Courier-TSL Faceoff

Left to Right (literally, not politically):
Pepperdine School of Law Dean Kenneth Starr
and UC Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

We'd meant to write up something about the March 5th mock debate at Pomona College between Pepperdine Law School dean Kenneth Starr and Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the new UC Irvine School of Law. The debate's subject was the Presidental War Powers Act.

Starr came to the debate the same day he argued before the California State Supreme Court on behalf of Prop. 8 proponents who sought to have 18,000 gay and lesbian marriages voided under the new state law.

Tony Krickl covered the event for the Courier, wrote about the goings on in a March 11 article:

Mr. Starr, who serves as the Dean of Pepperdine University’s Law School, was invited to speak by the Pomona Student Union. Along with Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the new Law School at University of California Irvine, the 2 deans staged a mock debate on constitutional powers of the U.S. President in a hypothetical war situation. Mr. Starr was invited to speak before becoming involved in the Prop. 8 case.

When asked why he would choose to represent a minority like violent death row prisoners rather than “a minority that who just wants to marry the one they love,” Mr. Starr responded, “because you are representing a particular cause doesn’t mean you are necessarily approving of that particular cause.

“[In this case,] I was pleased to represent what I feel is a very important principle,” he added. “That is the sovereign power of the people. However you vote is to protect the sovereign right of the people, until we change that mechanism for amending the constitution.”

After the debate, students gathered in the nearby Smith Campus Center quad to stage mock same sex weddings as a form of protest to Mr. Starr’s visit.

Called “Wedding Under the Starrs,” the light-hearted event featured wedding cake and cider, music from an A cappella group and Mariachi band and several staged same-sex weddings.

Pomona College's student newspaper The Student Life seems to have found Krickl's coverage of the event wanting. The TSL editorial board wrote an opinion piece for their March 13 edition that excoriated the Courier for what TSL thought was a "lack of journalistic ethics," as well as other lapses. The TSL editorial, titled, "Courier Article Shows Unprofessionalism [see page 8]," said this about the Courier article:

The content of the article barely mentions the actual debate, or Ken Starr’s opponent Erwin Cherminsky. Instead, the Courier implied that Starr was on campus solely to field questions about “gay rights and his role in the controversial case being heard before the Supreme Court of California.” We stand on a pedestal of perfect reporting here at TSL; in fact, we are well aware of our own missteps.

We do, however make a conscious effort to cover news items with depth, clarity, and balance. What was published in the Courier on Wednesday was a gross breach of journalistic ethics and reporting etiquette.

TSL felt that the Courier article missed the main point of Starr's visit, which was the mock War Powers Act debate, and that Krickl's coverage wasn't balanced because Starr's comments on the Prop. 8 litigation weren't balanced in Krickl's article by the opposing litigants' views.

Krickl, meanwhile, took exception to the TSL editorial and blogged about TSL on the Courier City Beat in a post titled "Big Talk, Little Content from The Student Life." In the blog post, Krickl defended his coverage:

First and foremost, what TSL editors may not realize is that at many professional newspapers, reporters are limited by page inches or number of words for stories they are assigned to cover. Given these limitations, reporters are forced to focus their articles on the meat of the news while cutting out as much fat as possible.

With the high profile nature of the Prop. 8 case and Starr's role as the lead attorney, clearly the presidential war powers debate was the fat. In showing up for the event, I never intended to cover the debate. I was there to report on any comments Starr might make on the landmark case and the planned protest outside.

And:

The COURIER article did not take any sides on this topic. It never criticized or praised Mr. Starr for his position on Proposition 8 or his role in the case. The article simply laid out Mr. Starr’s positions on the issue, his responses to questions on the topic and provided a description of the student protest.

I'm not so sure I could say the same about the TSL's coverage of the event. In their article (see page 1 and 3), the TSL reporter interviewed or used statements from 4 different people who were directly criticizing Starr, his appearance on campus or Prop. 8 itself.

But TSL's report fails to counter these statements with a single voice of opposition, making the student paper's political leanings on Prop. 8 clear for all to see. Is this the neutral or balanced coverage that TSL editors are demanding?

