The old college try

Victor Davis Hanson properly eviscerates Maureen Dowd’s laughably inane column denouncing Perry’s college grades as proof positive he couldn’t be a good President. Bad grades! Terrible example! He’ll show students they can succeed in life even if they have bad grades! The problem for liberals even bringing up the argument:

When Dowd trashes Perry and Bush (why not quote the hardly impressive Kerry record?), she is arguing that long ago college records and scores are a good barometer of presidential success (that is dubious if one were to compare a Lincoln or Truman to Wilson or Carter), and, by inference, that the current president is also apparent proof. But does she have inside information about the Obama undergraduate record at Occidental and Columbia? If not, why not, given the supposed importance of undergraduate grades to liberal observers? I suppose we are to conclude that supposedly poor students like a Perry or Bush released their grades or had them leaked, but brilliant undergraduates earning top slots at Harvard Law have no need to release obviously straight-A transcripts and no worry that anyone would care?

Whoopsie.

Finally, VDH scores another point for real knowledge from an ag school vice race-class-gender idiocy masked as learning:

Finally, some of Perry’s education reforms would probably do more to raise SAT scores and improve undergraduate education than the current race/class/gender industry that has turned a once classical curriculum into therapeutics, and tried to apply an illiberal equality of result standard of college performance rather than the old ideal of an equality of opportunity. In regard to Dowd’s sneer quote of  ”What appears to be a course called ‘Meats’,” it might, in fact, offer more real knowledge (about animal science, nutrition, and physiology) than, say, any of hundreds of classes in our universities like  ”Queer Mobilities” at Yale or “Desire and Repression: Economic Anthropology and American Pop Culture” at Princeton or “Of Mean Streets and Jungle Fevers: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee” at Harvard?  

I got caught in the idiocy during grad school. I had a tough choice one semester as the only two literature–I use the term loosely–courses available for my schedule were Queer Theory Shakespeare or Jihadi Lit. Choices, choices. It was a long semester. At least I balanced it out with a little Melville.

Althouse chimes in and points to this MoDo outtake:

“Perry told the students, ‘God uses broken people to reach a broken world.’ What does that even mean?”

Althouse responds:

But if you’re so smart, why can’t you understand the poetically rich “God uses broken people to reach a broken world”? You think intelligence is demonstrated by the pompous overachiever’s use of big words and long sentences?

Crisp aphorism marks the genius.

Liberals don’t get that. Nor does the sesquipedalian who chooses to punish others with trite sentences loaded with excess verbage. With a teleprompter no less.

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