Last Time Around
In September, I complained about the lack of journalistic standards shown by the Monterey County Herald. They never acknowledged the reply, much less offered a retraction for their incorrect factual allegations about what I wrote.
Now they once again are citing something I offered in the most recent PM posting about 10 politically-incorrect reasons to be depressed.
(http://www.montereyherald.com/opinion/ci_11069229).
I think a reply will only confirm the validity of my original essay, and shed light on contemporary problems in both journalism and the university as outlined in the posting. Call the following a “teachable moment.” So here we go again (my comments follow theirs in parentheses).
Our second favorite conservative columnist, Victor Davis Hanson, chooses an odd list of examples as part of a fresh column trumpeting his political incorrectness and grousing about what has gone wrong in our fair state. Comparing the good old days of Gov. Pat Brown’s to rotten more recent times, Hanson writes of things that would “make our forefathers weep.”
He lists, with cryptic lack of elaboration, a walk through downtown San Francisco, a stroll along Fresno’s main street, an afternoon at the Los Angeles airport, a visit to the park in the small San Joaquin Valley town of Parlier and “a glance at the catalogue of Cal State Monterey.”
One imagines Hanson is channeling a 10-year-old column by our favorite conservative columnist, George Will, in which he famously lamented the over-the-top political correctness of CSU-Monterey Bay.
(”cryptic lack of elaboration”?–the essay was a reflection on ten things that had gotten worse, and was a blog that already had run to 1700 words. I have no control whether other sites such as realclearpolitics, instapundit, or powerlineblog choose to run it. It was not a formal column, but a long reflection.
1) I think most Californians who walk in downtown 2008 San Francisco and compare it to what it was like 20, 30, or 40 years ago would be depressed.
2) I suggest the editors go down the Fresno mall and ask seniors what in comparison it was like when it opened in the early 1960s.
3) Does anyone think flying in and out of LAX is a normal air-travel experience?
4) I suggest the editor picnic in the public park in Parlier.
5) Now we hit home with CSU Monterey Bay.
I have never read, as the Herald alleges, a 10-year-old column by George Will; but as a 20-year veteran and emeritus professor of the CSU system, I suggest I am more familiar with the campus, now and when it opened, than Will, insightful though he probably was.
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19 Comments
1. vanderleun:I would suspect that the entire combined brainpool of the Monteray Herald would generate about one-tenth the wattage of Professor Hanson.
Nov 25, 2008 - 9:40 pm 2. J.E. Dyer:Methinks thou dost take the Monterey County Herald a tad too seriously, sir.
But I’m always up for whatever exchanges you want to keep going with that, um, modest media organ.
Nov 25, 2008 - 11:37 pm 3. Broadsword:Ah come on…there’s no such paper as the Monteryey Herald. You made them up so’s you could make up those phony class offerings…didn’t you?
Nov 26, 2008 - 6:24 am 4. RJ:I would call this a “Lanny Davis” moment. What you need is a Greg Graig working on your side. Your PR man should be Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal.
Perhaps you should take a course on the Dogon society. Get to your roots, so to speak.
Lawyers…trained to know just what? Ask my bud Plato, he had them figured out 2300 years ago!
Nov 26, 2008 - 6:41 am 5. Miles:My taxes go to pay for that? Someone please check the budget at CSU.
Great points otherwise. In a further descent into political incorrectness, I bid you a Happy Thanksgiving VDH!
Nov 26, 2008 - 7:04 am 6. ~Paules:Dear Professor,
You argue with logic and eloquence, but your refutation will have as much effect on the Monterey County Herald as debating Toquemada over the existence of witchcraft. Your opponents live in a fixed world based on faith that logic cannot penetrate. In their mind you have no standing because you are a heretic. The inquest presumes guilt; the facts matter not at all. It remains only to see if you will confess before burning at the stake.
I am not the first to suggest that contemporary liberalism is a religion. It starts with the presumption of a collective guilt for all our societal ills: racism, homophobia, poverty, etc. The high priests then offer absolution for true believers. Those who reject the revelation handed down to them are not just misguided, they must be evil. Next arrive the scoundrels with indulgences for sale. Al Gore shows up in the robes of Johann Tetzel.
