Excerpts from Ward Elliott’s Comments on the manuscript of Kevin Starr, Commerce and Civilization, May 16, 1997, release 1.10, updated to Oct. 15, 1997, section IX updated to 4/2000. Commerce and Civilization, the official commissioned history of CMC, was published in 1998. Elliott was the only faculty member permitted to comment on the draft. His suggested additions and clarifications (some of which were incorporated into the printed version) included the following:

II. An early thumbnail contrast between CMC at 50 and CMC at the outset, maybe in the form of a prologue keyed to the 50th-anniversary black-tie celebration at the Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, Oct. 25, 1996, would also give some perspective and help pull the 50 years together. As Board Chairman Bob Lowe '62 noted, CMC in 1946 was not much more than a gleam in its founders' eyes, with a few acres of rocky wash, Story House, $88,000 in gifts and pledges, a five-person pickup faculty, and a pickup student body of 86 local hopefuls too raw and new and busy to bother totting up their high school grades and SAT scores. Lowe did not say so, but, if we had kept track of entering students' grades and scores, as we finally did for the class that entered in 1957, the SAT median would probably have been in three digits, not four, somewhere between the 1995 scores of Slippery Rock University (Slippery Rock, PA: 860) and those of Samford University (Birmingham, AL: 1030), and much too far from the top tier to bother counting. [SAT's were in common use in early '50's; need to check whether they were in common use in 1946]

By 1996 CMC was still not as well known in the East as its much-older rivals, such as Amherst (1821), Williams (1793), or Haverford (1833), but, by a number of measures, it could stand comparison with the very best of the country's "trophy colleges." U.S. News & World Report had just ranked CMC 15th among all liberal-arts colleges in the nation. Even this understated the relative quality of CMC students in the last year before SAT scores were "renormed," that is, inflated by as much as 60-70 points. CMC's last median SAT score on the old, uninflated scale was 1310, fifth-highest of small liberal-arts colleges in the country, and only 20-40 points below the most competitive colleges, Williams, Swarthmore, Pomona, and Amherst. Compared with all liberal-arts colleges and universities, CMC was tied with Columbia and Johns Hopkins for 14th in the nation. Since 1970 its median SAT had risen by 100 points and more than 30 places in relative selectivity, more than any other college in the country, and doubly impressive for a college that had already risen 200 points since its founding. Its endowment per student was over $250,000, fourth among liberal-arts colleges in the country, and exceeded only by Swarthmore's, Grinnell's, and Pomona's.

CMC's students were not just talented on paper but highly competitive with the best by every available measure. Its athletes, in alliance with those of Scripps and Harvey Mudd Colleges, had won the combined, all-sports trophy in its league in ten of the preceding eleven years. In 1996, Division III colleges were ranked nationally for the first time in all-sports competition. CMS turned out to be the fourth-winningest of the nation's small private-colleges programs, after Williams, Amherst, and Emory. In some cases -- soccer, tennis, water polo and rugby -- Claremont athletes had taken on teams from heavyweight Division I powers -- such as UCLA, USC, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown -- and beaten them. At the time of the Biltmore celebration, Claremont's parliamentary debaters ranked second in the U.S., after Rice University. Since the early 1980's Claremont's debaters had been 16-5 against Harvard, 16-7 against Stanford, 3-0 against Oxford, mother of all parliamentary debate, 12-2 against all English and Scottish teams. By the 1990's CMC had also become a top contender for national scholarships, still a step behind the national leader, Harvard, in Rhodes and Marshall scholarships per capita, but already a step ahead of Harvard -- indeed, a step ahead of everyone -- in Truman scholarships per capita [this is true of Watsons this year, and it is probably true of Watsons over the years, since I think we get almost a Watson a year, on average, and a Truman only every other year. Harvard and other large universities were dropped from the Watson competition a few years ago, but I would guess that we were ahead of them when they were in competition for the same reasons we are ahead of them in Trumans per capita; John Farrell is checking].

The still-young College also had an enviable faculty, which over the years had amassed more than its share of honors for teaching and scholarship. One professor [Martin Diamond] had appeared on the cover of Time magazine as one of the Ten Greatest Teachers in the country. Another [John Roth] had been named Case Professor of the Year. A third [Harry Jaffa] had been hailed in a National Review cover story as "the foremost contemporary interpreter of the American political tradition." A fourth [Jack Pitney] was among the seven most-quoted political scientists in the country, [after Larry Sabato, Stephen Hess, Norman Ornstein, Thomas Mann, James Q. Wilson, and Merle Black]. All the others were older men, most of them no longer teaching full-time. And the CMC faculty were not just hothouse academics. Especially in the early days, they had been chosen for their real-world experience, as well as for teaching and research, and many had left lasting marks on the outside world. Some [Benson, Stubblebine] had helped create the nationwide Reapportionment Revolution and the California Tax revolutions; others [Elliott, Heslop] had helped identify and control the effects of these revolutions. CMC professors and students [Heslop] had spearheaded a series of campaigns which, after a 30-year Claremont-based struggle, had finally curbed blatant gerrymandering in California and elsewhere, and done it in a way that was both bipartisan and attentive to the desires of minorities to have more representatives from their own groups. CMC faculty reformers [Heslop] had also pioneered California's successful campaigns for term limits in the 1980's.

In the 1960's one professor [Jaffa] had helped give the Republican party a thorough ideological refurbishing, based on Lincoln, Jefferson, and natural law. He and two other CMC professors [Uhlmann, Diamond] also led the drive to save the Electoral College, which created and still sustains the two-party system, against efforts to scrap it in the 1970's. Yet other professors had played key roles in developing market incentives to control smog [Elliott], congestion [Elliott, Eckert], and water waste [Rodney Smith; Teeples] in California. One had drafted the economic-incentives enabling language of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 [Elliott]. Thanks in part to these efforts, the number of first-stage smog-alert days in the Los Angeles Basin declined from one day in three in the 1960's to only one day in all of 1997. CMC faculty had also been responsible for keeping Poseidon and Polaris nuclear missiles from going off at the wrong time [Myhre]; for rescuing the U.S. Laws of the Sea from crippling degradation [Eckert]; for getting China and Israel to establish diplomatic relations [Balitzer]; for helping bring down the former Soviet Union without bloodshed [Rood, Jaffa, Blitz], and for decontaminating the U.S. blood supply [Eckert]. CMC also in one way or another produced six college presidents. But for the efforts of these high-impact CMC people, the world would have been a noticeably less healthy and more dangerous place.

If one had counted up its graduates, CMC would have had less than the normal share of artists, poets, and musicians, but much more than the normal share of people destined to run things, often at the cutting edge. By the College's 50th year, its graduates seemed to be managing everything in sight, including the College itself. One out of every 27 alumni was a political leader, head of a firm, or holder of a major national scholarship award. Some, such as buyout tycoons Henry Kravis '67 and George Roberts '67, were world-famous and the subject of several books. Others were not so famous but of comparable or even greater public impact. David Dreier, '75, representing the College's own district, was a senior Republican Congressman, no. 2 on the House's most powerful committee. Steve Merksamer '69, and George Dunn III '72, had been chiefs of staff, respectively, for California Governors George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. [Rob Hurtt '66, Calif. Senate minority leader; Johnny Ellis '82, Alaska State Senate; Michael Feuer '80, L.A. City Councilman; last two are liberal democrats; there are more] William Crouch '63 had been a four-star general in charge of U.S. forces in Europe. Richard Flamson '51, had been Board Chairman of the Security Pacific Bank. Robert Day '65, was Board Chairman of the multi-billion-dollar Trust Company of the West. Stephen Kay '64 had put Charles Manson and other murderers behind bars; Sebastian Graber '74 had argued and won before the U.S. Supreme Court the right to picket the Supreme Court. Stephen Remp '69, was chief architect of the consortium that was developing a half-trillion-dollars worth of oil reserves under the Caspian Sea. Watson Fellow Tom Neff '76 had founded Fibrogen, a firm whose work on synthetic human collagen had offered new hope to the sixth of the world's population which suffers from otherwise-incurable fibrotic diseases. Truman Scholar and Washington powerlawyer Jim Dunstan '80 was working seriously on ways to fly his clients to the moon. [Orme Phelps says alums have more of a presence in CMC's management than that of most colleges: Stark, Weiss, 60% of Board of Trustees, recent heads of Board: Lowe, Day, Flamson.]

With typical Stark-era reticence, CMC spokesmen at the Biltmore gala mentioned none of these superlatives except the one about endowment per student. But there was a broad reference or two to "leaders in the making," and the audience seemed to understand that there was a lot of leadership and impact in the air. Things did seem to be going well for the young college, which had chosen the celebration to kick off a $100 million campaign to start its second half-century with a big dose of investment. The featured speaker, California Governor Pete Wilson, declared that "you are decidedly one of the brightest in the firmament" and hoped that his grandchildren could attend the College one day.

Not present at the Biltmore that night, but aware in his own way of what CMC had to offer, was Francisco Bravo, caretaker of Pitzer Hall, the College's original administration building. He was working two full-time custodial jobs to support his five children; he got four hours of sleep a night; and he had encountered many students in their night modes of partying, cramming, or handing in papers at 4 a.m. Occasionally he played the lottery. What would he do if he won? Retire, go fishing, and catch up on his sleep? "No," he said. "I would become a student here."

III. More and better defined sense of how CMC resembles, and differs from, its competition. CMC's basic differentiators are quality, size, membership in The Claremont Colleges, special disciplinary focus, and openness to conservative perspectives.

1. Quality is covered in Section II.

2. Membership in the Claremont Colleges, in a sense, has made the other distinctions possible. CMC could afford to be small, fourth smallest of all top liberal-arts colleges (after the two St. Johns campuses and Scripps), without having to settle for a tiny library like St. Johns'[only 100,000 books for both campuses] because it shares facilities with the other Claremont Colleges. CMC is half the size of Amherst or Williams, and, hence, more together, more attentive, and more focused as only a truly small college can be; Pitzer, Scripps and HMC are even smaller than CMC -- yet their students have access to a central library as large as Amherst's, Williams' and Haverford's combined, 20 times as large as St. Johns' two libraries. By the same token, CMC, with 950 students, could have government and economics departments as big as Dartmouth's, and more published, because it did not have to cover Latin, Greek, Fine Arts, Theater, and so on, all well covered by the other Claremont campuses and freely available to CMC students. It could also afford to be more open to conservatism than a college outside the Cluster because the other Claremont Colleges had liberalism and radicalism abundantly covered.

The Starr manuscript is very good on the Oxford model distinguishing The Claremont Colleges from Johns Hopkins, but the Colleges differ in many ways from Oxford, too; they also have had many U.S. imitators. Have any of these gotten it right? Pomona was one of a string of originally-denominational colleges which sprang up along the railroad in the 1880's and 1890's: USC, Oxy, Whittier, La Verne, Redlands. Why did it and its Claremont progeny take the path they did, and why were they so distinctive and successful? Location? Leadership? Timing? Central vision? Layout? Luck? Distinctiveness of components? Where in the world can you find campuses as small, as elite, and as different from each other, and from all other colleges, as CMC, Pitzer, Scripps, and HMC, situated across the street from each other?

3. Disciplinary focus: CMC's Old-fashioned, neoclassical, Straussian government department.

The Starr ms. has the beginnings of what is distinctive about CMC's emphasis on "political economy" and "public affairs," and its role as a "bastion of conservatism" in the Benson years. But a lot of work is still needed on this. CMC, with its neoclassical, Chicago-school economics department and several leading Straussians in its government department, really has been a kind of miniature edition of Chicago's most distinctive departments. But "Straussian economics" is a misnomer which conflates and confuses our two flagship departments. Leo Strauss was not an economist but a political philosopher, one of the greatest of the many great minds of those who fled Hitler in the 1930's. His outlook was old-fashioned, attentive to classical institutional analysis of the differences between one regime and another, and intensely focused on great books and great ideas, as promulgated by great writers and statesmen. He wrote: "It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low," and he roundly condemned modern, quantitative, "value-free" political science -- which can tell you everything about kurtotic indices and roll-call analysis, but nothing about whether a regime establishes justice, promotes the general welfare, or secures the blessings of liberty -- for ignoring the essence of what politics are about. Strauss and his followers are often criticized as "Talmudic," but no one that I know reads classical texts more deeply, closely, or carefully than they, or pays more detailed attention to the thoughts and natural-law principles of the founders of the Republic. Very few are better grounded in the subtle, historical, institutional underpinnings, many of them undreamed of by the founders, which still make our regime functional and just today.

