I notice that you play an instrument. My son went to Harvey Mudd. And, all his clarinet playing skills, that earned him first chair. And, chances to play in Pasadena’s Honor’s Band during two Rose Parades went down the toilet.

GOOD FOR YOU! You didn’t let go of something wonderful. (Stuff that gave me, and my mom, such naches.) Why no time at Mudd? To fulfill the dreck of the humanities units, he went to Pomona, another part of the Claremont campus, and he studied Chinese. Took it for 3 years, there. And, is very decent at “it.” Mandarin. Only 4 tone sounds; instead of the Cantonese 7. Or 9. But fluent enough to later catch onto Japanese. And, a “smackerel” of Korean. (”Smackerel,” is a Winnie The Pooh word.) As my accordion, upstairs, expands and shrinks, like breathing.

GOOD FOR YOU, AGAIN, and this mother’s kisses on your head, for going and looking up when Peter Robinson got his MBA from Stanford. (You mean you couldn’t write your own book about your experiences there?) Of course, after college life tends to get tough. At least, I said that to my own son. So, “Snapshots from Hell,” indeed. But it’s a wonderful book.

GOOD FOR YOU, ROGER! Making a difference at the Board at what was once Animal Farm! Free people kick ass.

“Um.. A Los Angeles Congressional race?”

According to the alumni directory, he took his MBA in 1990, so 1988 seems just a bit early for the book.

he recalls a professor’s words. How selective Stanford is, in terms of admissions. They could take all their students to golf courses, and the world will still be a better place, because these people meet each other.

Yes, a professor (perhaps the same one) was saying something similar when I was there, although I wasn’t in that particular classroom.

You went to Stanford? Dorm? Or rental?

Graduate school only. Entered as a JD/MBA, entered law school a year behind Paul Mirengoff (deacon from Powerline). Hated law school. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t a lot of work. I did just fine. But I hated it, mostly because of the people – my fellow students, the professors, the deans, the people who ran registration. I lived in an apartment in Menlo Park (built, I think, as a military barracks during WWII), then an apartment in Shallow Alto (with a lovely view of the Bayshore Freeway), then a room in a very nice house in Shallow Alto.

We’re probably boring the rest of the people here. If you want to discuss further, you can e-mail me at lonesome_picker at yahoo dot com.

In looking at making academic institutions more democratic in nature, I can’t help but think that such an initiative would serve corporate boards well. Corporate Boards have forgotten their responsibility to their shareholders and employees. Rather than censure fiscally-abusive CEO’s and other spendthrift officers, these boards are made up of similarly cossetted indivduals who are unlikely to reign in their peers, lest their own positions of privilege be similarly affected. Rather than represent shareholders, nearly the entirety of whom do not hold enough of a stake in the company to be heard in the boardroom, these boards serve to isolate corporate officers from facing the consequences of their ineptitude or irresponsibility.

Far from being anti-capitalist, I believe in the competitve nature of our economy. I just think that many Boards have forgotten their fiduciary responsibilities, and to allow such boards to continue is wrong. As we have seen evinced in academia, these examples are perhaps the lone segment of our society where indivduals seem to face no consequence for their behavior, unless such behavior crosses the line from unethical actions to that of outright criminality.

You went to Stanford? Dorm? Or rental? His had a jacuzzi. And, if memory serves me right, I do so enjoy first person stories.

Take David Horovitz. Who replaced Bret Stephens at the Jerusalem Post. He’s written non-fiction books about his life in Israel. Hit paydirt when I went to Amazon and bought them all!

We are not separate classes of people. Your eyes won’t glaze over if you read SNAPSHOTS FROM HELL. (It’s the work burden, not the school.) And, from my memory alone (I read this book in 1988), he recalls a professor’s words. How selective Stanford is, in terms of admissions. They could take all their students to golf courses, and the world will still be a better place, because these people meet each other.

Under Plato’s tree, math was an abstract language. But the PEOPLE POWER … those who met under the tree of learning … THEY MOVED HIS WORDS FORWARD so today you can go to the library and read them in translation.

Anyway, others who are reading this thread are welcome to go to Amazon. Plug in Peter Robinson’s name. Or, even just this one title. Paradise awaits.

Thank you for realizing that I wasn’t poking fun at you. I really don’t think that I need to read Snapshots From Hell, since I actually attended the school.

Mathematics is, in my opinion, fundamental; it is every bit as important as philosophy or the arts. Yet many of the same people who complain that, say, engineers aren’t very good at speaking or writing are actually proud that they (the ones complaining) are ignorant of mathematics. When Plato founded his Academy (which gave us the word “academy”) he had inscribed over the entrance “a credit in mathematics is required”. Perhaps the greatest of philosophers required a credit in mathematics as a prerequisite for studying with him. Yet Peter Robinson evidently scoffs at the “difficult” mathematics required at the Stanford GSB, where I never once had to take a derivative, calculate an integral, or do explicit matrix algebra (there was, at the time, a required course that taught, among other things, linear programming, in which George Danzig’s simplex algorithm is in fact matrix algebra, but nobody was actually taught anything beyond the simplex algorithm itself).

Exploring many fields is important. I myself am a reasonably accomplished musician and quite knowledgeable about chamber music in particular. To exclude mathematics from that exploration would be a huge mistake.

To the point, that in a physics (for dummies) class at PCC, I remember the professor writing “E, equals MC, squared, on the board. As a math formula. And, by it’s side, he put a neat paragraph of what it meant. I loved that paragraph! And, when the professor asked “which is better,” you know, my hand was one of the few that shot up in defense of words.

Later, I asked this wonderful man why he taught this class. And, not “real physics students.” He just laughed. He said, the kids who understood the work, didn’t need him as a teacher. Just as a shoulder when they wanted someone to complain to. And, sometimes, they needed a quick kick in the ass. A year before, his friend, Richard Feynman had died. But he said teaching us students was such a pleasure (because we sat enthralled, listening to our lectures), that Feynman often walked over from Caltech, to substitute in front of his class.

Live and learn. Even old gals can learn new tricks. My son, at the time I was being remediated was an ace in high school. Able to handle a physics load of chemistry, physics, calculus and statistics, coming home, and having time to play. While I burned the midnight oil trying to do algebra problems. (Bad habits? Sure. A tendency to treat a “power” as simple multiplication. And, not using my eyes to see how to distribute correctly.) I used to laugh. What did an ending paren bracket mean to me? I used the wall to stop distributing signs incorrectly.

And, I bless my college teachers. SNAPSHOTS FROM HELL is still available, too. What a terrific book that was! Don’t miss it. Even if you’re great at math. Maybe, especially if you don’t see math as a terrible chore. For me, it was a path strewn with broken glass. And, when I was young, the teachers taught it at too fast a clip for me to comprehend. Information doesn’t have to fly over heads, and be beyond reach. And, you’re never too old to stop studying the hard stuff.