Educators Lacking Common Sense

AIA-FL Blog ^ | June 17, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

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Educators Lacking Common Sense

Bethany Stotts, June 17, 2010

If there is one place where common sense seems often in short supply, it is in the classroom, be it in kindergarten or all the way up through higher education.

Wisdom of the Faculty Lounge

“We [Americans] are being run by the mindset of the faculty lounge, as if the philosophy or English department has taken over running the country,” writes former California State University, Fresno professor Victor Davis Hanson on June 13. Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

“Some of you were not academics for 21 years,” Hanson later adds, criticizing President Obama’s record on taxes, finance, foreign policy, and race relations. “No problem, you can easily imagine what the worldview is on campus—given that after six years on the job you cannot be fired except for felony conviction (and even that is problematic),” he writes.

“After tenure a failure to publish and awful teaching evaluations mean nothing. ‘Post-tenure review’ has the teeth of a UN investigation.”

He later continues,

“When I would go to department meetings, get coffee, or see faculty at receptions, I could never quite understand the aberrant mental processes. There was never a connection between our salaries and the source of wealth generated to pay them. Taxes could be limitless, because a Michelle’s proverbial ‘they’ had far too much money anyway, and so spent their lucre on needless things like jet skis and SUVs. Better for the university to have it and spread it around wisely.”

Other areas in public education, both here and in Britain, seem to be lacking in a little common wisdom of late.

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