Since the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling striking down affirmative action in university admission as violative of the 14th Amendment, which it clearly was, attention has suddenly been focused on "legacy" admissions into Harvard.
It should be, and frankly the inordinate influence of Harvard should be in focus as well.
Let's start with legacy admissions.
Legacy admissions are the admittance of the children of prior graduates. Perhaps it's cynical, but the reason for it is obvious. If graduates of Harvard go on to earn big bucks, and most will, Harvard, a private schools, wants some of those bucks to come Harvard's way. The grads buying into admission for their children, so they can also have their ticket's punched and be rich, are what legacy admission is all about.
If you take Legacy admissions away, some of those grads will keep their money instead.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc, are all private schools and can do pretty much what they want in this category. So contrary to what some are now suggesting, legacy admissions are clearly not illegal. The same Constitutional provisions that preclude race from being a factor in admission don't apply to rich parents.
It is unfair, of course, and it does just what its critics claim it does. It reinforces the WASP demographics of these WASP institutions and gets students in who aren't of the same academic caliber as some of the other applicants.
Well, that's unfair, but that's life too.
Also unfair, however, is that graduating from one of these schools is just graduating into wealth. You can pretty much choose to do not much and make a really good living just because you went to them. And they have a lock on government appointments.
Of the current U.S. Supreme Court justices, only Amy Coney Barrett, Notre Dame, is not a Harvard or Yale Law School graduate. Are Harvard and Yale really that much better. I really doubt it.
There's all sorts of left wing hand wringing and angst over the Supreme Court right now. People like Robert Reich (Yale Law School, 1973) are full of cries that the right wing justices suffer from ethnics deficits. While Reich, to his credit, did write an article awhile back wondering what the crap had happened to the Ivy League as some of the big annoying figures on the political right are also Ivy League grads (Ted Cruz, Harvard Law School), what you simply don't hear is something you should.
Let's have a twenty-year ban on government appointments out of the Ivy League.
Yes, I mean that.
Thirty would be better.
If you want diversity on the Court, for example, appoint some justices who came out of state universities. We've had them before, and low and behold they were just as bright as the Ivy League grads. They'd also be more likely to have a diverse view on things compared to those who gradated from The Golden Ticket school.
And frankly, I feel the same way about other government appointments. Harvard? Yale? The old boy network will take care of you just fine. It's private business for you.
Of course, this won't happen. The Ivy League has a lock on this.
The United States Supreme Court held that a Federal Minimum Wage was unconstitutional, ruling to that effect in Adkins v. Children's Hospital.
The holding was, rather obviously, later overruled.
On the topic, it's worth noting that generally wages, even the lowest paid wages, tend to be well above minimum wage. The minimum wage is near and dear to the hearts of political liberals, but it basically ceased to function as a floor years ago.
The Tribune had some notable headlines:
Harvard University passed a resolution that whites and blacks (all men) could not be compelled to live or eat together, but that no man could be excluded by reason of color
Los Angeles won its bid to host the 1932 Olympics, a bid made easy by the fact that it was the only city to put in for it.
I've been really critical of the Ivy League law schools here from time to time, with a lot of that criticism being that graduating from these schools has become the right of passage into non work in the legal field in a way that makes their utility to the actual field of law doubtful.
Indeed, it's become uniquely destructive in some ways, but only as a focused part of what a recent critic of law and the baby boom generation has otherwise noted. The overproduction of lawyers starting in the 1970s and the liberalization of legal education in the same period has created an anti democratic class of lawyers more or less imbued with the Napoleonic concept of creating a liberal society through force, although in their case the field of battle is the courts rather than some poor farmer's wheat field.
A good example of this is the recent lawsuit against the National Rifle Association by New York's Attorney General Letitia James.
James is a Harvard law graduate who is the elected Attorney General of New York. A member of the Working Families Party and the Democratic Party, James is a left wing activist who has never worked in private practice, but rather has served in her state's AG's office and for her state's legislature for years.
The lawsuit is political.
I haven't looked at the details, but it would appear doubtful that there's a good grounds for standing for New York to sue the NRA. If its court's uphold the bringing of the suit, it would say something disturbing about them and the state of the law in New York. The most probable result of the suit is to flood the coffers of the NRA with donations, demonstrate to American firearms owners that the Democrats really are out to take their guns, and to be an expensive embarrassment to New York. In some real ways, the suit couldn't have come at a better time for the NRA no matter what happens. It's going to survive and profit from this.
