I woke up this morning and the sun wouldn’t shine. I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine. I loaded sixteen tons of Number 9 coal, and the strawboss said, “This is a Bible school. We don’t even use coal. Have you ever considered more productive uses for your time?”

OK, OK. It wasn’t sixteen tons. But I did work today (my annual orientation talk to the incoming students), while the rest of you were enjoying your bourgeois, degenerate cookouts and picnics. I don’t mind. I’m glad to do it.

Because it makes me better than you.

And when you get down to it, isn’t that what we’re all working for, really?

I did a little web searching about my new exercise regimen, “Walking with weights.” I found that fitness experts are almost unanimous in their opinion that it’s a very, very bad idea. High risk of injury. Likely to cause dangerous high blood pressure levels.

Just what I’d expect. I finally find a discipline that really makes me feel good, and it turns out to be a dangerous drug.

Too late now, though. I’m hooked.

World has an incredible cover story on how a study program at the University of Texas was skunked by liberal faculty who care more about their careers than teaching students. It’s an example of liberalism undermining the ideas that prop it up or enable it to live, the results being uneducated students and purposeless colleges.

Talking about the program his designed, professor Rob Koons writes:

Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a ‘distribution’ standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences. . . .

The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.

Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one’s salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one’s own narrow research agenda. . . .

Rather than admit this self-interest, liberal arts professors at UT use postmodern and multicultural ideas to defend the Uncurriculum. These fashionable ideas form an ‘ideology’ in Marx’s sense: a system of ideas designed to cloak, rationalize, and defend an unjust set of relationships, namely, the exploitation of undergraduates and their underwriters (parents, taxpayers, and donors). . . .

Due to the Uncurriculum, the humanities are committing slow suicide. There has been a steady decline in liberal arts majors in the last thirty years (from over one-half to fewer than one-quarter of the total). However, the decline is slow enough to make little difference to tenured professors. . . .

The experience of the Western Civilization and American Institutions program underscores a sad truth about higher education in America—it is mostly run by and for the faculty. What it likes and dislikes trumps what would be best for students. Our system will never fully achieve its promise as long as that remains true.”

The Eilean Donan Castle

Filmmakers said The Dark Knight changed how superhero movies would be made in the future, so why haven’t we seen or heard about those new, influenced movies yet? For instance, where’s a good, dark Shazam flick?

I’ll wait for you stop laughing. No, no–take your time.