I'm not sure if you read last week’s TSL, but
if you didn’t, you really should have, since (with the
exception of my rather half-baked column) it was chock-full
of nutty goodness. I’m speaking metaphorically here with
regards to most of the goodness in question, although several
of the stories were actually kind of nuts. One of them raised
the possibility that Oldenborg might be demolished. Although
I can approve of a vague and theoretical framework under which
it might be acceptable to one day turn Oldenborg into something
un-Oldenborg, the prospect that this might occur in the not-too-distant
future is frankly a little disturbing. Throw in the possibility
that Oldenborg, which I consider one of the nicest dorms on
campus, might actually be demolished before Wig Hall, and
I think we’re rapidly approaching the territory where
we move from “inefficient waste of college funds”
to “crime against humanity.” Some people may argue
that comparing the potential renovation/demolition of Oldenborg
to a crime against humanity is completely ridiculous. However,
I find it unlikely that those people have recently visited
Wig.
Besides, I work for TSL, and am thus covered by the recent
executive decision that apparently authorized the editorial
board to stop making any sense. I’d expressed confusion
about the purpose behind “Organic Intellectuals are Hard
to Find” (October 11) until it was clarified by the following
week’s editorial (called either “AIDS and the Senior
Gift” or “The Senior Gift Blows” depending
on whether you like your TSL in paper or internet form). Whatever
its name, it was the follow-up to “The Senior Gift Sucks”
that was really funny, and would have been my favorite thing
in the paper this year had not Michael Owen felt the pressing
need to write a meta-commentary last week, and thus make my
article look bad in comparison.
Unfortunately, some of the Senior Gift Committee members responded
to the editorial by writing some well-worded letters pointing
out that the cost per student of running Pomona College is
nearly twice what even full-tuition students pay, and foundations
use the numbers of alumni who give to the senior gift as a
measure of how worthy Pomona is of the foundation’s money.
So that sort of hurt some of the rhetorical strength of “The
Senior Gift Sucks.” This apparently was just the excuse
the editorial board was looking for to launch into some strange
socialist tirade.
According to the first paragraph of last week’s editorial,
“it must be conceded” that Pomona is “an ideological
state apparatus.” Apparently, this fact has something
to do with why Pomona is not worthy of our money, although
I’m still lost trying to figure out exactly what that
phrase means. “State” isn’t being used in the
sense of political affiliation, or anything else for that
matter, because Pomona isn’t dependent on state funds—that’s
why we’re not a state school. Hell, we don’t even
have an ROTC program like CMC’s, so we’re not receiving
state money there either. That leaves us with Pomona being
an “ideological apparatus,” and since “apparatus”
is just a fancy word for “thing,” I’m left
concluding that Pomona is somehow bad because it’s ideological.
Pomona is also apparently guilty of creating inequalities
by training people who, by virtue of their Pomona College
education, will earn lots of money and generally go about
being all elite and stuff. Or, in the board’s words,
“The $61,000 per annum that Bernstein cites as the cost
of molding us into elites could be much more efficiently allocated
to something along the lines of, say, an AIDS charity, if
one’s ultimate goal is to combat wealth polarization
and to make our world a more just, equitable and hospitable
place in which to be born.” Truth be told, I’m not
exactly sure how we’re going to transfer any amount of
money into a cure for AIDS without talented doctors and scientists—people
like the pre-med chem martyrs we all know. It’s probably
also worth mentioning that if you take away everyone’s
education, we’re all much more equal, but that’s
not really a good thing.
This is all very unfortunate, because immediately above and
to the right of last week’s editorial, you’ll find
a letter from Dorothy Lam knocking TSL for being ideological,
and sarcastically recommending that “the editorial staff
drop out of Pomona College in order to make room for people
unafraid to confront thoughtfully and with an open mind ideas
that conflict with their own.” Given the fact that Dorothy
Lam and the TSL board are polar opposites to such an extent
that it is theorized that if they ever were to make physical
contact with one another, both would cancel each other out
in a tremendous explosion of political ideology, I’m
kind of worried that the shock of finding themselves in agreement
with Ms. Lam (or, possibly, the shock of realizing that she
rhetorically kicked their collective asses) may cause them
to actually follow her advice, and drop out.
This would be disastrous, as without TSL, the only way for
me to convey my writings to the world would be to tack them
to my bulletin board outside my room. And drunk students have
already shown their disagreement with my opinions by tearing
them down and scattering their confettied remains all over
the hall. I’m afraid that if this were to happen again,
the Oldenborg Task Force would see it as yet another justification
for committing paramilitary acts of aggression against my
dorm. So, we need TSL.
Allow me to attempt to rehabilitate the board’s argument.
We really ought to examine the senior gift not because of
the ideological state apparatus, or because of any radical
notions that we must level our society and eliminate its elites.
Instead, we should look at the notion of senior giving and
the $61,000 education in the light that perhaps there really
are more efficient ways to spend this money. Is free beer
five nights a week really something that ought to be a sacred
right? Is that big sign in the southwest corner of campus
necessary? Do we really think it’s worth the money to
knock down Oldenborg just because it would be possible to
build something even better? Most people I know, myself included,
look on our college’s massive expenditures with a mix
of pride, horror, and amusement. I like Death by Chocolate
just as much as the next person, but is it really worth the
money we pay? That’s a question that may well be worth
asking.
