Scripps College

This post contains the financial snapshot of our second-oldest college in Claremont--Scripps College, or, as them womyn over there like to point out: "The Women's College".

See this link for a general explanation of where these numbers come from. Compare to Pomona College here.

All numbers shown are from the IRS Form 990 (Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax) filed by Scripps College reflecting the fiscal year beginning 7/1/2004 and ending 6/30/2005. These are the most recent data available.

Tuition and Fees: $24,455,485 (added to post on 6/4/08 by request)

Room and Board: $6,238,339 (added to post on 6/4/08 by request)

Total Revenue: $53,688,059

Total Expenses: $48,394,311

Excess for the year: $5,293,748

Net assets on July 1, 2004: $265,324,750

Net assets on June 30, 2005 (includes approximately $17M, mostly unrealized gains): $287,405,582

Corporate Officers

Nancy Y. Bekavac recently sighted in Iowa, President (resigned early 2007 effective end of June, 2007) Fritz Weis now interim president
Compensation: $301,186
Contributions to employee benefit plans: $27,468
Expense account and other allowances: $37,200

James H. Manifold (hat tip to the Scripps webbie for the link), VP/CFO/Treasurer
Compensation: $168,300
Contributions to employee benefit plans: $24,229

Michael D. Lamkin, VP, Dean of the Faculty
Compensation: $193,479
Contributions to employee benefit plans: $29,788



Martha Keates, VP-Development/College Relations
Compensation: $155,400
Contributions to employee benefit plans: $24,767

Patricia F. Goldsmith, VP-Dean Administration/Financial Aid
Compensation: $134,962
Contributions to employee benefit plans: $20,102

Debra Carlson Wood (Debbie Downer!), VP-Dean of Students
Compensation: $118,038
Contributions to employee benefit plans: $21,651
Expense account and other allowances: $24,000




Linda R. Scott, Board Secretary
Compensation: $90,875
Contributions to employee benefit plans: $14,270

Compensation of the Five Highest Paid Employees other than Officers, Directors, and Trustees

John Geerken ("He's really funny for an old guy"), Faculty
Compensation: $118,106
Contributions to employee benefit plans and deferred compensation: $20,303

Alan Hartley, Faculty
Compensation: $119,227
Contributions to employee benefit plans and deferred compensation: $15,157

Donald Crone (I study Chinese martial and medical arts and teach Bagua Zhang), Faculty
Compensation: $114,455
Contributions to employee benefit plans and deferred compensation: $19,454

Roswitha Burwick, Faculty
Compensation: $114,527
Contributions to employee benefit plans and deferred compensation: $17,328




Eric Haskell, Faculty
Compensation: $108,907
Contributions to employee benefit plans and deferred compensation: $18,434

Compensation of the Five Highest Paid Independent Contractors

E. Moule and S. Polyzoides, Inc., Pasadena, Architects
Compensation: $146,591

PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP, Los Angeles, Audit/Tax
Compensation: $129,756

Commercial Interior Resources, Inc., Irvine, Flooring Contractor
Compensation: $88,685

Lime Twig Group, Inc., Pasadena, Magazine Design
Compensation: $88,310






Cambridge Associates, Boston, Investment Consultants
Compensation: $106,633

finis

42nd Street Bagel Incident Sparks Letters to Local Paper

Race is a touchy subject, more so in Claremont than in many places. Just ask Scripps College Dean of Students Debra Wood. Or former Claremont McKenna College visiting professor of psychology Kerri Dunn. And then there was the matter of Pomona College's decision to not have the school's Alma Mater sung at this year's commencement.

And then, too, Claremont has had some real incidents of people being the targets of violence because of their race.

So, we intentionally held off commenting immediately on the the recent incident at the 42nd Street Bagel restaurant on Yale Ave. in the Claremont Village until we had more information.

