Talent works, genius creates.
Robert A. Schumann
FEECast: Stop Bezos? No
Why Wages Rise
Molyneux On Kavanaugh Hearing
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| Courtesy of the original artist via Facebook |
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Post #3825 M. Bezos vs. Bernie; Why Wages Rise
Quote of the Day
Talent works, genius creates.
Robert A. Schumann
Talent works, genius creates.
Robert A. Schumann
Paul McCartney & Wings, "Hi, Hi, Hi".
Post #3824: Rant of the Day: The Persecution of Judge Kavanaugh
There are several things that make the character assassination of Judge Kavanaugh morally repugnant to me. One of these is this politically correct lynch mob mentality, leftists who loudly confronted most recently Sens. Cruz and Flake separately over support for Kavanaugh. Another element is the fact that the opposition to Kavanaugh is a below-the-surface political vendetta that had blocked Kavanauth's initial nomination to the courts for almost 3 years almost 15 years ago (chiefly because he was involved in the Clinton impeachment process). The Dems on the Judiciary Committee ideologically opposed Kavanaugh from the get-go, without a pretense of impartiality before the hearings and then, in a last minute desperation tactic, personally attacked Kavanaugh with baseless smears (I have been a victim of these types of dishonorable tactics in different contexts). Then there's this whole "recovered memory" junk science. People's lives have been ruined over false accusations. It's all but impossible to prove a negative, i.e., that something didn't happen. (A number of these dubious allegations came out during the Catholic priest sexual misconduct allegations several years back.
Recall registered Democrat Ms. Ford's opposition to Kavanaugh was political; she, in fact, has never filed charges in Maryland, where it might have triggered an alert during any of 6 background investigations during his work in Washington and the courts. She did not file a statement with the committee chairman but with her Dem Congressman and Sen. Feinstein. She requested anonymity in a country committed to due process and the right of the accused to confront his accuser. (Oh, yes, the political whores like Charles Schumer will point out, "Hey, this isn't a court; this is the US Senate." Damn right, you uncivil, hypocritical bastard. But I've personally seen the Democrats go after 3 SCOTUS nominees, Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and now Brett Kavanaugh. It offended my sensibilities so much, I left the Democratic Party. I've never seen Republicans do anything comparable (and I'm no longer a Republican).
The BEST you can say about Ms. Ford is maybe she had been assaulted but by someone else. As I've written before, I've personally read thousands of academic psychology articles. Not to go into the weeds here, but I wrote an unpublished article on MIS measures, like computer user satisfaction. The creator of one such measure used a statistical test of independent observations to argue the completeness of his measure/ His data? Interviews with a small number of interviewees, presumably in the Arizona area. He was arguing that the odds that his sample did not identify a significant factor in computer user satisfaction was near-zero. It was a highly unusual argument that I had never seen in the psychology literature, and it was utter nonsense because of the conflated nature of memory recall: they hardly amounted to independent events that the statistical test use required. I have not reviewed the literature on the construct since leaving academia, but at that time, I was unaware of a single other MIS researcher making that criticism. My paper was rejected in personal terms; I suspected the editors farmed out the reviews with people who were vested in the measures I was criticizing. As a junior (nontenured) professor, I was not trying to alienate other MIS academics. I was concerned that many of the peer reviews of the studies I was critiquing had been made by people not familiar with measure design and validation. Many scholars were using these measures not aware of any legitimate critiques. I simply wanted to start a long-overdue conversation. Some of the reviewers raised points really not in the scope of the article, like instead of criticizing other people's measures, I should constructively devise my own; when I pointed out reported Cronbach's alpha was likely an artifact of poor questionnaire design, I got slammed for not discussing more recent psychometric heuristics since Cronbach's alpha (not that the reviewer suggested any); I personally regarded this as a sham rationalization for recommending its rejection, obfuscating the reviewer's agenda. Not one of the reviewers specifically disputed any of the points I made in the article.
So yeah. Whereas I was not involved in memory research, I was far more informed on the topic than most in academia and of course the general public. And Ms. Ford's rejection that her "recovered memory" could be mistaken is simply not credible. And some memory researchers have paid a steep price in politically correct attacks on their research. And this is a point few others I've read: that we know convicted rapists have had their sentences overturned based on compelling DNA evidence. Those convictions were based on the testimony of women identifying the alleged perpetrator. Ms. Ford isn't even alleged rape, but a self-described assault. An assault which she didn't mention to friends or family, which she didn't record details in a personal journal. She has tried and failed to get support from friends in high school and college that she mentioned the incident to them.
One of the things that really pissed me off was how the Senate Democrats, in the wake of Kavanaugh's passionate response to the Ford smear, was that he lacked the temperament to serve on SCOTUS. This man has gone through one of the most scrutinized nomination processes in history--and at the last minute vaguely specified, unsupported decades-old allegations are made in the middle of MeToo hysteria, death threats are being made at him and his family. Even Clarence Thomas didn't go through this hell. His judicial temperament, which the Dems don't acknowledge, is a matter of public record over a decade on the courts.
I've never gone through this process, but I want to reprise some stories I've written about my initial professor appointment at UWM. I had already made up my mind I wasn't going to stay at UWM my first semester, an incident I described recently. (DH and his doctoral student DM (who I had befriended) were playing keep away with the latter's dissertation proposal, which made me more, not less curious. DM was trying to attain ABD status to go into the academic job market. The proposal must be frozen before the defense; I checked out a copy and found it shockingly undeveloped and incompetent. I advised him to withdraw the proposal and he refused. Soon thereafter I found myself needing a ride home from one of DH's consulting clients giving a dog-and-pony show. DH basically told me he had named a well-known academic PN with marching orders to take me out at the proposal defense and then reminded me I didn't have a vote in my own tenure process. The chance of me winning tenure with opposition from my area's senior profs was near-zero. It was a breathtaking violation of professional ethics.)
But a second incident just completely nauseated me. I had gained PhD faculty status (at the time which had to be earned, but soon thereafter they made a rule change that conferred this status after year 1), which meant among other things I could participate in the PhD comprehensive exam process. In essence, I was a tie-breaking vote among 5 professors; DH/HJ and GH/KK basically did not get along. CK, the student who drove the WB dog-and-pony show described above, was really more of an accounting student, but UWM didn't have an accounting PhD program, so he was going for an MIS doctorate. Before I joined the PhD faculty, CK had failed his first of up to 2 qualifying exams. He wanted to immediately go for it; the other faculty advised him, to no avail, to take more time before going up again. He was well-liked by all the faculty, including myself.
He came to my office, trying to brown-nose me into the question I would be allocated. He tried flattering me, telling me he had read all my published papers and liked them. (I was doing research on documentation and more broadly human factors/ergonomics in IS, at that point a minor emerging area in MIS research.) I was very proud of the 3 questions or so I brought to the exam committee; they were more open-ended questions that were meant to see how he would approach a problem as a researcher. There weren't necessarily right or wrong answers, but I would expect him to summarize some key studies in the literature, maybe propose a research hypothesis, operationalize a study, etc. I realized the other 4 profs may have liked my 3 questions, but none of them were going to give up their (predictable) question. So they selected one of mine.
Long story short, CK bombed the exam (and my question in particular). And this was with DH/HJ trying to game the scoring process in favor of the student. (For example, we had a scoring mechanism like dropping the high and low scores, and DH/HJ would both submit inflated scores on an answer, knowing it would boost his score. Bur it wasn't enough; DH told GH/KK that one of them would have to tell CK he failed the exam because DH wasn't going to do it. GH/KK backed off. I was furious because this was blatantly an abuse of process and professionally unethical. From my perspective, CK had made a decision to take the exam against everyone else's advice; he was responsible for his own bad decisions.
So the evil 4 senior professors made an unholy decision: HJ was the chair of the PhD Program committee (the name might be slightly different). So they suspended the committee, HJ pushed through an option they could admit a conditional pass with remedial work. The committee resumed session and issued CK a conditional pass. This goes beyond equal protection; they changed the rules of the game after it was played. I jokingly asked GH afterwards what would have happened if CK had my personality. Without hesitation, GK said that he would have been done. This was unfair to students held to a higher standard. What I realized at this point my colleagues were all morally corrupt bastards; the idea of spending the rest of my career with colleagues I didn't respect was nauseating.
