Ahmadinejad Is Going to College

He’s been invited to speak at Columbia University.

I want to know who invited him, and why? Surely it can’t be just one guy saying, “Let’s invite the Ayatollah!” (Yes, I know Ahmadinejad is not the Ayatollah, but it’s funnier than “President of Iran!”) And how can it possibly be that a group of Ivory Tower Intellectuals (ITIs) think it’s kosher to invite the guy who’s people are actively trying to blow up US troops and destabilize Iraq? The same guy who’s denied the Holocaust, made blanket statements about wiping Israel off the map– you know who I’m talkin’ about, Willis!

What’s a real shame is the work that comes from Columbia is truly impressive, from a research standpoint. In the field of chemistry, there’s a few Priestly award winners. There’s Fields medal recipients there. Nobel laureates. The place is an intellectual powerhouse. And it’s clear that the ITI’s of Columbia don’t see any problem with inviting an Islamofacist to their home for a little chat.

Well, if you must ask, it’s all about Bush Derangement Syndrome. The enemy of my enemy and all of that nonsense. Because Ahmadinejad regularly thumbs his nose at the US and Bush, the ITIs at Columbia are just wetting themselves with glee that they can get this guy to come speak and “speak truth to power”. (And, if you’re a conservative at Columbia, don’t bother coming. We don’t want your truth speaking to our power– the ITI administration.)

Jeff Goldstein over at Protein Wisdom sums it up in a quote I want on the wall of my office:

And because there is nothing more intolerant than value judgments, your value judgments will be shunned. In the name of tolerance!

His take on the subject is priceless.

And yes, I know the Littlest Mullah is going over to Ground Zero, and yes, it is an offense. But I’ll remind you of something– the US is a free country. We’re willing (although begrudgingly) to allow him access to Ground Zero because we are free. Can you imagine Bush trying to go to Iran without being captured, attacked, bombed? Never.

Jeb Bush Gets No Love

I’m not a huge fan of the Bush political dynasty. Bush 41 was no Reagan. Bush 43 is good on foreign policy, but he hasn’t been shrinking government or curbing spending. But Jeb Bush seems to have done reasonably well for Florida, and he’s certainly aided education by green-lighting three new medical schools (and it’s diluted the money for the Florida Medical School!, is the complaint).

Well, it’s enough to have the faculty senate veto his selection for an honorary doctorate, primarily because the Senate hasn’t felt he’s done enough for the school.

Sure, that’s it. It has nothing to do with him being a Republican and/or the brother of the Bu$$$$Hitler. No, of course not!

But they have given honorary doctorates to some left-leaning people without a problem, like Fredrico Mayor in 1992 (liberal? You betcha!) . But they’re trying to make it sound like a snub from a snub from Jeb. Riiiighhtt.

Did you know how many honorary degrees Edward Kennedy has? One. Two. Three (pre Chappaquiddick). Four(pre-Chap). Five. Jeb Bush? Zero.

So, let’s see. Get away with murder? Three honorary law degrees. Republican governor? Zero.

Hostile College Campuses!

I know, it’s a shock– SHOCK I tell you– that college campuses are hostile environments towards conservatives. And when you get a biased teacher with a captive audience, they’ll use that time to preach a political agenda. I think we’ve all had a teacher like that. Where I teach, I hear about it. I’m careful to avoid the comments altogether.

If only other teachers would follow my lead.

Among the allegations: Bryan reported President George W. Bush won the election “because people … can’t read,” and, regarding the death penalty: “First we line up everyone who can’t think and right behind them, anyone who’s ever voted Republican.”

…Bryan said she thought Cook had enjoyed the “debate” of the classroom, but Cook said she chose not to confront the teacher during class time. “If someone’s suggesting you just be killed you don’t sit down and say ‘let’s talk,’” Cook said.

Bryan’s perception is that she was the one who was hurt.

“I do see it as an insult, personally and professionally,” she said. Bryan told the Sentinel she believes Cook is making a “mountain out of a molehill.”

The department syllabus notes that English 102 teaches “critical thinking” as well as essay and persuasive writing.”

