The Farcical Tragedy of Border Security

Curmie recently drove to the closest international airport to pick up an exchange student who’ll be spending most of the spring semester at Curmie’s university. No biggie, right? Well, the student in question was held up by Homeland Security (or whoever) for quite a while. How long? Well, from the moment the plane was listed on the arrivals board as having arrived until the young woman finally emerged into the publicly-accessible lobby was 10 hours and 11 minutes. (10/11: one better than 9/11, apparently.)

Curmie even knew she’d been stopped only because a little over two and a half hours after arrival, she sent a Facebook message to her mother, who in turn Facebooked Curmie. Good thing, too, because the student’s phone was confiscated soon thereafter. (She eventually got it back.) From the moment Curmie knew the student had already been detained until she was released from Immigration: about seven and a half hours, during which she was shuffled from room to room but not given any real information about her status until around midnight, over nine hours into her ordeal.

And of course there was no way anyone in the International Arrivals terminal—as depressingly boring a space as Curmie has seen in a long while—was going to be of any help. There are no airline desks, so it’s impossible to know if someone even boarded the plane. The “information desk” is about as self-negating a description as the “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea” (whyever would Curmie think of that regime in this connection?). There’s a courtesy phone that allegedly connects to the Border Patrol/Customs/Immigration/Homeland Security offices. Any phone call goes straight to voicemail, however. There is no one to talk to in person. The place is Kafkaesque.

In other words, the only way Curmie even knew the exchange student had arrived was that Facebook message that made it through before the quintessential representatives of what those in Curmie’s generation used to call “the Man” showed off what manly men they truly are by finding a soft-spoken post-adolescent woman on her first flight anywhere ever, and cutting her off from all communication. Don’t you feel safer already, Gentle Reader? I mean, after all, Curmie is not one to advocate profiling, but if he were, he could certainly think of no one more terrifying, more likely to wreak havoc on American society as we know it, than a 19-year-old white Christian female British citizen with a stereotypically Scottish surname and a student visa so she could study scene painting in the States. Hell, she might weigh as much as 115 pounds after a big meal. Now you’re trembling in mortal terror, aren’t you, Gentle Reader?

And, of course, her ordeal was completely justified. After all, she had broken a rule. The heinous crime against humanity she had committed surely justifies indefinite incarceration at the very least: although her passport and visa were fine, she brought a photocopy of a form instead of the original. Break out the rack! Release the hounds! Prepare the guillotine! (By the way, the director of the Office of International Programs at Curmie’s university says that it’s not at all uncommon for foreign students not to have that form at all.)

So this is a British national’s first experience of the United States: bullying, intentional humiliation, isolation, denial of the ability to communicate with friends and family, sleep deprivation (Amnesty International calls most of those torture, by the way). And for what? To protect anyone from anything? No, they knew all along they were going to let her into the country. This shit is sport for these sick fucks. Seriously, how awful must your life be if you get your jollies pushing around nervous, exhausted young women at the end of their first flight ever?

Of course, one thing that happens when you’re standing around waiting for hours on end is that you make friends with other folks suffering the same fate. I don’t expect to be on the Christmas card list of any of these folks, but we were comrades once… the large African-American man who shrugged and said he understood why he would be profiled, but couldn’t figure why his mother-in-law should have any trouble returning from Guatemala; the federal agent (!) who couldn’t get any more answers than the rest of us could; the young woman who was trying to keep her 2-year-old son occupied while waiting for her mother, who was visiting from Romania (and speaks no English)—only after six hours did the geniuses behind the partitions decide that if they wanted their routine questions answered, maybe they really should allow a no doubt intimidated middle-aged woman to call her daughter, who could translate.

Most of all, I’ll remember the African-American man about my age whose wife was on the same flight as Curmie’s student…. Or at least she was supposed to be on that flight. At least our student had managed to get word to me, indirectly, that she was being detained. This poor man didn’t know for certain that his wife had even landed in the US—she could have missed the flight at Heathrow, for all he knew… and if she did, and hadn’t called… his mind had to have been racing to all the horrible possibilities. Chances are, she emerged a couple minutes after our student, but Curmie had a two-and-a-half-hour drive ahead, and, much as he sympathized with the man’s plight, he didn’t stick around to commiserate.

To be fair to the agents involved, they appear to have been hopelessly understaffed—at one point, we were told, there were only two agents trying to handle the influx of a half dozen jumbo jets. And whereas the average DHS agent isn’t necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, they’re bound by stupid rules and regulations that actively discourage detached discretion, let alone compassion or empathy. Should human feeling trump national security? Of course not. But should it be a default condition in the absence of any evidence whatsoever that a traveler has committed an offense greater than failing to negotiate the arcana of government bureaucracy? Curmie thinks so.