There is a brief follow-up anecdote to the incident after I left UWM. I went to a purported interview screen in an unusual open area. (Most interviews were held in closed rooms.) (It briefly crossed my mind that this was no coincidence, but I shrugged off the paranoia: maybe he was waiting for his own interviewee or taking a breather.) Somehow the interviewer brought up my UWM experience. This was always a touchy subject, because no employer wants to hire someone who is perceived as a problem, chronic complainer; there were some positive aspects to my UWM experience, particularly teaching graduate classes, the main reason I picked UWM over BGSU/Ohio. At some point, I think mentioned the CK incident. I briefly passed by DH after the interview; I had no desire to talk to the son of a bitch; he talked loudly enough for me to hear, something to the effect CK had gotten nowhere since I left. No shit! The bastard had been eavesdropping on the whole conversation! The whole interview had been a setup for him to find up what I was saying about him and UWM. I, of course, never looked back after I left UWM. I didn't know what happened after I left UWM, and I didn't care. It had nothing to do with CK personally. It had to do with a corrupt, manipulated process that violated equality under policy.
So I've told this story of what happened that led me to leave UWM when I did. There are exceptions to this general pattern, and some things may have changed since I left academia in the 90's. But usually you go up for tenure in 6 years and gain tenure in year 7 or year 7 is the terminal year of employment, a year to find another academic job somewhere. (Ironically tenure is a concept that would have been intended for me, like when I got rebuked on that unpublished paper by the powers that be.) So in my case I signed an initial 3-year contract. What happens is you to go up for a 3-year contract renewal, which is normally a formality. In the unlikely event your renewal is denied, you have the final year of your original contract to find another job in academia.
I made a fatal decision to teach undergrad COBOL in my second year, surrendering one of my cherished graduate courses (DSS) in the process. There were some minor research motivations, like testing the readability of ANSI standards, but the ANSI-85 Standard had some new support for Structured Programming constructs. The business school had Microsoft COBOL licenses, but Microsoft had not upgraded its software; I assigned a textbook which provided a floppy disk restricted use license for ANSI-85 compatible Ryan-McFarland COBOL. The Administration was overjoyed to hear one of its faculty take on a service course--until they learned that I wouldn't be using their paid licenses (as if it was my fault Microsoft hadn't upgraded its compiler). There were other complications, e.g., the student programmer aides in the computer labs weren't familiar with the new standard.
I've mentioned part of the story before and I won't go into detail here, except to note that a group of malcontent students appeared at my office early in the semester to demand I postpone the first due date "or else". I thought they were panicking' it was literally 2 weeks before the first assignment was due (and I never gate out an assignment it took me more than 30 minutes to write myself). I always reserved the right to modify the due date if it looked like an issue for most students by the deadline, but I didn't want to set a precedent, I don't respond well to extortion, and they repeated their threat.
The first and second computer assignments had gone past without incident; I was aware my contract renewal was coming up. To me, I had no interest in going up for tenure at UWM, but a 3-year renewal gave me more flexibility in leaving UWM. I had to teach the day of my hearing (which I didn't attend) and had gone back to my office in the evening to work on my lecture notes when I found a thick folder of anonymous student complaints. I shit you not---the folder was full of absurd nonsense like "Prof. Guillemette's chalkboard behavior is so bad, I feel like screaming if I have to endure it one day longer". These jerks were demanding that the committee deny my contract renewal.
The last-minute sabotage of my renewal was somewhat similar to what happened to Kavanaugh. I had asked the committee to respond to an intentionally late response designed to preclude due process and the right to respond. There is, of course, this idea that sabotaging students need to be protected against retaliation from "powerful" faculty--and let me tell you, there are few so powerless as a white male junior professor. Didn't I have a right to confront my accusers? Who was there to protect my rights? It wasn't the faculty or the administration. There were rumors of certain students circulating petitions against my renewal--I could certainly guess who the ringleaders were.
I initially lost a split committee vote on my right to respond. The majority responded that I would have my right to respond before the senior faculty vote. I showed up, basically to defend my honor, integrity, and record. Not a single faculty member said a word (I suspect for legal reasons); one or 2 faculty members congratulated me for showing grace under the circumstances. I think the vote against me was unanimous: an unusual rebuke.
I knew the student sharks would taste blood in the water, giddy over the success of their sabotage, knowing that the faculty and administration refused to back me. Someone from the business school administration tipped me off that a handful of students had been showing up at the Dean of Students office, showing up one at a time every day for weeks. (Think the Dean of Students would ever talk to me? I still don't know who suggested sabotaging my contract renewal; my area colleagues, the administration or others.)
I take pride in my professional integrity; if I graded an essay question, I would rank order answers to ensure fair grading. I have given A's to students I personally disliked, and one of the few students I failed had actually supported me against political garbage at UTEP (he gave me nothing to work with: he didn't turn in required work, he didn't come to see me). The presumption of retaliatory action against a student is an unconscionable attack on one's professionalism. The UWM senior faculty and administration made it clear that I had to leave at the end of my third year; from my standpoint: fine with me: I don't want to work with you bastards, either. But as a fellow professional, you owe me the courtesy afforded a fellow faculty member.
There were rumors that one or more of the troublemakers were planning to file a grade appeal. I suspected a last-minute appeal designed to prevent my right to respond in kind. I literally checked within an hour of the deadline for submitting a grade appeal. The assistant dean promised I would be provided a copy of the evidence and the complaint if it happened.
Now let's make it clear. The rules of grade appeals were very specific: the complaint had to be objective, not subjective like "I think the professor didn't like me and lowered my grade below my performance". It had to be based on specifics, like a mismarked exam that materially affected the grade he got.
So TM, one of the malcentents, did file an appeal plus filed "evidence" that seemed to impress idiots by its size and extent. The administration quickly reneged to provide me with a copy, saying it would be impractical. They would allow me monitored access (to guard against my "destroying the evidence". The "evidence"? Basically a dump of unorganized computer program listings, class notes, etc. No where anywhere was any specific mention of grade components and unfair marking. [As I recall, he passed the course with a B or C.] I would later make reference to a newer MIS hire on the committee. "Have you even looked at this stuff?" "No, there's just so much of it [more or less, where there's smoke, there's fire]" And I'm thinking, "Boy, are you a stupid bastard! You don't think reviewing the "evidence" is your responsibility?"
So when we got to the hearing, I made an immediate motion for summary judgment, based on the fact that TM's filing was based on a suspicion that he thought the administration had leaked his identity (absolutely false; I did know he was one of the malcontents who had threatened me at the start of the semester) and he felt that I had lowered his grade in retaliation (false). The committee chair laughed off the motion, like "that's not going to happen", a complete violation of policy. Who know what set of standards were in place? It was an arbitrary abuse of process.
I thought the matter was closed because the student certainly had not made a single coherent point on how he thought I had violated my grading criteria. As I pointed out, his whole appeal was a violation of university policy. But, no, the committee decides it wants to look at TM's final exam. This is more than ever a witch hunt. The committee, which is theory was to judge the appeal, was now taking on the role of a prosecutor. I'm being put in a position like Kavanaugh, asking me in effect, what do I have to hide? The fact of the matter is the student never even discussed the final exam in his whole complaint, had raised the topic in the hearing.
I didn't have anything to hide, but the optics looked bad if I refused to let this witch hunt continue. Kavanaugh similarly faced the same situation for a hearing where the liar Ms. Ford was allowed to testify against him without a single piece of evidence. In my case, it was like every single moment of this frivolous complaint was an unfair assault on my integrity and professionalism.
I was resigned to do this, when one of my few faculty friends, a finance junior professor, came to me on behalf of other professors, who didn't like what was going on and worried about the precedent being set potentially affecting them.
I think for the first time I was emboldened to push back against the committee. Basically, look I've got nothing to hide. TM's grade was based on my published criteria. TM has the burden of proof, and he didn't make his case; this whole witch hunt has violated published policy. So no more of this; you need to rule on the evidence. If you do rule against, me, I will consult a lawyer for possible libel and slander by you and the university.
The committee quickly backed off, explaining they were just doing "due diligence". (No. They were on a fishing expedition. It was not their duty to fill in the gaps of a frivolous grade appeal.) They then ruled against the grade appeal, and as far as I know,
To this day, I don't know why they did this. Was it some gimmick to get me to resign before the end of my contract by treating me like crap?
To satirize the Dems, did I feel better because I was cleared by the committee? No. I know TM was judged just like every other student. I had to endure some paranoid student's mad rants against me.
The university and faculty had publicly put me in a weak position which encouraged frivolous complaints.
