be close to their loved ones’ unmarked graves.

Celebrating September 11 should not simply be about those Americans who perished nine years ago, but also those who have made sacrifices since then to preserve our freedom. Hopefully when next year rolls around, there will be a greater recognition of that both on and off campus.

9/11, cont. from pg. 7

CI

by Helen Highberger

CI

10 world news

exico is a country washed out by political corrup-tion, a country where 1 in 5 of the population lives

in extreme poverty, where thousands are dying every year by greedy and powerful drug-cartels, and where the line between police and criminal is almost non-existent. The Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego has confirmed reports that roughly 28,228 people have died in drug-war related incidents since President Felipe Calde-ron’s official declaration of war in January 2007.

To combat drug-cartels, the Mexican government has mobilized a total of 5,000 federal police and 45,000 troops from the Mexican military while the United States’ plan of action involves a $400 million annual handout to the Mexi-can government, specifically dedicated to diminishing the power of drug-cartels. Despite these efforts, the death toll continues to rise and drug-cartels still flourish. Why have President Calderon’s combative actions failed so far?

To answer this question two factors must be considered. The first involves an understanding of the po-litical and judicial infrastructure and security apparatus within Mexico and the second requires knowledge of how drug-cartels work and feed off of weaknesses inherent in this in-frastructure.

The U.S. Justice Department estimates that Mexican drug-cartels make $39 billion annually, with $10 billion of that coming from U.S. con-sumers alone. Given these exorbitant gains, drug-cartels act very much like competing companies vying for the most clients, drug consumers in the United States and Eu-rope. The major drug-cartels, like the Sinaloa, Gulf, and Juárez cartels, establish and have control over trafficking routes that consequently run through cities and small vil-lages where local politicians do not have the financial or enforcement power to check the actions of drug-traffickers. To successfully compete for control of these routes drug-traffickers will bribe and threaten the lives of local politi-cians, while engaging in armed conflict with members of the competing drug-cartel, causing danger for innocent Mexican citizens in the middle of the cross-fire.

On September 23 of this year, Prisciliano R. Salinas, mayor of a small town northeast of Monterrey, was assas-sinated over a land-dispute by a gunman believed to be affiliated with a local drug-cartel. If confirmed, this would be the fourth drug-cartel related assassination of a mayor

in a six-week time frame. Using weaknesses in the political structure on a local level, drug-cartels grow into opposing, regional forces that endanger the lives of politicians.

Along with weaknesses in local politics, shortcom-ings in the Mexican judicial process contribute to unbri-dled drug-cartel activity. The first major problem with the judicial process is that there are no juries in the Mexican trial courtroom, so that judges have sole discretion over verdicts and sentencing in the lower courts. Centralizing judicial, authoritative power to one person greatly increas-es the vulnerability of the trial to bribery and other forms of external corruption, especially for drug-cartel members who use this to bypass much of the judicial process. The second major problem is overcrowded courtrooms. On a state and local level, there are not enough resources to prosecute higher-level crime; consequently, the judiciary is flooded with petty crimes, 50% of which involve property

crimes of less than $20. High court traffic means that state and local ju-diciaries, where drug cartels wield the most power, have a difficult time legally controlling drug cartel activ-ity.

Although political and judicial weaknesses contribute to drug cartel power, weaknesses in law enforce-ment are the most salient. There are more police officers in Mexico per 1,000 people than in the United

States, yet drug cartel members are running around relatively unchecked. The higher number of police officers points to the shortcomings of the screen-ing and training processes for police officers. It is simply too easy to become one in Mexico. As a result, not only is Mexican law enforcement vulnerable to infiltration of drug-cartel pawns, but untrained police officers are having difficulty tracking complex drug-cartel activity. Case in point: Julio Godoy Toscano, brother of Michoacan Gover-nor Leonel Godoy, entered the lower house of the Mexican Congress despite the fact that he was issued an arrest war-rant by a state judge for drug-trafficking connections. To-scano was able to enter the political process without action from security personnel.

It is not surprising then that the mobilization of feder-al officers and military troops has done little to counteract drug-cartel power. Poor training programs have left securi-ty forces inept to handle elaborate workings of drug-cartel activity while impotent screening tests have undermined

The straight dope on Mexico’s “drug war”by Joanna Chavez

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To degrade the power of drug-car-tels in Mexico, profit-able routes to the US must be cut off.

11world newsthe legitimate authority of these se-curity forces. The National Human Rights’ Commission in Mexico has documented nearly 650 cases of alleged abused by the Mexican military as of the beginning of 2010. Furthermore, U.S. annual aid of $400 million to the Mexican government comes with no evalua-tion from the U.S. government; as a result, not much is known about where or how this money is spent. Obviously, the United States gov-ernment is not spending its money wisely, but to what extent should the U.S. help Mexico fight the Drug War?

