“All he had to do is be a white guy about it”

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     Playing catch-up to the OC Reg, the LA Times has a new piece on the “secret tapes” of conversations between former OC Sheriff Mike Carona and his pal Don Haidl: Secret tapes of former Orange County sheriff contain racist and coarse language:

.....Former Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona used racial and sexist slurs during secretly recorded conversations with a confidant and boasted that the benefits of public office included hobnobbing with billionaires and getting "phenomenal" sex.
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.....The partial transcripts included in this week's motion show a raw side of Carona that the public probably has never witnessed, talking crassly about his sexual conquests and other women he knew and repeatedly using a racial slur.
.....In one of the milder exchanges, Carona interrupted the conversation when Haidl was talking about something that had happened to his private pilot.
.....Carona: "He still with his old lady?"
.....Haidl: "Ah hmmm."
.....Carona: "I always figured, kind of she was so [expletive] hot, she was going to get herself in trouble."
.....Haidl: "Oh, yeah. She still looks good too."

.....—A month or two after this conversation, a pious Mike Carona attended a 9-11 Commemoration event at our own Irvine Valley College, making patriotic speeches and rubbing shoulders with similar pillars of the community: Tom Fuentes, et al.
.....The taped conversations, which are peppered with such retrograde gems as the title of this post, are available in transcript form. The LA Times offers all of the transcripts as a single pdf file here. The OC Register has links to different portions of the transcripts in this article.

• "A MAJOR IDEOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL SHIFT." In this morning’s New York Times, there’s an interesting piece about changes in attitude among academics. The upshot? —Among the professorate, the 60s generation is retiring, replaced by a generation disinclined to challenge authority.

The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire:

.....…Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.
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.....Individual colleges and organizations like the American Association of University Professors are already bracing for what has been labeled the graying of the faculty. More than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50 in 2005, compared with 22.5 percent in 1969….
.....Yet already there are signs that the intense passions and polemics that roiled campuses during the past couple of decades have begun to fade….
.....… [A] new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.
.....When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.
.....“These findings with regard to age provide further support for the idea that, in recent years, the trend has been toward increasing moderatism,” the study says.
.....The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old. But as educators have noted, the generation coming up appears less interested in ideological confrontations….
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.....With previous battles already settled, like the creation of women’s and ethnic studies departments, moderation can be found at both ends of the political spectrum. David DesRosiers, executive director of the Veritas Fund for Higher Education Reform, which contributes to conservative activities on campuses, said impending retirements present an opportunity. However, he added, “we’re not looking for fights,” but rather “a civil dialogue.” His model? A seminar on great books at Princeton jointly taught by two philosophers, the left-wing Cornel West and the right-wing Robert P. George.
.....Changes in institutions of higher education themselves are reinforcing the generational shuffle. Health sciences, computer science, engineering and business — fields that have tended to attract a somewhat greater proportion of moderates and conservatives — have grown in importance and size compared with the more liberal social sciences and humanities, where many of the bitterest fights over curriculum and theory occurred.
.....At the same time, shrinking public resources overall and fewer tenure-track jobs in the humanities have pushed younger professors in those fields to concentrate more single-mindedly on their careers. Academia, once somewhat insulated from market pressures, is today treated like a business. This switch is a “major ideological and philosophical shift in how society views higher education,” Mr. Schuster and Mr. Finkelstein write in “The American Faculty.”….