Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Ben Sasse explains it all


More than 90,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus. For more than three months, the president of the United States did nothing, despite repeated warnings.

He repeatedly said the virus would disappear -- like a miracle. He repeatedly said it was a Democrat hoax. He repeatedly has touted quack cures.

Americans can't get tested when they need to. Doctors, nurses, first responders and "essential workers" can't get proper protective equipment. The elderly are dying in nursing homes -- alone.

The gravely ill are dying in hospitals, about one every minute. Alone.

America's governors and mayors are trying to manage the gravest threat this country has faced since World War II -- alone, with scant aid from the federal government.


ALL ACROSS our land, high-school and college seniors are graduating -- online. And their future? Up in the air, where the virus spreads.

And spreads.

And spreads.

The president -- many governors, too -- pushes to "reopen the economy." We have no tools, no procedures to intelligently and safely do it. Yet we plow ahead into the unknown, hoping magical thinking will conquer biology.

Into the darkness of the pandemic steps a learned man, a United States senator from Nebraska. He beams into little Fremont from the big Internet to shine a digital light -- to offer wise words and sound guidance from afar to the new graduates of his alma mater.

Ben Sasse speaks. He is unshaven. Well, many of us are these days.

The graduates listen, and so do his state and his country. What shall we do? Why is this happening? Where lies hope?

The learned man answers all.

What shall we do? Not major in psychology.

Why is this happening? Blame China. Maybe Jeremy -- you can't trust a guy named Jeremy.

Where lies hope? Obviously, not in Ben Sasse.

He's such a Jeremy.

Tuesday, February 12, 2019

The unshakable burden of growing up fascist


I have come to explain my native region of the country as born fascist. Fascist from its settlement by the white man -- fascist before we knew what fascism was.

The American South is fascist, was fascist and always has been fascist. Adolf Hitler and his German Nazis carefully studied the South as a blueprint for the kind of society they wanted to build at home -- and violently impose upon the world.

The evidence of this lies in the headlines of your daily newspaper today . . . and it was ever present in the headlines of yesteryear's daily newspapers, too. The articles here both were on the front page of the Morning World-Herald right here in Omaha, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 1948.

The police commissioner using his police powers to determine what records could and couldn't be sold in stores or played on jukeboxes was in Memphis. James O. Eastland -- the U.S. senator who went out of his way to make sure reporters knew he had referred to an NAACP official with a vile racial slur -- represented Mississippi, right next door to Tennessee.

Eastland served until 1978. Because Mississippi.

Any white Southerner of a certain age -- namely my age -- has to live in fear, to some degree, in the wake of the "woke" attempts at purging all racial transgressors from public life, regardless of the offense or whether it occurred decades ago. On one hand, it is inexcusable that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam dressed up in blackface as a 20-something. It ain't good that Virginia attorney general Mark Herring browned up his face as a 19-year-old college freshman to impersonate one of his favorite rappers.

Northam is 59 now; Herring is 57. I am 57 -- almost 58.

On the one hand, this stuff is bad. Oughtn't have happened. Even in the 1980s, white Southerners should have known this stuff was unacceptable.

On the other hand . . . what the hell do people expect? How, in the name of basic sentience and a basic knowledge of American history, is anyone surprised?

And when, exactly, did Americans lose any belief in the tenets of grace, forgiveness and redemption? When did we all decide that it was impossible for people to change, to grow?

Listen, those of us born during the tail end of Jim Crow -- many of us raised by thoroughly racist parents within thoroughly racist families in a pervasively racist Southern society and culture -- too often didn't know what we didn't know. We all had to deal with the burden of our upbringing.

You have to understand the ubiquity of an extremely warped culture, and the Jim Crow and post-Jim Crow South was an extremely warped culture. After World War II, Germans of a certain age were allowed to redeem themselves once the Nazi regime had been relegated to several awful chapters of a world history textbook. Apparently, Southerners such as Northam and Herring in the commonwealth will not be granted that opportunity -- by their own countrymen, no less.


OBVIOUSLY, Northam botched his opportunity to explain himself and shine a light on what was, and to a large degree still is, a sick and racist culture. There probably will not now be a fruitful national dialogue about the role of culture -- particularly racist cultures -- in forming civil society and what it means to have been formed by a deviant society.

Neither will we have a productive national discussion about how we -- each of us -- might shed the unbearable burden of our upbringing. In this case, our very Southern upbringing.

