Owls Of The World, Unite!

The newspaper of record for Cobb County, The Marietta Daily Journal, has recently exposed that the prospective new provost for my dear alma mater, Kennesaw State University, may be or may not be kind of a sort of communist.

As anyone who has spent any time in the any liberal arts department at any college in the United States, including unaccredited home school Bible Colleges, knows that most college professors are well to the left-politically speaking-to the average Joey Bagofdoughnuts. Actually, it would have been bigger news if Dr. Tim Chandler would have been a conservative.

To be fair to Dr. Chandler, the matter in question is a paper he wrote over twelve years ago with another professor that just happened to turn out to be a “9/11 Truther” ( a person who believes George W Bush came up with this great plan to kill three thousand people because, well, this is where it gets complicated).

The paper, in academic terms, said Capitalism stinks and that the United States is the most violent nation state ever because Chandler had never heard of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, et.al because Chandler’s doctorate was in Education/Physical Education. Chandler says he wrote it through “Marxist lens”.

I wish I had come up with that when I was at Kennesaw State. I could have remarked about a test that I was writing with my “Doofus lens” and that the test was not an accurate reflection of my knowledge of the subject.

What’s even more remarkable (other than my general agreement with The MDJ,which is unusual) is that one of my old professors wrote an Op-Ed piece defending the Chandler hiring. I will also mention that it is remarkable that someone who taught me hasn’t retired yet, but that’s another story, smarty pants.

Dr. Thomas Keene wrote that it was wrong for The MDJ to attack KSU and Dr. Chandler. Dr. Keene, I am happy to report, is a swell fellow. He was a fair professor, although in 1983 he looked like one of those professors that were way too interested in the peasants. I once told him a joke I borrowed without footnotes from The National Lampoon that would probably get me expelled today. He told it at a Department Meeting, giving me full credit. I had his colleagues for weeks coming up to me telling me what a funny guy I was. Keene was also on the committee that recommended football for KSU, so I have no beef with him as a person.

Dr. Keene says college professors by nature are contrarians and that’s why they are college professors. Again, I wish I knew this back then. I would have answered the questions on my exams with the exact opposite from what was given in the lectures.

Dr Keene writes, “Conservatives often complain that universities are filled with liberals. Of course they are. University professors are contrarians who like contesting authority, whether it is the authority of ideas or institutions. They are paid to do it. They are rewarded if they do it well. One of the questions on teacher assessment surveys at KSU asks whether "the instructor challenges me to think." It's an appropriate question. It gets at one of most important criteria on which professors are judged.”

Besides a big high five to Dr. Keene for admitting what we conservatives have been complaining about forever, I would like to add that this is an attitude that is prevalent only in the Liberal Arts department. For some unknown reason,the Liberal Arts department feel it is their duty to make everyone in steps into their building a Democrat. The Business Department seems more interested in getting a student a job.

What this is really about it feckless leadership of Dr. Dan Papp. He has the unenviable task of being the President of KSU after Betty Siegel, who everything little thing she did was magic (thinking about my college career got me thinking about the great hits of the 80’s.)

In his first year at the helm, at statue called “Spaceship Earth” mysteriously fell apart into a broken heap. To be all Liberal Artsy-it seems to have foreshadowed Dr. Papp’s tenure with his “dog ate my homework” response to Jessica Colotl (an illegal alien/student that was arrested on campus and blamed big bad America for enforcing these strange little things called laws). Now comes Dr. Chandler and his paper.

The only lens Papp’s administration can look good in are called beer goggles.