In January, 2006 the National Drug Intelligence Center reported that gangs, such as the Latin Kings and MS-13 in Chicago and Los Angeles, buy methamphetamine and distribute the drugs throughout the southwestern United States. To degrade the power of drug-cartels in Mexico, profitable routes to the United States must be cut off. Mexico and the United States share a 1,950-mile relatively unprotected border and it is estimated that the San-Ysidro border, the crossing between San Diego and Tijuana, sees 300,000 people cross daily. The Congressio-nal Research Service estimated in 2008 that a fence and increased security surveillance along only 700 miles of the border would cost $49 billion. Although tighter regulation of border security would do much to restrict heightened drug-cartel activity in Mexican border-states like Chihua-hua and Nuevo Leon, it is an inefficient and expensive plan that would only suppress direct drug routes to the United States.

Earlier this month Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a controversial statement at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington claiming that Mexico “is in some cases morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency in Mexico.” The Sec-retary of State compared this “insurgency” in Mexico to the type of insurgency found in Colombia’s own drug-traf-ficking conflict twenty years ago, much to the annoyance of President Calderon. The reasons for Calderon’s anger stem back to Colombia where the U.S. government, under the first President George Bush, led an American military operation against drug-cartels known as PLAN Colombia. American military operations in Mexico would not only signal the failure of Calderon’s government in the Drug

War, but would mean fighting a war in a neighboring coun-try that could risk Mexican-American relations. Although the Obama administration is not currently planning on mo-bilizing American troops into Mexico, the possibility of such a response should be reserved as the last resort.

Given the deep structural problems within Mexico, the most effective solution involves the Mexican govern-ment’s efforts to provide better physical and intelligence training programs for military and federal forces. Presi-dent Calderon launched Operation Clean House in 2008 to increase funding for better training programs; however, most of the training is still operated by Mexican military officers who have inadequate expertise to train. In order to effectively train officers, the Mexican government needs to employ foreign military specialists from the United States and Europe. Foreign aid in the form of intelligence and physical training needs to be combined with financial sup-port that must be tracked and given with strings attached. By forcing the Mexican government to enact legislation that would fix problems inherent in the judiciary and mili-tary using financial incentives, the drug-cartels would be stripped of the mechanisms they use to wield their power.

There is no one easy and straightforward short- or long-term solution to the War on Drugs in Mexico, but by understanding the root of the problem both Mexico and the global community can create strategies that minimize drug-cartel power.

United States President Barack Obama meets with Mexican President Felipe Calderon in Mexico.

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12 world news

The intellectual elitism of a campaign internhis summer I decided to concede a point of personal pride in calling myself a Libertarian and go to work for a viable candidate whose party does not consist of ado-

lescent anarchists and lonely intellectuals. Jaime Herrera is a moderate Republican running for Congress in Wash-ington State. Perhaps because of her tough on government spending stances or perhaps because the words “young,” “attractive,” and “female” rarely describe any GOP candi-date, she generated quite a bit of interest and beat out two Republican opponents in the August primary. Currently leading in the polls by 9 points, she stands a very good chance in the general election for an open seat that has been held by a Democrat for 12 years.

We all know that the Republican Party rightly has high hopes for this election cycle. Independents are turning out in droves to support the anti-establishment candidates. Republican campaigns, however, have the undesirable task of reeling in these moderate votes without casting out the issues that appeal to a broad base of social conservatives. I dealt with both groups on a daily basis at the campaign office, but enjoyed more the company of the latter. These folks flesh out Republican stereotypes to such a degree that their roles deserve to be immortalized - or at least repeated.

My first day of work, I arrived in a pencil skirt and heels with pinned back hair and a professional attitude to conceal my eagerness. The second day I wore jeans and a t-shirt and exchanged Facebook friend requests with my boss and supervisor. That was the day that Randy came into the office to show his support for Jaime. Our field organizer did little but nod his agreement for the next half hour as our visitor relayed his points of disgust with the Obama Administration. Randy left a box of 7.62 rifle bul-lets for Jaime. The campaign manager decided that the virtue in candidate Herrera accepting such a gift was ques-tionable. He placed the box on my desk and thus began my collection of campaign memorabilia. After much on-line navigation, I determined that Southwest’s ammunition policy was too open to TSA discretion and decided to ship the bullets to Claremont. They make a marvelous bookend.

After the initial excitement of the unfamiliar, I set-tled into the drudgery of field work. Scripted phone-banks were broken up only by conversations with the most inter-esting people I never met. Expletives and hang-ups were not unusual, but those who stayed on the line provided fas-cinating character profiles. One gentleman listened to my spiel and informed me calmly, “I don’t vote for women.” My mind went blank—I had never heard those words ut-tered explicitly. My shocked silence prompted him to re-

peat himself. “I don’t vote for women because in the Bible, God gave man authority over woman.” I finally muttered a generic pleasantry and hung up. I think a little divine in-spiration may strike him when he stares at the only two choices on the ballot this November.

