P.J. O’Rourke, author of Eat The Rich, gives commencement advice worth giving:
1. Go out and make a bunch of money!
Here we are living in the world’s most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever […]
Archive for the 'Academia' Category
May13th2008
Comencement Advice Worth Giving
Published by in Academia, DayToDay, Economics and General. 7 CommentsApr21st2008
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Economics, Education, General, University and Wal-Mart. 1 Comment“I have never quite encountered an intrinsically less fair institution than the university, at least in liberal terms of egalitarianism and respect for the underclass. A full professor may damn Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart would never get away with the two-tier system that the university in built upon: the PhD part-timer has no job security, sometimes […]
Oct20th2007
Quote Of The Day
Published by in Academia, General, Hispanics (Minority Issues) and affirmative action. 10 Comments“Question to think about: If right-wingers are underrepresented in universities relative to the population and discriminated against by the left-wing majority, as Larry suggests, should there be affirmative action for right-leaning academics? It seems that, on principle, those on the left (who favor affirmative action to promote diversity and correct past injustice) should endorse such […]
Oct6th2007
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Books, DayToDay and General. 3 Comments“[Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence] Thomas was talking about how surprisingly positively he has been received in campuses around the country over the past two decades. It is mostly the faculty, not the students or the public that are tough on him. Of course, there are some law schools he does not expect an invitation […]
Apr11th2007
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Capitalism, Economics and General. 0 Comments“The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he’s opposed to freedom for others.…He thinks…there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities.…The businessmen are just […]
Oct31st2006
“Many campuses have speech codes where it is called creating a “hostile environment” if you say things that make various racial, sexual, or other protected groups unhappy. Young people educated at our most prestigious colleges and universities are learning the lesson that storm trooper tactics can silence those who are not in vogue on campus, […]
Oct13th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Foreign Policy and General. 3 Comments“The voices of appeasement are familiar to historians, for we have heard them loudly, especially within the twentieth century. Intellectuals have done more than their share to convince others that standing up to aggression is a practical and moral mistake. Be nice, thoughtful, and considerate, the argument goes, and the murderers, thugs, and bullies will […]
Oct6th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Communism, Economics and General. 6 Comments“Again, one reason why intellectuals are so much more obsessed with Nazi crimes than Soviet crimes – even though in terms of human lives lost the Soviets way exceeded the Nazis – is that intellectuals, by the very nature of their professions, grant enormous attention to words and ideas. And they are attracted by socialist […]
Sep28th2006
Where Historians Often Go Wrong
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia and General. 0 CommentsHistorian Thomas C. Reeves gives us the details of a talk that Alan Charles Kors, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, gave on the often incorrect paradigm of historians:
Secondly, Kors contends, ideologically driven historians misunderstand reality. They “imagine that goodness, wisdom, order, justice, peace, freedom, legal equality, mutual forbearance, and kindness are the […]
Sep16th2006
“The feminists at Harvard seek to remove every vestige of patriarchy in America, but they have said almost nothing about the complete dismissal of women’s rights by radical Islam. To do so would be to attack Islamic culture, and according to multiculturalism, every culture is equal and none is evil. They forsake women in societies […]
Sep15th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Foreign Policy and General. 4 Comments“Harvard has just welcomed the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami to give a little talk. Harvard thinks this is free speech, but in fact the university has allowed itself to be used as a platform for sweet-talk in the service of a regime that hates, and wants to bamboozle, America. Note, too, that Harvard professor […]
Jun28th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Communism, Economics, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 11 Comments“Most people agree that Marx’s predictions about capitalism turned out to be dead wrong. What most people don’t know is that Marx was an out and out racist and anti-Semite. He didn’t think much of Mexicans. Concerning the annexation of California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: “Without violence nothing is ever accomplished in history.” […]
Jun6th2006
I Can’t Stand Radical Chicanoism
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Chicanoism, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 34 CommentsI can’t stand radical, and even most forms of moderate, Chicanoism. A case in point is Marcos Aguilar, most known for assisting in occupying (and laying to waste) the Faculty Center at UCLA in 1993 that resulted in the creation of the Chicano Studies major dept.
Aguilar is back in the spotlight, as founder and principal […]
Jun5th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 0 Comments“Today, the United States is more security conscious — 9-11 did that. New security concerns have a subsidiary effect: an increased emphasis on immigrant assimilation. Most new Americans learn English and salute the flag. However, radical “multiculturalists” (many drawing paychecks at U.S. universities) urge separatism. Their abrasive identity politics lacks political traction, but they have […]
Jun2nd2006
“Perhaps the ugliest side of professors is the conviction that specialized knowledge about a few narrow subjects confers intellectual and moral authority on matters about which one knows almost nothing. How is it possible, we wonder, that students who do not share our fascination with the English Civil War and Marxism can somehow also be […]
Jun1st2006
“Pride: If it does nothing else, the process of becoming a professor should involve the recognition of how little one knows. Even in the smallest subfield, there are always new questions, and revolutions in thought arrive with the regularity of new generations of scholars. Perhaps the evident pride of professors is based upon a secret […]
