Firing Editors Is Almost as Much Fun as Firing Guns

Dick Metcalf: Insufficiently fanatic about guns.

One of the more intriguing stories of the last few days concerns now erstwhile Guns and Ammo Contributing Editor Dick Metcalf, who was sacked by that magazine for penning an editorial in which he suggested the utterly reasonable suggestion that some restrictions on gun ownership are not only constitutional but possibly even a good idea:

The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be. Freedom of speech is regulated. You cannot falsely and deliberately shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Freedom of religion is regulated. A church cannot practice human sacrifice. Freedom of assembly is regulated. People who don’t like you can’t gather an “anti-you” demonstration on your front lawn without your permission. And it is illegal for convicted felons or the clinically insane to keep and bear arms….

I firmly believe that all U.S. citizens have a right to keep and bear arms, but I do not believe they have the right to use them irresponsibly….

I don’t think requiring 16 hours of training to qualify for a concealed carry license is an infringement in and of itself.

I mean, wow, right? This, like any manifestation of sanity or moderation, is tantamount to treason in the world of the echo chamber. This applies to the left and the right, of course, and the phenomenon doesn’t change based on whether or not I agree with the content of the material.

Naturally, the zealots called for blood, and, has become a depressingly familiar reaction of late, the less-crazy promptly capitulated. Editor Jim Bequette immediately (or nearly immediately) fired Metcalf, apologized profusely to the readership, and promptly resigned, himself. (He was planning to step down in another month or two, anyway.)

Let’s be clear: it is absolutely within Bequette’s rights to fire Metcalf. Guns and Ammo is a privately-owned enterprise. They’re under no obligation to provide a forum for views they don’t support. Nor can they be faulted for making a business decision to accommodate the collective will of their subscribers (barring some sort of discrimination, and there is no evidence of that). There’s nothing wrong, either, with those readers’ exercising their right to protest decisions they don’t like. And Metcalf’s response to the controversy—a column published on the Outdoor Wire website—comes perilously close to conflating the philosophical/ethical concept of freedom of speech with the constitutional/legal protection of freedom from governmental restrictions on free expression.

All that said, the story remains disappointing. First off, if Metcalf is to be believed—and I’ve seen no evidence to the contrary—he was asked to write the offending article on a page that was “intentionally designed to address controversial issues, and to invite reader response.” His intention in writing and, apparently, Bequette’s in publishing it, was to “provoke a debate” (Metcalf), or to “generate a healthy exchange” (Bequette). What they got was simply a shitstorm, which, to say the least, isn’t the same thing.

More disturbingly, Bequette apologized for what should have been a good thing: the attempt to apply a little nuance to the conversation, to assert that it is possible to be pro-gun without being doctrinaire about it. To be sure, there is nothing inherently positive about moderation, but Bequette’s servility is truly problematic:

I once again offer my personal apology. I understand what our valued readers want. I understand what you believe in when it comes to gun rights, and I believe the same thing.

I made a mistake by publishing the column. I thought it would generate a healthy exchange of ideas on gun rights. I miscalculated, pure and simple. I was wrong, and I ask your forgiveness.

To call this craven display troubling is akin to saying it can get a little brisk in Duluth in January. After all, Bequette effectively begs forgiveness for over-estimating his audience, for daring to believe that the G&A readership came to their conclusions based on a thoughtful analysis rather than as articles of faith surpassing any rational analysis. What “our valued readers want” is red meat, not… you know… thinking. Bequette suggests that anyone, including a long-time gun proponent, who suggests that recognizing judicial precedent and political realities might not be a bad idea… well, such a person is to be treated like crazy Uncle Carl. If anyone was mistreated by Bequette, it wasn’t the readership whose tender sensibilities were sore offended by the ravings of someone who agrees with them only 98% of the time. No, it was Metcalf, who was sent as a lamb to the slaughter, and then unceremoniously dumped when Bequette’s decision to publish an editorial with even a whiff of moderation blew up.

Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall asks “Was ‘Guns and Ammo’ unfair to fire Dick Metcalf for writing a moderate and thoughtful opinion piece advocating some gun controls?” My answer is equivocal. On the one hand, Metcalf bears responsibility for his own words, and he had to know that suggesting anything other than conventional NRA-like dogma might end badly. Moreover, the whole comparison of gun ownership to car ownership may appeal to the moderately-minded, but anyone with a lick of sense knows that to conflate those ideas in something to be published in Guns and Ammo is to pour every manner of flammable liquid on an already raging conflagration. And, as noted above, G&A can hire and fire whomever they choose for whatever (legal) reason they choose. Metcalf knew that when he signed on. But yes, it is unfair that Metcalf was asked to write a piece intended to engender discussion and was fired for then doing so. Note: “unfair” is not to be confused with “immoral” or “outrageous.”

More significantly, the increasing unwillingness to admit even the possibility of compromise or even consensus signals not merely the immaturity of both the editors and the readership, it portends a crisis in democracy itself. (I wrote about this in one of my last essays in the old blog.) Jack Marshall observes that “Advocacy organizations cannot afford to let moderate positions weaken their absolute missions and credibility as champions for them, no matter how reasonable those moderate suggestions may be to objective parties. Indeed, properly used, extreme and absolute positions lead to more moderate policies.” I disagree. Refusing to consider alternate points of view runs counter to everything we in a democratic and deliberative society ought to hold dear. And the fact that moderate policies sometimes result from clashes of extreme ideologies (even then, only as the result of eventual compromise, which the G&As of the world hold as anathema) strikes me as merely consequentialism: puerile behavior cannot be legitimized by the off-chance of a positive result.

None of this, of course, means that the leadership at Guns and Ammo did anything wrong. Not unless they want to be taken seriously but anyone but True Believers, that is… and they pretty much gave up any claim to that a long time ago.

Lexiles and the Fetishization of Quantification

A year and a half or so ago, I wrote about an inane report about how the level of discourse of our Congresscritters has generated in recent years. And, of course, there was “objective” analysis, which didn’t have anything to do with renewed fervor for partisan hackery, increasing disregard for the accuracy of one’s statements, or the apparently undeniable siren song of equating one’s political opponents with Hitler. No, the scourge blighting American political discourse was an insidious combination of monosyllabic words and simple sentences.

You see, there’s something called the Flesch-Kincaid score, which bases an objective (albeit worthless) ranking of the sophistication of one’s rhetoric on two factors: syllables per word and words per sentence. The F-K scores are alleged to match up with the grade level of the linguistic sophistication of the piece under consideration. So what are we to make of the fact that Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, one of the greatest displays of rhetorical brilliance ever created, checks in at freshman-in-high-school level? Or that the most famous line from that speech, “I have a dream today,” gets a score of 0.52? You and I, Gentle Reader, see a problem with the methodology.

Not so, however, the hack journalists of both sides of the political divide, who pounced on the alleged “evidence” to show the The Other Guy really is as ignorant as My Side says. Exhibit A, Fox News: “Obama’s SOTU Written at 8th Grade Level for Third Straight Year.” Exhibit B, The Inquisitr: “Congress Officially Dumber, Study Finds, Republicans in Particular Showing Marked Decline.”

