Sunday, May 29, 2005

Amoral Retard

Normally I don't even bother thinking about pseudo-intellectuals like Professor Timothy Shortell, but flipping channels the other day I happened to see this photo of him.

It reminded me that he had recently called religious people "moral retards." So I read up on him and found out that he was recently elected chairman of the sociology department at the Brooklyn College Midwood campus. Given statements that he made such as "Christians claim that theirs is faith based on love, but they'll just as soon kill you," one has to wonder just as much about the other professors that elected him chairman.

I decided to take a peek at his
website and found some gems. For example, he states that "I am proud to be among a group of intellectuals who have argued for a free, secular society, including Voltaire, Marx, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Mark Twain, Richard Dawkins, and many others." Really! This guy thinks he is like Voltaire or Mark Twain? Look at what he has published and it looks like he should be lucky to get a post at the crappiest community college in Mississippi (no disrespect intended to Mississippians).

He also shows how intellectually vacuous he is by offering up links to articles by Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman. Now there is a group of diverse and intellectual heavy hitters! He reminds me of the Janeane Garafolo puppet in Team America that says something like "We will read newspaper editorials and repeat them as if they were our own opinions."

Shortell and his electors really make me wonder about the status of higher education these days.

Oh, yea ... I wonder what PETA thinks of that chair cover?


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