Dress Codes and Potential Curmie Nominees

Curmie is WAAAAAAYYY behind on his writing, but we’re going to try to play catch-up in the waning days of 2015 so the most deserving of Curmie contenders get their fair shot at that coveted title.

Over the summer, Curmie wrote about stupid dress codes associated with high school proms, and promised a second post about stupid dress codes not associated with prom. Here it is, with six examples that happened to have crossed Curmie’s vision over the past few months. The frightening thing is that there is little doubt that we’re only scratching the surface of this inanity; there are no doubt dozens if not hundreds of idiot administrators enforcing moronic dress codes all over the country. These are just the ones that got written up in a place Curmie happened to see them.

We’re going to take these a little out of chronological order in order to start with the one story that isn’t about double standards for girls and boys, and to conclude with Curmie’s choice for the Ontologically Stupidest Dress Code in the History of Ontologically Stupid Dress Codes. It will almost surely get a Curmie nomination; one or two of the others might, too, and you, Gentle Reader, will get to vote for your… erm… favorite.

Gay O.K. is not O.K.

We start, then, at Faubion Middle School in McKinney, TX, where two 7th-grade students were sent home and a dozen or so others were forced to change clothes or cover up t-shirts that read “Gay O.K.” The students say they were showing support for a classmate who had come out as gay and was being bullied. The school, of course, did nothing about the bullying allegations because, well, Texas.

The students say they were confronted by administrators as soon as they arrived at school, but according to Sammy Heiman, who designed the shirts, “we were doing perfectly fine until lunch. And then … [the administration] called us all out, all the people wearing them, called us out of the cafeteria. And people started getting rowdy because they knew what was going on. They were making us take off the shirts.”

I need hardly mention, Gentle Reader, that there was nothing in the school’s dress code that prohibited a political statement of this kind: the district instead relied on a clause reading “any disruptive or distractive mode of clothing or appearance that adversely impacts the educational process is not permitted.” This is, of course, as Curmie has pointed out before (in a very similar case in Ohio three years ago), administrative code for “there’s nothing illegal, unethical, or immoral about what you’re doing, but we don’t like it and we’re going to forbid it because we can.”

By the way, the dress code seems to have been changed over the summer to a more draconian version that outlaws basically everything, including “items that display… slogans, or language that is provocative.” (“Provocative” is another useful word to hide behind for censorious asshats who seek to deny 1st amendment rights.) Nothing like a little ex post facto cover-up to brighten all our days, after all.

Of course, we were subjected to the utterly disingenuous response of the school’s designated talking head, one Cody Cunningham, who self-righteously proclaimed that the school’s “primary obligation is to ensure a safe and productive learning environment.” OK. How is safety an issue here, except by means of a heckler’s veto, and if you were all that interested in productivity and lack of distraction, maybe you shouldn’t have initiated the confrontation? And forgive Curmie the suspicion that if the t-shirts had called President Obama a tyrant, suddenly your hypocritical administration would have been all about free speech.

Anyway, we move on to four—count ‘em, four—instances in which high school girls were subjected to idiotic rules with even more idiotic enforcement for dressing, well, completely appropriately according to any rational standards.

This dress is too short?

We start, then, in Dayton, Idaho, where senior Evette Raye was suspended with only a half hour left in her high school career for wearing a dress that violated West Side High’s dress code. If this incident falls a little short of a Curmie nomination, it will be because the dress really was shorter than the allowable limit. The rule is certainly stupid and probably sexist, but it is at least the rule. And the insubordination charge may actually be legitimate in that manifest defiance of stupid rules administered by puritanical jackasses is still insubordinate.

If the kerfuffle garners a Curmie nod, it will be because of the ham-handed treatment of Ms. Reay by a boatload of school officials. A teacher, Legrand Leavitt, chose the last 30 minutes of a student’s high school experience to be a dick strut his authority enforce the dress code; the school violated their own policy in suspending Ms. Reay: their handbook reads “If a student is inappropriately dressed, he/she will be required to call home to arrange for appropriate clothing, or the school will provide a t-shirt, sweatshirt or sweatpants to be worn that day.” The school didn’t offer to make any such accommodations, nor would they allow Reay’s mother to bring something else for her to wear. (By the time she could have gotten there, the school day—and year—would have been over, and then petty little morons like Leavitt and Principal Tyler Telford wouldn’t have had the chance to feel self-important.)

Shoulders!  Think of the children!

And so we move on to Fort Myers, Florida, where junior Cameron Boland had the audacity to wear a spaghetti-strap sundress to deliver a victory speech after being elected historian for her county’s National Honor Society chapters. Yes, really. A sundress. In Florida. In May. OMG, shoulders! Blindfold the young ‘uns: we can’t have them subjected to this lasciviousness!

As usual, the dress code is a grammatical and syntactical nightmare as well as a sexist manifesto, essentially blaming girls for boys’ distractedness. (Curmie does like the injunction against “tub tops,” though.) To be fair, spaghetti straps are indeed forbidden. In school. This is an extracurricular activity, and the event was held at another school. It’s reasonable to suggest (though obviously not certain) that Ms. Boland really didn’t know she was breaking any rules. Technically, of course, she was, and she should have known that if she didn’t. But it is beyond question that she didn’t violate any rational standards of decency.

Once again, the manner of enforcement of what is already a stupid rule is the real problem. First off, the voters in the election in question were presumably students, so the district’s over-riding of the results translates into a usurpation of students’ (honor students’), authority. And notice that the speech was allowed to happen. You can’t stand by and watch what Pompous Twatwaffle of the Year School Board Vice Chairman Steven Teuber, in a predictably ungrammatical and boorish screed in the local newspaper (so much for FERPA, right?) calls “a flagrant violation” of the rules, and then decide 45 minutes later that the results of a free and fair election must be overturned. Cameron Boland may or may not be a trouble-maker and a provocateur. But two things are eminently clear: The NHS advisors who made the initial call are buffoons or hypocrites or both. And Steven Teuber is an ass, and apparently a creepy one, at that. Sending a Facebook friend request to a 17-year-old girl you’ve never met? Ewwwww.

Apparently cooler heads have prevailed, and Ms. Boland has been duly installed as co-historian of the county’s NHS chapters. The “co-“ part is a compromise position enacted by Superintendent Nancy Graham, who, unlike Mr. Teuber, seems to have an intellect superior to that of a pile of rotting leaves.

