10 minute read
Letter
to the editors: Letter from the editors:
The following letter was sent via email to TSL editors on Feb. 22. A similar email was sent to the Pitzer College community on March 1.
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To the Editor,
On behalf of the Pizer College Administration and Trustees, I would like to correct recent comments regarding the College and its employees that were recently published in TSL in a news article and an opinion piece.
Comments in TSL allege that the College has taken actions “in an attempt to discourage support for the newly-formed union.” This is not true. The facts are that the College has expressly agreed in writing to remain neutral. In August 2022 we voluntarily recognized the union. Since then, we have been engaged in good faith negotiations, not in any way to discourage support, but to reach a mutually agreeable collective bargaining agreement.
Other comments allege that Pitzer fired two employees at Bon Appétit for their support of the union. This is not true. The facts are that the workers referenced were not employees of the College, and Pitzer could not have fired them. The article also reports that “Pitzer began subcontracting workers through [Bon Appétit] after Pitzer staff went public with their union campaign last spring as an attempt to exclude new workers from the union.” This is not correct. Pitzer has had the same contractual relationship (and related employment practices) with Bon Appétit for years.
The College has been portrayed as uncaring of employees. In fact, Pitzer College cares greatly about the welfare of every one of our employees. To cite one recent and very important case in point, during the COVID-19 shutdown, unlike many colleges and universities across the country, Pitzer did not lay off any employees, despite the fact that many were no longer able to perform their duties due to the campus closure. Instead, Pitzer reduced the wages of our highest-paid workers, such as College administrators, and increased wages for our lowest-paid workers to help them get through the pandemic. This action cost the College millions of dollars at a time of great financial uncertainty, but we did it out of concern for the welfare of our most vulnerable employees—an action entirely consistent with our shared core values.
Pitzer College will continue to do right by its employees.
Jill A. Klein Interim President
In response to Jill Klein
On Feb. 10, TSL published a news article on the three Unfair Labor Practice charges filed by UNITE HERE! Local 11 against Pitzer College and Bon Appétit Management Company (BAMCO). Twelve days later, Pitzer’s Interim President Jill Klein responded with a letter to the editor that critiqued comments included in the article.
We would like to thank President Klein for pointing out two factual errors in the article. Firstly, the dining hall workers that were fired were employed by BAMCO, not Pitzer directly.
Secondly, we want to correct a quote from Natasha Wong PZ ’22 that we misparaphrased. The statement included in the article previously read: “According to UNITE HERE! Local 11 representative Natasha Wong PZ ’22, Pitzer began subcontracting workers through BAMCO after Pitzer staff went public with their union campaign last spring as an attempt to exclude new workers from the union.”
Pitzer has maintained a subcontracting relationship with BAMCO to manage their dining hall staff, since before unionization efforts began, according to both Klein and Wong have told TSL. However, we’d like to clarify that Wong alleged that BAMCO’s scope of responsibility has widened after Pitzer’s Union campaign. Prior to the campaign, Pitzer hired the dining staff and contracted BAMCO to manage the dining staff. However, after the campaign, Pitzer allegedly tasked BAMCO with hiring and managing dining staff. On behalf of UNITE HERE! Local 11, Wong and the ULPs allege that adding on hiring to BAMCO’s responsibilities was an attempt to disqualify workers hired under BAMCO from joining the Pitzer Union.
Whether or not Pitzer and BAMCO changed hiring practices following the start of the union campaign remains in dispute and TSL was not provided with documentation to prove either side.
TSL regrets these errors and the article has since been updated with correct information. We hold ourselves to the highest possible journalistic standard. In that aim, we strive to diligently fact check every story we publish to the best of our ability. We are grateful for this opportunity President Klein has given to correct our mistakes and hold ourselves accountable.
At the same time, we would be remiss to not acknowledge the ambiguity and limited information available to students and our journalists to find the truth about Pitzer’s hiring practices. Prior to publishing the article, TSL reached out to both Pitzer and BAMCO’s Department of Communications for clarification on Pitzer’s hiring practices and offered a chance to preemptively correct any misinformation.
Our writers were met with very little transparency from both administrations, with no mention of the corrections that were presented in President Klein’s letter. We want to exercise good faith and acknowledge that it’s plausible these concerns were brought to our attention as soon as they happened, but we can speak for our entire staff when we say that we hope for a more transparent relationship with all 5C administrations to avoid any misinformation in the future.