In writing about this pseudo-evidence, Curmie exclaimed, he hoped rhetorically, “Seriously, is there a study that means less than this one?” Alas, someone took that as a challenge. Unfortunately, it’s a lot more serious, as this particular round of pseudo-scientific idiocy actually has consequences.

The concept of “lexiles” has apparently been around for a generation, and I think I knew that but the first I really registered hearing of it was reading a rather foam-flecked article on the New Republic site. Yes, the faux terror of “federal bureaucrats” is hyperbolic at best, and author (and University of Iowa professor) Blaine Greteman casually ignores the fact that the lexiles are only one means of determining “readability” levels. For all that, this is scary stuff, indeed.

Let’s face it. If it is even possible to begin a story the way Greteman does, the supposedly objective criteria being employed are worse than worthless:

Here’s a pop quiz: according to the measurements used in the new Common Core Standards, which of these books would be complex enough for a ninth grader? 

a. Huckleberry Finn
b. To Kill a Mockingbird
c. Jane Eyre
d. Sports Illustrated for Kids’ Awesome Athletes!

The only correct answer is “d,” since all the others have a “Lexile” score so low that they are deemed most appropriate for fourth, fifth, or sixth graders.

Kid stuff.

Wow. I was one of the top couple of students in my 10th grade “intensive” English class when we read Huckleberry Finn, and to say it was plenty “complex” for me would be to err on the side of understatement rather than hyperbole. “Complexity” has more to it than vocabulary and sentence structure… you know, like subject matter and levels of ambiguity and symbology and… well, other things that actually matter.

Let’s face it: if you’ve got a mechanism that says that Mr. Popper’s Penguins is a tougher read than Hemingway, Steinbeck, or Graham Greene, you’ve got a system so flawed that it deserves to be promptly shit-canned. Naturally, the Common Core geniuses institutionalized it.

There’s a good discussion by Rider University prof Russ Walsh, in which he references the actual CCSS (Common Core State Standards):

Appendix A of the CCSS defines text complexity. It is very important that all teachers understand this definition because it is useful and empowering. Text Complexity is made up of three dimensions: quantitative, qualitative, and reader and task. Quantitative measures include the useful, but limited “reading level” measures like the Fry Readability Graph and Lexile scores. The CCSS has focused on Lexile scores and has recalculated them to reflect the push for greater complexity. Qualitative measures include such issues as considerateness of text (clear structure, coherence, audience appropriateness), knowledge demands, use of figurative language, vocabulary, etc. Reader and task measures concern themselves with the cognitive abilities, motivation and experience of students.

Walsh does describe the Lexiles as “useful,” but that’s because he’s nicer than me, not because we really disagree. Lexiles are also “limited” in Walsh’s world; more importantly, he “[worries] that simplistic readings of this call for greater text complexity will lead to disempowerment of teachers and inappropriate reading assignments for students.” The likelihood of that happening, from my perspective, borders on ontological certitude.

That’s because the fix is already in. Here’s Greteman again:

As the Common Core Standards Initiative officially puts it, “until widely available quantitative tools can better account for factors recognized as making such texts challenging, including multiple levels of meaning and mature themes, preference should likely be given to qualitative measures of text complexity when evaluating narrative fiction intended for students in grade 6 and above.” But even here, the final goal is a more complex algorithm; qualitative measurement fills in as a flawed stopgap….

… I believe that many educational leaders will hear the call for more complex texts and will try to force teachers to use texts that are simply harder. Remember “rigor” is not in the difficulty of the text, but in the vigor of the instruction. Texts that are too difficult for a particular reader are not rigorous; they are just hard. I also believe that publishing companies, under the guise of the publishers guidelines provided them by the authors of the CCSS for ELA, will soon be on the market with anthologies purported to “meet the standards” that will not meet the needs of many students.

Heady intellectual fare.

In other words: the CCSS folks aren’t going to budge on using their stupid rubric for grades 5 and below, and the expertise of teachers will become subservient to their divinely inspired claptrap as soon as they can develop quantifiable criteria that are merely inaccurate instead of So Freaking Imbecilic That Nobody Could Take Them Seriously. Well, nobody but the likes of The Atlantic’s Eleanor Barkhorn and whoever wrote that headline: “Teachers Are Supposed to Assign Harder Books, but They Aren't Doing It Yet.”

Implicit here is the double-whammy of shoddy journalism: the assumption that anything the corporatists behind the Common Core require is legitimate, and the implicit belief that the problem isn’t bullshit requirements, but teachers’ intransigence. Of course, teachers, principals, superintendents, and school boards have not only the right but the responsibility to reject nonsense like lexiles and to substitute their own… wait for it… expertise. (Anyone who has read Curmie’s page for a while knows my take on the two meanings of authority.)

Of course, using completely nonsensical means to measure literature isn’t new. Well over 2400 years ago, Aristophanes concluded his long farcical confrontation between Aeschylus and Euripides in The Frogs by having Dionysus challenge them to recite their “weightiest” verses. Aeschylus wins every round because rivers are “heavier” than cattle, death than persuasion, chariots than clubs, etc. “Weight,” then, no longer means “profundity of thought or expression,” but rather, “the gravitational attraction or solemnity of the subject matter.” It’s a joke, of course, and the overwhelming majority of the audience in late 5th-century BC Athens would have caught on. Somehow, however, I suspect that there was someone named Βιλλγάτες or Αρνεδύνκαν who saw nothing wrong with the test. It was objective, after all.

The attempt to scientize art got a huge jolt in the mid- to late 19th century, with the rise of naturalism, a movement headed by Émile Zola but ultimately inspired by social Darwinism. Zola, Balzac, and their contemporaries generated some stark portrayals of life as lived, especially in urban areas during the Industrial Revolution. They also propagated some really bad theatre (and quasi-theatre): since art was supposed to replicate life, the ultimate expression of theatrical naturalism was to charge admission to watch an actual butcher carve up a beef carcass. Really. No wonder Henrik Ibsen supposedly described the difference between realism and naturalism by tersely observing, “I go to the sewers to clean them; Zola, to bathe.”

The earnest desire to make art more scientific (Curmie resists the urge to use the phrase “reduce art to the level of science”) also manifested in the work of François Delsarte, best known for his voluminous commentaries on elocution, most especially his System of Oratory. Delsarte writes expansively about virtually every conceivable vocal inflection and gesture, seeking a communication system that is efficient and transparent. In one sense, this is a noble goal; in another, it’s transcendently naïve. The fact is that in life and especially in art, ambiguity is not merely ubiquitous but desirable—and this is true whether we ascribe to the modernist model of artists’ imbedding meaning to be discovered by the spectator or the post-positivist schema in which the artist’s function is to catalyze meaning which is ultimately constructed by the observer. Delsarte was a significant player in the development of modernism; he influenced a number of important figures in theatre history (Steele Mackaye, for example), and he is still highly regarded in much of the dance community. Theatre people today, however, regard him (rightfully, I’d suggest) as the quintessence of wrong-headed reductionism.

