God is not a Republican or Democrat

More on the Calvin College speech.

I don't know why I am so obsessed with the fact that King George is speaking at this small Evangelical school and has basically snubbed our higher institutions of learning. My favorite part of the commencement speech:

"Some day you will appreciate the grammar and verbal skills you learned here," quipped the president who is not known for his eloquence. "If any of you wonder how far a mastery of the English language can take you, just look what it did for me."

Why must our country continue to mock intelligence?

What's worse is the attack that our universities have come under of late. Jeff Langstraat writes on Culture Kitchen about the way he teaches. He says:

The partisan political framing of academic knowledge production is highly problematic, especially for many of us in the social sciences and humanities. Some of the foundational principles of sociology make us particularly good targets. For instance, our emphasis on inequalities flowing from social causes based in power relationships isn't exactly amenable to a perspective that proposes atomistic individuals who "make it" or fail to based on sheer willpower and effort. Our emphasis that the meaning of any action is contextual and not inherent doesn't sit well with moral absolutists. The call of one of our discipline's founders, Max Weber, to maintain a "respect for inconvenient facts" is one the wingnuts willingly ignore. I wouldn't say that sociology is "liberal" so much as I would say that the ontological assumptions upon which sociology rest have political implications. If you want to study asocial actors making rational choices, study economics or law at the University of Chicago.

I don't think the wingnuts would have a clue what that means.