Good night, Ziggy.

One of the many permutations
of David Bowie.

David Bowie was one of those rare musicians in the sliver of the Venn diagram reserved for those who are both immensely talented and immensely popular. It may be fitting in this regard that the song most associated with him, “Space Oddity,” was probably Curmie’s least favorite of the canon. Even his first breakthrough song, “Changes,” never really resonated with me. Except…

Except that it did. I was never a fan of the whole song, but that refrain, “turn and face the strange”… that resonated with high schooler Curmie in a way that little else ever did; that admonition has stayed with me for the ensuing forty-something years. And temporal art—music, film, theatre—is often measured not by the effect of the whole, but by the indescribable thrill of that perfect few seconds. Later in life, other parts of the song—“A million dead end streets and / Every time I thought I’d got it made / It seemed the taste was not so sweet,” for example—took on extra meaning. And that was sort of the point, wasn’t it? Bowie was in his mid-twenties when that song, his first hit, came out, and yet there was a maturity of both philosophy and expression seldom seen even in older songwriters.

Bowie crafted himself in countless ways, great and small. He was the quintessence of glam rock and then he was recording Christmas songs with Bing Crosby or a Motown standby with Mick Jagger. He was androgynous and not; he was mainstream and bizarre; he was the leper messiah, the rebel rebel, the returnee from suffragette city.  And he was never, never boring.  As a friend put it on Facebook today, “Prepare for global warming. The planet just got significantly less cool.”

One of my favorite memories of Bowie songs came in the 1997 World Series, when NBC used “Heroes” to introduce its coverage. And sure enough, the Florida Marlins won the odd-numbered games (and therefore the Series), while the Cleveland Indians won the even-numbered games. Every night we heard “we can be heroes, just for one day,” and then, every night, last night’s heroes weren’t, anymore. “Just for one day,” indeed.

Above all, David Bowie was an original. He was constantly exploring, probing, testing the limits of his art form(s), of his popularity, and indeed of himself. And when he knew he was dying, he responded the way great artists do, by using his condition as the catalyst for new art. Warren Zevon, another of Curmie’s all-time favorites, wrote and performed songs like “My Ride’s Here” (“Man, I’d like to stay / But I'm bound for glory / I’m on my way / My ride's here...”) under similar circumstances. Bowie’s swan song was “Lazarus”: “Look up here, I’m in heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.”

Like the man once called “Swamp Thing,” Ziggy Stardust is gone now. Sort of. His passing reminds those of us of a certain age that we’re not as young as we used to be. But he’s with us still, not in some New Age-y pseudo-spiritual way. No, David Bowie lives on because, more than any other artist since Salvador Dali (at least), he was inseparable from his creativity and his creations.

David Bowie was not merely a consummate artist. He was the art itself.

Wheaton College Revokes Tenure of Prof for Accurately Quoting the Pope

Larycia Hawkins: Christian scholar fired
for being insufficiently anti-Islamic.

The administration of Wheaton College in Illinois has announced that Dr. Larycia Hawkins, a tenured Associate Professor of Political Science is about to be out of a job. Real colleges and universities treat tenure seriously. To fire a faculty member with tenure requires—or at least ought to require—some sort of serious transgression: not going to class, plagiarizing an article, sexually harassing students, that sort of thing. Dr. Hawkins’s transgression: accurately stating that Pope Francis had claimed that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.”

Colleges and universities with religious affiliations are an intriguing, not to say self-contradictory, phenomenon. If, as Curmie believes, the purpose of post-secondary education is to challenge assumptions and encourage critical and independent thinking, then adherence to a religious code would seem to run contrary to that end. This doesn’t mean, of course, that such institutions can’t thrive, and many religiously-affiliated schools—even evangelical ones—rightly maintain reputations for academic excellence.

But insistence that faculty march in lockstep to narrow and ultimately divisive theologies inevitably raises concerns in any legitimate scholarly community. And Wheaton risks sacrificing its time-honored standing in the academy to chase after the phantoms of Islamic otherness.

Dr. Hawkins, a Christian, first made headlines when she donned a Hijab throughout the recent Advent season:

... in human solidarity with my Muslim neighbor because we are formed of the same primordial clay, descendants of the same cradle of humankind…. I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.

Curmie can’t confirm that Pope Francis made that statement “last week,” but it is a recurrent theme in his discourse. But the Doctrine Police at Wheaton couldn’t have that: it suggests that someone of less pretentious religiosity (Dr. Hawkins) or even someone who worships the same God differently (Muslims) might be worthy of respect. “Question all things except our interpretation of religious teachings,” in other words.

