Pryor, Oklahoma, and a break from MYOB

Workout notes 1 mile walk on the treadmill (13:30), 2 mile run (19 minutes; last .5 mile at 8:57), 1 mile walk (about 13:30), then a few minutes of yoga. Short, but I got nice and sweaty.

I usually stay at the Micro-Tel as they have a treadmill, bike and elliptical trainer, and free internet.
Their breakfast sucks (dried out old biscuits and old gravy; or some too-sweet-for-me cereal) but for 41 dollars, I can pack along my own apple and bagel.

Rant-humor-none of my business Do you ever entertain yourself by making internal rants or “observations” about stuff that are really none of your business but you do it anyway just to feel superior?

Here is mine for this morning: as I went up stairs after my workout, some younger woman (30′ish?) was going down the stairs talking on her cell phone (loudly, of course). She was whining to someone about how much it took to fill up the gas tank in what must be a large SUV (you’ll love that postsimian).

I smiled to myself at how my Prius got me from Peoria to Lebanon, MO (about 360 miles) on 7.1 gallons of gas.

I go upstairs, take a shower, pack most of my stuff (except for the computer of course) and go back to the car. She is in the lobby, still yelling on her cell phone. That’s ok as she had a huge creeper in her sweatpants.

Now she is eating while talking on the phone. That used to be bad manners, right?

She just reminds me of the pinheads that I attempt to teach for a living (college level). I suppose that they learn something in college, though I wonder if a correspondence course on how to use google and how to cut-and-paste text from a browser would teach them just as much.

Anyway, that is my old curmudgeon, “nobody asked you and there is a good reason no body asked you” rant for the day!

Now to spend the rest of the day driving and focusing on stuff that is my business.

Ok, I will post something that is part of my business: I decided to do one final check of my e-mail and what do I find in my inbox:

Dear Townhall Opinion Leader,

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is looking for some help.

We are the group of scholars who got together in the 1980s to fight political correctness on America’s college campuses. Back then, we imagined that the grown-ups on campus only needed to be reminded of their responsibilities to put things right. After all, how could serious scholars permit higher education to descend into speech codes, racial quotas, and political indoctrination? Or preside over the trashing of the core curriculum, Western civilization, and the American founding?

Boy, were we naïve!

We fought and fought hard. But while thousands of professors joined us, and we surely slowed the tide, American higher education is more politicized and less intellectually cogent today than when we started. Then we faced Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States) and Jesse “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go” Jackson. Today we have Ward Churchill, Sami Al-Arian, the Duke 88, as well as entirely “postmodernized” academic programs and university requirements, devoted to ensuring that students, who may know little else, know loads about diversity, feminism, global warming, the failures of capitalism, and the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson.

An ideological monoculture reigns supreme. Outside the hard sciences, only a handful of institutions exist in which the full spectrum of ideas gets robustly debated. Notions elsewhere regarded as good common sense are routinely dismissed by academic putdowns implying ignorance and malice. Where else but on an American college campus would you find male-female attraction stigmatized as “heteronormativity?” A recent study showed that students at some elite universities, including Yale, know less about American history upon graduation than they did when they finished high school. In some ways, an American college education has become an act of cultural erasure, with “identity” and political commitment replacing genuine knowledge.

Undaunted, we continue to fight, but, now more than ever, your help is needed. We ask you to take our survey. We’ll make good use of your answers in any case, but we do have an ulterior motive. We also welcome your questions—you can reach us at nasonweb@nas.org.

Yours Sincerely,

Stephen H. Balch
President, National Association of Scholars

Townhall Opinion Leader? Hmmm, all I did was sign up for e-mail updates. Now note the “oh so scary people that they trotted out”: Ward Churchill? I believe that he was, uh, fired?

He was accused of plagiarism, inventing historical incidents and ghostwriting essays which he then cited in his footnotes in support of his own views.

Those allegations were the ones that brought dismissal today.

The Duke 88? Yeah, some people, gasp, signed a petition when they didn’t know all of the facts (the so-called Duke rape case, where the DA got fired (deservedly so). It isn’t as if they, say, voted to go to war over non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

I haven’t checked out what they think about the teaching of evolution, but at least they don’t seem to be condemning the hard sciences. That is a relief.