Clarice's College Guide
If you’ve recently lived with a high
schooler in his last two years at home, your mailbox doubtless has been
overflowing with college brochures. They picture friendly, sage-looking
professors with tweed jackets and leather elbow patches; ivy-covered
classical-looking buildings, interior shots of oaken libraries and
wholesome-looking students studying in sylvan retreats. This week’s news has
put me to mind of creating my own online college course. Here at Clarice
College we haven’t any pictures of sage professors -- though we do use top men
and women in their field -- and ivy-covered buildings, but our courses are
especially relevant and candid. Best of all, it’s free -- all you need is
internet access and a computer.
1. Core Curriculum
At our school we teach how to lie,
bully and master the art of self-aggrandizing arrogance while cleaning up on
outside consultancies, made possible by our minimal teaching requirements.
This week we are featuring
demonstrations by Jonathan Gruber of MIT and Ben Edelman of the Harvard
Business School.
Jonathan Gruber played an
instrumental role in fashioning the monstrosity which ensnares one-sixth of our
economy – ObamaCare. When a hapless Mr. Feinstein was trapped by its high
costs and low coverage, he dug up numbers of Gruber’s taped speeches at
conferences of other heath care “experts” bragging about his key role in
writing the Act, smarmily suggesting he pulled this one off because the people
are “stupid”, and then when called to account by Congressman Darrell Issa,
responded: "In excerpts of these videos I am shown making a series of
glib, thoughtless, and sometimes downright insulting comments. I behaved badly,
and I will have to live with that…"
Still, he refused to say how much
his work enriched him. (Credible accounts say about $6 million from the federal
and various state governments.) And he denied he’d been an architect of
ObamaCare. Unfortunately for him there are videos of him seeming to contradict this.
Congressman Issa has subpoenaed
Gruber’s records.
As The Hill notes, in
a late 2010 lecture to students at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where Gruber is a faculty member, he talked about the health law
and described his role in its creation, saying, "Full disclaimer: I'm
going to describe it objectively, but I helped write it."
In another 2010 video, captured by
C-SPAN and posted at Townhall, Gruber also noted his bias in favor of the law
while claiming to have helped write it. "Once again, unabashed, I
helped write the federal [health care] bill as well," he said. That remark
was made the same month that Obamacare was signed into law.
Two years later, Gruber hadn't
changed his story. In a now-infamous 2012 lecture on the law's health exchanges at Noblis, Gruber not only
said that states that don't set up exchanges don't have access to tax
subsidies, he also referred to the "the one bit of the bill I actually
wrote."
The issue isn't whether those
statements were glib. It's whether they were true. (Notably, when asked by Rep.
Scott Desjarlais (R-Tenn.) whether other embarrassing videotaped statements
were lies or not, Gruber would only say that his remarks were "glib and
thoughtless and really inexcusable.")
There is no way to reconcile his
multiple past statements with the statements he made this week while under
oath. Either Gruber spent two years lying about his role in writing the law, or
he was lying this week in his sworn congressional testimony.
For how to deal with such
contingencies, we will be offering a course at a later date.
Also teaching this course will be
Dan Edelman, a graduate of Harvard Law School and an associate Harvard
Business School professor in the Negotiation, Organizations and Markets unit.
Dan enjoyed the food from a mom and pop Chinese restaurant near his home but
made history when he complained that the website misstated by $4 the price of
the food, rejected the owner’s apology for an out-of-date website and an offer
to refund the difference. The email correspondence continued on with the professor arguing on dubious authority that he was entitled to treble damages.
“Indeed, just reading the statute
carefully ought to have given the professor some pause. While he makes a big
deal in one of the emails about being ethically bound to deal only with an
attorney if the restaurant is represented by counsel, it strikes me as a
possible ethical problem to be making demands (particularly on an unrepresented
party) for which one lacks a legal basis. I don't think negligent belief about
the law helps the professor here.”
What we are hoping students will
learn from this is how not to negotiate, how not to show your regard for those
outside the academic precincts, and again how to apologize -- as Edelman did --
when caught out being a pompous ass.
2. Our Training Guide for College
Administrators
College Officials Are not neglected
here at CC. We’ve some useful courses for them, too.
