The Case Against Mortarboarding

The Case Against Mortarboarding
Burt Prelutsky
Friday, July 24, 2009

I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America. One minute, it seems the kids are sane, or at least as sane as one can expect of 18-year-olds, and the next thing you know they’re parroting the likes of Ward Churchill, William Ayers and Noam Chomsky, bad-mouthing America and yodeling the praises of such left-wing troglodytes as Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and Barack Obama.

I feel their frustration. Even if the little nincompoops can’t do long division or write a coherent sentence, parents feel like child abusers if they don’t pony up the dough to send their kids off for what is laughingly referred to as higher education.

If I were running things, most high school grads would enter trade schools. America will always need nurses, plumbers, carpenters, glaziers and mechanics. What nobody needs is some 21-year-old schnook who’s wasted four years and most of his inheritance majoring in black, Hispanic or lesbian studies. And then, to make matters worse, because like the Scarecrow of Oz, they have a sheepskin, they’re actually convinced they’re smarter than their parents.

One of my readers, Penny Alfonso, of Glendale, California, shared a conversation she had with her daughter. “I told her I won’t pay the tuition for any classes that end in the word “studies”. I have also told her that while I have no right to tell her how to think, if she comes home hating America and spewing the lies of the leftists, I will tell her I love her, and that she has the right to believe whatever she wants to believe, but I don’t have to pay for it. In the 20 years of her life, if she’s learned nothing else, she has learned that I am completely serious about this.”

If more parents adopted this attitude, the state of education would improve in a hurry. The lefty professors want to mold young minds, but the administrators just want your money. So use your clout where it counts. Adopt Mrs. Alfonso’s declaration as a Bill of Parental Rights.

Of course, the other thing I would promote is an end to the tenure system. The original idea behind it was to protect professors from being fired because of their unpopular political beliefs, but in 2009, conservatives aren’t hired in the first place, so the only people whose jobs come with a lifetime guarantee are those addlebrained morons, safely ensconced in the Humanities, espousing liberal claptrap.

Somebody recently took me to task for referring to Michael Jackson as a pedophile. This yutz pointed out that Jackson had never been convicted in a court of law, as if that proved anything. The fact remains that the King of Pap had paid out millions of dollars in hush money to keep a case from going to trial. And, by his own admission, he admitted he enjoyed sleeping with young boys. Where I come from, if it waddles, swims and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

Whenever people use that court of law argument to make a point, I know they’re desperate. Heck, O.J. Simpson and Al Capone were never convicted of murder, and Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Idi Amin and Kim Jong-il, have never even been convicted of jay-walking.

Something else I always find irksome is when Obama’s liberal groupies, along with a few conservative commentators, deny that the President is a left-wing ideologue. All of his schemes, from gobbling up car companies and banks to nationalizing health care and redistributing wealth, show his true colors. As I say, if it waddles, swims and quacks like a duck, feel free to pop it in the oven and serve it with string beans and sweet potatoes at Christmas.


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