We want to reaffirm our commitment to TSL’s ethics statement: “We aim to seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently and be accountable and transparent.” As such, the student journalists of TSL will continue to prioritize truth above all else.
Sincerely, Hannah Weaver, Editor-in-Chief, Averi Sullivan, Managing Editor, Gerrit Punt, Managing Editor
Professor Koonin’s climate talk was misleading nonsense — here’s why
Let us set the scene for you real quick. Stanford’s Hoover Institution fellow and NYU Professor Steven Koonin was the guest speaker at Claremont McKenna College’s beloved Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum (the Ath). The room was packed with our peers, all busy chatting about their LinkedIn profiles, comparing Deloitte-branded merch and complaining about 50-degree weather. We expected nothing less.
But for those of you who aren’t familiar with Professor Koonin’s work or his talk at the Ath, we’ll fill you in. Koonin is a theoretical physicist with quite the résumé — he taught theoretical physics at Caltech for 30 years, then joined BP as their chief scientist. He would go on to serve under both Obama and Trump and for numerous federal advisory boards.
In 2021, he published “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters,” the book that was the subject of his talk at the Ath.
But despite the density of his work, Koonin’s talk can be boiled down to two simple parts. The majority of it consisted of statements along the lines of “it’s not as bad as we think it is” or “we’re doing better than we were 100 years ago even with climate change.”
Koonin even said — verbatim — “Climate alarm robs youth of their optimism.” He accompanied these statements with various factoids from recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and plenty of graphs from other sources. The second part of the talk was him showing a set of predictions and broad positions he defends — with actual statements like “cancel the climate crisis.” His solution? We should develop more nuclear and renewable power and we shouldn’t prevent low income countries from industrializing.
So, what did people in the room think of the talk? From the 15 or so people we heard from, the review was surprisingly positive. While there were some critical comments, many of the questions that were asked of him were prefaced with some statement to the effect of “thank you so much for your talk, it really opened my eyes.”
Now would be a good time to give a little more context on Prof. Koonin. Remember his book?
Yeah, so he got a ton of criticism for that book from the broader scientific community. For starters, he isn’t a climate scientist — he’s a theoretical physicist. His education in climate science was something he got at BP — that’s British Petroleum. The book has been summarized by dozens of actual climate scientists and science historians, led by science misinformation expert Naomi Oreskes, as a “scientifically empty” document that “cherry-picks and misrepresents outdated material to downplay the seriousness of the climate crisis.”
Having this context beforehand, we saw that Koonin’s flaws were on full display during his presentation.
For instance, he claimed that “[a]nybody that tells you that renewables will be cheap is just not paying attention to the data,” while showing a slide only of current renewable prices, ignoring that solar prices are going down exponentially. When asked about IPCC projections of sea level rise, he vaguely objected without citing any conflicting projections, merely asserting that the IPCC’s numbers didn’t make sense in light of historical data.
But we’re not just here to dunk on a misinformed talk or to judge students for believing his schtick. There’s something much more interesting — and insidious — going on here.
For the first 40 minutes of his talk, Koonin adopted the aesthetic and discourse style of a good-faith academic, displaying graphs upon graphs and flaunting his impressive credentials to give the impression that he’s some supergenius who just disproved all of modern climate science. Koonin portrays himself as the enlightened, objective scientist rescuing his audience from the other guys’ politicized rhetoric, then uses this persona to sell dangerous policies of climate inaction.
When theoretical physicist Steven Koonin spoke at cMc last week, rowan Gray cM ‘26 and Gabriel Konar-Steenberg PO ‘23 weren’t impressed — they were appalled.
And we wouldn’t blame people for falling for it — we’re taught, for mostly good reasons, to trust people with big résumés, fancy figures and long words. We’re sure we would have been pretty swayed if we hadn’t already known the context.
And that’s exactly what is so dangerous and irresponsible about Koonin’s brand of climate denialism.
The kind of discourse he engages in is toxic. He made ill-defined claims with cherry-picked data, planted seeds of unjustified doubt in a room full of change-makers and then weaseled out of having to answer for it. This betrays the scientific ideals Koonin claims to champion. Koonin’s abuse of the scientific ethos and baseless attacks on actual science makes room for others to claim that there is legitimate disagreement among scientists and for the media to portray the issue as having two equally valid sides. The ultimate impact is powerful — trust in scientists, journalists and other institutions is quickly declining. What else are we supposed to do?
