Chemerinsky and Menkel-Meadow on curricular reform

From the Volokh Conspiracy:

In the New York Times, Erwin Chemerinsky and Carrie Menkel-Meadow offer a very sunny perspective on the current state of legal education. At the end, they argue that what law schools really need these days is curricular innovation:

Law school faculties, in their teaching and their scholarship, must deal with the emerging problems of the 21st century. Law schools need to develop new courses to provide students with the expertise to deal with the crucial problems of our time in fields like banking law, national security, conflict resolution, food safety, Internet law and migration policy. There should be “problem-based” seminars in fields such as public health, homelessness, environmental habitat regulation and world peace.

I don’t find these suggestions very useful. First, don’t most schools already have these “new” courses? I’m most familiar with the curriculum where I teach, but we already have one or several courses in each of those named fields.

Second, I don’t see how the listed “problem-based” seminars are supposed to help. What legal issues do students study in their Word Peace class, and how does expertise in World Peace help students get jobs? Presumably students aren’t expected to practice World Peace law. And I assume no one expects that two-credit seminars will actually create world peace.

The Outlaw Campus — The university has become a rogue institution in need of root-and-branch reform.

From Victor Davis Hansen of National Review:

Two factors have so far shielded the American university from the sort of criticism that it so freely levels against almost every other institution in American life. (1) For decades a college education has been considered the key to an ascendant middle-class existence. (2) Until recently a college degree was not tantamount to lifelong debt. In other words, American society put up with a lot of arcane things from academia, given that it offered something — a BA or BS degree — that almost everyone agreed was a ticket to personal security and an educated populace.

Not now. Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.

These two paragraphs simply expand why Universities in this Country need to be gutted and re-built from the ground up.

Hansen continues:

Few if any other professions — not law, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. — offer guaranteed lifetime employment after a six-year apprenticeship. Tenure was predicated on a simple premise: The protection of faculty free speech and instruction was worth the possible downside of complacency and an absence of serious ongoing faculty audit. Whatever may once have been the case, in our time tenure does not ensure free expression, but instead a banal orthodoxy, in which 90 percent of the faculty in the humanities share the same progressive outlook.

Hansen lists 10 areas that need radical reform at colleges to fix the problems.

Read the whole article.

Bowie State (Maryland) Student Harassed by Administrators for Speaking Out About ObamaCare Disaster

From Jammie Wearing fool:

So much for freedom of speech on a college campus. The bigots at Bowie State in Maryland have been giving this young man grief since he dared to criticize King Obama and have called him a wannabe grandson of Clarence Thomas. How nice. Here’s Eugene Craig with Megyn Kelly Tuesday night.

Can you imagine the nationwide firestorm if white college administrators tried to stifle dissent by minority students?

Aftermath of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax

From Roger Kimball of PJ Media:

And then there was the Duke faculty. As Vincent Carroll, writing in the Rocky Mountain News, noted, “the most astonishing fact, hands down, was and remains the squalid behavior of the community of scholars at Duke itself. For months nearly the entire faculty fell into one of two camps: those who demanded the verdict first and the trial later, and those whose silence enabled their vigilante colleagues to set the tone.”

Particularly egregious was the behavior of the “Group of 88,” a congeries of faculty activists and fellow-travelers who signed “What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?,” a full-page manifesto published in April 2006 in the Duke student newspaper. The statement, which purported to be “listening” to students on campus, mingled anonymous student comments with racialist agitprop. “Regardless of the results of the police investigation,” ran part of the introductory comment, “what is apparent every day now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism.” There followed a mosaic of histrionic proclamations: “We want the absence of terror,” one student is supposed to have said. “But we don’t really know what that means.” “This is not a different experience for us here at Duke University. We go to class with racist classmates, we go to gym with people who are racists . . .”

Some of the Group of 88 were common or garden-variety academic liberals—timid souls whose long tenure in the protected purlieus of the university surrounded by adolescents has nurtured their risible sense of self-importance and political enlightenment. But a good percentage were radicals more devoted to political activism than scholarship. Indeed, one scandal that still has not received sufficient publicity is the preposterous pseudo-scholarship purveyed by many trendy academics. A look at the CVs of many members of the Group of 88 provides a case in point, partly shocking, partly embarrassing. It’s 99 percent race-class-gender gibberish embroidered with a toxic dollop of ill-digested lit-crit-speak and infatuation with the dregs of pop culture. “Shuckin’ Off the African-American Native Other: What’s PoMo Got to Do with It?,” Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, etc. This is scholarship at one of America’s best universities?

One of the central players in the scandal was Houston A. Baker, Jr. A former president of the Modern Language Association, Baker has built his career through a carefully orchestrated fabrication of race scandals and juvenile cultural relativism. (Choosing between Shakespeare and Jacqueline Susann, he once wrote, is “no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza,” adding that “I am one whose career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards.”) Soon after the lacrosse scandal broke, Professor Baker called for “immediate dismissals of those principally responsible for the horrors of this spring moment at Duke. Coaches of the lacrosse team, the team itself and its players, and any other agents who silenced or lied about the real nature of events.” He joined the other members of the Group of 88 in signing a “thank you” letter to campus radicals who had distributed a “wanted” poster of the lacrosse players and publicly branded them “rapists.” After the more serious charges against the three students were dropped in December, the mother of another member of the team emailed to ask if he would reconsider his comments. Professor Baker’s response is illuminating:

LIES You are just a provacateur [sic] on a happy New Years [sic] Eve trying to get credit for a scummy bunch of white males! . . .