Let me say it again: The American South, basically, was Nazi before the Nazis were Nazi. And that's the air that was the burden of Southern whites' upbringing. We didn't know anything else.

In the case of this Southern white boy who came into the world in the Louisiana of 1961, my first inkling that my world might be seriously f***ed up was network television. Specifically, Julia and Room 222. I cannot tell you how revolutionary it was to see black folk who were anything but the stereotypical "n*****s" we had been carefully taught to see and believe in.

There's a word to describe the upbringing of lots of Southern kids just like me. That would be "brainwashing." It started at birth and primarily was administered by parents who themselves had been brainwashed since birth.

Not to put too fine a point on it, network television was we Southerners' very own version of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty or the Voice of America. Many of our parents, kinfolk and the other adults surrounding us did not see it that way. In their vision, ABC, NBC and CBS were more like a bunch of "agitators," a bunch of "n***** lovers" or a "bunch of goddamn commerniss."

This can't be overstated. It just can't. Oh . . . I was born and raised in Baton Rouge. I went to public schools. That means, for my grade level, that I went to de jure segregated schools until fourth grade in 1970.

And when my school was "integrated" -- and in 1970 "neighborhood schools" was a federal-court desegregation tool in Baton Rouge -- my school had two black kids . . . whose family had lived in the neighborhood before there was a neighborhood. One, Janice, was in my class.

She was my friend, and we played together at recess. A teacher told me I shouldn't do that -- it didn't look right to be playing with "a colored girl." To her credit, my racist mother (rather inexplicably, given "racist") called the NAACP to complain about that one.

Janice was treated horribly across the board. Seeing that was another brick knocked out of the wall. A major reinforcement to the counternarrative coming from Radio Free Dixie -- a.k.a., ABC, NBC and CBS.

So, on one level, I'm reluctant to condemn Ralph Northam, as bad as it all is. I was guilty of something worse than blackface when I was just 4 years old. But we Southerners just have to quit lying to ourselves and everybody else. We have to look -- hard -- at who we were . . . and are.

And we, at long last, have to be accountable.

We Southerners, in addition to a racism/fascism problem, have had a sincerity problem for a long damn time now.

Thursday, April 05, 2018

Is that kinda like whores who bellyache about prostitution?


And Mary Fallin is the shyster who'll sell 'em a 1974 Chevy Vega with sawdust in the differential and a spiel about how all cars burn a quart of oil every week.

Merle Haggard wept.

Thursday, March 22, 2018

A canary in the @#$&*! coal mine doth protest too much


Well, this was extraordinary . . . even for Louisiana.


You might think that was a wild overreaction by Sen. Conrad Appel, but you have to remember he's a Republican who represents Metairie, and that's what one has to do to hold on to one's job in David Dukeland.

People think Donald Trump is America's national disease. He is not.


What Trump is, is a particularly devastating symptom of an even more devastating disease (as evidenced by this display from our national canary in the coal mine, Louisiana).

Buckle up, America. The fun is just beginning.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

East of Yoknapatawpha


It was an embarrassing, dismal night for my Tigers in StarkVegas on Saturday. So, I'm reaching for a little LSU gridiron perspective here.

Some "my native state" perspective here. This otherwise is known as a "rant." A justified one, but a rant nonetheless.

But I prefer "perspective."
Such as . . . I wish to holy hell that Louisianians were as mortified by a failing, dysfunctional and violent state as they are about the mere mediocrity of the flagship university's football team.

I mean, I meaannnnnn . . . how come no one has fired the whole goddamned Louisiana Legislature and all the state's incompetent and venal constitutional officers? (I'm looking at you, Attorney General Jeff Landry.)

How come nobody is firing their whole slew of short-bus refugees, otherwise known as your local city council or parish police jury?

And what about your racially riven, squabbling school boards? Why are those assholes still sucking at the taxpayer teat? I mean, is not an 0-and-forever record sufficiently bad?

While I'm at it, did you ever think there might be reasons some kids don't learn well and become problems -- reasons apart from "It's them commerniss teachers' fault"? Did it ever occur to you that if dismantling public schools were the answer, you might be seeing improvement by now?

Can anyone tell me what the hell this man is saying?
THEN, of course, you have your local cops, who manage to shoot an alarming number of people -- mostly black but not all -- who aren't actually trying to shoot them first. How come y'all can't even fire most of 'em, much less prosecute them?

