Posted on 09/24/2011 7:06:01 PM PDT by Shalmaneser
Lots of people are taking this Elizabeth Warren person out behind the woodshed. I thought I’d add my two cents.
Let us note first off that none of what she said is particularly surprising. It’s painfully obvious that she’s a perfesser, and that’s just what perfessers do. Trust me: I’ve observed the species in their native habitat a long time now (there’s a reason I call this blog Academic Zoology), and I can recognize them on sight. Just by looking at her, you know Elizabeth Warren has three cats and a collection of “world music” on her iPod. She’s got at least seven handmade shawls, each purchased from representatives of a different Native American tribe (an experience she describes as “authentic” and “transcendent”). She’s spiritual, but not religious. Her kids take lessons on instruments like the harp (the violin being “too commercial”), and they have names like Petal and Maximilian. Her husband is a lobbyist or a lawyer for a nonprofit, and of course he has a different last name. He probably has a pony tail and definitely sports a beard. They both wear sandals year round.
Checking the Google machine…. yep. Her resume reads: law school (student), law school (professor), government (“adviser,” natch), “consumer advocate,” law school (professor). Go figure. With tenure, that’s about 200 G’s a year, plus speaking fees and book royalties.
Ain’t it just fucking typical? People who are already wealthy by any reasonable standards, and who produce no discernible product whatsoever, want to take even more of your money, because they know what to do with it better than you do.
That’s how it goes in academia, y’all. You’ll probably have to trust me on this, but I speak from long experience: most academics have NEVER held a payroll job. Not once. Ever.
Think about it. The kind of kid who goes to grad school spends his high school nights cramming for the SATs. While most of us were humping groceries or flipping burgers or holding down a cash register for our date money, these nerdlingers were working up their speeches for the debate club meet. Daddy covered the incidentals.
Because they aced those debates and their SATs, they got into good schools, where they proceeded to study the kinds of things that kids who aced their SAT verbals study. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the same clever word games that won them high school debate meets is also pretty good for telling unwashed, bearded, ponytailed TAs what they want to hear. Daddy, plus the government, paid the tuition.
And then they went on to grad school or law school, because hey, anyone who’s pulling down a 4-point in Protest Studies is wasted in the grubby world of commerce. They’ve got a higher purpose (and besides, that’s where all those icky frat boys and shallow sorority girls go). Turns out that clever word games work well there, too, and best of all, you don’t even have to pretend to interact with the icky frat boys and shallow sorority girls… except in class, where you’ve got the power because you’ve got the grade book. Meanwhile, the government is still picking up the tab.
And then the blessed day arrives, and you don a funny robe and get your sheepskin. Now it’s time for “interviews.” You’ll have to trust me again on this, but the “interview” process for academic jobs is so far removed from the ones most of us went through, they might as well be conducted in Martian. The most important point is, it’s run like the kind of old boys’ club a Gilded Age robber baron could only fantasize about in his wettest wet dream. People are hired entirely on the basis of three or four people’s personal prejudices. The process is unregulated, unobserved, and unappealable.
And if you get a job, you spend the next decade or so grubbing for tenure, which means producing the same kind of ass-kissing “scholarship” that got you hired in the first place. For pandering to the prejudices of washed-up radicals, you pull down a fairly nice salary (in the just-below $100K range), all of which is paid for by taxes.
See what I mean? For people like Elizabeth Warren, of course it’s “all of us” who pay for stuff. They’ve never actually felt the hand of the government hoovering hard-earned coin out of their pockets, because they ARE that hand. Most of us, I’ll wager, remember the exact moment we became conservatives for life — it’s the one where you looked at your gross pay, then your net pay, and said, “I busted my ass on the fry-o-lator for this?!”
Academics, y’all, have NEVER had that experience. Money has always just kinda, you know, been there. On the first and the fifteenth of each month, it shows up in the ol’ bank account. It’s not tied to anything measurable –they don’t get paid by the classroom hour (most of them hardly teach at all); they don’t get paid by the published article (academic journals are as subsidized as the rest of the university system); they don’t get paid by the hour spent in the library doing “research” (which is unmeasurable in any case). The disparity between gross and net is meaningless to them, because it’s just kinda there the way the money itself is just kinda there. It’s ALL just government largesse.
How could anyone in this environment NOT think like Elizabeth Warren does? Hell, given that these are the people teaching ever liberal arts course offered in every university in America, we should all be thanking God that college kids are generally too lazy and apathetic to vote.
Wow. That’s quite a quote.
I wonder how SHE contributed to all this. All she did was talk. i wonder if she ever served in the military? .....just kidding...
Describes my government worker, Obama voting neighbor to a "T."
She’s a “genetic democrat”.
You can literally see the stupid in her face.
So true. I must agree with others that think these types have genetic flaws. Possibly we could use them in gene modification experiments.
John Doe Citizen;
I built my factory and had to train the workers I hired because they learned precious little in the Government schools.
I had fire supression systems installed to protect from fires and to hopefully lower my government mandated insurance costs.
I hired a contract security agency to guard my factory because when seconds count the police are only minutes away. My trucks that carry my goods pay tire taxes, road use taxes, gas taxes state vehicle inspection taxes to name a few.
KISS MY ASS MS. WARREN
Well said. It looks like you’re probably a great boss—one to be proud of.
Hey, hey, hey... I have three cats. Let’s not blame this on the cats, now...
Kind of strange. I have Jerry Doyle on the radio as I’m reading this post and just as I got to her quote he played it back. I thought her obnoxious whiney voice had become imbedded in my psyche and I would need shock therapy or brain bleach to get it out.Whew!! It was a rough moment.
I always taunted my cat for being a democrat and being a mediocre cat. He was mailing it in.
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