CMC Government

09/22/2026

At Claremont McKenna College, the Dreier Roundtable is holding an op-ed contest.

09/21/2026

Candace Valenzuela is an alum of Claremont McKenna College.

09/19/2026

On September 16, Claremont McKenna College alum Sean Elsbernd '97 shared insights about his career in San Francisco politics and offered valuable advice to students interested in public service careers. He also highlighted how the Rose Institute of State and Local Government report, "Re-Assessing San Francisco’s Government Design: Is City Hall Well-Structured to Meet the Current Crisis?" directly influenced several propositions that will appear on the San Francisco ballot this November.

09/19/2026

Helena Bottemiller Evich is an alum of Claremont McKenna College.

What farm bill and food safety politics tell us about our deteriorating legislative branch.

09/18/2026

For a college without a journalism major, Claremont McKenna College produces a lot of journalists. See the list (and please let me know if you spot errors or omissions -- JJP).

CMC Alums in Journalism by jpitney | Sep 18, 2026 | Uncategorized | 0 comments A list in progress (updated September 18, 2026) Kahani Malhotra ’27 — CalMatters College Journalism Network Fellow. Nate Weisberg `24 — editor, Washington Monthly Chandler Presson Pibl `21— Interiors Market Editor...

09/17/2026

Ellie Lerner is an alum of Claremont McKenna College.

When political idealism bleeds into political absolutism.

09/16/2026

Richard Johnson is an alum of Claremont McKenna College. He teaches in our Washington Semester Program. POLITICO quotes him today:

Richard Johnson, OpenAI’s national security risk mitigation lead, said the company’s support for the legislation parallels its thinking around AI cybersecurity. “We need to be worried both about the safety and the risk side, but we also need to be looking at the opportunities for getting the tools into the hands of the defenders,” he told POLITICO...

Johnson told POLITICO that data and standards addressed in the bills are essential for developing better methods of evaluating how increasingly powerful models may impact biosecurity. “We need to constantly be able to measure capabilities and risk, and then be able to compare where we are in that stage to everything else that’s happening in the industry,” he said...
Johnson said such legislation would help enable AI research focused on better understanding what the pace of development means for biosecurity. “We need to make sure that we’re understanding what the capabilities are and make sure that we don’t move so fast that we’re getting ahead of our ability to know how these things could be used and what they could do,” he said.

09/16/2026

Chad McIlroy and Jacob Smagula are alumni of Claremont McKenna College and the Washington Semester Program.

We are living through a new wave of lunar exploration, one quite different from the “flags and footprints” ethos of the Cold War expeditions. This time, the goal is lunar permanence, and the technologies required to stay on the Moon are, almost incidentally, many of the same technologies needed ...

09/15/2026

Last night, Sally Field won an Emmy for her performance in "Remarkably Bright Creatures," and thanked the author: Claremont McKenna College alum Shelby (Johnson) Van Pelt.

If you're seeking ways to connect with working television industry professionals, both in front of and behind the camera, joining our organization offers you unparalleled access, benefits and opportunities.

09/13/2026

Shiv Parihar at the Claremont Independent:

Professor Ioannis Evrigenis, director of Claremont McKenna College’s Open Academy, viewed the aftermath of the Kirk assassination as an opportunity to set CMC apart from other schools in its dealings with free speech. He told the Independent that it was “evident that students, in particular, were shocked both by the event itself and their peers' reaction to it online, and that it was necessary to provide an opportunity to process what had happened and express their concerns.” After the assassination, the Open Academy hosted a lunch forum on the dangers of political violence at CMC's Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. Dozens of students attended.

“The discussion that took place was thoughtful,” Evrigenis commented, “and it allowed students, faculty, and staff to see how many others had been affected by the assassination and its aftermath, and hear what they were thinking.” He told the Independent he believes the Open Academy’s quick response time was an asset that “made it possible to have such opportunities to reflect on consequential events…keeping it as productive as possible.”

Many CMC students share Evrigenis’s assessment that the College’s speech climate is strong, as indicated by consistently high rankings in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual college free speech rankings. Some disagreed. A conservative freshman told the Independent that while “I chose [CMC] because of its highly rated free speech index,” reactions to the Kirk assassination’s anniversary were “deeply alarming.” This student found it “shocking to see an allegedly educated student body abandon basic human decency simply because they disagree with someone's politics.

A year after Charlie Kirk was murdered in front of thousands of onlookers at a debate event at Utah Valley University, the assassination continues to divide the Claremont Colleges. The anniversary of the murder prompted celebrations on campus and online, which drew national attention on X. Students....