After all, your stupidest, laziest student might someday be in a position to get revenge, not just on you but on all of higher education.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out. Books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993) Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989) UCLA Homepage Curriculum Vitae Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com View all posts by Mark Kleiman
Assuming Repugs still want the Presidency in 2012, I’d say this just about clinches his nomination.
These kind of revelations do indeed help Governor Perry. When left-wing elites sneered that George W. Bush was a C student, our nation of C students liked him more and the left less.
Well, of course it was a conspiracy by those lefty professors of Shakespeare and Organic Chemistry. I mean, he got an A in World Military Systems.
From the WaPo story:
“More recently, Perry has proposed that the state’s top colleges come up with a four-year degree that costs no more than $10,000 — a goal that skeptics say cannot be achieved without sacrificing academic quality and prestige.”
Let’s grant that you can’t run UC for $2,500 a year in tuition. (It’s unclear what kind of state subsidies we’re talking about here.) But the ever-rising cost of tuition is not exactly an unfamiliar problem — yet it’s one nobody in politics seems inclined to act to do anything about. I can’t help but give Gov. Perry credit for jumping into the pool.
Actually it would be easy to run a university system for $2500 a year in tuition. There are plenty of fine universities and colleges where tuition is or used to be free. It simply requires some citizens to invest rather more in their fellow citizens’ social capital than they are willing to do in Texas.
Keith,
I agree with your facts, but disagree with the conclusion that you drew from it. 2000 was 2000 and 2012 will be 2012. One big difference between 2000 and 2012 is that George Bush is anathema to everybody. Even the Teahadis pretend to abjure him. (TARP! Medicare Part D!) If an opponent can paint a candidate to be like George Bush (Texan! Dimwit!), the opponent will win.
Of course, it is not true to call George Bush a dimwit. As Al Gore said, Bush isn’t stupid; he’s just lazy and chooses to be ignorant of most things. But by all reports, he is quite knowledgeable about the few things he is interested in: e.g., the oil industry and baseball. Perry may be a true dimwit. The voters won’t care about the distinction, because Bush undersold his intellect, although not as much as did Eisenhower, who was far smarter than St. Adlai Stevenson.