Something's Happenin', Mr. Jones
My latest L.A. Weekly column looks at the case of a certain Mr. Jones -- Andrew Jones. He's the former UCLA student (and certifiable wack job) who had been offering $100 to other students who would tape record or provide notes from the lectures of leftist professors.
Jones would then add the info to his website which exposes and documents what he argues is the commie take-over of American college campuses.
Some profs cried McCarthyism when the news of Jones' antics broke open last week. But is that, perhaps, a bit of an over-reaction? As I said, Jones is a right-wing loon. That aside, why should any professor fear having his or hers views publicly displayed and debated?
Anyway, after teaching university classes on and off for 25 years now, there have been many times when I would have paid $100 out of my own pocket to get some students to pay enough attention to take detailed notes!
Read the whole piece before sounding off, please.
January 26th, 2006 at 3:03 am
Here’s a little something for catharsis, Marc…
http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/
January 26th, 2006 at 3:11 am
And since Marc refuses to post his review of Brokeback Mountain, I guess we’ll have to make do with this:
http://16mmshrine.blogspot.com/2006/01/no-i-will-not-call-this-piece-bareback.html
January 26th, 2006 at 7:31 am
As a former UCLA student radical (60s, with a righteous repeat performance as a grad student in the 70s) I have to agree with the basic tenure of Marc’s LA Weekly piece. Those of us on the left have got a lot of work to do countering serious issues like the war in Iraq, the assault on the constitution, and so forth. We don’t have time for a lot of whining about “McCarthyism.” Any time remaining from fighting what the right is doing should be spent coming up with positive programs around bread and butter issues like health care coverage and economic and social justice.
People who have convictions should be willing to fight for them and accept that this is the price of being serious. The victims of McCarthyism during the late 40s and 50s are still trying to get us to feel sorry for them today, in books and films like The Front. They were supposed to be revolutionaries, for Chrissake, not whiners and moaners when the big bad government tries to suppress them.
January 26th, 2006 at 7:33 am
That’s basic tenor, not tenure, of course, but that slip just shows that I did read Marc’s piece before commenting.
January 26th, 2006 at 7:59 am
What did the professors have to worry about from that site? Even Ward Churchill couldn’t get fired.
If professors are so proud of their classes, then they should welcome review of themselves by someone outside of their protective cocoon. If they don’t, they might be hiding something–incompetence, uninvited liberal indocrination of students, or plain laziness…all protected by tenure. It seems as if most are like the old Soviet Union–putting up an Iron Curtain and a Berlin Wall to keep from being exposed and to keep students from being able to make informed choices.
It’s proper and fair that students should be able to know more about professors before signing up for their classes. If I had known that my biology teacher was only going to talk about WWII all semester, I would have looked for a history teacher who would talk about biology.
In addition, taxpayers need to know if the state and the universities are being good stewards of the money extracted from them and if the money is being used for the originally stated and agreed-upon purposes. If professors want to rant about the ideals of socialism, then let the Democratic Party pay their salaries.
Also, journalists who pride themselves on uncovering stories should have welcomed an attempt by anyone to bring light to the performance of professors. Yet, because these professors were liberal or worse (if that’s possible), most journalists chose to shoot the messenger. We’ve seen similar attacks on John Stossel, who recently reported on the disasters in government schools. Such attacks on truth seekers are a disgrace to field of journalism.
Our schools are half of what they should be and could be. It’s about time that someone, even “right-wing wack jobs,” bring attention to that.
At risk to my untarnished reputation, I offer these sites, which provide more attention to problems with professors:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/contributors/MikeAdams/archive/
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200503240801.asp
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/index.jsp
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/Funniest.jsp
I didn’t see a place to evaluate the instructors at the USC Annenberg School of Communication, but we can start one.
Finally, and without further discussion, it’s time to end the policy of tenure.
January 26th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Mr. Jone may or may not be a whack-job (since I don’t know him I can’t say one way or the other), but I have no objection with class instruction being independently monitored. I’m getting my Masters in Education next month, and will be teaching high school social science. Public school teachers are very aware that parents can by law observe class lessons and procedures. Since many college students use electronic recorders to tape the presented lesson, I see no problem with an independent public review process, say posted on a blog, even if it’s biased one way or the other. As teachers, we can all benefit from the opinions and observations of those outside of our normal sphere of influence.