This idea that objectivity often creates precisely the opposite result of that which was intended serves as one of the themes of The Memorandum, one of the best plays by the late, great, Václav Havel. Shortly after Havel’s death two years ago I dug up a piece I’d originally written for the Cedar Rapids Gazette back in 1990, and re-printed it on my other blog. I therefore quote myself from 23 years ago:

In The Memorandum (1968), the central character, Gross, heads an unnamed government agency. After authorizing the circumvention of a silly regulation, he allows himself to be half blackmailed, half cajoled, by an amoral underling into approving a new synthetic language called Ptydepe. Said to make communication more “efficient,” Ptydepe mandates that every word must differ from every other word of equal length by at least sixty per cent of its letters. Further, words are assigned to concepts by the relative frequency of their use: the more often a word is used, the shorter it will be. Hence, the shortest word in the language, “ng,” means “whatever”; the word for “wombat” has 319 letters.

I should add that in Ptydepe, vowels and consonants are used in random sequence, so a word with a half dozen consecutive consonants is not uncommon. Moreover, every variation of a conventional word, including whether it’s used in jest, or to surprise the listener, gets its own Ptydepe word—defeating the purpose of language play altogether. Eventually, of course, Ptydepe proves to be an unsuccessful experiment, so it is eliminated… to be replaced not by the perfectly workable normative language that people can understand, but by a new, totally different synthetic language with a completely different but equally inane set of rules.

You see where this is going, don’t you, Gentle Reader? Objectivity for its own sake is inherently idiotic. Eliminating ambiguity provides a false efficiency, but it destroys nuance, and ultimately both language and art suffer irreparable damage. Everybody knows that. Well, everybody but the educationists. They sort of think that an educational system based on the philosophical principles advocated by the Communist apparatchiks in post-Stalinist Eastern Europe is the way to go. How very “American” of them.

“It's Not Our Job to Do Our Job”: Two Faces of the Decline of Journalism

Chuckles the Clown

Chuck Todd, NBC News’s chief White House correspondent and political director, is an idiot. Curmie tried desperately to ignore this fact for a while, especially when Rachel Maddow showed him considerable respect, but ultimately the evidence won out: he didn’t want to wait in line when they were passing out brains, so he went back for a second helping of pomposity, instead. (Anyone remember Big Head Todd and the Monsters? Wonder why that ‘90s group came to mind just now…)

Most Curmiphiles will by now be familiar with Todd’s faux pas a month or so ago, when he self-righteously declared that it isn’t journalists’ jobs to… uh… do journalists’ jobs and actually separate facts from lies. “No, that’s Obama’s job because people expecting us to actually earn even a fraction of our 6-figure salaries are making unreasonable demands and generally being poo-poo-heads.” OK, maybe that’s not a direct quote.

What he did say was in response to a comment by former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who opined that most opponents of the Affordable Care Act don’t know what it does: “If you took ten people from different parts of the country who say that they are against the bill and sat them down, I’d love to have ten minutes with them and say ‘tell me why you’re against the bill.’ And if they told you anything, it would be stuff that’s incorrect.” Todd’s response: “But more importantly, it would be stuff that Republicans have successfully messaged against it. They don't repeat the other stuff because they haven't even heard the Democratic message. What I always love is people say, ‘Well, it’s you folks’ fault in the media.’ No, it’s the President of the United States’ fault for not selling it.”

OK, I’m saying this once: Horseshit.

It is indeed the President’s job to make the case for why the ACA is a good idea. It is not his job to counter factual untruths. Doing so is decidedly unpresidential, for one thing; more importantly, if Obama corrects a misstatement, it’s a battle of opposing political forces. Even his supporters grant that Obama is a politician, and he might spin a statement to make it more persuasive than it should be. But—and here’s the important part—he might be telling the absolute truth. So might Ted Cruz on the other side, although that hasn’t happened in this century. It here’s where a free and open—and conscientious—press comes in: it’s not their function to advocate for or against a policy, a law, a candidate. But it is very much their responsibility to separate fact from prevarication, common sense from insanity, projections from concrete evidence. It is, in fact, their primary responsibility.

Called out on his slothful abrogations, Chuckles proceeded to surpass even his own lofty standards for imperious twatwaffledom, and took to the Twitter, claiming “Somebody decided to troll w/mislding headline: point I actually made was folks shouldn't expect media to do job WH has FAILED to do re: ACA.” No, you point you actually made, you waste of potentially useful protoplasm, is precisely the one you were accused of making. That might not be the point you were trying to make, but that’s a different story altogether. Maybe you should take a remedial English class before you try running with the big dogs again.

In a sane society, dumbfucks like Chuck Todd would be employed, if at all, to ask us if we’d like fries with that. In today’s America, he makes more than the POTUS (who actually does his job, whether you think he does it well or not), and stretches the limits of the term “euphemism” to its very limit in self-describing as a “journalist.” He is the walking, talking (and talking and talking…) definition of incompetent. Still, the country is strong, and can endure a solitary dim bulb like Todd.

Ginger Gibson: sloth is under-appreciated

Trouble is, he’s contagious. Witness one Ginger Gibson, a Politico reporter who freely admits that even when there’s an allegation that a particular statement is a lie, even if it has been deemed so by a fact-checker, she first of all waits for the “other guys’ press secretaries” to “blast out a press release” (she doesn’t admit to this explicitly, but it’s certainly implicit), then “most of the time, ignore them.”

She made this bizarre proclamation on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” Guest host Frank Sesno followed up:

FS: You ignore it! Wait, wait, wait. So if someone is called a liar or is exposed in a fact check and you’re the reporter of it, you ignore that?
GG: Well, we ignore it when it becomes political fighting, right?
FS: But if someone is objectively wrong…
GG: As a reporter who covered the [Romney] campaign and covers the Hill now, these fact checks are great for us because sometimes when the claim keeps getting repeated, we can point to them in a story and say, look, they’ve been deemed untrue by multiple fact checkers. And I think that line is important, the multiple fact checkers. When it’s multiple fact checkers agreeing, we can go to that.

Translation: “It’s not my job to do my job. I’m supposed to know this story better than anyone else on the planet; I’m not supposed to need a fact-checker. But I’ll first let the press secretaries fight it out, even if one of them is objectively correct and the other one a bald-faced liar. Then I’ll sit around for another couple of weeks while the lies are being spread wider and deeper until “multiple fact checkers” have all gone on record that X is full of crap, and then maybe… maybe… I’ll do my job and show a little concern for the truth. Basically, you see, I’m not only lazy, I’m also a coward unwilling to stand up against a prating prevaricator.”

The real culprit here—apart from the total unsuitability of either Todd or Gibson for any job vaguely connected to reporting—is a disturbing and well-entrenched trend in what passes for journalism these days: a belief, or rather a feigned belief, that the real story is the controversy, not the actual substantive policy arguments. The very first piece I wrote in this iteration of my blogging life was entitled “One does not disagree about the empirical”. I’m still trying to make that case, Gentle Reader. There are opinions with which I disagree, and there are lies. If you can’t win an argument without the latter, maybe you ought to lose.

But the pseudo-journalists—Todd, Gibson, and a veritable phalanx of similarly diffident and apathetic mediocrities—don’t see it that way. Covering the dogfight is easier, and therefore preferable. It doesn’t involve analysis, or logic, or, frankly, much work. “Candidate X increases lead over Candidate Y” is to journalism what Mantovani is to classical music. If you want Bach, you’ve got to write stories like “Candidate X has proposed a new policy mandating A, B, and C, and forbidding D and E. Candidate Y argues that A will increase taxes, B will threatens national security, and C is unconstitutional. Experts agree that taxes might rise, but by less than 1%; we could find no national security experts not in Y’s employ who foresee any significant issues should this proposal become law. Respected authorities F and G disagree about constitutional issues: here’s their analysis…”

Stories like that used to be the norm—in the nation’s leading newspapers, newsmagazines, and even television. Curmie would rejoice now if he saw a single corporate news reporter more interested in getting to the truth than in making a big salary and keeping his/her particular Goliath news syndicate out of trouble with moneyed interests.