Now I’m willing to give Bryan the benefit of the doubt, to a certain degree. We see what happens when a college is reactionary to any student-induced scandal. But there had to be a precipitating incident, and conservatives have pretty tough skin as it’s politically correct to make Republicans the butt of your jokes. Try it with the other side and you’re likely to get crickets. (For example, try this joke at your next Faculty Senate session: Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: That’s not funny!)

My biggest problem here is that it was an introductory English class. Why should politics or jokes about politics be brought up at all? If it’s a Political Science course, sure, one expects it. But English?

How are you shaping your future leaders?

Charles Murray has a thought-provoking piece over at the Opinion Journal. He’s concerned about the education system– actually, the education system for the intellectual elite. He’s afraid, and rightly so, that he intellectuals in our classrooms are not being challenged and that they are not learning some of the best life lessons out there– what it’s like to lose.

Charles fashions the idea that the brilliant among us, about 10% of the population he estimates, are never challenged growing up, so we get a few million intellectuals who are condescending and intolerant of the less intelligent. It’s hard to argue. In my classes I see the many of the students that he’s talking about. These students are those seeking to become doctors, scientists, criminal investigators, rocket scientists, biochemists, medicinal chemists, pharmacists.

And I am appalled at just how lazy these kids can be.

I know they are smart. Their test scores coming into my class are exceptional. But when they land in my class and I assign weekly reading and homework, I am treated to shoddy work. Then I am hammered on evaluations for “not giving partial credit on homework”. What’s worse is that I give one or two tough (but not that tough) problems on the homework, and many of the students just give up. Others complain that it’s “too hard”. Only a handful respect the challenge and go on to solve the problem, and fewer then come to my office hours for help solving the problem. And then I get students writing “he doesn’t make us learn” on evaluations. It’s frustrating.

Many are coming up through an elementary and secondary education system that doesn’t want to fail students. We hate to see people fail. But I think we can all agree that the best lessons learned in life were from times we failed. When I am working on research, if a system fails, it provides a wealth of information just because it didn’t work. In my graduate work, my entire project was a failure, and that’s not from lack of trying. Was I denied a Ph.D.? No. Why? Because I redoubled my efforts to attempt to solve our research problem. The Ph.D. recognizes that I know my field, not that I succeeded in my research project. I’ve seen people succeed in their research projects then stumble into a review committee not knowing the basics of their field. It’s embarrassing.

Applying the same ideas to the undergraduates I teach now, I understand the value of the “tough love” teaching approach. If someone doesn’t know their subject, then there is no reason to pass that student. Hard work is nice, fine, but if I’m training someone who’s pre-medical, then do I really want to be putting a borderline student into situations where he’s cutting others open? Or assigning them medicines they really don’t understand?

The major problem, as I see it, is that the K-12 years, for the smart, are not challenging. The K-12 programs are trying to get as many kids to graduate with an H.S. diploma as possible. The teachers (God love them) work their asses off to make sure the marginal are not marginalized. Struggling students are encouraged to succeed. But if that teacher is spending more time with the struggling, then who is spending time with the average and the gifted? What’s worse is that to make sure more students pass, standards have been lowered. I know for a fact that subjects I took in H.S. are not teaching the material I learned. Pre-calculus is no longer covers the natural log, for example. Writing is suffering as well. Students, supposedly the best and brightest, are handing in reports that have fifth-grade comprehension problems associated with them. Students can’t critically communicate the data learned in a laboratory, and that’s a monstrous failure at the secondary education level. Few can write well. But a strong majority cannot communicate in a written fashion.

It can be argued that students do not have technical writing skills coming into college. That’s fine. I agree. But I’m not talking about technical writing skills. I’m talking about sentence structure. I’m talking about misspellings. Hell, I know for a fact these kids are using MS Word, and that program is kind enough to underline in red common misspellings. But the students are so lazy they don’t correct the misspellings. These kids are sophomores in college and they can’t do a 5 minute proofread of their laboratory reports. I’m supposed to evaluate and hone technical writing skills, but when I spend an extra 20 minutes correcting misspellings, capitalization errors, punctuation errors, grammatical errors– it’s more than I can stand. I know for a fact these students have been writing essays for at least 10 years. Hasn’t anyone taken them aside and compared their paper to that of a fifth grader?