The Straussians' approach is not inherently conservative. Their Lockean, Jeffersonian, Lincolnian conviction that some truths are self-evident was revolutionary in 1776; it was radical when it produced the Emancipation Proclamation; many academics and media people considered it radical when it was used to support a hawkish position against Hitler, Stalin, and their successors, and many opinion leaders still consider it radical today when it is used to attack reverse discrimination. But today only half the radicalism would be considered liberal, supporting the revolution, freeing the slaves, and opposing Hitler; the other half would be considered conservative, opposing communism and "benign" discrimination. The principles remain the same, however, no matter how people classify them.

Martin Diamond studied the classics of political philosophy during long hours as radioman on a WWII merchant-marine freighter. Onetime secretary to Norman Thomas, and a Strauss student at Chicago, he was a dedicated, old-line liberal who almost single-handedly restored the Federalist Papers to a place of honor in American political studies. He died with his boots on, of a heart attack suffered in 1978 while testifying in favor of saving the Electoral College, which was then under heavy attack. Neither Diamond, nor the Electoral College got much help from the behavioralist mainstream of the American Political Science Association, but, luckily for us, he prevailed by explaining the Electoral College's role -- classically argued by Harry Jaffa in 1964, and by Jaffa's student and CMC Washington professor Mike Uhlmann in the 1970's -- in creating and preserving the two-party system.

Harry Jaffa, by contrast, is a hero of National Review conservatives, a crony of Bill Buckley hailed in NR's cover story as the foremost interpreter of the American political tradition, the Goldwater speechwriter who wrote the famous words, "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." This doctrine wasn't enough to win for Goldwater in 1964, but it ultimately triumphed under Reagan, and even, in a sense under Clinton, who beat two Republican moderates essentially by adopting a conservative agenda, much of which had been promulgated by new-generation conservatives like Jaffa and savvy old-line liberals like Diamond.

Jaffa was anything but a spokesman for the nostalgic, tribalistic old conservatives who sat on the back benches in the 1960's invoking Burke and Calhoun and deploring the latest news over juleps and cigars. He was the firebrand who breathed a radical Jeffersonian, Lincolnian natural-law fundamentalism into American conservatism, revitalizing it and mapping out its eventual road to resurgence in the 1980's and 1990's. Jaffa was merciless in his attacks on Calhounite paleoconservatives like Mel Bradford and relativist/positivist neoconservatives, such as Robert Bork and William Rehnquist, and even on many fellow Straussians, such as Diamond and Alan Bloom, whom he thought to have strayed from the true path. His detractors, including many disaffected former allies, looked on him as a contentious, overbearing loose cannon, even when they agreed with him. As William F. Buckley, a Jaffa admirer, put it: "If you think Harry Jaffa is hard to argue with, try agreeing with him. It is nearly impossible."

But to sum up Jaffa as a loose cannon is a bit like saying that Moses was nothing but a pain in the neck. There is a grain of truth to it, but it misses the role he played in the transformation and resurgence of American conservatism, in staffing Republican administrations, both state and national, with his students for two decades, in writing speeches for Goldwater and others, and in counterbalancing both the arid technicality of mainstream political science and the heated radicalism of the Caucus for a New Political Science. His students founded the Claremont Institute, which still regularly puts on about a fifth of the panels at American Political Science Association conventions. With Diamond and Uhlmann, he also helped rescue the Electoral College and the two-party system it sustains from heedless demolition. His 1964 article, "The Nature and Origin of the American Party System," is the classical statement of this position. And I haven't even mentioned his writings (with Allen Bloom) on Shakespeare's politics, showing Shakespeare to be Platonist at heart. I have heard it said that, between his work and that of the Shakespeare Clinic, our government department has published more on Shakespeare than all the literature departments in Claremont combined. It could well be so. In any case, Jaffa has had by far the greatest intellectual impact of a very high-impact faculty, and it seems a shame to skim over it as lightly as this draft does. I would often ask Harry after one or another of his crunching assaults, "Why don't you pick on someone your own size?" "There is no one my size," was his response, and there is a lot of truth to it.

CMC's has been one of maybe a half-dozen government departments in the country with a significant Straussian presence. Chicago, Toronto, Cornell (but no longer), St. John's Annapolis, and the University of Dallas are the others which come to mind; we are by no means the least of these, and I think it has had much to do with our capacity to see things that others have missed and do things which others have not been able to do. My own background is with the Harvard government department, which in my day was also historical, institutional, and philosophical, but not nearly as zeroed-in on great books and founding fathers as the Straussians. When I first encountered a Diamond and Jaffa-trained CMC alumnus, Patrick Riley '63, I was amazed at how much he knew about the Federalist Papers, and how much pertinence he was able to find in them to the political problems of the day. My years at CMC, with Diamond, Jaffa, and Strauss himself, have only confirmed this impression.

4. Disciplinary focus: CMC's Old-fashioned, market-oriented, neoclassical economics department. It seems to me that something similar may be said of our economics department. I am not as up on its discoveries as I am on those of the government department, and it may have had less impact on its discipline than our department has had on ours -- or it may not. I believe that Economic Inquiry, the journal of the Western Economic Association, has been run by Tom Willett and several other CMC and CGS economists for many years. The government department doesn't have a major journal of its own. Also, the economics department has been profoundly different from, and hence nicely complementary to, our Straussian government department. Its heroes have been the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo and their great Chicago-school expositors, such as Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell. All of these were eloquent defenders of consumer and investor sovereignty in the economic realm. None was bashful in the least about judging the high -- government policy -- in the light of the low -- impact on ordinary people's economic options. De gustibus non est disputandum was the title of a famous essay by Chicago Nobelist George Stigler, and CMC economist Procter Thomson put it even more tersely: "Greed," he said, echoing Adam Smith, but defying Leo Strauss, "is good."

But, like the government department, the economics department differed from "mainstream" Keynesian economics departments, and it helped its students grasp many things to which most other departments were blind. And it, too, has had massive impacts on public policy (IV below). I owe one of my own principal discoveries, congestion charges and HOT lanes, to our econ department, and I am almost embarrassed at the frequency with which visiting social scientists oblivious to the economic dimensions of public-affairs issues, get mauled by our students in question-and-answer sessions, simply because our students, even non-economists, are much better trained in economic perspectives than most people from other colleges.

Our econ department has been one, again not the least, of a half-dozen or so departments in the country which did not go completely Keynesian in the postwar years -- others being Chicago itself, UCLA, University of Virginia, and, more recently, Clemson, Auburn, and George Mason. I don't know whether any of the others on this list have their own journals. They have had more regard for producers, savers, risk-takers, and market-equilibrium mechanisms than most mainstream departments have had, and less regard for government command-and-control regulations, especially wage and price controls and import restrictions. They have paid more attention than most to monetary policy -- printing dollars -- and have been more skeptical than most about government subsidies, guarantees, and entitlements, and Keynesian pretensions to "command" or "fine-tune" the economy. They have been more inclined to expand the range of economic choices than to restrict it. They have been more doubtful than most about the power and enforceability of collusion, whether among competing domestic firms or among nations trying to enhance their oil revenues with cartels. They have also been more doubtful than most that the government could spend people's dollars better than people could spend them themselves.

The seventies and eighties were generally kind to the neoclassical school's views of the world, and cruel to the dirigist, Keynesian world-views which reigned at Harvard, Yale, and other mainstream departments. In the West, dirigist programs were failures. Fiscal "fine-tuning" and protectionism flopped; price-control regulations, production and import quotas and solemnly-signed price-control treaties proved powerless to soften the energy crisis or curb energy consumption or inflation. In fact, they made the situation worse than it would have been had the government printed less money and left the market alone to correct its own imbalances. By 1980 the U.S. public (doctrinaire dirigists in the economic "mainstream" aside) was tired of clumsy government meddling with the market and ready to give Reagan and his neoclassical advisors, including many from CMC (see IV below), a chance to try something different. The "something" was massive deregulation; dropping the controls and quotas, and slowing down the printing of new money. It caused a brief, fierce recession in 1981-82, but both inflation and the energy crisis evaporated; the country embarked on one of the longest growth cycles in its history; and, by 1990, the great Soviet and Chinese experiments in dirigism had collapsed -- partly, no doubt, in response to Reagan's vigorous, CMC-connected prosecution of the Cold War [see below] but mainly because the bankruptcy and wastefulness of their own dirigism, long argued in vain by a neoclassicist minority of economists, had finally become apparent to all. It's too bad that it was too late for Procter Thomson to have lived to see the resounding vindication of one of his laws: "Bad economics makes bad ethics."

CMC's hardheaded minority view on these matters may not have been the last word on the subject, and the neoclassical school itself, as more people came to heed it in the 1980's, broke down into sometimes-quarreling subgroups, "Supply-siders," "monetarists," "rational-expectation" people, "Austrians" and so on, whose differences and relative merits could be better explained by an economist than by me. But by the 1980's the neoclassicists seemed to offer so much better an explanation of what was going on, and so much better ways to deal with it than "mainstream" departments had managed, that even Harvard and Yale trimmed their dirigist sails a bit and scrambled to add a neoclassical economist or two to their mainstream departments. Investors flocked to neoclassical economic forecasters such as AFEC and the Claremont Economic Institute, which were far outperforming their mainstream rivals -- until the government finally switched to neoclassical policies and the rival forecasters themselves switched to neoclassical models.

5. Openness to conservative perspectives. This gets covered piecemeal in the middle chapters, especially 4 (pp. 48 ff; CMC under Benson a "bastion of conservatism" ) and 5. I think it needs more explanation, integration, and nuance. I don't think "bastion of conservatism" is quite right even for the Benson years, other than perhaps as a contrast to other elite campuses, typically the ones most vocally dedicated to "diversity," where Jane Fonda-style radicalism had become the outward norm and conservatives and open conservatism had all but disappeared. It is true that throughout his CMC years Benson was the embodiment of squareness. He went to church every Sunday; he loved the flag; he was proud of his military service; he defended ROTC; he endorsed Nixon and was campaign chief for David Dreier; he was an outspoken cold warrior and critic of government meddling in the economy; even the architecture of his buildings, variously described as "S&L" and "Benson frugal," was square. And he certainly did not mind catering to conservative donors, either the rock-ribbed kind, such as Jerene Appleby Harnish, or the more moderate (and more typical) kind, such as Donald McKenna.

Squareness and conservatism are overlapping, but not interchangeable terms. Benson came from a line of abolitionist Republicans, many of them preachers; he was named after his distant cousin, Radical Republican Charles Sumner. In the 1930's and 1940's he had favored the New Deal and voted for Franklin Roosevelt. He switched back to Republican after the war, but he was much more a liberal, reforming, non-isolationist, New Deal-accepting Eisenhower Republican than a conservative, Taft Republican. [Invited by Eisenhower's staff chief Sherman Adams?] In the 1950's he was research director of the reform-minded Kestnbaum Commission (Commission on Intergovernmental Relations).

For all his dedication of professorships to the principles of free private enterprise, he was steeped in the progressive-era mystique of trained public administration and scientific management which seemed to have conquered the Depression and won World War II, not just on the battlefield but in the think tanks and production lines that sustained the war effort and in the military government that looked after the conquered populations when the war ended.

Some great spokesmen and practitioners of this managerial mystique were A.A. Berle, Gardener Means, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henry Ford, Rexford Tugwell, Peter Drucker, Robert McNamara, Zbigniew Brzezinski, McGeorge Bundy, and John Kenneth Galbraith. One could call this group by many names: "brilliant, analytical, dedicated, self-assured, imperious, urgent, reformist, activist," maybe. But "conservative" is hardly the first word that would come to mind. All preached salvation by managerial experts; none but perhaps Galbraith drew a sharp distinction between public management and private. The manager's job was pretty much the same whether it was Ford or the Defense Department, and the primary goal in either case was the enhancement of the public welfare, with a flood of cars or tanks, as the situation required, though, in the private sector, profits and sales volume helped show how efficiently and abundantly the public welfare was served. CMC's motto, "Crescit cum commercio civitas," comes straight out of this tradition, and WASC's notion that CMC has somehow failed to serve its mission because it turns out more lawyers and business leaders than bureaucrats or politicians would have seemed strange and perverse to Benson, as it would to the College's other founders. They would have been pleased, not chagrined, to see graduates like Terry Sanchez '78, the first member of his family to go to college, become a senior partner in a top Los Angeles firm -- Munger, Tolles, and Olson -- handling several billion-dollar Fortune 50 clients.

After retirement as president of CMC, Benson spent his last years calling for ethical instruction in the nation's schools and for codes of ethics for its corporations. From beginning to end, compared to those of the general public, his personal views and causes were much more those of the reform-minded center than those of the Taft right or even the Goldwater right.

