When MBAs decide they’re qualified to run higher ed…

In my years of teaching, I have occasionally had students with conservative views, and that’s fine. They’re a minority, but tolerance is one of the default principles of liberal arts education, so they get to express their position, everyone else shares their ideas, we all learn.

The problem isn’t conservatism, it’s authoritarianism. We are living in a country with a rising authoritarian minority that wants to shut everyone else down, and that is a problem. And that’s why Ohio is a problem — authoritarians want to dictate the content of a college education.

Ohio universities’ new centers to combat “liberal bias” aren’t popular with students, so a Republican leader wants to require attendance.

Bringing in America’s 250th anniversary, the Republican supermajority in Ohio’s legislature wants to expand civics education at colleges and universities. That hasn’t been getting the warmest of welcomes on campuses.

This puckered prune of a beancounter doesn’t like free speech

So this Republican, Jerry Cirino, has passed a new law.

S.B. 1 focuses on what Cirino calls “free speech,” banning public universities in Ohio from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, having “bias” in the classroom and limiting how “controversial topics” can and can’t be taught. “Controversial” under Ohio law includes “belief policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”

I appreciate how the report mentions that Cirino is a “free speech” advocate, and the next word is “banning”. It goes on to say that he opposes “controversial” ideas, in which he gets to categorize what ideas are to be policed. “Climate policies”? Climate change is real and has serious consequences (witness the heat wave we’re experiencing now), but Cirino wants to control discussion of what to do about it.

“electoral politics, foreign policy”…do Ohio universities lack political science and history departments?

I know Republicans hate DEI, but Ohio is a diverse state, and universities tend to hire from an international pool of academic candidates.

Ohioans can’t even discuss immigration policy? Are we just supposed to accept a conservative white man’s opinions without recourse to evidence, or the consequences, or the literature?

The primary consumers of college education are 18-22 year olds. Lord forbid that marriage and abortion be a topic of interest and concern among that group.

Jerry Cirino is a retired medical device company executive. Don’t assume that he therefore has experience in medicine or engineering, though — he has a BS in business and an MBA, and has completely foregone the kind of breadth of knowledge a typical liberal arts graduate gets, and instead has been narrowly focused on making money.

Yet he thinks he has the qualifications to overhaul higher education in Ohio? Jesus. This really is the age when incompetence rules.

Jurassic Park is a bad movie

Sometimes, when volunteering at the local theater, one must sometimes suffer through terrible (but popular) movies. This week was my turn to carry out my obligations. The movie: Jurassic Park. I’ve hated this movie for decades. It brings in money, though, so I sold out my principles.

That doesn’t mean I won’t complain about it, though!

Oooh, I liked this one

I watched Backrooms. It’s very good.

I’m an official member of the Morris Theater Co-Op board. I’m going to be running the projector at the theater about once a week. Pro: I get to see a free movie, in addition to my $1 discount. Con: Our scheduled projectionist couldn’t make it tonight, so I’ve volunteered to take it on at the last minute. This will be my first solo! I’m worried that I might forget to flip some essential switch and a horde of movie-goers will lynch me.

A sad anniversary

Today marks the 10th anniversary of Prince’s death. I love that guy’s music, and I’m going to be playing his music nonstop today.

This one tells me he really was a Minnesotan.

My favorite, though, is Raspberry Beret. That one takes me back to being 19 and taking my girl on drives through farm country — not in Minnesota, but the music is universal. I was a fan before I moved to this state!

Lately, I’ve been setting summertime goals for myself. I know I’m probably going to be laid up with knee surgery for a while (I hope I can get these wobbly aching knees fixed!), and I’m going to get through it with some dreams. One is to get up to the Boundary Waters before the Republicans destroy them, and go spidering in the woods. Another is to visit Paisley Park. I’ve driven by it many times, this summer I’m going to get off the damn freeway and take the tour.

I hate it when Republicans do this; I might hate it more when Democrats do it

Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania has decided what kids in his state need to learn. It’s cursive handwriting.