As Krickl notes, TSL is a student paper, so maybe you have to grant them a little more latitude than you would a commercial publication. Still, TSL has had some notable missteps in the recent past. For instance, TSL's coverage of the Jonathan Petropoulos matter last year, when they ran the wrong painting on the front page, along with some other errors, led to the April 4, 2008, edition being pulled from newsstands.

There have been some other newsworthy things happening at Pomona College, including the banning (and subsequent unbanning) of two Claremont McKenna College students, David Daleiden and Kyle Kinneberg, from Pomona's campus. The ban occurred without much respect for due process and drew a good deal of criticism for the "Ready, Fire, Aim" mentality that Pomona Dean of Student Miriam Feldblum displayed in her mishandling of the situation.

We haven't had much time to explore the banning/unbanning, but we may have post or two on the subject in the coming week. The Claremont Conservative, though, has been all over this issue from the beginning.

Cootie Approach

[ A few weeks ago--November 23--we received this letter. There has been a flurry of conversation about the Pomona Alma Mater in recent days (see this link, especially Comment 1 by Professor Kim Bruce, and Comment 4, by Pomona alumna Rosemary Choate). Probably the renewed interest is because the committee referred to below has completed its report, will discuss it with President Oxtoby by Wednesday, and President Oxtoby will meet with the Trustees on Thursday. The emphases, links, and a few editorial style changes that in no way affect the content are ours]

* * * * * *

CARL OLSON ‘66
[address redacted]

October 17, 2008

Kim B. Bruce, Ph.D. and Jeanne Buckley ‘65
Co-Chairs, Committee on College Songs
Pomona College
Claremont, California 91711

Re: Pomona College: Thought Promoting Academy or Thought Police Academy

Dear Co-Chairs:

Your committee has been commissioned to look into the college’s songs, including the Alma Mater song “Hail! Pomona, Hail!” [Listen Here, Lyrics Here] and make recommendations.

In addition to being an alumnus, I am connected to this issue by being the General Editor for the 1968 edition of the school songbook “The Songs We Sing At Pomona”. It included background material on the 17 songs. For “Hail! Pomona, Hail!” I quoted the jacket notes from a 1958 record by the song’s composer Richard N. Loucks. He indicated the song was written for a blackface minstrel show at the school. In addition I wrote a letter to the Pomona College Magazine in 2002 about a photograph of a 1910 minstrel show at which the song purportedly debuted.

Apparently some anonymous advocates passed out flyers on campus last spring. It is truly a troubling indictment of persons at Pomona who are not willing to stand behind their own views. My name has been brought up in this issue with the implication that I somehow favor banning the song. This was done without my participation or consent. One purpose of this letter is to disown any support for or involvement in the ban advocacy.

In editing the songbook, I did not do any original research. Now some original source research has been done rather than secondary sources such as the record jacket. This is a hallmark of honest academic pursuits. The show in question was in fact a fundraiser for the baseball team. The Student Life of January 21, 1910, gave this account, “The Finale, ‘Blue and White’—the words and music of which were composed by Richard Loucks—sung by the whole troupe, was splendid.” No mention at all about “Hail! Pomona, Hail!” The Pomona College Handbook for 1910-1911 included “The Blue and White” but did not mention “Hail! Pomona, Hail!” The words for the two songs are not similar. In the next year The Pomona College Handbook for 1911-1912 included “Hail! Pomona, Hail!” along with “The Blue and White”. The conclusion is obvious that it was composed by Mr. Loucks sometime between the two handbooks. In 1958 Mr. Loucks’ recollection apparently confused his two fine songs as to their actual debuts within a year. That’s understandable after nearly half a century. We can thank Rosemary Choate ‘63 for this diligent research.

The ban advocates have the burden of proving their case, both for the facts involved and the proposed extreme punishment. They need to present evidence showing the song was ever used in the show. Right now the evidence shows it wasn’t.

It’s troubling that this original research was not conducted by the ban advocates months ago. I understand that thousands of dollars in grants were received for work over the summer on the issue. Why could not any of these faculty/students find these easily discovered facts? How about an audit by whoever made the grant?

Ban advocates contend that if “Hail! Pomona, Hail!” were contained in a blackface minstrel show, it should be shunned as being fatally tainted under a guilt-by-association process into an anti-Black/Negro/African-American song.

