Many people today have emailed me about the current uproar surrounding (tenured!) University of Santa Barbara professor William I. Robinson (this link via Glenn). It seems this advanced thinker has compared the Holocaust to the Israeli incursion in Gaza (yawn). It’s not worth a second to deal with the logical absurdity of this. I have a simpler solution:
Close UCSB.
I’m serious.
Well, half serious…. Close everything but the necessary subjects: science, math, foreign languages, etc. Dispense with all the nonsensical propaganda. Sociology – what’s that? (This dude is a professor of sociology.) Yes, I know – Max Weber, Durkheim, etc., blablabla… But what is sociology really? Anything you couldn’t pick up in a back issue of National Geographic coupled with a little web surfing? I sincerely doubt it. If the likes of William I. Robinson (yes, I know he’s Jewish) wants to spew his shopworn marxist bilge circa 1966, he can do that on Huffington Post, assuming they’ll take him. Failing that, he can start a blog. In fact, he already has. (Sorry, comments are not enabled, but he does have a Flickr page.) What do we need to pay him +/-200 grand a year for? (based on estimates from 2004 yet) Think of the money we could save!
Arnold Schwarzenegger, are you listening? You’ve been swearing for months you’ve been bending over backwards to cut the bloated California budget and here’s your solution served up on a silver platter. I bet there are several thousand – maybe even tens of thousands – of these clowns all over the UC system.
Speaking of which, you parents – UC tuition is hovering around 9 thousand for in-state students, with out-of-state pushing 30K, not to mention living expenses. Is this a rational amount to pay to be educated by William I. Robinson? Time for a little Tea Party action perhaps? [Isn't the tuition three times that at private institutions?-ed. Alas. With the same professors? Alas. Then what we do? Screw the Tea Parties. Drink gin.]
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26 Comments
1. Gary Rosen:How do you know he’s Jewish? His say-so? When is the last time he was in shul?
Apr 30, 2009 - 10:56 pm 2. Roger L Simon:Basically, yes. His word. Has he been to shul? Doubt it.
Apr 30, 2009 - 11:35 pm 3. Colette:You don’t have to go to shul to be Jewish. Ask a Nazi, or Ahmadinejad. The concentration camps were full of non-observant Jews. So is Israel.
May 1, 2009 - 12:17 am 4. Lightnin' Hopkins:Universities nationwide are already saving big bucks since cutting all of those “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” classes back in January, so hey, why not cut the Soc. profs too?
The only concern is whether there would still be enough good teachers left to inspire inclusive “dialogue” such as “Yes racists, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night!” whenever a right wing meanie visits a campus to speak. The Science and History departments may need to pick up the slack.
May 1, 2009 - 7:28 am 5. Judy, NYC:just as there was the Greatest Generation and the Sixties Generation, we now have the Stupidest Generation, coming from the notion that all should go to college. unable to read or write, they also have no ability to do any original research. just blab from the net, like gossip over the fence. it doesn’t matter who teaches them, they are dumb blobs in any case and would never understand complex issues, even if they huffed and puffed over them. we are stuck with these simplistic souls. the tyranny of the majority and its idiocy. get used to it. or, get sick.
May 1, 2009 - 7:47 am 6. chuck:Back in the day I had a very liberal friend who was doing graduate work in sociology, but she quit. The reason: her advisor was twisting the results from a survey to support his politics (left) and she couldn’t abide being party to the dishonesty. Such is sociology.
May 1, 2009 - 7:58 am 7. Ellsworth:Gosh, Judy NYC, that is a pretty harsh generalization. If you really believe in “the tyranny of the majority,” it seems to me that you don’t believe in the American system as it was designed. Calling a generation “dumb blobs” is about as elitist as anything I’ve ever heard at the left leaning reactionary Ivy League institution I attended. Just wow.
May 1, 2009 - 8:47 am 8. Ellsworth:I should add that you might want to get out more often. Even in NYC, you will find plenty of young people who are far more thoughtful and independent of mind than you describe. And if you venture farther you will find many more. The truth is that younger people are far more open to change and growth. So you are doing a great disservice to what I suspect is your cause by writing them off. It’s too late for much of the Sixties Generation to open their minds. But what you refer to as the “Stupidest Generation” are victims of their educational system. They are not innately less intelligent than any others and in fact, can be reached more easily. But not by calling them idiots.