There was an ironic twist as I packed up my office at the end of my contract. I found the elevator floor covered with COBOL program listings. (No longer covered by a professor.) Ask me if I was surprised. No longer my problem.
Recall registered Democrat Ms. Ford's opposition to Kavanaugh was political; she, in fact, has never filed charges in Maryland, where it might have triggered an alert during any of 6 background investigations during his work in Washington and the courts. She did not file a statement with the committee chairman but with her Dem Congressman and Sen. Feinstein. She requested anonymity in a country committed to due process and the right of the accused to confront his accuser. (Oh, yes, the political whores like Charles Schumer will point out, "Hey, this isn't a court; this is the US Senate." Damn right, you uncivil, hypocritical bastard. But I've personally seen the Democrats go after 3 SCOTUS nominees, Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and now Brett Kavanaugh. It offended my sensibilities so much, I left the Democratic Party. I've never seen Republicans do anything comparable (and I'm no longer a Republican).
The BEST you can say about Ms. Ford is maybe she had been assaulted but by someone else. As I've written before, I've personally read thousands of academic psychology articles. Not to go into the weeds here, but I wrote an unpublished article on MIS measures, like computer user satisfaction. The creator of one such measure used a statistical test of independent observations to argue the completeness of his measure/ His data? Interviews with a small number of interviewees, presumably in the Arizona area. He was arguing that the odds that his sample did not identify a significant factor in computer user satisfaction was near-zero. It was a highly unusual argument that I had never seen in the psychology literature, and it was utter nonsense because of the conflated nature of memory recall: they hardly amounted to independent events that the statistical test use required. I have not reviewed the literature on the construct since leaving academia, but at that time, I was unaware of a single other MIS researcher making that criticism. My paper was rejected in personal terms; I suspected the editors farmed out the reviews with people who were vested in the measures I was criticizing. As a junior (nontenured) professor, I was not trying to alienate other MIS academics. I was concerned that many of the peer reviews of the studies I was critiquing had been made by people not familiar with measure design and validation. Many scholars were using these measures not aware of any legitimate critiques. I simply wanted to start a long-overdue conversation. Some of the reviewers raised points really not in the scope of the article, like instead of criticizing other people's measures, I should constructively devise my own; when I pointed out reported Cronbach's alpha was likely an artifact of poor questionnaire design, I got slammed for not discussing more recent psychometric heuristics since Cronbach's alpha (not that the reviewer suggested any); I personally regarded this as a sham rationalization for recommending its rejection, obfuscating the reviewer's agenda. Not one of the reviewers specifically disputed any of the points I made in the article.
So yeah. Whereas I was not involved in memory research, I was far more informed on the topic than most in academia and of course the general public. And Ms. Ford's rejection that her "recovered memory" could be mistaken is simply not credible. And some memory researchers have paid a steep price in politically correct attacks on their research. And this is a point few others I've read: that we know convicted rapists have had their sentences overturned based on compelling DNA evidence. Those convictions were based on the testimony of women identifying the alleged perpetrator. Ms. Ford isn't even alleged rape, but a self-described assault. An assault which she didn't mention to friends or family, which she didn't record details in a personal journal. She has tried and failed to get support from friends in high school and college that she mentioned the incident to them.
One of the things that really pissed me off was how the Senate Democrats, in the wake of Kavanaugh's passionate response to the Ford smear, was that he lacked the temperament to serve on SCOTUS. This man has gone through one of the most scrutinized nomination processes in history--and at the last minute vaguely specified, unsupported decades-old allegations are made in the middle of MeToo hysteria, death threats are being made at him and his family. Even Clarence Thomas didn't go through this hell. His judicial temperament, which the Dems don't acknowledge, is a matter of public record over a decade on the courts.
I've never gone through this process, but I want to reprise some stories I've written about my initial professor appointment at UWM. I had already made up my mind I wasn't going to stay at UWM my first semester, an incident I described recently. (DH and his doctoral student DM (who I had befriended) were playing keep away with the latter's dissertation proposal, which made me more, not less curious. DM was trying to attain ABD status to go into the academic job market. The proposal must be frozen before the defense; I checked out a copy and found it shockingly undeveloped and incompetent. I advised him to withdraw the proposal and he refused. Soon thereafter I found myself needing a ride home from one of DH's consulting clients giving a dog-and-pony show. DH basically told me he had named a well-known academic PN with marching orders to take me out at the proposal defense and then reminded me I didn't have a vote in my own tenure process. The chance of me winning tenure with opposition from my area's senior profs was near-zero. It was a breathtaking violation of professional ethics.)
But a second incident just completely nauseated me. I had gained PhD faculty status (at the time which had to be earned, but soon thereafter they made a rule change that conferred this status after year 1), which meant among other things I could participate in the PhD comprehensive exam process. In essence, I was a tie-breaking vote among 5 professors; DH/HJ and GH/KK basically did not get along. CK, the student who drove the WB dog-and-pony show described above, was really more of an accounting student, but UWM didn't have an accounting PhD program, so he was going for an MIS doctorate. Before I joined the PhD faculty, CK had failed his first of up to 2 qualifying exams. He wanted to immediately go for it; the other faculty advised him, to no avail, to take more time before going up again. He was well-liked by all the faculty, including myself.
He came to my office, trying to brown-nose me into the question I would be allocated. He tried flattering me, telling me he had read all my published papers and liked them. (I was doing research on documentation and more broadly human factors/ergonomics in IS, at that point a minor emerging area in MIS research.) I was very proud of the 3 questions or so I brought to the exam committee; they were more open-ended questions that were meant to see how he would approach a problem as a researcher. There weren't necessarily right or wrong answers, but I would expect him to summarize some key studies in the literature, maybe propose a research hypothesis, operationalize a study, etc. I realized the other 4 profs may have liked my 3 questions, but none of them were going to give up their (predictable) question. So they selected one of mine.
Long story short, CK bombed the exam (and my question in particular). And this was with DH/HJ trying to game the scoring process in favor of the student. (For example, we had a scoring mechanism like dropping the high and low scores, and DH/HJ would both submit inflated scores on an answer, knowing it would boost his score. Bur it wasn't enough; DH told GH/KK that one of them would have to tell CK he failed the exam because DH wasn't going to do it. GH/KK backed off. I was furious because this was blatantly an abuse of process and professionally unethical. From my perspective, CK had made a decision to take the exam against everyone else's advice; he was responsible for his own bad decisions.
So the evil 4 senior professors made an unholy decision: HJ was the chair of the PhD Program committee (the name might be slightly different). So they suspended the committee, HJ pushed through an option they could admit a conditional pass with remedial work. The committee resumed session and issued CK a conditional pass. This goes beyond equal protection; they changed the rules of the game after it was played. I jokingly asked GH afterwards what would have happened if CK had my personality. Without hesitation, GK said that he would have been done. This was unfair to students held to a higher standard. What I realized at this point my colleagues were all morally corrupt bastards; the idea of spending the rest of my career with colleagues I didn't respect was nauseating.
There is a brief follow-up anecdote to the incident after I left UWM. I went to a purported interview screen in an unusual open area. (Most interviews were held in closed rooms.) (It briefly crossed my mind that this was no coincidence, but I shrugged off the paranoia: maybe he was waiting for his own interviewee or taking a breather.) Somehow the interviewer brought up my UWM experience. This was always a touchy subject, because no employer wants to hire someone who is perceived as a problem, chronic complainer; there were some positive aspects to my UWM experience, particularly teaching graduate classes, the main reason I picked UWM over BGSU/Ohio. At some point, I think mentioned the CK incident. I briefly passed by DH after the interview; I had no desire to talk to the son of a bitch; he talked loudly enough for me to hear, something to the effect CK had gotten nowhere since I left. No shit! The bastard had been eavesdropping on the whole conversation! The whole interview had been a setup for him to find up what I was saying about him and UWM. I, of course, never looked back after I left UWM. I didn't know what happened after I left UWM, and I didn't care. It had nothing to do with CK personally. It had to do with a corrupt, manipulated process that violated equality under policy.
So I've told this story of what happened that led me to leave UWM when I did. There are exceptions to this general pattern, and some things may have changed since I left academia in the 90's. But usually you go up for tenure in 6 years and gain tenure in year 7 or year 7 is the terminal year of employment, a year to find another academic job somewhere. (Ironically tenure is a concept that would have been intended for me, like when I got rebuked on that unpublished paper by the powers that be.) So in my case I signed an initial 3-year contract. What happens is you to go up for a 3-year contract renewal, which is normally a formality. In the unlikely event your renewal is denied, you have the final year of your original contract to find another job in academia.