We should examine this assertion. As everyone knows from having sung the song many times, there is absolutely no connection to anything racial in the music or lyrics, let alone anything disparaging. This should be the end of the matter among responsible academics. What if the song had been written for a Plug Ugly show?

Ban advocates apparently have taken umbrage about the blackface minstrel tradition of the day a century ago. That’s their prerogative. But then they apply a “cootie” approach to the subject. This approach says that if something, in their opinion, is offensive in any way to them and is connected to any otherwise innocent bystander, then they can penalize or ban the bystander totally—and anything remotely connected to the bystander. Sort of a group punishment mentality. Sort of a modern “memory hole” from George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sort of “corruption of the blood” from the Middle Ages to go after relatives of criminals and so on. The ban advocates have appointed themselves to speak on behalf of some amorphous group which is “offended”. In this controversy, from what I can tell, none of the ban advocates has been elected by any such group to act as spokespersons.

Politically-correct fads and advocacy do not make good science, history, or college policy. Pomona has the important ideal as a thought promoting academy, not a thought police academy.

Actually, Pomona would do well to offer a freshmen course in Critical Thinking. Many colleges have this course on how honestly to pursue all lines of study. It deals with logic, fallacies, red herrings, false premises, group think, original source research, statistical measures, and valid scientific and historical evidence.

It has been put forth that some donors may refuse to donate to Pomona because it does not ban “Hail! Pomona, Hail!” as a patently racist song. This is truly a troubling assertion. Just how many closed-minded politically-correct donors are out there that we should fear? Remember, Pomona has a vast cash reserve in the billions of dollars in its renowned endowment fund. Even without any more donations from anybody—not just the alienated ones—the college could function just fine in its current mode for a half century. Actually, Pomona may gain from donors who favor academic honesty.

Even to outsiders the conflict seems like a petty cavil. Randy Cohen, "The Ethicist" of The New York Times Magazine in his column of August 10, 2008, concluded without much ado, “Sing out—full-throated, clear-conscienced.”

Finally, as to the remainder of your committee’s activities, you should hold open public hearings on this matter. You should publish your committee’s report in draft form on the college’s website, so that informed comments can be solicited before any action is taken. You should seek out free speech advocates for comment.

Frankly, I’m troubled by an Administration which has let this issue get this far and has imposed an interim ban. We should find out what written procedures the Administration followed in poisoning the well with such a preemptive prejudicial strike. The Trustees should weigh in. They have ultimate authority for the college. They should make the final decision.

Please let me know how you will proceed. I will be happy to contribute to your further deliberations in this important issue.

Sincerely,

Carl Olson ‘66

Cc: Committee Members
President David Oxtoby
Trustee Chair Stewart Smith and board members
Editor, The Student Life
Distribution

* * * * * *

TSL-Taylor Lovefest

At the suggestion of Charles over at the Claremont Conservative, a Claremont McKenna College student blog, we picked up a copy of the April 25th edition of Pomona College's weekly journal of creative writing, The Student Life (TSL).

You may recall that that TSL ran an error-filled article about CMC history professor Jonathan Petropoulos on April 4th that resulted in that week's issue of the paper being pulled from newsstands. TSL's Petropoulos article included a headline that seemed to imply that the professor had been criminally charged with a crime related to a Camille Pissarro painting (Petropoulos has not been charged with any crime), and it also included a very large, mislabeled image of the wrong painting.

Now, we don't want to single out a student paper for an honest error. Lord knows we have our share of mistakes, but we do try to acknowledge those and correct them as soon as possible. TSL's Petropoulos story seemed worse than an simple mistake. Anytime an entire issue of a paper has to be erased from history, something's wrong. Of course, one could argue that the removal may have been an apt metaphor for the whole Petropoulos affair.

Besides the problems with the headline and the image, the article itself seemed like a pastische of passages from other articles, including the work of Claremont Independent editor Elise Viebeck. As we wrote at the time, TSL's reporting for the Petropoulos piece was a lazy sort of journalism.

Click to Enlarge

So, we weren't really expecting much when we got the last week's TSL, which carried an article on page 2 by writer Kavisha Singh about a visit by Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor on April 16th to Pomona College's Women's Union.

