College Students with Subterranean I.Q's.

[Warph]

Just when you think the folks on the left can't get any goofier, they go and surpass themselves.  If silliness were an Olympic event, these lunkheads could be counted on to bring home the gold. The fool's gold, that is.

Actually, they could probably excel in the sprints, seeing as how they're not weighed down with a whole lot of common sense. In case you haven't gotten the word, the religious left, as I like to think of them, seeing as how they live their lives by a certain dogma, have now determined that poor people are terribly under-represented on America's college campuses.  It was, I suppose, only a matter of time.  After all, if no institute of higher education can justify its existence unless its student population is composed of X-percent of women, hispanics, blacks, gays and the physically handicapped, some Democrat was bound to notice that there still remained an untapped source of future votes; namely, poor, young whites.

Diversity in the student body is the catch phrase.  But, as you may have noticed, there is no parallel diversity along the faculties.  In the humanities departments of most American colleges, professors run the gamut from liberal to radical.  Given a choice between Ahmadinejad and a Republican, a large majority would vote for the little dwarf schmuck in the windbreaker.

Frankly, I see no reason to give preferential treatment to students for no better reason than that their parents are poor.  If a mix of humanity is what they're really seeking, I say they should throw open the doors to idiots.  And, no, I'm not referring to those aforementioned professors in the liberal arts who get paid a lot of money for doing nothing more than foisting their half-baked politics on a bunch of highly impressionable 18-year-olds.  No, I'm talking about the genuine article -- people with subterranean I.Q's.

I mean, if diversity is of such monumental importance, why limit it to race, gender and national origin?  Obviously, members of these groups have far more in common with each other than they have with the intellectually- challenged -- or whatever it is that the P.C. crowd is calling dumb people this week.

Honestly, I haven't a clue why college would be a more exalting experience just because the student in the next seat has different pigmentation or hails from a country where indoor plumbing is optional.

Admittedly, it's been many years since I was a collegian.  Still, as I recall, the real value of the years spent, aside from learning how to drink and how to talk to women without stuttering, was the enforced proximity to the minds and works of Socrates, Newton, Freud, Shakespeare, Plato, Milton, Michelangelo, Einstein, Da Vinci and Jefferson, and was neither enhanced nor diminished by the color or creed of the other students.

The truth of the matter was that my interest in my fellow scholars, and I don't think my attitude was at all atypical, was limited to wanting to date the more attractive coeds and wanting to eviscerate those brainiacs most likely to raise the class curve.

Inasmuch as smart, poor kids already receive academic scholarships, one can only assume that it's the stupid ones whom the social engineers are trying to cram through the ivyed portals.  But, inasmuch as once in, they're destined to flunk out, I have a better solution.  I suggest we take our lead from "The Wizard of Oz."  The Scarecrow, as you may recall, didn't waste four years boning up for final exams.  The great and powerful Oz merely handed him a diploma, and just like that, Scarecrow was squaring the hypotenuse and jabbering away like a young William F. Buckley, Jr.

Why not give diplomas to anybody who wants one?  In a day and age when people are wasting their parents' hard-earned money majoring in things like Gay Studies, Sit Coms of the 60's, and Comic Books as Literature, why not do the decent thing and just hand out sheepskins to anyone who says, "Please"?  A built-in bonus of my plan is that with all those goobers off the campuses, there would be additional parking spaces for the people studying to be doctors, mathematicians, and scientists.

After all, when all is said and done, most college graduates aren't really smarter than other people.  They just think they are.

There are new studies and new polls that strongly suggest that we are breeding increasingly stupid kids here in America.  Like our tasteless tomatoes, they merely look good and healthy.

I love Jay Leno's UCLA study. This isn't a Hollywood spoof, these are real answers:

Jay: What state holds the Kentucky Derby every year? 
Woman Student: Wha....?  [The woman student just stands there]
Jay: Think about it.... what state holds the.... Kentucky.... Derby every year?
Student: I know it this... it starts with a K.... Kansas?

Jay: Name the famous American author, Ernest....?
Woman student: Crump?
Jay:  Ernest Crump?  No, Ernest Hem....Heming...
Student: Ernest Hemington?

Jay:  Finish the name of this book: War And....?
Male student: Sex?

But of course there is more than one way to test intelligence.  So, while only 43% of our 17-year-olds know that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900, as opposed to, say, 1750-1800 or after 1950, they are very good at text-messaging.  They also probably know the names of Britney Spears' kids, which is more than Ms. Spears does at any given moment, but they have no idea why December 7, 1941, was a day of infamy.  They also don't know what "infamy" means.

What makes the situation even more pathetic is that these kids, for the most part, have a terrifically high opinion of themselves.  To be fair, nothing much has ever been asked of them, let alone demanded, and yet they are constantly being told how special they are. Hardly any of them are expected to do chores, and as teachers have been ordered by craven school boards to pass along any student who's breathing, D's are frowned upon and F's are verboten.  As a result, 18-year-olds, who can barely count up to 18 without taking off their shoes, automatically get their high school diplomas.