For starters, c’mon CMC. We know you can do better when picking speakers. This isn’t about stifling legitimate disagreement — this is about bad-faith presentations that seek to mislead.
But what about us? We can start by learning more. STEM isn’t only useful for high-paying jobs — it’s an integral part of the liberal arts, crucial for understanding the modern world, no matter one’s place in it. There are courses that tackle these exact issues head-on, such as the recent offering “Climate Science and Human Behavior,” jointly taught by a Pomona College psychology professor and a Harvey Mudd College chemist. And there are plenty of free online resources for those who are not able to take advantage of dedicated college coursework.
It’s also crucial that we work on our understanding of public discourse. TSL itself is not immune from the impulse to accidentally amplify misinformation. The initial news article on Koonin’s visit echoes a bizarre claim about graphite being “fancy” and expensive — it’s not more than a few dollars per pound — and, more importantly, fails to mention the overwhelming scientific consensus against Koonin’s claims. It is an unfortunate reality of our world that we are constantly bombarded by misleading content, and it’s absolutely critical that we notice toxic discourse when it shows up.
The climate crisis may inspire a sense of hopelessness. Indeed, this is one of Koonin’s arguments against talking about it too much (though we’d argue that his response to a student who asked about the mass extinction humans are causing — that we should keep going because we must value human lives over the environment — isn’t cheering anyone up either). But not all is lost.
The sooner we as a society wholeheartedly dedicate ourselves to the climate transition, the more harm we can avoid. Even individual action makes a difference — multiple studies show that taking steps in your own life to be more sustainable helps us all see the situation as the emergency it really is, rather than absolving more powerful actors of their responsibility.
People who were told that 30 percent of Americans had recently changed their habits to eat less meat were twice as likely to order a meatless lunch, and the odds of someone installing solar panels on their house goes up with every other person in their neighborhood who does so. At the very least, there’s another talk you can go to. Remember Naomi Oreskes? She’s coming to Harvey Mudd on April 17. We hope to see you there.
Rowan Gray CM ’26 is from Sharon, Massachusetts. He wants you to know that all Oxford commas in this piece were violently deleted by his copy editors.
Gabriel Konar-Steenberg PO ’23 is a computer science major from Minneapolis, Minnesota planning to enter the renewable energy field. He firmly believes that the center block should never be taken in a game of Jenga.
Jasper & JJ’s Crossword: Give it a rest
instructions
23. Stars in bright states 24. Response to “t’es bien?”
25. She sings “Hello” and “Oh My God”
29. Like two, four and six 30. D.C. area known for dignitaries 32. With 46-down, Iowan capital 33. “Dagnabbit!”
34. Had as crudités
35. Attribute in a Chicago nickname 36. ‘The windows to the soul’
37. Hawaiian hellos 40. Apollo who sings “Evergreen”
41. Poet Scott-Heron
44. It makes a project feel complete
46. Pfizer vaccine’s tech.
47. “___ Frutti” (Little Richard song)
48. State highway (abbr.)
49. Castle defenses
50. Kindergarten teacher’s reminder, perhaps — or elements of 20, 30 and 44-across
53. Gambles
Aptly-named “Ratatouille”
59. Successful outcome
60. Feeling relaxed
61. “You’ll regret it”
62. Oakland-to-Berkeley dir.
63. Repeated lack of 59-across
Down.
1. Like Ophelia, in Act IV
2. Scold
3. Medications’ ingredients
4. “You got our support!”
5. Fixes up an essay
6. Philosopher Descartes
7. “Absolutely”
8. Gaynor who sings “I Will
Survive”
9. Spot (someone)
10. They change your locks?
11. Like the median U.S. senator
12. Nice words
13. Hermana de la padre
21. Digital ___ (remote worker)
22. Egg-themed holiday
26. “To ___ is human”
27. Mauna ___
28. “Gross!”
30. Accounting firm founder
31. Dentist’s instruction
33. Join a conference call
35. “Why are you upset?”
36. Host of an in-person show
37. Toward the stern
38. Lucy in “Chicago” and “Kill
Bill”
39. LAX alternative
40. Surpassed
41. Thanks for a paleta
42. Extreme
43. Pulls in a steer
45. Kind of story for Superman
46. See 32-across
49. “___ bene!” (Very good!)
51. Stitched (together)
52. Meat from a calf
53. Like “Frozen II,” especially compared to “Frozen”
54. ___-friendly (like LED lights)
55. The “T” in SOHCAHTOA
