I just finished grappling with my latest 30-plus-page writing turn-in deadline for my Bennington MFA program, and am losing my ability to form coherent English sentences, so will post more later.
I also guest-lectured at a graduate sociology class at UCLA yesterday, for my friend Jorja Leap, along with three brilliantly articulate and wise former homeboys I know, who now work for Homeboy Industries. (Two of the guys—Joseph Hoguin and Luis Perez— are pictured above.) Whenever I do one of these gigs with these guys, I’m blown away all over again by their intelligence, ability, great-heartedness, courage and humor. More about all that later too.
In the meantime, take a look at this LA Times editorial talks about the genuinely terrific program that the Urban League has been heading up on the Crenshaw area. This is the kind of “whole ecology” approach to gang prevention and intervention that Connie Rice and most others with any sense have been recommending for a while. But it’s a labor intensive, all-hands-on-deck endeavor that few neighborhoods have had the will or money to embrace. On the other hand, judging from preliminary results, the program is working. So, if it continues to do well (as it likely will), perhaps the will and the money ought to be found. (It’s cheaper than, say, building and staffing more prisons.)
NOTE: Nearly anybody who could claim any kind of association with the project, from the mayor, to LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, and City Council people galore, all showed up at Thursday’s press conference—except the folks from LAUSD who evidently had a headache, or had to wash their hair.
Credit Blair Taylor, the Urban League’s inspirational leader, with having the vision and skills needed to marshal such resources. (Simply arranging the side-by-side seats for so many current, former and eternal political rivals took exquisite political finesse.) And beyond building the political cohesion so desperately needed by the schools in general and Crenshaw in particular, Taylor has raised $13 million in private money for the program. Toyota has provided not only funds but cars. Two will be raffled to seniors with perfect attendance.
Although it is still struggling, Crenshaw High is moving in the right direction. The school, which lost its accreditation in 2005, earned it back in February of last year. It also exceeded its improvement target for this year’s Academic Performance Index. Glaringly absent from the panel of dignitaries, however, was anyone from the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Raffling cars to kids simply because they did what they were supposed to do? Isn’t an education and a better future incentive enough?
Yeah. Definitely a pattern here.
Yeah. Definitely nothing constructive in his replies.
Accusations of “ad hominem” comments which come from knowledge and experience only apply to those the insular, uneducated and untraveled (therefore supremely confident in their ignorance) would diss no matter what they did or said. They demand links upon links to “prove” any point, but they themselves shoot their mouths off to no purpose whatsoever.
See a pattern here? It sure is tiresome.
Celeste, no one in their right minds would offer an OPINION on this blog unless to second Comrades in Arms reg and ric — who needs that plunge into the social and mental sewer?
I’ve never said anything like this about anyone, but the two trolls you’ve attracted are a piece of work. Yes, Woody tends to jump in critical of everything, sometimes first post, but he says his piece, ignore him or not, and sometimes he offers a good point, with or without a link, sometimes not — he’s not the knee-jerk nasty one.
Maggie’s comments derive from “experience” and knowledge” – she’s “worldy”, “traveled” and “educated” but Fareed Zakaria (whose considered judgements about the relative threat of Iran and the bizarre extremity of BushCo rhetoric were most recently borne out by the National Intelligence Estimate that’s driving Neo-Cons crazy) is “moronic” – despite the fact that there was not a single substantive counterpoint offered by Ms. M – only extreme ad hominem.
Keep chewing on it, lady. You look “crazier” every time you re-hash your meltdown.
I’m usually first because I live in the Eastern time zone and see the posts before others wake up. I don’t actually disagree with Celeste. I just try to help her see the entire picture.
I appreciate results, but I wouldn’t reward or pay off gang members in hopes of taming them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting SUV’s.
“Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.”
I didn’t comment before but I have to say that Maggie’s claim of a superior education and world experience is belied by here comments her.
