Adiós and hola!

• HOLA. Life is good! The OC Reg reports (Case against H.B. Mayor Debbie Cook dismissed) that

Congressional candidate Debbie Cook has won a victory, after the Fourth District Court of Appeal dismissed a lawsuit that challenged her ballot designation as mayor of Huntington Beach...Republican leaders said they filed the lawsuit on the grounds that Cook, a Democrat, shouldn't be allowed to use the "Mayor" designation on the ground that the voters elected her to the City Council and not to the position of mayor.... Cook has said she followed the law. She called the suit an attempt to distract her from her campaign to unseat Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, incumbent for the 46th Congressional District.

.....The lawyer for the Repubs? That would be Tom Fuentes' pal (and OC "Republican mafia" Godfather) Michael Schroeder. State GOP official Keith Carlson filed the suit. Carlson, who is on the IVC Foundation board, was the emcee at the November Fuentes fundraiser.
.....The Reg notes that "Three Republican candidates for Assembly had also indicated 'mayor' in their individual ballot designations and achieved the position in a similar manner as Cook, records show. Republican leaders had not filed suit against them."
.....That's because they're assholes.
.....Carlson and Co. were ordered to pay Cook's litigation costs.
.....Nya!

• ADIOS. Meanwhile, our pal Gustavo Arellano has written his last "Ask a Mexican" column. He ended today's offering with:

And with this, the Mexican formally bids adios, effective the feast day of St. Melito. It’s been a great run, cabrones, but all the hateful e-mail, the attacks by PC pendejos and the fact that few of you have bothered to submit video questions to my YouTube channel wear on a guy, you know? Besides, like Mr. Dooley, Olle I Skratthult and The Katzenjammer Kids before me, this column’s time has come: It’s no longer necessary to explain Mexicans to Americans because Mexicans are Americans. Gracias for all the fights, the propositions of sexytime explosion, and the slugged-back tequila shots after book signings, but there’s a little ranchito in Zacatecas waiting for me and a barefoot muchacha ready to cook me dinner. Vaya con Dios, America, and always remember: Order the enchilada-and-taco combo TO GO.

Indoctrination? Don't think so!

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: Faculty Are Liberal—Who Cares?:

One of the key arguments made by David Horowitz and his supporters in recent years is that a left-wing orientation among faculty members results in a lack of curricular balance, which in turn leads to students being indoctrinated rather than educated. The argument is probably made most directly in a film much plugged by Horowitz: “Indoctrinate U.”

A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics accepts the first part of the critique of academe and says that it’s true that the professoriate leans left. But the study—notably by one Republican professor and one Democratic professor—finds no evidence of indoctrination. Despite students being educated by liberal professors, their politics change only marginally in their undergraduate years, and that deflates the idea that cadres of tenured radicals are somehow corrupting America’s youth—or scaring them into adopting new political views.

The study’s authors—Gordon Hewitt of Hamilton College and Mack Mariani of Xavier University, in Ohio—write that they believe too much time has been spent debating the proper methodologies for testing whether there is a political imbalance on college faculties. If the danger of such an imbalance is that it is hurting students, the key question is whether the imbalance leads to an otherwise unexplainable shift in student political attitudes.
…..
Based on a review of numerous other studies, as well as of specific surveys of faculty political attitudes at various private colleges, they do not contest that the faculty in higher education is liberal—significantly more so than the public at large. To measure student shifts, the scholars used data from the University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute in which students are asked—as freshmen and seniors—to place themselves ideologically. Student data were examined for specific colleges for which data on faculty political leanings were available, and those colleges were grouped into three categories, based on politics. The student attitudes were examined in 1999 as freshmen and 2003 as seniors.

The scholars find some self-selection, with students who enter college as conservative slightly more likely to be found at relatively conservative institutions, and so forth. But over all, they found only slight shifts in political leanings (albeit to the left) during the students’ four years. The analysis also found explanations other than faculty ideology—gender and wealth, for example—that correlate with the modest political shifts that took place. Whether the students attended a college that was more liberal or conservative did not correlate with the shift—which it would have had liberal professors been engaged in indoctrination, the authors write…..