Ummm, Bart, do you suppose you could number your paragraphs in some logical order and include a few connective and transitional devices? A tad hard to follow for those ofus unaccustomed to a rich diet of non sequitors.

lineal, at 6:53 am EDT on July 20, 2005

Professor Lazere is right to question the influence of monied interests on the conservative agenda, but a few clarifications are in order.

1. The money from conservative foundations and think tanks is miniscule compared to the money from liberal and Left foundations and think tanks (including universities). The entire annual working budget of Heritage Foundation is around $30 million, not a lot compared to the budgets of the more Left wing departments around the country. And while Olin and others gave out grants of a quarter-million dollars to National Association of Scholars and the like, the Ford Foundation gives out a full $500 million every year. Three years ago, it gave the Civil Rights Project at Harvard $600,000 solely to create a network to advocate for affirmative action programs. The fact that liberal foundation money isn’t so narrowly tailored to liberal causes and that it goes against its corporate origins doesn’t change the overall slant to the Left.

2. Professor Lazere cites David Brock on the Leninism of the Right, that is, the Right’s demand that intellectuals follow the party line. Do we really want to take David Brock as a reliable source here? Don’t we need more evidence than that? I’ve attended meetings of MLA, American Studies Association, and a dozen other academic organizations, and I can say that there is a broader range of opinion, and greater tolerance for dissent, at a meeting of NAS or a symposium at American Enterprise Institute.

3. Finally, Professor Lazere tells people with conservative outlooks to do the work, commit to academe, and find jobs. This underestimates the barriers to doing so. In ed. schools, humanities departments, and the “softer” social sciences, a left-of-center ideology is buried into the nature of the disciplines. We don’t need overt political litmus tests. As Roger Bowen of AAUP said at an AEI meeting (AEI always invites dissident voices to its panels), disciplines such as anthropology are, by their very nature, critical of the status quo, questioning reigning notions of humanity and society, and so they always tilt to the Left. But then, what if you’re an aspiring anthropologist who isn’t critical of the status quo, but actually affirms aspects of it—not mindlessly, but critically? Well, your outlook won’t be recognized by anthropologists as anthropological.

The basic question of Professor Lazere’s commentary remains. Money corrupts. But money isn’t the only corrupter. The comforts of tenure, the insularity of academics, the power over students,. . . they, too, have their pitfalls.

mark, at 11:03 am EDT on July 20, 2005

Kudos to Lazere for articulating so well the hypocritical pleadings of Horowitz and his fellow oppressed conservatives. When Horowitz (in his blog) blames 70 million deaths in WWII and 2.5 million deaths in Cambodia and now thousands more in Iraq on “left wing dissenters and pacifists,” and when he calls campus opponents of the War on Iraq “supporters of terrorism,” it’s hard for academics like myself to take him seriously. If Horowitz sincerely wants to “level the playing field,” he should try using rational thought instead of money-driven agitprop.

Tom, at 11:44 am EDT on July 20, 2005

I Like Ike

“I am reminded of that crazy leftist radical, General Dwight David Eisenhower. That pinko commie warned against the military-industrial complex taking over the universities.”

Actually, Ike, as a vet (probably your favorite people), was trying to *control* rising military spending.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/speeches/eisenhower001.htm

Also, some believe his speech was a reaction to a “macho” President-elect John F. Kennedy and JFK’s youthful enthusiasm for military adventures. (Ever heard of Vietnam?)

Finally, as a thrifty, central Kansan, I suspect Ike would have found someone with a tenured government job that paid $65,000/year, despite hundreds of qualified, potential replacements, to be very lucky.

Bart, at 5:01 pm EDT on July 20, 2005

I will refer Bart back to my original post. I do not know what type of statistics he is looking for, but all of the information about hiring and promotion done at public universities is available by law at those institutions.

The contention of Professor Lazere was that college professors are hired and evaluated by their peers. Bart suggests that some sort of statistical analysis would refute that. I dare say that if he were to take the time, request the data, and examine it, he would see a 1:1 correspondence between the person hired or promoted and committees of that person’s peers making the evaluations. He would also see zero correspondence between the influence of liberal think tanks and hiring decisions. But Bart cannot expect us to do the work for him. Professor Lazere already supported his contention through logic and common knowledge within academia. In any argument, it is up to the opponent to produce the evidence to refute that contention. Bart cannot expect his opponents to produce further evidence when he has said or done nothing to counter the initial assertions. If he thinks quantitative evidence will supply his side with proof, then he must supply it. No evidence of any merit relies on the possibility of its own existence.