Moreover, Benson's personal conservatism, such as it was, should not be equated with CMC's conservatism. He never appointed Jerene Appleby Harnish to the CMC board; she was too flamboyantly conservative. He recruited a student body which, often as not, was to the left of the general public. He worked hard to have a balance between conservatives and liberals on his featured economics and government faculties, and the ratio in these departments during most of the Benson years was roughly half and half. He did not work as hard to balance the other departments, so their faculty was overwhelmingly liberal, and the faculty as a whole was about three-quarters liberal Democrats, well to the left of the general public. Gerry Jordan, Winston Fisk (Fick), Orme Phelps, Jack Dunbar, and Martin Diamond, former secretary to Norman Thomas, are conspicuous early examples of liberals on the faculty.

Diamond is particularly interesting for being been both an outspoken Social Democrat and Jewish -- and perhaps also for bearing a striking resemblance to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Though Benson lived in an era when Jews had been systematically excluded from university teaching, and often acknowledged the then-general stereotype of Jews as clannish and contentious, he served notice immediately that his faculty would not be closed, hiring a Jewish professor, Everett Carter, in his starting faculty in 1946. This was four years before Pomona hired its supposed first Jewish professor, Karl Kohn, over muttered objections by some Pomona faculty that Pomona was not paying the "tribute to Christian Civilization" mandated by its motto. Pomona's president E. Wilson Lyon threatened to resign if the appointment was blocked. It wasn't. [Hank Meyer’s father, Henry Meyer, who taught history at Pomona and UCI, says that Kohn was not really the first Jew in Pomona’s faculty; that there was a Jewish lady teaching Spanish at Pomona in the 1940’s. There was an uproar over appointing Kohn nevertheless] Everett Carter's appointment at CMC was also seven years before the Harvard government department hired its first unconverted, tenure-track Jew, Henry Kissinger.

Having hired a scrappy, formidable, predominantly liberal faculty, Benson would then often clash with them and occasionally lose, as he did over his attempts to hire a professor of real estate or to register the college with the national association of business schools. These clashes could be intense. Orme Phelps recalled Benson throwing a copy of Who's Who in America at him in the heat of debate over Benson's unsuccessful attempt to appoint a professor of real estate. Anton de Haas chimed in: "Are we to have a professor of barbering?" But Phelps went on to note that Benson took the defeat in stride, went on about his business, and bore no grudge against those who had opposed him. (Stark was also notably indulgent of his campus opponents.) Whatever one may make of all this, it does not add up to building a bastion of conservatism. CMC in the Benson years was best summed up as he described it to me when he recruited me in 1967, as a place balanced between liberal and conservative perspectives.

I think it could still be so described, though major changes took place in the Stark years. Benson was ideological, visionary, a born proselytizer, a preacher's son who would talk your ears off about his dreams for the College -- while picking up stray bits of debris and kicking fallen olives off the Pitzer Hall courtyard. Jack Stark shared the managerial mystique, but much more as a doer than as a preacher. He didn't just kick olives and ask for an occasional broom closet in a new building. He put on a uniform and worked a day on buildings and grounds, and poring over architect's drawings of new buildings was one of his greatest pleasures in life. Public speaking was not among his greatest pleasures, especially if it had to do with doctrinal issues. Stark hated boasting; he was uncomfortable and fidgety when abstract, divisive ideological issues were in the air (and what ideological issues are not?); and his favorite and most effective platform line was "Enjoy your dinner." He was as relentlessly focused on tangibles, on buildings, bodies, and budgets as Benson had been on his missionary visions. He was perfectly suited for the much-confronted presidency inherited from Benson and Neville -- not the stirrer-up that Benson was, but a matchless calmer-down, cool, fearless, down-to-earth, organized, accommodating and willing to listen, but not disposed to yield to force, or, indeed, to any kind of bid to meddle with his job performance; he was not hung up on ideological issues, quick to get down to the budgetary details. I suspect that, if you asked him about his principal accomplishments, there would be very little about the remarkable discoveries and impacts of the people on his payroll. He would give you instead an administrator's list: balancing the budget every year, never deferring maintenance, boosting the endowment, closing Mills Avenue, going co-ed and expanding the student body smoothly and quietly with full consultation and no lasting dissention among stakeholders -- and greatly lowering the College's profile on conservative issues.

6. CMC in the age of confrontation.

Not everyone at CMC liked the idea of soft-pedalling the college's conservatism, given the shrill, confrontational Jane Fonda world view that seemed to have captured every other campus's imagination in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The pack had moved so far left that you didn't have to be very conservative to distinguish yourself from it; and, despite Stark's reluctance to preach the Gospel, CMC's heritage of political balance, inherited from the Benson years was sufficient, not just to maintain the reality of openness to different views, but even to preserve for most outsiders, and some insiders, the illusion that the college, with both its faculty and its students generally left of the general public, was a "bastion of conservatism."

"Openness to different perspectives" is not the first thing you would think of as characterizing most college campuses of the last three decades, but it lingered on at CMC. By the end of Benson's tenure as president, demonstrations, declarations, marches, occupations, liberations had sprung up everywhere; everyone was demanding ethnic studies centers, to which no conservatives need apply, and "guidelines" for recruiting and hiring women and minorities. Pitzer Sociologist Inge Bell proposed that the Military Science Department be renamed the Department of Mass Murder, stripped of academic credit, and then expelled as signals to stop the war in Vietnam. Army and navy recruiters and recruiters from the Dow Chemical Company, which made napalm, were to be shut down. Unpopular speakers, such as Hubert Humphrey, William Westmoreland, Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein, were to be shut down or shouted down without a word of remonstrance from college faculty or administrators who had once stoutly defended the right to speak and teach on campus against red-baiting and McCarthyism. Jensen had to meet his Berkeley classes in secret. A CGS-based "Committee on the Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Vietnam" got headlines with a proposal to adopt the University of Hanoi as sister University to The Claremont Colleges, calling for a "town meeting" to express the views of the "widest segment of the American people."

Many of these views were expressed as "non-negotiable demands" backed up by threats of violence. Jeering mobs of Harvard and Columbia students and armed gangs of Cornell students occupied their respective administration buildings for several days. Student militants from the other Claremont Colleges "liberated" the ROTC unit at CMC, camping out, ripping telephones out of the wall, turning desks upside down, scrawling obscenities on the wall. A year earlier a crowd of 400 demonstrators had tried to shut down a drill. CMC's Story House fire, supposedly caused by a hot radiator pipe, was one of 25 fires and three bombs which went off on the Claremont campuses. The Story House fire itself took place six days after a black militant from Pomona, demanding the endorsement of ethnic quotas and black studies courses, had asked the CMC faculty, "Do you want this campus burned down this summer or next summer?" Scripps President and Claremont Provost Mark Curtis was hauled out of his office to answer to an angry crowd of students and faculty. Anonymous phone callers inquired by what route his children went to school. One of the bombs maimed and partially blinded Mary Anne Keatley, wife of Robert Keatley, a CMC football player. Robert is now advisor to the City of Boulder, Colorado on the JonBenet Ramsey case. The militant spokesman later cautioned that he had only been speaking rhetorically.

These confrontations revealed a serious weakness in the Claremont Cluster plan, which, like the United States under the Articles of Confederation, had no central executive, legislature, or judiciary. By 1968 CMC, the most conservative of the campuses, with the least militant students and the least permissive faculty and administration, had the most inviting targets for "liberation," ROTC and the military and corporate recruiters. The other colleges had most of the militants and the most pro-militant student bodies, faculties, and campus judiciaries, often called by some milder name, such as "community council" to underscore their repudiation of the scorned punitive, adversary traditions of their predecessors. Militants from CGS, Pitzer, and Pomona would march to CMC, liberate ROTC, and go home to get either a slap on the wrist or a high five on their home campus for doing their bit to shut down the Department of Mass Murder. The Protestant chaplains, to a man, could be counted on to justify the Liberations by situation ethics either as an act of Gandhian nonviolent civil disobedience, or as something akin to the French Résistance. "Violence may be a sin" intoned the Reverend James Joseph, "but it can also be a duty." As often as not the following Sunday would be devoted to a sermon celebrating Christ as the Lord of the Revolution or to a public mourning for the rogue American massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, but not, of course, of the much larger, more official Viet Cong massacres at Hue or Dak Son.

The trial of the "Pomona Nine" December 3, 1969, illustrates some of these forces at work. Nine Pomona students were identified among the Liberators of the CMC ROTC and tried before the Pomona Community Council for trashing a building and shutting down classes at a sister college. On every campus, posters with kangaroos [copy attached] announced/denounced the trial, which was to be held, not in a secluded hearing room but in Pomona's spacious Olney Dining Hall. The Pomona Nine and their counsel, CGS student Mansour Farhang -- a wild-looking man with glowing eyes and a massive wreath of dark curls who would later, as Iranian Ambassador to the U.N. under the Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, become famous for defending the sacking of the American embassy in Tehran and the imprisonment of its personnel -- made clear to the packed hall that it was not really the demonstrators who were on trial, but Amerika, the monstrous and inhuman System they were attacking. The defendants marched in in lockstep, gave the revolutionary-power clenched-fist salute, and barked "Not guilty" in unison as each was charged, with obvious misgivings, by two of Pomona's antiwar Deans. (Pomona Professor Leo Flynn, the college's leading authority on public law and an ex-Marine, had been removed from the Community Council for the occasion because he "would not understand.") The crowd roared.

The defense consisted of testimony by three protestant chaplains that the Liberation was both nonviolent and theologically justified, plus a recording of the broadcast testimony of Pfc. Paul Meadlo describing the My Lai Massacre. The recording was complete with beer commercial highlighting the link between the despised war and the equally despised Amerikan capitalism, as if in eerie mockery of CMC's motto. It would be hard to imagine a more complete rejection of everything CMC had stood for in the Benson years, its WWII mystique of American government and business working and managing together to conquer the pertinent emergent foreign despots with a flood of planes, trucks, tanks, training, and technique. Now it, it seemed, the Mandate of Heaven had passed to the foreign despots, and the Amerikan system, whose productivity was now considered grotesque, was despised for its wasteful, futile efforts to stop history. It is not hard to imagine why Benson's ulcers gave him a lot of trouble in the last years of his presidency. The crowed roared again. And again. The defendants got off with a suspended sentence, amounting to a slap on the wrist. The crowd nodded.

If CMC lacked the means to punish invasions from the other Claremont Colleges effectively through the Colleges' own judiciaries, it also lacked effective access to outside police, since an adequate crowd-control force took seven or eight hours to muster, and since enforcement by outside police tended to be harsh and indiscriminate. Harvard president Nathan Marsh Pusey famously discovered this in 1969 when he ordered police to clear out the student Liberation of University Hall. Calling in the police seemed to produce more student militancy in the long run than it curbed in the short.

In those days most campuses' answer to militancy was temporization and accommodation, even where, as in most cases, Liberators were not immune from campus prosecution. Stanford, Harvard and most of the Ivy League abolished ROTC on campus. Every elite college in the country, The Claremont Colleges included, adopted ethnic recruitment "guidelines" and minority studies programs which clamored for "diversity," but only of the radical kind. CMC, which by the 1970's was already the most aggressive and successful of The Claremont Colleges in recruiting minority students, stepped up its efforts and has remained a leader in minority recruitment ever since. But it never had much enthusiasm for "guidelines" and, especially in the Stark years, managed time and again to block or water down outside (or inside) efforts to impose them. Though it was among the most vulnerable colleges in the country to outside student occupations, and among the poorest in available resources to halt or punish them, it was among the least willing to be governed by them. It never dropped ROTC; it did not call for moral disarmament in the Cold War; it never adopted the University of Hanoi as a sister university; and it remained open to the possibility that the U.S. might have something good to offer the world, and that the future might not belong exclusively to the Reds.

Despite CMC's situational weaknesses in dealing with Liberations (or was it because of them?) both Benson and Stark found ways to work around them. In the fall of 1968, when a mass demonstration to shut down an ROTC drill was in the offing, old soldier Benson had a fence built around the drill field and prepared warnings for the demonstrators that they were trespassing on CMC property and would be subject to criminal prosecution. Photographers would be on hand, ready to record each infraction for referral to the prosecutor. But Benson was as cautious and consultative as he was resolute. He asked Ward Elliott, a young political scientist freshly arrived from demonstration-torn Harvard, and an ROTC sympathizer, what he thought of his preparations. Elliott had been a lawyer and, as a tutor at one of the Harvard Houses, a veteran of the Dow Chemical sit-in at Harvard. He thought that prosecuting the demonstrators was too clumsy and punitive an opener, and he found that Benson was willing to try a softer approach -- once. "They are making a mistake attacking students," said Elliott. "Let me talk to the cadets and see if we can't come up with something a little more subtle than hauling the demonstrators into court."