It won't impact James in any fashion as she'll gain liberal credit, no matter what happens.
All of this is not to say that there aren't some obvious problems with the organization of the National Rifle Association. The last few years its internal organization has been disarray with long time firms that have worked for it having severed their connections for one reason or another, and with significant staffers departing under odd circumstances. Last year there was rumor of an attempted coup in the leadership of the NRA, and frankly it's due for a change. Under Wayne LaPierre the organization has become increasingly hardcore in its views which in recent years is hurting it and which has somewhat alienated firearms owners who are not on the AR15 end of ownership. It's been successful in holding the line on litigation, and very successful in the courts, but there's a real sense that things are likely to change soon.
Part of the reason that's the case is that the NRA, in 2016, completely aligned itself with Donald Trump in a way that was extremely unwise. By doing that, it abandoned a policy it was abandoning anyhow of supporting politicians of either party who were pro gun. That direction became apparent during President Obama's administration as President Obama took no action in this area at all and yet was still criticized. That Trump was likely to be a heavily polarizing President was obvious from the onset and now, four years later, it looks almost inevitable that he will be defeated and possible that the Senate will change hands. If this is the case, the NRA will have no Democratic allies in Congress whatsoever.
Another part of the reason for this is that at this point the NRA, in the form of LaPierre, is like politics itself and has become dominated by Baby Boomers who should have left some time ago. LaPierre is 70 years old and really past the point where he should be leading the organization. A change in leadership really should have come at least a decade ago, which is likewise true of the political leadership of both parties. The leadership of the NRA, like the leadership of the political parties, has ossified in a way that is now hurting it.
The lawsuit won't change that. But the upcoming election may. Firearms owners in the US really have nowhere else to go to as all competing organizations are much more to the right of the NRA and they therefore don't attract the loyalty of firearms owners at large.
But, fwiw, the NRA has more or less been through this before. In the 1960s and 1970s the organization struggled with how to deal with new gun control provisions that had just come in, with the existing leadership being willing to accomodate them at the time That lead to a type of coup in the organization then, which put in the more or less current leadership. Chances are good that there will be a changing of the guard soon.
Something that shows no sign of chaning, however, is the vast overproduction of law school graduates by American law schools. It was thought that a depression in the industry would address that, but it hasn't. Indeed, the ABA has been lobbying to suspend in person bar exams this year, when the sane approach, which we'll deal with later, is just to place a hiatus on new bar memberships in general for the remainder of the pandemic, and then tighten up admission standards in general. That's not going to happen, however.
Today will be Brett Kavanaugh's first day as a sitting justice on the United States Supreme Court.
Robert Bork in 2005. Bork's nomination by Ronald Reagan, and its defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, gave us the modern Supreme Court era. Bork was a University of Chicago educated lawyer who quit a law practice to the shock of his partners to become a law professor and then went on to become U.S. Solicitor and a Federal Court Judge. At the time of his leaving private practice his close friends noted that he stated he didn't want to leave a legacy of "depositions, briefs and money". He would leave a real legacy, but it was no doubt not the one in some ways that he hoped to leave.
I had predicted that the Kavanaugh nomination would be a circus. I just didn't realize the extent to which my prediction would prove true.
It's been absolutely crazy. Even shameful.
We still don't really know what happened on that night back in the early 1980s at a high school party or that evening at an alleged college party. We are never going to know, probably. It's actually perfectly possible that every single person involved is telling the truth. If the show surrounding the nomination provided any service to the nation in a larger societal sense, it might be in exposing the moral decline that had set in by the late 1970s and early 1980s from which we are now thankfully rapidly retreating, even if we fear on actually re-adopting the standards that a full retreat would require. I can believe that Dr. Ford went to a high school drinking party in an innocent naive fashion three decades ago and was the victim of a violent groping assault that scared her, and I can believe that boys at that party through that they had the license to do that and it would just be good fun (I'm less willing to believe that their motivation was actual rape). I can also believe that at a college party at Yale Mrs. Ramirez, after having drunk too much, was the victim of an indecent exposure by a male student and that likewise that student didn't think it assault but license. I can also believe that Kavanaugh was a male participant in all of that.