OMG, this girl has a collarbone.

Next up in our tour around the country: Woodford County High School in Kentucky. Because if you thought shoulders were over-stimulating, you should look at (Curmie blushes to even type the word)… collarbones. Once again, there is technically a violation at play here: yes, the dress code says that necklines can’t extend below the collarbone. Well, actually, it was written by the usual pack of illiterate butt-scratchers, so what it really says is that the shirt can’t do so—that really would cause some distraction! But we know what the censorious asshats meant. They meant that Stephanie Hughes was in violation for the outfit you see here. Curmie, who is not a collarbone fetishist, honestly couldn’t figure out what the problem was until he read the article.

The dress code had been the subject of no little debate before this year, largely because of a Youtube video created by a student named Maggie Sunseri. In it, girls describe how virtually all of them have been found in violation of the dress code at one time or another. They complain that even if the majority of teachers have no problem with a student’s apparel, “one person can call it inappropriate and make us miss class.” Curmie didn’t watch the whole thing, but was caught by this thoughtful response, obviously to a question about why there is a dress code at all: “…to give everyone a good learning environment, but honestly, it distracts from it. If you’re worried about, hey, am I going to get caught for dress code today because I couldn’t find a shirt that I could wear that was in dress code, “am I going to get caught for dress code today,” not “what’s the lesson on today.” Curmie suspects that the girls in question probably could indeed have found such a shirt… but also notes that the dress code applies almost exclusively to girls, and thereby privileges the “good learning environment” for boys—wouldn’t want them to be led astray by those collarbones, after all--at the expense of fostering such an environment for girls. “It sends a message to boys that’s it’s all girls’ fault,” says another girl. Precisely.

And, of course, we also get the platitudes from the principal about getting students “college and career ready” and similar bovine feces. As one of the girls points out, “college doesn’t have a dress code, so it’s not really preparing us for college.” Curmie can attest to the validity of that point. But the other thing is… sometimes someone wears something inappropriate once or twice, and then they don’t anymore. These things tend to sort themselves out if you let them.

The good news is that Ms. Hughes and her mom, Stacie Dunn, seem little interested in suffering fools, so when Stephanie was busted for clavicular revelation, not only was a social media campaign born; it went viral... and by “viral” I mean 46,000+ shares. Curmie heard about it at the time, for example, even if he’s only writing about it now. Ultimately, the mobilization of dozens of students and parents (and a healthy dollop of international embarrassment) proved sufficient: the new standard (to be implemented in January, apparently) is still written by someone who shouldn’t have been let out of 6th grade, let alone a college-level Freshman Comp course. But it says that necklines can now extend 2 ¼” below the base of the collarbone—a not unreasonable criterion. If only the powers that be had listened years ago.

Not really a violation at all, but we’ll pretend it is.

Finally… well, finally before the grand finale… there’s this from Huntsville, Alabama’s Grissom High School, where Josefina Thompson was punished for wearing leggings, despite the fact that her outfit seemed to be acceptable under a provision that “Students may wear yoga pants, tights, leggings, or jeggings as long as they are used as an undergarment covered by shorts, skirts, or dresses that are at least no higher than three inches above the bend of the back of the knee.” Is the problem that she was wearing a sweatshirt instead of a dress over the leggings? Curmie doubts it.

Rather, it’s all about that “distracting” thing. Ms. Thompson, by the way, was stopped not by a teacher or administrator, but by a security officer, whose business ought, in any sane universe, to be, well, security, and not to interpret the dress code. This isn’t Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, where a comely young woman’s backside is determined by the drunken but just (or just but drunken, depending on your point of view) judge Azdak to be a deadly weapon. This is an average high school girl whose choice of apparel would be acceptable to any rational being even if the sweatshirt was too short, which it doesn’t appear to be.

Like Stephanie Hughes, Ms. Thompson has a mom who cuts to the central argument in a hurry. In a Facebook post, shared over 2000 times (!), Deanna Wolf writes:

Huntsville City Schools, I would like to ask a question. What are you teaching our children about their bodies and their minds? My daughter was not allowed to go to class, and was held in ILC for an entire class period because she wore this outfit to school. She would have been held even longer had someone not been able to bring her more “appropriate” clothing. I would like someone to please explain to me how this is justified. Why single a student out, put her in a locked room and inhibit her learning because of one faculty member’s INTERPRETATION of her clothing? It boils down to the claim that girls’ “revealing” clothing is a distraction to male students. That the mere idea of a girl even HAVING a derriere (or, heaven forbid, shoulders) is so scandalous that we must stop everything and hide her away. I am sick to death of the public shaming of the female form. You are telling girls that their bodies are to be hidden, and that boys cannot control their minds if they see the basic female figure. It’s disgusting and it belittles both sexes. Not to mention that this whole situation clearly states that a girl’s education has less importance than a boy’s education, and that her right to said education is secondary to providing a distraction free learning environment for the opposite sex. Your misguided attempt at disciplining my child has only succeeded in giving an example of the skewed gender bias perpetuated by society. The lesson she learned today was NOT that her clothes were inappropriate, but rather that the behavior of the school was inappropriate. It’s asinine things like this which push more and more parents to homeschool their children.

Yes. What she said.

Curmie is also, by the way, particularly impressed (notice he didn’t say “positively”) with Keith Ward, communications director for the system, who tried valiantly to convince us that “the dress code applies to everyone.” This is an all too common avoidance of responsibility, akin to “no, it isn’t sexist to tax tampons; men who buy them have to pay the tax, too.” Ward also professed ignorance as to whether students are allowed to, say, wear cheerleading uniforms to class. Way to know your job, there, Keith. For the record, cheerleaders in Curmie’s high school days were required to wear their uniforms to class on game days, skirts in general were shorter then, and we all managed to survive and even get diplomas. Either the adolescent libido or the inanity of school administrators has increased exponentially in the intervening years. Curmie’s money is on the latter.

And so we move on to the incident Curmie regards as the most ridiculous of them all… Drumroll. A couple hours down the road from Curmie is the Cypress-Fairbanks School District in greater Houston. Cy-Fair, as it is commonly known, is a well-respected school system; at least three of Curmie’s former students teach there (or did). But it is also home to a certain Curmie contender.