We first learned of it when a letter appeared in the Claremont Courier from a person who said that the were in shock after "witnessing a blatant racist attack" there on an elderly "woman of color" by a "large, older man wearing a 'David Duke for President' T-shirt. The letter writer felt that the restaurant's employees seemed to favor the man rather than the woman.

After that first letter, the elderly woman involved in the incident wrote in to the Courier asking for a public apology from the store's manager. In response, the management of the 42nd Street Bagel wrote in to apologize.

There were also a number of letters in support of the woman, as well as calls to have the matter referred to the city's Committee on Human Relations, and other calls to boycott the bagel place for its coddling of the alleged racist and its insensitivity to the elderly woman.

Now other letters have appeared in the Courier saying that there was more to the story than was originally reported. The letters included one from the co-founder of 42nd Street Bagel and another from the David Duke-shirt wearing man at the center of the controversy. There were also some from a witness or two who supported the man's account of the matter.

If we can dig up some video, we'll try an delve more deeply into this bagel business later. For now, a word to the wise: in matters of race, use some commonsense. Claremont is usually better off counting to ten and then looking into things. We don't need another witch-hunt in Claremont. The obvious racially-motivated crimes, such as the stabbing of the African-American man by four men on their way to a White Power rally in Los Angeles are a completely different category than the hyped up melodrama of these other incidents, and they deserve to be treated differently.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

No, we don't receive ad revenue from NBC, but we couldn't help noticing that things have reached a truly sad state when the most honest treatment of race in America happens on a sitcom:

30 Rock, Season 1, Episode 16, "The Source Awards":

Jack: Well, well, well Lemon. Steven’s a good man; he’s on partner track at Dewey, and he’s a Black.

Liz: A black?!? That is offensive.

Jack: No, no, that’s his last name: Steven Black. Great family.

Liz: Oh, yeah, of course.

Jack: They’re remarkable people, the Blacks: musical, very athletic...not very good swimmers. Again, I’m talking about the family. Black is African American, though.

We were working on yesterday's post about the upcoming Black Party at Pomona College and the letter the Claremont Colleges received concerning their censorship (okay when it comes to things they don't like), when it occurred to that the treatment of issues like race, gender, or class sometimes receive at the Colleges risks turning a good number of people into caricatures incapable of speaking for themselves.

These and other matters of political correctness are serious issues to be sure, and we have a long way to go to solving any of them at the Claremont Colleges, in this city, or for that matter as a country. We should have serious discussions of issues; however, we should also not become so serious that we misread something as innocent as a party flyer, as Scripps College Dean of Students Debra Wood did in February, or become so straitlaced that we can't laugh at ourselves.

The self-seriousness of those who would protect the oppressed or downtrodden in a way dehumanizes the very people they would protect. You almost want to see these protectors slip on a banana just to get them to lighten up enough to allow you to talk to them without having to walk on eggshells. These folks haven't figured out that the best way of deflating some of these stereotypes is to poke fun at them.

And efforts to stamp out racism or any other -ism through censorship, as Pomona, Scripps, and Harvey Mudd Colleges were accused of doing, seems a terribly Procrustean solution to what are really very human problems. Watching the current presidential campaigns try to deal with the same issues, one really does sense that there is a significant segment of the voting public who are ready to try some different approaches to such things as discussions of race.

Let's see how long it takes that debate to filter down to the local level.

Free Speech Black Out at 5-Cs

Above, left: Good --- Above, right: Bad
(Click on Images to Enlarge)

Aditya Bindal over at the Claremont Conservative blog has a post about a "Black Out" party being thrown next Saturday at the Edmunds Ballroom on the campus of Pomona College. The party is sponsored by Pan African Students Association, a 5-College organization.

Bindal wonders if the racial and gender stereotypes seen in the Black Out party poster will provoke the same sort of outcry from Scripps College Dean of Students Debra Wood as the February's White Party did.

