URLs du Jour (11/8/2005)

It looks as if today's Pun Salad theme will be "Professors Behaving Badly."

  • Princeton's McCormick Professor in Jurisprudence Emeritus, Walter Murphy, was interviewed about Judge Alito in the Daily Princetonian. (Via Bench Memos.) He's generally favorable to Alito, but can't resist the following ugly comment:

    "Sam is his own man," Murphy said. "He'll never be 'Scalito.' And then it's a gross insult to say in the mold of [other conservative and constructionist justice] Clarence Thomas. Their IQs are so radically different ... We're not talking about someone in Sam's intellectual league."

    Do you remember when Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve was published and all the liberals hastened to pooh-pooh the very concept of IQ? How soon that position is forgotten, even at the highest levels of Academe, when it comes time to insult Clarence Thomas.

    [And as a side issue about the sad state of college journalism, note this post from Patterico on how the reporter botched one of article's main points. Comments Patterico: "This person is headed for Big Journalism, there's no doubt."]

  • At the NRO Corner, Byron York briefly informs us of the current Moonbattery of one Mark Crispin Miller (Professor in the "Culture and Communication" department at NYU), who is on a crusade (related to a new book he's flogging) trying to pump up the long-deflated meme that the 2004 Presidential election was "stolen". Today's episode is priceless: apparently Miller met with Senator Kerry informing him of his thesis, and Miller claims Kerry was in total agreement. But now a Kerry spokesmodel denies that Kerry was claiming any such thing.

    I know, I know: remarkably similar to the classic Kerry "I voted for it before I voted against it" waffle.

  • And Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom has the sad (but revealing) story of one Wallace Hettle, history professor at the University of Northern Iowa) who was displeased with the comments made by one Paul Deignan (a student at Purdue) at a leftwing blog. Wally typed:

    Troll boy [Deignan] is a student of the highly relevant field of mechanical engineering.

    The moron is trolling under his real name from a home page which lists the names of his advisors. So I emailed them, as this behavior is thoroughly unprofessional.

    BTW, I have a PhD and actual tenure. And I happen to know many profs who work from home, like myself.

    [...]

    Maybe Paul can come back after finishing HIS dissertation--if he finishes.

    Anyway, Paul, I'm going to make an acquaintance with the admin. of your engineering school tomorrow, but I'm logging off for tonight.

    Wallace Hettle
    Actual Professor
    Google Me
    University of Northern Iowa

    Yes, Wally is an "Actual Professor" with "actual tenure." And a PhD! And he has no compunctions at all about trying to bully a student at another university via e-mail to his professors. Truly a proud moment for Academe! Jeff's comments are devastating and precisely on target. (Also see his followup here.)

  • And (via Dartblog), Michael Herman at Agenda Gap posts and article entitled "More Irritating Left Wing Professors at Dartmouth". You'd think that would be about as blogworthy as "More Flies at Town Dump", but anyway.

Last Modified 2012-10-26 5:47 AM EDT