Lady, I’ll match my educational attainments against yours anytime, anyplace. I’ve taught at the university level. How about you? And I taught Argumentation and rhetoric and its clear that you know little of either. As for worldly experience – lets just say that I come by my skepticism of administration claims in its GWOT by direct experience in out last great crusade in SE Asia as an Intelligence officer in the Army and at NSA. Where did you get your knowlege of the Great World?
rlc was an intelligence officer for us in SE Asia. Well, that explains a lot.
Keep ruining the blog, Comrades — my making whatever point I chose about Rosa Brooks coming off as nuttier than her targets and pointing out the fallacies of Zakaria’s justifications for Iran, would have been accepted as my right to speak under any normal circumstances. But the venom and personally vindictive vitriol these two low-lifes spewed at me then and continuously puts them in a category in the social and mental cesspool which speaks for itself. (If ric “taught Argumentation” lord help the victims of his “teaching.” Anyone at any decent university would have laughed him out of class and demanded their tuition back.
(As for being “an intelligence” officer, in your case, that title would be an oxymoron, emphasis on root of that word.)
Yes, I “see a pattern here” all right. Poor Celeste.
You have a right to speak. Say anything that strikes your fancy. What you don’t have is a right to pop off – under a guise of “neutrality” which bizarrely preceded your attack on Brooks and Zakaria – and expect half-baked notions to be taken seriously or let lie there, regardless of their making any sense or being rooted in substantive argument. Nor do you have a right to claim some sort of intellectual superiority when you offer little or no evidence even of common sense (i.e. to go back to what struck me at the point this childish go-round started, your extreme characterization of Zakaria’s quite reasonable – and increasingly well-substantiated – perspective that, no, Tehran isn’t even remotely an existential threat to western civilization as has been claimed by the Bush administration with talk of “World War 3” and the rest of it.) You’re the one who steadily invoked crazy stuff like “Che Guevara!” as response and dragged assertion of your injury at my hands, linked to ad hominem hysterics, through successive threads. You’re easily the most whiny, unpleasant person who frequents this place. In some ways, worse than Woody. He has resilience and some version of a sense of humor. You just creep me out.
(There are, incidentally, two contradictory roots to the word “oxymoron.” That’s the whole point.)
Further, if one does happen to (vindictively and baselessly) hold your low opinion of “Comrade” richard’s intellectual prowess , his being an “intelligence officer” would be a “misnomer”, not an “oxymoron.” Anyone who teaches English at a “decent university” could have told you that.
Yes, Woody does have “resilience,” the nail that keeps popping up to be beaten down — why, I’m not sure, except that without him irritating you and your comrade(s), it would be boring and self-righteous at hominent attacks by people who, as Woody says in previous thread, “have nothing constructive to contribute.” == On that thread, you and ric trade 5 snide barbs at imaginary right-wingers, waiting for Woody or someone to pop up and maybe divert your phantom ire. You two are really pitiful. (As for your English lesson…!!)
Well that sure puts me in my place! Guess I’ll slink off and lick my wounds!
You’re right it wasn’t a “Decent Univerity” – it was USC!
Well, USC has been improving lately.
Good gravy. If y’all bothered to stop throwing things you might actually enjoy each other. Geeze-us! On the other hand, maybe the food fight has an aerobic value. Hard to say.
(And about USC: Although they were unwise to let RLC slip away, Marc Cooper and Alan Mittelstaedt teach there, and I’ll be teaching a couple of classes in the Winter, in addition to my UCI workshop. Okay, yes, they lost to Stanford this year, but they’re more than making up for it with our wing of the J-school staff.)
maggie, when you get reg on a rant, you know that you’ve said something truthful that hits home with him.
Celeste, do any conservatives teach in USC’s journalism department? I don’t mean conservatives as you define them. I mean REAL conservatives.
What do you call getting RLC to leave USC? A good start.
They had to let me go. I was good friends with and collaborated with a prof from UCLA! Even though he went on to Northwestern the damage was done.
Woody – you nor Maggie have ever “hit home” with me with your incessant foul balls. What you do manage to do is say things so patently absurd that I can’t help but respond. Big waste of time. My bad.
Woody, Marc would know better than I in that he’s on the faculty whereas I’m new to teaching at USC, so I only know some of the faculty members.