At the same time, however, I can also believe that the long passage of time and the vagaries of memory could have messed with the accuracy of all of those recollections. Peoples memories fail and become altered. Either a lot of memory failure is operating here in this case, or somebody is lying. We're not going to ever know what the situation is.
That is, I suppose the nature of recalling, but the bigger problem here is that it is now perfectly clear, if it wasn't before, that the political left has reached such a state of contempt for large sections of the voting public that it will go to nearly any extreme to prevent the electorate from voting on certain issues. The left feels more comfortable with a type of judicial dictatorship than it does with democracy. That is, at the end of the day, which much of this is about. The left fears that a conservative tilt to the Supreme Court will mean that the court will review decisions in which it also feels that there is little Constitutional support for the holdings and reverse them, sending the questions back to the states, where it fears it will loose. Posed in terms of "right", it's a contest between whether a judicially constructed thin construction of rights should trump the rights of the electorate. That's a dangerous place to be as it could just as easily flip. The left should perhaps stop and consider what it would mean if really conservative justices accepting a theory of natural law took the same approach as liberal judges have in the past and imposed a new set of rights and duties based on that analysis.
Much of this simply didn't seem to come up. There wasn't a heated debate on "strict construction" as opposed to "living documents" or the like, which would have been instructive. The arguments just devolved to theater, with those opposed to Kavanaugh largely acting as if he was a fascist there to seize rights rather than perhaps a jurist who might operate in combine to return questions to the states.
That's bad enough, but we've been seeing things like that every since Robert Bork's nomination went down in a debate that at least did discuss real issues and theories. His mistake, of course, was in honestly answering the questions posed to him. Now nobody makes that mistake, which is part of the reason we have the circus we do. We can thank Joe Biden, who lead the charge against Bork, for that.
But beyond that what is also now apparent is that there are certain elements on the left who feel that any effort is justified to prevent a conservative justice from being seated. That effort is quixotic but scary. That group doesn't feel that lying to keep a judge off the bench is wrong, but rather laudable.
I'm not saying that either Ford or Ramirez fit that mold. But I am saying that those who fit into that camp are pretty happy to use and emphasize memories that they have that may or may not be faulty. Both Ford and Ramirez did not wish to come forward but were forced by the times, or in Ford's case by unwanted disclosure in a questionable manner, to do just that.
This is a new development. When Bork was taken down so many years ago, it was pretty openly due to his views, which actually were novel at the time, following a long Supreme Court departure from originalism. Agree with the views held by Biden or Bork, at least it was views that were in contest. Following that we had the entire saga surrounding Justice Thomas an Anita Hill, which is still one in which we don't know what happened a person's views tend to follow their political beliefs, but this takes the entire drama one step higher and indeed further than what seemed to be a new accommodation which was similar to the old one which was outside of pure political advantage (a factor that was always there in spite of what people claim), qualified justices would be approved. Now it's pretty clear that qualified conservative justices will be uniformly contested on any grounds, real, suspected, or constructed, and we can presume the same will be the case for liberal justices as well.
This next act of the circus seems to have come about largely due to Trump's election, which the left has an absolutely over the top reaction to. Readers here will recall that I was never a Trump fan and was surprised by his nomination and his election. But the "resistance" attitude to a legitimately elected President is scary. Not that even this is wholly new, in spite of what people claim. That sort of view seems to have dated back to Barrack Obama's first election at which point a certain percentage of the political right took an absolutely over the top view of his election, and maintained all sorts of absurd claims regarding it. As a result of this, we're now into the tenth year of an escalating and ever more extreme resistance to the occupier of the White House in a fashion which we have not seen since the Civil War. It's a bleak situation to be sure.
And therefore it's probably naturally that its finally spilled full scale over to the Federal judiciary. One can only hope that at some point this sort of behavior stops, but there's no end in sight anywhere. All of which takes us back to Kavanaugh.
Now that Kavanaugh has been confirmed can we say he should have been? Based on what we know, I would have voted to confirm. I don't think he was the ideal choice, and I do think his views on executive privilege are really troubling. Those alone would have caused me to question passing him, but they're not sufficiently dominating that I think a person can legitimately get to a no.