The perp and the offending dress.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Here’s the story. Parent Jef Rouner wondered why his daughter was wearing a shirt over the sundress she wore to school. Was she cold? “No… I had to change because spaghetti straps are against the rules.” Rouner’s daughter has also had to change into jeans despite the fact that her dress went all the way to the floor. Did Curmie mention that she’s five, and we’re talking about kindergarten, here?

In Rouner’s words:

Five. You get me? She's five. Cut her hair and put her next to a boy with no shirt on and she is fundamentally identical. I guess you could argue that a boy would not be allowed to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps either, but the day they sell anything like that in the boys section of a Target I will happily withdraw my objections.

Yes, there is a specific injunction against spaghetti straps (Rouner rightly notes that there is nary a male-specific rule in the list, but plenty of female-specific ones), but surely any rational person would link that prohibition to the writers’ palpable terror of breasts and cleavage, right? Well, apparently not. Because… she’s five, remember?

Rouner again:

Make no mistake; every school dress code that is not a set uniform is about policing girls and girls alone. The only time I've ever seen it go the other way around was when I was fighting the battle for my long hair throughout middle and high school. That was last century, but I had a friend go through the same thing with Needville ISD less than a decade ago with her son. And why? Because long hair belongs on girls. There's literally no other possible reason to force a boy to cut his hair if he doesn't want to.

Let’s hear it for parents worthy of the name. But stupid, senseless, draconian, body-shaming, sexist, and otherwise despicable dress codes can teach only two things, both of them bad: patriarchic bullshit or contempt for legitimate laws. The perpetrators are probably so insensate that they fail to realize the harm they cause. But we must not look away. We must not be silent. We must not fail.

The Case of the Paranoid President

To say that Curmie is way behind on his writing is like saying Donald Trump has a high opinion of himself. I keep a log of links to news stories that I might like to turn into blog pieces someday: my current backlog is 92 stories, just on education, from calendar year 2015 (there are almost exactly the same number of stories about topics other than education). Part of the problem is that it’s been a particularly busy summer—work-related trips to London, Kent (Ohio), and Montreal totaled well over a month away from home, plus writing a conference paper that turned out to be more work than initially suspected, preparing for a larger-than-normal production this fall… well, you get the idea. But part of the problem is simply that with so many things to write about, Curmie dithers about what topic to choose, then watches Netflix instead of writing about anything.

Today, therefore, represents an attempt, however feeble, to break out of that rut. With so many potential Curmie contenders to choose from, it’s time to just pick one—not necessarily the most egregious, but the one that interests me most today—and go with it. So today I write about a story from May (it found its way into the popular press in June).

Margaret B. Lee: A Curmie contender, and a strong one.

It seems that Oakton Community College President Margaret B. (Peg) Lee was retiring after three decades of service to the Des Plaines, IL, institution, and the college held a reception in her honor. So far, so good, right? Well, a couple of days after the April 25 “gala,” a former adjunct named Chester Kulis copied Lee on an e-mail sent to adjunct instructors. Titled “MAY DAY—The Antidote to the Peg Lee Gala,” the offending missive consisted of a single sentence: “Have a happy MAY DAY when workers across the world celebrate their struggle for union rights and remember the Haymarket riot in Chicago.” [Curmie’s note: overview of the events of the Haymarket riot here.]

Chester Kulis:
Not advocating violence.

Kulis, a long-time member of faculty unions, was miffed that Lee had not re-appointed him (and some 50 other adjuncts) after the school was hit with a $150,000 fine in the wake of a recently-adopted state law which imposes significant financial penalties on any institution which hires officially retired state employees who are paid (by that institution and any others, apparently) a total of more than 40% of their salary in their highest-paid year of employment by the state.  (A revision of the statute, which would exempt retirees receiving less than a $10,000 annual pension, has been proposed, but as far as I can tell not passed into law.)

OCC spokeswoman Janet Spector Bishop was certainly correct in arguing “We’re a public entity. We can’t be spending taxpayer dollars on financial penalties we can avoid.” Her ensuing sentence, however, is no more than equivocation: “It’s not the choice we wanted to make, but we do need to comply with the law.” No one suggested that non-compliance was an option, but there are plenty of ways of ensuring legalities without summarily firing a considerable number of presumably valuable adjunct faculty. Such solutions would require both thought and work, however, and Lee’s administration seemed uninterested in either.

So let us stipulate a few things. 1). The law was well-intentioned but had some unanticipated and negative side effects. 2). The Oakton administration’s solution was pragmatic but lazy and pedagogically silly. 3). Adjunct faculty are probably the most exploited and under-appreciated group of professionals in the country. 4). Kulis is a whiner, and copying the e-mail to Lee was a little boorish.

What it was not, however, was threatening. Nonetheless, he received an indignant case-and-desist letter from one Philip H. Gerner III, one of the college’s attorneys. He wrote: “Your reference to ‘remember the Haymarket riot’ was clearly threatening the president that you could resort to violence against the president and the college campus. Threats of violence are not First Amendment protected free speech.”

Two points: First, Lee doesn’t get off the hook. Yes, it’s the lawyers who look like buffoons, taking an OBVIOUSLY non-threatening comment which was merely copied to Lee as “clearly threatening.” BULLSHIT. But it was Lee’s own paranoid delusions that spurred the response, or the lawyers would never have heard of the e-mail to begin with.

Second, Kulis’s e-mail, read as if grammar matters (and it sure as hell does to Curmie), does not call on the recipients to “remember the Haymarket Riot” à la the Alamo or the Maine, but rather points out that May Day is traditionally associated not merely with a celebration of the labor movement, but also with a commemoration of the Haymarket riots of May 4, 1886. Of course, if you don’t believe in the Oxford comma, you might read those last six words as hortatory rather than a second predicate clause with the same subject: “workers celebrate… and remember.” But, even if that’s how you read it, so what?

It takes a particularly feverish mind to extrapolate a threat out of that phrase. Kulis is absolutely right to declare that “I would put it this way. No one who read this email, with the exception of Peg Lee and her attorneys, thought there was any violent intent.” Curmie would phrase it differently: “no sane person could read violent intent into this e-mail.”

FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), an organization that’s a little too libertarian even for Curmie’s taste but is unquestionably a net positive force, weighed in on May 22:

In declaring Kulis’s email a threat of violence and ordering him to cease and desist from sending similar messages, OCC and its attorney have ignored clear legal precedent, violated Kulis’s rights, and deeply chilled expression on campus. OCC must immediately retract the cease and desist letter and respect the First Amendment rights of faculty members who criticize the college’s administration or its policies….