I made a fatal decision to teach undergrad COBOL in my second year, surrendering one of my cherished graduate courses (DSS) in the process. There were some minor research motivations, like testing the readability of ANSI standards, but the ANSI-85 Standard had some new support for Structured Programming constructs. The business school had Microsoft COBOL licenses, but Microsoft had not upgraded its software; I assigned a textbook which provided a floppy disk restricted use license for ANSI-85 compatible Ryan-McFarland COBOL. The Administration was overjoyed to hear one of its faculty take on a service course--until they learned that I wouldn't be using their paid licenses (as if it was my fault Microsoft hadn't upgraded its compiler). There were other complications, e.g., the student programmer aides in the computer labs weren't familiar with the new standard.
I've mentioned part of the story before and I won't go into detail here, except to note that a group of malcontent students appeared at my office early in the semester to demand I postpone the first due date "or else". I thought they were panicking' it was literally 2 weeks before the first assignment was due (and I never gate out an assignment it took me more than 30 minutes to write myself). I always reserved the right to modify the due date if it looked like an issue for most students by the deadline, but I didn't want to set a precedent, I don't respond well to extortion, and they repeated their threat.
The first and second computer assignments had gone past without incident; I was aware my contract renewal was coming up. To me, I had no interest in going up for tenure at UWM, but a 3-year renewal gave me more flexibility in leaving UWM. I had to teach the day of my hearing (which I didn't attend) and had gone back to my office in the evening to work on my lecture notes when I found a thick folder of anonymous student complaints. I shit you not---the folder was full of absurd nonsense like "Prof. Guillemette's chalkboard behavior is so bad, I feel like screaming if I have to endure it one day longer". These jerks were demanding that the committee deny my contract renewal.
The last-minute sabotage of my renewal was somewhat similar to what happened to Kavanaugh. I had asked the committee to respond to an intentionally late response designed to preclude due process and the right to respond. There is, of course, this idea that sabotaging students need to be protected against retaliation from "powerful" faculty--and let me tell you, there are few so powerless as a white male junior professor. Didn't I have a right to confront my accusers? Who was there to protect my rights? It wasn't the faculty or the administration. There were rumors of certain students circulating petitions against my renewal--I could certainly guess who the ringleaders were.
I initially lost a split committee vote on my right to respond. The majority responded that I would have my right to respond before the senior faculty vote. I showed up, basically to defend my honor, integrity, and record. Not a single faculty member said a word (I suspect for legal reasons); one or 2 faculty members congratulated me for showing grace under the circumstances. I think the vote against me was unanimous: an unusual rebuke.
I knew the student sharks would taste blood in the water, giddy over the success of their sabotage, knowing that the faculty and administration refused to back me. Someone from the business school administration tipped me off that a handful of students had been showing up at the Dean of Students office, showing up one at a time every day for weeks. (Think the Dean of Students would ever talk to me? I still don't know who suggested sabotaging my contract renewal; my area colleagues, the administration or others.)
I take pride in my professional integrity; if I graded an essay question, I would rank order answers to ensure fair grading. I have given A's to students I personally disliked, and one of the few students I failed had actually supported me against political garbage at UTEP (he gave me nothing to work with: he didn't turn in required work, he didn't come to see me). The presumption of retaliatory action against a student is an unconscionable attack on one's professionalism. The UWM senior faculty and administration made it clear that I had to leave at the end of my third year; from my standpoint: fine with me: I don't want to work with you bastards, either. But as a fellow professional, you owe me the courtesy afforded a fellow faculty member.
There were rumors that one or more of the troublemakers were planning to file a grade appeal. I suspected a last-minute appeal designed to prevent my right to respond in kind. I literally checked within an hour of the deadline for submitting a grade appeal. The assistant dean promised I would be provided a copy of the evidence and the complaint if it happened.
Now let's make it clear. The rules of grade appeals were very specific: the complaint had to be objective, not subjective like "I think the professor didn't like me and lowered my grade below my performance". It had to be based on specifics, like a mismarked exam that materially affected the grade he got.
So TM, one of the malcentents, did file an appeal plus filed "evidence" that seemed to impress idiots by its size and extent. The administration quickly reneged to provide me with a copy, saying it would be impractical. They would allow me monitored access (to guard against my "destroying the evidence". The "evidence"? Basically a dump of unorganized computer program listings, class notes, etc. No where anywhere was any specific mention of grade components and unfair marking. [As I recall, he passed the course with a B or C.] I would later make reference to a newer MIS hire on the committee. "Have you even looked at this stuff?" "No, there's just so much of it [more or less, where there's smoke, there's fire]" And I'm thinking, "Boy, are you a stupid bastard! You don't think reviewing the "evidence" is your responsibility?"
So when we got to the hearing, I made an immediate motion for summary judgment, based on the fact that TM's filing was based on a suspicion that he thought the administration had leaked his identity (absolutely false; I did know he was one of the malcontents who had threatened me at the start of the semester) and he felt that I had lowered his grade in retaliation (false). The committee chair laughed off the motion, like "that's not going to happen", a complete violation of policy. Who know what set of standards were in place? It was an arbitrary abuse of process.
I thought the matter was closed because the student certainly had not made a single coherent point on how he thought I had violated my grading criteria. As I pointed out, his whole appeal was a violation of university policy. But, no, the committee decides it wants to look at TM's final exam. This is more than ever a witch hunt. The committee, which is theory was to judge the appeal, was now taking on the role of a prosecutor. I'm being put in a position like Kavanaugh, asking me in effect, what do I have to hide? The fact of the matter is the student never even discussed the final exam in his whole complaint, had raised the topic in the hearing.
I didn't have anything to hide, but the optics looked bad if I refused to let this witch hunt continue. Kavanaugh similarly faced the same situation for a hearing where the liar Ms. Ford was allowed to testify against him without a single piece of evidence. In my case, it was like every single moment of this frivolous complaint was an unfair assault on my integrity and professionalism.
I was resigned to do this, when one of my few faculty friends, a finance junior professor, came to me on behalf of other professors, who didn't like what was going on and worried about the precedent being set potentially affecting them.
I think for the first time I was emboldened to push back against the committee. Basically, look I've got nothing to hide. TM's grade was based on my published criteria. TM has the burden of proof, and he didn't make his case; this whole witch hunt has violated published policy. So no more of this; you need to rule on the evidence. If you do rule against, me, I will consult a lawyer for possible libel and slander by you and the university.
The committee quickly backed off, explaining they were just doing "due diligence". (No. They were on a fishing expedition. It was not their duty to fill in the gaps of a frivolous grade appeal.) They then ruled against the grade appeal, and as far as I know,
To this day, I don't know why they did this. Was it some gimmick to get me to resign before the end of my contract by treating me like crap?
To satirize the Dems, did I feel better because I was cleared by the committee? No. I know TM was judged just like every other student. I had to endure some paranoid student's mad rants against me.
The university and faculty had publicly put me in a weak position which encouraged frivolous complaints.
There was an ironic twist as I packed up my office at the end of my contract. I found the elevator floor covered with COBOL program listings. (No longer covered by a professor.) Ask me if I was surprised. No longer my problem.
Saturday, September 29, 2018
Post #3823 M: Love Gov 2.3; The Evil of Political Correctness;
Quote of the Day
Either I will find a way, or I will make one.
Philip Sidney
Paul McCartney and Wings, "Letting Go". I'm going out of sequence because this is one of my favorite Wings songs and I haven't heard it in a long time.
Either I will find a way, or I will make one.
Philip Sidney
Love Gov 2.3
Tom DiLorenzo On The Evil of Political Correctness
Blockchain Technology
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Michael Ramirez via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Paul McCartney and Wings, "Letting Go". I'm going out of sequence because this is one of my favorite Wings songs and I haven't heard it in a long time.