Part of the problem is that far too many parents don't place any particular emphasis on education.  They worry plenty if their kids aren't popular, but hardly at all if they can't write a coherent sentence or identify Tom Sawyer's best friend or name the inventor of the electric light bulb.

The fact is, you can't fault the kids when it's the parents who decide whether or not to contribute to the college alumni fund on no other basis than whether or not their alma mater fields winning football and basketball teams.

On top of that, you can hardly blame the youngsters for preferring to spend all their time exchanging confidences with their classmates than with the likes of Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dumas, when they see their adult role models vegetating most weeknights in the company of Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Ryan Seacrest.

This is not to say or even suggest that there are no brilliant young people out there who will grow up, in spite of everything, to design beautiful bridges, compose and perform gorgeous music, reach distant planets and, if we're lucky, even cure the diseases the space explorers will inevitably bring back with them.

However, the greatest danger of this backsliding into the abyss of ignorance, this 21st century version of the Dark Ages, where emotions and self-satisfaction constantly trump logic and intelligence, is that Democrats may never again lose a presidential election.

One of the many questions I asked some students was the best piece of advice they had ever received.  In most cases, the gist of their responses was that people should never cease pursuing their passion, whatever it might be.

Even I can't quibble with that.  I do believe that far too many people surrender their dreams far too soon.  I mean, unless you believe in reincarnation, this one life here on earth is all we have.  Why be so anxious to settle for less than you really want?

I have never been invited to give a commencement speech at a college graduation, and that is probably just as well, seeing as how the order of the day seems to be to praise the youngsters to the heavens, to insist that they're the shining hope of the future.  How could I, in good conscience, promote such nonsense when so many of them have squandered their parents' hard-earned money majoring in such kiddy fare as black studies, Hispanic studies, lesbian studies and binge-drinking?  When I see thousands and thousands of these so-called scholars gazing goo-goo eyed at Barack Hussein Obama as he utters endless banalities about hope and change, my own hope for the future doesn't extend much beyond the middle of next week.

Myth:  Educating children is too important to be left to the uncertainty of Market Competition.

Truth:  Educating children is too important to be left to a Government monopoly!

It always struck me that there was something wacky about teenagers, whose biggest decision in life has been to choose which of the dumb Hollywood comedies to go see this weekend, deciding what they'd be doing 50 years down the road.  Quite honestly, I don't know how I'd improve on the present system, but I think simple logic indicates there is something amiss about a 65-year-old selling insurance or fixing teeth or teaching phys ed because an 18-year-old, whose opinion he wouldn't trust to pick out a magazine, got to pick out his career.

Most of these commencement addresses are nothing more than a series of platitudes emphasizing the importance of courage, honesty and devoting one's life to good works. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with such speeches, aside from the fact that they fall on deaf ears and are typically sleep-inducing.  Most of the kids are not looking to slay dragons.  They're looking to find the fastest way to pay off student loans and get behind the wheel of a new BMW.  That's not to say that among the hordes of mortar-boarded youngsters there aren't a few who will make their mark in some extraordinary fashion, perhaps by curing a disease, inventing a low-cost fuel or even by becoming that most essential of human beings, an essayist.  But it won't be because they sat in cap and gown, sweltering in the sun, listening to a lot of hogwash.

If the responsibility were mine, I would not waste my time or theirs by trying to curry favor by comparing the young grads to the gods on Mount Olympus.  It's bad enough that their parents have already made too big a deal out of their having done little more than endure endless lectures, which only speaks well for their survival skills.

Instead, I would give them three pieces of practical advice, which, if followed, would do a great deal to improve everyday life in America.  First, I would advise the grads to always slow down when leaving their phone numbers on answering machines.  It's at the very moment when people should be speaking slowly and distinctly that they usually turn into motor mouths.  I can't tell you how often I have had to replay messages eight or nine times while trying to decode something that sounds like seventhreefoureightsixninefive.

Next, when giving someone directions, don't just say "Take Sixth Street to Lipton Drive, turn left and go south to Main.  Then take a right on Main until you reach Harper. It's on the southeast corner. You can't miss it."  At least until the great come-and-get-it day when everyone has a navigational system in his or her BMW, you must learn to indicate the distances the person is going to have to drive on Sixth, Lipton and Main.  On one memorable occasion, I was given directions to a meeting by someone who neglected to mention that the last leg of the drive, which I assumed would just be a couple of blocks, was actually 17 miles!

And, finally, as I gazed out over those fresh, young faces, I would advise them to have nothing whatsoever to do with people who insist on using their computers to send Instant Messages.  IMs, as they are better known, combine the worst aspects of phones and computers.  Like phones, they are rude and obnoxious, demanding, like some bratty two-year-old, your complete and immediate attention; like computers, they require typing.  I never believed Al Gore when he claimed to have invented the Internet, but I never doubted for a moment that he had a lot to do with foisting IMs on the rest of us.  It has his carbon fingerprints all over it


.....Warph