(I posted about this on the article on proposed professor tenure changes – quoting:)

Since when is student satisfaction a good indicator of the quality of a professor? Some are indeed well-liked and excellent teachers – but many others who produce great learning in their classes are eccentric, abrasive or insular, but students and our state would be much more poorly served by those who are personable but glib and vacuous.

This is just a farther undermining of intellectual rigor in the service of the great cynical dumbing down of America that allows a leading candidate for leader of our country to offer the precisely backward analogy that his rejection of settled climate science resembles Galileo’s rejection of his era’s earth-centric view of the solar system: sorry, Mr. Perry, but Galileo was explicitly – and at great personal cost – rejecting the fallacious religion-driven orthodoxy to which the leaders of his day adhered in spite of solid scientific evidence to the contrary. History tells us who comes out the hero, and who look like willfully ignorant, small-minded and spiteful yahoos.

Certainly Perry’s – and his acolyte Scott’s – education reforms are constructed to make such ignorance easier to perpetuate. Who needs rigorous education to improve ourselves and our society, drive innovation and make us competitive in the 21st century? We have Fox News, deep-fried twinkies and American Idol to keep the proles fat, happy and compliantly drinking the red (state) Kool-Aid…..