Added to that, and no doubt plain from my earlier writings I"m really tired of Ivy League appointees to the Supreme Court and that would have influenced me a little. I refuse to believe that the only ones who are qualified to occupy the highest courts are those who came out of Harvard, Yale, etc. That can't be true, and that view is serving to further convert the Supreme Court into a Platonic Council of Elders, which is not what the Supreme Court should be. It also serves to elevate the law schools of those sch
And the claims of moral turpitude? Well, what with the Me Too movement blooming into full flower and then being taken over, i.e., having gone from legitimate exposures of sexual misconduct to lewd conduct or even the suggestion of lewd conduct, we've entered an era when any figure, usually a male, can seemingly have his career wrecked by a mere allegation. Did Senator Al Franken deserve his downfall for acting like a lout? Should people whose careers are well advanced see them go down by allegation alone.
At least in Kavanaugh's case, it would appear that the answer would be no, but there were those who seriously argued for that and who are very much offended. Indeed, Kavanaugh's words in his resumed confirmation hearing when he made an observation about "what comes around goes around" were taken boldly out of context by those who, if they'd read them, should have known that they were misrepresenting what he said.
So where should all of this lead us?
Well, for one thing perhaps there needs to be some sort of consensus that times change and people do as well. Bringing up crimes that can be proven are one thing, but perhaps a societal statute of limitations needs to exist on allegations of old past misconduct that are truly old. That is, perhaps people shouldn't be deemed to be presently condemned for allegations or past misbehavior from decades ago if there's no suggestion, and here there wasn't, that such conduct pressed forward to the current day. Nobody ever maintained such a thing here, and all the argument was on what happened decades ago.
Likewise, perhaps its okay to acknowledge, as some are in fact doing, that the standards of the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s that applied to the young were debased. If we do, we have to look at where that took us and what it means for us today, and we don't seem to want to do that. But if we're going to condemn people for acting in a manner that was actually celebrated at the time in film (and yesterday's example of Animal House is hardly the only one that could be given), maybe we better see where that same movement took us and where we're acting on it today. We always consider our present standards to be prefect, but they rarely are, and linear time is always impacted by what came before it.
Finally, while everyone has been saying it, at some point the dysfunction in the nation's politics has got to cease. There is seemingly no end in sight, and the Democrats are focused on the election next month with the hope that they'll take the Senate and maybe the House and then the resistance will be able to set in. In other words, there seems to be no hope for a return to any sort of normalcy for the rest of this Presidential term, which unfortunately means that much of the nation will continue to be unwilling circus viewers while those enjoying it, and there are many, on the right and the left continue the show.
In the Governor's debate on Wyoming PBS, at least each of the first tier of candidates were all very careful to say "the World needs more Cowboys" and show where their feelings were in regards to this. Of the second tier candidates, Foster Freiss called the marketing campaign a ridiculous expenditure, with which I must agree.
Good for all of them.
I graduated from the University of Wyoming twice. Once in 1986 with a degree in Geology and once in 1990 with a Juris Doctorate. I first attended UW, in a sense, in the Summer of 1983 when I took a field geomorphology class at UW's Casper extension, which in that case was indistinguishable from being at Casper College as the class was at Casper College and taught by one of my favorite Casper College geology professors. At that time, however, I'd just graduated from Casper College and was admitted to UW, where I started attending full time in the fall semester that year.
Given that, you'd think that I'd be one of those folks with a brown and gold license plate and a member of the Cowboy Joe Club and all that.
I'm not.
It's hard to explain and it may be a mere personality quirk of mine but I've never really warmed up all that much to UW, in spite of spending six years of my life as one of its students, in spite of meeting some really good lifelong friends there, and in spite of sort of passing from very early adulthood to early adulthood, with all the attendant agony that entails, there. And in spite of having a few really good professors there.
Nope. It just didn't happen to me.
Now, let me admit this may just be, as already noted, a personality quirk of mine. I'm not much of a joiner and there's a lot of things other people get really excited by, organization wise, that don't click for me. For example, I've never become that much of a booster of my old high school even though my father went there, my wife went there, my kids went there, all my father's siblings went there, my wife's siblings went there, and my in laws went there. Indeed, my family is so well represented there its not funny. But I'm not really warm and fuzzy about it either (and I don't recall my father being either, for that matter). Indeed, not until my kids went there did I really start to become that way a little.