And speaking of violence and guns, did you ever wonder what the hell has gotten certain heavily-impoverished communities in Louisiana to the point where murder and mayhem is something of an epidemic? Didja ever wonder what gets people -- black, brown, purple, green or white -- to the point where life is that bloody cheap?

If your response is to gloss over the "purple, green or white" part and just hit me with "That's just what n*****s do," thank you for participating, and here's your parting gift -- an official cast-iron, pineapple shaped MP3 player preloaded with Florida-Georgia Line's greatest hits. Just pull the pin and let loose of the handle, and you're good to go!

Finally, did you ever wonder how come football has all kinds of "boosters" with all kinds of cash but, in Louisiana, the folks working in actual university classrooms and decrepit university libraries and woebegone parish K-12 schools . . . not so much?

Has a math major with a pocket protector ever gotten a $100 handshake?

Middleton Library, LSU. Photo by Bob Mann
WHY IS THERE the fancy Cox Center for LSU athletes to occasionally study, but just the moldering Middleton Morass for the poor schmuck you're going to be counting on to take care of that bum heart of yours someday? Assuming he or she doesn't look around too closely, decide (in the eloquent words of ex-Tiger coach Nick Saban) "F*** that shit!" and haul ass two seconds after graduation.

This is my attempt at football-fanatic perspective tonight. Yes, I've been drankin' a little, and thus feel free to tell the God's honest, God-forsaken truth.

Amen.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Trumpiana


Alas, alas . . . whither my poor alma mater, Louisiana State University? Yet another semester, yet another budget cut, in all likelihood.

Bigly.

With cuts right around the corner, the president of LSU warned Louisiana lawmakers Wednesday that his university cannot handle many more budget reductions.

“Another cut to higher education furthers the dire straits that we're in. I don't know how much more efficient we can become,” President F. King Alexander told the House Appropriations Committee.

For the 16th time in nine years, LSU is once again preparing for the legislative knife.

“It's endless, it's like Ground Hog Day,” said Rep. Larry Bagley, R-Stonewall.
In order to fix the state’s $313 million shortfall left over from last year, higher education will like have to endure another multi-million dollar cut. Back in November, the governor proposed about $18 million in cuts to higher education overall, with more than $8.5 million from LSU. Those could be enacted through executive order. Any changes to that plan could be announced Thursday, at which time legislators could also vote to increase cuts to education.

Over the last decade, LSU has cut back on courses while freezing faculty salaries time and time again, according to Alexander. Meanwhile, competing universities have lured away their LSU faculty by offering them better pay. Overall, Alexander said budget cuts have led to a net loss of 500 faculty members over ten years.

“We would take notice if we were losing football coaches,” Alexander told the committee.

With regards to how much the university spends per student, LSU currently ranks near the bottom. The school is 46th out of the 50 flagship schools across the country and 12th out of the 14 SEC schools, according to Alexander.

“This day is the worst day of hearings every year because we talk about what should be the hope of the future of our state, and then we talk about how dramatically we've dis-invested in it over the last nine years,” said Rep. Walt Leger, D-New Orleans.

Added to that, the shortfall is holding up maintenance projects. The LSU system current has a backlog of $750 million in upkeep projects that cannot be completed under current budget restrictions. About $500 million of those projects are on the main campus.

When it comes to TOPS, which is only partially funded in the spring, Alexander said it is unclear how it will impact enrollment. His bigger concern, he said, is next fall and beyond.

“The uncertainty of all this has the potential to drive the best and brightest out of the state,” Alexander said.
THERE REALLY isn't much to be said about this ongoing tragedy any longer. It all has been said, and we're all getting tired of repeating ourselves.

Here, though, is one thing I don't think has been repeated to the point of ineffectiveness.

You want to know the best way to describe my woebegone home state? This way.

Louisiana is just like its favorite politician, president-elect Donald Trump: It spends its life acting like a stupid asshole, then it goes bankrupt.

Trumpiana, for short.

That is all. That's enough.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Public schools fail . . . to fail as badly as private sector


Public policy in education has come to this in Louisiana -- and too much of the rest of America.

What is "this"? "This" is a Brookings Institute report on research showing students who "win" Louisiana's school-voucher lottery and escape their "failing" public schools . . . lose. Big time.