However USC’s Annenberg School of Communications—which houses the J-school— was founded by Walter Annenberg, a Nixon conservative, who funded many conservative candidates and causes. His daughter Wallis, who has taken over as main player in the family foundation, runs in various conservative social circles, but she is very sympathetic to social causes, which should be neither conservative nor liberal, but is considered liberal by y’all.
I imagine if you look at their law school roster you’ll find scholars on the right and the left, as the law lends itself more easily to both perspectives. Liberal arts, quite frankly, tends to draw, well… liberals. Conservatives, for the most part, do not show up in as many numbers in those arenas. I should think in the schools of dentistry, business and engineering again, you’d find a more even distribution. But I’m just speculating.
A liberal arts education requires that one deeply into the western literary canon, and it’s a hard fact of life that a goodly number of the world’s great works of literature have be written by folks you’d consider to be those horrid liberals. Some of them are even—gasp!—Russian. (Tolstoy, that pinko cad!!) Then there’s that pesky Dickens fellow. And don’t even get me started on the South Americans! And the poets, dear god, the poets. If you think all this is some kind of left-leaning plot, you’re absolutely right. So there you have it.
(If you haven’t guessed, I think this is a silly way to look at scholarship. You could peg W.B. Yeats as a liberal OR a conservative, if you were interested in making the case. What one hopes for in a professor is a finely tuned intellect, a still lively thirst for knowledge, a voracious curiosity and, hopefully, a love of teaching. A sense of humor would be nice too. If you’ve got all that, politics don’t matter.)
I don’t think that your predictable liberal nuance (evasiveness) speaks to Woody’s identity politics concerns. Shouldn’t there be affirmative action for conservatives in liberal arts and journalism schools to assure proportional representation ? And, in fairness, shouldn’t some Naderites be hired to teach in every business school to balance the free-market, profit-mazimization bias of their curricula ? After all, the most important thing is diversity. Every conservative knows that.
(As for poets, point taken (although we shouldn’t necessarily confuse a propensity for substance abuse with political “liberalism”), but Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens certainly represented a pretty broad “conservative” spectrum in the upper ecehelons of 20th Century poetry – rangiing from fascist nutcase, to Anglican elitist (and anti-semite), to modest and respectable WASP businessman. Stevens actually rejected a faculty chair at Harvard in order to remain as Vice President of Hartford Insurance company. Go figure… Also, although this probably qualifes more as trivia than commentary on the politics of poetry, Marianne Moore contracted with the Ford Motor Company to come up with a name for the car that was finally marketed as the Edsel.)
Go to the Law School at USC and check out the benefactor’s wall and you’ll find a lot of Nixon Administration donors. One of my better students was local Chair of “Youth for Reagan” in 1976 and he had plans for 1980. Donald Segretti leaarned “Dirty Tricks” while “Rat-F**king” frat elections at Trojan Central. Laater that became SOP at YounG Republican gatherings and was mastered by Jack Abramoff and young Karl Rove from Texas.
So, the professors are all liberal. I thought so.
But, it’s not a “silly” way to look at scholarship, when students are routinely mocked and silenced for voicing conservative views and the professors use their podiums to push their left-wing agendas, which the students are expected to regurgitate back on the tests. College professors don’t encourage freedom of thought and expression but demand going along with the left-wing herd mentality. That’s a problem, and concern about it shouldn’t be called “silly,” which appears to be an attempt to avoid an awkward reality.
Study: 72 percent of those teaching at American colleges are liberal, 15 percent are conservative. 50 percent of the faculty surveyed identified themselves as Democrats versus only 11 percent as Republicans.
One other thing that you’ve illustrated is that conservatives start good institutions only to watch them get taken over by liberals. Oh, and didn’t you know that there was a Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication? How many truly conservatives does UC-Irvine and USC invite to speak on campus versus raving lunatic liberals?
And, if a good teacher needs a sense of humor, that cancels most liberals, which means that they can be hired to teach but not do it well.
Celeste, you don’t know liberal bias when you see it.
