BIASED GRADING? (Warning: mini-dissertation.) Kitchen Cabinet finds a post critical of the war effort headed The C-Student War. Kitchen Cabinet correctly recalls that the Vietnam War was a production of the self-described "Best and Brightest" (there is a great, albeit dark Doonesbury cartoon from the mid-1970s in which several guys attending a party as "the best and the brightest" lay some hubris on other guests, "We can win the war in Vietnam!" after which Mike Doonesbury remarks, "what has happened to us?) and that production didn't turn out very well for anybody. Captain Indignant, on the other hand, suggests there is a necessary role for the U.N. (enlighten me, please?) One wonders if the A grades and the C grades aren't being assigned on the basis of agreement with Generally Accepted Mushy Good Intentions rather than on any substance. The Paul Krugman column Captain Indignant links to goes on in a similar vein: the absence of any Grand Plans after the toppling of the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party cause the professor to furrow his brow. (I have to wonder, however, if these same people wouldn't be complaining about cultural insensitivity, or hegemonic biases, or some other Intolerance, if Defense and State had Grand Plans for the future Afghanistan and Iraq.)

Perhaps it is Captain Indignant (whose background I'm not familiar with) and Professor Krugman (who ought to know better, his recent professional writings on suburbanization show some awareness of emergent systems and spontaneous order) who deserve a C (or, as it's the holy season, the benefit of an Incomplete) for arguing from a weak model. As Command Post notes, the notion of showing up for work even if the Ba'ath Party is no longer around to tell you to do so is a new idea in Iraq, and the notion of starting your own business may take time to catch on. It strikes me as presumptuous in the extreme to argue that there's any kind of Grand Plan that anybody (United Nations, State Department, Northern Illinois University faculty senate) could design for Iraq or Afghanistan that would have any hope of working.

(Footnote: Paul Krugman's New York Times columns do not rise to the standard he has set in his professional writings. It is useful to visit Hoystory or stay alert to unrefereed comments such as this article (hat tip: Common Sense and Wonder.) Perhaps in the midst of all the selective interpretation of the spin is something resembling the truth, but getting at it is oft a lot of work.)

Perhaps the reason Mushy Good Intentions earn undeserved As is that Mushy Good Intentions oft go unchallenged for too long. Consider today's first academic atrocity, again from an Ivy League university. Students Eliana Johnson and James Kirchick filed a report on a teach-in with Front Page, a site that doesn't like the academic Left. Yale professor Jim Sleeper keyed an op-ed for the Yale Daily News making a case for civility. But even he is not immune from sloppy thinking. Start with his thesis: "But we do endure something more chronic and perfectly legal: the belligerence of some students who think themselves entitled to subject their peers and even professors to baiting, ridicule, and ad hominem attack." So far, so good. Logic and content are supposed to rule. But read on: "Unlike us in 1968, though, none of you has to risk your life, fortune, or sacred honor for your convictions. You haven't had to oppose this war by risking imprisonment and life as a felon. You haven't had to support it by serving in it -- and I note that none of the Fedayeen Uncle Sams who've intimidated people here has enlisted, as did many Yalies whose names and dreams outlasted their 20s only on those icy, marble walls." Hasn't the good professor crossed the line into baiting (you ingrates aren't old enough to have protested President Johnson's war with your graduate student deferment, let alone to be conscripted into and subsequently killed in President Roosevelt's war) and the ad hominem (never had to go to Canada, never had to meet a payroll, blah blah blah.)

Hugh Hewitt has pointed out some other problems with Professor Sleeper's logic, with the thanks of Power Line, and SCSU Scholars have located a rejoinder by the students, with a response from Professor Sleeper (just keep scrolling.) Clearly, the war at home, over what kind of culture we are going to have, and whether there is going to be viewpoint diversity at the universities, and whether there are going to be consistently applied standards of discourse, is a long way from over.

UPDATE: Kitchen Cabinet with some local knowledge of the Yale squabbles.