January 26th, 2006 at 10:38 am
I was a nightmare for my CSUN profs. Except for the biology department where it was reversed in a big way. It was the fall of 2000 and I had to take California poly sci since my Maine course didn’t count out here, [the same requirement that kept James Taranto of the WSJ from graduating to this day] and the prof. was a serious wingnut: Dr. Present. So much for the liberals, although they are there, in Chicano studies especially.
We argued incessently in a sea of student apathy, but with one exception, a particularly anglo religious student, the class sided with me and Al Gore. Present insulted everyone by race, cluelessness or anything else he could find. We had a deaf girl in class and I knew things were heating up when the entire signing team showed up to translate the class. I got thumbs ups from students around campus two years later. No easy task with 30,000 students. So yeah I hear ya.
January 26th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Marc, this piece was graced with so many witty double entendres that I’m not inclined to grapple with the thesis. “admire their tactics but dissent from their goals”, “What a wuss…More wusses!”, “is just a dick”. Great stuff to read.
About the “manicured cemetery” effect — here’s a thesis. New technological forces (internet, digital media, gaming, etc.) are, at the moment, more exciting and seem to hold more transformative power than conventional political activism as practiced by 68ers. We have seen the limits of the latter: indeed, you can hear the compost decaying on KPFK anytime. These new forces seem to allow us to play a win-win game, not engage in a power struggle as politics can be.
People who are by nature interested in societal transformations are drawn to play with these technologies — and, now as in ‘68, people who are not will focus on GPAs and climbing the meritocracy. Bill Clinton was a 68er too.
January 26th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
I’m not up on academia, but this idea of more transparency and dialogue between students and professors strikes me as a definite step in the right direction. Tenured professors in particular strike me as one of the most privileged and protected group of folks - other than children of the rich - in our society so this might keep them on their toes. Any professor who had both the teaching skills and mastery of their subject that should be the basic qualification for the job would have nothing to fear from this kind of exchange. It actually seems like an opportunity to advance both comprehension and student engagement. Of course, it would be subject to occasional abuse and would need some ground rules, but that’s also true of the current system.
January 26th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
Love the column, Marc…..particularly as one who—as you know—-has recently entered the university teaching fray (at UC Irvine).
“Tenured professors are allowed to slowly ossify and decompose, growing ever more detached from the reality around them. ..”
On that subject, here’s my most recent experience:
I’m teaching a journalism workshop called, “Crime and Consequences.” This means that the young darlings in my charge for 3 hours a week have to report and write about murder and mayhem-related issues.
With this in mind, I suggested to several of them that they contact professors at the University’s stellar Criminology, Law & Society dept, at their School of Social Ecology, as some of those tenured folks have specialties in the individual areas on which several of the students are presently reporting.
But when my newly enthused kids contacted these lofty folks—nearly to a person—the profs in the other dept. were shocked and horrified that an actual student—not their own— would have the temerity to e-mail or call. Most responded—if they responded at all—with the polite equivalent of “Go, away, kid. You’re bothering me.”
Yeah, yeah, I know. Everybody’s busy. But these were full time faculty members, and none of the requests were out of line, overly time consuming, or intellectually frivolous. Frankly, I found it all an appalling collective display of academic disengagement.
[Disclaimer. There ARE some people on the Social Ecology faculty whom I know personally, who would have responded, particularly if the kids had used my name. But, in these cases, they didn’t happen to be the ones with the relevant specialties. And it shouldn’t take a personal connection to get faculty to respond.]
Again, great column, Marc.
January 26th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Marc,
I want to respond to your statements entitled “Something’s Happenin’, Mr. Jones,” by sharing this e-mail:
The recent news that privacy is a thing of the past and that our life is now an OPEN BOOK is quite a disconcerting disclosure—we must now assume that e-mails are nothing more than postcards and internet searches mere fodder the for Fed’s rumination.