So, I’m off on a rant. Excuse me. But it’s frustrating on my end. As a faculty we are seeing an overall decline in the quality of our students from a statistics standpoint. What’s worse is that I know kids today are smarter than kids 100 years ago. But the kids 100 years ago were living in a pre-WWI era. Many struggled through hardships and they didn’t have the luxuries of life showered upon them. Few had manufactured toys. A doll was considered a prized possession. Now kids get “Bratz” complete with the Jay-Z “Big Pimpin‘” package or a cell phone that can play pirated music, take snapshots, and download porn while sitting in class.

Our best and brightest are not being challenged, and I can only wonder what the future generations hold when they reach positions of responsibility.

Lindsay Lohan’s Publicist says: Lindsey’s not illiterate, her blackberry is.

Seriously.

Obviously they don’t teach how to proofread in publicist school.

The Great Democrat Tax Boondoggle

In the campaign rhetoric leading up to the Great Indecision of ‘06, the Democrats promised to roll back the “tax cuts for the rich” and offer “tax cuts aimed at the middle class”. The American people responded with a thunderous, “What?” as they marched off to their local alcohol-dispensing establishments to drink away their miserable decision to replace one sucky political party with another.

And now we see the promises of politicians coming to light. The Washington Times is reporting that the Democrats are offering tax cuts! Permanent tax cuts! Hooray, right?

Well, according to the story:

Democrats have long attacked President Bush for the historic tax cuts he ushered through Congress during his first term and have promised to reverse at least some of them.

So, they are reversing a global tax cut. Sounds like a tax increase. But wait, here’s the good news:

Included in their “Six for ‘06″ platform that they say helped them win majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats promised to: “Make college tuition deductible from taxes, permanently.”

Huh? What? That’s a “tax cut”? That’s only a tax cut if you’ve got a child going to college. So it’s a very specific tax cut. It does nothing to help the single, the elderly, those with children under the age of 18, those with children not classified as dependents above 18, and young adults who are going to college but are claimed as dependents by their parents.

Not to mention the fact you have to dole out the cash for college first, and then you get to deduct a part of it next year from your taxes.

Bush’s tax cut was across the board. We even got a small amount of a refund (which caused numerous heart attacks and fainting spells across the country when the government actually gave back some of its tax revenue). Of course, we soon descended into deficit, but in Bush’s defense, we were attacked, and we did pursue two different and prolonged military conflicts, something that’s a healthy drain on the economy.

But the Democrat tax cut isn’t a tax cut. It’s a scholastic incentive. And it’s a “tax cut” only for the four or five years your kid goes to college. What’s worse is that it removes the pain from paying for college. Let me explain.

Everybody in this country gets to go to school, K-12, for “free”. (If you own property, it’s hardly “free”.) Now we’re edging towards making college “free” as well. That’s not a good idea.

At some point, young adults have to strike out on their own. If they are living off their parent’s buck continuously, they aren’t going to learn about investment, savings, budgeting, credit, and work ethic. College should be tough. You should strive to be in college. You shouldn’t treat it like 2-4 extra years of high school. People with college degrees should be standouts in our society. The easier it is to get a college degree, the lower the value of those college degrees. College degrees (B.S., B.A., and equivalent) will begin to approach a value comparable to that of a HS Diploma.

At 18, children in America enter the first year of their adulthood. The dedicated get scholarships, the smart go to college, the persevering get student loans, borrowing now to get a good paying job in the future. We do a disservice to all these gifted individuals when we dilute higher education and make it easier for other unqualified individuals to stumble through and get the same degree.