From Brookings:

The affected students had won a voucher to attend, at no cost, a private school in Louisiana. Nineteen states have such voucher programs, with Louisiana’s the fifth-largest in the country. The vouchers, averaging $5,311 per student, must be accepted as full tuition at the private schools that participate in the program; schools are not allowed to ask students to “top-up” their vouchers if the school has a higher sticker price. Further, schools can’t pick and choose among the voucher winners. Instead, they have to take any student who holds a voucher.[ii]

Nationwide, 141,000 students use a voucher to attend a private school.[iii] Louisiana’s voucher program launched in New Orleans in 2008. It was expanded to include the entire state in 2012. Students from families with incomes below 250 percent of the federal poverty threshold are eligible for the voucher as long as they attend a public school the state has labeled as low-performing. Over half of Louisiana’s public schools fall into this category.

Researchers have long attempted to understand the effectiveness of private schools. It’s a difficult task, because parents choose their children’s schools, either by living in a certain school district or by applying to a private or charter school. The challenges are identical to those in evaluations of charter-school effectiveness: kids who attend private school are different from those who attend a public, neighborhood school, who in turn are different from those who attend a charter school.[iv] When comparing school performance, researchers struggle to distinguish differences in schools’ effectiveness from variation in the types of students who choose those schools.

A voucher lottery provides an unusual opportunity to measure the effectiveness of private schools. The lottery serves as a randomized trial, which is the gold standard of research methods. Random selection means that lottery winners and losers are identical, on average, when they apply for the voucher. Any differences that emerge after the lottery can therefore be attributed to the private-school attendance of the winners.

The results were startling. The researchers, a team of economists from Berkeley, Duke, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the scores of the lottery winners dropped precipitously in their first year of attending private school, compared to the performance of the lottery losers. The effects were very large: roughly a quarter of a standard deviation in math, social studies, and science. There were no effects on reading scores. On a per-year basis, these negative effects are as large as the positive effects that a similarly-designed study found for charter schools in Boston (the authors of the Louisiana study are my collaborators in the charter research).[v]
HERE'S HOW you get to the abject cluster(expletive) that exemlifies "this," and here's where you like go from "this":
1) We declare public education a failure, blaming it for not magically taking the sociological deviance amid the student population and turning it, alchemist-style, into 24-karat gold. And MIT scholarships.

2) We take a page from our highly successful Vietnam playbook: We must destroy this village in order to save it.

3) As part of the destroy-to-save process, we starve public schools of funds so we can give it to a motley crew of private and charter schools . . . because private sector.

4) We sit back and watch the chaos ensue as the private sector f***s the whole thing up worse than the public sector at $5,500 a head, if not more.

5) Wait! A solution to make the whole thing work just like we know it can! Double down -- with taxpayer money -- on what hasn't yet worked.

6) Look! A liberal! Git a rope!

7) Pay no attention to that social scientist aggregating data sets.

8) Look! Pinko-commie-fag academics talkin' trash about free enterprise and educational choice! Grab your guns!

9) We'll surely get the right charter- and private-school partners this time!

10) Well, shit.

11) Pay no attention to the poverty, chaotic lives and toxic culture of "that part of town." Public schools! Bad!

12) Avoid "that part of town."

13) MY kid's private school is pretty good -- a bargain at $9,500 a year!
14) Raise property tax on my house by $100 to fund those failed government schools?!? What, I'm made of money???

ON THE other hand . . . don't worry. Be happy. Donald Trump will fix it all.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

The content of our character


Martin Luther King Jr., lived for the proposition that "all men were created equal," for the vision "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

He also died for that proposition, that vision, that dream.

And it is for that "last full measure of devotion," to quote Abraham Lincoln, another great American who died because of a noble vision, that we honor Rev. King this time every year. To again borrow from our 16th president, King called us to heed "the better angels of our nature."

This trait in national leaders today is so rare that we are obligated to celebrate those who called us to transcend our fallen human nature all the more. It's important that we acknowledge that spark of the divine within us during an age when so much of the world seems to have gone to the devil.

Sadly, because we humans are a sad, sinful and petty lot overall, King's dream has yet to be fulfilled. Things are better, yes, than when an assassin cut down the civil-rights leader, but they're not good enough. Far too often, we judge one another by the color of our skin, not the content of our character.

That recently has been brought home right here . . . at home, in Omaha, Neb.

ENTER A small-time local Republican politician, Pat McPherson, recently elected to the state education board. McPherson seems to be one of those politicians who just can't help himself, or stay out of trouble. The content of the man's character seems to be, well, questionable.