It all seems so Orwellian, but Orwell was writing about the fascists of the 1930’s; think how more efficient those fascists would have been if they only had access to 21st century technology.
DOCTOR, DOCTOR I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS—THAT’S BECAUSE I CUT OFF YOUR ARMS
Imagine turning on your computer, hearing it come to life with all its familiar little beeps; typing in a website, eagerly looking for information and only coming to a DEAD END. Each inquiry remains unanswered, until you feel as if you entered an intellectual cul-de-sac and the only exist out has been blocked by an intricate technical filtering regime.
This total censorship is buttressed by a complex series of laws and regulations that control all access to publications of materials online. While no single statute specifically describes the manner in which the state can carry out its filtering regime, a broad range of laws – including media regulation, protections of “state secrets,” controls on Internet service providers and Internet content providers, provide a patchwork series of rationales and, in sum, massive legal support for filtering by the state. T
he rights afforded to citizens as protection against filtering and surveillance in the constitution is considered inapplicable in this context.
This filtering regime appears to be carried out at various control points and also to be dynamic, changing along a variety of axes over time. This combination of factors leads to a great deal of supposition as to how and why there are filters in the Internet. Filtering takes place primarily at the backbone level of the network, though individual Internet service providers who implement their own blocking.
Major search engines filter content by keyword and remove certain search results from their lists. Similarly, major websites and service providers prevent posts with certain keywords or edit the posts to remove them.
Some keyword searches are blocked by gateway filtering and not the search engines. However all websites are now required by law to track Internet usage by customers and to keep correlated information on file for 60 days. As a further indication of the complexity of this filtering regime, there are instances where particular URLs are blocked but the domain is accessible, despite the fact that the source of content appeared consistent across the domain – suggesting that filtering may be conducted at a even a finer level. Moreover, Internet filtering continues to grow more refined, sophisticated, and more target specific.
This Internet filtering regime will become the most sophisticated effort of its kind because it is pervasive, sophisticated, and effective. It comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control. It involves numerous state agencies and thousands of public and private personnel.
It censors all content transmitted through multiple methods, including Web pages, Web logs, on-line discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and e-mail messages. It prevents access to a wide range of sensitive materials, and to any discussion about political dissent.
Citizens seeking access to web sites containing content related to politics, opposition political parties, or any anti-government movements will frequently find themselves blocked. While it is difficult to describe this widespread filtering system with precision, it is a method that imposes stringent controls on a citizens’ ability to view Internet content.
It’s ONLY A MATTER OF TIME– WILL IGNORANCE BE BLISS?
CAN GOOGLE BE GAGGED?
1. Google’s immortal cookie:
Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from using persistent cookies altogether. Now its years later, and immortal cookies are commonplace among search engines; Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them. This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don’t already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique ID number.
2. Google records everything they can:
For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as “IP delivery based on geolocation.”
3. Google retains all data indefinitely:
Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save.
4. Google won’t say why they need this data:
Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment.
5. Google hires spooks:
Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington.
6. Google’s toolbar is spy ware:
With the advanced features enabled, Google’s free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf, and yes, it reads your cookie too. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that’s only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google’s toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you connect to Google (which is many times a day). Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you’d like an updated version. But not Google. Any software that updates automatically presents a massive security risk.
7. Google’s cache copy is illegal:
Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S. copyright laws to the Internet, Google’s cache copy appears to be illegal. The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a “noarchive” meta in the header of every page on his site. Surfers like the cache, but webmasters don’t. Many webmasters have deleted questionable material from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages live merrily on in Google’s cache. The cache copy should be “opt-in” for webmasters, not “opt-out.”
8. Google is not your friend:
By now Google enjoys a 75 percent monopoly for all external referrals to most websites. Webmasters cannot avoid seeking Google’s approval these days, assuming they want to increase traffic to their site. If they try to take advantage of some of the known weaknesses in Google’s semi-secret algorithms, they may find themselves penalized by Google, and their traffic disappears. There are no detailed, published standards issued by Google, and there is no appeal process for penalized sites. Google is completely unaccountable. Most of the time Google doesn’t even answer email from webmasters.