Kulis’s brief email is entirely protected by the First Amendment, and the charge that it was “clearly threatening” to anyone in the OCC community is without merit and wholly detached from our legal system’s understanding of what constitutes a true threat. OCC must immediately rescind its cease and desist letter and threats of further action against Kulis—its only acceptable option as a public institution bound by the First Amendment….

FIRE asks that OCC immediately reassure Kulis that his First Amendment rights are respected on campus, rescind its cease and desist letter against him, and make clear to OCC faculty that they will not face backlash from OCC’s administration if they criticize the college, its administration, or its practices, as is their fundamental right.

This prompted a different idiot lawyer from Robbins Schwartz, this time Catherine R. Locallo, to respond rather huffily that of course President Lee’s irrational delusions were completely appropriate. The letter even bases a good deal of its rationale on the idea that Lee thought the letter was addressed to her alone, since it was sent to an “undisclosed recipient” list, cc’d to Lee. (Because if I’m sending you a private e-mail, Gentle Reader, I make sure there’s a blank list of undisclosed recipients and you’re only copied on the message intended for you alone.) Wow.

FIRE naturally jumped all over this inanity. Ari Cohn responded,

Colleges and universities are bending over backwards to label benign, constitutionally protected speech as ‘violent’ or ‘threatening.’ While sometimes administrators act out of an overabundance of caution, other times it’s clear they are playing on our basest fears to justify censoring speech with which they simply disagree. In either case, the censorship cannot stand at a public college bound by the First Amendment, nor in any environment that claims to be committed to the marketplace of ideas.

Amen to that.

This one is a slam-dunk. Lee’s administration is loath to spend public money on… you know… frivolous stuff like the best available faculty, but I’m willing to bet that high-priced Chicago law firm ran up some billable hours strutting around proclaiming that an utterly unsupportable claim was actually valid. Moreover, the cease-and-desist letter didn’t arrive until after the anniversary of the Haymarket riot, by which time Kulis’s alleged violence would, logically, have already taken place. Of course, anything approaching rationality is apparently in rather short supply both in the OCC administration building and at the headquarters of Robbins and Schwartz, whose denizens would be walking lawyer jokes, except that they aren’t funny.

The good news is that Lee will no longer be in charge of Oakton Community College. If she was ever fit for the job, she certainly isn’t now. It would be especially sad if Lee had been an outstanding leader for 30 years, only to have her legacy reduced to this sorry incident.  But that’s what happens when your lawyers are interested in their bottom line rather than your reputation (or theirs).

Curmie Contender: Dew Yew Bee Leave This? Edition

Sometimes people just jump up and down and scream that they want to be in the running for next year’s Curmie Award, given to the person or institution who most embarrasses the profession of education. Well, metaphorically, at least.

Clarke Woodger: Curmie Contender

Such an eager contestant is one Clarke Woodger, the owner of the Nomen Global Language Center, a private school in Provo, Utah that specializes in variations on the theme of English as a second language. According to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, Woodger fired his social media specialist, for writing about homophones. Yes, really.

Tim Torkildson wrote a blog on the school’s website explaining what homophones are—words that sound the same but mean different things and are often spelled differently. This would seem to anyone with an IQ above room temperature to be an obvious topic to discuss with ESL learners: one of the most difficult things about English is that we have far more homophones than most other languages do. While this adds to the richness of our discourse—and allows for many more puns and other word-play—it’s a particularly arduous task for non-native speakers (Nomen caters to foreign students seeking admission to American higher education) to differentiate between “pairs” and “pears,” “be” and “bee,” “road” and “rode,” and the like.

Well, let Torkildson tell it:

This week I was fired for writing a blog about homophones for an educational website.

“I’m letting you go because I can’t trust you” said Clarke Woodger, my boss and the owner of Nomen Global Language Center. “This blog about homophones was the last straw. Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality.”

I said nothing, stunned into silence.

“I had to look up the word” he continued, “because I didn’t know what the hell you were talking about. We don’t teach this kind of advanced stuff to our students, and it’s extremely inappropriate. Can you have your desk cleaned out by eleven this morning? I’ll have your check ready.”

To be fair, Woodger claims that his concerns with the blog had nothing to do with homosexuality, and it may be true that the blog entry in question, which has been taken down, was problematic in other ways. Still, the Tribune’s Paul Rolly does quote Woodger as saying that “People at this level of English… may see the ‘homo’ side and think it has something to do with gay sex.” So his protestations seem a little… compromised.

That said, Torkildson himself defended Woodger against some of the more damning accusations that have come from all quarters in the past couple of days. The now-unemployed blogger told Newsweek’s Zach Schonfeld that he hadn’t been accused of advocating a gay agenda or anything like that. The objection was simply that Woodger thought students would be confused.

That presents us with a different problem, but a problem nonetheless. Woodger is not, in the typically clever and typically vulgar term used on the Wonkette site, an “ash whole.” He is, rather, at best nigh eve and probably more than a little dents.

When I first came across this story and posted it to the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, it didn’t take long for a dear friend and former student of Curmie, now a middle-school teacher, to point out that her 5th-graders know what homophones are. Another commenter suggests that homophones are introduced in the 2nd grade. So… yeah. I’m all for giving the benefit of the doubt. Mr. Woodger is not, perhaps, a homophobic (not to be confused with “homophonic”) jerk, or at least as big a one as some have alleged. He is, however, dumber than a turnip and totally unfit to run a lemonade stand, let alone a school.

Are we really to believe that someone who runs a language school doesn’t have the… wait for it… language skills of a 5th-grader? Are we to believe that he doesn’t think that teaching ESL students about homophones will make their future lives in the Anglophone world considerably easier? Are we to believe that the owner of the largest ESL school in the state doesn’t understand the Streisand Effect? Because if he’d simply said that Torkildson had been released for other reasons, this would have been a prime example of tempest in a teapot. Everything would have blown over quickly once people realized they were hearing only one side of the story, and perhaps Mr. Torkildson might not be as sore abused as he would have us believe.