If Bart is suggesting that statistics would show something else, I welcome him to explain what he is talking about.

William, at 9:45 am EDT on July 21, 2005

If you smear the messenger, perhaps you can bury your head in the sand about the facts. Look, academia in the humanities is so far left it is simply unquestionable. Spend some time with a critical ear. Do your colleagues often bash Bush, Republicans, Fox News, and other conservatives with the implicit assumption that you share their views? A colleague of mine told me, “I can’t imagine that anybody in our department voted for Bush.” Wrong. But that is the ready assumption. Democrats are typically toward the right-wing of humanities departments.

Necessarily Closet Conservative, at 1:28 pm EDT on July 21, 2005

Excuse me, but none of the conservative critics of my column have responded to its main points: that the big conservative foundations and many of those they fund, while posing as impartial champions of academic freedom, are in effect hired enforcers for the Republican Party and its corporate backers, while the same cannot be said for either “liberal” foundations or for university faculties in the humanities, in relation to the Democratic Party (in which few have the same kind of direct influence or support) or to corporate or any other sponsors. True or false? Evidence to the contrary?

The responses to date are classic illustrations of the desperate ruses conservatives use to evade and obscure central issues.

Donald Lazere, at 4:37 pm EDT on July 21, 2005

Donald says that people in Right wing think tanks are “hired enforcers” for the Republicans. But this is to deny them any independent commitment to Right-wing causes and ideas. It could be that they actually believe in what they say, and that the think tanks are the only institutions that allow them a means to act upon it.

As for the remark that there is no necessary connection between the professors’ voter registration and their outlook in the classroom, that may be true in the empirical disciplines, but in education, law, the humanities, and the softer social sciences it is hard to credit. It also goes against the prevailing social theories in those very disciplines.

mark, at 9:13 am EDT on July 22, 2005

What’s your problem, pal?

OK .. I’ll simplify it, for you, Willie ..

The “America is always wrong” crowd is comprised of multi-millionaire Michael Moore and his like-minded Democrats, Ford Foundation leadership (vs. Ford Motor Co., which has its own foundation), and taxpayer-funded academics like the author. That is part of the vast left-wing conspiracy.

The author describes the right-wing conspiracy as Horowitz, his benefactor Mr. Scaife, et al.

The author is seriously deluded, if he thinks the average person would accept his contention that the left-wing conspiracy has been powerless against the right-wing conspiracy.

That is what elections are for, and his side lost in 2004 — period. Grow up, and get over it — China and India are taking U.S. jobs.

Bart, at 10:47 am EDT on July 22, 2005

William:With his increasing ad hominem attacks, his O’Reilly-style invective, his recycling of trite slogans ("vast leftwing conspiracy,” “get over it,” etc.), and his unending non sequiturs, I think Bart has more than adequately demonstrated his unwillingness and/or inability to engage in any kind of civil, substantive discussion of the issues. To the extent that his behavior is characteristic of much conservative public discourse these days (e.g., Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, Liddy, O’Reilly, Michael Reagan, et al.), it goes against the very grain of rational intellectual thought as fostered in the academy and thus undermines his (and Horowitz’s) clamoring for a more ideologically-balanced professoriate.

In any case, he’s made your point for you. I wouldn’t waste any more time on him.

Tom, at 1:46 pm EDT on July 22, 2005

Professor Lazere accuses his critics of not responding to his main point that, unlike conservative foundations and think tanks,liberal foundations have few personnel who have been visible figures in the Democratic Party. Setting aside for the moment the weakness of his simplistic equation of “conservatism” with corporate interests and the GOP agenda, he apparently hasn’t made the slightest attempt to check the facticity of his own assertions about “liberal foundations.