Jolly.

Three Volleyball Stories That Aren't About Volleyball

[EDIT: It turns out that Erin Cox may well be a fraud, and that school authorities behaved appropriately. I leave the story up simply as a reminder to us all that a little skepticism is seldom misplaced. Curmie apologizes to Principal Scuzzarella and the other school officials.]

So what is it with high school volleyball these days? Not one, not two, but three stories have come across Curmie’s virtual desk in recent weeks. One, I’ve already written about: the case of North Andover (MA) High School’s Erin Cox (left), who was stripped of her captaincy of the volleyball team and suspended for several games for collecting a drunken friend at a party so the other girl wouldn’t be driving home drunk, endangering herself, others, property… well, you know all the reasons not to drive while impaired.

There’s an update, and it will surprise no one. The school district has doubled down on its idiocy in a petulant display worthy of a six-year-old… or a Tea Party Congressman, which is pretty much the same thing. Naturally, there’s the denial of the zero tolerance policy (chances that Superintendent Kevin Hutchinson is lying: slightly greater that 99%, but—to be fair—less than ontological certitude). There’s the claim that the reason the school isn’t commenting further is a concern for the student’s privacy rights—no, really, it isn’t that they don’t have a f*cking case; it’s all about laws and privacy and whatever else they can think of so they can throw their temper tantrums and no one will be able to prove anything. Let’s face it: if it’s Ms. Cox’s rights they’re concerned about, well, it’s not like there are a lot of people in the area who don’t know what she’s been charged with or what the punishment was, ya know? She has the right to privacy. She also has the right to waive those rights. Challenge her to do so, if you’re really concerned about her instead of maintaining dictatorial control over your petty fiefdom.

(Side note: the owner of the property—the mother of the boy hosting the party—faced no repercussions because “police said she wasn’t aware of the party.” Good mother, that.)

Most interestingly, there’s a rather relevant section of the school’s official Athletic Handbook:

MIAA [Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association] Rule- 62 From the earliest fall practice date, to the conclusion of the academic year or final athletic event (whichever is latest), a student shall not, regardless of the quantity, use, consume, possess, buy/sell, or give away any beverage containing alcohol; any tobacco product; marijuana; steroids; or any controlled substance. This policy includes products such as “NA or near beer”. It is not a violation for a student to be in possession of a legally defined drug specifically prescribed for the student’s own use by his/her doctor.

This MIAA statewide minimum standard is not intended to render “guilt by association”, e.g. many student athletes might be present at a party where only a few violate this standard….

(Curmie has added the boldface emphasis, but not otherwise altered the mispunctuated original.) Apart from that significant injunction against assuming guilt by association, there’s also the key consideration that there is no apparent evidence that Ms. Cox “used, consumed, possessed, bought/sold, or gave away” anything alcoholic. She is, in short, not in violation of school policy.

The good news: a huge outpouring of support for Ms. Cox: nearly 20,000 virtual signatures on a Change.org petition and over $7000 (as of this writing) raised in a GoFundMe campaign. [EDIT: the GoFundMe appeal has now been taken down at the request of Erin’s mom.]

On to the other stories… we start in Dayton, Iowa (no, Alternet, not Ohio), where 12-year-old Dezi Hughes was forced to sit out a volleyball game because she didn’t dress up on game day, wearing instead what you see at right. No story there, right? Many if not most schools require their athletes to demonstrate “school pride” in this manner. (Curmie is not sure how that equation works, but acknowledges its ubiquity.) And if you don’t follow the rules, you don’t play.

Here’s the thing. Ms. Hughes isn’t just any high school kid. She and a friend, Kathlynn Shepherd, were kidnapped in May by a sex offender. Shepherd was killed; Hughes managed to escape.

Volleyball, apparently, has become an important part of her therapy: a chance to be a kid, to forget, at least for a few moments, the horrible ordeal she endured, not to mention the possibility of survivor’s guilt, given the death of her friend. So, not getting to play is a problem.

Fact is, nobody looks good in this one. The fact that volleyball has become an outlet for Dezi doesn’t mean she should be given preferential treatment. She shouldn’t get a starting job she doesn’t deserve, for example. And there’s not—to my mind, at least—a substantive difference between dressing up for school and wearing a uniform at the game. Both are arbitrary requirements, but both are the rules, whether established by the school and the coaching staff on the one hand or by the athletic conference on the other. So why shouldn’t she be expected to follow the same strictures as everyone else?

On the other hand, if there are legitimate reasons why Dezi doesn’t want to dress up—if that would somehow remind her of what she was wearing the day she was kidnapped, for example, then the school’s “rules are rules” attitude would be somewhere between boorish and cruel. Certainly cutting a little slack for an apparent first offense under the circumstances would seem warranted. Conversely, if there’s a legitimate reason why wearing nice clothes—and, let’s face it, no one would suggest the outfit Dezi wore on the day in question qualifies—would somehow impede the girl’s recovery, then the time to make that argument is before she gets told she can’t play because she violated team rules. Does the school look good in this? No. But this isn’t even honorable mention Curmie material.

What is? Well, Naples (FL) Middle School’s letter to the parents of 11-year-old Lily Grasso would qualify. To be fair, the school was simply following a stupid rule established by the legislature; this is Florida, after all. And the Grasso clan did over-react, but certainly their response is understandable. Anyway, Lily is listed at 5’3” and 124 pounds (there’s some dispute as to whether they even got her height right), giving her a body mass index (BMI) of 22. That, according to the “fat letter” that was sent after a screening by the Collier County Health Department, makes her “at risk.” A link on the form sends you to the Centers for Disease Control website, which cheerfully informs us that a child with a BMI% of 89.56—Lily’s percentile—is “overweight.” Lost in the fine print are the caveats:

BMI is not a diagnostic tool. For example, a child may have a high BMI for age and sex, but to determine if excess fat is a problem, a health care provider would need to perform further assessments. These assessments might include skinfold thickness measurements, evaluations of diet, physical activity, family history, and other appropriate health screenings.

In other words, BMI isn’t worth a hell of a lot as a determinant of health or fitness or anything else. Muscle weighs more than fat; 11-year-old bodies are changing; health can’t be determined by any single measurement… need we go on?

A reasonable approach would be to trust that parents know whether their kid has weight issues. A reasonable approach would be to allow doctors rather than charts to determine health. BTW, Clayton Kershaw, widely regarded as the best baseball player in the world right now, has a BMI of 27.1; NBA Most Valuable Player LeBron James is at 27.5; NFL MVP Adrian Peterson checks in at 28.6; former All-Pro defensive tackle Casey Hampton: 42.9. All of those world-class athletes are considered “overweight” for an adult male, except for Hampton, who’s over a dozen points higher than the cutoff for obese. I’d call those guys reasonably fit, nonetheless. But this is state government, school districts, and Florida, all at the same time: a triple whammy if ever there was one. The idea that expertise matters is alien to all of these constituencies, of course. After all, it’s a short step from believing a calculation that puts some of the world’s best athletes into the “overweight” range might be… erm… flawed to thinking that standardized tests aren’t the best measure of academic accomplishment, and we certainly can’t have that.