Letting our kids be kids also means getting back to the basics. That’s why, earlier this year, | signed into law a bipartisan bill that requires cursive handwriting to be taught in Pennsylvania schools.
It may seem strange, but cursive handwriting is a fundamental skill that all of our kids should learn. They may not get why now, but that’s how they’ll sign their very first check — or maybe even someday, a bill that gets to the Governor’s desk (trust me, you’ll want good penmanship for that).

Nope. It’s not an essential skill anymore. You can sign a check with a barely legible scrawl…it’s still accepted. The President of the US can sign bills with a peculiar string of pointy squiggles that is completely illegible…it still works, unfortunately. When I have to sign a series of papers, it starts out OK, but I use a kind of sloppy block printing, and by the time I’m done the “yers” in my last name has eroded down into a kind of uneven flood plain. That’s a really stupid reason to force kids to write in cursive.

Also, Shapiro has a law degree, not an education degree. He is not qualified to tell people what educational initiatives are “fundamental”. Leave that to educators.

It reminds me of my early disaffection with Bill Gates. He was doing all this philanthropy, and one of his pet projects was reforming US education…by taking it out of the hands of teachers and promoting charter schools. Like Bill Gates, Shapiro is meddling in subjects in which he has no authority and is going to end up doing more harm to education.

The queen of incompetent bigotry is “winning,” big time

Bari Weiss has made a lot of bad decisions since being put in charge of the news division at CBS. One of her most amusing was promoting Tony “Two-Cuts” Dokoupil to be the head newscaster for the evening news. It seems the primary motivation for promoting him was his love of Israel and Judaism — he earned his nickname because he was so devoted to his version of Judaism that, despite already being circumcised, he got a second circumcision because his rabbi said the first one wasn’t good enough.

That’s one of the defining characteristics of the Weiss regime: a fervent dedication to Zionism and Israel that she’s using to shape the news program.

Dokoupil is no Walter Cronkite, the anchorman I grew up listening to in the 60s and 70s. That era is definitely over now, and Weiss is accelerating its decline. The facts and figures are in, and CBS is in trouble.

CBS Evening News has struggled to gain a foothold since relaunching with new anchor Tony Dokoupil in January.

Ahead of the end of the first quarter later this week, the news program is on track for its lowest-rated first quarter this century, across both total viewers and the crucial 25-54 demographic, Status reports, citing preliminary Nielsen ratings. The program is currently averaging 4.3 million viewers; in the 25-54 demographic, ratings are down by 18 percent at just 541,000 viewers.

To make matters worse, the network’s morning show—of which Dokoupil, 45, used to be co-host—is also failing to attract viewers, with CBS Mornings experiencing its lowest-rated quarter on record, averaging 1.8 million total viewers, down from 13 percent in the same quarter last year.

The disastrous ratings are a blow to Weiss, 41, who was installed as editor-in-chief after billionaire nepo baby and Paramount Skydance owner David Ellison acquired her outlet, The Free Press, for $150 million in October. She had no experience in broadcast journalism and reports directly to Ellison.

You should never put billionaires in charge of anything — they’re all incompetent. Disastrous ratings don’t actually matter to Weiss. She got her $150 million. The network can go into a death spiral, but she got hers.

“It’s pretty terrible. Once you’re under 4 million, you’ve got to be worried that you’re in a death spiral,” another CBS insider said. “If they can’t retain an audience in the middle of a war, God help you when the war ends.”

Other industry insiders concurred, with a TV news veteran telling Status on Saturday, “The first rule of television medicine is do no harm—and Bari has done so much harm.”

Go anti-woke, go broke, but they’ll never figure that out because once you’re rich enough, consequences don’t matter anymore.

Never let your sons join a fraternity

Once upon a time, I was briefly exposed to the university fraternity system. My first year of college, I attended Depauw University in Indiana, which had a fairly conservative policy: your first year were required to live on campus, segregated dorms, and we could only apply to a fraternity or sorority in our second year or later, and I transferred to the University of Washington in my second year. When I arrived in Seattle, I got so many invitations to fraternity parties before classes started, I think because I had a 3.9 GPA and was a National Merit scholar — I had the potential to raise the average house GPA. I was popular, a novel experience! I attended one party, and that was enough.