9. Google is a privacy time bomb:
With 200 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S., Google amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those newly-commissioned data-mining bureaucrats in Washington can only dream about the sort of slick efficiency that Google has already achieved.
Here’s the issue when you start to worry about these things: first, the US acts like Big Brother, and conducts warrantless domestic surveillance; second, it decides to do widespread electronic monitoring. After that, they’d decide to go after the very obvious identifiable data such ISPs, web access logs and e-mails, and then they observe all ambiguous search queries. Eventually Google would turn this data over to the government and then the NSA would draw conclusions about U.S. citizens from this information. That chain of reasoning could already be a fait accompli!
Yesterday in the news, the US Government said it is taking legal action to gain access to Google’s vast database of internet searches in an historic clash over privacy.
The Bush Administration has asked a federal judge to order the world’s most popular internet search engine to hand over the records of all Google searches for any one-week period, as well as other closely guarded data. The California-based company is to fight the move.
The Government indicated that other unnamed search engines had already agreed to release the information, but not Google, which runs 46 per cent of all US web searches.
DOMESTIC TERRORIST: YOU, ME, HIM OR THE GAL DOWNS THE STREET?
Who will be considered a domestic terrorist? Is it the college student demonstrating against the war in Iraq? Is it a conservation group concerned about energy polices and global warming? Is it workers who try to organize a union? Is a pro-choice group trying to protect a woman’s right to choose? Is it citizens gathering at a town hall meeting trying to have Bush impeached?
A recent news story reported that a conservative alumni group dedicated to “exposing the most radical professors” at the University of California at Los Angeles is offering to pay students $100 to record classroom lectures of suspect faculty.
The Web site of the Bruin Alumni Association also includes a “Dirty Thirty” list of professors considered by the group to be the most extreme left-wing members of the UCLA faculty, as well as profiles on their political activities and writings.
So now even students and professors can’t express themselves freely and must be apprehensive; for fear that there will be repercussions for expressing their opinion.
What is college, if it is not a place where students can openly debate a multitude of ideas and political points of view?
Will U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales be the one to determine who is a DOMESTIC TERROIST—Only today Alberto Gonzales said in a letter: ”These NSA activities are lawful in all respects,” he subsequently released his Justice Department’s 42-page legal analysis documenting why it’s okay to spy on you.
I FEAR FOR THE FUTURE OUR CHILDREN WILL INHERIT
Our children will never know a time where there is no war or lack of fear from terror. Our government has placed us on a path and there is no turning back. Fear of terrorism will be with us for the rest of our lives and our children’s lives—and so there will never be a time when there will NOT be a need for surveillance.
If we apathetically disregard this first wave of warrantless domestic surveillance we are in effect, giving our stamp of approval and additional societal controls will follow. Where will it end? The “Rendition Program” allow people to be snatched off the streets, never to be heard of again. At Guantanamo Bay captives are kept indefinitely, and are not entitled to due process—will there ever be a time when U.S. Citizens will have this same fate. During the 1940’s there were Japanese Internment Camps in California, these U.S. Citizens were considered a threat, forced to abandon everything and lived in camps until World War II ended.
In Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s there were concentration and extermination camps for all those whom the government considered a threat. Among the first victims of persecution in Nazi Germany were political opponents–primarily Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to serve in the German army or take an oath of obedience to Adolf Hitler and consequently were also targeted.
The Nazis harassed German male
homosexuals, whose sexual orientation was considered a hindrance to the expansion of the German population. “Habitual” homosexuals were incarcerated in prisons; many were later remanded to concentration camps following the completion of their sentences.
The Nazis persecuted those they considered to be racially inferior. Nazi racial ideology primarily vilified Jews, but also propagated hatred for Roma (Gypsies) and Blacks. The Nazis viewed Jews as racial enemies and subjected them to arbitrary arrest, internment, and murder. Roma were also singled out on racial grounds for persecution. The Nazis viewed Poles and other Slavs as inferior, and slated them for subjugation, forced labor, and sometimes death. Jewish prisoners received the most brutal treatment in Nazi concentration camps.