Childhood obesity is a problem. But so is female self-image. Tell an athletic, healthy, 11-year-old girl that she’s “at risk” because of her height and weight, or “overweight,” and what she hears is “fat.” And if there’s anything our society won’t allow women to be, it’s that. The number of eating disorders these intrusive letters generate will far outweigh any good that come of increased attention to maintaining healthy diets and exercise regimens. You, Gentle Reader, know a perfectly healthy adult woman who agonizes over gaining a pound, much less a dress size. Perhaps you are that woman. And stupid charts and form letters that tell the girl in the picture to the left that she’s overweight are one place this obsession with thin takes hold. (Note: if girls are subject to over-sensitivity to the idea of being too heavy, Curmie, who graduated from college with a BMI of 17.5—“underweight” is anything below 18.5—can personally attest to the self-image problems of skinny boys.)

A Time magazine article last month called attention to an effort in Massachusetts to abolish the “fat letters.” The article notes that:

Parents and pediatricians have been going back-and-forth on the “fat letter” issue recently after an August report by the American Academy of Pediatrics urged parents to put their pride aside and welcome the screenings and letters, which they say will help parents and their children adopt healthier lifestyles.

“BMI screening letters are an additional awareness tool to promote conversations about healthy eating habits, exercise, and weight in the safety and confidential environment of the child’s home,” read the report.

Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought), he might suggest that the AAP likes the letters primarily because they generate highly remunerative visits to their members, who also, in many cases, get to be the “good guys” and reassure parents that there’s nothing wrong with their kid: “Little Suzie is just fine, Mrs. Smith. That’ll be $200. You can pay at the desk as you leave.” It’s worth noting, too, that the “overweight” and “obese” ratings seem to be based on BMI%, not BMI per se. In other words, the highest 5% of BMIs will always and forever be considered “obese,” whether that is an accurate description, even in BMI terms, of 1% or 20% of the population.

More importantly, the principal advantage to BMI as a tool is that it’s easy: easy enough that parents could do it on their own (as if glancing at their kid weren’t enough to give a rough idea). How hard is it to measure your child’s height? There are short horizontal lines at various heights on walls and door jambs all over the country that suggest the process isn’t terribly taxing. Then you plop the kid on a scale, enter the results into one of the manifold online calculators, and bammo-whammo, you know the BMI. So why, exactly, do we need to spend public funds to do this? Why should government be allowed to intrude into the private medical details of, well, anyone? And, especially since we’re talking about growing, changing bodies, why on earth would anyone pay the slightest attention to any of this? But to ignore the authority of the “fat letter” takes either educated resolve or ignorant bluster, and the majority of the population will adopt neither of those approaches. The point is, parents who care about this stuff have ready means to take appropriate measures. Those who don’t—whether that hesitation comes from skepticism about the usefulness of BMI as a determinant of relevant information or dismissiveness of the legitimate perils of obesity—aren’t going to care what the stupid form says.

Anyway, all these stories are about volleyball, but none of them are really about volleyball, are they? They say (whoever “they” are) that sports are a microcosm of life. These three stories, about incompetent school administrators, bureaucratic intransigence, and nannyish intrusion would certainly seem to suggest as much.

Now That's a Curmie Contender

[EDIT: It turns out that Erin Cox may well be a fraud, and that school authorities behaved appropriately. I leave the story up simply as a reminder to us all that a little skepticism is seldom misplaced. Curmie apologizes to Principal Scuzzarella and the other school officials.]

Even a quick perusal of the nominees for Curmie Awards past (2011 nominees here, 2012 nominees here) will reveal some of my particular bêtes noires when it comes to school administrations: punishing students (or faculty) who didn’t do anything wrong, clinging to inane “zero tolerance” policies, attempting to police legal behavior that takes place off school grounds. A recent case in North Andover, MA, rolls all of these personal pet peeves into one tidy bundle.

Erin Cox (left) is a senior at North Andover High School. She’s an honor student and is, or was, the captain of the volleyball team, and a two-time all-star. A couple of weeks ago, she got a text from an underage friend who thought (no doubt correctly) that she was too intoxicated to drive home from a party. So Cox went to pick her up to give her a ride home. Unfortunately for Ms. Cox, she arrived at about the time the cops did (different reports say she got there just before, just as, or just after the police showed up). The police made several arrests, but recognized the fact that Cox was neither drunk not in possession of alcohol, so she was not among those arrested. Still, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, she appears to have been “summoned to court for drinking.” Given the fact the police obviously found no evidence against her, and apparently agreed that she had not been drinking—not to mention the fact that she could readily prove that she hadn’t been at the party even as a bystander—this constituted more than a little over-reach, but, as Fox News reports, “police later backed Cox's version of events.”

In other words, there was no harm done… until the cretinous yahoos at the high school got into the act, that is. Principal Carla Scuzzarella, you see, stripped Cox of her team captaincy and suspended her from five games, because… well, because. There’s a zero tolerance policy, of course, and Scuzzarella, who would apparently have to evolve to have the brains of a rotting rutabaga, dutifully exacted what apparently passes for justice in her little fiefdom. Needless to say, Superintendent Kevin Hutchinson, just as addle-pated as his minion, rushed to her defense, babbling about how participation in athletics is a privilege and claiming that student-athletes receive due process and a fair hearing. The fact that there is no evidence of such a hearing, or any common sense attributable to anyone in that administration, rather undercuts that argument, however, does it not?

Cox sued the district to re-instate her on the team. The court ruled it had no jurisdiction (one wonders who does), but not before the school’s attorney, one Geoffrey Bok, allegedly claimed that Cox had been arrested: that would be, to coin a phrase, a lie. Cox’s lawyer, Wendy Murphy, made the following statement:

That a school would then lie to a judge in a court of law is an outrage and shows the length some school officials will go to to retaliate against a family that dares to challenge an irrational zero tolerance policy.

In fact, as the police officer at the scene reported in a statement that was provided to the principal and the judge, Erin was not arrested and did nothing wrong. He added that she had not been drinking, had no intention of drinking, was there to help a friend and did not have even the ‘slightest’ odor of alcohol on her person.

So let’s review the bidding. There’s a zero tolerance policy about drugs and alcohol. Such policies are always, and I do mean always the result of an administration too morally craven and/or too intellectually comatose to recognize that one size never fits all.

This policy, moreover, applies to off-campus events, where the school has no legitimate jurisdiction. If the police choose to act, that is their decision and their responsibility. The school might, then, reasonably, apply sanctions to students found guilty of a crime… or, perhaps, even those charged with one. But the school district, however much they might wish it to be otherwise, is neither a law enforcement nor a judicial authority. Oh, and of course in this case, the school's lawyer appears to have lied in court in a Hail-Mary attempt to make the principal’s absurd over-reach a little less ridiculous.