But, oddly, I feel differently about Casper College. I have always remained fond of it, and was while I was there.
T-rex at Casper College. There's an older one at UW.
I also feel that way, perhaps oddly, about the Wyoming Army National Guard, or perhaps more accurately the 3d Bn, 49th FA, Wyoming Army National Guard.
And in recent years I've been fairly miffed and from time to time even disgusted with UW or certain branches of it.
But I'm not wholly sure why.
I suspect that it might date back to the 1970s when a push was on to make Casper College a four year university. I've written on that before but UW successfully parried that with its outreach program, but its fight back, or rather that of its legislative backers, did leave a lot of wounded feelings here. Most Natrona County residents felt pretty slighted by UW at the time and for those of us in school who were looking at going through university there the fact that UW was basically telling us that our only option was to go to Laramie at some point or to take a hike out of the state wasn't really received all that well. I suspect feelings are different now, but for those of us who spent two years in Casper College's geology program, which was fully friendly with UW at all times, our transfer down to Laramie came with a feeling that on our part that we were sort of conscripts in a way, there because we were left with no other realistic in state choice. Of course, some of us could have gone out of state, and in retrospect UW's geology department was excellent so we really didn't suffer by going there. Frankly, while Casper College's geology department was great, those of us who did two years at CC and then transferred did have some ground to catch up both in terms of classes we now had to take and were not able to a bit earlier and in regard to catching up with an academic standard that was undoubtedly significantly higher than what we'd previously experienced. Having said that, I am pretty convinced that if I'd gone straight to UW I would have dropped out after about one year (everyone who knows me really disputes this assertion) so I'm grateful for CC being there.
Maybe that's part of it, as even after two years at CC, UW was a bit of a shock that first semester but I managed to get up and rolling pretty quickly. I had friends down there as it was, including a couple who had transferred down from CC, as well as those who had entered UW right out of high school, so I wasn't exactly an orphan in a strange land. I really didn't like Laramie much at first, but I acclimated to it relatively quickly. My experience as a geology student in that regard, I'll note, was much different than what it is for those in other majors as being a geology student at UW in the 1980s was to be a member of one of the first ranked programs in the nation which, accordingly, kept you buried in study all the time. It was extremely rigorous and if we went out for a beer on a Friday we really thought that we were living it up.
Indeed, that last fact may have been a little of it as going into the UW geology program at that time, as a transfer student, had a real sink or swim feeling to it. We hadn't been there from the beginning of our studies and even though there was no hostility to us at all, we were right at the point at which the geology department started weeding students out. The community colleges didn't do that, but UW sure did. That first semester I had mineralogy, a required course, which failed 50% of the class as part of its grade curve. That fact was announced on the first day of class. If you took the class twice and failed both times, you were out. And a D, for that matter, was a bar to remaining in the program. I passed the first time but it was nerve wracking to say the least, particularly as the class contained students who were on their second try who had to make it through or be dropped and, additionally, as the class contained graduate students who had not taken it in their out of state undergraduate programs (one of whom I became very good friends with from the class).
After getting familiar with the area I came to really like the Laramie Plains, for which I owe a real debt to a close friend of mine from Casper College who is still a close friend of mine. Later when we added a couple of other guys to our circle of friends we fished and hunted in a great area of the state which remains fond in my memories. I know more about rural Albany County than I do about any other area of the state other than Natrona County, and its beautiful. And I learned a fair amount about northern Colorado, and even Denver, in the same time frame. I really didn't care much for Laramie the town during my undergraduate years as I was a tenant in a town that was expensive to live in, but when I was a graduate student that changed as the graduate students had a different relationship with the town than undergraduates and, by that time, some of them were property owners and somewhat a part of the town themselves. Moreover, at that time, one of my law school friends was from Laramie and his very nice parents were professors there, which gave me a different impression of the town than I'd had before. By the time I graduated law school I'd come to like Laramie quite a bit and I still do.
Looking back, I enjoyed the geology department a lot more than I did the law school, although what I've said about my time as a geology student is at least partially true of my time as a law student. I had good friends in law school and some of my geology friends were still there. I didn't get out to hunt nearly as much as a law student, and in retrospect my slow conversion from an outdoor creature glad to be outdoors to an indoor creature wishing I was outdoors really started, and that has a sense of gloom associated with it. With two really outstanding exceptions the nature of my friendships changed as well as my friends had always been aboriginal, like myself. Having said that, two of my law school friends met that definition, one from Laramie and another from Texas, and they remain my good friends (at least one other common friend of ours has simply outright disappeared). And law school featured intellectual studies of a type that I'd never experienced before in that degree and hugely enjoyed.