Truth has a liberal bias. Persons not tainted by liberal bias remain true to their beliefs, regardless of the facts, or empirical advances.
Celeste, a liberal arts education doesn’t necessarily “tend to draw, well, liberals” — liberal isn’t a political designation but means broad, diverse, wide-ranging, fired by intellectual curiosity WITHOUT a preconceived agenda: like the rest of your otherwise eloquent description of what makes a good prof.
Yes, political liberals tend to infiltrate and dominate the ranks of liberal arts depts., and I posted some stats some time ago that were also published in the UCLA Bruin and gained some traction among the student commentators there: this does pose a negative pressure to agree with their liberal prof’s views to get a good grade, and to diss the views of conservatives accordingly. Maybe this is why so many young people are registering as Independents, to be free of both left and right bias, and why I feel so much more at ease with them than among those who came to intellectual maturity in the 60’s and 70’s, with their agenda of radicalizing students with their own biases. (They also recoil from the crude rudeness of attacks by the reg’s and ric’s against those whose views they disagree with, which are just as bad as Lush Rimbaugh’s.) As I’ve said, I believe that’s one reason Obama is more popular among young people than the other candidates — because he’s a black man actively trying to rise above the old-style polarizing views. (To her credit, Hillary is trying.)
I think Woody actually makes some good observations here and frankly, I agree with his last para.
The fact that I’m giving up any further attempts at postings says a lot about how I’ve felt about being battered every time I venture an opinion that doesn’t meet with the lockstep of Comrades in Arms noted — and how, then, must a student dependent on someone like them for a grade feel?
Even when I was in college, I had to filter out the overtly political biases of my prof’s from their courses (like the brilliant one who taught the philosophy of Marxism, openly admitting he was a Marxist and admiring the views: I could admire his brilliance, and Marx’s brilliance in turning the Hegelian paradigm into a seemingly logically perfect social one, but the fact is, that what’s brilliant within the closed confines of philosophical thought, is idiotically myopic and downright deadly within the context of reality. The fact that he could have believed this after the tragedies of Stalinism, the tens of millions killed, what Communism did to half of Europe economically, and to their people mentally and psychologically — yet been a brilliant philosopher — is something students in the top tier schools have to deal with every day. If you can stick to the tests and papers being on the Marxist-Hegelian philosophy alone, then fine — a smart student can separate the two. But there were many sociology, history and government classes where the prof’s couldn’t make the disctinction, so wouldn’t accept students doing so; some other history profs were and are national names and rise above all political distinctions even though, invariably, they’d be moderate Democrats if asked.)
So, I’d agree with you, Celeste, partially, especially when it comes to prof’s of a rare brilliance, but the majority even at the top schools really can’t and don’t separate their personal politics from their teaching and pose serious problems to students navigating their way.
I’m going to duck the tomatoes and rotten eggs now, coming from our open-minded left-liberal faction.
Maggie and Woody, I’m running out (to a…um… liberal dinner party) or I’d make this longer. Speaking personally, I think it’s appalling when a teacher imposes his or her biases on students, whether those biases are liberal or conservative. That’s bad teaching pure and simple. And does it go on? Oh, hell, yeah. All the time.
It’s one thing if professors are open and declare their biases, with the caveat that they are just that, biases, not the revealed truth, and then encourage students to explore all sides of a question and form their own opinions.
I utterly loathe the king of thing you describe in which profs can’t separate their politics from the scholarship. There’s no excuse for it, in my book, unless perhaps the bias is in the class description and you’re taking the class to experience specifically that POV. But that’s the only exception, and it should be a rare one. I think this sort of thing does get laid on kids all to often, and I think it sucks. The profs I know and respect at UCI and USC wouldn’t dream of it—and neither would I.
Academia’s a strange world. That’s why so many novels are written about it. It’s rife with bad behavior.
PS: No the professors AREN’T all liberal. Survey the MBA programs.
PPS: Cool Marianne Moore trivia, Reg.
Celeste, just because you may find some conservative teachers in an MBA program doesn’t mean that translates into turning students into Republicans. The curriculum doesn’t lend itself to that.