May 1, 2009 - 8:56 am 9. david foster:To a very substantial extent, America’s universities have been turned into factories for the creation of resentment, feelings of entitlement, and even outright hate. They have become purveyors of a form of social autoimmune disease in which a society endlessly attacks itself.
And the track record for fixing large institutions and groups of institutions which have become dysfunctional is not very good: see Chrysler and GM for examples.
May 1, 2009 - 9:08 am 10. CR:“Close everything but the necessary subjects: science, math, foreign languages, etc. Dispense with all the nonsensical propaganda. Sociology – what’s that?”
This should be the case for just about every university out there. I was an engineering student at a well known technical university in the late ’80s. The “humanities” offerings included the basics in literature, language and history but also had a smattering in various “modern” “studies”. I took a few of these only to be assaulted with overt politicization. They were easy A courses, though; just spit back whatever BS the professor wanted to hear.
May 1, 2009 - 9:20 am 11. Insufficiently Sensitive:And the track record for fixing large institutions and groups of institutions which have become dysfunctional is not very good: see Chrysler and GM for examples.
The Chrysler and GM examples have nothing to do about ‘fixing’ large institutions. There are decades of precedent in the bankruptcy laws that actually have a track record at equitably salvaging the remaining value of dysfunctional institutions.
But Chrysler and GM are only being fixed on the Chicago basis of ‘the fix is in’. Their manufacturing/administrative/selling model is indeed in need of fixing: they can’t support themselves, and haven’t done so for years. Obama’s political fix is only a naked highjacking of control, to transfer unearned share values to his UAW voting bloc at no risk. That’s not an economic fix, as the gentlemen from the unions will discover (surely they already know) when they offer ‘their’ products on a market in which the laws of supply and demand have not yet been repealed.
What will generate a fair amount of resentment out here among the voters is the endless series of ‘fixes’ which will be transferred from our taxes to the pockets of those unions as they continue to ‘run’ the businesses at never-ending losses.
May 1, 2009 - 9:57 am 12. EdSki:I took a sociology class back in the 1990’s as an elective while finishing up a Comp Sci degree at night.
The professor gave some long winded, high falutin sounding definition, that I won’t even try to remember, but I do remember how I interpreted it at the time.
People who want the prestige that comes with being a psychiatrist or psychologist but with out having to put in all the extra hard classes required to learn a subject that actually matters. So instead they study society at large.
I don’t recall doing a whole lot of studying for the class, but I got around a 99 for a final grade, so it couldn’t have been that difficult a class.
Of course compared to classes like physics, calculus and circuit analysis, most classes aren’t that hard.
May 1, 2009 - 12:31 pm 13. AD:“…Screw the Tea Parties. Drink gin.”
I would, but it makes it too difficult to focus on the front sight!
May 1, 2009 - 2:13 pm 14. glenn:Sorry to have to say this but Judy is right. The problem is generational, it started when the Boomers demanded consequence free, standard free education and consequence free employment. They dismissed those of us who saw the problems with their lack of standards with the famous Boomer shrug and “Whatever, Dude” Now their kids are a useless lot of badly educated sloppily dresses mouth breathers. When they have spent all the assets their ancestors built up they won’t have a clue what to do to re-create them.
May 1, 2009 - 5:44 pm 15. David Thomson:“And the track record for fixing large institutions and groups of institutions which have become dysfunctional is not very good”
I have long advocated the abandoning of these institutions. The crazies are legally protected to the point of absurdity. It is near impossible get rid of even the most whacked out professors. The results of the recent Ward Churchill trial should discourage anyone who might want to give it a try. Only hard science degrees are generally worth respecting. Those obtaining a liberal arts degree should be treated as an idiot until proven otherwise. And I am being fair to say this! There are just too many idiots running around who possess a soft science PhD. The vastly overpaid William I. Robinson merely represents the tip of the iceberg.