So I should be a huge UW fan.
But I'm not.
As I noted above, there's no doubt a variety of reasons for this. For one thing, just because of the time period in which I went to UW, it was a hugely disorienting and not particularly wonderful period of my life, even though I didn't look on it that way at the time. For the entire time I was going there my mother was getting increasingly severely ill and that meant my departure left my father to deal with it all on his own, which I felt guilty about. The oilfield economy was collapsing, followed by a coal collapse (sound familiar?) which meant that what I was working on so hard as an undergraduate was becoming increasingly a dead end that looked as if it might end up being a non profitable one at that. Working through university meant that I was working toward a definitive end of my schooling and a definitive launch into the working world and as I was engaged in that my career goals were being hugely, indeed, completely redefined and plans I had, both vague and concrete, when I graduated from high school were evaporating and in fact completely altered. The entire time there was absolutely nothing available to fall back on career wise whatsoever, except for the National Guard, the latter of which kept me keeping on to an extent, but which also meant that after five years of hard scientific study the only occupation that I found I was qualified to fill was that of an artillery sergeant. By the time I figured out what I wanted to do I had fallen into the situation of it not really being an option and the immediate fall back didn't pan out either. It wasn't great.
But that's only part of it. I think the bigger part is that at UW I felt, and I still feel, that I never really belonged for some odd reason, some of which I noted above.
Part of that might be just size. I've read quite a few times that combat soldiers identify with their small units, rather than their big ones. When we read of wars, for example, and the views of average soldiers are looked at, it tends to be the case that soldiers think of themselves as belonging to "C Company" or "Headquarters Battery", or maybe as a member of "3d Battalion". Rarely, at the time, do they think of themselves as being part of the "2nd Infantry Division" or even less "The Sixth Army". To an extent they do, but in more immediate terms they don't. That is, they know that their in the 2nd Infantry Division, but they more closely identify with their company, platoon and squad.
Something like that works with big organizations as well, at least for some people. And maybe that's why at the time I tended to think of myself as being a geology student, rather than a UW student. Indeed, I spent a lot of time in the geology building as I tended to study there and I used it as a my default during the day study location when I was a geology student. As a law student I very briefly did the same thing; used the geology department library as a study location, but only very briefly before I switched to the law library.
But most UW grads seem to identify with UW a lot more than I do, and I'm sure that most law school grads identify much more closely with the law school than I do.
Which is all probably due to a personality quirk of mine, mostly.
But jumping back up to it, at UW there was sort of a lost in the crowd feeling, even though a lot of excellent teachers from every department clearly had their students constantly in mind. And part of that is likely because as a hopelessly rural character the college life, with its focus on the campus and football, etc., never appealed to me very much.
Or maybe its a UW is about UW feeling, which sort of leaves you a part of it, rather than it being a party of you. It can do just as well without you, is sort of the feeling you get.
Anyhow, something about the University of Wyoming has always been sui generis. And that I think started being pretty clear in law school. In the geology department we were pretty tied to the state as geologist are an integral part of Wyoming's economy that's tied to the land itself, much like agriculture in a way.
At the law school it was clear right away that about half or more of the students were there planning on going elsewhere, and that's increased over time. So the law school was focused on teaching a student body that really wasn't focused on the state. Since that time the law schools support of the Universal Bar Exam has hurt the state's lawyers, showing that it can in fact operate in a fashion that's opposed to the interest of its graduates who remained here while acting in favor of those who departed. Beyond that, even while I was there, there was one professor who was involved in activities that operated directly against the state's mineral industry. He's since left, but another professor is a dedicated radical opponent of agriculture.
The fact that the state retains and even supports a university that has individuals who hold some of its key industries in contempt shows how deep, and even blind, support for the University of Wyoming really is in the state. I'm afraid that sort of thing has reduced my feelings towards it however. And since that time we've seen other acts, such as disposing of the Y Cross Ranch and now outright contempt for "cowboys" on what amounts to a radical bigoted view of what the world is supposed to be like. . .and that view shares almost nothing in common with the views of almost all actual Wyomingites.