(a) How to abjectly kowtow to the
irrational.
There’s lots of irrationality on
campuses and you should learn how to quickly bow down to it. The trustees don’t
like to see strong administrators -- they just want their names on buildings
and avenues for getting their friends’ dumb kids into your school so
genuflect, genuflect, genuflect. And to teach us how we have a number of
first-rate college presidents up to bat this week.
The president of prestigious Smith
College is red-faced and apologetic Tuesday for telling students on the
Northampton, Mass., campus that "all lives matter."
Kathleen McCartney wrote the phrase
in the subject line of an e-mail to students at the school, whose alumni
include feminists Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, former First Lady Nancy
Reagan and celebrity chef Julia Child. McCartney was attempting to show support
for students protesting racially charged grand jury decisions in which police
in Missouri and New York were not charged in the deaths of unarmed black men.
Protesters have adopted several
slogans in connection with the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner,
including "Black Lives Matter." McCartney's more inclusive version of
the refrain was seen as an affront that diminished the focus on black lives and
racism, according to emails obtained by FoxNews.com.
“We are united in our insistence
that all lives matter,” read the e-mail, in which she made clear she was
strongly behind the protests, writing that the grand jury decisions had “led to
a shared fury… We gather in vigil, we raise our voices in protest.”
So, at Smith, black lives matter --
even if the slogan is in support of two thugs whose deaths were connected to
their illegal activities (and in Garner’s case ill health). Nor is it
significant to these students that black-on-black crimes far exceed deaths by
blacks at the hands of police or of white people for that matter. White lives,
Asian lives, presumably do not matter.
Not to be outdone by Smith, we have
Jane Close Conoley, president of California State Univerity.
In a Dec. 5 op-ed, the president of
California State University (CSU) claimed if you are “light skinned” you have
“significant unearned privilege” and routinely think less of those who are
different than yourself.
In her piece, “Privilege at The
Beach,” -- referencing the Long Beach area where the school resides -- Jane
Close Conoley, a white woman herself, asserts that “light skin color and high
income levels may attract significant unearned privilege.” Those who qualify
for such privilege, often unknowingly exert distrust and “lower expectations of
behavior” on those of another skin color.
“This privilege can manifest itself
in numerous ways that afford automatic trust, deference, and security,” writes
Conoley, in the piece first noticed by the Pundit Press. “Those who are less
affluent with darker skin or from other cultures can be targets of micro to
macro aggressions, distrust, and low expectations for behavior.”
Conoley claims that if a non-white
person walks into a department store they may be followed by employees and
their presence is often times acknowledged with “suspicion and fear.”
“Those with privilege are often
unaware of this discrepancy, as people treat them with respect -- as all
individuals should be treated,” Conoley writes. “When they enter department
stores they are greeted with smiles and offers of help. When they ask questions
or request additional service, they are answered cordially. On approach, they
are seen as benign.”
(Someone else living nearby held
much the same views. David Ruenzel, who made a living excusing black crime and
denouncing white privilege, was just murdered there by two black thugs.
The Ruenzel case is unusual.
Academics and other professionals who engage in such odious talk are
usually shielded from the dangerous violence it engenders. It’s the little
people in unguarded communities without means to avoid it that suffer.
(b) How to ignore facts and jump to
conclusions
We thought that we could skip this
course for now after the Duke Lacrosse debacle, but no, we have to keep reminding you guys that when it
comes to white male students, it’s the narrative that counts.
Teaching this course this week, we
have the president of the University of Virginia who based her actions on
a now thoroughly debunked Rolling Stone article.
The article was suspicious from the outset. Among other things (rather like the Feinstein released
intelligence report) the sourcing was not first-hand, but that didn’t stop President Teresa A. Sullivan from acting on it.
The University of Virginia is
suspending all fraternities and associated parties until January 9 following a Rolling Stone magazine article that described a student's account of being gang raped and
her frustration at trying to bring her alleged attackers to accountability.
"The wrongs described in
Rolling Stone are appalling and have caused all of us to re-examine our
responsibility to this community," school President Teresa A. Sullivan wrote in a statement to the university community. "Rape is an
abhorrent crime that has no place in the world, let alone on the campuses and
grounds of our nation's colleges and universities."