More than a decade ago, there were allegations of groping a teenage girl dressed as the Red Robin mascot at a chain hamburger joint. McPherson, after a criminal trial, got out of that scrape, though not before he was pressured to resign as Douglas County election commissioner.

Now, after being elected to the Nebraska State Board of Education in November, McPherson is in trouble over his blog, The Objective Conservative. Several posts -- and McPherson has denied authorship or knowledge of the screeds . . . on his own blog -- refer to President Obama as "a half-breed," the latest coupling that derogatory reference with one to "our great Black Leader."
McPherson
Obama was described as a “half breed” in five separate postings on McPherson’s Objective Conservative blog — postings that McPherson said he did not author and that he disavowed after critics drew attention to them.

McPherson, a Republican, said they were posted by a contributor he would not name.

Three of the postings are written as if they reflect the opinion of the blog itself, which McPherson founded and said he co-edits. The three postings are listed as posted by Objective Conservative and are written with the pronoun “we.”

The three postings begin, “Frankly, we’ve had enough ...,” “We think Ted Nugent is cool ...” and “We are tired ...”

In one posting, the author jokes that the article may be their last because “we suspect the NSA has forwarded it to (Attorney General) Eric Holder for potential prosecution under hate-crime laws.”

The postings date back to May 11, 2011. McPherson said he deleted them from the site Tuesday. He declined to identify who wrote the blog posts, but he said he has expressed his disappointment to that person.

The chairman of the Nebraska Democratic Party said Tuesday that Ricketts “just flunked his first test as governor as he failed to ask for McPherson’s resignation.”

“How will Mr. Ricketts explain to schoolchildren and teachers why it’s OK with the governor for a State Board of Education member to have a racist blog?” Vince Powers asked.

Powers said McPherson either wrote the posts or is covering for the person who did.

He described the posts as “garbage.”

McPherson said Tuesday that he will “absolutely not” resign. He said he plans to shut down the blog and has blocked any new postings.

McPherson is a former Republican Party chairman in Douglas County who served as director of administrative services under former Omaha Mayor Hal Daub. He ran for the State Education Board on a conservative platform.

The blog, which claims to present a conservative view, is a hodge-podge of photos, articles and opinion. Much of the content needles Obama, Democrats and their policies.
ONE REFERS to an animal as a "half-breed." One does not respectfully refer to a human being that way. That, you could presume, goes double when the subject of your remarks is the president of the United States.

The term is biracial, one that could describe any number of McPherson's own constituents.

The temptation here is to launch into a grand dissertation about the wrongness of McPherson's views, the brazenness of his bile-spewing (and, seriously, no one really takes McPherson's disavowal of the contents of his own blog seriously) and how tragic it is that we Americans no longer can disagree with our fellow Americans without resorting to branding them as The Other. That ought to be bloody well self-evident.

The extent to which the obvious no longer is in this society is a direct indicator of how untenable it has become. Translation: We well may be on our last legs.

What else is self-evident -- or should be self-evident -- as this King Day winds down in Omaha is that Omaha-area voters messed up badly in electing not only a racist to public office but a man who didn't even have the decency to be a hypocrite about it on the Internet. A man whose public past ought to have given the electorate a pretty good idea about his public future.

Sadly, American voters oftentimes are just as foolish as those they put into office. Or bigoted, as the case may be.

FINALLY, it is self-evident that Pat McPherson is just another boil on the buttocks of American democracy. Worse, he is a cancer on the administration of Nebraska elementary and secondary education. It is a pity -- a tragedy, really -- that public disorders like McPherson are too often tougher to excise from the body politic than they are from the human body.

Martin Luther King's dream lives. But his work remains unfinished, thanks to human frailty, hearts of darkness and the politicians who exploit both.

In the name of King's dream and our future, we cannot afford to be content with characters like Pat McPherson. Either their day is done . . . or ours will be soon enough.

Thursday, April 03, 2014

Louisiana: What doesn't kill you. . . .


If you are really good at something and really want to test yourself, move to Louisiana.

Anybody can be good at something if they have the right tools and institutional support. But only the
crème de la crème can be good at something in Louisiana, where you'll be looked upon with suspicion for your uppityness and be consigned to toil in decrepitude while officialdom spends taxpayer dollars on more important things than, say, education.

Like, say, graft.

