We need a bigger brick

• FEWER THAN 90 DAYS UNTIL THE APOCaccredALYPSE. I've heard very little about the goings-on at the district and the two colleges. As you know, the Accreditation Commission expects reports from each college in less than three months. (It's do or die this time, they insist.) And so you'd think that the designated report-writers would be busy bees.

I do know that Irvine Valley College's Accreditation efforts have moved forward nicely during these summer months. By all accounts, the focus group, which is impressive, has produced many pages of excellent work. Even more impressively, faculty have yet to throttle trustee Don Wagner, and the Wag-Man has yet to throttle any faculty.

As far as accreditation is concerned, Saddleback College, on the other hand, is like the guy who "flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions." Saddleback's Accred focus group has produced a draft of a report that, according to my sources, is short, unimpressive, and sans faculty input. You see, way back in the spring, Saddleback faculty leadership decided to bail from the proceedings—in disgust, a feeling that was perfectly natural, given the viciousness with which Donny and MaGoo messed with the last report. When the new leadership returned from vacation this summer, they were shocked to behold an apparent disaster-in-the-making.

Meanwhile, administration at Saddleback is sans leadership until the new Prez arrives in August. But nobody wants to deal with Chancellor "He who must be obeyed" Mathur, and our trustees, evidently, do not communicate between board meetings. (Some of 'em don't communicate during board meetings either.)

So there you are. Big, old Saddleback College lumbers and slumbers to the brink. Raghu Mathur sits in his office, counting his money and admiring his phony degrees. The trustees show up once a month to see if any buildings are burning. ("No? OK, then.") Trustee Tom Fuentes wanders around, smiling at his continued dark existence. —It's a freakin' disaster.

I've been trying to smash that college upside the head (don't thank me; it's the least I can do) for months now, but, evidently, there's no brick large enough to awaken this crew.

And now, the news:

• MY BIG FAT CORRUPT CONGRESSMAN. Oh, great. My Congressman—the stunningly corrupt Gary Miller—is at it again. In this morning’s OC Register (Congressman has financial stake in O.C. tollway), we learn that “One of Congress' strongest supporters of the Foothill tollway's controversial southern extension steered taxpayer money to and lobbied for the project while holding a financial interest in a connected tollway." "In an interview," we're told, "Miller acknowledged getting an $8 million appropriation for Foothill-South's construction in 2005. He has subsequently signed letters to the state Coastal Commission and the Commerce Secretary as part of a lobbying effort in support of the tollway agency's plan to build the road through a coastal park."

Naturally, Miller “expressed surprise when asked about that investment.” Must’ve been the wife who bought that, he says. Waddya gonna do?

The Reg notes that it is against House rules for a Congressperson to appropriate money or to use his position “to benefit projects and organizations in which they have even a small financial investment.”

• DEATH AND TEXAS. In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed, we learn that

British authors and universities are afraid that the University of Texas at Austin is outbidding British archives for the collections of many of the country’s writers. [In an article that appeared in the Guardian, a] British archivist is quoted as saying: “Two things are inevitable: death and Texas.”

• HEY, TRY STUDYING. We also learn that

Community colleges in California might be able to significantly reduce the need for remedial education among students by using the results of 11th grade state testing to better direct students prior to enrollment, says a new report from the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success, known as Cal-PASS….

This has been tried by a state university, and it seems to work, they say.

• CHEAT.COM. Remember that new website in San Diego that provides copies of instructors' tests submitted by students (they're paid) for other students to download? Well, when professors complained, the owner said that the professors could submit a request to ban their students from using the service. But, according to Inside Higher Ed, now we learn that PostYourTest.com has suspended the banning option.

I think it was a business decision. I bet that Demir Oral, the website's owner, is a pal of Gary freakin' Miller and they count their money together on Republican junkets to China.

• SEXY BIOLOGIST HAS A POINTLESS SUGGESTION. In this morning’s New York Times (Let’s Get Rid of Darwinism), sexy biologist Olivia Judson suggests dumping the term “Darwinism.”

Naturally, she’s a fan of the D-man. But, according to Judson, his stature has an unfortunate consequence: "It’s a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. 'Why Darwin was wrong about X'; 'Was Darwin wrong about Y?'; 'What Darwin didn’t know about Z'."

“[I]t’s all grossly misleading,” she says. Since Darwin's time (one hundred and fifty years ago),

…[T]he field as a whole has been transformed. If we were to go back in a time machine and fetch him to the present day, he’d find much of evolutionary biology unintelligible — at least until he’d had time to study genetics, statistics and computer science…. Obsessively focusing on Darwin, perpetually asking whether he was right about this or that, implies that the discovery of something he didn’t think of or know about somehow undermines or threatens the whole enterprise of evolutionary biology today….

This all sounds good to me, but does she or anyone think that the culture will be taking her up on her suggestion? Nope. There're too many STUPID PEOPLE. Makes you wonder why somebody like Judson writes stuff like this.

Makes me wonder why I put out this blog.