May 1, 2009 - 7:03 pm 16. POPPABOB:At an Ivy league school in 1954 I had a sociology professor who unequivocally stated that “Man will never go into space. It is physically impossible” In addition, I was a psych major because it was easy and gave me time to study the pre-med science courses. In a required psych statistics open book exam I was asked by the professor how I could have got a 99, when the class average was 40, including 40 on a question that could be copied right out of the book. Things in the social “sciences”
May 1, 2009 - 10:07 pm 17. Richard Nieporent:haven’t changed that much.
How dare Israelis defend themselves. Don’t you know that Jews are supposed to be the victims. Professor Robinson is just another left-wing, self-hating Jew.
May 2, 2009 - 6:08 am 18. jim gibson:Great post! UCSB should be closed and idiots like Robinson should try to get a job in a real world, something like dish washing
May 2, 2009 - 7:31 am 19. Ellsworth:Okay, Glenn, if you want to look at it that way, who created the Boomers? The Greatest Generation, who didn’t want their kids to suffer, who wanted to give them everything. So then I guess it’s their fault. Sheesh. Nothing more unproductive than the blame game. Do you really want to write off an entire generation as idiots? And where will the next generation come from? We might as well all just give up if it’s as hopeless as that. Don’t you think we owe it to OUR kids to figure out a way to move forward and reach these people?
May 2, 2009 - 11:54 am 20. Roger L Simon:What Ellsworth said.
May 2, 2009 - 11:56 am 21. EdGi:Yes, what Ell said. Also, Gin Parties are not the answer, you have to eventually get up, become horrified again, and repeat the cycle. Teabagging is for the White House/MSNBC/CNN crowd and simply not our thing (not that I’m sayin’ they shouldn’t have their rights), thus Tea Partying and doing what you’re doing, slogging through the mud, is most likely to get us out of the swamp to the promised land.
May 2, 2009 - 10:16 pm 22. RKV:As far as ol’ Robinson is cocerned, we Irish Catholics have our Robinsons too, but we call them traitors and consider them an embarrasment to their families and community. Have you considered the Amish way, shunning?
As a UCSB alum, I here to tell all of you who want to close the university – “piss up a rope!” And no I’m not a fan of what this guy did. The reality is this stuff happens every day in academia, and not just at UCSB.
That said, get your kids educated and make sure they major in a discipline that has some economic value. If it has “studies” in the name, then that’s a “no go” sign, eh? There are plenty of fine scholars and students at UCSB and I know quite a number of them even now, including about a dozen Iraq War vets who I take to my gun club on weekends for R&R.
May 3, 2009 - 4:46 pm 23. Mike_K:You might consider reading the Nacissism epidemic and see where the past three generations have led the kids who believed the “self esteem” movement’s teachings. It’s depressing, though, I warn you. Back in the 1950s, there was a study of the use of amphetamines in pilots. The pilots were convinced the use of amphetamines made them more alert and improved their performance. The problem was that objective measurement showed they had not improved their performance and, in fact, it was worse. That has now occurred with the psychology of self esteem. College age kids think they are smarter and better informed than they are. The results are now showing up in such areas as financial derivatives and investment bankers. They are far over the line in risk-seeking behavior.
May 3, 2009 - 7:32 pm 24. Cynic:Maybe one should blame Benjamin Spock whose advice set the ball rolling for screwing up child rearing and started the slide from the Greatest Generation into the Stupidest Generation?
May 4, 2009 - 6:33 am 25. CORWIN:Roger,
May 5, 2009 - 8:59 pm 26. Haggy Williams:Sociology is what my father called a “Trust Fund Degree”. In response to a query as to how my cousin Eve-lon ago could major in it.
“Your cousin ,Eve,has a very good trust fund.You ,unfortunately,will have to work for a living.”
Personally I think everyone in California should be given a test. It would consist of fitting the appropriate block into the corresponding hole, so that square blocks went into square holes, etc. Those residents who could successfully fit all the blocks into the correct holes were invited to move out. The rest had to stay in california.
May 10, 2009 - 4:53 pm