Or, say, an archive in Franklinton dedicated to a former two-term Republican governor. Who happened to be the political mentor of the present two-term Republican governor, Bobby Brady Jindal.

I'm pretty sure of two things: First, that my home state has serious problems with priorities and, second, that the best ceramics artists in the universe are found at Louisiana State University. I know this about the LSU art school because its ceramics program is ranked ninth in the country, and the students and professors have managed to achieve that level of notoriety as they dodge falling concrete ceilings while fighting off rats, raccoons and fleas in the Studio Arts Building. That's no easy feat as you struggle not to inhale asbestos particles or ingest lead-paint chips.

And then there's the electrical wiring next to ceiling leaks.

And the broken windows, some of which won't lock.


And the flood-prone basement.

And the lack of climate control like, say, heating and air conditioning. Ever been to south Louisiana in  August and September? An art student fainted during class last fall -- the temperature inside was nearly 100 degrees, the (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reports:
Emily Seba/Facebook

Gleason said while she’s at the building she forces herself to take five-minute breaks outside. She spends about 26 hours a week there between class and work, and she worries the mold, asbestos and lead paint that LSU’s own facilities department confirmed is on most every surface might be harmful to her health. “It’s a concern,” she said.

When maintenance crews worked over the Christmas break to scrape asbestos off of steam pipes in the building, they removed some insulation, too. The steam got so hot, it ruined a student’s artwork nearby, Gleason said. These type of maintenance efforts occur regularly, costing a “couple hundred thousand dollars” a year, LSU Office of Facility Services Planning, Design and Construction Director Roger Husser estimated. His department, too, is eager to permanently solve the building’s problems rather than continue the Band-Aid method that’s driving up maintenance costs. But it’s not his call.
As the building’s conditions worsen, maintenance costs grow and students question their safety, renovation plans sit on the shelf, awaiting $15 million from the state needed for renovations. To show they won’t sit idly by as their needs get trumped by programs with big donors or lucrative ticket sales, students have planned protests on Thursday (April 3) at LSU’s campus and Tuesday (April 8) at the steps of the Capitol to ask for better working conditions and a safe environment.
But unless what’s sure to be creatively designed picket signs inspire a change in the political will of the Louisiana Legislature and Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration -- their protests this week and next, according to one lawmaker, will be in vain.

Sen. Dan Claitor, R-Baton Rouge, a self-proclaimed cheerleader for the arts who toured conditions of the Studio Arts building last fall, said if it were up to him the project would get the needed funding, but “a handful of legislators are not going to be able to (get enough support) to fund it on their own.”

Without private funding matches, the arts building simply doesn’t rise to the priority level of other donor-backed projects, which tend to get bumped up the list much faster. Though Husser said the Studio Arts building has been in the capital outlay queue for “a very long time,” if the state sees an opportunity to take advantage of private match, it will usually take it. But that means projects without donor support will keep slipping down rungs of the ladder as privately aided ones climb up. “The pie is not unlimited,” Claitor said. “The budget is tapped out.”




I WOULDN'T say the budget is "tapped out," exactly. It's just that everything else in the budget -- from Medicaid to masking tape -- has been deemed more important than giving art students at Louisiana's flagship university facilities fit for human habitation . . . as opposed to that of rats, raccoons and fleas.

Still, LSU's School of Art is fielding nationally noted programs. It's rather like winning Olympic medals in the 100-meter dash while dragging a boat anchor.

For three straight Olympics.


Writes columnist Stephanie Riegel in the Baton Rouge Business Report:
Since the early 2000s, the building has been slated for renovation. Several times, the project was designated as Priority One in the state capital outlay bill, meaning it was at the top of the list to receive construction dollars. One spring, it appeared so imminent the faculty was told to pack up their offices.

But, as so often happens, other needs took priority. This year, the project—now estimated to cost $15.3 million—isn't even included in the capital outlay bill, much less specified as an item likely to see a single dime.

"It's depressing," says professor Kelli Scott Kelley, whose critically acclaimed paintings hang in galleries around the country. "It affects morale. It affects the ability to attract good faculty and good graduate students."

Which gets to the heart of why this matters beyond, of course, concern for the well-being of students and faculty. There is a connection between a thriving art school at the state's flagship university and the community in which that school is located.

Consider what the arts have done for the revitalization of downtown and the role the Shaw Center for the Arts has played in bringing about that renaissance.