He mentions four liberal foudations — Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie and MacArthur. I’ve gone to thier websites as Lazere might easily have done and looked for bios of thier trustees. Extended bios aren’ t available for the Ford and Rockefeller trustees, but they are for those of the Carnegie Corporation and the MacArthur Foundation. Of the thirteen members of the MacArthur board two — Drew Days and Jamie Gorelick — were senior Clinton Administration officials, the former serving as Solicitor General, the latter as Deputy Attorney General. Among the sixteen trustees of the Carnegie Corporation,two are prominent Democratic politicians, former Governor James Hunt of North Carolina, and former Governor of South Carolina and Clinton Education Secretary, Richard Riley. Also on the board is Timothy Pickering, a career diplomat who was appointed Under Secretary of State by President Clinton. In addition, the board contains one prominent Republican politician, Tom Kean, the former Governor of New Jersey, widely regrded as a member of the party’s liberal wing. (Another member of the board who might be regarded as having some political significance is Janet L. Robinson, president of the New York Times Company.)

Lazere also mentions Robert Reich as an example of that “rare exception,” a faculty liberal who has played an insider role in the Democratic Party or a Democratic presidential administration. Strange that Larry Summers and Donna Shalala, academics who also served in the Clinton cabinet should have slipped his mind. Then there’s also Mary Frances Berry, currently professor of history at Penn, and former Assistant Secretary of Education in the Carter administration and Chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission through the Clinton years. Reich is hardly rare.

Can such sloppy argumentation have any credibility?

Glenn

Glenn, at 9:17 pm EDT on July 22, 2005

Thanks to Glen for FINALLY providing some substantial evidence, of the kind that can advance a reasoned, civil discussion. I stand corrected on some of the points he makes about liberal foundation executives’ and academics’ roles in the Democratic Party. With that concession, I will refine my argument as follows, with an invitation for further, good-faith refinement of these complex issues from either political side.

First, the role of executives and trustees in most “liberal” foundations, and their relationship to their corporate patrons as well as the Democrats, is much less militant than that of their Republican counterparts in the leading conservative foundations like Richard Mellon Scaife, William Simon, or the Coors family. To reiterate my original question, can anyone here claim that any of the foundation Democrats Glen mentioned were such “visibly partisan” political or cultural warriors? And I reiterate that, while the conservative foundations act directly in the interests of their executives, patron corporations and the Republicans—in the manner of lobbies—the liberal foundations’ support of projects contrary to their wealthy patrons’ class interests seems to be evidence of philanthropic rather than propagandistic motives. What do conservatives think motivates them?

As for liberal academics in Democratic administrations, yes, I should have mentioned Donna Shalala and Mary Frances Berry along with Robert Reich. But Larry Summers? With Democrats like him, or Richard Riley as Clinton’s Secretary of Education, who needs Republicans? Who among these has the omnipresent public visibility and partisan belligerence of Horowitz, Bill Bennett, Lynne Cheney, or Bill Kristol (a Harvard Ph.D who was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff and who currently acts as a Republican point man at Rupert Murdoch’s The Weekly Standard and on every TV interview show)?

This gets into the whole question of what it means for academics to be Democrats. My column did not delve into the complex of reasons that most faculty members, at least in the humanities and social sciences, vote Democratic. Whatever the significance of that fact may be, it is diminished by the very diffuseness of the Democratic Party, which is splintered between its conservative, centrist, and liberal wings (the first two, which have prevailed in recent decades, being barely distinguishable from the Republicans in their captivity to corporate big money). Many who vote for Democrats as the lesser of evils detest those like the Clintons and Kerry who consistently sell out liberal and left constituencies, and would prefer a European-style multiparty system including socialist and labor parties.

What might a really liberal Democratic administration look like? How’s this?

President: Bernie Sanders Vice President: Maxine Walters Secretary of State: Noam Chomsky Secretary of Defense: Daniel Ellsberg Attorney General: Lani Guinier Secretary of the Treasury: Paul Krugman Secretary of Commerce: Ralph Nader Secretary of Labor: John Sweeney (has a union leader ever held this post?) Secretary of Education: Jonathan Kozol Secretary of HUD: Jesse Jackson Secretary of Health and Human Services: Barbara Ehrenreich Secretary of the Interior: Lisa Renstrom (President, Sierra Club) Secretary of Agriculture: Wendell Berry National Endowment for the Humanities: Toni Morrison, Cornel West, or Fredric Jameson Head of FCC: Jeff Cohen (of Fairness and Accuracy in Media)Presidential Press Secretary: Molly Ivins

I am joking, of course, but my point is that any administration of real liberals would be anathema to the present Democratic power elite.

