Editorials/Fraudulence I/Fraudulence II
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS FRAUDULENCE I Washington Apparently I have again been defrauded by the public prints. Innocent that I am, I read headlines and take them to heart. Having read headlines attributing...
...Ruolfo's celebrates the "impotence and despair" of Mexican Indians residing in a desert...
...When his Pulitzer Prize-winning book of that name appeared twenty-seven years ago the anti-intellectualism threatened the universities...
...Cheney's findings, "At 38 percent of the institutions, undergraduates can earn a bachelor's degree without taking a single course in history, and 77 percent without taking a foreign language...
...There's no human tragedy—perhaps a form left uncompleted, but we are not talking about the establishment of the Tweed Ring in the Executive Office Building...
...This was all in conformity with the law...
...Apparently while absorbed with the ethics of others, it is Congress that has been experiencing a crime wave...
...Juan Ruolfo...
...They are led to believe that they are mastering the humanities, but all they are getting is another taste of what the historian Richard Hofstadter termed anti-intellectualism in American life...
...When George Jones of the New York Times exposed it in 1871 he demonstrated courage and diligence in uncovering an abuse of government trust that earned the Democratic boss of New York City, William March Tweed, between $75 million and $200 million annually in 1871 dollars...
...The brothers cannot sell the company and Boyden Gray can vacate his trusteeship only with difficulty...
...However, if one is a devotee of Washington scandal, I recommend sticking with the misdeeds of senators and representatives...
...Over the last fifteen years the geniuses on Capitol Hill have woven an elaborate net of unreadable rules, purportedly to keep officers of the executive branch conflict-free...
...At Wellesley an expository writing requirement can be met by taking a course that probes the question "Why is Donald Duck so much smarter than the criminal Beagle Boys...
...no one had enriched himself by abusing a public trust...
...Despite all the boastsby R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Gray was an excellent lawyer before leaving private practice to serve George Bush...
...Since becoming counsel to Vice President George Bush, he has filed the requisite disclosure forms annually, including mention of his annual trusteeship fee of $100,000...
...They are that tedious...
...Think of it: the reporter could have been killed...
...apply to senators or to representatives...
...When Mr...
...Now it has conquered them...
...Moreover, 45 percent need not take any coursework in English or American literature, and 62 percent can graduate totally untouched by philosophy...
...Surely there is more to Plato than this...
...If Washington's legislative branch has its way, the executive branch will be a kind of secular monastery with employees professing the usual noble vows, most notably those of poverty and silence...
...At many of the universities of this great Republic, on campuses where the eggheads once joshed that the intellectually inert jocks were studying basketweaving and shuffleboard, it is now considered highly intellectual to take courses in the art of the comic book, the cartoon, the cocktail party...
...Consider this...
...Those classics that survive the faculty club's bookburners are read as ideological tracts...
...Not only are infantile gibberings dumped into the humanities curricula...
...But to understand them one needs to read one's newspaper with the assistance of a competent lawyer and auditor, which can become quite costly...
...Students paying to take the aforementioned courses are being defrauded...
...He is accused of the appearance of the appearance of the appearance of an impropriety...
...Now these stories about Gray could kill the reader...
...I am sure this is diverting stuff, but does it transcend Jane Austen...
...But now the New York Times wants Gray fired because of appearances...
...Delicacy restrains me from identifying the recently convicted, but fourteen of your elected representatives have been sent up the river since 1973...
...Well, I do not like being deceived into believing that high crimes have been committed when they have not...
...Reviewing the reforms in curriculum of the past five years, Mrs...
...Miss Hurston's classic is about a lady who thwarts the menfolk what dominate Amerika by becoming a bean-picker...
...At Harvard a course is offered in "The Origins of Rock and Roll...
...So when one of your elected representatives is hauled off to the calaboose, it is for the usual stuff: conspiracy, extortion, racketeering, driving under the influence of alcohol, perhaps contributing to the delinquency of minors...
...But more on that later...
...Based on a study she has recently concluded, the universities are guilty of mere laxity...
...Moreover, upon mastering the story one usually discovers that no crime has been committed...
...And Gray does not stand accused of earning a nickel, not even of breaking a law...
...Had he avoided government service, he would have by now earned several million dollars...
...Based on my researches, many are guilty of fraud and ought to be sending refunds to their abused students, many of whom have had such boring experiences at university that they will not, of their own free will, ever read another book...
...At such hopelessly politicized asylums as Stanford, works by Aquinas, Descartes, and Mill have been banished from the struggling Great Books course and replaced by the pedestrian propaganda of such transient figures as Miss Zora Neale Hurston and Sr...
...At New York University a student interested in philosophy can slake his thirst by taking "Experiencing Sports: A Philosophical and Cultural Analysis...
...According to Mrs...
...She is devoted to advancing the humanities, knowing as she does that it eases one's path through life to have a mind well stocked with history, philosophy, and literature...
...I am contacting my legal counsel to investigate whether the Times's act of deception is actionable...
...Having read headlines attributing grievous impropriety to White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, I concluded that the dog was guilty of highly unethical behavior...
...from academe about tightening the curriculum requirements, Mrs...
...As is its custom, the rules Congress adopts for the executive branch do not Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Actually, it is a rather common one for this byzantine metropolis...
...In fact, no public trust had been abused...
...The alleged ethics violations of a C. Boyden Gray might interest an accountant or a journalist pursuing a place on the front page beneath Second Coming headlines...
...What kind of scandal is this...
...Cheney observes that "the significant thing is what didn't happen...
...Again, a generation ago, if the lunkheads on the football team snoozed away in such a vacuous course the eggheads would shout scandal...
...Twenty-three hundredyears of readers have thought so...
...Cheney is being too gentle...
...Only 0.2 hours of humanities study have been added to university requirements nationally...
...They are numerous, comprehensible, and rather delicious...
...Gray's father died in 1982, his will made the younger Gray and three brothers trustees with fiduciary duty to oversee the family corn-pany for future generations of Grays...
...Alas, according to my researches, true friends of the humanities should be praying that not one minute more is required in the study of humanities until the profs return to a civilized con10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 ception of them...
...At Stanford Plato's Republic is read as an example of "anti-assimilationist movements...
...Deeper and deeper, paragraph after paragraph, was I lured into major news stories alleging Gray's disturbing misdeeds, and then the lights went on: no law had been broken...
...When he returns to private practice, he can handle my case...
...To find other felonious solons, one must go back to 1949...
...They are forced to pay for a university education and the university is not delivering...
...Actually, Mrs...
...Pursuant to her task, she is now notifying the universities of the inferior job they are doing in teaching the humanities to their clients...
...Cheney's study reveals that most institutions of higher education maintain very few requirements for those studying the humanities...
...T he Tweed Ring was a superb scan- 1 dal...
...1=1 FRAUDULENCE II Among this city's national treasures, one of the most precious, if least heralded, is the cheerful, thoughtful, superbly knowledgeable chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney...
...The fewer contacts with the outside world, the better...
Vol. 22 • April 1989 • No. 4