Finally, of course, there’s the fact that Erin Cox not only did nothing wrong, she in fact did something right. Were it not for her, her friend might well have driven away from the party before the police arrived, putting a drunken teenager behind the wheel of a car. At the very least, she is to be praised for acting responsibly—and, if I might say so, maturely—in taking care of her friend; the friend, too, while not all her decisions that night were the best, did at least have the sense to ask her friend—Cox—to drive her home. Both these decisions—to ask for help and to give it—are admirable. Both, of course, are being punished by an administration too concerned with rules and too little concerned with moral responsibility, justice, or education. For if nothing else comes of this case, the next time a situation like this comes up, some student somewhere is going to hesitate to do the right thing; some friend is going to be reluctant to ask for a ride; sooner or later, someone is going to get hurt or killed… all because Principal Scuzzarella has neither the moral authority nor the intellect to do her job.

Needless to say, public opinion from observers from the left, right and center on this case is running overwhelmingly in favor of Ms. Cox and against the Silly Squad at the high school. Of course, there’s one exception: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the quintessence of a narcissistic enterprise if ever there was one. Only the Susan G. Komen Foundation offers any real opposition in the competition to be the alleged charity most about itself and least about its stated cause. Drunk driving is still very much a concern, but MADD per se hasn’t been relevant for at least a generation, if indeed it ever was. So color me unsurprised that they’d object to getting a drunk driver off the road and would side with the authoritarian morons. 17-year-old designated drivers weren’t their idea, after all.

So yes, MADD gets to share in the ignominy of being shown to be ridiculous. But they’re not eligible for a Curmie Award. Scuzzarella and her gaggle of brainless dissemblers, on the other hand: that, my friends, is Curmie material.

The Overlooked Element in the Government Shutdown

Anyone who pays even a little attention to the news knows that there has been a substantial if incomplete shutdown of the federal government, precipitated by a temper tantrum thrown by John Boehner, who dances subserviently at the behest of everyone’s favorite foreign-born chauvinist, Ted Cruz. The allegedly left-leaning press has contorted itself into knots too complicated for the Boy Scout Handbook in order to appear impartial, suggesting that “there’s plenty of blame to go around,” and similar twaddle. Fact is, this debacle is 100% the result of a Republican-controlled House of Representatives’ falling well short of the maturity level of a particularly bratty 2nd-grader. Whereas there is little doubt that the Obama administration is playing this situation for political points rather than engaging in anything resembling statesmanship, the GOP—intentionally or otherwise—bear all of the responsibility for the shutdown.

The original excuse for the Republicans’ juvenile display—the alleged horrors of “Obamacare”—was transparently mendacious from the start. Curmie was only reluctantly and tentatively brought around to the point of view that the Affordable Care Act was a net positive, and may change his mind in the future. But the claim, as Fox News asserted and GOP politicos obediently echoed, that the ACA had “failed” before it even took effect would have to take a step up in integrity to qualify as sophistic. More to the point, you never get everything you want in politics: that’s the way of the world. Inconveniencing millions of people and actually endangering lives in order to engage in a histrionic hissy fit to overturn a bill that was passed by the Congress, signed by the President, and upheld by the Supreme Court isn’t statesmanlike; it isn’t adult behavior; it isn’t even ethical.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about. I choose instead to discuss something the yammering classes have scrupulously avoided… how we ended up with a divided government. After all, it would be impossible to imagine a Speaker Pelosi furloughing workers and denying access to needed services in a fit of pique against the Obama administration. I doubt, in fact, that had the 2012 election turned out radically differently, she’d have done so to protest the overreach of a Romney administration… she might have, of course, but we’ll never know.

We’ll never know because President Obama cruised to re-election while the GOP maintained their majority in the House, even though they lost seats both there and in the Senate. Given the fact that the Dems actually followed Curmie’s advice (not that they actually paid any attention to Curmie, per se, but you know...) and ran as Democrats this time, embracing rather than running away from the signature achievement of Obama’s first term, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the electorate rejected the ACA. Rather, there is one word that accounts for the Republican majority in the House: gerrymandering.

The Democrats won the popular vote for the House of Representatives in 2012 by over 1.6 million votes, or 1.4 points (not a landslide by any means, but not close, either) and yet Speaker Boehner claimed affirmation because the GOP kept a 33-seat majority (over 7.5 percentage points). In other words, the disparity between the popular vote and actual representation differs by about 9 percentage points. That’s a lot.

There are plenty of analysts who attribute much if not all of the disparity to gerrymandering, and while there are those who disagree, the fact that in, say, Pennsylvania, the Democrats took a clear majority of the votes but got fewer than a third of the Representatives… that certainly suggests an inequitable distribution of voting suasion. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that the district lines were drawn intentionally to shift the balance of power from one party to the other, and there were in fact some states in which Democrats received disproportionate representation—Republicans took the popular vote in Arizona by 8.5 points but the Dems got 5 seats to the GOP’s 4, for example. So the above commentary isn’t intended to criticize only the Republicans. But, as Sam Wang wrote in the New York Times in February of this year, “Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.”

Moreover, there’s this: Texas Attorney General and (God help us) likely successor to Rick Perry as Executive Idiot Governor Greg Abbott actually brags about his gerrymandering chicanery, not in some backroom schmooze with campaign contributors like Mitt Romney’s unfortunate “47%” gaffe, but in public court documents (!). In a defense of Texas’s practice vis-à-vis the Voting Rights Act, Abbott argues as follows:

DOJ’s accusations of racial discrimination are baseless. In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats.

Seriously, he said that. You see, the attempt wasn’t to disenfranchise minority voters; it was to disenfranchise Democrats, and it’s just a concidence that a lot of Dems are minorities and vice versa. Paraphrasing only slightly: “Of course we cheated, but we’re not racists.” (A good many Texas Republicans actually are, of course, but that’s another matter.)

Most Republican legislators and other politicos aren’t as brazen as Abbott in privileging their own power over the actual will of voters, but you can bet that a lot of them had similar motivations. So when you contemplate the puerile antics of the Boehners and Cruzes of the world, remember this: there may be a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, but there isn’t in the population that elected them.

Curmie Doesn't Like Being Condescended To

Several years ago, Curmie received an e-mail from a well-meaning colleague at another university. He was collecting information about course release for college/university theatre faculty doing production work, i.e., to what extent (if any) do faculty have fewer curricular responsibilities if they’re directing or designing a play in a given semester. He was particularly interested in whether such accommodations were more or less standard for faculty with “heavy teaching loads” of five or more courses a year.

Curmie chortled. Yes, out loud. I’ve done five courses in a semester before. Several times early in my career I taught four regular courses plus two “practicum” courses (one of them in journalism) in a single semester while also directing, designing, and tech directing two major productions including a musical. In the past year I have taught seven sections of courses (six preps), including five different classes at the 400 (senior) level. Four of those courses require assessment reports in addition to the usual work of preparing lectures, searching out supplementary readings, grading, etc.