The bottom line is that the “people of the book” description is time-honored, and no one seems to have suggested that Christians ought to convert to Islam, merely that treating their Muslim friends and colleagues (and Muslim strangers) as… you know… people is the appropriate—dare I say Christian—thing to do. Indeed, as Miroslav Volf of the Yale Divinity School argued even before Hawkins was dismissed, “There isn’t any theological justification for Hawkins’s forced administrative leave. Her suspension is not about theology and orthodoxy. It is about enmity toward Muslims. More precisely, her suspension reflects enmity toward Muslims, taking on a theological guise of concern for Christian orthodoxy.”

That initial episode—not the hijab per se, according to the school, although Curmie suspects a quibble about that part—earned Dr. Hawkins a paid administrative leave. What got her fired was apparently her unwillingness to cooperate fully in the ensuing witch-hunt. Curmie uses that term quite intentionally, as the Wheaton administration is interested primarily in acquiescence, sincere or otherwise, and in the stomping out of anything so heretical as free thought. They make lots of fancy statements like this one:

In the interest of rigorous academic inquiry consistent with a Christian liberal arts education, Wheaton College exposes students to a variety of views to encourage them to think through difficult issues, embrace a mature adult faith with integrity, and learn how to articulate their own commitments.

Fact is, however, just want their faculty to shut up about anything that would actually lead to reasoned, disciplined, interrogation of social, political, and religious doctrines.

This is an act of intellectual cowardice, as is any suppression of free speech other than the usual regulations against treason, libel, and the like. A rigorous search for the truth will reveal the manifold falsehoods and slanders of petty minds. Seeking nuance in, for example, an approach to homosexuality is not a capitulation to secular forces: it is the essence of any legitimate religion and any legitimate educational enterprise. If the school’s narrow (not to say narrow-minded) interpretation of God’s law is appropriate, it will be revealed as such. But just as the ancient Athenians understood that the satirical barbs of an Aristophanes actually strengthened the polis, just as the Anglo-American system of jurisprudence insists on a vigorous defense of even the most obviously guilty defendant, so is probing, prodding, and questioning an inherent good in a theological system. Wheaton faculty understand that; their students understand that; their administration does not.

None of this is to suggest that Wheaton doesn’t have the legal (as opposed to ethical or pedagogical) right to do whatever the hell they want. Faculty sign declarations of faith as a pre-requisite to hiring, and however creepy such a practice might be, it’s still legal. But Wheaton has cost itself dearly in this contretemps: it risks falling out of the company of the most reputable schools of its kind—Calvin, Seattle Pacific, and the like—and into the mix with Asbury, Liberty, Bob Jones and their brethren: places where philosophy, science, history, and literature are subordinated to religio-political indoctrination. It would be a shame for that to happen, especially to the students who chose a religious school they thought viewed “rigorous academic inquiry consistent with a Christian liberal arts education” as a real goal instead of a marketing ploy. The administration, however, has brought whatever ignominy might occur upon itself.

NOTE: After posting this piece, Curmie came across a very good, detailed, view of the case. You can read Tobin Grant’s excellent analysis here.

 

Dueling Privilege: This One Is About Misogyny, Not Road Rage Or Race

Sara Mutschlechner and her killer, Eric Jamal Johnson.

There’s a sense in which there’s not much of any particular interest in the shooting death of Sara Mutschlechner, a University of North Texas student acting as a designated driver after she and some presumably less than sober friends left a New Year’s Eve party in Denton, TX, at about 2 a.m. Yes, it’s horrible, and yes, it would sure as hell affect us if we knew the victim. But does it rise to the level of national news? Not really. There are about 40 murders per day in this country—that’s just the “intentional murder” stat—and whereas I’m sure Ms. Mutschlechner was a lovely young woman,  there was nothing especially newsworthy about her, nor does there seem to be much special about Marine Corporal Eric Jamal Johnson, who has confessed to the shooting.

True, there’s the disturbing fact that the perpetrator was a Marine at the time of the murder (People magazine’s description of Johnson as a “former Marine,” which technically he was at the time of the confession, is a prime example of a literal truth used to intentionally deceive: he was a Marine at the time of the incident and of his arrest), and there’s the irony of Ms. Mutschlechner’s dying as a direct result of serving as a designated driver, attempting to protect her friends from harm. Those facets of the case, taken together, might move the story to above the fold in the Denton paper, and might even warrant a little coverage in Dallas. But the New York Times? That’s all about the fact that young Sara was white and a sorority girl. (This latter description appears in a lot of headlines and even more articles.)

True, the Times didn’t play up the black-on-white violence angle, although they did post a photo of Johnson. Other venues were less subtle. How about headlines like ”White Female College Student Executed By a Group of Black Males in Texas”? Or ”White College Student Sara Mutschlechner Shot in Head by Car Full of Blacks has Died”? The word “Negro” appears in more headlines than Curmie wants to contemplate.  I suppose we need to rejoice that a different word beginning with N has been largely absent.

