On April 20 I posted about what I called a “simmering, occasionally boiling cauldron of ethnic self-pity, social-justice terrorism, whines about homework, and calls for the abolition of free speech” at the five ultra-elite Claremont Colleges in Southern California. I focused on news accounts about the successful efforts by about 250 Black Lives Matter protesters to block the entrances to an April 6 speech on the campus of one of the five, Claremont McKenna College, by conservative pro-police author Heather Mac Donald, forcing Mac Donald to deliver her address to a nearly empty room. I added: “So far there has been no attempt by college officials to identify the bullying students, much less punish them.”
On April 22 I received an email from Claremont McKenna literature professor Robert Faggen. He wrote:
Fair enough, I thought. So I turned to Claremont McKenna’s website. Sure enough, there was a link to an April 7 statement from Chodosh—except that at least part of it seemed to bolster my observation that the Claremont McKenna administration had essentially stood down while the rioters raged:
But Chodosh did add the following:
So on April 24 I phoned and emailed Joann D. Young, Claremont McKenna’s director of media relations, to find out what efforts the college had been making during the more than two weeks since Chodosh’s April 7 statement to identify and duly hold accountable students who had participated in shutting down access to Mac Donald’s speech. Young assured me that the college was preparing a “statement” that would be posted on the college website no later than noon on April 25, and that she would email me a link.
Noon on April 25 came and went without either statement or email. After that, four business days of telephone and email tag ensued between me and the ever-gracious Young in which there were at least two promises to “have something” for me “very soon.” Finally Young called me on May 1 to apologize profusely and say that, well, there wasn’t a statement just as yet—and who knows exactly when there will be one?—but that she would really let me know as soon as it emerged.
It’s now been nearly a month since Mac Donald delivered her speech. I might offer this Monday morning quarterbacking suggestion: If Chodosh had actually approved some “arrests” of the access-blocking rioters on April 6, it would have been pretty easy to use the police reports to find out who among the arrestees were Claremont McKenna students.
Of course, even if Chodosh had managed to find the names of the rioting Claremont McKenna students, how “accountable” they would actually be held remains an open question.
Another elite institution, Middlebury College in Vermont, a few days ago issued a statement that it had imposed disciplinary sanctions on some 30 Middlebury students involved in a violent protest that effectively canceled a scheduled speech by Bell Curve and Coming Apart author Charles Murray and briefly hospitalized Allison Stanger, a Middlebury political science professor who had agreed to moderate Murray’s discussion. “We will not comment on the nature or range of the sanctions until the process is complete,” the statement read. Campus rumor has it that the offending students were put on probation through the end of the school year. Since it’s now close to final-exam time on many U.S. campuses, that amounts to about two weeks’ worth of mild sanctions in toto.
So while it’s always possible that college administrators are emulating Animal House’s Dean Wormer behind the scenes, and are busy putting bullying students on “double secret probation,” I see no public evidence calling into question my assertion that supine college presidents really aren’t doing much about a free-speech crisis in their midst.