We couldn't help but notice some pretty obvious errors in the piece, some of which could probably be attributed to Queen Ellen's usual dissembling. However, is it too much to ask for a little fact-checking? To begin with, the article states that Taylor contrasted Claremont's strong tradition of women involved in city governance with neighboring La Verne, which the article said "has never had a female council member."

Well, here's an image of the La Verne City Council's website (note the councilmember farthest to the right, Donna Nasmyth):



So, was Ellen wrong, or is she trying to insinuate that La Verne's Nasmyth is a transvestite? Some clarification, please, TSL. To make its point, the article might have said that Nasmyth is La Verne's first female councilmember, but it did not.

The article also painted a false picture of Taylor as being unfairly criticized (much like Hillary Clinton, Taylor seemed to hint), for being a strong woman. Taylor was quoted as saying, "In this field, a strong man is seen as charismatic, but a strong woman is considered aggressive."

What the article failed to acknowledge is that fact that Taylor hasn't been unfairly criticized because of her gender. Instead, she's been rightly characterized as an arrogant, egotistic, bullying person. Her behavior would be wrong in anybody, and Taylor's hiding behind gender is the worst sort of cowardice. TSL's reporter obviously did not do enough homework. After all, how does Taylor's attacking fellow females fit into her portrait of herself as a victim?

There's nothing wrong with a strong woman. There's plenty wrong with an obnoxious autocrat who abuses her position of power.

The article contained plenty of other Taylor misinformation. According to the TLS piece, for instance, Taylor mentioned the acquistion of Johnson's Pasture as a success. TSL failed to mention, though, how the actions of Taylor and fellow councilmembers Peter Yao, Linda Elderkin, and Sam Pedroza almost resulted in the city's failure to be able to purchase the land.

Recall that those four councilmembers were part of the group that pushed the 2006 Parks and Pastures assessment district as a funding mechanism for Johnson's Pasture. The assessment was opposed by a majority of property owners in Claremont because only about half of the money $48 million it would have generated would have gone to paying for the pasture. The rest of the money was at best very loosely programmed and was seen as a backdoor way of creating a new revenue stream for the city. The assessment failed 56% to 44% because of the greed and overreaching of Taylor, et al.

In contrast, the bond measure that was eventually passed for Johnson's Pasture will end up costing about half of what the assessment would have and will be paid off at least five years sooner than the assessment district would have and was initially opposed by Taylor.

The TSL article also claimed that Taylor said the city "is also considering building a medical marijuana dispensary." Imagine that, Claremont going into the ganja biz. Talk about a new revenue stream!

A word to TSL, whenever you plan on doing another article about local issues, check your facts, especially when dealing with our Mayor. Is that really too much to ask?

Petropoulos Resigns Center's Director Post

Elise Viebeck at the Claremont Independent has reported that Claremont McKenna College professor Jonathan Petropoulos will resign as director of CMC's Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights.

Viebeck writes:

(4/9/08) -- Claremont McKenna College history professor Jonathan Petropoulos will resign as director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights effective summer 2008. Dean of Faculty Gregory Hess made the announcement to CMC professors at a meeting on April 8.

The announcement comes amid controversy surrounding an effort by Petropoulos to restitute a Nazi-looted painting to its rightful owner in which his associate, a Munich art dealer, has been investigated for blackmail. The painting was looted in 1938 from the childhood home of Gisela Bermann-Fischer, now a resident of Zurich, shortly after she and her family escaped the Nazi Anschluss.

Sources say that Hess' statement, which will be released to Trustees on April 9, closely resembles a March 7 letter sent to Trustees and tenured and tenure-track faculty....

* * *

In other related news, issues of last Friday's The Student Life (TSL), the newspaper published by the Associated Students of Pomona College, apparently disappeared from newstands over the weekend. CMC blogger Stagafling remarked on this, and we've heard that the paper may have been pulled because of the problem-filled Petropoulos article TSL ran in Friday's issue. We had a post on Monday about the TSL article. The article in question was written by TSL news editor Travis Kaya and staff writer Cindy Hernandez.