The next afternoon, 400 demonstrators showed up, anti-war banners waving, some looking for a confrontation, most just wanting to get out and apply a little peaceful-but-forceful collective moral muscle on a beautiful fall day. The organizers' plan was to surround the 44 cadets, join hands, and close the circle, bringing the drill, and, through it, the War Machine, to a halt. To their surprise, they were greeted at the gate by Cadet Executive Officer Clayburn Peters '69, a handsome, poised black student from Watts who had graduated from David Starr Jordan High School in 1965, the year of the Watts riots. Peters loved CMC and later said "it was Camelot; there was no other place like it in the world." He also loved ROTC and some months earlier had turned down an offer from a beautiful blonde Pitzer College radical to spend a night with him if he would publicly denounce ROTC.

"I would like to welcome you all to the Claremont ROTC Leadership Laboratory," he announced. "In today's class we would like to discuss with you the role of coercion in campus politics." Inside the fence, the cadets were deployed in debate formation, and each cadet soon gathered a circle of ten demonstrators. What did the demonstrators think they were doing, trying to close down other people's classes by force? Such questions had not loomed large in the thoughts of many of the demonstrators, and it soon became manifest that they had lost the high ground to the cadets. The organizers shifted uneasily from foot to foot for ten minutes, then repaired to the center of the field to sing We Shall Overcome (together with the relieved cadets) and left, not to return that year. Los Angeles Times columnist Art Seidenbaum happened to be with the demonstrators, visiting with a Pomona student. He shortly wrote an article praising the "Pomona" cadets -- a few of whom probably actually were from Pomona -- for their sophisticated handling of the situation.

[could add something here about response to 1973 Hanoi Sister "Town Meeting" or Dec. 1969 nailing of 16 theses to door of College Church after one of its politicized liturgies: "As far as we know, God's views on foreign policy have not been revealed." Football team, denied the alternative of effective institutional sanctions, lined up outside ROTC at dawn to drive off insurgents themselves; Associate Dean Bob Rogers giving CGS demonstrator John Minnich a fat lip for trying to break up Benson testimonial dinner at L.A. Music Center, Jan. 1970; demonstrators' occupation of Pomona's Alexander Hall in 1990's, over Pomona's refusal to tenure a black professor, using recruits mostly from campuses outside Claremont.]

Benson's defense of ROTC was not confined to Claremont. In 1969 he also was the co-founder, with Frank Trager, of the National Strategy Information Center, and E. Howard Brooks, of Stanford University, of the ROTC Academic Enrichment Program (AEP). This program, privately financed by the Carthage Foundation, of Pittsburgh, and run successively by Benson, Brooks, and Elliott, put together a panel of star speakers on national security, organization studies, and area studies for ROTC units in the Western States. Thanks in part to this enhancement, all but two ROTC units in the West survived, while dozens of units in the East, such as Harvard's, Yale's, Brown's, and Dartmouth's were being abolished. The two western exceptions were Stanford, already abolished before the AEP was founded, and Colorado College, which did not have enough demand for ROTC to support a unit. Benson and Elliott were awarded the Army's Distinguished Civilian Service Medal for their contributions. After retiring as president of CMC in 1969, Benson went on to become Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Education. For the next three years, he would be in charge of the largest educational establishment in the country. ROTC was one of his responsibilities, during the years it was under heaviest attack on campus. After his return to CMC, the Army took over the funding of the AEP for several years and extended it to all units in the country.

Defending and administering ROTC was not CMC's sole contribution to the Cold War. Also of note were Professor Harold Rood's, Kingdoms of the Blind (1980), foreshadowing the strategic thinking of the Reagan administration as clearly as Jaffa had foreshadowed its philosophical thinking -- though Rood, unlike Jaffa, remained an old-line FDR Democrat. Rood had served in a pack artillery unit in WWII and was as deeply influenced by his war experience as Benson. Like Benson, he never dreamed of spelling "America" with a k. After the war he was commissioned in the Army Intelligence reserve, rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and became a Cold War virtuoso. In the days when Martin Diamond was on the ten-greatest cover of Time, Rood was by all odds the students' favorite teacher. He had the intelligence man's knack for seeing, recalling, and explaining the little picture in the light of the big. He had a voracious curiosity, a photographic memory, and a seemingly bottomless file system. He knew Jane's Fighting Ships by heart and had a disconcerting way ("disarming" is not the right word) of comparing official reassurances that "there is no Cuban missile crisis" with actual Soviet deployments on the ground.

One September day in the 1980's, with only a day or so of public notice, he gave a speech for the Winston Churchill Society at the American Political Science Association annual convention in Washington, DC. He listed a host of indicators that the Soviets -- who we now know had assigned tank commanders to drive commercial trucks through Western Europe to learn its best invasion routes and had even printed up currency to use after its Liberation -- might not have had our best interests in mind. Present at the speech were the principal young strategists of the Reagan administration, Paul Wolfowitz and his retinue -- and a close-cropped gentleman from the Soviet Embassy in a grey suit and shiny shoes. From the look of him, he must have been a KGB lieutenant colonel at least, sent from central casting with a script to match. After the speech he rose, introduced himself, and asked "If we are as powerful as you say we are, why haven't we crushed you long ago?"

"I don't know, sir," said Rood, backing up a step or two and giving the close-cropped man a quizzical look. "Perhaps you can tell us."

Rood's and Jaffa's students were numerous and influential in Washington in the Nixon and Reagan years, both in official positions and in new-minted conservative thinktanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute, founded and run by students of Jaffa and CMC political philosopher Charles Kesler. Fred Balitzer was a director of the Republican National Committee under Reagan, chairman of Scholars for Reagan-Bush in 1984, and special emissary to the Sultan of Brunei. He was the American most responsible for getting diplomatic relations established between China and Israel and played a leading role in blocking efforts to make the District of Columbia a state. Alan Heslop was head of the California Republican Party under Governor Reagan, a senior consultant to President Nixon's ill-fated Committee to Re-elect the President (he resigned early in the campaign after tangling with what was later to become its Watergate faction), and, under two [three?] Republican Presidents, Chairman of the National Commission on Educational Research and Improvement. A future CMC political philosopher, Mark Blitz, was Associate Director of the U.S. Information Agency during the Reagan-Bush years and shared in the triumph of ending the Soviet Union without bloodshed.

Charles A. Lofgren was not a Washington hand, but his "War-Making Under the Constitution: The Original Understanding" (1972) and his "Compulsory Military Service Under the Constitution: The Original Understanding," (date*) showing, respectively, that both Presidential Wars like Vietnam and the federal draft were far outside the Framers' original intent, were intensely read by all sides in Washington during the closing years of the Vietnam War. In The Imperial President, Arthur Schlesinger described "War-Making Under the Constitution" as "the indispensable commentary." Other CMC professors or professors-to-be in Washington in the 1980's or 1990's were James Nichols, Associate Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities' Division of Programs; Ralph Rossum and Joseph Bessette, heads of the Justice Department's Bureau of Criminal Statistics; and John Pitney, campaign strategist for the Republican National Committee.

Not the least of CMC's contributions to the Cold War were those of CMC mathematician Janet Myhre, who devoted many years of consulting work for the Navy to improving the quality control on its nuclear-tipped Poseidon missiles to make sure that they would go off when they supposed to, and not otherwise.

Finally, there were the graduates who actually served in the military. Clayburn Peters and his fellow cadets went on to serve honorably, occasionally heroically, in the much-reviled War Machine. Peters himself was lucky. He got a law school deferment, attended UCLA Law School, served six months at the end of the war, and became a Los Angeles County District Attorney. Many others, like Joseph Busch III '70, went to Viet Nam. He commanded the USS Canon, a light gunboat which patrolled the Mekong River and covered the famous USS Turner Joy in a ferocious night firefight when the Turner Joy ran aground off the Song Ong Dok River. Michael Bruce '69 was a forward observer for an artillery battery in the First Air Cavalry Division near the Dog's Head on the Cambodian border, then along the Street Without Joy in the III Corps area north of Ben Hoa. He would be dropped by helicopter into enemy territory and left to search it on foot for days or weeks to call in artillery fire on Viet Cong units. Occasionally, as "Tiger three-three," he would also call for naval fire from the destroyer USS Morton offshore, directing the barrage sometimes as close as 50 meters from his own position. Only after the war did he discover that "Angel one-four," the sharpshooting assistant engineer on the Morton, was his classmate Steven Frates '69. [Busch now works in the Newport office of a big L.A. law firm, Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher; Bruce is now director of Spencer Stuart, an executive search firm; and Frates is Senior Research Associate at CMC's Rose Institute.]

Robin Bartlett '67 came from a family that had more than paid its military dues. He was a third-generation Army man, ROTC graduate, Airborne, Ranger, Special Forces, turned down West Point appointment to go to CMC, lost his West Point-trained brother in Vietnam. He arrived in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive in 1968 and volunteered for a long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP) squad, which was dropped into hotspots along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in Laos and Cambodia, as well as Vietnam. Later he commanded a First Air Cavalry Division infantry platoon in the I Corps area, mostly setting up -- and trying to dodge -- night ambushes in deep jungle enemy terrain. His platoon saw constant, heavy action, sometimes so close, and so cautious about making noise, that the grimy, sweaty contenders could and did jump each other and settle matters with a bayonet. In one of many bloody firefights his platoon was ambushed in a rice paddy and all but wiped out. 1/lt. Bartlett was wounded, knocked unconscious, dragged to a tree line by his heroic medic, triaged, and left for dead. Later he groaned, was evacuated at daybreak, sent to a hospital ship, and returned to (light) duty ten days later. He wrote up the medic for the Silver Star for Valor; his description was so moving that the medic got the Congressional Medal of Honor instead. The powerful writeup -- and Bartlett's dogged persistence in learning to write effectively at CMC in a series of grueling classes with Ladell Payne -- probably saved Bartlett's own life by getting him moved out of the heaviest fighting. The report attracted attention, and, not long after he sent it off, Bartlett was reassigned to the division's Military History Department, charged with interviewing survivors of big engagements, trying to piece together what had actually happened, and writing up after-action reports. In his seven months in the field he got the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation for Valor, two Purple Hearts, and two Air Medals, each one representing 30 combat assaults.

At Christmas of 1968 he sent a First Cav Christmas card to his classmate Albert Carpenter '67 at Carpenter's parents' stateside address -- only to get another First Cav Christmas card back from Carpenter weeks later, indicating that Carpenter, a combat engineer-turned-infantry lieutenant, was serving in the same division only 20 miles away from Bartlett's position. They later had a joyous reunion at the division base camp. Bartlett now markets the Physician's Desk Reference and doesn't talk much about the war. But twice a year he visits the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, where every known U.S. battle death in Vietnam is recorded. 28 of his men are on it, about as many deaths in seven months as the platoon had had at its maximum strength.

Al Carpenter had been trained as a combat engineer, was flown to Vietnam with a planeload of other combat engineers, all of whom were given infantry assignments on landing in Vietnam. One day he wrote a "last letter" to his Scripps-graduate wife, Daisy, to be sent if he were killed or missing in action. He put it into his footlocker, forgot it for several months, then found it again and mailed it, no longer mindful of its somber contents. Daisy's alarm was only slightly tempered by having received several letters dated after the "last" one prior to its arrival. Carpenter recalls his own meeting, by chance, with a half-dozen CMC-graduate officers serving in the First Cavalry Division at the time, collecting pay for their troops at division headquarters. He is now president of Hypertek, Inc., a computer service company offering data sets of U.S. military specifications.

William Crouch, '63 served two tours in Vietnam, his armored cavalry unit defending Hue and the A Shau Valley against the Tet Offensive. He won the Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Bronze Star and later became a four-star general commanding U.S. Forces in Europe. One military man, Ronald L. Ridenhour '72, came from Vietnam to CMC, where he became a global media sensation. Ridenhour, while a LRRP specialist in Vietnam, had heard rumors of the My Lai massacre, of Vietnamese civilians by a rogue U.S. army rifle platoon. He verified the incident while still in Vietnam and spent his first months at CMC trying -- with surprising difficulty, because neither the Pentagon nor 24 anti-war Senators and congressmen would listen to him -- to bring it to public attention. By his second semester he had made contact with Seymour Hersh, a Washington journalist with the right connections, and the incident became the international scandal triumphantly presented by the Pomona Nine. But the scandal might never have become known, nor the perpetrators punished, nor the testimony of Pfc. Meadlo ever heard, had it not been for this CMC student who spelled America with a c, served without complaint, and, unlike the Pomona Nine and their sympathizers, supposed that shooting civilians was not in the Army's ordinary line of duty.

