KF is there, and dealing with the fallout.
Thanks for the plug, ogged. Everybody here is feeling a bit fragile right now, trying really hard to find productive ways of dealing with the news. It's important to note, of course, that the prof in question has denied the police's accusations, and she's still got that whole assumption-of-innocence thing working in her favor.
That said, we're all more than a little distressed, and worried about the backlash this might produce against the kinds of pro-diversity work that got set in motion last week. O'Connor and her cronies are just the leading edge of the "told you so" group, who are using this as proof that there is no racism here, and that anyone who claims there is is lying or acting out of some craven ideological impulse.
It's profoundly dispiriting, to say the least.
The cultural whitey righty reaction to this has been deeply shameful, I think we can all agree. Southern California is the most reactionary area of the country, and has been for a long time. The Claremont schools are the only remnant of Straussianism in the academy, and it doesn't strain my particular credulity to imagine a deeply racist climate at a college populated by overprivileged trustafarians and their slightly more ambitious young Republican kin.
Having taught till last spring at CMC, where the incident occurred, I'll add my two cents.
If the (visiting) prof in question -- whom I don't know beyond saying hello at the faculty mailboxes during the year we overlapped -- did stage this event, that shows that this single individual is psychotically confused. And it *may* give (yet more) evidence for a thesis for which I argued while there: that the college does not invest sufficiently in non-t-track searches (not that there aren't some excellent visitors hired by accident!).
So -- again assuming the prof did wreck her own car -- I don't think the incident gives any evidence either (a) that the concern to create an inclusive social climate at the colleges is overblown or otherwise illegitimate, or (b) that racism at the colleges, or at CMC in particular, must have led her to do it, or is in some other way indirectly revealed through her act. It's important to worry about racism (and there were other incidents). And it's equally important not to let that worry override other worries -- e.g. about how effective (or just) it is to label someone, or an entire campus, racist simply because they lean conservative or libertarian.
In my time there I did not find CMC to be any more racist than any of the other colleges in Claremont, or than Kenyon and Bowdoin or the University of Michigan, where I'd formerly taught. What's different about CMC is that there are real conservatives on campus, both faculty and students. So those of us who are not conservative had real intellectual and institutional adversaries. This tended to create a slightly paranoid tendency among faculty on the left (or the non-right), since we really were confronted with a "vast right wing conspiracy" on campus: it was organized, it was well funded, it was powerful. But it was not uncivil or ultimately unreasonable. And it was certainly not racist. (Unless of course you think opposing affirmative action is necessarily racist.)