There is, of course, no indication that there was any racial motivation to the crime. Ah, but you see, the site wasn’t far from another shooting last year, and race was a factor in that totally unrelated event.

So the racial element race is underscored by racist bloggers (not news) and the story is likely not to have been covered at all had Johnson been white or especially if Mutschlechner had been black. But the bias and incompetence don’t stop with the racial angle. The Denton cops apparently declared the shooting the result of “road rage,” and the term was immediately pounced on by virtually every news outlet, including the New York Daily News, ABC, the Huffington Post, and a host of others.

To this description, Curmie replies with a single word: Bullshit. Road rage happens when somebody cuts you off in traffic, or drives ten miles an hour under the speed limit in the passing lane, or sits immobile in front of a green light because texting is important, yo. What road rage is not, is pulling up alongside a stranger, screaming at her that you want to fuck her, and then shooting her when she doesn’t respond the way you want. No, that’s something other than road rage. That’s male privilege and misogyny. To say that this shooting is the result of road rage because it happened on the streets is to say that Lincoln was shot because he went to the theatre.

Curmie turns to the commentary of a friend and former student, who makes the point extremely well in a Facebook post:

This should not be happening to anyone. It’s 2016. Aren't we supposed to have progressed more than that? A lot of “news sites” (I use the term loosely here) are painting this racially but guys of all races overreact to rejection far too often. This is a sexist crime. These men felt entitled to say what they said to Sara and her friends and when it wasn’t received the way they wanted, this man ended her life. Because she didn’t want the sexual advances of a stranger at 2 in the morning while she was trying to drive her drunk friends home from a party. This is horrifying and extremely disappointing. We need to teach our sons not to be like these men.

She’s right, of course. This is all about man believing he has the right not only to say whatever he wants to a woman, but to have her respond the way he wants. But only the violence separates this murderous little asshole from an all-too-prominent segment of the young male population in general. Curmie seldom goes a week without hearing one of his female students complain about having been catcalled (or worse) on the way to or from class or rehearsal. Curmie, needless to say, has never been on the receiving end of this kind of harassment. But the impossibility of attributing the testimony of all those young women to over-reaction or hypersensitivity… that moment happened many years ago, and the situation, if anything, is getting worse.

Yes, a black man shot a white woman. But if race factored into the story at all, it’s that we—not in Denton, not friends or family of the victim—know about the assault at all. And to call this a case of road rage is not merely inaccurate: it’s deceitful. If white privilege is what publicizes this incident, it’s male privilege that caused the problem to begin with. Let’s do something about that.

Amherst and Las Putas

Voting is still underway for this year’s Curmie Award (please vote if you haven’t already) and we’ve already got a strong contender for next year’s… erm… honor.

Here’s the lede for a Washington Post article by Susan Svriuga: “Teaching assistants at Amherst College were encouraged to sleep with and socialize with students to boost enrollment in the Spanish department, according to a lawsuit filed by a former faculty member.” Excuse me, but… WHAAAAAT???

Yes, Dimaris Barrios-Beltran is “a pretty face.” 

Curmie suspects she’s got more to offer than that.

Yes, it’s true. That is to say, there is indeed such a lawsuit, brought by former lecturer Dimaris Barrios-Beltran against her former boss, Victoria Maillo. So one of two things is true: Maillo was essentially running a forced prostitution ring out of the Spanish Department at one of the nation’s most reputable academic institutions, or a fired lecturer has fabricated a particularly scurrilous form of vengeance against her former employer (Barrios-Beltran was dismissed, officially because of declining enrollments; Maillo no longer teaches at Amherst). Given the fact that the Maillo just sort of disappeared and Barrios-Beltran now teaches at Mount Holyoke, Curmie sort of suspects that the airborne particulate matter suggests the presence of a conflagration.

Assuming Barrios-Beltran’s version of events to be accurate, Maillo was upset with a TA for dating a student at the University of Massachusetts instead of someone from Amherst. The TA told Barrios-Beltran that Maillo was treating her “like a prostitute.” Asked if the TA was expected to sleep with “a different guy every night” like one of her colleagues was supposedly doing, Maillo responded “that’s what I brought you here for.” She allegedly sought “pretty faces” to fill TA and lecturer positions. Barrios-Beltran certainly qualifies in that regard, but she says Maillo retaliated against her when she objected to her supervisor’s shall we say idiosyncratic recruitment methods, ridiculing her Puerto Rican accent, and trashing Jews and people with disabilities for good measure. The TAs have all returned to their native Spain. They’re reluctant to talk, but will apparently testify if the case goes to trial.