The party started with beer on the front lawn. They were having a casino night inside, and they also had a giant slingshot on the roof for firing water balloons at people walking down the block…for fun, you know. Their house was adjacent to a sorority, and the two groups were taking turns flashing each other through the windows. As the party started, they started serving rather potent rum-and-cokes, and I was not in any sense a drinker, but I had to down a couple of them. I was totally blitzed early in the evening.

One thing I learned is that I cannot hold my liquor. Another thing I learned is that I am the most boring drunk on the planet. I spent the whole night at the craps table, throwing dice and staring owlishly at the results, estimating probabilities with a brain that no longer worked. Don’t invite me to your party if you expect an antic, table-dancing maniac, sorry.

I did not join any fraternity, was never invited to join one, and never attended another frat party. They were not my thing at all.

But I am not at all surprised at the news that a hazing event at Iowa’s Alpha Delta Phi was raided by the police, who found 56 shirtless young men standing in a basement, wet and covered with thrown food.

The willing victims were stupid sheep, reluctant to speak up about what was going on. The leaders of the fraternity were arrogant, truculent, and trying their best to avoid responsibility. The adults who were supposed to be in charge of managing the house were unavailable and the student leaders pretended to not know how to contact them. It was a beautiful example of what fraternities are actually for, for indoctrinating young people into a hierarchical culture of subservience, and it produces some of the snottiest chickenshit lackeys who will use the hierarchy to diffuse responsibility and allow stupidity to run wild. These are the future leaders of the United States.

I lived in sane, clean, dormitories for four years where we learned to get along in an egalitarian manner, and avoided the more stupid nonsense that the frat cultures demanded of you. They aren’t places for learning, or becoming a better person, or experiencing a good community — they’re for chiseling you into a corporate drone who will reflexively obey. They’re tools for churning out Republicans.

P.S. The fraternity was suspended for four years, and the national chapter is already complaining that that’s not fair.

Sympathy for Samantha Fulnecky

The Algorithm keeps throwing articles and videos about this bad essay that was written by OU student Samantha Fulnecky. I can understand that — there is so much content being generated over the terrible writing by this student, because the internet is full of educated people who in many cases have professional expertise in evaluating writing. I’m going to be teaching a class in writing scientific papers this Spring, so I’m familiar with the work. Here’s an example:

If you didn’t watch it, that’s OK, you can find hundreds of similar examples on the internet. And that’s the problem!

I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of student papers, and some of them have been atrocious and earned zeroes. But I would never drag a student publicly, I would never shame a student’s lack of rigor or talent or ability on the internet. We have strict rules about that — I would get dragged into the division chair’s office, and get a few phone calls from the university’s lawyers, and face disciplinary action if I did that, no matter how badly the essay I was mocking was written.

However, in this case, Samantha Fulnecky exposed herself — she gave her awful essay to Turning Point USA, and they cruelly posted it online with full attribution, and invited the brutal savaging she is getting. I cringe a little bit deep inside every time I see these dissections of her paper, because normally a teacher would do that in confidence, one on one, with the goal of helping the student learn and get better, not to rip her apart in a public display.

I experienced this myself. The first essay I wrote in graduate school was for a physiology class, and I apparently expressed a view on the role of synapse structure that the professor did not like, so he spent an entire class hour going over it line by line and telling the entire class how stupid and wrong I was. It was not a good learning experience, except that I did learn that this one professor was an asshole.

Now, even worse, the entire internet is shredding Fulnecky’s paper, and probably millions of people are wallowing in schadenfreude over this one student’s disgraceful inability to make a coherent argument. What has Samantha Fulnecky learned? Probably only that she has to be more careful about letting people see how she expresses herself.

I also suspect that I’m seeing so much criticism of Fulnecky’s paper because she made herself fair game for the dammed up resentment so many of us have for the bad papers we have to routinely read in detail. Finally, we get to explode at this garbage we have to carefully evaluate, rather than being professional and courteous!