Donald Lazere, at 2:44 pm EDT on July 25, 2005

Since you ask, Bob, my goal is not a Euro-Socialist government, but as an English teacher trying to foster critical thinking and civic literacy, I do consider one of my goals making students aware of a full range of ideological perspectives. That includes a broadening of the American political, journalistic, and educational range of ideological perspectives that would allow more of a hearing for democratic socialist and social-democratic ideas, which are part of the cultural mainstream in most other contemporary democracies (as anyone with the slightest knowledge of the world beyond American ethnocentrism knows). The range of American political discourse is pathetically limited to often-superficial differences and trivial debates between two equally corrupt parties that are captive to corporate America and the military-industrial complex. Political parties come and go historically; who ordained that the Republicans and Democrats are eternal verities as the only American options?

I don’t think even most conservative intellectuals, though they revile socialism, believe that democratic socialist views should be banned from American public discourse. But America today has a weakened working class and long-lost socialist presence, caused partly by the discrediting of American socialism by the dominance of the Communist Party in the 20th Century. Corporations and the profit motive run just about everything. Can capitalists be expected to finance activities supporting socialistic policies, which are both unprofitable and in opposition to capitalism? So if college courses and foundations are among the few media that allow a voice for views not controlled by corporations, isn’t that healthy for the cause of free thought and expression? (This is not to condone voicing them in a coercive manner, which is as deplorable as suppressing them.)

Why are conservatives so terrified at the notion of socialist views being expressed in these realms that they have poured hundreds of millions of dollars in the past thirty years into overwhelming them? Why do they hysterically depict corporate-servant Democrats like Clinton and Kerry as radical socialists? And why do they smear democratic socialists by distorting their beliefs and equating them with their deadly enemy, Communism—when such red-baiting would be recognized as nonsensical anywhere else in the world? Hillary Clinton’s timid steps toward national health insurance, long taken for granted in other democracies, were savaged by conservatives, led by Bill Kristol, as a slippery slope toward the Gulag Archipelago.

Then there’s the kind of self-contradiction Bob expresses. Half the time conservatives demonize teaching socialist views as a menace to American youth. The other half they ridicule teaching socialist views because they are out of the American mainstream and scoff that their “goal. . . is 50+ years off.” Well, if these views are so marginal, shouldn’t they perhaps be encouraged, as a safeguard against a capitalist monopoly restricting free thought, rather than reviled? Bob’s phrasing seems to imply that democratic socialism is an idea ahead of its time in America. If it takes 50 years to nurture a social advance, why not let the nurturing begin instead of trying to stifle it?

Donald Lazere, at 5:05 pm EDT on July 27, 2005

In what I imagine will be the final word in this discussion, I must say I am disappointed at the lack of substantive conservative responses to my column and follow-ups. I hoped for a reasoned, civil level of argument from colleagues like my friends in NAS (who always vaunt their commitment to academic civility), not the incoherent, irrelevant ravings and personal insults that marked most of the responses, with Glen’s being the most admirable exception.

Most of the responses just kept referring back to the conservative studies showing a preponderance of Democrats in academia. But I never disputed these studies here, and they were irrelevant to my arguments. This is yet another instance of the way Republicans these days appear to be trained to argue: “Stay on message” and “Just keep repeating your talking points,” “Obfuscate, insult, and toss in every non sequitur and red herring you can think of,” to evade responding to substantive rebuttals of your positions.

Few of the responses even TRIED to refute my following key points:

1. The major conservative foundations to a large extent fund think tanks, organizations like NAS, and individuals, not as autonomous scholars, but as propagandists for corporate-capitalist ideology. These foundations are also branches of the Republican Party attack apparatus, though their beneficiaries include a handful of conservative Democrats to provide a fig leaf of nonpartisanship. Comparable arguments cannot reasonably be made about “liberal” foundations in relation to their parent corporations (whose motives appear to be more philanthropic than propagandistic), or to the Democratic Party, in the sense of foundation executives being bellicose party chieftains like Richard Mellon Scaife and William Simon. (Partial exceptions are George Soros’s foundations and the Center for American Progress, though they again support projects opposed to their patrons’ own corporate interests, and were conceived recently and precisely as a counterforce to the conservative foundations.) Despite the unquestioned intellectual integrity of some beneficiaries of the conservative foundations, they are in an intrinsically compromised situation, which they should at least honestly acknowledge and deal with by showing that they are willing to deviate from the corporate and Republican party line, in the manner of Nathan Glazer. (I could be wrong about all this, of course, and I am open to further substantive evidence to the contrary, along the lines of Glen’s.)