The newsstands remained empty yesterday, so TSL's staff has made no efforts to replenish the stands. If the issues were pulled, the matter would seem to have degenerated into farce. We can envision a video montage with a goofy but lovable sitcom character (picture Kenneth the NBC page from 30 Rock) running around to a soundtrack of peppy music pulling any issue he can find - from newsstands, dorm rooms, out of the hands of students at tables and benches.

Update, Wednesday Afternoon. Life imitates art. We actually saw it--Kenneth was removing TSL from a lounge in Smith Campus Center:

Pomona College's TSL Runs Petropoulos Article

The Student Life (TSL), the newspaper put out by the Associated Students of Pomona College, had a front-page, above-the-fold article in the paper's April 4th edition about the contretemps surrounding Claremont McKenna College history professor Jonathan Petropoulos:

Click to Enlarge

The article is not online, unfortunately, so we can't link to it. However, the piece, by TSL editor Travis Kaya and staff writer Cindy Hernandez, was notable for several reasons.

First, the headline, "CMC Professor Petropoulos Found Not Guilty of Blackmail in Nazi-Stolen Pissaro [sic] Scandal," was incredibly misleading. Petropoulos was never charged with anything, so he could not possibly have been found guilty or not guilty of any crime. Petropoulos never faced a trial court, and the only finding that was made was by a law firm hired by CMC to look into the matter. That private investigation, while no doubt helpful to CMC and Petropoulos, hardly constitutes a court determination of guilt or innocence.

Second, the article appears to be mostly an unattributed restatement of work done by Wikipedia and Elise Viebeck at CMC's Claremont Independent. The article does attribute information taken from an Associated Press article, but the bit that's cited does not exactly show Petropoulos to have been "found not guilty":

[German prosecutor Christian] Schmidt-Sommerfeld said the investigation does not extend to Petropoulos because he is an American citizen and his alleged crimes would have been committed outside Germany.

According to that information (lifted almost verbatim from the Claremont Independent article, not the Associated Press), Petropoulos was merely found to be not a German citizen. Not other finding of guilt or non-guilt regarding Petropoulos was made by the German authorities prosecuting the professor's partner, Munich art dealer Peter Griebert, in their attempted deal to return the painting in question to its rightful owner, Gisela Fischer, for a fee of 18% of the Pissarro's auction value.

Apart from those errors and omissions, and seeming at times as if the writers were being spun with information from a Friends of Petropoulos Society, the article also contained one very serious factual error: it ran the wrong painting! The painting shown in article is a different Pissarro than the one involved in the scandal. Rather than the Fischer Pissarro, it is another, painted in the same year, 1903, and titled, "Le Louvre, matin de soleil, Quai Malaquais."

The attribution for the image is also incorrect. The photo credit reads: "www.lemondedesartes.com." If you try that address, you'll find it's non-existent. In fact, the correct website address has no "e" towards the end and is
"www.lemondedesarts.com."

In any case, wrong painting, guys and gals:

Photo Credit: http://www.lemondedesarts.com/Dossierpissarro.htm
CAPTION: "C. Pissarro, 'Le Louvre, matin de soleil,
Quai Malaquais', 1903"

And here is the correct Pissarro, "Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps," from the ARTnews article describing the Petropoulos-Fischer matter:

Photo Credit: ARTnews, Summer, 2007
Camille Pissarro,
Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps, 1903

Charles Johnson at the Claremont Conservative also finds fault with the TSL Petropoulos article writers, whom he thinks may have plagiarized the Claremont Independent. Johnson calls the TSL work "lazy writing," and he's right.

Besides managing to wrongly imply that Petropoulos had been charged with a crime and was "found not guilty," failing to give proper attribution for the portions of their piece pulled from the Claremont Independent article and other sources, and using the wrong painting in their article, the TSL writers completely ignored the ongoing debate about the ethics of Petropoulos' dealings with Gisela Fischer and with Bruno Lohse, the former Nazi who had acquired the stolen painting and the subject of a forthcoming Petropoulos book.

Note to prospective Friends of Petropoulos: Next time, invest some time and money in finding a good PR firm to write a news release and include your own images. It gets your message out more effectively, and TSL can simply run it as a news piece.