[CMC grad's service in Desert Storm, 1991: Carl Giles; Nathan Mobley, III, Carl Watson served before coming to CMC.]

Many of CMC's returning Vietnam veterans were spat upon by angry protesters, who made a special trip to the airport for the purpose. Three CMC alumni, all officers and two of them ROTC graduates, were spared this indignity because they did not come back. Army First Lieutenant Jesse Clark III, '65 hit a mine on patrol in Vietnam, April 12, 1966, and died the next day. He received the Bronze Star for gallantry and the Purple Heart. Captain Stewart R. Moody '67 was a second-generation Army officer who had been a "Berger [Hall] Boy" at CMC on an ROTC scholarship. He too served in the First Air Cavalry Division and went down with his helicopter January 3, 1970, at the age of 24. His friends describe him as "friendly, a straight-shooter, tough as nails." Navy lieutenant (j.g.) William A. Pedersen '68 also went down with his helicopter. Pedersen had volunteered for service in Vietnam, served his full tour of duty, and won the Navy's Air Medal with strike/flight number "25," indicating 25 strike-flight awards. He also received the Navy Commendation Medal, with Combat "V." When his tour was over, his replacement was not expected for ten days. Rather than subject the men with whom he had served to extra duty, he volunteered once more, to serve until his replacement arrived. On the second day after answering this final call, he was killed in action. Pedersen was a student and fellow cycling enthusiast of Harry Jaffa, who had pedalled the San Gabriel foothills with him many times on pre-dawn rides. Jaffa dedicated his book The Conditions of Freedom (1975), to Pedersen with these words:

Billy Pedersen was a scholar, an athlete, an officer, and a gentleman. He was one of those "golden lads" of whom A.E. Housman wrote, who went to war, not gaily, but without a doubt that freedom and duty spoke with a single voice.... His patriotism was so natural to him that I think he was hardly aware of it.

[Pomona lost 5 alums in Korean War, one, Ronald Penn, PO '63 in Vietnam. HMC lost one alum, Douglass Yuki '69; Pitzer and Scripps lost none. As far as I know, CMC lost no one in Korean War; need to check with alums.]

8. Student and faculty politics. As always, it is important to add that showing that CMC was unusually open to conservative perspectives is not the same as showing that it was closed to liberal perspectives, or even dominated by conservatives. It was neither. ROTC members and supporters were a minority at CMC, as elsewhere, albeit one that managed to survive and flourish as on few other elite campuses. For every Rood or Jaffa on CMC's own faculty defending the military there was a John Israel, a Jeffrey Cooper, a Ricardo Quinones, or a chaplain marching with the demonstrators or helping them draft demands, plus a host of other sympathizers joining in petitions to shut down classes to protest the war. One such petition in October 1969 had 83 faculty signers from all the colleges, including 14 from CMC.

After the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in May 1970 student window-smashing strikes erupted on virtually every campus in the country, most famously at Kent State University, Ohio, where four demonstrators were shot by frightened National Guardsmen. Few people today recall that the Kent State ROTC had been firebombed the night before, nor that an Army Research Center at the University of Wisconsin was destroyed a few months later by four antiwar radicals with a truck bomb, killing a graduate student. The "nonviolence" encompassed more than broken windows. In Claremont there was a 14-hour sit-in at the office of CMC president Howard Neville, with student demands that the college stop informing draft boards of student dropouts, divest itself of war-related investments, and cancel classes for a strike to protest the war. As usual, off-campus participants were ready with a broad indictment of the system. Signing himself "Acquitted ROTC Sit-in Defendant," Paul Henriquez of CGS wrote: "the only human and rational response is 'f*** your entire repressive legal system and functional fascist prosecutors in liberal's clothing.'" The CMC faculty voted overwhelmingly to close classes for a Day of Dialogue on the war -- which later turned out to be closed to conservative panels -- but at least the shutdown was supposed to be optional both with faculty and with students. The other campuses were less circumspect than CMC, and in most cases expressly supportive of the demands of the Bauer Hall sitters-in, but even they laughed off proposals that student insurgents take over the (student-run) newspapers and radio station.

Over the years I have tried to keep track of changes in student and faculty political opinions at The Claremont Colleges from one election year to another. In February 1996 I wrote up a summary which was later condensed and printed in Profile, the CMC alumni magazine [copy attached]. It does not include anything on the 1996 elections, and data on those may not be available because I was on leave and I don't think the Collage took a survey. But I do have figures for most other election years from 1972 on. The gist of the summary is that The Claremont Colleges do differ sharply from one another in political views, just as the Claremont stereotypes of CMC as a Wall Street Journal campus and Pitzer as a Mother Jones campus, would suggest. The differences are instructive and provide a unique educational resource. At CMC in 1992 self-identified student liberals exactly balanced student conservatives at 40% of the student body each; CMC students preferred the Democratic Clinton-Gore ticket to the Republican Bush-Quayle ticket by 2-1. On CMC's faculty in 1988 liberals outnumbered conservatives by 1.4 to 1; faculty Democrats have consistently outnumbered faculty Republicans by 2 or 3 to 1 since I came in 1968. At Pitzer, by contrast, student liberals outnumbered conservatives by 7 to 1, faculty liberals outnumbered faculty conservatives by 8.5 to 1. The other Claremont faculties, and the faculties of the country generally, were much more like Pitzer's than like CMC's. In other words, consistent with the stereotypes, the students and faculties of all the other Claremont Colleges were without exception far to the left of the general public.

Not so consistent with the stereotypes is that the CMC faculty was likewise far to the left of the general public (though not as far as most other faculties) and that CMC students were left of the public in three out of the five election years covered. CMC was indeed looked on as a "bastion of conservatism," and CMC delegates to the Model U.N., to knowing giggles from the other colleges over the poetic justice of it, would often be assigned to represent Apartheid-era South Africa. But the conservatism was only relative to other colleges, especially elite ones, not relative to the country at large.

The net of it is that a surprising uniformity developed on campuses across the country, and with it a new orthodoxy and a new concept of academic freedom which said, in effect, that those who wished to hear radical speakers were free to do so, and those who wished to suppress conservative speakers were free to do that also. The term Political Correctness only came into common use in the 1980's, but the reality of it dates from the 1960's. Radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse had put it in a nutshell in 1969: "Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance of movements from the Right, and tolerance of movements from the Left." Benson-style openness to both left and right was "false consciousness" and "repressive tolerance." The years since Marcuse wrote saw a remarkable opening up to fashionable new perspectives -- assigning Black Rage, The Wretched of the Earth, or The Color Purple to every freshman writing class; setting up programs in women's studies, black studies, gay and lesbian studies, and so on; and a vigorous use of "goals" and "guidelines" for hiring faculty women and minorities to provide "role models" and "diversity." Of course, it helped if they were free of "false consciousness."

Unfortunately, opening to the new seemed to involve closing to the old. Phallocentrism, Eurocentrism, Logocentrism, Dead White Males, Fifties-theme parties, and anything that smacked of "insensitivity" were out. Harvard, Pitzer, and Pomona, who had permitted their students to join ROTC in the 1960's and 1970's, when it was seen as the Department of Mass Murder, finally put it off limits in the 1990's for being Homophobic. Disfavored conservative speakers like Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, William Westmoreland, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ralph Reed, Ward Connerly, even Richard Rodriguez, who had doubts about race preference mandates, could not appear on most campuses without ugly attempts to shout them down. Prudent faculty and administrators in most cases found it much more convenient not to invite them at all. Pomona faculty demanded that a performance of The Mikado be cancelled as "racist, sexist, and imperialist." Despite the outcry and picketing, the performance took place as scheduled -- but no Gilbert and Sullivan has been performed in Claremont since that time.

As significant as the repressive demands of the left on most campuses was the absence of remonstrance from the middle or the right -- perhaps because the middle didn't care, and because the right had all but disappeared on most faculties. In the 1980's, when I asked a savvy Pomona political scientist how many Republican professors Pomona had, he replied, "He died last year." Since the 1960's, one can think of dozens of "liberal" attempts to silence an offending speaker or newspaper. PC campus vandals stole and destroyed thousands of copies of offending campus newspapers in more than a hundred separate instances between 1993 and 1997, often to the apparent satisfaction of deans and presidents, who say, like Cornell's Dean of Students, John Ford, "If it offends people..., it is something we should not tolerate." Despite frequent campus warnings against the threat of resurgent McCarthyism, it would be hard to name a single instance of such silencing behavior by conservatives on any U.S. campus. Showing a Vietcong flag and burning and trampling the U.S. flag are sacred rights of self-expression on U.S. campuses. Showing a Confederate flag is an offensive and intolerable display of insensitivity.

Ironically, the rise of "Liberating tolerance" on campus coincided with a tremendous resurgence of neoconservatism off-campus, both in intellectual journals, such as The Public Interest and Commentary and in the Reagan Revolution among the general electorate. This trend was strongly reflected among students on many campuses, especially CMC, but not among faculty, most of whom had been hired in the 1960's and tenured in the 1970's. Conservative commentators marvelled at the strange reversal of universities's traditional role as islands of tolerance in a sea of intolerance; by the 1990's they had become islands of intolerance in a sea of tolerance [need to find and credit Commentary writer for article "Islands of Intolerance in a Sea of Tolerance"].

CMC never made a fuss about it under Stark, but it was an honorable exception to this trend, open to many of the "new" perspectives, but not closed to the old. In an era of loud vocal commitment to "diversity," it actually offered some. I have always had the notion that, because of this diversity, debate at CMC has been more wide-ranging and less one-sided than at other campuses, and less likely to be settled with a smug collective sneer that "no one believes that any more." Neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on the truth, but conservatives are more inclined to realize it than liberals have been in the kind of cloistered, monochromatic world where New York film critic Pauline Kael asked: "How could Nixon have won the [1972 landslide] election? I don't know anyone who voted for him." [need exact quote] Of course, my Pitzer anarcho-syndicalist colleague, Dan Ward, disagrees, because my "measuring stick extends only from Democrats to Republicans ... a very narrow range. When one stops to ponder the fact that Pitzer has two avowed Anarchists on their faculty, and who knows how many closet Marxists, then it seems quite apparent that in fact the range of opinion on the Pitzer faculty is FAR broader than that on the CMC faculty." And more militant, too, if one compares the number of their attempts to suppress speakers and classes at CMC with the number of attempts by CMC faculty or students over the years to suppress speakers and classes at Pitzer. Maybe range, robustness, and two-sidedness are in the eye of the beholder.

However one chooses to resolve such disputes for any one campus, it is hard to deny that Claremont as a whole, with six "real worlds" of political discourse truly different from one another, is an extreme educational rarity, offering a range of "sidedness" far greater than most other college towns. Where else can you move from a serious discussion of the gold standard to a serious discussion of animal liberation simply by crossing Ninth street?

IV. CMC Discoveries and Impacts

1. Cold war. See III, 6 above.

2. Political representation. Benson was among the initiators of the Reapportionment Revolution as staff chief of the Kestnbaum Commission. Under his direction, this reformist Commission sought to cure the states of cynicism, apathy, and corruption by court-ordered reapportionment of political districts in the states, making them all of equal population. The Commission predicted that reapportionment would revitalize state legislatures, supposedly gridlocked by "barnyard governments" of dominant blocks of overrepresented rural voters, and that the requirement to make every district equal would greatly reduce gerrymandering. This view almost instantly became conventional wisdom among political scientists and in the media. In all the hubbub Benson's name was barely mentioned, nor does his tour as director of the Commission get more than passing mention in his own memoirs. But the Commission's recommendations were echoed and unanimously endorsed by several blue-ribbon panels; reapportionment became a Kennedy cause; the Commission's endorsement figured in both the Eisenhower administration's and the Kennedy administration's decisions to support the plaintiffs in Baker v. Carr (1962), and, thanks to the U.S Supreme Court's intervention in Baker and subsequent cases, it got every state but Oregon reapportioned and transformed the political landscape of the country.