Despite this man and another self-admitted chauvin-ist who said Jaime would “get both of [his] votes” (an im-plication that he also controlled his wife’s ballot), most of the phone calls were fairly pleasant. One man called in to know Jaime’s position on the Second Amendment. Spe-cifically - “Is she a hunter? If she’s a hunter she’s got my vote!” Ignoring the line of logic that ties gun-ownership with the political competence to serve as a Congresswom-an, I assured him that Jaime was a member of the NRA and licensed to hunt in all fifty states.

As an unrecognizable number calling during din-ner hours, I left plenty of messages on machines whose prompts ranged from disturbing to heartwarming. It’s amazing how many people invoke God’s name to bless the strangers that call them. Several quoted the Bible as they wished me a pleasant day. Between the cursing and hang-ups that surrounded them, I was quite thankful for these bright bits of goodwill.

From a practical perspective, the intellectuals of the Republican Party will say that these are well-meaning peo-ple and consistent conservative voters. There are plenty of stereotypes that fill the ranks of the Democratic Party as well. I am the product of my education and an elitist of the worst kind, but the truth is - the people I just described to you are the people I want to be my neighbors. My boss and I joked endlessly about Lewis County, the Bible Belt of the Third Congressional District. But personally, I enjoy living in a place where I see someone every day who has asked the highest power they believe in to bless me. It’s the kind of goodwill toward mankind not often lauded by our society. For those of you laughing at the image of a person whose life is shaped by a gun and a Bible, I’d like to know what you rely on and what you believe in - coffee and CNN?

There’s a reason the Claremont Colleges produce some of the finest members of the political leadership of both parties. They educate students classically and rigor-ously to prepare them for lives of leadership. As their repu-tation indicates, this education has been quite effective. I may laugh at the Tea Party’s unwillingness to compromise, but I can appreciate that on a basic level, I share many

by Hannah Burak

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13world news

hank goodness we go to CMC.” I’ve heard those words on a pretty regular basis

since coming here, and there’s good reason for it. It’s not just that we never would have seen this much sun in Brunswick, Maine. The fact is that we go to one of the shockingly few schools that still focuses on educating the whole person.

As institutions designed to serve as the bastion for American enterprise and intelligence, it concerns me when universities across the country make knee-jerk reactions in response to the latest research in education, or worse, popular trends. What worries me about our latest stumble in developing the next generation is that it doesn’t seem to be a fad.

The past twenty years or so have seen a marked de-cline in post-secondary Humanities education nationwide. Colleges are requiring and students are taking many fewer courses in subjects such as literature, history, and philoso-phy. In itself, this doesn’t seem like that big a deal; it’s a difficult job market, and many people want to leave college as technically trained as possible. But what this leaves us with is a generation of young people who are ill-prepared to tackle many of the dangers of today’s world.

In a world where information travels at the speed of your modem, and an increasing number of blatantly biased sources gain clout and reputations for “unfiltered informa-tion,” it is more important than ever that we have the abil-ity to analyze the rhetoric, consider the source, deconstruct the arguments, and establish the credibility of any piece of information with which we are bombarded in the constant onslaught of media. We have to continue to educate future generations in a way that ensures their ability to do so, or we run the risk of becoming even more reliant on fickle popular thought and trends in determining our nation’s po-litical, cultural, and social perspectives.

The problem is not a lack of requirements. Even though the general trend over the years has been for large universities to cut down on the number of required courses in fields such as foreign languages and philosophy for grad-uation, these are not the sole causes for concern. The truth is, CMC’s own requirements in the Humanities are pretty light. But students here know that the Humanities profes-sors at Claremont McKenna are some of the best in the nation. As a result, students voluntarily take a great deal of their courses outside of their major, and dabble in subjects such as religious studies and literature. As a result of this freedom, CMC students grow in truly myriad ways, allow-ing them to become more well-rounded people, students,

and active members of society. It is this basic understand-ing in a wide range of disciplines that gives students like these a strong grounding in a number of methods of think-ing and analysis. This set of skills allows such students the ability to pursue careers in a wide variety of fields.

It is central that the student be able to freely choose what courses of study they pursue, or the information will never truly be absorbed or applied. When given the free-dom to determine their own curriculum, the student will be able to target their studies on perspectives related to their interests and passions. By offering courses in a plethora of foci within the traditional disciplines of the Humanities, a college gives the student the maximum ability to apply the skills and methodology learned in a Humanities cur-riculum to their specific field of study. Of course, at first glance, this sounds like an incredibly costly endeavor. Is funding the reason colleges have fallen so far behind in the humanities?