Curmie confesses to being a little baffled. He understands the allure of a pretty face, however euphemistic that term might be, but wonders if one can really seduce one’s way to meaningfully larger enrollments, especially of students savvy enough to get into Amherst. But then again, it’s been a while since Curmie was 20. One never knows.

Announcing the Nominees for the 5th Annual Curmie Award

It’s that time of year again: time to ask you, Gentle Reader, to help decide the appropriate recipient of the 5th Annual Curmie Award, presented to the person or persons who most embarrass the profession of educator. I remind you that the award is not for the most egregious act, but the one that shows the profession in the worst light. That is, a thoroughly heinous but isolated act shouldn’t necessarily get your vote over a less outrageous action that might be seen as either an exemplar of a systemic problem or a harbinger of bad things to come.

As usual, the transgressions in question must be directly related to the profession, to someone acting in an official capacity: junior high teachers who sleep with their students are abhorrent, but there’s nothing about that act that links directly to education. That there are unethical teachers is not news, and the same person might initiate a similar relationship with a child s/he knows through church, Little League, or the neighborhood. Similarly, idiotic decisions by politicians, pseudo-philanthropists, or university Boards of Trustees aren’t included because the perpetrators aren’t educators.

Lastly, I must have written, at least briefly, about the story in 2015, and the incident in question must have taken place either in calendar year 2015 or close enough to it that it had not really entered the public consciousness until 2015. An exception would be an older story that got new life: a lawsuit that went to trial, a newsworthy fact-finding report was released, that sort of thing.

Previous winners included the anonymous middle school teacher (and the teacher’s aide) in Mercer County, Kentucky, who punished an autistic boy by cramming him into a gym bag intended to hold gym balls; Lillian Gomez, a Florida teacher who figured that marinating Play-Doh and crayons in hot sauce and feeding the concoction to her autistic students would be a good way to teach them not to put things in their mouths; Principal Greer Phillips of PS 79 (the Horan School) in East Harlem, who ordered a lockdown, complete with false claims of an armed intruder—without notifying either the faculty or the police that it was only a drill—in a school with a high percentage of special needs kids less than a week after the events in Newtown, Connecticut; and the administration of Rhame Elementary School in East Rockaway, New York, for pulling Vuola Coyle from the classroom for the sin of having her students perform too well on standardized tests.

And now we have a new crop of contenders. As usual, Curmie chooses eight finalists and roughly that many (dis)honorable mentions. You, collectively, decide the recipient from among the finalists; there are no write-ins. If you think someone else should have been nominated, that is your right and privilege. Your choices: accept my apologies for the omission or write your own blog and remedy the situation.

Curmie wrote only 35 posts for the entire year, the fewest since the Curmie Award was instituted, and whereas education has gradually become the top topic here, there are a number of essays dealing with other issues altogether. Still, I wrote 11 posts about (depending on how you count) about 35 Curmie-worthy incidents. The competition is still stiff. Indeed, when I was trying to choose the nominees, I struggled to narrow the field to fewer than a dozen finalists and at least that many (dis)honorable mentions. Of course, the corruption and incompetence of the Arne Duncan-led Department of Education was an ongoing tragedy for education in this country, but there weren’t any specific examples (that Curmie wrote about) that rose to the level of Curmie-worthy stupidity.

There were plenty of stories I never got to, and others, of course, I never heard about. It’s a big profession, and even if the percentage of morons is quite low, there are still plenty to go around. Curmie is a life-long educator himself, and whereas he’s experienced at least his share of self-doubt, that’s at a personal level—there is no questioning the legitimacy of the profession or the skill, passion, and integrity of the majority of the teachers (and even administrators) out there. And here is where Curmie separates himself from, say, law enforcement: every cop in the country seems ready to defend every vicious, boneheaded, and brutal episode of police arrogance and ineptitude, apparently out of some presumed brotherhood. Curmie, less paranoid, seeks to root out the incompetents and the frauds in his own profession, because he doesn’t want to be represented by bozos.

And so: we start with the (Dis)Honorable mentions.

• The Alabama high school that forbade its history club from seeing “Selma.”

• The junior college president in Illinois who claims to have been “clearly threatened” by a mass e-mail referencing the Haymarket Riots.

• The Georgia (public) primary school whose teachers led their kindergarten and 1st grade classes in prayers.

• The Florida (Methodist) school that fired a beloved teacher for being a lesbian, then sang her praises.

• The Texas high school that not only painted Christian zealotry on the corridor walls, they used made-up quotations from the likes of George Washington and Ronald Reagan to do it. (It was tough to keep this off the finalists list.)