Despite all the endorsement, we now know that most of the Commission's predictions turned out to be wrong. Ironically, the task of setting things straight also fell to Benson's own CMC government department. Barnyard government was a myth. Urban representatives, not rural, voted in dominant blocks. And reapportionment neither revitalized state legislatures nor reduced gerrymandering. Instead, it led to an orgy of gerrymandering which protected incumbents excessively, polarized the parties, and further isolated and incapacitated state legislatures. It blocked legislative response to the many "revolts" of public opinion which sprang up during the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's, and contributed to the collapse of public trust in government. Incumbents were all but impregnable. The party which drew the districts got half again as many seats per vote as the one which did not. Unchallengeable in general elections, but still challengeable in primary elections by "holier than thou" candidates, Democratic representatives moved left, way left of ordinary Democrats, and Republican representatives moved right, way right of rank-and-file Republicans. Working relations soured, co-operation ceased, output stalled, the system jammed. Liberals were forced to look to the courts -- until the voters ousted Rose Bird and two liberal colleagues on the California Supreme Court for excessive activism in promoting liberal causes. After that, anybody who wanted any kind of change had to resort to the initiative process. Astonishingly, most mainstream political scientists failed to see the connection between the reapportionment mandate and the legislative logjam which followed it; most continued to demand yet further reforms which would add to the appearance of democracy while subtracting from its substance. My Rise of Guardian Democracy (1975) was the first comprehensive, systematic description and explanation of what was going on; it spotted things which others missed, got many raves, and ruffled many feathers.

But the true hero of the Reapportionment Revolution is not the one who set it off, nor the one who diagnosed its problems but the one who has done most to fix them, Alan Heslop, with his Rose Institute. The Rose Institute got a lot of press, and the Starr manuscript likewise gives it a lot of piecemeal attention, but I am not sure that the magnitude of the problem, nor the importance of Heslop's contribution to solving it, in a 15-year campaign, really shines through.

Heslop's tactical shrewdness, and his Rose Institute Data base, lay behind a half-dozen initiatives and more white papers, press releases, symposia, and court cases than I would care to count. Thanks to his work, any interested person could take a Rose Institute cursor, draw up a voting district on screen, and recognize at once whether it would be Democratic or Republican, safe or competitive, and likely or unlikely to elect a minority candidate. Applied to actual districts, which were normally prepared in secret and delivered, not graphically, but in the form of pages and pages of census tract numbers, it could also show at once which were outlandishly shaped and which were not [see p. 206 of attached book review of Bruce Cain's The Apportionment Puzzle. I have a more recent review somewhere and could probably dig it out if needed.] It was like turning on the lights in every major pressroom in California, and many elsewhere. The final outcome (or at least the latest outcome) is a court-ordered system which is much more competitive, much less biased, and much less cavalier about splitting and splicing communities than the corrupt, gerrymandered, gridlocked monstrosity it replaced.

Heslop also braintrusted the California term limit movement and wrote the best defense of term limits that I know of. Term limits spread like a bonfire to 20 other states, but their net value is not as clear as that of curbing gerrymanders. If Heslop's colleague, Charles Kesler (who has written the best critique of term limits that I know of) is right, the costs of term limits may well outweigh the benefits. Term limits did end the legislative careers of entrenched California liberals like Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a powerful, consummately skilled, politician who had done his best to end Heslop's career but in the end was outmaneuvered and ousted by Heslop. But they also bar the re-election of Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who would otherwise be an odds-on favorite to succeed himself in the 1998 elections. Since the Democrats control both houses of the legislature and may well continue to do so, the Republicans without Wilson face a much higher risk of restoring the Democratic monopolies of both houses and the governorship which had allowed their previous gerrymandering coups. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has voided term limits for state legislators, but not for Wilson, whose office was not at issue in the suit. The U.S. Supreme Court could still reverse this decision, and we can only guess now at the outcome of the elections of 1998 and 2000. Nevertheless, it is entirely possible that Heslop's second coup will wipe out most of the fruits of his first. Good or bad, term limits have had tremendous impact nationwide, as well as in California. Much of the credit (or blame, if it comes to that) belongs to Heslop.

I have earlier mentioned Jaffa's and Diamond's role in pointing out the role the Electoral College has played in creating and maintaining the American two-party system. There is no constitutional requirement for state delegations to vote as a block, but states recognized early they would have more impact on the outcome, and have more sway with candidates, if they did not divide their delegations but made each delegation winner-take-all. Winner-take-all elections, in turn, reward inclusive parties with broad, center-seeking coalitions. They discourage narrow, separatist, doctrinaire parties of the type that destroyed the Weimar government and the Fourth French Republic with their inability to coalesce and which are still a public embarrassment to the government of Italy. The Electoral College still weeds out fringe parties and perpetuates centrist ones; replacing it with direct elections, as is proposed after every close presidential election whose winner is widely grudged, would have the opposite effect, rewarding fringe groups more and broad, stable coalitions less. The election of 1968 was indeed a close election, whose winner, Richard Nixon, was widely grudged, and Congress came within a hair of thoughtlessly abolishing a principal support to the two-party system which makes it functional. We have Jaffa, Diamond, and their student Michael Uhlmann to thank, in large part, that it didn't happen.

3. Criminal Justice. As far as I know, I was the first political scientist to discover, in a 1972 APSA paper called "Crime, Punishment, and Professional Paradigms," that a dozen famous studies of criminal rehabilitation, invoked by Ramsey Clark and a half-dozen national crime commissions, were fudged to make therapeutic "Swedish" methods look more effective than punitive "Arkansas" ones in discouraging prisoners from returning to crime. Therapy at the time was supposed to be the wave of the future; it was already the cornerstone of the California corrections system. In practice, it was in some ways more humane than punitive methods, but in other ways less, because "clients" (as California prisoners were called then) were kept in prison much longer than Arkansas prisoners, and kept more in the dark as to when they would be released; they also resented being treated as sick people with no moral agency. This paper was a bombshell among Claremont psychologists, who assured me it could not possibly be correct and even assigned a graduate student to do an M.A. thesis refuting it. However, they changed their minds the next year when Howard Martinson published his now justly famous "What Works?" in The Public Interest, examining 300 rehabilitation studies and not finding one that was methodologically sound and showed therapy to be more effective in preventing recidivism.

I never published the paper, but it was a first, and, like the voting rights book, it had an impact, not through my work but because it influenced future Government Department colleagues, in this case, Ralph Rossum and Joe Bessette. Both read it, and Rossum, at least, was deeply impressed by it. Both wound up studying the empirical issues more systematically as heads of the Justice Department's Bureau of Criminal Statistics, and both have since produced studies more tightly focused and thorough than mine on specific issues where a less therapeutic, more punitive approach may well be called for: juvenile justice, in Rossum's case, punishment for murder in Bessette's.

Both Rossum and Bessette have considerable followings among criminal justice professionals. Rossum runs seminars for judges, with guest lectures by Antonin Scalia, of the U.S. Supreme Court, and has been drafting a model juvenile justice code. Bessette has shown that punishment after conviction is much less severe than most people think it is or ought to be -- and also that Congress is more deliberative than most political scientists think it is.

As with the Cold War and political reform insights, these enterprises may well have something to do with CMC's openness to views out of line with current academic orthodoxy. CMC Psychologist John Snortum did a paper defending the effectiveness of Sweden's drunken driving laws, which are punitive compared to ours; it might be fit in to this theme somehow, though he did not have empirical evidence of greater deterrence. The special capital-punishment issue of a psychology journal that Mark Costanzo edited the other year could also be pertinent, but I haven't read it.

4. Other discoveries and impacts. I have in mind several other examples of unique CMC discoveries and impacts but am running out of time and space, if not of personal and group narcissism, to describe them in detail.

a) My work on smog control as president or VP of Coalition for Clean Air for 14 years. Cut smog-alert days in Basin by 99% since 1960's; fought stubbornly and quixotically for high-resolution smog and congestion charges for 26 years; got AQMD to adopt economic-incentive RECLAIM program, first of its kind in country; drafted most of economic-incentive language in Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990; identified Red Line as costly boondoggle in 1975 when everyone was endorsing it; invented the HOT lane concept (first two in world are now in service in S. Calif.); this year got blue-ribbon REACH Task Force to call for more HOT lanes, comprehensive system of congestion and emissions charges in SCAG Regional Transportation Plan. Could save several billion dollars a year in smog and congestion damage in the Los Angeles region alone.

b) Ross Eckert's service on Calif. Transportation Board, also advocating emissions and congestion charges, deregulation and desubsidization of public transit, requiring full-cost accounting in transportation plans. On many of my transportation causes, especially deregulation and desubsidization of public transit, Ross was there first, often in a more influential position. California's "Garlene Zapitelli" bill, decriminalizing carpooling for pay is largely attributable to the pathbreaking article he wrote with UCLA's George Hilton on "The Jitneys." See attached article "Fumbling Toward the Edge of History" (1986) for more background on some of these struggles.

c) Ross's articles on the Law of the Sea and on Cleaning up the Blood Supply. Both showed fresh insights on issues of major importance; both had tremendous impact. As far as I know, the Reagan administration was ready to let the sea become even more of an international commons, with attendant additional wastage of resources that no nation has any interest in protecting; Ross's work turned that around. He also turned around the blood banks, which were shielded from liability for HIV-tainted blood and correspondingly casual about screening and cleaning, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of a planeload of transfusion recipients a month. Blood supply is now safer by an order or two of magnitude, too late to save Ross's own life (he was a hemophiliac who died of AIDS from a tainted blood product), but not too late to guess that by now scores more of planeloads of people owe their lives to his skill and persistence in stirring the blood banks into action.

d) Craig Stubblebine's pioneering drafting for the Legislature of a purist's version of what ultimately, in watered-down form, became Prop 1. He was not sole drafter, but head of the drafting committee. The bill failed in the gridlocked legislature, but it was a first shot in California's Taxpayer Revolt, and, by most accounts, a better one than what became the initiative. Also did work on U.S. Balanced Budget Committee.

e) Rodney Smith's and Ron Teeples' work on water pricing and cost curves in California. Urban water users have always paid 20-40 times as much for water in California as rural users; heavy subsidies to rural consumption have produced a lot of waste. Rodney Smith also did important work on international energy pricing and policy.

f) Tom Willett's service on Nixon transition team and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Treasury for International Research in mid-1970's. Sven Arndt, John Rutledge, and Richard Sweeney also worked for Treasury Department, and Rutledge for OMB in early Reagan years. [Meigs?] Sven Arndt has produced many key trade policy studies both for the American Enterprise Institute and for the Lowe Institute. Arndt, Richard Burdekin, and Willett contributed to a major project on economic reform in Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

g) Rod Smith, Craig Stubblebine, Dick Sweeney, and Tom Willett's service as co-editors of Economic Inquiry: The Journal of the Western Economic Association. Sven Arndt and Ross Eckert were on its editorial board.

h) Janet Myhre's quality-control work on Polaris/Poseidon missiles. See CMC and Cold War, above. It's classified, but one wonders whether her work might not have saved a few planeloads of lives, too.

i) Ralph Rossum's and Fred Lynch's books and articles criticizing ethnic preference, and Peter Skerry's work on integration strategies for Chicanos have played significant roles in securing the passage of Prop. 209.

j) Alex Johnson '75's articles defending affirmative action. He is a black graduate, now Vice Provost for Faculty Recruiting and professor of law, U. Va. has published in Yale, Mich. Law Reviews. And Laura Simón '85's prizewinning film "Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary" attacking Prop. 187. She immigrated legally from Mexico at the age of six, endured racial taunts, was valedictorian of her high school class, president of her CMC class. "I ... did go to Claremont. That's why I'm almost romantic about the idea of education. It changed my life. Education to me was the miracle of America." Los Angeles Times May 27, 1997, p. E7, c. 2.

k) Rossum is co-founder of new, less PC alternative accreditation group, AALE; a now-deradicalized Quinones is co-founder of new, less PC alternative group to MLA (Starr does mention latter).

l) Bill Arce was U.S. baseball ambassador to the world, trained teams in Holland, Italy. Mike Sutton coached the U.S. water polo team in the Barcelona Olympics, 1992.

m) Valenza's and my Shakespeare Clinic. Did not save any lives or dollars but was original and unorthodox both in goals and in means. As far as we can tell now, the Clinic kids have actually settled a question on which thousands of books and articles have been written and which burns perennially outside of Lit departments -- though I don't expect the anti-Stratfordians to admit it any time soon. John Ferling also did some interesting work on author identification.

n) Harvey Wichman's class design of space capsule.

o) Fucaloro, Feldmeth blocking of giant, toxic-spewing BKK incinerator.

p) CMC past and future college presidents: President before CMC: Gordon Bjork, Linfield College; Max Mason, University of Chicago. President after CMC service: John Atherton, Pitzer College; Ladell Payne, Randolph-Macon; John Lindauer, Macmurray College, University of Alaska; Ralph Rossum, Hampden-Sidney College. Jack Stark, CMC.

q) Thomson's laws. These constitute discoveries of sorts and are pithy, colorful and serviceable. The Starr manuscript does have several of the choicest ones. I bet that Pitney has a set of rules of writing, and there is also a set of Elliott's laws [attached]. If I had more time, I would make a collection of quotes from PPE T-shirts, which reminds me that CMC's Edward G. Sexton PPE program, like the Shakespeare Clinic, is a unique piece of small-scale, high-intensity, Oxford-inspired innovation, which might deserve some mention. I know of nothing else like it, even at Oxford.

r) And David Sadava's wife has discovered something that looks very much like a vaccine for AIDS, but hasn't announced it yet.