I really hope whoever sent this stupid farce of an email rots in. . . . umhappy [sic] new year to you . . . and forgive me if your [sic] really are, quite sadly, mother of a “farm animal.”

Houston Baker was the George D. and Susan Fox Beischer Professor of English at Duke. How proud the Beischers must have been! In the aftermath of the Duke scandals, Baker decamped to a distinguished professorship at Vanderbilt University. What does that tell us about the state of American academia?

The true tragedy of what happened at Duke can be summarized with the answer to one question, who was fired after this debacle?

The Lacrosse Coach was the only one fired, no professor, no administrator, no one but the Head Coach, who players were innocent.

Felony weapons charge for student who brought fishing supplies to school

From the Dailycaller.com:

The arrests of several students who unwittingly and accidentally violated school weapon policies has some Georgian lawmakers saying “zero tolerance” makes zero sense.

A Cobb County high school senior was charged with the felony of bringing weapons into a school zone after police found fishing knives in a tackle box in his car. Cody Chitwood, a 17-year-old student at Lassiter High School and avid fisherman, turned himself in and was released on $1,000 bond.

Police were performing a random sweep, and drug-sniffing dogs detected black powder in Chitwood’s car. The powder was residue from a firecracker that had been in the car since Fourth of July, but it was enough to a warrant a full search that turned up the fishing-related weaponry.

.............

Andrew Williams, a senior at nearby Allatoona High, received an identical felony charge after an assistant principal searched his car and found a knife. The official conducted the search after another student suggested that Williams had been smoking marijuana in his car. No drugs were found — just the knife.

Several state legislators say enough is enough.

And these people who make these decisions are the ones charge with educating our youth.

No wonder the country is in so much trouble.

Ignorant students willing to send care packages to al-Qaida

From the DailyCaller.com

Several college students signed a petition to send care packages to al-Qaida-aligned rebel fighters in Syria, wrongly believing that the initiative was sponsored by President Obama.

In reality, the petition was the product of a stunt designed to expose misinformed liberal students.

The stunt was conducted by Liberal Chick, a satirical reporter masquerading as a liberal activist for Clash Daily, a conservative website. She visited Broward College, a state college in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, posing as a signature gatherer for the Obama administration. She told students that for every person who signed her petition, the White House would send a care package to al-Qaida freedom fighters in Syria.

It has been said for many years that most college students are forced fed liberal propaganda and are reflexively liberal. I think college has forgotten, their purpose is to TEACH critical thinking.

The Democrats’ ‘Smart Power’ Lies in Ruins

From Jim Geraghty at NationalReview.com

You can pin this on Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Susan Rice, but most of all, the buck stops with the president. Those of us who scoffed a bit at a state senator ascending to the presidency within four years on a wave of media hype and adoration are not quite so shocked by this current mess. We never bought into this notion that getting greater cooperation from our allies, and less hostility from our enemies, was just a matter of giving this crew the wheel and letting them practice, as Hillary Clinton arrogantly declared it, “smart power.” (These people can’t even label a foreign-policy approach without reminding us of how highly they think of themselves.) They looked out at the world at the end of the Bush years, and didn’t see tough decisions, unsolvable problems, unstable institutions, restless populations, technology enabling the impulse to destabilize existing institutions, evil men hungry for more power, and difficult trade-offs. No, our problems and challengers were just a matter of the previous hands running U.S. foreign policy not being smart enough.

The Lib and the Drive-By Media have been arguing for years, that America's foreign policy problem are based on decisions made by a Texas cowboy.

So, has the decision being made by the "former constitutional law lecturer/Nobel Prize Laureate" and his Regime proved to be any better? Does the International community have more respect for this country? Do other countries of the world support our country and it's goal? Do Arab countries think more highly of us?

I have said it before and I will say it again.  The Dear Leader has never had a real job, never had to produce, and has no experience in the real world.  He is the very definition of an Ivory Tower Intellectual , whose response to failure is, "That's not how it worked out in my doctoral thesis."

Iowahawk Tweets

"Mr President, how many days will the bombing last?" "FORE!"
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) August 30, 2013

Having France as a war ally is like going to a pickup bar with Perez Hilton as your wingman.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) August 30, 2013

If John Kerry knows anything, it's razing villages in former French colonies.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) August 30, 2013

Bombing Syria to save Obama's credibility: a human sacrifice to a religious myth.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) August 30, 2013

The Ku Klux Klan only dreams of destroying as many black kids as the Chicago Public Schools.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) August 31, 2013

Iowa hawk strikes again and again

On the announcement of Jenny McCarthy, former Playboy Playmate of the Year and anti-vaccine crusader:

Jenny McCarthy is truly the Marie Curie of 90s titty magazine models.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 15, 2013

Such a post would not be complete without a shot at Princeton Econ Prof and Nobel Prize Laureate, Paul Krugman:

I'll say this for Jenny McCarthy: she's better at immunology than Paul Krugman is at economics.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 15, 2013

Big SIs leaves the Administration and come to California

For Homeland Security Secretary Janet "Big Sis" Napolitano has announced she is leaving the Obama Regime to become the head of of the UC system in California.

A few of questions:

1.) California has over 35,000,000 current resident and an untold number of ex-patriots, and NONE were qualified for the job, that pays $600,00 per year.

2.) What is her link to California?

3.) What qualifications does she have to run the pre-imminent college system in the world?

Value of an advance degree, from the World of Dilbert

If this wasn't so true in real life at so many places of work, it would be even funnier