Post #3822 J: Hidden Costs and Government-Controlled Healthcare: Reflections on a Hallmark Movie
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| via LFC on FB |
Pricing Systems Obfuscated by Government Intervention
Around a dozen years back, I had moved to an apartment complex just west of Baltimore County. About 8 months into the lease, the complex announced it was going to convert the complex into condos, and we would have to leave by the time contractors were to start on our building. My apartment was one of the first to be affected, but it wouldn't be for a few months. I lost my job and interviewed for two out-of-state jobs in the midwest and Chicago. Basically I thought I would be relocating, but the offers fell through The apartment complex had offered me a deal on a terminal 6-month lease on a yet unscheduled apartment conversion, 2 bedrooms vs 1 bedroom. Among other things, I was between jobs and it would be an issue in an apartment search.The new apartment was maybe 6 or so apartment buildings down the street. I really couldn't move the furniture myself, so I hired a moving company. (Today I would have rented a U-Haul and hired some independent mover helpers, like I've done on 3 of the last moves.) This is a long story just to provide context to a lesson I learned the hard way. I thought I had agreed to a flat price. So at one point I had a framed print, not something I would have bought for myself, but my Mom had given it to me and it had sentimental value. On the moving date, while the movers focused on major items, I worked on smaller unpacked items in trips between apartments; at one point, the main mover turned to me with my Mom's print and asked me if I wanted them to move it; I remember being confused by the question (and he didn't provide a context for the question). At the end I was given an invoice that included a number of unexpected surcharges amounting to over $100--including a $20 charge for moving that print (I'm not even sure the print was worth $20). I was irate as the mover quickly pointed out the surcharge list buried in the middle of all that paperwork I signed (who really reads all that crap? I thought we had an agreement in earlier discussions. It was deliberately deceitful for that mover not to point out that their carrying out that frame, which I could easily have just stuck in my car, would add $20 to the bill. If I knew it would have cost an extra $20, I would have taken it. But the fact is, I'm responsible for signing off on paperwork I didn't read closely enough--I just wanted to get the movers started, and they took advantage of that. It's not ethical, bur it's legal.
So what does this all have do so with a healthcare meme and my pro-liberty perspective? Well, I want to point out I had two advantages in dealing with movers: there were other movers in a competitive market. My adverse review could cost them more than their $20 gain. This was money coming out of my savings; no company was footing the bill. Second, I had a vested interest to minimize my moving costs--which theoretically included knowledge of surcharge items and trying to minimize them as much as I could. $426 is obviously an absurd markup on an $8 product. This kind of distortion is only possible where there is a lack of transparency in the market, which often reflects a corrupt, noncompetitive relationship between providers and government bureaucrats/policymakers (e.g., consider things like certificates of needs)
I've given other examples like when I sometimes had to go without insurance between jobs. Given a certain thyroid deficiency, I've had to get blood tests and prescriptions. I discovered I could get my blood drawn at the office and the lab work done for under $25; furthermore, I could get generic prescriptions filled for say under $10 at the Walmart pharmacy.
But third-party payers, i.e., health insurers through the workplace, a consequence government intervention designed by FDR et al. to work around economically illiterate wage and price controls, while still light years better than a monopolistic single-payer system, are a poor substitute for customer incentives to limit costs. Policyholders are more likely to use medical services given the understanding they have already paid for them. Me, if I had to go to a clinic without insurance, it was going to cost me $100+ a trip out of my savings. Of course, there was always the possibility of a catastrophic health care condition--but the Democrats had megalomaniac dreams of running the sector, not reforming in.
How I Would Have Edited a Hallmark Cable Movie
There was a recent movie (Pearl in Paradise) based on the search for a fabled clam blue pearl lost in the Fiji Islands. The fable is this young man years back found a giant blue pearl and wanted to use it to woo the heart of his crush and her parents' approval; tragically he lost the pearl in a storm and spent the rest of his life searching for the pearl, unrequited love. At some point the pearl was recovered and later buried. There was a legend of whoever found the pearl would also find the love of his life.A male romance writer (Colin) who mostly wrote about foreign locations he never visited, based one of his novels (the movie title) on the legend. Alex. a widely traveled female photographer, has been pitched on a major anniversary story for her magazine publisher employers, paired with Colin, to recover the fabled pearl.
\
I'm not going to repeat the story in detail; in many way, the storyline is predictable: opposites attract, and it's unlikely that they won't somehow find the pearl. (It's somewhat ridiculous that all the writings and inscriptions are conveniently in English, hardly the first language in Fiji (it remains an official language as a former English colony), but go with it for the sake of the story.)
A key scene in the movie is when Alex gets set to photograph the fabled pearl for the magazine and Colin stops her, reading a somewhat obscure inscription to the effect "those who are worthy of the pearl cannot have found the pearl".
And this is the point where the movie loses me. Colin then goes on this weird monologue about how finding the pearl destroys the faith in the legend of the pearl, as if faith is preferable to the fact and reason of the pearl, that the recovered pearl loses its mystique displayed in some sterile museum or whatever.
And for the life of me, I don't know why the writer didn't forward what seems to be a more obvious message: the pearl is not about its possession but in the journey in life to find love, which is far more precious. It wasn't the pearl that the native wanted, but what it might bring to him, his unrequited love. And if you've stumbled into your one true love in its pursuit, what need do you have of the pearl? You've become part of the legacy of the pearl; leave it for future lovers to seek.
Friday, September 28, 2018
Post #3821 M: Love Gov 2.2; College Costs
Quote of the Day
The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me
away from those who are still undecided.
Casey Stengel
McCartney & Wings, "Mary Had a Little Lamb"
The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me
away from those who are still undecided.
Casey Stengel
Love Gov 2.2
The College Loan Crisis
The Illinois Diaspora
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Chip Bok via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
McCartney & Wings, "Mary Had a Little Lamb"
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Post #3820 M: Is America Great?; The Persecution of Kavanaugh; Lindsey Graham's Finest Moment
Quote of the Day
Murphy's Fifth Law: If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway.
Paul McCartney, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish"
Murphy's Fifth Law: If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway.
Is America Great? Yes, but Despite Trump
The Liar, Ms. Ford
Lindsey Graham Kicks Durbin's Ass
Choose Life
Don't mess with little sister!Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of AF Branco via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Paul McCartney, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish"
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Post #3819 M: No on HR 6729; No, The Welfare State Doesn't Create Trust
Quote of the Day
The market is not an invention of capitalism.
It has existed for centuries.
It is an invention of civilization.
Mikhail Gorbachev
The market is not an invention of capitalism.
It has existed for centuries.
It is an invention of civilization.
Mikhail Gorbachev
STOP HR 6729
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| via Justin Amash on FB |
Kavanaugh: Presumption of Innocence
Kavanaugh, Accuser Hearing Coming Up
DEAD WRONG: The Welfare State Creates Trust
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Steve Kelley via FB |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Paul McCartney, "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey". Paul's first solo #1.
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Post #3818 M: Love Gov is Back!; Stossel On Leaving the Left
Quote of the Day
Men of sense often learn from their enemies.
It is from their foes, not their friends,
that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war;
and this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.
Aristophanes
Paul McCartney, "Another Day". McCartney's brilliant song writing/performances did not suffer after the Beatles' breakup.
Men of sense often learn from their enemies.
It is from their foes, not their friends,
that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war;
and this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.
Aristophanes
Love Gov 2.1
Leaving the Left: Stossel On Rubin
The Kavanaugh Kerfuffle Continues
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Steve Kelley via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Paul McCartney, "Another Day". McCartney's brilliant song writing/performances did not suffer after the Beatles' breakup.
Monday, September 24, 2018
Post #3817 M: The Fox News Kavanaugh Interview; Originalism
Quote of the Day
Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words ,
And never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson
Madonna (featuring MIA and Minaj), "Give Me All Your Luvin'". Madonna's last Hot 100 Top 10 (to date). This ends our Madonna retrospective.
Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words ,
And never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson
The Fox News Kavanaugh Interview
Well, Kavanaugh remained on message and repetitiously drove home the same talking points. He wisely sidestepped questions over his accusers' motives. I thought he came across as a touch defensive, pointing out issues with the accusers' cases (but perhaps the audience is not aware of them).
Former Kavanaugh Law Clerk
Originalism vs Living Constitution
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Robert Ariail via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Madonna (featuring MIA and Minaj), "Give Me All Your Luvin'". Madonna's last Hot 100 Top 10 (to date). This ends our Madonna retrospective.
Sunday, September 23, 2018
Post #3816 M: Teacher Pay, Statistics and Politics; More on the Ford Smear of Kavanaugh
Quote of the Day
Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
I'm with the host--and the umpires ....
Madonna (featuring Justin Timberlake and Timbaland), "Four Minutes". This is Madonna's last Top 5 hit (to date). We are one hit from the end of this retrospective. The next artist: Paul McCartney.
Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
FEECast: Teacher Pay and Statistics
A Response to the Ford Smear of Kavanaugh
A Sports Debate: Umpires Consider Boycotting Serena Williams Matches
I'm with the host--and the umpires ....
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of AF Branco via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Madonna (featuring Justin Timberlake and Timbaland), "Four Minutes". This is Madonna's last Top 5 hit (to date). We are one hit from the end of this retrospective. The next artist: Paul McCartney.
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Post #3815 M: Ron Paul On the Resurrection of Socialism; Sweden Lessons For America?
Quote of the Day
It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life does not lie in not reaching your goal.
The tragedy of life lies in having no goal to reach.
Benjamin E. Mays
Madonna, "Hung Up"
It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life does not lie in not reaching your goal.
The tragedy of life lies in having no goal to reach.
Benjamin E. Mays
Ron Paul On How the GOP Is Responsible For the Resurrection of Socialism
Shapiro On Ford's Attempt To Manipulate the Senate Kavanaugh Hearing
Dershowitz On Ford's Demands
Sweden: Lessons For America?
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Chip Bok via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Madonna, "Hung Up"
Post #3814 Why I Believe Kavanaugh and Not His Accuser
Let me start out by saying that rape and other forms of aggression and violence against women are violations of natural law and an abomination. I have a Mom, 4 sisters, nieces and grandnieces; I don't need a lecture over protecting them or other women. It comes from the way I was raised, my Dad as a role model, the military communities I grew up in, and my Roman Catholic faith, not by ideological feminism or political correctness.
I've mentioned some of these incidents before from my own experiences:
Now I'm not sure what may/may not have happened 36 years ago. Let me start by saying that I think that Judge Kavanaugh was not my preferred nominee, given a weak record on the fourth amendment. I certainly am not a Trump supporter nor a Republican.
But any familiar reader knows that the Democratic assault on Judge Bork during the Reagan Administration was the final straw in my leaving the party as a conservative Democrat. Only a few years later the Democrats launched a similarly odious personal attack against another superbly qualified Clarence Thomas, in many ways currently my favorite jurist on the court.
Why do I believe Kavanaugh? It's based on a number of inferences. Is it possible Kavanaugh and Ford casually met during high school? Yes; he attended an all-boys school and she an all-girls. If they met, it would likely have been at a party mixer. I'm sure that the upper-class athlete might have attracted her interest. Is it possible he said or did something (non-sexual) which offended her? I know women who have held a grudge against me and have lied about the circumstances. As I recently tweeted, there was a UTEP student who went ballistic after I discovered she had worked together with a male student on an independent assignment. I had a Houston girlfriend who was unhappy with me after I went to an Astros game without her (and she didn't even like baseball)--I found she literally left something like 14 messages on my answering machine during the game; when I later broke up with her, she responded with a "Dear Spawn of Satan" letter typed on Merrill Lynch letterhead. Years later, a work colleague, apparently so embarrassed that a geek like me would dare ask her out to lunch, tried to get me fired. I'm not exactly proud of admitting I tried to date evil women.
Is Ford an evil woman? I don't know yet. But let me point out that anyone who has studied psychology--and I've read literally thousands of applied psychology papers, knows that human memories are not like copy machines. I'll give a minor example. I remember trying to convince my Mom to vote third-party in 1972. She later told me (in a letter) the person I was backing was not on the ballot, that she voted for Nixon instead. Some time later, I raised the topic of her 1972 vote. She called me a liar, saying that she never discusses who she votes for with anybody. I let it go, thinking it was a stupid argument: I still had the letter in question in my trunk.
The MeToo industrial complex wants you to believe a traumatic experience gives you super-memory powers, but that is a disprovable myth. It may be other unpleasant memories of Kavanaugh (maybe he rejected her interest in him) got fused with an unrelated event. There is a whole area of psychology based on false memories. The anti-science ideologues went after Sen. Hatch when he suggested mistaken identity. In fact, Hatch is likely correct, as I'll discuss.
So I know what it's like not to be believed? Yes. Not a sexual incident. But I had an unexpected event in my last year of academia as a visiting professor at Illinois State. I had had a contract dispute with UTEP; Professor JC from Arizona State was a leading scholar in my segment of MIS dealing with human factors/ergonomics in information systems. BB at ISU was taking a year's leave to start up a research center at ISU; this opened up a temporary position, and I was offered the appointment.
Now the Applied Computer Science at ISU was not an MIS program in a business school, like my past positions; it was more of a fusion program. Among other things, they wanted their students to program in PL/1 vs. COBOL (like you might have seen at the time in an undergraduate MIS program). Chairman LE was well-aware that I didn't teach or write in PL/1, but he wasn't bothered by that; he assigned me to teach a data structures course and assigned a PL/1 grader for me. Now what got me on the senior professors' shitlist from the get-go was that I made the programming language OPTIONAL. As far as they were concerned, I was supposed to require PL/1. And I heard rumors on the grapevine that certain idiot troublemaking students in my class were spreading rumors that I was teaching COBOL (gasp!) in my class. (Nope. I was using pseudocode, but students didn't seem to recognize the difference.) Around mid-semester, without warning, the class was taken away from me. There was not even an interim discussion with LE. I suspected that LE acted under pressure from the senior faculty, but there wasn't even the pretense of due process.
This put my academic career in jeopardy; another college hearing what happened might infer it was misconduct or incompetence in the classroom. LE and I had a frank discussion about PL/1 before I stepped into the classroom. I had his full support--until I didn't.
Now I was between the rock and a hard place: I needed to land a new academic appointment soon, and a positive recommendation from LE was almost expected if I were to be successful.
So there was no doubt that I was internally fuming over the injustice that had happened. But I didn't go around talking about it, even with junior professors I had befriended during my stay. My focus was to get my next job offer (little did I realize in academia that wouldn't happen for another 3 years) I had made no attempt in the weeks that followed the class decision to file a grievance; I had not discussed it with others. LE never discussed it.
To this day, I cannot explain what happened next--if LE was being paranoid, if someone was spreading false rumors about me, etc. Maybe he thought he could intimidate me into silence, an insurance policy. If I had known what he was up to, I would have taped it.
He made a first-time, unexpected visit to my office. He shut the door so we could speak privately. He then threatened explicitly to reassign my classes if I decided to file a complaint over what he did last semester. I couldn't believe what I was hearing; it was a blatant abuse of power--and completely counter-productive from his point of view. I could easily see why people might question why I didn't file a complaint immediately in the fall; in part, academic hiring in my discipline at the time started at DSI and ICIS conferences late fall semester. So I was going to be leaving ISU come May, no matter what. Plus, as a visiting professor, I frankly doubted that the good old boy network would back me up: I would be gone in a year no matter what, while they had to live with my tenured adversaries.
But LE's threat to relieve me of classes just for filing a legitimate grievance was an inexcusable breach of professional ethics. I went straight to the administration. They had to craft a decision that provided for my due process while acknowledging LE's legitimate authority; they made it clear, however, they would scrutinize decisions like relieving me from my classes.
LE squealed like a stuck pig that the Administration was basically eviscerating his meaningful authority. I had lost whatever professional respect I had for LE; whatever he was going to say to other colleges was beyond my control.
Before I left ISU, I hit LE and his cronies with what they feared the most, a complaint of what they had done as a blatant abuse of academic freedom, plus a complaint of LE's personal threat and other things. I didn't get an offer in the middle of a recession. Did LE blackball me? I don't know. I was facing an uncertain future, with the IT profession skeptical of my skills after 8 years in academia and wary of my using them as a refuge until the academic job market recovered.
So what did I have to gain? In part, I wanted to make things better for other professors that followed me.
The results: the investigating subcommittee (I got their decision long after I left ISU; they didn't contact me during deliberations) agreed that LE had violated my academic freedom and couldn't explain why I had not been counseled during the fall semester incident. I am grateful they did the right thing. Of course, I never got a follow up. For all I know, the college quashed their finding.
However, and this is the main point for telling the story, the committee cleared LE from my charge about his threatening to strip me from my classroom duties in the spring, noting that he denied the charge and I had failed to prove my charge. What the hell? Of course, LE had manipulated the situation so there were no witnesses. But why did I go to the Administration when I did? Why did the Administration explicitly assert its rights to review LE's personnel decisions? Why did LE protest the Administration's letter? These details were on the record; of course, LE would make a self-serving denial. But you would think that a department chair who actually stripped me of a course in the fall might credibly threaten to do it again. What exactly did they want: a videotape of an unexpected meeting?