Back in my home state, Ohio State University has re-cently opened the doors to a brand new student recreation center, in addition to a multi-million dollar renovation of its existing student union complex. But these improve-ments came at a cost. As Frank Donoghue, professor of English at OSU and contributor to The Chronicle of High-er Education, notes in his recent article, departments such as business and medicine have seen great improvements as professors in such disciplines as English and History have seen their salaries stay constant, and the size of their departments shrink drastically. Here in California, every member of the staff of the University of California at Los Angeles’ Writing Programs has been sent firing notices, when no such cuts have been even discussed regarding de-partments in the natural or research sciences.

But don’t the sciences bring in more funding to the school? One would think, given all of the money that is given in research grants, that departments such as biology, physics, computer science, and mathematics are huge as-sets to the school’s resources. But Reem Hanna-Harwell, Assistant Dean of the Humanities at UCLA, has found just the opposite to be true. By calculating the cost of the resources used by students in each department, as well as credit hours earned, tuition paid, etc., Hanna-Harwell found that students who major in programs such as English and anthropology often end up “paying for the chemistry majors.” In fact, the Writing Programs threatened with the chopping block at UCLA turn an annual profit of around

How America’s colleges are failing their studentsby Evan Lind

continued on pg. 19

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n December 2008, the New York Times cited a study done by the National Center for Public Policy and High-er Education which found that “college tuition and fees

increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent.” Now these numbers look all the scarier because they were not controlled for infla-tion, but that still means that increases in college tuition outpaced income nearly three to one.

The price tag for any of the Claremont colleges ex-ceeds $50,000 a year for tuition, room and board, books and supplies, and other living expenses. The obvious ques-tion is: is it worth it?

There are numerous articles decrying the expense of college. They point out that students often perform an in-adequate cost benefit analysis about the price of college because of the almost compulsory lens our society sees it with. The result is a higher education bubble which funds wasteful projects, people and activities including fraud, drop out factories, administrative bloat, excessive athletic expenditures, cost inefficient facilities, palatial campuses, and tenured fossils, while doing little to further the devel-opment of human capital. Despite all these problems, a col-lege education remains a sound investment.

One thing that is critical to take into account is that college education has been the recipient of increasing sub-sidies, over the years. The CATO handbook for policy makers points out that from 1986 to 2006 the cost of col-lege increased 69 percent in terms of real dollars, but when grants, loans and tax benefits are factored in, the increase is actually a much more manageable 29 percent. Given that enrollment has increased 48 percent over that time period and the supply, especially of elite schools, is relatively in-flexible, it is only natural for the price to increase. Also, the returns on education have been increasing: economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy showed that in 1980 a col-lege graduate made 30% more than a high school gradu-ate; in 2005 that number had jumped to 70% - graduate and professional degrees also show similarly increasing returns. Even when innate differences in ability are con-trolled for, a study by Princeton economists Orley Ashen-felter and Cecilia Rouse indicated that the majority of the difference in income associated with college education is due to the education itself.

While it could take $200,000 of borrowing against future income to complete college, it is usually worth the cost. If, however, one wishes to pursue a lower income ca-reer (more common among softer majors like art) college may not be the best financial investment, but it may open

up rewarding careers which give more than just financial returns.

One situation where the price of college does not match the benefits is when a student chooses to drop out. Less than 60% of students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. complete their degree in less than 6 years. Per-haps one of the many ills of federal subsidies is that they may encourage students who may not be cut out for college to enroll. While enrollment has increased, a federal as-sessment found that in 2003 only 13 percent of Americans 16 years old or older were ‘‘proficient’’ in reading prose, understanding written directions, or performing quantita-tive tasks. In 1992 that number was 15 percent of the popu-lation. This along with the increased number of remedial courses offered at colleges point to an unfortunate effect of a well-intentioned policy.

The merits of subsidies become even more dubious upon consideration of Ayşegül Şahin’s staff report at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, showing that subsi-dies which effectively lower the price of college may have a negative effect on the development of human capital due to decreasing student effort. The lower the price of college is, the lower standards parents and students will have in regard to benefits gained from college; students’ utility will the best be served by changing their activities to include more leisure. The effect is stronger in lower motivation students but still present in higher motivation students.

The Department of Education’s management is noth-ing to smile at either since it is believed to have lost tens of billions to fraud and mismanagement of higher educa-tion subsidies over the years. On top of all this, the effect of federal subsidies is largely negated by the correspond-ing increases in tuition along with diversion of school re-sources away from poorer students. This means that they do little to aid the poorer members of society they seek to help. “[We] should worry more that increases in Pell Grants may lead institutions to reduce the amount of dis-counts they would otherwise have provided to the recipi-ents, who are from poor families, and move the aid these students would have received to others. This possibility of a substitution effect is supported by the data showing that public and private institutions are now more likely to pro-vide more aid to more middle-income students than low-in-come students,” said Arthur M. Hauptman of the Center for American Progress; he also stated that there is no evidence that the grants result in higher completion rates. In fact,

14 world news

The price of higher education: is it worth it?by Christopher Ranger

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Obama’s “Posse”: politics of education funding

resident Obama, ever the college professor, loves to lecture us about how the jobs of the future demand a college degree. He wants America to be the world’s

leader in the proportion of students attending college by 2020, and he wants more federal grants for college students, even though all evidence points to more grants increasing, not decreasing, the cost of college. (Colleges, in the competition for students, just increase their amenities – and their costs – with lavish student centers and dining halls.)