• The Georgia elementary school teacher who punished an autistic child by putting him in a trash can. (This would certainly have been a finalist except that it’s too similar to a previous winner.

• The Idaho (public) high school that sought to prevent a female non-Mormon from running for school president.

• The Texas elementary school that fired a teacher for protecting herself and her students by locking a violent student out of her classroom.

• The Georgia university advisor who threatened to call security to remove a student who had the audacity to come by without an appointment and wait for an available advisor. (This one would have been a finalist if Curmie were convinced that such advisors are actually educators.)

Those are, I think, all pretty scary. So what are the finalists like? Well, here we go, in chronological order (of when Curmie wrote about them, not necessarily of the events themselves).

First up is tiny Gustine ISD in Texas, where Principal Alan Luker faced a rather unique problem: someone was leaving feces on the gym floor. So, naturally, a couple dozen 4th and 5th graders were carted off to separate rooms for girls and boys and made to drop their pants. Apart from the outrageousness of this action—searching students without the slightest bit of actual evidence or parental notification (let alone consent), there’s a pragmatic problem: what the hell were they looking for. Unless the excretory processes of pre-teens have changed appreciably since Curmie was one of their number, the undergarments of the Pooping Vandal would be indistinguishable from those of the 95%+ of students who are completely innocent (of course, they might all be innocent, an eventuality apparently too complex for Luker’s feeble brain to contemplate).

Next: in a year dominated by dress code kerfuffles, largely precipitated by egregiously sexist concerns for the way high school girls dress—lest the boys be distracted by legs or collarbones or shoulders (OMG! Shoulders!)—there are actually two Curmie nominees related to what students wear. The first comes from Harrisburg (PA) Sci-Tech High School, where an (of course) unnamed Assistant Principal threatened senior Alexus Miller-Wigfall with suspension for wearing a dress that was “too revealing” to prom. So far, this is a pedestrian story about a puritanical idiot in school administration; Lord knows, there are enough of them. But this case takes on an especially unsavory aroma: the threat occurred three days after prom and was apparently motivated by the fact that Ms. Miller-Wigfall has “more boobs than other girls,” who “have less to show.” (More boobs? Two aren’t enough for this girl?) Oh, and the dress code, as usual, is written by an illiterate: “Dresses and Gowns [yes, “Gowns” is capitalized] MUST cover all body parts….” Yes, all. No faces may be seen in school or at prom.

Curmie stated above that Arne Duncan won’t garner a Curmie nomination this year, but you can’t talk about anti-educational idiocy without mentioning the test-and-punish fetishists he encourages. The signature case comes from the State Education Department in Florida, which devised a testing apparatus whereby students who got perfect scores on a standardized test actually hurt their school and their teacher by not improving on the previous year’s perfect score. How often does this happen? Actually, tens of thousands of times annually. Yes, there’s a provision that allows districts to correct the record, and indeed the problem might have been fixed by now, but the mere fact that the default position was to punish teachers and schools for not improving on perfection tells us everything we need to know about the corporate-driven lunacy that now infests public education.

Our other dress-code-related nominee is just a couple hours down the road from Curmie, in the Cypress-Fairbanks School District in greater Houston. Administrators there made Jef Rouner’s daughter wear a shirt over her sundress and jeans under it because it had spaghetti straps. There are two or three other incidents of the horrors of feminine shoulders that Curmie wrote up, at least briefly, this year, but this one is special. Rouner’s daughter, you see, was five at the time. Yes, five. If her shoulders were too distracting for other students (or for teachers… ewwwww), then Houston, we have a problem. There is a rule against shoulder-baring, but of course there is no rationale for such a prohibition other than instilling in young girls the idea that all subsequent sexual harassment they endure is in fact their fault.

Next up: Bedford (VA) Middle School, and specifically Assistant Principal Brian Wilson and School Operations Chief Frederick “Mac” Duis, who suspended the 11-year-old son (identified as “RMB”) of Bruce and Linda Bays for a year marijuana possession. One problem: every field test of the substance found in the boy’s backpack came up negative. Not “inconclusive,” negative. It wasn’t pot, and school officials (admittedly, led on by an overzealous—to say the least—cop) went ahead and threw the boy out of school even though they knew the kid was guilty of—at most--pretending to have marijuana. (That’s also against school rules, but that wasn’t what the boy was charged with.) A judge later described the “hearing” the school granted the boy as “the pretense of a trial which in truth is but used as a means of depriving a defendant of liberty through a deliberate deception of court.” As far as Curmie knows, these asshats still have their jobs.