I earned my Masters in accounting, and the professors taught us, guess what, accounting! Can you believe it?! There was no place for some professor to say that he thinks that debits should be on the right rather than the left. He would have been tossed out. We learned what the tax laws were and how to apply them. The professor couldn’t say that he didn’t like the tax rates so he would make up new ones to teach us. It’s like teaching a trade, of which colleges should do more.
Courses in liberal arts, many of which are required such as English and History, do lend themselves to “interpretations,” shall we say, and those interpretations are abused.
If anything, if a business professor got off topic, it was because we started discussing football–something that left-wing, hippie, drug-induced, liberal professors don’t understand.
Maggie, don’t go away. I need someone in my court at times. Just consider the sources of the abuse. reg and rlc are like Larry the Cable Guy trying to teach us how to become cultured.
Celeste, please report on the liberal dinner party. Was there anyone there who didn’t despise President Bush?
The condescending first paragraph of the previous comment proves precisely where the bias is coming from. The notion that Celeste doesn’t know the meaning of “liberal” in the context of liberal arts is…uh…preposterous. What our host said is that “liberal arts tends to draw, well, liberals.” That happens to be true for a variety of reasons that are pretty much commonplace observations in reasoned discourse regarding the broad (and, in fact, diverse) political leanings of academics in certain disciplines.
The twist on this that “political liberals tend to infiltrate and dominate the ranks of liberal arts depts” is a statement that has bias built in. “Infiltrate and dominate” reflects a perspective tantamount to conspiracy theorizing rather than empirical or critical reflection. No rotten eggs or tomatoes. Just profound boredom with hearing the familiar David Horowitz propaganda spiel recycled once more under the guise of “objective analysis.” (If we’re looking for a Rush Limbaugh analog here, we don’t have to go any farther than this half-baked critique of liberals “infiltrating” the universities.)
At least as commonplace as any liberal “infiltration” of liberal arts – i.e. folks of liberal political views finding certain academic disciplines congenial to their interests and temperment – is an economics profession that overwhelmingly tends to draw folks enamored of the “free market” as some sort of pure paradigm for social activity. One doesn’t have to read too deep into the literature to recognize that there’s often a large dose of “conventional wisdom” peddled as academic insight in those quarters. Many academic economists’ claims of “the way the world should work” don’t pass the smell test in “the real world.” The overall impact is an academic “discipline” that’s too often steeped in what is clearly an ideology rather than a reflective, non-dogmatic empiricism or a searching critical analysis. (Of course, the same could be said – with the political poles reversed – of certain distinct enclaves that have been established within the liberal arts – but hardly the entire spectrum of liberal arts. The idea that the history profession or, more to the point, the social sciences are in the grip of “marxism” is preposterous. The sole example we’re treated to above (that “marxist professor” who taught from a philosphical perspective that he was open about and didn’t impose dogmatically on his students) would seem to disprove the “rule” that’s being asserted. Ironically, the disciplines that – and admittedly this is just from my fairly random reading – appear to be most”infiltrated” with leftish trends are those that are least relevant to politics, ex. it’s most often the MLA types where post-modernist theories hold sway who seem to be hidebound, intellectually arrogant “lefties” (who, also ironically, appear to be unable to write coherent English sentences.) But to assign some notion of “infiltration” to any of these phenomena goes way off the deep end. Personally, I don’t give enough of a shit about academia to consider this a major problem. I doubt that most students are indoctrinated by college professors. Generally in my encounters with typical recent college graduates in the business environment, I wish they had been a bit more attentive to whatever the hell it was their liberal arts professors were trying to communicate. Rather than being animated by ideas of any sort, most of them strike me as simply vapid.
Celeste, your deprecating everything I’ve said by virtue of the fact that MBA profs aren’t libs, is proof of what I’ve said: every single IVY school’s rep is built on the liberal arts ed, while the MBA programs are often filled with people maybe a decade older, with biz experience, and even as undergrads doing p/t jobs in the library, we felt they were a joke in terms of “intellect.” These are people who take notes and not challenge — which goes on across the board in second and third tier, vs. first tier, schools all the time.