So yeah, I can understand why a victim of sexual crimes is incensed when people don't believe me (and no, I'm not trying to compare my experience as a professor to a victim of sexual aggression).
So why don't I believe Ms. Ford? It's based on a number of inferences, including but not restricted to these:
I've mentioned some of these incidents before from my own experiences:
- Part of the time I attended UH as a grad student, I lived in Cougar Place, with duplex studio apartments sharing bathrooms, on the left edge of campus, a few blocks away from satellite parking. One of my former coed students recognized me and flagged me down. She asked me if I would escort her to the parking area, and I agreed. There is not much to this story beyond a minor inconvenience.
- A few years earlier I had just moved to Orlando's naval base, the site of the nuclear power school. The base didn't offer BOQ's, i.e., housing for officers, so I had to find an off-base apartment. In the interim, there were temporary quarters, basically studio apartments with an intermediate shared bathroom. One day I heard female screams and calls for help; she managed to get into the bathroom and started knocking desperately on my locked door. I let her into my apartment to escape while fending off the man who was following her, keeping him back in the bathroom. He was out of control, screaming that she was his wife, I had no business getting involved, and that he was going to kill me. (This is the first time I ever got a direct death threat.) I later reported the incident to the MPs, who literally laughed it off.
- Around 2009 I lived in a basement apartment just west of the Baltimore County line in Howard County. I often heard loud arguments coming from the apartment over mine. One day I heard female screams in the hallway crying for help. I came out of my apartment and noticed a trail of female possessions down the staircase from the apartment in question. They had gone out of the apartment building, and I stood outside the entrance. I think she was going to a parked white car at the curb and he intercepted her at the car. She was a petite young lady, maybe 5 feet tall, her boyfriend maybe my height, a head taller. I recall she was wearing jeans too long for her: her feet were covered with jean leg. She saw me and ran up to me, asking me to call the police. One of her eyes was purplish, swollen shut; I knew instantly what must have happened, and I had to exercise self-control from going after the bastard boyfriend. The boyfriend came up to us, echoing his girlfriend's pleas to call the police, claiming that she had assaulted him with her fingernails, scratching the outside of an eye. It was a very surreal experience; the girl was at one moment screaming that the police were going to lock his ass in jail and then, the next moment, crying that she didn't want to see him go to jail. I didn't have my cellphone with me, but I was determined to stay her as long as it took--he was not going to hit her again on my watch again. I mostly stood there listening to the both of them, keeping the situation calm under the circumstances. A neighbor must have called because the police showed up maybe 10 minutes later, immediately putting the guy in cuffs. I listened to the girl plead with the accompanying lady cop, pleading her not to put her boyfriend in jail; it was the drugs that were responsible to this, that all he needed was a stern talking to. She mentioned while under the influence he was paranoid, thinking the people in the apartment above and below him (that's me) were trying to gas his apartment, that he was under government surveillance. At some point, the lady cop turned to me and said, "I've got this; you can leave." (I didn't know if they needed me as a witness.) I don't know what happened afterwards; the police never contacted me if they needed me as a witness.
Chivalry is not dead. One of my nephews got punched out protecting the honor of a young woman.
Now I'm not sure what may/may not have happened 36 years ago. Let me start by saying that I think that Judge Kavanaugh was not my preferred nominee, given a weak record on the fourth amendment. I certainly am not a Trump supporter nor a Republican.
But any familiar reader knows that the Democratic assault on Judge Bork during the Reagan Administration was the final straw in my leaving the party as a conservative Democrat. Only a few years later the Democrats launched a similarly odious personal attack against another superbly qualified Clarence Thomas, in many ways currently my favorite jurist on the court.
Why do I believe Kavanaugh? It's based on a number of inferences. Is it possible Kavanaugh and Ford casually met during high school? Yes; he attended an all-boys school and she an all-girls. If they met, it would likely have been at a party mixer. I'm sure that the upper-class athlete might have attracted her interest. Is it possible he said or did something (non-sexual) which offended her? I know women who have held a grudge against me and have lied about the circumstances. As I recently tweeted, there was a UTEP student who went ballistic after I discovered she had worked together with a male student on an independent assignment. I had a Houston girlfriend who was unhappy with me after I went to an Astros game without her (and she didn't even like baseball)--I found she literally left something like 14 messages on my answering machine during the game; when I later broke up with her, she responded with a "Dear Spawn of Satan" letter typed on Merrill Lynch letterhead. Years later, a work colleague, apparently so embarrassed that a geek like me would dare ask her out to lunch, tried to get me fired. I'm not exactly proud of admitting I tried to date evil women.
Is Ford an evil woman? I don't know yet. But let me point out that anyone who has studied psychology--and I've read literally thousands of applied psychology papers, knows that human memories are not like copy machines. I'll give a minor example. I remember trying to convince my Mom to vote third-party in 1972. She later told me (in a letter) the person I was backing was not on the ballot, that she voted for Nixon instead. Some time later, I raised the topic of her 1972 vote. She called me a liar, saying that she never discusses who she votes for with anybody. I let it go, thinking it was a stupid argument: I still had the letter in question in my trunk.
The MeToo industrial complex wants you to believe a traumatic experience gives you super-memory powers, but that is a disprovable myth. It may be other unpleasant memories of Kavanaugh (maybe he rejected her interest in him) got fused with an unrelated event. There is a whole area of psychology based on false memories. The anti-science ideologues went after Sen. Hatch when he suggested mistaken identity. In fact, Hatch is likely correct, as I'll discuss.
So I know what it's like not to be believed? Yes. Not a sexual incident. But I had an unexpected event in my last year of academia as a visiting professor at Illinois State. I had had a contract dispute with UTEP; Professor JC from Arizona State was a leading scholar in my segment of MIS dealing with human factors/ergonomics in information systems. BB at ISU was taking a year's leave to start up a research center at ISU; this opened up a temporary position, and I was offered the appointment.
Now the Applied Computer Science at ISU was not an MIS program in a business school, like my past positions; it was more of a fusion program. Among other things, they wanted their students to program in PL/1 vs. COBOL (like you might have seen at the time in an undergraduate MIS program). Chairman LE was well-aware that I didn't teach or write in PL/1, but he wasn't bothered by that; he assigned me to teach a data structures course and assigned a PL/1 grader for me. Now what got me on the senior professors' shitlist from the get-go was that I made the programming language OPTIONAL. As far as they were concerned, I was supposed to require PL/1. And I heard rumors on the grapevine that certain idiot troublemaking students in my class were spreading rumors that I was teaching COBOL (gasp!) in my class. (Nope. I was using pseudocode, but students didn't seem to recognize the difference.) Around mid-semester, without warning, the class was taken away from me. There was not even an interim discussion with LE. I suspected that LE acted under pressure from the senior faculty, but there wasn't even the pretense of due process.
This put my academic career in jeopardy; another college hearing what happened might infer it was misconduct or incompetence in the classroom. LE and I had a frank discussion about PL/1 before I stepped into the classroom. I had his full support--until I didn't.
Now I was between the rock and a hard place: I needed to land a new academic appointment soon, and a positive recommendation from LE was almost expected if I were to be successful.
So there was no doubt that I was internally fuming over the injustice that had happened. But I didn't go around talking about it, even with junior professors I had befriended during my stay. My focus was to get my next job offer (little did I realize in academia that wouldn't happen for another 3 years) I had made no attempt in the weeks that followed the class decision to file a grievance; I had not discussed it with others. LE never discussed it.
To this day, I cannot explain what happened next--if LE was being paranoid, if someone was spreading false rumors about me, etc. Maybe he thought he could intimidate me into silence, an insurance policy. If I had known what he was up to, I would have taped it.
He made a first-time, unexpected visit to my office. He shut the door so we could speak privately. He then threatened explicitly to reassign my classes if I decided to file a complaint over what he did last semester. I couldn't believe what I was hearing; it was a blatant abuse of power--and completely counter-productive from his point of view. I could easily see why people might question why I didn't file a complaint immediately in the fall; in part, academic hiring in my discipline at the time started at DSI and ICIS conferences late fall semester. So I was going to be leaving ISU come May, no matter what. Plus, as a visiting professor, I frankly doubted that the good old boy network would back me up: I would be gone in a year no matter what, while they had to live with my tenured adversaries.