With such a focus, it wasn’t surprising then that Obama decided to give the majority of his $1.4 million Nobel Prize money to six charities that serve “underserved” minority scholarships. All told, he gave $750,000 total ($125,000 each) to College Summit, the United Negro College Fund, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the Appalachian Leadership and Education Fund, the American Indian College Fund, and the Posse Foundation.

Of these groups, Posse has received the most media attention from President Obama. In 2007, then-candidate Obama praised its founder Deborah Bial. “The playing ground, using traditional metrics for college admission, is unacceptably uneven,” Obama told The Chronicle of Education.

And untraditional Posse certainly is. Ms. Bial developed Posse after a minority student dropped out of an Ivy League college “because he couldn’t bring his posse with him.” Posse works on the premise that if ten “disadvantaged” students are admitted to a competitive school in a “posse,” they will support one another, rise to the occasion, and be able to graduate on time.

At least that’s how it works in theory. In truth, Posse is a mirage of educational achievement. At great cost to the colleges – well over $220 million at last count – it places ill-prepared students in thirty-plus of some of the most competitive colleges in America.

Regrettably, Posse seems more interested in agitating on campus than in promoting educational excellence. It encourages students to “set up organizations on campus that promote diversity” and hosts retreats where they discuss privilege and race. At one such retreat, it was argued that the right-leaning publication on campus, the Claremont Independent, was sexist and racist because it didn’t have the appropriate number of women and “persons of color” on staff.

They likely take their cues from Deborah Bial, who argued that Posse wasn’t using affirmative action, but achieved the same results. Borrowing from the UCs, which assiduously define down merit, Posse eschews grades and

SATs in its selection process, just as all affirmative action programs do in favor of such non-quantifiable metrics as “leadership” or “perseverance.” Unsurprisingly, its students often have much lower GPAs and much lower SATs than the general population of a selective school – or even their athletes. A 1998 evaluation of the Posse program at Vanderbilt University found that athletes entered with an average of 1042 SAT score and maintained an average GPA of 3.13, while Posse students came in with a 900 average SAT and finished with a 2.93 average GPA. Due to low grades of their Posse students in their engineering programs, Rice and Lehigh canceled their involvement with Posse. The rigors of engineering school were ill-suited to the Posse students.

Posse touts a statistic that 90 percent of Posse members graduate in five years, which seems impressive when compared with the national average of 55 percent, but it is actually pretty average when you consider that the average graduation rate in six years for all 33 of the Posse schools is 83.4% - and few of those students receive as generous full-scholarships as Posse.

Moreover, merely graduating from college is far different from graduating well from college. What percentage of those students go onto graduate school? How many graduate in the top percentages of their class? What about the 10% of students who don't graduate in five years? Could more middle class students graduate if they received some of the Posse money? These are admittedly difficult questions to ask, but they deserve to be asked all the same.

The tragedy and the irony is that President Obama could make a real difference if he and his party weren’t so beholden to the people holding these students back: the teachers’ unions which have kept our public schools failing. This moral failing on the part of the Democrats is exposed in two new films, Waiting for "Superman" and The Lottery, which depict the underlying education truth of our time: the more money we pour into the public schools, the poorer outcomes we seem to get. Education may be the “civil rights issue of our day,” as says Geoffrey Canada in one of the films, but President Obama, who claimed to be the bridge between Selma and modern America, doesn’t seem to care. He let die a successful voucher program in the nation’s capital while he bails out the very people whose fat pensions have made flabby minds with money from the food stamp program.

But Posse doesn’t agitate to change that. And President Obama is more interested in sending his children to private schools than in fixing broken schools anyway.

by Charles Johnson

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16 opinion

Legalization is the wrong question

egalization is not the answer to our nation’s drug woes. It is not even the question. I do not doubt that there exists a vested interest in deterring drug use

among the citizens of the United States; I do not doubt that there exists an interest in quelling the drug wars of Mexico and the borderlands. The seemingly conflicting positions of enforcement and legalization, however, have a fortu-itous intersection in a rarely examined policy option – that of decriminalization.

Under a decriminalization policy, the drug offenses that are so severely prosecuted at present are transformed to the status of civil offenses. The practical implications of the change are enormous. Decriminalization achieves the justice of outcomes sought by legalization proponents, yet it also enables the moral and procedural goals that inform the present effort against drug consumption.

