A thought has occurred to me this week with the silly uproar over Janet Napolitano's visit to UC Irvine, where meetings were held in secret locations.
Is this any way to run a university?
Not that I sympathize with the student protesters. I don't because I think they are protesting Napolitano's appointment as UC president for the wrong reasons. They are upset because the new UC president was head of the Department of Homeland Security, which-horrors- deported people who were in the country illegally.
I think Napolitano is a horrible choice because she was a feckless DHS head who failed to protect our borders and was ineffective in her approach to terror. I have gone into considerable detail on this site about her performance-or lack thereof in Operation Fast and Furious and other issues. To be blunt, she was incompetent and would not even address the main threat facing this country-Islamic terrorism. Add that to the fact that she has no experience in the field of education, and her selection is puzzling.
So now we have a UC president who has to sneak around UC campuses in secret because the students and various campus workers want to protest her at every opportunity. She has tried to reach out to students and said she wants to provide higher education to all students-documented or undocumented. It seems clear that she will bend over backwards to accommodate the squeaky wheels on our campuses. After all, when it is all said and done, she thinks as they do.
Well, in this case, Gary, you must be sexist! In other cases, you must be racist!
ReplyDeleteWhat other reasons could you have for opposing the policies of this administration? We have such a booming economy and prestige in the world. You must be looking at the wrong facts to come up with some malevolent reason not to love our Leader and leaderesses.
The only other reason was that the whole mess (s) were the fault of the opposition... that sounds good... let's go with that.
I think Napolitano was a poor choice because, whether you agree with Gary, or the protesting students, or neither, she comes to the job as a symbol of a job too well done or not well done enough, and that baggage will weigh down her ability to do the job she was hired for.
ReplyDeleteBesides, does she have any experience with academic institutions? She may have, before being governor of Arizona, but I've never heard of it. She seems to have taken the job as a trophy, rather than as a professional challenge, and the UC system hired her as a trophy, rather than as a capable administrator who could get the job done.