I directed two full-length productions (one with a cast of 28 and two big sets, the other a musical), supervised four (or was it five?) student productions, and was artistic manager for all 20 or so student productions. I was vice chair of the Fine Arts Council and served on a university committee on sabbatical leaves. I have about 30 advisees, not counting the de facto ones, and I actually spend time with them: at least an hour or two per student per semester, and oftentimes many times that. I am the principal on-campus recruiter for our program: I organize our three departmental “Theatre Days” and I represent us at the three major university-wide recruitment events unless I’m unable to get free of other work-related duties on those Saturdays. I served on two search committees for my department, chairing one. I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on the self-study documents required by our discipline’s accrediting agency. I attended a meeting of the Professional Advisory Board of my doctoral alma mater and drove a full day each way in order to do so. I served on a committee for a professional organization. Oh, and I wrote two scholarly papers and delivered them at conferences.

I think I can say, moreover, that I know something about the way colleges and universities work. I have taught at least one course in 61 of the last 68 semesters, and in every calendar year since 1979 except 1983. I’ve either directed a production or taught (or both) in the summer in 10 of my 12 years at my current job. I have 22 years in tenured or tenure-track positions at three different colleges or universities and I’ve taught as either a grad student or adjunct at four other institutions; depending on how you count (do team-taught courses count? what about being a discussion leader with someone else as the lecturer?), I’ve taught somewhere in the vicinity of 185 classes.

This, Gentle Reader, is the background I bring to bear when I read stuff like Karen Kelsky’s blog, “The Professor Is In,” being hosted (if that’s the right word) by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Dr. Kelsky is a career consultant specializing, one presumes, in higher education issues. She’s been, we learn from the blurb, tenured at two universities, and has been an advisor and mentor to undergrads, graduate students, and junior faculty. So far, so good, right?

I was initially heartened by the choice of question to answer and the first paragraph of the response:

I have a Ph.D. from a mid-ranked program at a middling university. I’m pretty sure I’ll be competitive for SLACs and teaching colleges with this kind of Ph.D., and that’s fine with me since I don’t want to have to work too hard to aim for a big fancy job. Am I right?

A: No, you are not right. Your logic contains two major misapprehensions of the academic job market.

Surely, I thought, she’ll explain that it’s your strengths, not those of your grad school department, that matter to search committees, O Jobseeker. And above all else she’ll disabuse this earnest but ignorant recent PhD of the notion that working at SLACs [Curmie finally figured out that stands for Selective Liberal Arts Colleges] and teaching colleges ought to be mentioned in the same breath as “not [having] to work too hard.”

Alas, Curmie was 0 for 2 in these surmises. Dr. Kelsky sees fits to castigate Eager Young Jobseeker for thinking he/she could possibly compete with someone from “R1s and even Ivy Leagues.” R-1s, for those of you unfamiliar with academic jargon, are “Research 1” institutions, a classification once used by the Carnegie Foundation to designate universities with extensive doctoral programs and a high priority on faculty research. (The Carnegie folks have dropped the term, but it has stuck, the way I think of my current university’s football team as competing in Division 1-AA, not the “Football Championship Subdivision.” FWIW, ESPN agrees with me.) After all, in Kelsky’s world—her CV indicates that she has never been either a student or a faculty member at anything but an R1—publications are paramount. Therefore, in the parochial logic employed by all too many people who ought to know better, it’s the same everywhere.

A few years ago I served on the Research and Publications Committee for a professional organization. I was a tenured associate professor at the time. I was the only person in the room who didn’t need to publish a book to get tenure, and over half of those present didn’t even know that it was possible to do so, anywhere. Yet there are far more institutions like mine than like theirs, and far more faculty members like me than like them.

You’ll notice that in my list of what I’ve done in the past year, there was no mention of publications at all. That’s because there weren’t any. Over the years I’ve published a handful of articles, couple of book chapters, some interviews, and a couple dozen reviews of books or theatre productions. But not this year… and probably not next year, either. I do write an average of two conference papers a year, but no R-1 would pay any attention to that. Still, my scholarly work was once described as “prodigious” in an official review document, and I’ve been nominated for the university’s research award.

Thus, I feel a particular pang when Kelsky offers up this claptrap: “Your competitiveness… is a product of your record beyond the Ph.D., in the form of refereed journal articles, major national conferences, national grants, substantive sole-teaching experience, and illustrious letter-writers.”

Journal articles are nice (although there are some colleges that distrust the priorities of faculty who are interested in publishing). Conferences accept most proposals based on an abstract—being able to sustain an argument for 250 words maximum is different from doing so for a 20-minute formal presentation, and very different from conducting a 50-minute seminar on the subject. National grants are important only in some fields, and only for a minority of colleges and universities. No one cares how “illustrious” your letter-writers are: we care what they say. If you’re just starting out and you have an “illustrious” reference, chances are that one of two things is true: that person was on your dissertation committee (making the “mid-ranked program at a middling university” description somewhat incongruous, and suggesting a potential conflict of interest since your getting a job makes your doctoral program look better), or he/she doesn’t really know you very well, and will write a generic paragraph about how much promise you have. In fact, many if not most search committees have abandoned the idea of letters altogether: a phone call reveals a lot more about a reference’s true feelings about a candidate than a “to whom it may concern” letter ever will.

Speaking as a veteran of search committees at both the SLAC and teaching college level, I can assure prospective applicants that we’re looking for three things:

1). Some demonstrable engagement with the field. This could be in the form of publications, conference presentations, workshop attendance… it doesn’t matter. No, really, it doesn’t. We’re looking for evidence that an applicant could publish (per se), but actually having done so is nowhere near a sine qua non, at least not in an initial hire—a tenure committee might want to see an article or two.

2. Breadth. Smaller departments mean a significantly increased likelihood that you’ll be teaching outside the narrowly-defined area of your research. You wrote your dissertation about Yeats? Great. You’re teaching the American Novel in the 19th century. Enjoy. Over the years I’ve taught beginning and advanced play analysis; numerous variations on the theme of theatre history and dramatic literature; a host of topics courses; beginning and advanced acting; beginning and advanced directing; production courses in stagecraft, lighting, makeup and costume history; a handful of courses in speech and communications; analysis of fine arts; classical mythology; and Eastern civilizations. Oh, and manifold variations on the theme of introduction to theatre. If you think you’re above that, then yes, your only hope is at an R-1, and you’d better get working on those refereed articles.

But the fact is that I generally spend about 15 minutes a year talking about the specific content of my dissertation. (Last year was an exception: I taught a topics course that allowed me to incorporate a couple of the plays discussed in my diss.) This isn’t to say that you won’t, over time, be able to move into coursework that fits your particular skill-set. Two of the courses that are now part of my regular rotation didn’t exist when I came here; I also created (with a lot of help) a study abroad program to Ireland which is about to head into its fifth biennial iteration. But you’ve got to get the job before you can adapt the job.

3. Teaching. This is the only absolute. You have to be able to teach, and you need to be able to do it at all levels. You are going to be in a room with a few dozen students who really don’t want to be there. You are going to be in a different room, or at least at a different time, with a bunch of students who know a lot (but not as much as they think they do). You are going to be in classes that drive you crazy because your students stare zombie-like at you and write down everything you say (including your jokes). You are going to be in classes that drive you crazy because nothing you do seems to engage them in any way. Teach them. Teach them all.

If you really want to improve your chances at getting a job at a university like mine, teach. Teach anything someone will let you teach. If you’re still working on your degree, talk to your department about letting you be teacher of record, about letting you teach the intro to botany course even though you’re a microbiologist. If you have your degree, don’t be afraid to take that adjunct job, as long as you save the time for yourself to do whatever it is that will make you more employable in a tenure-track position. Go to workshops and roundtables on pedagogy. Go to conference sessions on textbook selection, integrating technology, accommodating students with idiosyncratic needs. Participate! (And talk about this stuff in your cover letter.)