The policy maintains the illegality of drug use. Pen-alties for use, however, are radically changed. Instead of serving nonnegotiable prison time for drug offenses, the penalties for drug use and abuse become similar to those of civil offenses – that is, they are focused on enabling the well-being of the offender rather than on punitive mea-sures. Options include fines, education requirements (a la traffic school), or rehabilitation programs (just as anger management is required of certain offenders today). Prison populations are thereby dramatically reduced, leaving the incarceration system more prepared to handle more serious offenders.

The decriminalization regime also allows for medical

applications of otherwise illegal substances without under-mining the ban itself. Just as morphine is a prohibited sub-stance for civilian consumption, it nonetheless serves an invaluable medial purpose. Marijuana and its derivatives, for example, may someday serve a similar role if they be-come permitted under a similar legal structure; other opi-um derivatives might be employed in treatment programs to gradually eliminate substance dependencies.

Even while the act of consumption is decriminalized, the unregulated sale of drugs remains a criminal offense. This policy ensures that those who seek to evade the law and broker addictive goods are punished properly without endangering the livelihoods of their customers in the thrall of addiction. The potential availability of medical-grade substances within supervised treatment programs for the seriously addicted undermines the market power and social stigma used so effectively by cartels and gangs today to push their illicit product.

The benefits of the decriminalization policy are large compared to both the legalization and strict enforcement positions. Law enforcement can devote more resources to enforcement against distributors while ensuring that dependent customers receive adequate physical and psy-chological treatment. Colleges and other communities can similarly move their focus to treatment rather than puni-tive deterrence. Regulated distributors and purchasers can more easily conduct valuable programs in research and treatment without running afoul of federal law. Decrimi-nalization, therefore, is the answer to the drug question.

by Ben Daniels

The price of higher education, cont. from pg. 14they may hurt them as they encourage predatory dropout factories.

Other things that subsidies fund include bureaucratic bloat – the number of administrators on college campuses has doubled since 1980 – and a virtual arms race in con-struction of incredibly expensive buildings like medical centers, which benefit relatively few. They also contribute to the increased pay, generous sabbaticals, and light class load offered to professors, the palatial campuses/dorms, superior athletic programs/facilities, small classes, solar powered trash collectors and many other benefits that we love on our college campuses. While there is no question that these amenities make college life considerably more pleasant, many do not contribute to human capital develop-ment while others like small class sizes are not necessarily the most efficient approach. This is not to say that all of these are terrible things that should be removed. I person-

ally love our small classes and Claremont Hall. If, how-ever, students begin to gag too much on the price of college they will demand more efficient behavior by cutting some of the more wasteful amenities and focusing on education rather than recreation.

One way we can force schools to be more efficient is to seek to phase out federal support of higher education from all areas except those that directly support federal interests: programs like ROTC, service academies, and national defense related research. While subsidies were created with the noble intent of aiding the poor and devel-oping human capital, they end up doing more harm than good. Removal of federal subsidies is more than just solid step towards fiscal prudence; it will check the rampant in-flation of tuition, and thereby keep college from becoming an institution reserved for the elite.

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17opinion

The problem with occupational licensure

he debate over public welfare raises one of the most important controversies in political thought: to what degree can existing political arrangements be explained

by reference to human nature, and to what degree is ob-servable human nature itself a creation of politics? Are humans naturally dependent creatures, inevitably in need of government welfare, or are modern political subjects dependent on the government because current political ar-rangements encourage dependency on the government?

All of us are inescapably dependent on others for parts of our lives - in childhood, in old age, or in sickness, for example. Others, such as those suffering from insanity or debilitating physical disorders, are dependent for their entire lives. Advocates of the welfare state claim that, as a practical matter, society requires government assistance to maintain a social safety net to help the dependent. To the extent that this claim represents fact, and given the uni-versality of dependency, the welfare state has a plausible justification.

But to what extent is the dependence of the citizenry on the welfare state a result of government policy, rather than an inevitable outgrowth of human nature? Common among conservatives is the claim that welfare programs themselves exacerbate the dependency they claim to alle-viate. But what is at least as notable is the proliferation of government policies in other areas that frustrate indi-vidual attempts to escape dependency for economic self-sufficiency.

Of these policies, one of the most appalling is occu-pational licensure. State governments regulate over 1,000 occupations through mandatory licensing, professions as different as hair braiding, funeral directing, fortune telling, reptile catching, law, social work, truck driving, and real estate brokering. Regulations establish entry requirements for an occupation, which may include, for example, edu-cational credentials, prior experience, payment of a speci-fied sum of money to a licensing board, satisfactory per-formance on an entrance exam, or residency in the state of practice. Licensing boards are typically established by and staffed by people currently competing in the occupation licensed, or in some competing profession aiming to disad-vantage sellers with substitutable products. Lobbyists for the establishment of licensing boards benefit from being able to use the political authority of the board to control entry into the industry, and thus to control supply and price - that is, to create a state-sanctioned monopoly.

