The Republican wannabees are all making their pilgrimages to a single institution of Higher Learning, these days. Regent University. And why not. As Rudi Giuliani said the other day to the faculty and students there: "The Amount Of Influence You Have Is Really, Really Terrific." Regent University is Pat Robertson's place: Christian Leadership to Change the World. If you've never heard of Regent, and its amazing academic stature, it's probably because you haven't been perusing the rankings in the U.S. News and World Report evaluation of higher education. Well, maybe you have and just didn't get that far. How far? Far.
Regent is a "tier four" school. There isn't a tier five. Tier four is as low as you can go. They are tied for 136th place, according to Think Progress.That doesn't mean that if you graduate from there you have no decent "life chances," however. One in six graduates work for the federal government, 150 in the Bush administration. Some are pretty well known:
Monica Goodling, the former top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who graduated from Regent's law school, perhaps best exemplifies the "terrific" influence Regent is exerting on the nation. Last month, Goodling admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had "taken inappropriate political considerations into account" while hiring career employees at the Justice Department. At one point she even pressured Michael Battle, head of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, to replace two long-standing Justice officials with "a fellow Regent law school graduate." (Think Progress)
If the next President is one of the Regent U. pilgrims (Mitt Romeny was there before Rudi and probably some other of these jokers), we can expect Big Things for Higher Ed. I'm getting my grant proposal for the National Institute of Intelligent Design ready now. I'm using a random number generator.
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Damn, I should have applied to Regent and scrapped microbiology for theology! I could be out there, right now, converting innumerable heathen bacteria and pagan viruses to the light of the Lord! Onward, Christian soldiers!
C. Porter has a but of a point. Maybe we can be a "fifth column" and join the fundy movement. Then we could sabotage it from within with the use of cool logic and righteous reason.
Well, as Saint Ronnie once said, "Facts are stupid things". But achieving the LibU variety of stubborn ignorance requires quite a bit of hard work, too. You need to stay abreast of every distinction between Reality and Making-Our-Own-Reality, learn to pretend that you can't see inconvenient data when it conflicts with this news cycle's conventional wisdom, and master every hairsbreath distinction between competing philosophies, whether it be premillenial dispensationalists vs. antidispensationalists or neoStraussians vs. paleoHegelians. Think of the Ptolemaic astronomers, spending their lives working out the extremely complicated mathematics of a system based on an entirely incorrect understanding of the universe. Unless you've got a native gift for a certain kind of social networking, it's probably less stressful just to stick to hard science.
Thats right. You dont have to go to Regent if you are a liberal, you can be a Rhodes Scholar and end up in Moscow somehow during the 60's.... Whats that guys name..... Clinton I do believe.
Look I dont get my jolly's beating up where someone speaks or goes to school. You go where votes are if you are a politician. I draw the line though when your name is Gore and you are caught red handed taking money that has been funneled to an election campaign. These guys are Americans, the other ones aint.
Everyone makes their own reality and we live within its boundaries. Sometimes that reality coincidentally works along that of someone else. As for not seeing inconvenient data I would suggest that as with everything else, prove it AnneL. Those are some of the best new labels I have seen for people that the lefties have come up with. Your suggestion about the Ptolemy's is well taken. Its like I said before its what you believe. If you were Catholic in the 1300's you KNEW that the earth was flat. If you were English in the mid 1600's you KNEW that all of the planets orbits were totally cylindrical around the sun. In the 1960's you KNEW that heart transplants were impossible. In 2000 you KNEW that no terrorist would ever be dumb enough to attack the US because of the reprisals we could carry out.
Its that reality thing... keeps getting in the way of good clean science.
"Everyone makes their own reality and we live within its boundaries."
Somehow, I suspect this isn't a philosophy Regent would want to be associated with. And as far as I'm concerned, that's one thing they've got going for them.