Student leaders will hold a news
conference at 10 a.m. Monday on the campus to "give voice to the student
perspective," according to a Student Council news release. Participants
include the Student Council president, the leader of the Inter-Fraternity
Council and the presidents of One in Four and One Less, support groups for
victims of campus sexual abuse.
Remember, above all “responsibility
to this community” in college administrator talk does not include
responsibility to white men, fair play, or respect for the truth.
This course, Rape Studies can be taken
in lieu of how to kowtow to racist division advocates.
3. Law School Guide
We have not forgotten law students.
While our courses do not lead to law degrees, they are helpful to those
enrolled in law schools.
Sensitive Law Students and
Exams.
Both in the framing of exam
questions and the timing of them, today’s law students at Columbia, Georgetown,
and Harvard have proved to be astonishingly sensitive and uninterested in fact
over narratives, just like the Lackwitz sisters of Smith. Cornell Professor William A. Jacobson was not impressed:
As we reported, a wide range of
Harvard Law School students, represented by over a dozen student groups, issued a set of demands to HLS administrators in light of the failures of grand
juries to indict police officers in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric
Garner.
One of the demands was to delay
exams, like happened at Columbia University Law School.
HLS did not relent, although it did
issue some statements of concern and sympathy.
I have it from reliable sources that
law students at Harvard are, as we write, being subjected to the oppression of
having to take final exams as scheduled.
Here’s my position:
“The decision of Columbia Law School
to allow students selectively to postpone exams as a result of emotional upset
over the Ferguson and Garner grand jury decisions shows, once again, how far
law schools have strayed from their mission.
Few if any of the students
complaining talk about the evidence, the forensics, the law that might have
justified the grand jury rulings. Instead, it’s all about them and their
emotions. Are we training students to think and act as lawyers, or emotional
activists?
If we are training students to be
lawyers, we should insist that they act like lawyers, and understand that there
will be decisions with which we disagree, but that cannot interfere with our
professional obligations.
Cry if you want to, but keep
representing your clients, complying with court deadlines, and pushing forward
under adversity.”
So, there you have it
-- potential enrollees, you can genuflect to unreason at Columbia
and turn out graduates too delicate to function in their chosen profession
-- or not. The choice is yours.
Even exam questions can cause
flutters of indignation, and when it’s pretty clear the administration will not
stand firm for common sense against race baiting, you can bow to unreason as one UCLA professor did.
Law school exams often present legal
conundrums ripped from headlines of the day, but one UCLA law professor is
apologizing for basing a test question on what is apparently a taboo subject --
the fallout from the police shooting of a black man in Ferguson, Mo.
Professor Robert Goldstein said the
exam question was designed to test students’ ability to analyze the line
between free speech and inciting violence. It cited a report about how Michael
Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, shouted, “Burn this bitch down!” after a grand
jury decided not to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the death
of Michael Brown.
The question then asked students to
imagine that they are lawyers in the St. Louis County Attorney’s office and had
been asked to advise the prosecutor “whether to seek an indictment against
Head” for inciting violence. The exam reads:
“[As] a recent hire in the office,
you are asked to write a memo discussing the relevant First Amendment issues in
such a prosecution. Write the memo.”
But students complained, and writer
Elie Mystal at the popular legal blog “Above the Law” opined
that the test question was “racially insensitive and divisive.” Mystal also
incorrectly alleged that the question asked students to “advocate in favor
of extremist racists in Ferguson.”
Goldstein has apologized
for putting the question on the test and has promised not to grade
the question.
“I clearly underestimated and
misjudged the impact of this question on you. I realize now that it was so
fraught as to have made this an unnecessarily difficult question to respond to
at this time. I am sorry for this,” he wrote in an email to his students that a
UCLA spokeswoman.
4. Student Life.
At CC we recognize that education is
not just studying and learning from books. There are lessons to be learned
outside the classroom (even the online one). Like how not to be caught with
your pants down in the middle of a Massachusetts winter: This week it was Harvard’s naked primal screamers running smack dab into a black lives matter kerfuffle on the
quad.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/clarices_college_guide.html#ixzz3Lrm1VmPI
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