Professors

So far, classes are going as well as can be expected. My "Energy and the Environment" course isn't really much about energy or the environment, it's really a remedial physics course that so far has taken four weeks to explain how conservation of energy works. I suppose you have to teach this stuff to somebody, but it's pretty aggravating to have to go through this kind of high-schoolish course again this late in the game.

Actually, I'm reasonably sure I did more complicated experiments in high school, where I was graded on my understanding of the subject matter and not how well I laid out an Excel 2007 spreadsheet. What's the difference between a 14 point font header and a 16-point font header? 3 points off your lab grade, according to the professor.

My professors are pretty uniformily and predictably liberal here, but it's better than Ken Barrett back in Madison. At least these guys are happy to run with the Sarah Palin rumors without issuing corrections instead of going full-on crazy. One has to wonder what posesses such supposedly smart people to latch on to such ignorant and obvious rhetoric. When a guy who writes a book called "Bureaucracy and the Policy Process" gets onto a five-minute tangent with some ham-handed joke about McCain's VP pick, I can't help but wonder if his mental faculties haven't seen some sort of decline in the intervening period.

These really are smart people. They're experts in their field, they write decent books and one of them writes for the Wall Street Journal four times a week. So why do these guys get sidetracked and feel the need to regurgitate rumors about banned book lists? I actually have a theory about this.

My Bureaucracy professor said last week that being able to teach is like being able to write your own script, direct your own cast and perform in your own movie five days a week. I doubt that many lecturing professors would disagree with that. There most definitely is a theatrical element to a lecture, and its pretty likely that anyone who has ever lectured knows it. And the most popular type of movie on earth is one where you give the audience what it wants, and there's really no question as to what that is when it comes to college kids taking care of the general education credits with a political science course.

They'd almost be stupid not to do it, especially if it meant their students disengaged from the subject matter. If you're going to teach people anything, you have to hold their attention, and objectivity and neutrality gets you no attention at all.