You’ll so hate me for this, but since you’re marginalizing everything I’ve said, and lumping me in with Woody (sorry, Woody, I luv ya, but you know — ) all I can say is, there’s a reason that USC has half its student population filled with students taking those “practical” MBA and engineering classes and isn’t even a blip on the “liberal arts” scene.
reg, I’m not getting past the first sentence. Education and travel and real-life experience do matter (or my Marxist prof would know that the pure logic of Das Kapital isn’t math and Hegelianism doesn’t translate into real world equality) and show in what you have to say, whatever you’re going on about, stick it in a sock.
Wha-a-aatt????? Maggie, I deprecated what you said how, exactly? The best way to read what I write is to not look for hidden meanings, or oblique references. I generally mean what I say and it’s extremely vexing not to be taken at face value.
Me in short version: Professors with political agendas—conservative OR liberal—who lay political trips on their students suck.
As for the liberal dinner party: We drank beer and wine, smoked cigars, watched the Hatton Mayweather fight (which was a GREAT fight) and talked about education policy. Bush didn’t come up at all. Obama did.
All of Maggie’s much-vaunted “education, travel and experience” hasn’t done much to season either her skills at thinking beyond recieved cliches or her constricted little personality. I’m not sure which is more unattractive – the persistent whining, the unhinged ad hominem rants or the bloated, overweening self-regard.
The truth is I wouldn’t have even bothered to respond to her blather had she not persisted in directing her crackpot ad hominem at me in that predictable Horowitzian diatribe. She could use a lesson in “putting a sock in it.”
All I can say is, there’s a reason that USC has half its student population filled with students taking those “practical†MBA and engineering classes and isn’t even a blip on the “liberal arts†scene
************
Yes that is correct, and the reason is a good paying job. Working in engineering I have met many liberal arts students who have returned to school to study computer science and engineering, not because of the radical liberal bias of university professors, but because they wanted a job which would pay enough to support a family. But unfortunately many of those jobs are now being outsourced to cheaper labor in India (just my “bug-a-boo”). I once was had a radical 60’s era hippie, teaching control systems theory, he gave us his radical leftist views of Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT). This is when I started my Che Guevara tee-shirt collection.
Celeste writes ….
As for the liberal dinner party: We drank beer and wine, smoked cigars, watched the Hatton Mayweather fight (which was a GREAT fight) and talked about education policy. Bush didn’t come up at all. Obama did
************************
Smoked cigars – Yuk, cough, cough
Celeste your liberal bias (or too much wine) obviously prevents you from being a true connoisseur of the pugilistic art of boxing. Ricky Hatton kept charging Floyd Mayweather while leading with his face, and Mayweather greeted his charging face with stiff right hands. Only in the first round did Rick Hatton stun Mayweather. Hopefully Mayweather will not retire and fight a really tough hombre from Puerto Rico, Sr.Miguel Cotto.
A list of a few recent very good fights
1) Kelly Pavlik vs. Jermain Taylor
2) Miguel Cotto Vs Shane Mosley
A “great fight†is more of
1) Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Marvin Hagler
2) Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Tommy “The Hitman†Hearns
3) Eric Morales vs. Manny Pacquiao
4) Marco Antonio Barrera vs. Erik Morales
**********************
I will share a “secret†with Celeste Readers and anybody who wants to watch a HBO-PPV (Pay-Per-View) event for free on your computer. Not recommended for inviting friends over to watch an event, because you will see a lower quality (pixelized) picture on your computer screen. You can connect your computer to a large screen TV video port for a larger blurry picture.
1) go here and set up free account
http://www.sopcast.org/
2) go here to download sopcast internet exploerer software
http://www.sopcast.referencias.tv/
3) Select this install option
(NEW SopCast 2.0.4 Webplayer for Internet Explorer.)
