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The Jury's in at Claremont

A Los Angeles County jury yesterday convicted Kerri Dunn, a Claremont McKenna College professor, of insurance fraud and filing a police report after an incident in which Dunn vandalized her car with racist slogans and then claimed anti-"diversity" students committed the crime. Before the facts of the incident were clear, the Claremont administration staged massive pro-"diversity" rallies; once Dunn's lying was revealed, the college placed her on paid leave.

At the time, Stanford sociologist Lee Ross said that regardless of who vandalized Dunn's car, "doing this may actually have accomplished some of her goals, if her goal was to make people feel that racism was present and that there was danger of white backlash." He continued, "Sometimes people invent facts because they believe that the conclusion that it would lead people to is true."

This is the educational philosophy of some extreme pro-"diversity" groups nationally, notably the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which argues that working-class and middle-class students need a college education designed to purge them of their ingrained sexist and racist beliefs. It's nice to see this line of thinking didn't carry the day in the jury room.

Posted on Thursday, August 19, 2004 at 10:28 AM | Comments (3) | Return

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