Sixty years later we look back in dismay, and wonder how it could have happened. Perhaps it was so horrendous that no one in their right mind could have conceived of such a thing–but it did happen! And now is the time to think about, how much more efficient these fascists could have been if they had access to 21st century technology.
January 26th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Obviously the concern is that professors will be pilloried because of the content of their teaching, not their abilities to inspire students to develop capacities to think and reason, among other things. But it does seem fair to criticize even the most inspiring teacher if she teaches that 2+2=5.
It seems we have all been students, if not teachers, so have some insight into the issues. I know I ran afoul of the very unorganized professors’ organization at my law school when we created a committee of the student bar association that was charged with taking testimony of students who had been/were being subjected to sexual pressures by professors [so common at this school it was practically an element of the job description]. Even the 3 or 4 profs who did not engage in this perceived job benefit professed alarm that we were interfering with academic independence or invading privacy of “consensual” personal relationships or engaging in some sort of bad or anti-intellectual behavior.
Transparency seems to be way to go, so long as the teachers are assured that they are not subject to reprimand for teaching unpopular (as opposed to incorrect or unsubstantiated) material. There will always be a tension in a democratic society.
January 26th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
I’ve never heard of “social ecology” and I’m practically an ecology major. But in the science department which is different.
January 26th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Mark…. Yeah, it’s a strange term. Oh, well. Here’s a link to Irvine’s definition, such as it is.
http://www.seweb.uci.edu/about/
I don’t know about Irvine’s whole SE school, but their Criminology, Law and Society, department is kick ass.
(Excepting those annoying profs who wouldn’t help my kids.)
They’ve snatched all sorts of hot shot folks from Harvard, USC, UCLA, Rand and other places—but I mean people who are truly fine researchers and thinkers.
January 26th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
“Was charged with taking testimony of students who had been/were being subjected to sexual pressures by professors [so common at this school it was practically an element of the job description]”
Mr. Jurisprudence,
Please don’t ever interpret any of my legal contracts—your example about sexual harassment, indicates that your comprehension of the topic is totally RIDICULOUS.
We’re not discussing sexual harassment we’re discussing POLITICAL harassment, by right wing nut jobs who want to REPRESS FREEDOM OF SPEECH!
It’s also not a discussion about lazy tenured college professors—maybe we can discuss that topic next week—along with why college presidents make a $100, 000,000 a year.
January 26th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
Yes Rosedog that is the picture I formed when I first read the term. I’m not against it per se but with a human-centric approach you’d think they’d be more open to interaction? I mean that’s what ecology is, humans included or not. It’s much easier with fish and insects, but the work still centers on us in the end.
January 27th, 2006 at 12:25 am
The idea of surreptitiously recording or monitoring speech goes against the American grain. There needs to be a compelling justification or warrant for such dishonesty. When you record someone without her knowledge you are involved in a deception, which by itself distorts the meaning of the communication. Statements for the public record are, by custom, held to a different standard from those made confidentially, or from those made casually among friends, or from those made sem-publically, etc.
Plato touched on the subject by defining “tendencies of speech,” which in Po- Mo language can be rendered as “the situatedness”
of the speech. You might say one thing to an old friend, another thing to an old acquiatence and yet a third thing in a public forum. All of your statements might be different, yet all of them might be true, and possibly consistent. Do you talk to your Mom like you do in a job interview? No, you don’t.
It is unfair to record someone without her knowledge.
The conservative wing-nut under discussion severely overreached, probably as a result of his paranoia, as though the droning left-wing bores and bigots of American academe were about to bring down the the oldest, freest, richest democracy and republic in the history of the world. His counterparts on the left, crybabies all, invoked the once once magic word “McCarthyism.” Yawn.
What he should have done was make an announcement: “Beginning on date such-and such, you public employees of this public institution will be held to account. It is easy to talk your talk to a room full of 19 year olds who depend upon you for a grade, but let’s see you defend your pronoucements against your equals.”
The guy was dumb. He had a good thing going and he blew it.
Viva la Free Speech!
January 27th, 2006 at 11:43 am
No, I don’t think Jones is an individual “nut case. ” Both Jones and Horowitz are threats to academic freedom. Serious ones.