2. Few Democratic academics are comparable, in being ensconced in the higher circles of their party and in constant public visibility, to Republican culture warriors like David Horowitz William J. Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Irving and William Kristol. They do as much to politicize culture and education as any tenured radical and have the power few Democratic academics have, to incite government action against their academic opponents.

3. To make a big deal out of most academics being Democrats is to ignore the diffuseness and inner divisions of the Democratic Party, whose present leaders are not sharply different from the Republicans in their captivity to corporate big money and the military-industrial complex. A more meaningful distinction would be between mainstream Democrats and those who would prefer a European-style multi-party system including socialist and labor parties. I argued that college teachers are justified in presenting students with the latter perspective, to broaden cognitive options beyond the parochially narrow scope of the Democrat-Republican binary. (In a hilarious non sequitur, Bob “refuted” this argument by saying I should be personally obliged to give away all my money to the poor! He also implied that it is hypocritical of socialists to benefit from Social Security; perhaps he is unaware that Republicans railed against it in its New Deal origin as socialistic, or that we all finance it through payroll deductions.)

4. Conservatives like Bart, Bob, and some of the legislators pushing the “Academic Bill of Rights” seem to have the idea that professors, especially in public colleges, should just conform to the will of the majority of “taxpayers” at any given moment (though that will is notoriously fickle, as in the reversal of public opinion in support of the Iraq War). These conservatives need a crash course in the concepts of academic autonomy and the history of figures in the humanistic tradition whose enduring greatness lay in their defiance of majority opinion and government authority in their day, like Socrates, Jesus Christ, the American Puritans and Revolutionary leaders, Henry David Thoreau, and Martin Luther King. Thus the public should recognize that teachers in the humanities do their duty precisely by acting as a Socratic gadfly to the body politic. (I think David Horowitz understands this, though many of the politicians jumping on his bandwagon don’t.)

5. My column concluded with an invitation to conservative intellectuals to collaborate with liberals and leftists in compiling an objective study of the relative financing of the American right and left, encompassing corporations, unions, the military, the media, advocacy organizations including religious ones, PAC’s, lobbies, law firms, advertising and public relations agencies, foundations, think tanks, and professional organizations, as well as all branches of universities, colleges, primary and secondary education. And I invited the conservative foundations to help fund this study. What objection could they or anyone else have to such a proposal? If they think it would support their side, shouldn’t they rush to fund it? I’m still waiting.

In all seriousness, I ask my friends in NAS whether they consider conservative arguments at the level of Bart’s and Bob’s respectable and embrace their authors as allies. I hope not, any more than I accept Ward Churchill as an ally. If they do, alas, perhaps the inference to be drawn is that the paucity of Republican professors might be due less to Democratic bias than to Republicans’ lack of concern for reasoning and arguing coherently at all.

By the way, David Horowitz, whom I do consider a capable polemicist, has agreed to an online dialogue with me pursuing these matters, on his blog discoverthenetwork.com. Stay tuned.

Donald Lazere, at 2:02 pm EDT on July 29, 2005

Advocacy

In reference to Lazare’s point that the far left is not represented as much in government, if you think about this, neither is the far right. For anyone that wants to have a comparative cabinet of Nazis to the Socialistic, the answer of the lack of representation of the far left could easily be replicated on the far right, if we are to simply go to the rolls of the National Socialist Movement (i.e. the American Nazi party).

The actual government for the last century has been far more moderate than anyone on either side would like to admit. This is not a bad situation – think about the implications of seeing Ted Kennedy shaking hands with a National Socialist Movement Senator as they have defeated some Republican idea, or of Tom DeLay shaking hands with a Communist Representative, having defeated some Democratic idea. This would be enough to truly infuriate the moderates, even if the Congress were more representative of the wide range of immoderate beliefs.

As for the connection of political affiliation and research, it is utterly preposterous to assume that the idea that political opinions never end up in research. They do, and a quick reading of the subject lines of research on, say, welfare, or affirmative action will show that the majority favor the more liberal positions. This reflects not that more Americans favor these ideas or that they are inherently better, but rather that more researchers are working from these premises.