But Woodger’s bizarre statement that suggests that any word that begins with “homo”—“homogenized” or “homogeneous,” for example—is inherently so confusing to the adult mind that no one could possibly think of anything other than homosexuality… well, that is precisely why the word “homosexual” is at all associated with the school. (Note: I remain unclear as to why such a linkage constitutes a problem at all, but that’s a rant for another day.) It will no doubt come as a shock to Mr. Woodger, but other languages use prefixes, too. Of course, he’d know that if he had the language skills of one of my friend’s 5th graders. (It might take a high school education to know what I mean by celebrating his wonderfully “Dickensian” name.)

Clarke Woodger strikes me as the kind of person who begins sentences with “Some of my best friends are…” or “I’m not prejudiced, but…”. Is he as obnoxious as the Rick Santorums of the world? No. But he’s just as stupid. And a better contender for the Curmie.

The Case of the False Credentials (and the Idiot Administrator)

Curmiphiles of a certain age will remember well the phrase, “it’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up,” one of the incessantly-intoned mantras of the Watergate era. I was reminded of that line today in reading about recent events at Birch Vocational Academy in Providence, RI. Birch is the district’s school for children with developmental and/or intellectual disabilities.

Nancy Stevenin: Liar and Cheat

After a scandal involving Birch students’ being forced to work essentially as prison labor, the district needed to turn things around. Part of the solution was to have been the hiring of Nancy Stevenin as Supervisor of Transition and Community Development (whatever the hell that means). Trouble is, the job requires a college degree and Stevenin doesn’t have one. Or, rather, she purchased hers online from a whorehouse diploma mill called Ashley University. Ashley University has no physical campus, no accreditation, presumably no actual faculty who can be contacted, and it’s kind of significant that their website is a dot-com instead of a dot-edu, don’t you think? But they’ll sell you a PhD for $648 (including tax, apparently) with no apparent concern for anything other than whether your credit card company approves payment. One supposes PhDs are pricier than other degrees; Stevenin probably didn’t have to pay that much for a Bachelor’s. And, after all, they’ll even backdate the degree for you, so they’re a model of customer service, right?

Everyone who works for Ashley is dishonest, and every one of their… erm… clients is worse. This is, after all, not Monsters U., Hogwarts, or the North American School of the Artsy and Somewhat Musically Inclined, who sent me a couple of brochures twenty-odd years ago for t-shirts, mugs, and the like. No, Ashley University is nothing more or less than a scam and a fraud: they really want unsuspecting people—like the folks in Providence—to believe in their legitimacy as an education institution.

Stevenin got the job, which pays roughly 50% more than Curmie makes with well over 20 years’ experience and an honest-to-God PhD from an actual university, because although nobody on the hiring committee had presumably ever heard of Ashley University, nobody checked to see if it was…you know… real. That’s not the quintessence of good hiring practices, but it’s at least understandable: no one can possibly know every college in the country, and even HR folks can be a little too trusting at times. So far in the story, then, there’s nothing to precipitate a Curmie Award nomination. Dishonest people exist. Other dishonest people will help them. And sometimes one of them gets away with something.

Susan Lusi: Dumber than a Sack of Hammers

Ah. But we’re not done. Having found out about Stevenin’s dishonesty, you see, Providence School Superintendent Susan Lusi described her underling’s perfidy as “a lapse in judgment,” and proceeded to… wait for it… “put Miss Stevenin on a corrective action plan immediately in February when we discovered that.” A corrective action plan? How about firing her sorry ass? No, because you see “Lusi said Stevenin is getting results at Birch and has an impressive resume.” WHAT??? First off, she’d only been on the job a couple of months when the school discovered the deception, so it’s unlikely she’d really done much yet. More to the point—her “impressive resume” has already been proven to be fraudulent. No one ought to give a single solitary damn about what it might contain in the way of alleged credentials.

The problem, in real terms, isn’t that Stevenin is a liar and a cheat. It isn’t that whoever is behind “Ashley University” makes Chris Christie look ethical by comparison. It isn’t even that Stevenin was hired for a job for which she lacked appropriate credentials. It’s that she wasn’t promptly shown the door when the revelations of her mendacity became known. The problem, in other words, is that Susan Lusi is a card-carrying moron.

Frighteningly enough, it gets worse. When parents, teachers and other sensible people who have a legitimate stake in the matter—paying Lusi’s $190+K salary, for example—made the obvious point (well, obvious to anyone with either a whiff of ethical sensibility or the brains of a kumquat) that allowing Stevenin to continue would be to condone cheating, Lusi replied, “No, I don't think so at all. If cheating was OK we would not have put her on the immediate corrective action plan.” Meanwhile, the cheater in question continues in her current job and salary but is responsible only for paying her own tuition to an accredited university to actually earn the degree she lied about already having. Genius.

Lusi further embarrassed herself, her district, and her profession, in response to a statement by Maribeth Calibro, the president of the Providence Teachers Union. Calibro noted that her members, who actually have university degrees and are making only a fraction of Stevenin’s salary, are “extremely disconcerted” and “very angry” about the situation, as well they should be. TV reporter Katie Davis (who appears to be an actual journalist) suggested to Lusi that it must be “frustrating” to teachers making “$30,000 or $40,000 a year with a bachelor's degree, [seeing] an administrator making $94,000 a year without.”

Lusi, of course, seizes on the seemingly no-longer-required credential rather than the integrity issue and presents an argument truly remarkable for its inanity. Remember, it was presumably Lusi who either insisted on or at the very least signed off on the bachelor’s degree requirement to begin with. And yet we get: “I guess people may get frustrated that Bill Gates doesn't have a degree. But he's judged on the merits of his work.” Actually, of course, there’s no stated requirement that Bill Gates needs a degree, he has never to my knowledge purported to have one, and (of course) he’s a particularly horrible example for any argument involving education, since his hypocrisy, arrogance, and pseudo-philanthropy have probably done more harm to the education system in this country than anyone whose name isn’t Michelle Rhee or Arne Duncan.

The real issue, of course, is skirted by Lusi. If you want to say that the job doesn’t require a degree, that’s OK with me. But there remain two unresolved issues. First, it’s not the teachers who need a degree who are the real victims of Stevenin’s dishonesty and Lusi’s ineptitude, although they certainly have a right to be upset. But what of the other applicants for Stevenin’s job—the ones who actually had the required credentials? Shouldn’t they be a little peeved that not only did the job go to someone without the necessary degree, but that Lusi did nothing to remedy the situation when the fraud was discovered? If I were Ms. Lusi, I might just be expecting a call from someone’s lawyer in the near future.