4) go here and learn about watching sports and movies on your computer. read the introduction and tutorials.
http://myp2p.eu/
5) This was Romanian HBO station showing Hatton vs. Mayweather on “sopcast” P2P streaming video.
http://myp2p.eu/broadcast.php?matchid=3131&part=sports
reg, I don’t know of one kid out of college, either in my family or those of my friends, who haven’t encountered a liberal professor who tried to shove his political crap down their throats.
You excuse the world of academics because you say that people are drawn naturally to fields that reflect their philosophies. No where should their positions to teach allow them to bully or intimidate students who have decent, religious, and/or conservative upbringings. That doesn’t happen in business classes.
It’s not the fields that are the problems. It’s the teachers in the liberals fields that are.
Celeste, in case anyone wants to send you a Christmas gift, what brand of cigars do you prefer?
If you’d like to send ME something, Woody, my favorite cigarmaker is Arturo Fuente. If you’re on a budget, Flor de Oliva will do. Think of it as your opportunity to shove something in my face.
No Cubans.
Hey LA Res that Fourier was a commie. He was one Napolean’s favorites and helped reform the system of higher education in the Republic – particularly the Grande Ecoles. What a marxist snot!
“Liberal Arts” of course means to “liberate the Mind” Since Maggie apparently missed that in her “Fine Education” let me suggest she go to her local library and check out two books: “The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” and “The Rise of Universities” both by Charles Homer Haskins. Then, if she is still interested maybe she can find a copy of “The Marriage of Philosophy and Mercury” by Isadore of Seville which describes the classic “Seven Liberal Arts” (the Trivium of Grammar, logic, and rhetoric; the Quadrivium of Arithmetic,music, astronomy, and geometry) which form the basic numerate and literate skills that are the bedrock of the learned man.
She also will learn that, since I have an M.A. she should address me as “Master” and defer to me in the street (see “The University in the Middle Ages” by Hastings Rashdall for more details)
Liberal philosophy in colleges is not about liberating minds. It’s about forcing students to conform to left-wing, politically correct dogma. Freedom of expression is only granted to liberals.
The persistent plaint of conservative “victimhood” boggles the mind.
“Woody Says:
December 9th, 2007 at 10:13 am
No Cubans.”
Nothing Cuban on my list – most are Dominican or Nicaraguan. Excellent stuff. My favorite Cuban cigar story is when Kinky Friedman met Bill Clinton, who is a fan of his detective novels. Kinky has a Cuban cigar connection (presumably along with other “controlled substances.”) and handed Bill one of his “undocumented” cigars. Clinton looked at the label and said, “I can’t take that. What are you trying to do to me, Kinky ?” Friedman responded, “Don’t think of it as trade with Cuba. Think of it as burning their fields !”
Only liberals, a group who mastered the claims of victimhood, would be blind to those that they, themselves, victimize.
On the victim thing – yeah, you’re right. I really don’t give a shit.
On your Friedman story, reg, the way I heard it was with Bush. It’s sort of like those urban legends that get changed depending upon who re-tells the story.
Here’s how I once related it in 2005 when I filled in for G.M., with accompanying comments from you and Celeste: Kinky Friedman to Bush–“Burn Cuba’s fields!”
Friedman now has a cigar business. Kinky Friedman Cigars
“Kinky’s newest venture – Kinky Friedman Cigars is officially open for business. …’These are Killer B Honduran cigars made by Cubans,’ said Friedman, ‘and the only non-Cuban cigars that have weaned me off Havanas.'”
If he’s from Texas, you know that you can trust him.
BTW, I noticed that the comment thread in my post of two-and-a-half years ago wound up discussing liberal professors. I thought that we had settled it then.
Nothing Cuban on my list – most are Dominican or Nicaraguan.
And thereby hangs a tale: no fact-finding just presumption on someone’s part.
The only time I know for sure someone was trying to indoctrinate someone to their views in school happened in the third grade to a friend of mine.
My sister’s senior year high school boyfriend was a Jewish teenager named Brian Reinbolt. When Brian was in the third grade in Alabama, long after the SCOTUS decision forbidding the teaching of religion in public schools, he had a teacher who insisted that the students memorize a verse from the New Testament. Brian, being an obedient student and like most eight year olds, not well-versed in the basics of constitutional law went ahead and memorized a verse from a religion that was not the one he practiced, but one the theocratic teacher insisted he learn.