5. Conclusions on Discoveries and Impacts. I am sure that this is only a partial list, overheavy on the Elliott-related ones that I know from personal experience, and a bit skimpy at the end. More could be added if desired. But it's a beginning, and enough of a beginning, I think to suggest that CMC, for all its conservatism and old-fashionedness -- or is it because of these? -- has had much more than its share of big, fresh insights and high outside impacts. 90% of the discoveries and impacts -- about half of which most people would consider liberal -- were by conservatives, who only make up a quarter of the faculty. Why? Because, contrary to normal expectations, CMC conservatives were smarter, more creative, or more hard-working that CMC liberals? Because liberalism everywhere had run its course for the moment, exhausted its stock of new ideas, and gotten mired in its own orthodoxy, while conservatism had not? Because CMC conservatives have mostly been associated with naturally high-impact departments? Because CMC spent more money on such departments? Or simply because CMC provided an environment uniquely favorable to a blossoming of new conservative insights and impacts? No one knows, though some -- such as nurturance/tolerance of conservatism -- seem more likely than others, such as "naturally high-impact departments." It is true that one would expect more public-affairs impact, and maybe more discoveries, too, from an economist than, say, from someone whose specialty is 16th-century English poetry. But CMC economists and political scientists have had many more discoveries and much more political impact than other economists or political scientists from garden-variety liberal colleges (such as Amherst, Williams, or Pomona) or from colleges which do claim to be bastions of conservatism (such as Hillsdale, Thomas Aquinas, or Pepperdine). And some of them actually found out things about 16th-century English poetry thitherto unknown to lit department specialists. It is tempting to suppose that CMC's special focus on public affairs, and its relative openness to unorthodox perspectives which are underground or nonexistent on most other campuses, might have had something to do with its unusually high rates of discovery and impact. A trailing edge from one perspective is a leading edge from another.

V. Polarization, "Marginalization" among CMC Faculty

Benson's policy of working hardest on scholarship and political balance in what became the government and economics departments had a price in polarization of the CMC faculty. Once the CMC faculty was assigned to departments, as it was in the mid-1960's, Benson's policies put most of the conservatives, and most of the big scholarly publishers into the two large, well-supported "flagship" departments, and most of the liberals, and faculty whose strength was teaching, not publication, into smaller, less well-supported departments, which often refer to themselves as "service departments," though CMC tends to avoid the term in official documents. These smaller departments were staffed and tasked, not as free-standing departments might have chosen for themselves, but as contributors to CMC's mission of training leaders in public affairs. Thus, Benson saw to it that the history department had political historians, more than cultural ones; the psych department had political and organizational psychology people, more than clinical. All the service departments, especially the math and science departments, were more called upon to teach the kind of introductory and lower-level courses that would give a lawyer or a businessman a working grasp of calculus or chemistry, than to teach the advanced, theoretical courses which would actually produce a professional mathematician or chemist -- and which faculty who like to publish most like to teach. It is worth noting that the inclination to subordinate college goals to departmental ones is not unique to the small departments, nor always detrimental to the college. The Economics Department had long since fought off Benson's efforts to hire a "Professor of Real Estate" and to enroll the college in the National Association of Business Schools; under Stark, it continued to resist presidential efforts to give the department a more applied, managerial, business-school orientation.

For a college with CMC's focus, the traditional emphasis on flagship departments made sense, even in terms of providing for the service departments, but it was an inherent source of faction. The flagship departments, having most of the development emphasis, and most of the big-name scholars, got most of the endowed chairs and research institutes, freeing up funds to enrich the service departments, but also creating a feeling of resentment that the service departments were getting the leftovers. As all departments become more and more entrenched under Stark, three sets of fault lines -- flagship v. service, publishing v. teaching, and conservative v. liberal -- largely coincided, each adding its own bit to the long-term polarization of the faculty, and to episodic complaints by many liberals that they were "marginalized." These differences, if anything, increased over time as publication-minded faculty, most of them from flagship departments, fought successfully to raise the college's scholarly expectations of all faculty, and service-department faculty, hired primarily to teach, found themselves obliged to publish also to get tenure and promotion. Service departments, in turn, began to reshape their offerings to their own disciplinary tastes, both to gratify and sustain their own scholarly interests, and to make departments more attractive to new hires with a scholarly bent. The gap in scholarship between the big departments and the small ones has greatly diminished over the years, but, especially among the small departments, commitment to CMC's distinguishers -- focus, size, balance, and place in the Claremont Cluster -- has weakened. Both service and flagship departments recruited new people with whom they were academically comfortable. Flagship departments continued to seek a mix of liberals and conservatives, many or most from outside the pertinent disciplinary mainstream; service departments recruited from their disciplinary mainstreams and wound up with more and more conventionally liberal members.

99% of the time this oddly-matched mixture worked together harmoniously and, in all probability, more productively and creatively for its diversity. The other one percent of the time the faculty would break down into two clashing coalitions, the liberals and their sympathizers, and the conservatives and theirs. These clashes could be bitter, and many faculty remember the rare moments of strife more vividly than the common moments of co-operation. Though conservatives were greatly outnumbered by liberals, the conservative coalition prevailed more often than not in such faceoffs, though it also suffered some notable defeats, such as the faculty's endorsement of ethnic studies centers. Both sides often felt threatened and besieged.

Judging from the liberals' complaints of "marginalization," this situation was particularly galling to them. Academics everywhere, even in places like CMC where they are wined, dined, pampered, well-paid compared to other small colleges, and given a fresh supply of the best students every fall, are perfectionists who seldom feel that they are paid, supported, or appreciated as much as they deserve. They are often offended that run-of-the-mill doctors, lawyers, accountants, plumbers, and even senior busdrivers make more than the cream of junior English professors. On most other elite campuses, liberals can console themselves with the thought that at least they live in a just and enlightened community where there are "goals" aplenty for the good, and banishment or at least the threat of sensitivity training aplenty for the bad; where disfavored speakers have been excluded or silenced; and where every precaution has been taken to eliminate racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism, eurocentrism, logocentrism, phallocentrism, and so on. But at CMC even these consolations are lacking. Not only are the smaller departments burdened with confining, mission-related restrictions, their dreams of living in a just, enlightened community are sullied by the constant, irritating presence of colleagues in other departments who subscribe to one or another of the objectionable ism's and fail to grasp the social imperatives. Conservatives often have the same problems with liberal ism's and failures to grasp social imperatives, even on a campus as uniquely hospitable to conservatism as CMC.

Benson could usually keep these problems from getting out of hand with a combination of preaching, momentum, and attentiveness. Jack and Jil Stark turned down the preaching and turned up the attentiveness; this strategy has generally kept things running smoothly and kept a lot of debate over CMC's direction off the agenda, but it requires a lot of behind-the-scenes hard work and sophistication on their part, neither of which can be counted on from whatever administration takes over when Jack retires.

VI. CMC's "positioning"

Ironically, for a college which prided itself for bucking the trends of academic fashion, CMC was amazingly well positioned to profit from trends it did not buck, for example, the tide of GI-bill applicants at the outset, the doubling of the college-age population in California between 1960 and 1980, and the nationwide increases in real per-capita income and in the percentages of 18-year-olds going to college. In the 1970's CMC could and did profit yet again from changing from a men's college to a co-ed college, almost doubling its applicant pool again simply by making women eligible, and making the college more attractive to men in the process. As a fledgling men's college, it had barely managed to survive the Korean War, which pulled much of its all-male applicant pool into the military, but by the 1970's it was much better positioned to thrive demographically as a convertible-to-coed California men's college than, say, as a women's college or even a coed college in the east. It is true that CMC was not as well positioned as Harvey Mudd, Pomona, and many other science-oriented colleges to profit from the science boom of the postwar years, nor from the disproportionate brightness of science majors, but it also avoided some of the rat-race atmosphere which can flourish at campuses where everyone is an engineer or a pre-med. A survey by CMC psych major Gayathri Jeyerasasingam '91 highlighted the differences in campus friendliness between students at a low-science campus (CMC), a medium-to-high-science campus (Pomona) and an essentially all-science campus (Harvey Mudd). She and her confederates observed lines of students on different Claremont campuses passing each other between classes and counted up the students' waves, smiles, greetings, and other signals of mutual recognition. CMC turned out to be by far the friendliest of the three campuses by this simple test. About 45% of CMC students greeted each other, 25% of Pomona students, less than ten percent of Harvey Mudd Students. CMC's positioning also avoided some of the enormous costs of big science programs, to say nothing of other costly programs, theater and arts programs, for example, or ambitious language programs, all which were lavishly provided by Pomona, most of them accessible to CMC students. Pomona, with an endowment per student significantly larger than CMC's, took on all of these costs. Financial sophisticates, looking at the commitments of CMC and Pomona, as well as at their resources, generally consider CMC in better financial shape. When the local and national supply of 18-year-olds dipped in the 1980's, thanks to the baby bust, CMC was still especially well positioned to profit from the economics/business booms of the 1970's and 1980's, and the international relations booms of the 1990's, as it had been with the political science/law boom of the 1960's.

Scripps is an example of a college which has not been so lucky, nor as adjustable to changing demands. Women's colleges went out of fashion in the 1970's; they mostly chose not to go co-ed and bottomed out in the 1980's; and they have made something of a comeback in the 1990's, possibly from the rise of a more militant feminism, possibly in spite of it. But, apart from Vassar, which did go co-ed and has held its old position, they are still 50-140 points behind where they were in 1968, with Smith and Mount Holyoke the biggest losers, Scripps and Bryn Mawr the smallest. Scripps's emphasis on the arts and the humanities was also in deep disfavor from the 1970's on; laying on more economics and pre-law courses, plus some recovery of the popularity of humanities, have partly fixed this.

VII. CMC and the future.

No one knows whether future shifts in subject-matter popularity will be as kind to CMC as past ones, but gross demographic trends in California look very favorable. The children of the baby boom, already born, are already starting to create a secondary boom of 18-year-olds, especially in California, whose absolute growth has been greater than that of other states for decades. California's growth is multiethnic, with most of it coming from Mexican- and Asian-born immigrants and their descendants. Mexican-Americans have been less likely than other groups to invest heavily in college educations, but Asians have been more likely than other groups, so the expected generational yield in prospective students is roughly the same. Some observers believe that Asians will become a plurality or even a majority at elite private colleges, as they already have at at least one University of California campus.

CMC no longer has superstars on its senior faculty as obvious as Strauss, Diamond and Jaffa were in their days, but the average quality of senior faculty today is probably higher than it was in the Benson years, and the average quality of junior faculty seems considerably higher than it was in the Benson years, especially in the smaller departments. Benson was amazingly successful in the 1950's in attracting able faculty to a college with no track record or name recognition; he was also amazingly successful in the 1960's in hiring able faculty during the greatest academic seller's market in history, when a new institution of higher learning was created every week and graduate schools could barely keep up with the demand for college professors.

By the 1970's the seller's market was dead, and it got deader and deader in the 1980's and 1990's. The graduate schools had expanded to meet the demand of the baby-boom years, but the colleges had been built, the faculty hired and tenured, at unprecedentedly high levels of pay, benefits, and job security. The end of the baby boom was in sight, tenure-track positions were expensive and hard to back out of, and new tenure-track openings got very scarce at the very time that liberal faculties were demanding that what slots there were in all fields, but, especially in user-friendly fields like history, lit, sociology, and psychology, be reserved for women and minorities. Some Pomona observers have claimed that, if Pomona were to follow its own guidelines to the letter, it couldn't hire a white male till well into the next century.

This drastic shift from seller's to buyer's market has meant that schools like CMC get hundreds of applicants for a given slot. It also means that, by rights, the new hires should be better than they were in the Benson years; certainly more is expected of them. Whether the best of new hires are better than the best of the Benson-era hires is open to debate. Time will tell. But it already seems clear that the worst of the new hires are much better than the worst of the Benson-era hires. New people are often better qualified than the people they replace. Some of the new hires, male ones in particular, quickly became dominant in the classroom, prominent in relations with the outside world, and not above thumping a little chest and claiming a little turf for it. This was not always a source of comfort to the greybacks, and some claim that wariness about upstart males is responsible, in part, for what otherwise might look like an astonishing change of heart by the patriarchs. Though about seven-eighths of the tenured faculty (excluding science and PE) are white males, 11 of the 12 new, entry-level hires currently bucking tenure are females or minorities (2 Asian males); 9 of the 12 are women [need to get exact figures from Tony]. Only one of the 12 is a white male.