And so we move on to the great state of Colorado, where Florence High School seems to have been turned over, lock, stock, and altar to Pastor Randy Pfaff, a run-of-the-mill religious charlatan with an ever-so-predictable persecution complex. Of course, the real problems are Principal Brian Schipper and Superintendent Rhonda Vendetti, who have allowed the school to become essentially a wing of the Cowboy Church at the Crossroads (could Curmie make that name up?). Prayer meetings are publicized over the school P.A. system; the church distributes flyers on school property; there’s a prayer request box in the faculty lounge; all-school assemblies involve concerts by Christian rock bands and are based off Gospel passages. You get the idea. That an evangelical preacher would seek an audience of adolescents is reasonable enough; that public school administrators would cater to his every whim is unconscionable.

On a different front, Marquette University, an institution with a solid academic reputation, tarnished it considerably by firing tenured associate professor John McAdams over a blog post. Perhaps Curmie, a tenured professor who writes a blog in which he sometimes criticizes (OK, ridicules) powerful people, is a little sensitive about this one, but really… wow. Yes, it is true that McAdams acted a little unprofessionally in calling out a grad student teaching assistant by name, but that’s an offense that (in isolation, at least) wouldn’t merit withholding tenure, let alone revoking it. And the insistence by Dean Richard C. Holtz that everything McAdams writes needs to go through a mind-boggling array of university censorious asshats administrative offices is borderline Stalinist. Curmie can’t help but agree with The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf: “Only myopia can account for failure to see the threat to academic freedom.”

Finally, there’s Glen Oak Elementary School in Lewis Center, Ohio, where administrators (and presumably the school board) fired 5th grade teacher Nicole LeMire for doing precisely what actual experts say to do when confronting a classroom bully: call him out in front of the class. Of course, people who don’t know what to do (and who are themselves bullied by the bully’s parents) are quick to judge. If, has been suggested, LeMire had a history of unprofessional conduct that was… you know… actually unprofessional, then this perfectly reasonable behavior may serve as an excuse to get rid of a problem teacher. But, if so, it’s still an act of cowardice if not malice.

So there you have it, Gentle Reader: the list of nominations for the 5th Annual Curmie Award.  Please vote for your... uh... favorites in the box in the upper right corner of this page (assuming you’re looking at it on a computer screen).  You may vote for as many or as few nominees as you choose, but please vote only once.  Voting closes at 5:00 pm CST on Tuesday, January 12.  High vote total wins (this isn’t Time Magazine or PolitiFact, after all).  Please note: you are welcome to comment on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, but you cannot vote there.

The Last of the 2015 Curmie Contenders

It’s New Year’s Eve, and Curmie still needs to cover a couple more stories to get them eligible for Curmie Award consideration. They have nothing in common other than being education-related and outrageous. I want to get as many in as possible, so I won’t spend a lot of time on any individual story.

Here we go.

Aiden Steward: apparently not a wizard.

In Kermit, Texas, 4th-grader Aiden Steward was suspended for telling a classmate that he was in possession of “one ring to rule them all” that could make the other boy disappear. Any normal adult would look at this and say “hey, 9-year-olds who just saw ‘The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies’ are going to act out movies.” Principal Roxanne Greer, however, is a couple sausage links short of a Grand Slam breakfast. That was a “terroristic threat,” you see. The boy’s father observed that his son “lacks the magical powers necessary to threaten his friend’s existence. If he did, I’m sure he’d bring him right back.” Unaccountably, Greer is still permitted to walk among us without adult supervision.

John McAdams: the canary in the coal mine?

Marquette University revoked the tenure of Professor John McAdams over a blog post (Curmie finds this especially creepy… I wonder why). True, McAdams behaved a little unprofessionally by calling out a graduate student by name. But the suggestion that he should have jumped through a zillion hoops before exercising his free speech rights is outrageous in the extreme, and Dean Richard C. Holtz is, frankly, the one who deserves to be fired.

As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf notes:

… Holtz's decision to hold McAdams responsible for [the grad student’s] harassment sets an alarming precedent: that faculty members will be held accountable not only for their words, but for any efforts to intimidate or harass those they publicly criticize. By this logic, a professor who criticized a college football player accused of rape, or a fraternity member who chanted “No means yes, yes means anal,” or a college Republican running an “affirmative-action bake sale” could be stripped of tenure based partly on whether that student got nasty emails. Only myopia can account for failure to see the threat to academic freedom.

This repression of faculty members’ rights is truly frightening. Should Holtz get the Curmie? That’s for you to decide, Gentle Readers, but he sure as hell ought to be a contender.

In Martinez, California, the school board had enough funds to provide air conditioning for only one of two elementary schools: John Swett and Las Juntas. Here’s board member Denise Elsken:

I would say 95% of the students at Las Juntas do not have air conditioning in their homes. So, whether that means those students are more acclimated and can handle a little bit more heat than the John Swett students, which I would say 95% of their residents have air conditioning in their homes.