But LE's threat to relieve me of classes just for filing a legitimate grievance was an inexcusable breach of professional ethics. I went straight to the administration. They had to craft a decision that provided for my due process while acknowledging LE's legitimate authority; they made it clear, however, they would scrutinize decisions like relieving me from my classes.
LE squealed like a stuck pig that the Administration was basically eviscerating his meaningful authority. I had lost whatever professional respect I had for LE; whatever he was going to say to other colleges was beyond my control.
Before I left ISU, I hit LE and his cronies with what they feared the most, a complaint of what they had done as a blatant abuse of academic freedom, plus a complaint of LE's personal threat and other things. I didn't get an offer in the middle of a recession. Did LE blackball me? I don't know. I was facing an uncertain future, with the IT profession skeptical of my skills after 8 years in academia and wary of my using them as a refuge until the academic job market recovered.
So what did I have to gain? In part, I wanted to make things better for other professors that followed me.
The results: the investigating subcommittee (I got their decision long after I left ISU; they didn't contact me during deliberations) agreed that LE had violated my academic freedom and couldn't explain why I had not been counseled during the fall semester incident. I am grateful they did the right thing. Of course, I never got a follow up. For all I know, the college quashed their finding.
However, and this is the main point for telling the story, the committee cleared LE from my charge about his threatening to strip me from my classroom duties in the spring, noting that he denied the charge and I had failed to prove my charge. What the hell? Of course, LE had manipulated the situation so there were no witnesses. But why did I go to the Administration when I did? Why did the Administration explicitly assert its rights to review LE's personnel decisions? Why did LE protest the Administration's letter? These details were on the record; of course, LE would make a self-serving denial. But you would think that a department chair who actually stripped me of a course in the fall might credibly threaten to do it again. What exactly did they want: a videotape of an unexpected meeting?
So yeah, I can understand why a victim of sexual crimes is incensed when people don't believe me (and no, I'm not trying to compare my experience as a professor to a victim of sexual aggression).
So why don't I believe Ms. Ford? It's based on a number of inferences, including but not restricted to these:
- Ms. Ford did not raise Kavanaugh's name for over 30 years and even then, did not go to law enforcement, but to politicians, wanting her identity to be hidden. Yes, Ms. Ford eventually went public, but I believe this had more to do with a news leak. There's a reason why there's often in law a statute of limitations. It's all but impossible for a defendant to mount a defense as potential witnesses die off or their memories fade with age.
- There's the problem of Ms. Ford not coming forward during his nomination to the bench in 2003 through approval in 2006. Recall Kavanaugh had been involved in the Clinton impeachment effort and so, when Bush nominated him, resentful Democrats blocked his nomination until a bipartisan agreement years later. Yet more than 20 years after the alleged attack, she didn't come forward then or at any point before or during the 6 federal background checks Is it that an alleged sexual predator is acceptable for lower federal judge positions?
- There's the problem of Ms. Ford's description of Kavanaugh and the preponderance of the evidence. We simply don't see anything like a pattern of behavior, multiple victims. Kavanaugh did not seem to have a playboy reputation; women are not coming out of the woodwork claiming to have been victimized
- Ms. Ford's allegations lack sufficient specificity for any prosecution . Time, location, witnesses for parties. She never apparently kept a personal journal, discussed the allegation with contemporaries, including her parents and friends. I'm not even sure if she can establish even meeting Kavanaugh. The WSJ reports that Ford desperately contacted her college roommate on Facebook, seeking corroboration that she had disclosed the allegation (nope).
Friday, September 21, 2018
Post #3813 M: Hurricanes and Climate Change; The Kavanaugh Hearings
Quote of the Day
It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time,
but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
Will Durant
It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time,
but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
Will Durant
Hurricanes and Climate Change
Taylor Wilson and His Dream For Carbon-Free Energy Generation
Ginsburg On the Kavanaugh Hearings
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
 |
| Courtesy of Pat Cross via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Madonna, "Die Another Day"
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Post #3812 M: RoboLawyer; Institute For Justice Victory Over Philadelphia Civil Asset Forfeiture
Quote of the Day
True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess.
Louis Nizer
Madonna, "What It Feels Like For a Girl"
True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess.
Louis Nizer
RoboLawyer
Institute For Justice Victory Over Philadelphia Civil Asset Forfeiture
Social Media Digest
Sen. Perdue (R-GA), a Trumpkin, on FNC, made an unchallenged assertion that the economy is growing twice under Trump as under Obama. This is nonsense; he is extrapolating from one good quarter (4.2% annualized). Obama had one good quarter, too (over 5%, 2014). Trump year 1: 2.3%.— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 21, 2018
Did something wrong happen to Ms. Ford 36 years ago? Certainly it's possible. But let's point out that some rapist convictions have been reversed on DNA evidence, and I'm fairly sure the rape victims thought the right perpetrator had been convicted.— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 21, 2018
I remember one past workplace adversary accused me of some totally fabricated nonsense. When I denied it, the moron insisted there were "witnesses". I responded, "You can't possibly have witnesses to something that never happened!" Yes, you can have a conspiracy of liars.— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 21, 2018
Ms. Ford claims strong memories of an alleged rape attempt but never filed charges, kept notes of time, place & other event witnesses beyond a well-known teen friend of Kavanaugh, or told friends or family at the time, including her best friend in college. No judge would allow it— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 21, 2018
What the anti-liberty trolls don't tell you is that leftist restrictions of background checks and assault weapons bans DON'T WORK. I think the murderer here killed 3 people. A crime, but hardly a "mass shooting".— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 20, 2018
Minoring in philosophy vs. computer science for my first Master's degree #BadDecisionsIHaveMade— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 20, 2018
Voting Democrat in my salad days #BadDecisionsIHaveMade— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 20, 2018
That some delusional woman who allegedly suffered a rape attempt suddenly decides she wants an FBI investigation 36 years later. #StrangeThingsToArgueAbout— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 20, 2018
Nope. Not one penny for any purported Ft. Trump in Poland. It's time we start scaling back our 800 military base empire abroad, not enlarging it. Trump has already added over $1T to the national debt.— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 20, 2018
I found this contemptible parasite's tweet in a Facebook post featuring an economically literate response but had to do a search to find the original. Notice the morally corrupt, Politics of Envy entitlement to another man's property. "Democratically accountable" my ass! https://t.co/piSKgROgkh— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 20, 2018
Before and after birth photo. Welcome to the world, little one! Choose life. pic.twitter.com/zUu8cuvfVp— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) September 20, 2018
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
 |
| Courtesy of Michael Ramirez via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Madonna, "What It Feels Like For a Girl"
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Post #3811 M: Authoritarianism and Populist Gains in Sweden; The Ultimate Polish Joke: Ft. Trump
Quote of the Day
The gem cannot be polished without friction,
nor man perfected without trials.
Chinese Proverb
Madonna, "Don't Tell Me"
The gem cannot be polished without friction,
nor man perfected without trials.
Chinese Proverb
DEAD WRONG: It's the Economy, Stupid!
How High a Minimum Wage? UCLA Students Are Economically Illiterate
Ron Paul on Ft. Trump
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
 |
| Courtesy of Tom Stiglich via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Madonna, "Don't Tell Me"
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Post #3810 M: Self-Driving Cars; Autonomous Warmaking
Quote of the Day
The best minds are not in government.
If they were, business would hire them away.
Ronald Reagan
Madonna, "Music". Her last (so far) Hot 100 #1.
The best minds are not in government.
If they were, business would hire them away.
Ronald Reagan
Self-Driving Cars
Autonomous Warmaking
Mind Your Business: Private Security and Public Safety
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
 |
| Courtesy of Robert Ariail via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Madonna, "Music". Her last (so far) Hot 100 #1.
Monday, September 17, 2018
Post #3809 M: Your Real Rights Don't Come From Government; The Insidious Welfare State
Quote of the Day
You don't understand anything
until you learn it more than one way.
Marvin Minsky
You don't understand anything
until you learn it more than one way.
Marvin Minsky
Government Is Not the Source of Your Rights
The Morally Corrupt Welfare State
Do the Rich Pay Their Fair Share?
Choose Life: Loving Baby Sister
Political Cartoon
 |
| Courtesy of Michael Ramirez via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Madonna, "American Pie". Madonna opened the new millennium with a rare remake, a rather bizarre take on the McLean 70's classic hit (in fact I only heard it for the first time writing this post). The video seems very dark and (at least to me) to fixate on Madonna's breasts. It barely hit Top 30, although it hit #1 in at least 7 other countries.
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