To the great unwashed, this seems a double standard, which it is. Wood, and no doubt others, refuse to acknowledge this, and they seem to want to practice censorship in some instances but not in other similar situations. This sort of irrationality gets explained away by the Debra Wood School of Thought by simply saying, "I know better than you what's right and what's wrong."

(Residents of Claremont are very familiar with this same thinking, which has been applied to any number of fiscal and program initiatives. Maybe this is where the overlap in Town and Gown governance expresses itself most.)

Wood's type of censorship is getting notice. Charles Johnson at the Conservative noted that an organization called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has singled out the Claremont Colleges for what FIRE believes is a chilling atmosphere for free speech.

In a letter dated March 18th, FIRE contacted the presidents of all five colleges, as well as the Claremont University Consortium. The letter cited the Debra Wood-White Party incident, as well as other incidents involving administrators at Scripps and Harvey Mudd College.

The letter said:

Taken together, these incidents show a concerted effort on the part of Claremont College administrators to pressure students to censor their expression. Even if those responsible for the controversial expression were not ultimately punished, the responses that were sent out to the Claremont College community - including references to notifying campus safety and to taking "appropriate action" in response to protected expression - are likely to have a profound chilling effect on speech at the five colleges.

Will Bigham covered the FIRE letter in the Daily Bulletin last week. The Bulletin also posted the actual letter from FIRE, which you can read here.

The Law Doesn't Concern Itself with Trifles

Those wacky college deans.

First, Dean of Students Debra "Debbie Downer" Wood of Scripps College willfully--or not--misinterpreted a flyer advertising a party at Claremont McKenna College, finding all kinds of racism and sexism therein (here, and here).

Then, in a bit we did not cover, but which was commented on here, Dean of Students Jeanne Noda at Harvey Mudd College got all exercised over a comment written at her college on a white board, to wit, "Hillary is a foxy lesbian".

Now, in a trifecta (but always remembering there are still two more colleges to go), Dean of Students Miriam Feldblum at Pomona College waxes earnest about what she sees as the very possibly incorrect origins of the Pomona College Alma Mater (circa 1910):

The nut graff of her memo, reproduced below, is this:

Learning that the origins of our Alma Mater--a song that many of us cherish, and one we sing at Orientation, Commencement, and numerous other times--is rooted in a minstrel show that was held at the College is very upsetting.

Really.

Is there some kind of chromosome for over-reaction that all college deans are required to possess? Or do the deans see their jobs as firewall busybodies protecting ever and ever small groups from ever and ever slighter slights? Don't they have better things to do with their time?

It's a losing battle to take on college students in this way. They are too shrewd in manipulation and we think there is at least a possibility that is going on here.

We remember a challenge taken on by a sociology class of ours in college. See if you can make the professor lecture from the corner of the room with one leg in the wastebasket--that was the idea. We never did get her leg in the wastebasket, but by paying rapt attention whenever she approached the corner and by shuffling papers and losing interest whenever she departed from it, we had her far into that corner most of the time.

Don't these over-educated, over-reactive professionals know when they are being played?

Click on Image to Enlarge

New Directions at Scripps

Parody Alert, for the humor-challenged

This morning's post about the misapprehension by Scripps College Dean of Students Debra Wood concerning the "white party" hosted at Claremont McKenna put us in mind of another politically incorrect situation at Scripps last fall that fortunately was squelched before before seeing the light of day.

It seems the Public Information staff was working on a cover for the Fall number of Scripps Magazine, and was stumped on what sort of illustration to use. The Insider, through our usual habit of dumpster diving, found an early draft of the cover which arguably carries the theme "New Directions" even better than the one that was used, shown reduced in size at the left. We guess the first draft was a little too "out there" for the College that styles itself "The Women's College".

Never one to avoid a cheap shot, nor willing to avoid piling on when an institution is already making itself look silly, we disclose, for the first time, a worldwide exclusive, the original draft cover to the Fall, 2007, Scripps Magazine:

End Parody Alert.

Ms. Wood, you may now begin again taking seriously everything the Insider says.