We’ll just leave it at that, OK?

Ken Simon, a veteran teacher (47 years!) at Raymore-Peculiar High School in Missouri, was pulled from the classroom in May for doing his job showing a 10-minute video that demonstrated evolving attitudes towards homosexuality. Two students complained (about what?) and the administration made the obligatory inane decision. Students and faculty alike supported Simon. The administration doubled down on the idiocy. Water is wet.

The very first Curmie Award went to a Kentucky teacher who thought it would be ever so clever to discipline an autistic student by shoving him into a bag intended to carry gym balls. Mary Katherine Pursley of Mt. Bethel Elementary School in Georgia was apparently lured by the bright lights and international renown of a Curmie, so she decided to duplicate the feat. There was no ball bag available, however, so she used a trash can. Yes, really.

Sierra Norman: female and not Mormon

At Declo High School in Idaho, Sierra Norman had the audacity to want to be student government president despite being (gasp!) female and (bigger gasp) not even Mormon. She was denied the opportunity because the district decided she wasn’t a full-time student: she was taking too many on-line courses. Trouble is, according to a formal complaint from the ACLU,

The school district told Sierra that she couldn’t run for Student Body President because she was not enrolled in at least six non-online classes. But the only other student who petitioned to run wasn’t enrolled in six non-online classes for credit either. The difference? He was enrolled in online classes and LDS seminary. And he is male.

Oh, and the school district’s state funding is based on the full-time student population. Guess who’s listed as full-time for those purposes. Finally, a teacher supposedly said that “someone ought to Ray Rice Sierra.” What a pleasant little hellhole Declo, Idaho turns out to be.

Here’s another case of a teacher being punished for doing exactly the right thing. At Nevada (TX) Elementary School, a troubled 4th grader threatened to kill teacher Judy Stough. To protect herself and her other students, she locked the boy out of her classroom. The boy banged on the door and yelled at everyone inside. The students in the room and their parents are unanimous that Stough did everything right. Therefore, the administration suspended her. Because: school administrators.

The principal of TNT Academy in Stone Mountain, Georgia was indeed fired for some racially charged (a.k.a. racist) remarks. At the school graduation, Nancy Gordeuk accidentally ended the ceremonies before the valedictorian’s speech. Stuff like that happens. What doesn’t, is Gordeuk’s screed: “You people are being so rude to not listen to this speech. It was my fault that we missed it in the program. Look who’s leaving—all the black people.” She reacted to the bad press by pretending the uproar was over using “black” instead of “African American.” Um… no.

Jerry Hough: an idiot who

shouldn’t have been suspended

Speaking of racist idiots, there’s Duke University professor Jerry Hough. Responding to a New York Times editorial, Hough launched into a diatribe about how “the blacks” ought to be more like “the Asians.” At Duke, he said, “Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration.” Etc.

Hough is an embarrassment. But his suspension for having an opinion, even one that is “noxious [and] offensive,” is also problematic. The substance of Hough’s argument is not (quite) as disgusting as his expression of it, and whereas his comments aren’t going to get a lot of support from Curmie, his right to express them will.

At Glen Oak Elementary School in Lewis Center, Ohio, it’s apparently not a good thing to stand up to bullies. Or at least doing so seems to have cost 5th grade teacher Nicole LeMire her job. One of her more obnoxious charges blew his nose on classmates, used inappropriate language, and generally behaved badly. So LeMire made him listen to his classmates for a change. Curmie is an experienced teacher, but not at the elementary school level. He does know enough to consult actual experts, however.

One of those experts would be Dorothy Espelage, a professor of education at the University of Illinois. She says LeMire did exactly the right thing:

You want to call out the behavior because the victim deserves to have an adult say “we’re not going to tolerate this.” Kids are paying attention. Teachers need to be role models, and it seems she did what experts would agree with, because there has to be a climate where bullied kids feel supported.

Naturally, doing what the experts say to do got her fired. Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought!), he might suspect that the bully has a relative on the school board or in the superintendent’s office.

Abby Dawson: definitely not good at her job

No enumeration of outrageous education-related behavior in 2015 would be complete without Abby Dawson, then the Director of Advising and Internships at Kennesaw State in Georgia. Seriously, Cruella De Vil has got nothing on this woman. Student Kevin Bruce showed up at the advising office without an appointment and said he’d wait until an adviser was available. For this, he was screamed at and told he was harassing the staff; Dawson threatened to call campus security. How do we know? Bruce made a video that went viral. Any sane employer would have fired her sorry ass in approximately 2 seconds. Kennesaw State suspended her a few weeks after the confrontation.

There are more stories, but that’ll have to do for 2015.

Good night, good luck, and Happy New Year.