The most important point, of course, is that Stevenin simply can’t be trusted… nor can Lusi, albeit in a different way. Curmie may be old-fashioned, but lying on a résumé is about the surest way to prove to me that you’re fundamentally incapable of functioning in an ethical universe.

Be it noted, there are sometimes judgment calls. For example, had Stevenin de facto passed the last class required for a real degree but the BS (could have been a BA, I suppose, but Stevenin and “BS” seem to go so well together) hadn’t officially been awarded yet at the time she applied… maybe. If she had fulfilled the job description of an assistant director of a project without ever having officially been given that title… maybe. If her undergrad college didn’t have minors (Curmie’s didn’t), but she’d done enough coursework in a discipline to have qualified for a minor at a different university… no, but at least there’s a case.

But this little escapade? There is literally no way to spin this as anything but an absolutely intentional deception without the slightest bit of actual justification. Ashley University is a fraud. Stevenin knows it to be a fraud, and is apparently utterly unrepentant (or she’d have resigned, thereby defusing the situation considerably). Stevenin should, of course, be fired. “Ashley University” should be roundly denounced as the deceitful enterprise it is (if not investigated for criminal misrepresentation). But the fact is that dishonest people will behave dishonestly, regardless of occupation. The greater threat to education per se, and therefore the Curmie nominee du jour, is Susan Lusi, whose transcendent incompetence is an inspiration to idiots everywhere.

Valerie Strauss’s Double-Header: A Pair of Curmie Contenders

If there is a better education journalist in the country than the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss, Curmie doesn’t know who it is. The last two days in a row, her column, “The Answer Sheet,” has highlighted a couple of prime contenders for the coveted Curmie Award, presented annually to the person or institution who most embarrasses the profession of education.

Steve Green, who apparently runs the Mustang schools now.

Yesterday, it was about the Mustang school district in suburban Oklahoma City that has blithely decided that including a year-long course on the Bible would be just a peachy idea. Of course, sanctimonious and venal plutocrat Hobby Lobby CEO Steve Green, whose Museum of the Bible (could I make that up?) minions wrote the curriculum, assures us that “This is not about a denomination, or a religion, it's about a book. We will not try to go down denominational, religious-type roads.” Gentle Reader, if you are even tempted to believe that line, may I humbly suggest that perhaps you have stumbled onto this blog by mistake. There’s a living-in-the-real-world requirement here. Turn back while your tender ignorance is unsullied.

First off, there’s the whole “Museum of the Bible” thing. No, that couldn’t be about (gasp) religion, could it? Next, notice the first person subject: “we” won’t be proselytizing. In other words, it’s not the district, much less the teachers, who will control the curriculum. Need more? Well, there’s this, from the AP article by Bailey Elise McBride:

From the outset, the book describes God as eternal, “faithful and good,” “full of love” and “an ever-present help in times of trouble.”

“The first pages of the Bible spotlight God's desire for justice and a just world,” the second chapter says, but adds, “When humanity ignores or disobeys his rules, it has to suffer the consequences.”

The course also says people should rest on the Sabbath because God did so after six days of creation.

Nope. No religious indoctrination there. Look, if you really want to have a course detailing the relationship of the Bible (and of Christianity) to history, art, and literature, fine. But somehow I doubt that students in such a course are likely to hear much about the barbarities associated with the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition, or pay a lot of attention to that business about camels and eyes of needles, or read that barely a generation ago even evangelical doctrine argued that fetuses aren’t the same as babies. Here’s McBride again:

Andrew Seidel, a lawyer with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, wrote to the Mustang district this week complaining that “negative aspects” of God, such as jealousy or punishing children for the actions of their parents, are not mentioned in the course.

The book phrases contradictory questions and answers — such as references to the Israelites being slaves — in ways designed to favor Christianity, Seidel said. He said it also poses Christian thought as rhetorical questions, such as asking, “How do we know that the Bible's historical narratives are reliable?” rather than, “Is the Bible historically accurate?”

“They assume the answer in the question and stifle all scholarly discussion,” Seidel said.

Dr. Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University who reviewed the curriculum at the AP’s request, said it lacked scholarly insight.

“It’s more of a very basic background book,” he said, adding that he found the curriculum “full of land mines” and used scripture from only one tradition, evangelical Protestantism.

Of course, the yahoos who run Mustang schools intone that the clown show that passes for a school board wouldn’t have approved the curriculum if they thought it “crossed a line.” There are only two possibilities, which of course are not mutually exclusive: they have the cumulative IQ of a pile of rotting tilapia, or they’re lying. My money’s on the latter, although thinking that no one would notice their egregiously unconstitutional indoctrination attempt does require a level of stupidity beyond the comprehension of the average mortal.

Today’s Strauss story of educational ineptitude may be even worse. At least there’s a logic to what the folks in Oklahoma want to do: they want to use public schools as a means of advancing their religio-political cause. It’s not constitutional, it’s not wise, and it’s not honest. But at least we can figure out why they want to do it. Not so with the news out of Elwood, NY, where the kindergarten show at Harley Avenue Primary School was cancelled because… wait for it…

What it lacks in substance it makes up for in pomposity.

We are responsible for preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers and problem solvers. Please do not fault us for making professional decisions that we know will never be able to please everyone. But know that we are making these decisions with the interests of all children in mind.

Yes, that’s right. That’s why the five-year-olds can’t do a show that, according to more than one signer of the petition on Change.org (which Curmie wouldn’t object to your signing and sharing should you be of a mind to do so), is a long-time tradition at the school.

Curmie has seldom seen so much stupidity in one place. We’ll leave aside the smugness and pomposity of the school’s response. “Please don’t fault us” [because we know what’s best, you insignificant little parent]? Or the fact that none of the letters’ signatories were available for comment after their obnoxious missive? Superintendent Peter Scordo wouldn’t talk about the glaring idiocy of it all, but sent forth a minion, one Michael Conte, who pompously pronounced that “the Harley Avenue Primary School educators believe that this decision is in the best interest of students. I don’t have anything more to add for your consideration.” Anybody but Curmie think these folks are a little longer on self-image than on sense? Finally, the apophasis du jour: we won’t even mention the irony of career-readiness being advanced by someone like Keri Colmone, who doesn’t even know where to sign a business letter.

