What on Earth Is Going on at the Claremont Colleges?

The five undergraduate Claremont Colleges, located about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, are famous for their elite U.S. News rankings, their exclusive admissions policies, their sky-high tuition sticker prices, and their gorgeous campuses in the bucolic college town of Claremont adjacent to Southern California's spectacular San Gabriel mountains.

And every single one of the five, in just a few weeks, has turned into a simmering, occasionally boiling cauldron of ethnic self-pity, social-justice terrorism, whines about homework, and calls for the abolition of free speech. All of it passively accepted by complacent administrators.

Let's start with Claremont McKenna College, supposedly the "conservative" one of the five, where "West Coast Straussians" are said to rule. Not so on April 6, when about 250 #BlackLivesMatter protesters—unimpeded by the administration—blocked the entrances to a speech by conservative pro-police author Heather Mac Donald, forcing Mac Donald to livestream her talk from a nearly empty room. So far there has been no attempt by college officials to identify the bullying students, much less punish them.

That's Claremont McKenna (annual tuition and fees, $47,395). But then there's Pomona College (tuition and fees, $49,005), flagship of the Claremont group. On April 7, the day after the Mac Donald fracas, Pomona's president, David Oxtoby, had written an email reiterating his campus's commitment to free speech and academic freedom as essential to the "search for truth" that is part of a university's mission. On April 17 a student group at Pomona issued a series of demands that included barring from the campus speakers like Mac Donald ("a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live"), taking "action against" the editorial staff of the conservative student-run Claremont Independent for daring to cover the McKenna fracas, and issuing an apology for Oxtoby's email. The students stated:

Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of "subjectivity vs. objectivity" as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. … This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.