One-Way Conversation With A Coward
I get many e-mails to my blog at FrontPageMag which are hostile, but which I often answer. And almost as often the e-mail address supplied is a fake one, and I get that irritating undelivered message. So I decided to post this one with my reply:
From: jimm@mmm.org
To: Dhorowitz@earthlink.net
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 12:10 PM
Subject: Blog Comment
Comment submitted by Jim in regards to blog entry: A new Brock slander goes round the web
David: If your facts were wrong, but your point is valid, what do you say about Rathergate? The documents were phony, but the facts they supported were vaild. Consider this: Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
My reply:
Well, of course they weren't. But for the sake of argument suppose they were. The difference is this. Rather has a massive multi-million dollar reporting operation, and his business is reporting. I don't and mine isn't. I never rested my case on this one story. It is in fact one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of abuses of students by professors who can't keep their political prejudices out of the classroom.
Dan Rather's story would have brought down a presidency all by itself. My story had been dismissed by the left as an "anecdote" since I first raised it (that's one reason why we have to gather so many similar ones). But then some bright-eyed leftist writing in The Cleveland Plain Dealer decided the student, the professor and the exam didn't exist. Enter David Brock to beat the allegation to death not only at my expense but at the expense of thousands of students, left and right, who are being abused by their professors.
But then we showed that the professor, the student and the exam did exist. Enter Scott Jaschik who interviewed the college administration, which had played a terrible and partisan role (naturally against the student) up to that point. Jaschik (I assume without malice) set us up by erroneously reporting that we had made the student our "poster child" and this one case the basis of our campaign. He also claimed without evidence that we had presented the professor as an "out-of-control liberal" yada-yada-yada.
In fact the professor's politics were irrelevant to us. We don't like any professors, left or right, giving exam topics like this (and have said so). But the bottom line was that the exam topic – the only thing really important in the story – was pretty much what we had reported it was. (BTW the student claims that the actual exam question was what she said it was and the professor rewrote it to make it seem more academic. She made an appeal about her grade. No one seems to have a copy of the exam.
Consider all this, and see if you don't agree with it, even if you disagree with me on everything else in the universe.
4 Comments:
You mean the student doesn't even have a copy of her own graded exam?
That speaks volumes to me about who's doing the lying here. I have all my non-controversial college exams filed away. Most students do the same.
If she can't find this incredibly important, controversial exam, she doesn't want it to be found.
the chemist:
Not all professors allow students to keep their exams, particularly if they will be re-using them. I obvisly don't know if that is the case in this instance, but it is not at all surprising.
Indeed, often these days exams are not returned. The student may be telling the truth about not having a copy of her exam.
The question had no business being part of an exam in a criminology course. Was there a shortage of controversial criminal cases in the news at the time of this exam? Was there no Simpson, Jackson, Peterson, BTK, Martha, or Enron to discuss?
This criminology professor needs a refresher course on the definition of a "crime". The US could not be "criminal" as the question poses, because neither the US nor any other nation is bound by laws above it's own sovereignty.
A criminologist may or may not have known this, because it's not his field of expertise (as opposed to, say, a qualified International Law professor, where this question would have been appropriate).
But the criminologist was too busy finding ways to inject his political opinion into his class content, which is apparently more important to him than teaching his subject accurately. And that's the problem.
This issue, as Horowitz points out, is not about a single errant question at one college. It's , among other things, an overall pattern of grossly unnecessary political baiting in totally unrelated subjects that takes place in university classes throughout the country every day.
The liberal culture is expert at exerting tremendous amounts of influence in the most incremental manner, such that complaining about an individual incident sounds absurdly petty to anyone listening. But taken as a whole, the liberal methods and means are quite surreptitiously effective.
Horowitz fell down on two important points: 1) He didn't verify the story of the student by requiring documentation. Although he goes through thousands of testimonials as he said, he needs to be rock solid on the 20 or so that he regularly relates in columns and speeches. 2) He explained that the student may have misinterpreted her own grade, because she could consider a "D" or "C" the same as an "F" because she is a straight-A student. That is flat out lame.
If she's such a good student, she should be more familiar with the alphabet, and Horowitz shouldn't be trying to justify her lying about her grade (if in fact, that's what's happened).
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