For the school’s decision to make any sense in pedagogical, inter-personal, or public relations terms, three things must all be true. (None of them are.) First, it must be something other than laughable that it is in any way the “responsibility” of any pre-primary educator to prepare his/her charges for “college and career.” That this is the insane rhetoric of wealthy helicopter parents who “love” their kids so much they deny them a childhood, and of Arne Duncan, the worst cabinet member of the millennium (and yes, Curmie includes the likes of Alberto Gonzales and Donald Rumsfeld in that analysis) doesn’t make it any less risible.

Secondly, we must forget everything we know about child development, or of our own educations. I learned how to read in 1st grade, not kindergarten, and yet I somehow managed to get an Ivy League undergraduate education and subsequently a PhD from a really fine Research-1 university. And… get this… I actually had some fun as a kid. I read literature because I wanted to, learned about science because it interested me, and I performed in some musical and theatrical activities. Every authority on childhood behavior (and the current Secretary of Education is about as far from that as it is possible to be) agrees that play is not merely a significant part of a child’s development, it is in fact crucial. Play teaches, and any educator who doesn’t understand that is fit for no job requiring intellectual skills greater than those required to inquire whether the customer would like fries with that.

But, let us pretend that the function of kindergarten is to move five-year-olds a step closer to career-readiness, and that having fun is at best a distraction. Fine. So in order to cancel a “show” for that purpose is to suggest that there are no careers in the arts per se, that speaking in public is never going to be required, that learning to be part of a team is irrelevant as a life skill. It is to declare the long-term uselessness of confronting and meeting deadlines. It is to pronounce that problem-solving never manifests in the production of a show. It is to proclaim that the memorization, development of muscle memory, and inter-personal requirements of mounting a production, any production, aren’t central to developing the intellectual and social maturity of any child.

And let’s take it yet one step further. Let’s even pretend (if that’s still allowed in this post-cancellation-of-theatrical-event world) that the school’s rationale has the slightest relationship to reality, that there’s a kernel of sense buried somewhere under that mountain of bovine feces. So… the school needs to spend more time on developing other skills than those relevant to the production of the show. Perhaps the way to do that would be to have full-day kindergarten classes, like virtually every other district in the area does. Ah, but that would require work and money, precisely the two things no one in the Elwood district seems ready to expend.

Had Interim Principal Ellen Best-Laimit and her dim-witted underlings drooled down their chins and slurred a few sounds that never quite rise to the level of language, in other words, they’d look better than they do now. The letter is condescending, rendered especially ironic by its utter disregard for tradition, pedagogy, child development, logical argument, or comprehension of what happens in the mounting of a show. One suspects that the “teachers” found out that producing a show actually involves a little more than a pile of old clothes and an uncle with a barn, and they really didn’t care to do their jobs if they… you know… had to work. Luckily for them, there’s enough pseudo-pedagogical jargon to wrap themselves in. Alas, it’s a little less fortuitous for anyone who actually cares about kids, education, or the future of the country.

But I can pretty much guarantee that Best-Laimit and company won’t go away empty-handed. There is a virtually certain Curmie nomination in this for them.

Fire, Blood, and Curmie Contention

Curmie has a Word document consisting exclusively of links to stories he’d like to write about when he gets a chance. At the end of every calendar year, he purges the list of topics and starts again. There are two categories—education and everything else. Sometimes the line is kind of fuzzy: where to put a discussion of the NCAA, for example.

What with a hiatus of over two months, there’s quite a backlog of stories just from 2014—big enough, to be sure, that I’ll never get to them all. Right now, there are 17 in the “education” category and 32 in the “other” group. But if there’s one thing I feel I owe you, Gentle Reader, it’s discussion of legitimate contenders for the 4th Annual Curmie Award, to be awarded in January of 2015 for transgressions committed this year. And we’ve got a couple of doozies.

Today’s contender comes from Bergen Community College in New Jersey, where a professor was suspended for posting a photo of his daughter to his Google+ account. No, not because it embarrassed the school that one of its profs is so uncool that he uses Google+. The Censorious Asshat Brigade objected to the “threat” associated with the 7-year-old’s t-shirt, which quoted a catch-phrase from the popular “Game of Thrones” series of books and television episodes. Yes, really.

I trust that you're as terrified
by this image as Curmie is.

This story, which seems to have been first reported by Inside Higher Education’s Colleen Flaherty has found its way across the Atlantic (here’s the story in The Independent), and to the snarksite AV Club. As might be expected, the folks at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) are already on the case, as is the inimitable Ken White at Popehat. Curmie can’t improve on Ken’s analysis, but he can at least repeat some of it to ensure that the Bergen idiocracy will receive full consideration for a Curmie Award next January.

The case immediately reminded me of the events at the University of Wisconsin-Stout about two and a half years ago. There, the Offending Object was a poster from the short-lived but much-beloved “Firefly” television series. The idiot campus police chief (that’s not quite a redundant expression) decided that it was a threat (it was, in fact, the exact opposite), and doubled down on her petulant ignorance, wrapping herself in righteous dudgeon that her right to violate free expression, to exercise power for its own sake, and to be dumber than a corndog in the process, should be open to criticism.

Naturally, the administration’s “Threat Assessment Team” (I think that’s the name of their comedy troupe), led by Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen, Provost Julie Furst-Bowe and Vice Chancellor Ed Nieskes (and the Office of General Counsel, who were at least smart enough to keep their names out of the headlines), backed the inanity of the cop-who-should-have-been-fired-on-the-spot rather than the faculty member (or the 1st amendment, for that matter).

I was smart enough to yield to Ken at Popehat then, too:

If a rational person wouldn’t take it as an actual threat of violence, then it’s not a true threat that can be censored, however much the hysterical, irrational, nanny-stating, coddling, or professionally emo think about it, and however much university chancellors would like to believe otherwise….

A system in which what we can say is premised upon the likely reactions of the mentally ill and the undernourished pussywillows of the world is a system that encourages suppression of all unpopular, forceful, interesting, or challenging speech. The irrational and the morally and mentally weak are not entitled to have their feelings protected through the force of law, however prevalent they are on campus….

If your “UW System Legal Counsel” told you that these posters could be censored based on their content, then stop hiring lawyers out of the back of a bait shop.

