Posts Tagged ‘damagnificent seven’

Student power and the end of reason

Posted: February 8, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

Although I know that colleges have been bending over backward to kowtow to students, I didn’t realize how far until recently.

In 27 years of teaching, I’ve never had a student officially challenge a grade. Until now.

A student, who was described as a “star” of the Department of Journalism at Temple, took my course in media law. She was a dreadful pain, consistently filing late assignments or asking for extensions.

By the end of the course, others followed suit, apparently driven by the less-than-stringent rules offered during the pandemic. In fact, I allowed for up to a grade of “C-” for assignments turned in within a week of the deadline.

By the end of the semester, I’d had my fill. Two days before the final assignment was due, I announced that no late submissions would be accepted.

The “star” was the only one who sent the material in late. I gave her a zero, earning her a “C” in the class.

In an email, I explained to her, “Over the course of the semester, you have asked for exemptions, extensions, and preferred treatment. On Saturday, I informed the class that no extensions would be granted. Deadlines in journalism are critical to its endeavor. It’s a truism you should learn. I will not accept your submission because it is past the deadline. It may be the most important lesson you learn from this class.”

Instead, the student learned how to work the system. She appealed the grade because I had changed the “contract” of the syllabus by eliminating late submissions.

Even more amazing is that my department chair ruled in the student’s favor.

“[T]he last-minute deadline change, in this case, goes against what is spelled out in the syllabus, which is a contract between a professor and students,” the chair wrote.

I didn’t change the deadline. I simply refused to accept late submissions.

What’s more important here is that a syllabus has somehow become a formal contract, which is unlikely to hold up in any court. Moreover, students have become consumers and teachers are products.

College is no longer a learning experience but akin to buying a car.

Thankfully, my time as a journalism professor comes to an end in June. If colleges are aiding and abetting such students and hiring administrators as consumer advocates, journalism and other professions will get even worse. Now that’s downright scary!

More important than JFK

Posted: November 23, 2021 by chrisharper in catholic, Church doctrine
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By Christopher Harper

Almost every American who was alive on November 22, 1963, knows where he and she was. That’s because JFK died that day.

But a far more influential man, Clive Staples Lewis, also died that day.

Better known as C.S. Lewis, or Jack to his friends and family, Lewis was one of the most important Christian apologists and fiction writers of the 20th century.

A recent motion picture, The Most Reluctant Convert, tells the story of Lewis’s evolution from atheist to great Christian writer. See https://www.cslewismovie.com/home/

The film doesn’t deal directly with his more famous works, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters, but follows Lewis’s path from nonbeliever to true believer. 

The Most Reluctant Convert is based on a successful stage play written by Max McLean. This filmed version features McLean as an elderly C.S. Lewis who walks viewers through key dramatized moments in his younger years.

The film uses Lewis’s own words to describe his path. As a young man, he explored the occult, including Nordic mythology. Eventually, he recognized how empty and destructive those choices were. Part of that realization occurred, he said, when he came to the aid of a tormented fellow war veteran who screamed that he was being hounded by devils and dragged into hell.

Lewis began his academic career as an undergraduate student at Oxford University. After a brief but dramatic stint in World War I, where he was wounded, he was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he worked from 1925 to 1954. He later joined the faculty at Cambridge University, where he taught until he died in 1963,

At Oxford, he returned to Christianity, having been influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings. Lewis resisted conversion as he described in Surprised by Joy:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [College, Oxford], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. 

Let me leave you with two other important quotations from Lewis:

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

In a much-cited passage from Mere Christianity, Lewis challenged the view that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not God. 

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

The Most Reluctant Convert is an engaging and important film. See it if it’s still in a theater near you!

Pork, pork, and more pork

Posted: November 9, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper 

By my calculations, every man, woman, and child of the 331 million citizens of the United States should get a benefit of $3.021.14 of the $1 trillion in pork just agreed upon by Congress. 

I’m willing to get a little less than others, and I realize that some of the alleged benefits of the program may not become apparent to me. 

Nevertheless, I suggest everyone do some calculations about how this megaton barrel of pork will affect you. Here’s an overview of the plan: https://www.investopedia.com/here-s-what-s-in-the-usd1-trillion-infrastructure-bill-passed-by-the-senate-5196817 

Pork Barrel No. 1: $110 billion for construction and repair of roads, transportation research at universities, funding for Puerto Rico’s highways, and “congestion relief” in American cities. 

I moved from the congested city of Philadelphia and rarely use major highways. To wit, the major highway near my current home in Muncy, Pennsylvania, Interstate 180, is moving along just fine without any new federal funding. Moreover, the state roads near my house, including the street at my front door, have just been redone. Benefit to me: Nada.

Pork Barrel No. 2: $66 billion for railroads include upgrades and maintenance of America’s passenger rail system and freight rail safety, but nothing for high-speed rail. Thirty-nine billion dollars for public transit would provide for upgrades to public transit systems nationwide. The allocation also includes money to create new bus routes and help make public transit more accessible to seniors and disabled Americans. 