The University system is predominantly leftist to the point that most people, who are not, but have an interest in research either give up or go to enclaves of conservativism – think tanks, where their views are appreciated, rather than ostracized as “ignorant” or “evil.”

The funding, I believe, comes more because that the corporations see research that they agree with, and therefore, provide funding to have continue. I am quite certain that the vast majority of the researchers in Republican think tanks would still hold the same opinions even if they were in academia or in the corporate world – the companies don’t so much create scholarship as support that which they agree with.

Some of the most liberal groups in the world are taxpayer funded (look at the institutes at UC-Berkeley). There is little need, therefore, for rich liberals to fund groups to represent their interests – university scholarship is weighted in that direction, as is the taxpayer funded research. This is no less questionable than the corporate funded institutes – when does the government welfare programs get questioned, except as not being generous enough by these university institutes? How about the very idea that the government has to pay for research?

Lastly, it should be pointed out that on the average, there are a lot few rich liberals than rich conservatives, and that typically, rich liberals have connections to the finite resources of foundations, rather than the massive wealth of fortune 500 companies. It may be a case of not having the money to launch and support ultra-liberal think tanks to the same degree, not that it would be unethical to do so, even if they found it necessary.

Kevin, Undergraduate, at 2:01 pm EDT on August 17, 2005

Party (liberal) does equal bias

In my own 4 years of college I ran into only one overtly liberal democrat professor who stated both his own bias at the beginning and who did not let his bias affect the way he ran the classroom. On the other hand I ran into over a dozen overtly liberal professors who did in fact let their liberal bias dictate their policies. One professor (English Department) specifically took points off for in her words “politically incorrect speech or writing". Another was so overtly biased that she spent most of the class praising Bill Clinton and saying “Republicans were evil". Still another was biased as to claim the greates president in the history of the US was Bill Clinton because “he created so many jobs". Her reasoning for this was one day she went into a department store that was very busy (during the Christmas season) and when talking to the sales lady she found out that the store was hiring. I of course couldn’t let that go so I pointed out that during Clinton’s presidency the greatest wave of bank consolodation occured causing the loss of hundreds of thousands of banking jobs. Of course not only my personal knowledge led to this fact but the previously mentioned liberal un-biased prof, could back me up (you see before being a professor his job was with a HR company who was contracted to send out those thousands of termination notices to people during the Clinton years.)

And of course there was the Anthropology Professor whose Leftist bias infected every part of the course. One example from our test was a true false question “All sociologist have proven that gun control prevents crime?” The answer is obviously false since UMass professors of sociology conducted a study that was biased to prove that very point and found the evidence overwhelming that gun control does not reduce crime. But if you wrote false you got it wrong. She would stick to the textbook regardless of whether it was right or not. And anything, that did not agree with its leftist bias, was rejected. The entire textbook was nothing more than leftwing propaganda. If you agreed with her anything you said was accepted on face value, but if you disagreed with her or the book you would be shouted down and accused of being disruptive, and that your argument was unsupported, after one class I made a point to bring in stacks of studies to prove my point. She once even accused me of not providing sufficient evidence to prove my point when I was the only one in the class to list and bring in my references, and studies. Facts never stood the the way of her pushing her politics. (she of course was the department head who had final decision on disagreements regarding the class.)

In that 4 years I also had only one actually conservative professor and he was a Physical Science professor (chemistry, physics, geology).

And further I had only 2 or three professors that had absolutely no overt political bias from which you could determine.

But all the rest were liberal and all promoted their liberlism through the courses they taught, but not to the degree as the prviously mentioned ones.

For those of whom think that I am complaining because of grades, out of 41 classes taken, I got 1 B (Intro to Anthropology (a 100 level) liberal teacher previously mentioned, with “A"s from 3 other Anthropogogy Professors (all 300 and 400 level courses), 2 “A-"s (the previously mentioned English prof was one the other was a Business Law class, for which I would have gotten an “A” if not for the fact that I was working a job that required lots of overtime, and I was awake for over 50 straight hours without sleep or study time right before taking the final). That’s it everything else was straight “A"s even in the classes with very liberlly biased professors, who desperately looked for anything, in some cases, to avoid giving me the grade I got and deserved.

Gerry, at 6:55 pm EDT on July 25, 2006