Anyway, things finally got back to normal after the university was embarrassed in the national press and the likes of “Firefly” stars Adam Baldwin and Nathan Fillion joined the chorus. (Baldwin actually tweeted a link to Curmie’s article, helping to make that story the most-viewed ever on this blog until a Russian bot zeroed in on another piece.)

This case may be worse. As was the case at Stout, even someone completely unfamiliar with the specifics would still know in an instant that the expression being used—in this case, “I will take what is mine with fire and blood”—is a pop culture reference. I’ve never read the Game of Thrones books, and I’ve never seen the TV series. But I can recognize mass-produced merchandise when I see it. And that inevitably leads to the presumption that maybe what I’m seeing as a threat might just be a line from a TV show or something. If I’m really curious, I can pop that sucker into a search engine and find 387,000 links (if I use quotation marks; over 28,000,000 if I don’t). My search engine also suggested that I might be interested in the 2 million links to “I will take what is mine with fire and blood t-shirt.”

But that, you see, is what a sensible person would do. It’s different if you’re a dean at a juco in New Jersey. So… Francis Schmidt, a tenured professor of art and animation, is a big “Game of Thrones” fan. And, in anticipation of the trailer for the forthcoming season, he posted a pic of his rather adorable daughter in a show t-shirt. The Google+ post clearly includes not only the photo but Schmidt’s comment, “Trailer for the new season coming out.”

Jim Miller (not the same as the aggrieved faculty member James Miller of the Stout case), the Executive Director of Human Resources at BCC, hauled Schmidt in for questioning with a cadre of administrators including a “security official” because of a “threatening e-mail.” It would be impossible for Miller to be any stupider. First off, it’s not a threat, and no rational person could construe it as such. Second, it’s not an e-mail—the Idiot Miller has his Google+ account set to forward all posts from his “circle”; Schmidt was included, so his public post of his daughter in a t-shirt was regarded as a private threat because… well, because Jim Miller would have to evolve to have the intellectual acumen of a pollywog. Meanwhile, Security Boy (I picture him in a fuchsia lamé cape) intoned that the word “’fire’ could be a kind of proxy for “AK-47s.” Seriously, how do these people feed themselves? (I suppose it’s a good thing that Schmidt didn’t mention that the actual reference is to dragons, because Miller and his gaggle of incompetents would be calling out the Air National Guard to protect the campus from the imminent aerial reptilian invasion.)

But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, that’s not all. Schmidt explained to the dim-witted Miller and his minions that the quote was from “Game of Thrones.” He did a basic web search and showed the administrators the several million hits. They weren’t impressed. They don’t watch the show, so apparently no one else does, either. So, according to CBS New York, they went out into the hallway, where one of the secretaries promptly identified both the phrase and “the sigil of House Targaryen.”

Case closed, right? Administrators mumbled apologies and shuffled back to their offices, leaving Professor Schmidt befuddled but otherwise unaffected, right? Of course not. These are college administrators, and a significant percentage of these creatures are pathologically incapable of admitting a mistake.

So… several days after the meeting, at which anyone with the brains of a particularly stolid wombat would have been satisfied that there was nothing to worry about, the school suspended Professor Schmidt without pay, pending a psychiatric evaluation. At least he could pass one, unlike the cretinous yahoos who did the suspending.

And then the Idiot-in-Chief President B. Kaye Walter intoned that “she did not believe that the college had acted unfairly, especially considering that there were three school shootings nationwide in January, prior to Schmidt’s post. The suspects in all three shootings were minors targeting their local schools (although three additional shootings at colleges or universities happened later in the month).”

Schmidt is back at work now, but the damage is irreparable. Walter, who is already under fire (see what I did there?) for other reasons, should be gone. So should Miller. So should mouthpiece Larry Hlavenka Jr., who somehow thinks the following is relevant: “Since January 1, 2014, 34 incidents of school shootings have occurred in the United States. In following its safety and security procedures, the college investigates all situations where a member of its community – students, faculty, staff or local residents – expresses a safety or security concern.”

As Ken at Popehat points out:

There are at least two maddening components to this. First, they didn't just “investigate” — they suspended the professor and made him see a psychiatrist because he posted a picture of his daughter in a wildly popular t-shirt from pop culture. Second, the statement is an implicit admission that the college refuses to exercise critical thinking about the complaints it receives. There is no minimally rational connection between school shootings — or any type of violence — and a picture of someone's kid in a pop-culture t-shirt. The college is saying, in effect, “complain to us about your angers or fears, however utterly irrational, and we will act precipitously on them, because OMG 9/11 COLUMBINE TEH CHILDREN.” Shameful. Ask yourself: what kind of education do you think your children will get from people who think like this?

I hate to say it, but Ken under-estimates the problem. This is why I said earlier that this case is even worse than the one at Stout.

First off, the (ahem) “threat” didn’t come from Professor Schmidt, but presumably from his evil girl-spawn, who… uh… okay, she’s really cute. We should also notice that the involvement of the administration didn’t come in the form of covering up for a particularly inept campus cop as it had at Stout; the instigation for this entire round of inanity seems traceable directly to the administration itself.

Moreover, the punishment was handed down after the case had blown up in the administration’s collective gawping faces. It’s one thing to completely misconstrue the meaning of a text, over-react to what you mistakenly thought it meant, and threaten dire consequences to those heretical enough to comment on the emperor’s nakedness. It’s another to have your entire case destroyed by one of your own secretaries and still pursue it because you don’t have the maturity to admit that you fucked up royally.

Finally, and most importantly, James Miller’s “Firefly” poster was on his office door at Stout. True, no one with the intellect of an addlepated chipmunk would think it was a threat, but at least it was on campus. Bergen has no God-damned business interfering with what Professor Schmidt says or does off campus. If you’re really afraid, call the cops. The real ones. The ones who’ll laugh in your face for being a paranoid nebbish. Otherwise, perhaps it might be a good idea to heed the old adage about the superiority of remaining silent and being thought a fool than speaking and removing all doubt.

Professor Schmidt claims that the Bergen administration was retaliating against him for filing a grievance when his application for a sabbatical leave was denied. In this, I have no opinion. Perhaps he’s right. But petulance and petty vengeance aren’t the only forms of incompetence. The real problem at Bergen would seem to be that no one in the administration could do better than third place in a battle of wits with a barstool and an eggplant.