All of this, of course, is true only if being in a SLAC, LAC, or teaching college is really where you want to be: you understand the requirements and the workload, and you want to concentrate on teaching while doing enough research to keep you current in your field. Kelsky assures us that “I have no problem at all with people aiming for careers at community colleges and SLACs—those are fine career options,” but of course there’s that tone of dripping condescension that sounds very much like she’s comparing my job to being the assistant manager at Wendy’s.

Fact is, whereas there are certainly those at my institution who couldn’t survive at an R-1, most could, although they’d have to re-orient their priorities to do so. (There are some at R-1s who couldn’t survive here, too.) I had a good talk with my Provost a few years ago in which I suggested that the quantity of my scholarly work wouldn’t keep up with my colleagues at “major” universities, but the quality of what I do present or publish had better be comparable. I am confident that I could have succeeded at an R-1 had happenstance pushed me in that direction—I had a couple of phone interviews at R-1s, but pretty well withdrew my application when the job descriptions became clearer. I’m sure that other R-1 jobs would have been more to my liking, but I’m pretty convinced that for me, personally, my current job (or one like it) is where I want to be. Good thing, of course, since no R-1 would hire a full professor, let alone one my age, with a publication record like mine.

Here’s the thing: if you want to work at an R-1, you need to follow R-1 rules. Publish. Present. Write grants. If you want to work at a university like mine, you follow our rules, and they aren’t the ones outlined by Kelsky. We aren’t the spillover trough. Many of the best scholars I know are also great teachers; many of the best teachers I know are also brilliant and active scholars. But anyone who has ever gone to grad school has had a course with someone who might be doing cutting-edge research but can’t teach a lick. And anyone who has spent any time on a campus like mine knows a professor who can teach anything to anyone but either wouldn’t or couldn’t crank out an article a year and a book every five.

That’s OK, Dr. Kelsky. Really. Different skills for different thrills.

The Debt and the Deficit Are Different Things

Curmie is no economist, but he is fundamentally honest, often to his detriment in a world overrun by self-aggrandizement, cowardice, and humorlessness.

By the first part of this statement, I do not mean to suggest that I know nothing of economics. I’ve taken only one college level course in economic theory, but that’s one more than most Americans have taken, and whereas I have no idea what a derivative credit default swap is, I do know that manipulation of those little rascals by the reckless and the unscrupulous was a cause of the global financial meltdown of 2008. I know that the idea that banks are “too big to fail” is a hoax propagated by politicians who know the origin of their re-election gravy train (cf. Iceland).

But what Curmie really understands about economics is the basic terminology: terms like deficit and debt, for example. In terms of governmental budgeting, a deficit occurs when, over a specified period of time, usually a fiscal year, more money is being spent than is being collected in revenue. Debt is the accumulated difference between what is owed and what is available. This blog piece is not about whether the debt or deficit ought to be bigger or smaller than they are. Rather, it’s about basic terms and basic honesty.

You see, Gentle Reader, both political parties in this country purport to care a great deal about these things: the fact that neither side really gives a shit about the bottom line, but only about how we get there, is to be ignored for the moment. There are some things about which honest people of all political stripes can agree: the deficit is going down, and the debt is going up. The Wall Street Journal reports that, “For the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the Congressional Budget Office estimates a deficit of $642 billion, compared with $1.087 trillion a year earlier and the smallest gap since 2008's $458.55 billion shortfall.” In other words, there’s roughly $400 billion less deficit and close to two-thirds of a trillion dollars more debt than a year ago.

And here is where we invoke the second half of Curmie’s self-declaration: the part about being honest. It will come as no surprise to you, Gentle Reader, that leaders on both sides of the aisle are lying through their teeth at every opportunity less than entirely forthright about this whole business. Whether lower deficits and/or debt are intrinsically good things hardly matters: both parties are pretending they are, so the Dems are pretending there’s no problem because the deficit is shrinking, and the GOP is doing their Chicken Little impersonation because the debt is increasing.

That may be more spin than substance on both sides, but at least it’s readily identifiable as political business-as-usual. We started getting into more problematic territory when the usual suspects actually start lying. Needless to say, I wouldn’t be writing this if we didn’t have someone from both sides doing just that.

We start, chronologically, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), who taped an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News on August 2 that aired on August 4. Here’s the key section of these remarks: “What we are trying to do is fund the government and make sure also that we take away the kinds of things that are standing in the way of a growing economy, a better health care. And all the while keeping our eye focused on trying to deal with the ultimate problem, which is this growing deficit.” [Both here and below, the emphasis is mine.]

Needless to say, Wallace, good little Fox minion that he is, didn’t correct him. And the incompetent yahoos at PolitiFact even gave him a “Half True” because, you see, although Cantor’s statement is so much equine fecal matter now, current projections are that, absent changes to policy, the deficit will indeed start to increase three years down the road to a point still less than the status quo. The logic—and I use the word loosely—of the PolitiFact idiocracy would similarly suggest that although I am writing this piece at about 11:00 at night, if I say the sun is shining brightly through my window, it’s half true, since it might well be doing so tomorrow afternoon.

No, one of three things is true. I list them here in increasing likelihood of being the correct explanation: 1). It was an honest mistake, a slip of the tongue. 2). Cantor really is so stupid that he doesn’t know the deficit and the debt are different things. 3). He’s lying, and being rather smug about it.

On to third-term Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who was pretending to care about veterans attending a discussion of veterans’ affairs in Shreveport. She “corrected” a veteran who expressed concern about the increasing national debt. According to retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Andre E. Dean, “She assured him that the United States did not have an increasing national debt. She then proceeded to tell all of us that for the past six to seven years the federal government had been continuously driving the federal debt down and reducing it, NOT increasing it.”

OK, this is even stupider that Cantor’s comment. For one thing, it’s even less likely to be a slip of the tongue—she was “correcting” a true statement. (Neither Cantor nor Landrieu have, as far as I can tell, admitted a mistake.) But not even the deficit has been falling for “six to seven years.” The biggest deficit was in FY2009, which was… um… four years ago. On the other hand, there’s a less likelihood that Landrieu was consciously lying, because—unlike Cantor—she really is stupider than snake spit, really is utterly inept, and really might not know that “debt” and “deficit” are different things (or that four is less than six, for that matter).

Whose offense was greater? Cantor, who is probably one of the half dozen most important figures in his party and ought to be held to a higher standard, or Landrieu, who apparently belittled a veteran while yammering nonsense that wouldn’t have been accurate even if she hadn’t confused her terms? Cantor, who was talking to a national television audience and should have been prepared to choose his words wisely, or Landrieu, who was picking a fight with a constituent?

I’ve gotta go with Landrieu’s as the more grievous gaffe. It’s OK if you disagree, though, Gentle Reader, because having Eric Cantor as the less mendacious, unethical, incompetent jackass in a scenario takes a little getting used to. But what’s really troubling is that whether the debt and deficit are actual crises, they’re certainly concerns, and the people we’ve got on the job to fix them are folks like these two.

We’re fucked.