But first, what is academic freedom? According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) academic freedom means that professors have full freedom to research & publish without outside interference from legislatures, alumni, trustees, parents, ecclestical authorities, etc. AAUP also says that professors have full freedom to teach within the classroom but should also teach the subject involved.
This academic freedom, a product of the Englightenment, is the cornerstone of an open, democratic society along with freedom of speech, assembly, etc. Academic freedom is also directly responsible for the great flourishing in sciences and humanities in the last two centuries in the West.
Tim Auxter, President of the United Faculty of Florida, when arguing against Horowtiz’s socalled Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) adoption by the Florida state legislature said that the ABOR would harm academic freedom in Florida and “would undermine higher education in Florida” as well as “cause damage without providing any demonstrated benefit.” What’s wrong with Jones is that he gives amunition that could result in great harm to higher education at UCLA.
One needs to look at Woody’s argument that professors are “accountable” to taxpayers.. Taxpayers and state legislatures, of course, should know that their money is not spent on $800 staplers, of course and that money is not subejt to waste and corruption. But professors every step of their career deal with peer review. Every research & publication is subject to peer review.
But, Woody, if taxpayers & state legislators want to continue to have a good higher education system, they need to also support academic freedom–which means that professors can promulate theories, even controversial ones. Professors job is to follow their research-whether in humanities or the sciences–wherever it leads.
What’s wrong with Jones is that he goes after professors’ opinion outside classes—he attacks their free speech, attacks the petitions, the essays they write. If Jones doesn’t like their opinions, he attacks their person–that’s just what McCarthy did. Jones was also paying, before he rescinded the $100 offer, to set up a spy system.
The problem with setting up a spy system is that two earlier periods in U.S. history–the Red Scares after both World War I and II–it led to professors & others, based on unsubstantiated allegations–getting fired & blacklisted. People look at history and don’t want it repeated.
January 27th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
A good amount of blame does rest on the shoulders of professors for creating a sterile and boring environment. Ironically, most of them were 68ers. The current obsession with GPA, credentials, rewards, etc… is directly related to the post 60’s meritocracy. Radical pedigree, a romantic life story, flattery, etc… gets you good standing these days in the academy. Not critical thinking. So the zombie like state of Universities is a product of the 60’s. The former radicals became insulated and institutionalized, and enough students are willing to be toadies for an A to keep things from changing. This also has ramifications on the activist community that seems to mirror this sorry state of affairs.
Most all star students I know that are entering the high profile public policy gigs seem to have little or no focus on what they are actually going to accomplish or the real human beings who’s lives they will effect. Instead life seems to be a like a board game where if you hit the right squares, you get recognition, house on the west side, etc… Very few of them seem to really have sincere solidarity with “the people.” Nor are any of my fellow graduate students who plan to follow through with a PhD seem to shy away from big ideas or big analysis and instead focus on trite nuggets that are “interesting.” The theoretical dogma of many professors is also troubling, and seems to work against a climate of free thought. While I am sympathetic to much of the political goals, things have gotten totally out of control and some scrutiny is due.
Critics of Bush from the beginning have focused on his GPA. Over and over, he was a “C student.” But what if he was a C student who learned a lot (not in Bush’s case)? You can see the obsession with achievement in the left and why regular folk are turned off by the arrogance.
January 27th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
Since when are good grades a bad thing? Let’s not root for mediocrity. Face it if the left were getting the low grades instead of the other way around it would be cited as prima facie evidence they know nothing. Please.
January 27th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
Mark,
Textbook smarts are not all. But the straight A’s are not exactly working for the left at the moment either.
It is not that bad grades are a good thing, but their is more to a person than credentials, grades, pedigree, etc… Like sincerity and character. My point is that a movement cannot be made up solely of achievers. Working people with life experience, who may not have done well in school, should be included as well. Probably more so when it comes to fighting poverty or the labor movement. The Left seems to be a niche for a certain group of elites. They can get teaching jobs, gigs at non-profits, foundation grants, instead of getting a shitty corporate job.
How do you think some working class person feels about mocking Bush because he is a C student? Do you think it might cause a bit of resentment?
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