Even at age eight Brian was a bit of a wag, so he chose a verse from the Gospel According to St. John, Chapter 11, Verse 35 which is as follows: “Jesus wept.” I wonder what the public reaction would have been if the teacher were Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist or Jewish and made the request from one of their holy books?
Kinky borrowed that. Alex Haig used the same analogy with Mort Sahl in the80s.
Randy, grow a brain and then learn to use it.
Cigars: Romeo Y Juleta. (the Dominican version)
LA Res, I’m glad you set me straight on Good Fights hierarchy. No doubt you’re right. I’m only an occasional fight watcher. But Saturday night was a lotta fun.
Ahh, Woody, when you can’t come up with something subtantive, you name call. Grow up.
Somewhere above Woody said that business profs would go off-topic to discuss football. Figures since, as George Will so aptly put it, footbaall is organized extreme violence punctuated by committee meetings – a perfect conservative metaphor. As for B-Schools our esteemed President mangaged to get thru Harvard’s (He took a degree in History at Yale where I assume he had a ghost writer sit his exams)and is our only MBA Chief Executive.
I rest my case!
rlc, if you want an example of the worst case of B-school influence in government, take a look at the Kennedy administration and his Harvard buddies. However, it really isn’t the discipline but the school that makes the difference.
At least Bush managed a baseball team, which, as we know from George Carlin, is nicer than football.
What a pompous ass ric is in 38 — actually everywhere, but he’s at his most smugly asinine there. If he was a professor (with a mere MA, that’s enough at USC?) he surely didn’t “liberate the mind” of anyone, just restricted it to within his own biased confines. I also never encountered anyone that spitefully closed to disagreement as him at my university — what a disservice to impressionable students. My sociology professors tended to be biased, but government, English, and other “liberal arts” profs really were focused on the classical tradition of thought — guess that’s one reason everyone wants to go to the best east coast colleges.
And reg, what a fool — to tell Maggie she was presuming to go way above her station to challenge Celeste’s observation that it was only natural that “liberal arts” profs were “liberal” politically, all when he’d never gone to college at any level, let alone a first-rate one and, from his discourse, has clearly never encountered a truly first-rate mind “liberated” from their narrow bigotry. One of the objectives of a first-rate education is to be able to see through the biases, illogic and factual or empirical inconsistences of anyone and to challenge them on it.
Guess only third-rate minds and uneducated fools like ric and reg should be constantly second-guessing and trashing not only the Admin. and every Republican who ever lived as a de facto idiot, but extending that superior “analysis” to moderates, and any genuinely thinking person.
ric, with his imbecilically pompous reading list for Maggie to understand what it means to “liberate the mind,” twisted and convoluded reg having to piegeonhole everyone with some sort of “David Horowitzean” or other label, to try to sound well-read and conceal his utter inability to accept the right of anyone who thinks outside his box to speak… What a pitiful pair.
Gee, wonder why no one who’s not a bitter, smug dinosaur of a leftie from the 60’s doesn’t “contribute” (if you can call what ric and reg do, contribute) to this blog? (Except Woody, who sensibly doesn’t give a hoot what they say and if he comes off as extreme on the other side sometimes, who can blame him when confronted continuously with such socially nasty and vile, as well as ignorant, closed-minded trolls like reg and ric? I don’t know about L A Res and his longtime friendship with Che, but he does seem to have some ability to evolve past the one-note “take over the student unions with guns to make our point and think we’re cool like the Black Panthers” 60’s of wanna-be Panthers of SLF members like ric and reg. — Hey, your “time” has passed, and no one cares about what you think except you.)
Lucinda (or Maggie – only your IP address knows for sure),
If you want to improve discourse, calling people “third-rate minds”, “pompous asses”, “uneducated”, “imbecil[e]” “bitter” and “smug”, has as much credibility as Hannibal Lecter extollng the virtues of veganism.