Oh, yeah, UD, you nailed that one. (As a youngster, I occasionally listened to Radio Moscow.)
If you live in a half-hundred Midwestern Rust Belt cities, go to your local Podunk Tech, grab a handful of glossy alumni magazines, internal newsletters, student newspapers, and clip a few puffy articles about PT from the local general circulation newspaper. Look at the “we are wonderful, we love ourselves” stuff. “Professor Y named to regional . . . .” Seamlessly blazing a trail to the future. That’s ol’ Podunk. There’ll be the occasional exception: “Police called to frat house barf-up”.
Then take a look at the busted-up factories and crumbling housing around you and ask, “Well, exactly how has Podunk Tech contributed to our economic development and civic comity?”
There are good arguments for higher education, but academic scandals, criminal misconduct, and waxing mushy over football ain’t helping much.
It was to the best of my memory Pravda, actually, which dependably started the wholly untrue articles: “As is well known….” Izvestia was pretty good, too.
August 17th, 2012 at 7:08AM
Oh, yeah, UD, you nailed that one. (As a youngster, I occasionally listened to Radio Moscow.)
If you live in a half-hundred Midwestern Rust Belt cities, go to your local Podunk Tech, grab a handful of glossy alumni magazines, internal newsletters, student newspapers, and clip a few puffy articles about PT from the local general circulation newspaper. Look at the “we are wonderful, we love ourselves” stuff. “Professor Y named to regional . . . .” Seamlessly blazing a trail to the future. That’s ol’ Podunk. There’ll be the occasional exception: “Police called to frat house barf-up”.
Then take a look at the busted-up factories and crumbling housing around you and ask, “Well, exactly how has Podunk Tech contributed to our economic development and civic comity?”
There are good arguments for higher education, but academic scandals, criminal misconduct, and waxing mushy over football ain’t helping much.
August 18th, 2012 at 6:26AM
It was to the best of my memory Pravda, actually, which dependably started the wholly untrue articles: “As is well known….” Izvestia was pretty good, too.