What should be done is dedication to making college tuition cheaper. Tuitions have been going up steadily around the country at public institutions. Instead of supporting the mission of the public university, lawmakers have been shelling out cash on their own pork-barrel projects. In the meantime, faculty go without raises, class sizes increase, and standards drop. If the “tax cut” goes through, it will just make things worse for the faculty and students because it will affect the quality of education.

Maya Angelou is a Dangerous Terrorist

Well, everyone’s calling everyone else terrorists nowadays, so let’s just call everyone a dangerous terrorist. I’m a dangerous terrorist. He’s a dangerous terrorist. She’s a dangerous terrorist. Wouldn’t you like to be a dangerous terrorist too?

But Angelou’s bout of terrorism comes from her autobiography. And some parents don’t want their kids subjected to dangerous terrorism:

Students at Fond du Lac High School read “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in sophomore advanced English classes.

But some parents have objected to passages that describe Angelou’s rape and subsequent unwanted pregnancy. About 80 people attended a meeting Tuesday at the school this week to discuss the book and the request to remove it.

School Superintendent Gregory Maass said the initial complaint came from one family. “We had a mother and father and student who questioned the book,” he said. “The high school provided the student with an alternative book.” The parents were not satisfied and asked for the book to be removed from the curriculum, Maass said.

I don’t know how you can object to someone’s autobiography– unless it is a bunch of meaningless tripe (Bill Clinton, I’m looking at you). More importantly, it’s about Angelou’s triumph over rape, which is a positive. The parents were probably objecting to the unwanted pregnancy bit. If they don’t want their child reading about it, then they certainly can get another book assigned, which was done in this case.

But to have the parents insisting on a change of curriculum is silly. They are the only objectors. If there were 20 sets of parents clamouring about an inappropriate book, then the curriculum should be examined.

Standardization of Colleges– How Dare They Touch the Ivory Tower!

John Seery over at the PuffingTons Host has a post where he blasts Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education, and her commission on “reforming” higher education. John’s in Higher Ed, a professor of political science, over at Pomona College, an outstanding liberal arts institute.

To summarize his post, where he completely misses the real problem, is that the Federal Gov’t should stay the hell out of higher education. I happen to agree.

John’s anger is delayed. It could have been seen that the architect of No Child Left Behind would eventually get to the No College Student Left Behind. Of course, this entire issue is an result of higher college costs, shifting demographics, and the gradual degredation of the college system here in the United States. John’s anger is directed at Mrs. Spellings. Instead, it should be directed at Jimmy Carter who helped establish the Department of Education, a bureaucratic behemoth that has grown out of control since its inception.

He also points the finger, naturally, at Bush, for No Child Left Behind, regardless of the fact that Teddy Kennedy was really pushing the bill. Remember, it was a bill approved by Congress back when the Republicans had a tenuous majority in the senate, unlike the 55-45 majority now. In fact, it passed the senate with an 87-10 vote. I think it is safe to say that No Child Left Behind has impacted, somewhat negatively, K-12 education in the United States. Putting a bigger bureaucratic standard on schools, with more administrators watching over the teacher’s shoulders, is a burden that our overworked and underpaid educators really do not need.

The Department of Education was threatened with destruction by Reagan, but embraced by Bush 41 and Clinton. Now it appears that the department is starting to insert itself into elementary and secondary education, and the sights have been set on higher education.

My question: who’s brilliant idea was it to have states and local areas pay for schools for their children, then give the oversight of those schools to the Feds? Isn’t that just a monumental screw-up? And now they want to do the same thing with Higher Education? Another pervue of the States?

I knew this would happen with the Department of Education. The Feds can’t stand not having complete control over thier pet projects, so the best idea to them is to assimilate these schools under a Federal umbrella while still making the states and local people pay for the Federal recommendations.

It’s a horrible system. It’s no surprise that it’s the brainchild of George Bush and Teddy Kennedy. In fact, Teddy should get drunk, take NCLB for a date and drive off a bridge with it.

Can we please stop increasing the size of government? Do we really need to fix things through government centralization?

So, John, stop fuming over George Bush and recognize the real threat the D of Ed poses. Dismantle the Department of Education, let the states regulate their schooling, from elementary ed to higher ed.