Science would eventually overthrow the fixed concepts of the medieval mind. But what do we do when our colleges are all turned into seminaries of a new religion? It must start, can only start, by taking back our schools and universities. We need the modern equivalent of a Galileo or Copernicus to step forward and denounce the fraud. It won’t change the mind of true believers, but we might instill in the next generation a logical mindset. The chill wind that honest academics feel today is the dark spectre of human ignorance returning from the past. I didn’t think it possible, but there it is.
Nov 26, 2008 - 8:19 am 7. GGA - Dublin, Ohio:Happy Thanksgiving, Dr. Hanson.
Thank you for your refreshing and thought-provoking commentary, which I always look forward to reading and is always worthwhile to do so.
I wanted you to know that you have inspired me to start studying history. I am now studying American history on my own, and I am the better for it. I greatly appreciate your inspiration and insightful writing. Thank you!
In this regard, I recently discovered the American Civil Literacy website: http://americancivicliteracy.org/index.html
and wanted to bring it to your attention, if you have not already learned of it yourself. I am eager to hear your feedback on its contents, since I think it provides the evidence to support some of your assertions regarding problems in education and the importance of history and the classics.
For my part, my concerns for the future of our great country were confirmed, and it made me a bit queasy. Not only are our politicians dreadfully uneducated about our American heritage, so too are average citizens. Consider: how exactly does one intelligently participate in an election if one has no idea how our unique system of American government works? The answer is quite disturbing.
Needless to say, while this is very serious news, you will hear nothing about it in the MSM, which as you know, is an entire set of other problems and issues, albeit the two are connected. I believe that the problems in education explain, in part, the shoddy
“journalism” of younger reporters and editors. But, I digress…
The breakdown in the fabric of our republic (like dry rot over time) is happening right out in the open in front of all of us. Some evidence of this is in that survey; more evidence is the conduct of many members of Congress. While this decay is out in the open, it is generally not perceptible, given how slowly it is happening. I think you understand what I am getting at here.
My contention is that this problem is due, in part, to the widespread breakdown of the family. This sad, sorry, and all-too-familiar saga for far too many has created a greater reliance in government schools in raising children. This reliance has created an even greater problem. Specifically, the greater reliance on raising children coupled with an education in government schools that is far less useful than it should be has created huge numbers of young (and some older) adults utterly unprepared to face, survive, and compete in the modern world in which they live.
If you get the chance, I (and surely many others) would greatly appreciate you sharing with us some of your insights into the problem presented by the array of failures in education. Not just the symptoms and evidence that you surely can easily identify, but also some real practical steps, solutions, tips, and alternatives for parents who do not want to see their kids educated to the lowest common denominator.
Given that our children are our future, carelessly casting off the opportunity to properly raise and educate them is one of the grossest derelictions of duty I can imagine. From the mind of one of our greatest, and most underappreciated, founding fathers, John Adams:
“It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.”
—John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756
True then; true now.
Again, have an enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday with your family.
All the best,
Nov 26, 2008 - 9:06 am 8. Jason:Greg Arenstein
GGA – Dublin, Ohio
Yet the CSU system just announced because of budget problems that they will have to turn away thousands of students that normally would have qualified to be accepted. But at least they will still be able to teach their phsychobabble ethnic studies nonesense classes. As a proud graduate of the CSU system in the last century, I have sadly found myself advising my own children to not attend the CSU system exactly because so much of the education has been watered down by feel good nonesense studies.
Nov 26, 2008 - 9:19 am 9. CDR:Dr. Hanson, your link at the very end to the September exchange with the Monterey Herald doesn’t work.
Nov 26, 2008 - 9:55 am 10. NJclosetconservative:That sample from the course catalog was shocking. I’ve taught at NYU which is often labeled a hotbed of critical theory but I can’t find one NYU program in all the colleges whose courses are as patently ridiculous as the one cited. I fear that the higher ed situation is much worse than I imagined.
