Subject:
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Re: A test! (was Mr. Squibbles)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.fun
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Date:
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Wed, 12 Jul 2000 00:57:54 GMT
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Viewed:
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504 times
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Christopher Weeks wrote:
> In lugnet.off-topic.fun, Lindsay Frederick Braun writes:
>
> > (The background is that the issue of grades came up between Gore and
> > Quayle back in '92, IIRC--Gore was apparently a model student gradewise,
> > but Quayle went I believe to Yale (how nicely rhyming) and got what he
> > characterised as a "gentleman's C"...apparently that 'potatoe' was worth
> > two grades.)
>
> To be completely fair, he probably worked as hard for a Yale C as I did for my
> Mizzou A.
Unfortunately the Ivies don't work that way, despite all the pretenses that they're
somehow the sole province of the godlike. Grade inflation is rampant to a degree
you wouldn't believe; these people have been getting As all their lives, and to
give one a C is to invite the obloquy of their rich and powerful parents. The
shorthand is that a B is, in effect, an F. (A colleague of mine who served as a
visiting professor at Princeton tells the story that a student confronted her with
a C grade, tossed the paper on her desk, and declared that "this is not the
Princeton way." Chutzpah!)
The same kind of thinking holds sway in graduate school, by the way. But I know
that I worked a lot harder for my grades at Michigan State than I did at Princeton
or here at Rutgers. That might just be the learning curve, however--had I started
here and ended up there, I might say the opposite.
> And you have to admit that not everything he said was stupid. (I mean, I can't
> recall anything off hand, but it must be.)
He wasn't an idiot by any means, but I'm of the opinion that he was terribly
unconcerned with the desiderata when he had other things on his mind.
Unfortunately that's politically fatal in a culture that picks its icons apart and
analyses their every move. Then again, Bush did once slip and say that November 7,
1941 was the date of the raid on Pearl Harbor, but people let it pass by because
they knew that Bush, having served in WWII, knew darn well what the correct date
was...and Reagan's basic intelligence was never questioned, even in his moments of
least apparent clarity or poorest judgement. People were much more ready to credit
him with extreme shrewdness (witness the infamous SNL "Reagan as Mastermind"
sketch), hiding behind a facade and exercising virtually complete control over
everything.
But Quayle, for some reason, started out on the wrong foot and snowballed from
there.
I have a theory as to why, but I'm not going to get into it here--but I don't think
it had to do with anything DQ could control.
best
LFB
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: A test! (was Mr. Squibbles)
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| (...) To be completely fair, he probably worked as hard for a Yale C as I did for my Mizzou A. And you have to admit that not everything he said was stupid. (I mean, I can't recall anything off hand, but it must be.) Chris (24 years ago, 10-Jul-00, to lugnet.off-topic.fun)
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