At last, we academics will be in charge!

Not only that, now they’ll also have the coercive power of government to make us obey.

It is logical that people would want the “best and the brightest” to be their rulers. Perhaps we mistake academics for the best and brightest. What is surprising is how often these people are unable to rule wisely. It is counter-intuitive for many that a Sarah Palin (or a Harry Truman), with her back-country hick ways and even more back-country ideals and values, could be a great and wise ruler.

I think before an academic is allowed to go to Washington, he should prove that he can find what he’s looking for in his own office. That ought to thin out the herd.

It might be worse than that. Rubin has his fingerprints all over President-elect Obama´s choices for economic related jobs. Ribn, along with greenspan and Phil Gramm are directly responsible for the failure to place the new derivatives market under the rule of law by insisting on laws that would require transparency in that market.

we are not hearing more complaints about this because both democrats and republicans supported those measures. It does not look good.

David Halberstram wrote an incisive book, The Best and the Brightest, about the mostly Ivy League types who delivered the country into and poorly executed the Vietnam War. One, also, thinks of Bill Buckley’s remark that he would sooner be governed by the first two-hundred folk in the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty.

From today’s C.S. Lewis quote of the day:

“It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.” One might replace the latter with “self-important academics.” See Lewis’s Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength for examples of self-important academics who ruled as moral busybodies.

Having earned a doctorate myself, and having spent twenty-plus years teaching theology, I am well aware (cue self-reference) that being an academic in no way demonstrates that said person has a great intellect.

Peter, you are exactly right. In fact most academics who have a modicum of self-awareness recognize this. All of the people I have had the privilege to work with have had that precise recognition of vocation that enables them to give other people the tools to think, and recognize that they are called to present God’s truth and then to get out of the way so that God can do His thing through His word. As soon as any of us gets too clever, and puts the focus on self and on one’s own brilliance rather than on God and His truth, God has His way of bringing us to account (and to repentance)!

And now the uncrowned leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, and a possible future Prime Minister, is an (ex-) Harvard Professor, and has held teaching posts at Cambridge, Oxford, London School of Economics and elsewhere.

What would that imply?

What does it mean, when governors go academic (namely Jesse Ventura)?

Peter – no – he is the old one. The new one is Michael Ignatieff.