And maybe that gets to it.
A recent study of UW raised some questions about how well it was fulfilling its mission, in a way. The Equality of Opportunity Project, which studies tax data and converts those into "Mobility Report Cards" shows that UW's students aren't really accomplishing that. The study concluded:
The
report card for University of Wyoming (UW) indicates the majority of
students come from higher-income families, while around three percent
come from low-income families. And the number of students from middle
and low-income families has slowly declined. The report shows that only
16 percent of UW graduates made notable economic gains.
Now, the headline on that might not actually reveal that much in the context of the finding. What this may simply reveal is that "higher-income families" send their kids to college and, in Wyoming, lower income families send their kids into the oil patch. Indeed, having deposed a lot of career oilfield workers who didn't even complete high school but who had incomes as high or higher than I do, I can understand exactly why they do that.
Anyhow, this drew some attendion down at US in any event, and that'll tie back in to my comments here.
UW
professor Scott Henkel studies higher education’s role in labor and
democracy. He said addressing the issues raised by the report card
should be top priority for UW because it’s a land grant institution.
It’s
written in the DNA of a land-grant institution, the need to serve
low-income, first-generation, working-class students,” said Henkel. “Do
we always reach that ideal? No, course not. But there are people here
working very hard in the service of those ideals.
Okay, I agree wit Henkel in part.
Or actually, I don't.
The point of a land grant college in fact was not to serve low income, first generation, working class students. A state university should serve low income, first generation, working class students. Of course, in order to do that, you have to not run around insulting them. There are going to be very few low income, working class, first generation, students, who come from the real world, who are really going to fall over and feint at the thought of a motto that boosts cowboys, nor are then even going to immediately assume that cowboys are white and that's bad, as some UW profs do. Indeed, the low income, first generation, working class students in Wyoming are actually made up of the very demographic that those UW professors find to be offensive hideous symbols of oppression.
Which does get back to the point.
Land grant colleges (and at the time, that also included land grant high schools) were supposed to take and educate the common population of a state in fields of education which served the state. Most early land grant colleges had really strong focuses on agriculture and mining because they were in the Western United States where those were, and to a large degree still are, the major economic engines. When those same universities branched out into more advanced degrees this was still the focus in a way. The University of Wyoming College of Law, for example, was established in 1920 with the idea of providing lawyers for Wyoming. . . not for Colorado.
Over time, in almost every upper academic realm, this sort of focus has become really lost. In the old Ivy League schools that makes sense, although ironically retain elements of their traditional focus. American universities of the Harvard and Yale type were not ever really focused on graduating individuals for the economic benefit to heir students more than they were providing them with a certain liberal, Protestant, class based, education.* Later private institutions were modeled on them even where they did not include the religious focus, although having said that a religious association with a four year institution was darned near the rule for most of American history.** Anyhow, these institutions seem to become all about themselves. The Ivy League law schools, for example, seem to have become separate institutions for the declaration of what an imaginary "progressive" constitution should hold. According to one recent book by a recent graduate of an Ivy League school this very liberal focus and the elimination of the old patrician boundaries that applied to these schools has given us the social mess we currently have, although he's optimistic that its self correcting. I'm much less so.
Indeed, the same evolution has occurred in universities where it never should have. Some large Catholic schools, for example Notre Dame, have become quite non Catholic in practical terms. Some may wonder why that matters, but as a school founded by the church, it's focus is supposed to relate to that of the churches, or otherwise it has little reason to really exist.
This same thing is true of land grant universities, such as the University of Wyoming. Why is there one? So we can support a football team? So that we can employ a collection of over sensitive pseudo intellectuals? No.
It's to support the state.
If it doesn't do that, something is in error.
That doesn't mean slavishly following the political whims of the state. Not by a long shot. But it does mean that it can't act like an isolated benighted intellectual institution existing on some other plain. The point at which it becomes irrelevant to the state, and treats its charges that way, is the point at which, when appreciated, the real decline really begins.
*Early on they also were religious schools and most of them retained a very strong Protestant focus up until the 1960s.
**Catholic universities like Notre Dame were actually formed as it was basically impossible for a Catholic to attend a private university and remain loyal to his or her faith.