Licensing requirements differ from industry to in-dustry, and from state to state. In some cases, becoming

licensed can be as easy as filling out a form; much of the time, however, becoming licensed requires a significant in-vestment of time and money, commonly, for example, in the form of a lengthy licensing course and a licensing fee of hundreds or thousands of dollars. The burden of these requirements fall often on the poor, to whom these en-trance costs are most inhibitive, because occupations that have modest entrance costs, like hair braiding or taxi driv-ing, are frequently subjected to licensing regulations. (The logic of this outcome is easy to understand: industries that are easy to enter into are highly competitive under free-market conditions. For this reason, they are more likely to give rise to groups of individuals within the profession aiming to restrict competition in pursuit of the benefits of a more profitable and predictable monopolistic business atmosphere.) Undoubtedly, occupational licensure, which affects between one-fifth and one-third of the American workforce (the imprecise estimate is due to the surpris-ing lack of interest of academic researchers in the topic), keeps many poor people poor, and violates the liberty of society’s politically weakest members to pursue economic betterment. Also importantly, licensure perpetrates these injustices without economic justification.

The most prominent economic justification for a li-censing regime in some industry is that the relationship be-tween seller and consumer of the good or service sold be characterized by “asymmetric information,” meaning that the consumer lacks specialized information that would en-able him to evaluate the quality of the good or service of-fered. This is certainly true for a profession like medicine or law. But for African hair braiding? Barbering? Land-scaping labor? Refrigeration repair? The case for licensure is much weaker or non-existent for many industries like these, in which consumers can distinguish between sell-ers of different qualities with relative ease. Occupational interest groups lobbying for licensing generally appeal to some version of the asymmetric information justification, even when such a claim is absolutely and undeniably ludi-crous, as in the cases, for instance, of Maryland’s licensing board for fortunetellers, Louisiana’s licensing regime for floral designers, or Texas’ licensing of eyebrow braiders.

Repeal of unjustifiably burdensome legal licens-ing requirements, either through internal state efforts or through federal action, would be an effective and just form of welfare policy. These repeals could serve to less-en the burden of welfare provision currently assumed by

by Julio Sharp

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18 opinion

My New York odyssey

was in the midst of an econ problem set last May when News Corporation’s Marty Singerman called with some very surprising news. I was very pleased and proud to

learn that I had capped the Claremont Independent’s hat-trick dominance of the Eric Breindel Collegiate Journal-ism Award. Following wins by former editors John Wilson CMC ’07 and Elise Viebeck CMC ’09, this managed to create a pretty awkward situation for the judges.

The award comes with an internship at one’s choice of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News or the New York Post, and I chose the Journal. The thought of writ-ing on the op-ed page was excit-ing, but I had little clear idea of what would really be entailed. I knew that the opinion pieces it publishes play a significant part in shaping the national discourse (Whole Foods boycott, anyone?), but I had never seen the prover-bial sausage being made. What does it really take to bring together the likes of British Prime Minister David Cameron, Bush advisor Karl Rove and Democratic senator Jim Webb to write about the ideas of the day?

Come July of this year, News Corp. flew me out to New York City to learn these things hands-on. After being sternly admonished not to let my successor, Helen High-berger CMC ’11, take the Breindel for granted as a benefit of editing this publication, I was shown the ropes.

The Wall Street Journal occupies four floors in the News Corp. building in Midtown Manhattan. Everything but one side of the fifth floor is devoted to the news side of the paper. Stories come in from around the world, harried reporters work leads, and caffeine flows freely. It’s not quite J. Jonah Jameson’s Daily Bugle, but there’s definite-ly an old-fashioned newspapery vibe to it all. The op-ed page’s corner of the fifth floor is different, though. There’s little sense of rush or panic here, the editors work in rela-tive silence, and visitors are likely to have D or R and a

state after their name. The Journal has a reputation as a primarily financial

paper, but the op-ed section is driven by politics and pol-icy. More than a few people asked me for stock tips this summer, but each time I explained regretfully that I’m “the wrong section for that.” That’s not to say that we were shy on economics. Art Laffer (whom Econ 50 students will remember as originator of the Laffer Curve) wrote for us periodically, and the editorial boardroom played host to hedge fund heavyweights and TARP regulators alike.

But politics was always cen-tral. California gu-bernatorial candi-date Meg Whitman came in to meet with us one day - another day it was Google CEO Eric Schmidt to talk about the implica-tions of the search giant’s censorship dustup with the People’s Republic of China.

