At Claremont McKenna College, where I am a student, an email recently invited the entire campus to a speaker series entitled “Moving towards Equality: Forty Years since Stonewall—Looking at the Accomplishments of the Gay Rights Movement and the Challenges Ahead.”
Few Claremont students had heard of the Stonewall Inn. The New York City bar was the site of a protest in 1969 against a police raid; that demonstration is considered the start of the gay rights movement. The email told students that speakers for this series included RuPaul Charles, a famous drag queen; Cleve Jones, a professional gay activist; and Dan Choi, a U.S. infantry officer committed to ending the current Armed Forces policy toward gays known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
It’s all right for Claremont to host a big event to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Inn raid. But that commemoration stands in stark contrast to the school’s indifference to the twentieth anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the wall separating East and West Germany was unarguably one of the most significant events of the last century, but the school has no event or speaker to discuss its implications.
That tells you a lot about priorities on the modern American college campus.
The Claremont Colleges, of which Claremont McKenna is a part, devote substantial attention to—and support of—gays. In fact, homophobic incidents have been fabricated just to make it seem that gays are under attack and therefore in need of special protection. For example, the Student Life, the newspaper of Pomona College (part of the Claremont group of colleges), reported a supposed hate crime against the Queer Resource Center, but subsequent investigation revealed the “attack” as nothing other than some drunken students dispensing a fire extinguisher nearby. And in 2003, the left-leaning newspaper the Claremont Port Side retracted a story that accused professor emeritus Harry V. Jaffa of saying that homosexuals should be shot after he threatened a lawsuit to clear his name. (Those who know Jaffa well knew that he would never say such a thing.)
Last year, following the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which recognized marriage as a relationship between a man and woman, David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, sent out an email encouraging students to join him in “expressing support for those who feel negatively affected by the passage of this measure.” Activist students disrupted dining hall lunches and dinners across campus decrying as “unacceptable” Proposition 8’s definition of marriage. Later, some even tried to disinvite Kenneth Starr, dean of Pepperdine Law School, from speaking at Pomona College because he defended Proposition 8. (The event went on anyway, and there was a tasteful protest outside.)
Compare this lavish attention to gay rights forty years after Stonewall to the silence surrounding the Berlin Wall.
November 9 marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first step in the collapse of communism across Europe. Despite the demolition of the Wall, more than a billion people still languish in corrupt and nominally communist regimes. They include some international students who will have much less freedom when they return to their native countries than they enjoy in the United States.
There is a museum at Checkpoint Charlie, located on the old border between West and East Berlin. The displays show the extent to which East Germans would go in their efforts to be free: Boyfriends rescued girlfriends by hiding them in their cars; makeshift hot air balloons whisked their occupants up and away to freedom.
Those stories are no more familiar to Claremont students than is the Stonewall Inn, but you’ll never hear about them at the Athenaeum (our center for public lectures).
I don’t know if any students at Claremont have family members who escaped from East Germany, but I know that some have families who waited in bread lines in Ukraine or endured the pink ration cards in India. Some students’ families started over from scratch when the Vietnamese government took their property and forced them out onto boats. Millions of people around the world have suffered as a result of socialism and communism.
Yet the Athenaeum continues to bring speakers who apologize for some of the evils inflicted by communism. One was Bruce Cumings, author of North Korea: Another Country and an apologist for North Korea. When he spoke here, he compared the treatment of blacks on the south side of Chicago to the gulags of North Korea.
Unique among national colleges, Claremont McKenna (formerly called Claremont Men’s College) was founded to help train men in political philosophy, public affairs, and economics. Founder George C. S. Benson wanted the school to impart an education that would imbue its students with a “deep sense of the values of American life.”
Tolerance for people who are different is one of those values. But you might think the school would also pay attention to the importance of freedom in general and particularly to great events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately, the academic culture celebrates only some kinds of freedom.