I love railroads and have traveled throughout the world on trains in China, France, Poland, Russia, and the United Kingdom. But the money here will be spent mainly on the Northeast Corridor, which means that Democrat-held cities will get nearly all of the dough. The same goes for public transit systems, which are almost entirely under Democrat control. Benefit to me: Zero.  

Pork barrel No. 3: $65 billion for the power grid to fund updates to power lines and cables and to provide money to prevent power grid hacking. 

Can’t the power companies charge their customers for the upgrades? Since PG&E, California’s main utility, is an absolute mess, I suspect a big chunk of the goodies will head to the Left Coast. Benefit to me: Nothing. 

Pork barrel No. 4: $65 billion to expand broadband in rural areas and low-income communities. Approximately $14 billion of the total would help reduce Internet bills for low-income citizens. 

I live in a rural area and get broadband just fine. Money in my pocket: Zero.  

I’ve gone through the rest of the appropriation, including dough for electric buses, electric charging stations, lead-pipe removal, and various other plans. I don’t find anything that will save me money or make my life better.  

What Brandon and Congress did accomplish, however, is to add a massive government bureaucracy to oversee all of these projects that won’t get going until 2023 at the earliest.  

It’s also important to keep in mind how unwieldy and corruption-prone massive projects become. Take, for example, the Big Dig highway project in Boston. Starting in 1991, the project was supposed to be completed in 1998 for $2.8 billion. Instead, it wasn’t finished until 2007 at the cost of $23 billion—a project tarnished by corruption, design flaws, and waste. 

Just think what the Democrats can do with budgets nearly 500 times the original estimate of the Big Dig!  

All told, I don’t see any appreciable difference in my life except that I am likely to pay increased taxes to cover the plunder and pork from the almost blank check Brandon and Congress have signed. 

Pennsylvania: The worst of the worst

Posted: October 26, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

Next Tuesday, I have the honor of voting for a representative on arguably the most corrupt and incompetent political institution in the country: the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Pennsylvania is one of the few states where judges run on a political ticket for 10-year terms. Over time, this formula has created one of the worst assemblies of jurists both Democrat and Republican.

Here is just the top of the pops:

Cynthia Baldwin served on the high court in 2006 and 2007 as an appointee of then-Gov. Ed Rendell. She later became chief counsel for Penn State. Baldwin received a reprimand in February by the high court over a complaint that she violated professional rules for lawyers by testifying about university officials accused in the Sandusky scandal when before that she represented them.

In 2010, two sisters of Justice Orie Melvin, Pennsylvania state senator Jane Orie and Janine Orie, were arrested and charged with theft of services and criminal conspiracy after a Pittsburgh grand jury investigation. They were accused of using Jane Orie’s Senate staff and office resources to help run their sister’s 2009 campaign for the State Supreme Court. Three years later, the justice also was charged and convicted on similar charges. Nevertheless, she didn’t spend a single day in prison.

Seamus McCaffery, another Supreme Court judge, sent e-mails with sexually, racially, and ethnically objectionable images and language. He apologized for sending the e-mails and confessed that it was “coarse language.” He was suspended from the bench for the e-mails and investigated for referral fees directed to his wife from personal injury law firms. He retired in 2014 with a full pension of $134,000 a year.

Michael Eakin resigned in 2016 from the bench after being suspended for sending e-mails containing pornographic material to his colleagues on the court, attorneys, and lower court judges. According to news accounts, the e-mails also featured sexual, racial, and ethnic humor that many found objectionable.

Eakin insisted that his “humor” and “sexual preferences” did not interfere with his ability to decide cases before the court fairly. By resigning, Eakin was able to escape a hearing before the ethics board and any punishment. He retired with a full pension.

Kevin Dougherty, the brother of union boss John Dougherty, reportedly got his snow shoveled and house repaired from an illegal union slush fund, according to federal prosecutors trying John for corruption charges. Justice Dougherty has not been charged.

When Kevin was elected to the court in 2015, it raised more than a few eyebrows because his brother was arguably the most powerful man in Philadelphia politics before his indictment for corruption.

But the court isn’t just about unethical and illegal acts; it also makes bad law. 

As you may recall, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court delivered a neck-snapping decision to allow ballots to be submitted three days AFTER the presidential election in 2020.

The law unambiguously stated that voters must “fill out, date and sign,” yet the state Supreme Court said the ballots should be counted, in a one-time exception for 2020. Earlier in the case, Judge Kevin Brobson had ruled the opposite. “To remove the date requirement,” he wrote, “would constitute a judicial rewrite of the statute.”

It will take a long time to get rid of these meatheads, but at least I can vote for Judge Brobson, a Republican whose website says he’ll defend “the law as it is written.”

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