Nov 26, 2008 - 10:54 am 11. A Claremont Thanksgiving:I experienced these (types of) classes as a Cal State Student. Many of us exchanged smirks and eye-rolls as the Old White Lady teaching the class tried to enlighten us. These Old White Ladies often claimed ethnicity-by-Marriage. Ironically, most of these Old White Ladies were divorced. They must’ve driven those poor guys crazy, but proudly kept the ethnic surnames for “authenticity.” The Old White Ladies often accented their drab faculty wardrobes with colorful items from the ethnic Ex-Husband’s homeland/oppressed American subculture.
Looking back on those Old White Ladies, I now understand their lives must be terribly sad. That might explain the frantic activism, an attempt to fill the emptiness…
Nov 26, 2008 - 1:46 pm 12. whiskey:PC is the province of women. Who are it’s main enforcers and beneficiaries.
Good insight Claremont Thanksgiving.
As Dr. Hanson has written, typically the male route to achievement, power, and so on has been to rise through the ranks of an organization by doing something, or sudden elevation during wartime (when the top class of generals are a disaster). Edison, Lincoln, Sherman, the Wright Brothers, are all examples of rising by achievement.
As opposed to a priesthood of sorts, that women (and a few men) tend to create with PC. A PC priesthood that has power by labeling some infidels and others holy. And as Claremont Thanksgiving noted, explicitly oriented AGAINST the “average White Guy.”
All will note that high-status men like Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Tony Villaraigosa, and Gavin Newsome faced no PC censure AT ALL. Because they were high-status, powerful men.
Really, the gender divide and power of women in the society, an inevitable outcome of demographics, explains much of PC and our politics. Including the Oprahesque, Dr. Phil Shaman-in-Chief, frequent visitor to Oprah and Ellen, as President. Put there by Single Women who voted for him 70-29.
Nov 26, 2008 - 3:56 pm 13. Doc:Every day I have to walk Market Street to get to and from work. It is filthy and every ten paces there is someone begging for money. Makes the bums of “Cannery Row” look like, er, journalists.
Nov 26, 2008 - 4:19 pm 14. Ron Kean:Dear Professor,
I pity that newspaper.
If they would run your essays their circulation would increase.
Nov 26, 2008 - 5:10 pm 15. CalifGirlInMaine:I was born in southern Calif. in the mid-20th cent., lived there my entire life until the year 2000, when I moved to Maine. I agree with you that many things in Calif. have changed over the last decades, and NOT for the better. Before I moved, I knew many people who talked about and wanted to leave Calif. because of the changes and the problems in the state and its society. If the Monterey County Herald writer cannot see this, he* is either blind or stupid, or both.
Nov 27, 2008 - 2:04 pm 16. 49erDweet:*(non-PC but grammatically correct, the writer could be a woman)
Because of its belief system maybe as ~Paules seems to imply it should be renamed California Seminary Unaffiliated, Monterey Bay.
As a resident near “feel good about myself CalState” I can only second VDH’s reading of the situation. Except he is being too easy on them. This particular campus is completely attuned to “victims” of whitey’s systems, and persons without color need not apply. If enrolled, they will not be noticed or encouraged. It must be in somewhere in the charter.
As for the MCH’s editorial staff, their world view triangulate’s from the Bixby Bridge to Moss Landing Harbor, both on the Hwy 1 corridor, and Laguna Seca Raceway on Hwy 68. Nothing outside those lines are worth noting unless Hollywood stars are involved.
Nov 27, 2008 - 5:08 pm 17. ET:The paper’s strategy seems to be denying the obvious – that is, ignoring completely the larger point – which is a good metaphor for the media at large’s “Coverage” of the Obama campaign. A reporter knows how to present the story he wants to tell, even if this process is subconscious.
In cases as glaring as this, it’s only possible that the authors are either disingenuous, or mentally deficient – and the latter would probably be less harmful to the process of general discours – but it is most certainly the former 99% of the time.
Nov 29, 2008 - 11:31 pm 18. steve:Hippies! Who cares what hippies think?
Nov 30, 2008 - 7:27 am 19. Dubrovnov:I didn’t know that they offered those courses so close to home (Monterey CA). Why then would anyone have to go to Harvard or Yale to get a good education?
Dec 1, 2008 - 7:12 pm