No one knows exactly what has caused this change. Maybe it was the "diversity" vogue finally hitting CMC ten years after it hit everyone else. Maybe it was shifts in the demography of graduate schools. Maybe hiring women and Asian males offered the same kind of competitive advantage in the 1990's that hiring Jews did in 1946 -- or maybe it was more the kind of comforts that not hiring Jews offered in 1946, a way of trying to keep the newcomers competent but not threatening. Maybe it was chance. Maybe it was all or none of the above. No doubt the motives varied from department to department, and from individual to individual. But a major change in hiring practices there has been, and anyone curious about CMC's future would want to examine it for possible indicators of what is to come.

Such an examination has not been done systematically, but it would be astonishing if bucking tenure, always stressful, is not more stressful at CMC than it was in the past. Tenure is a bigger prize, more sparingly awarded; expectations of candidates' scholarly productivity are higher; the penalties for failure are higher; women aspirants in particular face not only the problems of balancing family and professional obligations that seem inseparable from being a woman in her prime child-bearing and profession-critical years (see Sylvia Hewlett, A Lesser Life (1986), and Claudia Goldin's book Understanding the Gender Gap (1990) and her 1995 NBER Digest study showing that nearly 50 percent of women who had a successful, high-paying career were childless), but of doing it at a converted men's college, whose faculty (and student) ambience and politics are much more masculine and old-fashioned than what most academics are used to these days, and in an era where battling for a trendy, balkanized curriculum of group advocacy -- women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, multicultural studies, postmodern studies, and so on -- is considered de rigeur by the people who count everywhere else. Bucking tenure is tough anywhere these days; it is particularly tough for a woman; and it is probably especially tough for a liberal woman with "off-mission" research interests in a small, liberal department at CMC, who must pass muster not only with liberal colleagues in the department, but also with mission-sensitive conservatives in the faculty at large. Hence, there probably is more unhappiness among entry-level hires than there has been in the past. Complaints of insensitivity and hostility are already in the air, both on the faculty and among the student body; they are traceable in large part to what is left of CMC's founding emphases on public affairs, political balance, and educating males; and they probably won't be the last, because quite a bit of the old CMC is left, and because women candidates continue to apply in droves for CMC positions and will probably continue to be hired in droves into positions which many of them, like the upstart males who preceded them, find uncomfortable. "Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery," says one of Elliott's laws, but it does carry with it new problems of mutual adjustment, not all of them easy to solve.

On the other hand, we should not forget Thomson's laws, especially the one that says "There is nothing either good or bad but alternatives make it so." Given the market and CMC's more prominent place in the academic world, raising scholarly standards and opening up to women, upstarts, and off-mission researchers may have problems, but they are nothing compared to the problems that would have come from not raising standards or not opening up to such people. Most of the new stresses look more like growing pains than like death rattles. Not everyone's research has to be on-mission for a college like CMC to work; old upstarts like Jaffa often saw things which others miss: why not the new ones as well?; and trying to force people to follow a prescribed, unwanted course of research is a cure worse than the disease -- though trying to hire people already strongly interested in "on-mission" research, as is still typical of above-entry-level hires, is no vice for a place like CMC. Some women with what looks like off-mission research in small departments have thrived at CMC (Humes, Shelton, for example. Humes' works may, in fact, not be as off-mission as they look. Her focus is on tantric and vedantic Hindu shrines in Uttar Pradesh, but, unlike most other religion scholars, she looks at them in the light of changing economic and political developments in India.) Many would argue, moreover, that CMC is now good enough, big enough, and rich enough to branch out a bit. Some appointments, in any case, take place above entry-level; these generally have fewer "fit" problems than entry-level appointments. Most on the CMC faculty, despite its problems of focus and fit, consider it a happier, more productive faculty than most of the other Claremont colleges; the possible exception sometimes cited is Harvey Mudd, which is even more tightly focused than CMC. Finally, if people find they don't like the results of one set of hiring patterns, they can change to another.

If one were to contemplate CMC's future in the light of its traditional "niche" distinguishers -- quality, membership in the Claremont Colleges, focus on public affairs, and openness to conservative perspectives -- the outlook would be generally favorable. Student quality is way up by all measures. Faculty quality, on average, is is also up. Most of The Claremont Colleges are going stronger than ever, not just CMC, but also Pomona, which is surely among the three or four richest and most selective small liberal-arts colleges in the country, and HMC, which is 70 points more selective than Pomona, and about the same level as Harvard. Scripps has lost some selectivity points since 1968, but less than the average college, and much less than most other elite women's colleges. Among surviving free-standing women's colleges it is exceeded only by Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Mount Holyoke in selectivity (1996). Scripps's and Pitzer's selectivity rankings among all liberal-arts colleges are essentially the same as they were three decades ago, when both colleges were ranked "very selective" in the guidebooks. They are still so ranked, both of them with higher 1996 SAT medians than quondam leader Occidental, and a "New Venture" College focusing on biochemistry is in the works. None of the northern colleges is as tightly focused as it was at the start. All of them started out without departments, or with extremely inclusive ones, such as "humanities" at HMC, but subsequently adopted conventional, segregated-by-discipline departments as they grew larger, more self-sufficient, more disposed to find diversity and comprehensiveness internally, and less disposed to look to the other colleges for these. Such loosening of focus will probably continue among the northern colleges, but they are already so different from all other colleges than the loosening would have to be enormous to put them back in the pack, whose focus was never very tight in the first place and is itself loosening under various trendy impulses.

What is true of the other northern colleges is also true of CMC. CMC started out with no departments at all and has become less tightly focused on government and economics since the creation of departments in a variety of other fields. Expansion will no doubt continue this trend, as all departments, especially the natural sciences, grow larger, more self-sufficient, more inward-looking, and more important. There are more and better departmental alternatives to government and economics now than there once were, none with any strong desire to perpetuate the college's tradition of political balance, some with an active desire to go beyond it and move on to the new, trendy, balkanizing modes of diversity. If they do, it is not clear than the only balkanizing forces will come from the left. Christian studies, white studies, and men's studies are anything but trendy now, but they would be logical accompaniments to the other faculty-favored "studies" devoted to building and asserting a stigmatized group's self-esteem, though the impetus for these, if any, is more likely to come from the students than from the faculty. CMC, responding to student demand, which actually enlisted some outside support, had a professor of Christian studies for several years in the 1970's, to the embarrassment of the regular religion department. He left when the outside support ran out. It could happen again. Within ten years or so, there will be a great shaking of the tree which could severely test the staying power of CMC's traditional focus. Three of CMC's traditional compasses will be going or gone: Jack Stark, Jil Stark, and most of the old-guard faculty hired in the Benson years. How they are replaced could make a huge difference as to whether and how much CMC stays on its traditional course, whether and how much it embarks on new courses, and whether it prospers or flounders. As things look now, they will leave some unsolved problems, but also an extraordinary array of assets, both deriving from CMC's original choice of mission, and from its success in sticking to it.

VIII. CMC stories.

I've managed to tell some of them: Bauer Hall demo; Trial of Pomona Nine; Rood and the KGB Colonel; Benson kicking olives. There are more if he wants. Carter Mullen and the 24 alarm clocks, Wohlford Hall. "Rood Sucks" episode. John Lindauer and the $100 bribe for an A (he gave the student a D- and $40 in change). Richard Bruce's operant conditioning class, which, unknown to him, arranged to yawn and doze when he moved left and to liven up when he moved right. By the end of the class the kids had driven him into the extreme right-hand corner and the class was sizzling. Hanoi Sister Town Meeting. Carl Giles, Carl Watson, and Nathan Mobley war stories from Desert Storm. Gaines Post Cold War yarns. Tales of extraordinary teachers: Rood, Pitney, Rogers, Massoud, Faggen, Eckert, St. Dennis, Roth, Bjork, Post. Wichman's space clinic. Garris-Pitney-Pomona-Pitzer Presidency-Congress simulations. Guest lectures by Pitzer anarcho-syndicalist Dan Ward. Beckett Hall Commune experiment. Wohlford Hall reunion. Jason Kreutzer's Satanic Coven. Student performances. Plays, talent nights, singing parties, Latin orations. To say that we have less than our share of performers is not to say that we have none at all. See comments on theater people, Robin Williams, Paul Brickman, Robert Daseler, Paul Miailovich in specific comments below. Balitzer exploits. More heroic stories of death and suffering: Ducey, Zinda, Eckert, Thomson, war heroes (see IX below). And, speaking of death, let's not forget resurrection. Steve Davis was co-chair of the Resurrection Summit, surely the highest position attained by anyone connected with CMC. He could also be among the top ten authorities on evil in the country, though he doesn't like to boast about it. Choice letters of recommendation [example attached]. Heslop master plan when became dean. What happened to cast of characters in later life.

IX. CMC Deaths

Somewhere, in addition to the descriptions of the way CMC people lived, should be some descriptions of how they died, doing what they believed in to the end. Ted Ducey, driving his truck into the path of a flash flood to rescue someone caught in the flood. Ross Eckert, battling to clean up the blood supply before AIDS took him away. Eckert, John Snortum, and Bob Feldmeth teaching, John Zinda and Grayle Howlett coaching till they had to be carried away. Marty Diamond, with his weak heart, dying with his boots on, defending the Electoral College in Congress. Dick Flamson ‘51, running the Security-Pacific Bank and chairing the CMC Board till the end; Steve Fairchild ‘90, world-class river runner, drowned running the Zeta Rapid on the Futaleufu River, Chile. Founders George Benson and Donald McKenna, teaching, shaping, and recruiting into their tenth decades. They fit the mold of building and campaigning for the college long after normal retirement age; as long, in fact, as they had the strength to do so. Procter Thomson, the one who told us that “greed is good,” not only teaching out his last semester, while dying of Hodgkins' Disease, but going to the Economics Association meeting and helping out with departmental recruitment -- and then coming home to mix up a huge batch of martinis, to his own special recipe, to be consumed at his funeral weeks later. As one admirer put it, “He was there in spirits.” His Chicago-school colleagues assure us (as he would have himself, had he lived) that such behavior, though it might look altruistic to a non-economist, was actually his way of maximizing his current personal utility, and was in perfect observance of his own laws. Maybe. But, if so, words like greed and personal utility mean something broader, deeper, warmer, fuzzier, and more subtle to economists than they do to ordinary people.

Billy Pedersen ‘68, Jesse Clark ‘65, and Stewart Moody ‘67 were neither economists nor ordinary people, but extraordinary people, looking death in the face on mission after mission in Vietnam till death won the last hand. Jesse Clark could play better golf on his knees than anyone else standing up. He was blown up by a mine in Cu Chi, South Vietnam. Billy Pedersen and Stewart Moody went down with their helicopters in Vietnam. Pedersen had volunteered for service in Vietnam, completed his tour of duty, packed to go home, heard his replacement had not arrived, and volunteered yet again to help his shorthanded buddies. He was shot down in an ambush and killed on his second mission. Harry Jaffa dedicated his The Conditions of Freedom (1975) to his memory. William Dickinson ‘60 played left field for the baseball team till he came down with cancer and had to have his leg amputated as a sophomore. As a junior he found that the cancer had recurred and that his days were numbered. He returned to the field as the team's scorekeeper, statistician, and co-captain, playing the best part he could in the game he loved, with whatever time and strength were left to him. He did not make it through the last inning but died just before graduation. CMC awarded him its only posthumous degree and gives the William Dickinson prize each year to CMC's most inspirational athlete.

Maybe my favorite of Procter Thomson's laws is the pertinent one here, as elsewhere: “There is nothing either good or bad, but alternatives make it so.”" Death erases the long run for individuals, and the threat of death blots out the conventional long-run incentives for individuals to carry on. But most carry on even when the conventional incentives are gone. Billy Pedersen did not have to go to Vietnam, nor to fly missions after his tour was over, but he did. William Dickinson, and the professors, coaches, and trustees who stayed at their posts to the end could have gone fishing and not suffered for it. But they didn't. Procter Thomson could have had the bartender make up a smaller batch of martinis, and drunk them himself without violating any of his own laws. He didn't. When the chips were down, each saw carrying on as the best of all alternatives and chose to die as he had lived. They have told us, in effect, that getting your job well done and your cause well fought are the greatest of all privileges and the highest of all priorities -- the kind of thing you would want to do if it were your very last act on earth.