 | Adrienne Janney |
Change of pace: Instead of e-mailing me this week, drop a line to George Cantor.
Who?
He's a columnist for The Detroit News editorial page. (See: The Detroit News, "U-M students deal with own King Lear," 11/23/96.)
I hear he wrote about your mother.
OK, that's a lie. But he did write about you. And me. He thinks we're a bunch of apathetic anti-intellectuals.
(Am I paraphrasing you right, George? Can I call you George? You know, it's a Gen-X thing. I have no manners.)
On what information does he base his theories?
He places students to the far right of the faculty with a survey of 29 students. A non-scientific poll, I assure you. He wrote that the day after election day a professor asked a political science class who they voted for - he reported that 15 voted for Clinton and 14 did not.
Hel-LO.
Who did the other 14 vote for? Old big ears? Bob "Just don't do it" Dole? Ralph Nader write-in? Your mother write-in? (I told you she was in there. Somewhere.)
What's more, George Cantor thinks that 29 people is a representative sample of the student body. "I don't think that is a terribly inaccurate profile of the university's student body," he wrote of us.
Obviously, he did not take statistics here - 29 does not a sample of 40,000 make. And what poli-sci class was that anyway ...?
Cantor is confused on other topics. He thinks we "elected" Lee Bollinger as the new University president. George: select. Since when do eight regents making decisions on a board get to be called an election?
Semantics aside, Cantor could not have attended the interviews. He believes the focus was on affirmative action and diversity. The regents were more concerned about the budget and the hospital than one candidate's handling of a sexual harassment case.
Then he jumps into "King Lear." 'Zwounds. Sorry dude. I'm the English major. You stepped all over my intellectual specialty. Get out your swords.
And just who is supposed to be Lear in this scenario? Who's crazy - the students or the administration?
Cantor wrote of the presidential search, "It all reminded me of the scene in King Lear in which the aging monarch's daughters compete to express their adoration for daddy. Lear, being gaga at the time, goes into a fury when Cordelia answers honestly ... She is cut off from the throne and disinherited.
"That's pretty much how it's done in Ann Arbor, too."
Expletive. Oh! :) Sorry. That was the Gen-X in me again.
Then he brings Proposition 209 into the picture - on which, may I remind you, most University students did not vote. Then he signals the downfall of universities due to a changing definition.
Well, now we get down to some meat. Yes, universities are changing - the federal government is anti-financial aid, and the Michigan Legislature isn't particularly fond of the University. But the students here are just trying to scrape by, so pardon us if we'd like to get the "ticket punched" ASAP. We're broke.
I do see my degree as a ticket to the rest of my life, to my career - you've got to have one these days, so they tell me.
But my experience here is something altogether different and invaluable. I'm a different person than I was in the fall of 1993, academically and otherwise. And what I've got to sell are my mind, my skills, my experience - not my soon-to-be BA in English, but what I learned getting there.
"Lear, of course, died blind and crazy. Maybe U-M will do better." Thank you for sharing, George. Guess we're all going down with the ship. But as you noted before, Lear was crazy to at the beginning. We may be contentious - and we may have a diverse array of beliefs here - but blind and crazy we are not. Lear is a tragedy. And our education is not. Let's keep that in mind.
University life is a "social experiment," Mr. Cantor. Ask anyone living in the dorms. And no matter how much I kvetch, the University is comfortably liberal. A little insulated, maybe, but still liberal.
As for affirmative action, Cantor was too busy with the poli-sci classes to notice the turnout of 150 very un-apathetic minorities at the Michigan Student Assembly affirmative action vote. The only member of the assembly who voted for the California-style anti-affirmative action resolution was the one who proposed it. One person abstained. The other 48 elected representatives voted it down. So much for Prop. 209 at Michigan.
The conservative forces you picture invading the campus are from way outside. University education in the United States faces plenty of problems. This just isn't one you can pin on the students.
Pick on someone your own size, Cantor. You're outnumbered 40,000 to 1.
- Don't write to me. Write Cantor.