From persons known and un-known, thousands

of op-ed submissions pour into the Journal’s inbox. Edi-torial Features Editor Rob Pollock and his staff face the daunting challenge of sifting through them to create the most meaningful pages possible every day. Some submis-sions, naturally, are semiliterate drivel, hate-filled rants, or deranged screeds ten times longer than what’s printable. But I got the impression that those account for a smaller fraction than might be expected. The rest come from small business owners, analysts, professors or heads of state. They all get read, and the Features staff decides which of the best submissions are most relevant to the news of the day. We would make changes, discuss them with the au-thors, and arrive at a final draft that we could all be pleased with.

The thoroughness of the editing thoroughly im-pressed me. The editors asked tough questions about my own pieces, and caught typos or style errors that would have slipped by just about anyone. By my last week on the job, I was just starting to get the hang of proofreading at

by John-Clark Levin

i

19opinionthat level, but I could see that it takes years to master.

I was most impressed, though, by my daily interac-tions with the Journal’s editorial staff. I suppose I would have imagined that people with Pulitzers and Loebs who lunch with world leaders would expect little more than cof-fee from an intern. I was wrong. Without exception, they extended themselves to me and offered their guidance and expertise. Instead of sending me on errands, they allowed me to share in all the aspects of their own jobs.

As my weeks in New York went by, I began to see the contradiction inherent in the job. From the lowliest interns to Editor Paul Gigot, a single day could encompass meet-ing a United States Senator and scouring an article for a single errant quotation mark. They didn’t see one as excit-ing and the other as drudgery - it was all just part of the job.

The city itself is a strange contradiction. New York is on one hand the most cultured city in the First World - a global center of media, fashion, cuisine and theater. The

best apartments there routinely sell for more than it costs to make a Hollywood action movie, and A-list celebrities can walk down the street without causing a stir. On the other hand, New York is more reminiscent of the Third World than any American city. The streets throng with pedes-trians moving freely between honking automobiles, ven-dors trundle around with carts of knockoff handbags and the sidewalks are lined with heaping piles of trash. The peace is kept by an NYPD larger than America’s force in Afghanistan until just last year.

Living in New York City allowed me to better under-stand my experience at the Wall Street Journal - precon-ceived notions of either should be discarded at the door. I certainly never expected I would be thrilled to read angry letters about myself, but I suppose I never expected to actu-ally find the sign for Sesame Street either. For those inter-ested, it was actually really exciting, and 64th and Broad-way, respectively.

Occupational licensure, cont. from pg. 15 the government, a burden that is sure to continuously in-crease, with negative implications for individual liberty and government solvency, unless this trend is opposed by innovative political proposals. Such a program of repeal as I recommend would have a significant, widespread, and positive effect on the poor, as I have noted, by eliminating arbitrary, exploitative obstacles to wealth, but also by low-ering the price of goods by enabling increased competition in deregulated industries. Moreover, such a policy satisfies

the values of citizens across the political spectrum, from those who value non-interventionist government and prop-erty rights, to those who emphasize the importance of shar-ing equitably the products of commerce, to those who view the flourishing of small business and entrepreneurship as a manifestation of American cultural greatness. And the reform effort has no more appropriate starting place than California, which ranks first among states in number of li-censed occupations, at 177.

CI

CI

CI

$1.9 million through student fees. Similar studies at the Uni-versity of Washington and the University of Illinois have posited similar findings; departments such as engineering and agriculture generally run at a net loss each year, whereas programs such as literature return large profits to the school.

It shouldn’t surprise us that government-run institu-tions have decided to continue to pour money into pro-grams that consistently do not operate in the black. But the right answer is clearly not to abandon these programs com-pletely, or even to downsize them greatly. We need quality scientists, engineers, and programmers in order to continue to be the epicenter of each eave of technological advances. What’s the right way to address this problem?

The fact is, students don’t want to study in programs that are considered weak or failing. When the President of

the University of California at Berkeley pontificates that the return on investment into programs such as literature and religious studies may not be great enough to justify the already comparatively insignificant funding they receive, students begin to wonder if the pursuit of such disciplines is worth the tuition and time. Colleges and universities, both public and private, need to make the funding and develop-ment of the humanities a top priority. If the justification for a publicly-funded university system of such incredible expense and size is to provide the average American with a quality college education, then there is no excuse for such institutions to leave out the courses and departments that will have profound effects on the student’s ability to act as a concerned and well-informed citizen in the years to come.

How America’s colleges are failing students, cont. from pg. 13

Intellectual elitism of a campaign intern, cont. from pg. 12values with these people. And let’s face it, the Libertarian Party hasn’t exactly passed much legislation in the forty years since its founding. But this vast base of staunch right-

wingers, they’re a little passionate, but they get things done - I look forward to shooting the breeze with them in the future. You never know, maybe I’ll even learn to hunt. CI

They came... from your townThey’re going... to WashingtonThey’ll make Congress live...

on peanuts!

They are...THE REPUBLICANS

coming November 2010