Think, too, about the near-obsessive fixation in this community for all things purple and gold—about the glowing headlines that follow when graduation rates inch up to 69%, or about the time and energy the university spends trying to earn a spot in the top quadrant of U.S. News & World Report's rankings.

Do top-flight schools have chunks of concrete falling from the ceiling? Are students at Duke or Vanderbilt or even the University of Alabama forced to paint in sub-freezing studios? Do you attract the best and brightest students by building a lazy river at the rec center while ignoring critical capital needs?
THE ANSWERS to Riegel's questions are an obvious no, no and no. Yet. . . .

As I said at the outset, if you are really good at something and really want to test yourself, move to Louisiana. Compete against the best. Do it while dragging a boat anchor. Win anyway. Come home victorious to the non cheers of the non-existent hometown throng of non-existent well-wishers.

If it's acclaim you want in the Gret Stet, be an LSU football player. That or an 86-year-old, ex-con ex-governor with a granddaughterly trophy wife, a new baby and an ego overdue for its 2 o'clock feeding.



Baton Rouge High, 2007
Kelli Scott Kelley, the LSU art professor, was in my graduating class at Baton Rouge Magnet High. And where she finds herself now resembles, and eerily so,  our alma mater before the parish school board was left with just two choices: Tear down the whole school and rebuild it somewhere else . . . or tear down and rebuild most of the campus, renovate the main building and keep BRHS where it was.

Thankfully, the board chose the second option. Baton Rouge High, after 30-something years of abject neglect, now has facilities worthy of the world-class teachers and students within its rebuilt walls. Our old school has shed its boat anchor -- for now.

In Louisiana, sadly, there's always another boat anchor to weigh you down. In Louisiana, fortunately, some folks find a way to stay afloat regardless.

Unfortunately for the state that forgot to care, however, many of those survivors soon enough will weigh anchor one last time before setting sail for a distant shore.


Guess what. A state that cares so little for its children . . . for higher education . . . for the arts . . . for its future . . . deserves exactly what it's going to get. Or not get, as the case may be.

Ask not upon whom the anchor weighs.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/659369154122784/?ref=br_tf

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Bobby, Bobby, Bobby!


Here's the story of a governor named Bobby, who says he's thinking about being more than that.

In an admission that surprised absolutely no one, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told a reporter for a Heritage Foundation "news service" that he might run for Barack Obama's job in 2016.

"It's something we're thinking about. It's something we'll pray about. But...we have to win the war of ideas first," Jindal said last week. "We've got to win the elections in 2014. And after we do that, we're certainly giving it some thought."

Insert GOP boilerplate about Obamacare here.

Insert Jindal boilerplate about his miracle-working in Louisiana here.


Now, with the possibility of a President Jindal come January 2017, I think it might be useful to explore the genesis of some of the governor's "reform agenda" in the Pelican State. Here it's important to explain how an Indian-American kid named Piyush became a Southern governor named Bobby.

IT ALL comes down to The Brady Bunch.

"Every day after school, I'd come home and I'd watch 'The Brady Bunch.'" Jindal told 60 Minutes' Morley Safer in 2009. "And I identified with Bobby, you know? He was about my age, and Bobby stuck."

Well, that explains a lot. It may even explain his Louisiana "reform" agenda, where wackiness has ensued much of the time. Indeed, if we closely examine one of the earliest and most profound influences on young Piyush/Bobby, we can see the genesis of key elements of his "miracle" on the bayou.

First, let's see whether we can unearth his inspiration for entering the political arena:



THAT DONE, it shouldn't be difficult to come up with the blueprint for his voucher-driven "education reform" program. It's all a matter of a) salesmanship and b) free customer service:



GROOVY! Now, I think I have an idea concerning the inspiration for Jindal's brilliant plan to bring transparency and more "effective" ethics enforcement to the notoriously corrupt Louisiana state government:



THAT'S RIGHT . . . behind every brilliant political scheme, there's a pop-culture inspiration. Yes, there is.

Now, let's move on to the genesis of Jindal's reform of Medicaid and the state's charity health-care system:



FINALLY, how in the world do you sell yourself as someone of presidential timbre when your entire body of work as governor of a poor, small and crooked Southern state has left it just as poor, just as small and just as crooked as you found it? And then there's the whole "I destroyed Louisiana higher education" thing.

But then you go back to the well one more time.  

What would the Bradys do?"



YEAH . . . that's the (2016) ticket.