Saturday, May 10, 2014

More On Rutgers Commencement Trainwreck

Open Thread: Classy College Sports, Rutgers Edition
This is my alma mater twice over.  Sad to see corpulent wreck Chris Christie's Midas-touch-in-reverse extending to New Jersey's finest educational institution.
"… This all begins with idiots and their awful dreams. Rutgers, New Jersey's state university, is one of the few institutions in the state that can broadly be said to work very well, and has survived the fat-fingered kleptocrats and reptiles and backslapping sociopaths that have attempted to loot or compromise it from the governor's mansion… [School president Dr. Robert] Barchi's mandate at Rutgers has been twofold, although the two are related. The job Barchi clearly regards as foremost is that of implementing Governor Chris Christie's over- haul of the state's higher education system, a costly and dubiously necessary process done without any state aid, at a school that is already awash in some very dumb debt. Barchi was also tasked with gigging various college rankings systems to increase the school's profile — out-of-state tuition is the last, best plan to pay for all this… Because this entire gambit was conceived and executed by idiots — or, more precisely, cynical technocrats without any great respect for the importance of an institution like Rutgers in a state like New Jersey — we have gotten what we've gotten. The goonish pretense that led the school to invite Condoleezza Rice to give the address in the first place, because she is a famous political person — and then have to rescind the invitation because a great many students and faculty consider her to be, um, a war criminal — is symptomatic of this. A former Secretary of State, even this semi-disgraced former Secretary of State, is the sort of speaker that Barchi's Rutgers would have giving a commencement speech. But, because this is Barchi's Rutgers, this is the Secretary of State they got. The decision to offer the honor to Eric LeGrand, the unsinkable and happily heroic former Rutgers player who was paralyzed in a game, was a corrective — here, after an embarrassment, was the one Rutgers alum that most everyone in New Jersey feels good about. The decision to take that invitation back and give it to Tom Kean, a perfectly decent governor from the state's long line of Anthropomorphized Boat Shoe elites, whose last year in Trenton was 1990, was a return to that parodic pretense. The late-breaking decision to have LeGrand speak as well is laudable, but the broader gong show remains what it is…"

Typos courtesy of my iPhone

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