Friday, April 02, 2004

The Pollies

It turns out that some folks actually track and rank campus silliness, in this case campus PC. The Polly Awards (Pollies) are given to the nuttiest campus PC episodes. The Collegiate Network gives first price to Yale for its "Sex Week". No kidding. Actually, just part of First Place (it's a tie) goes to Yale's Sex Week (see the site for the co-recipient).

My own favorite is Duke University and its Chairman of the Philosophy Dept who defends the school's 17-1 left leaning political line-up of faculty by claiming that Duke will not hire dummies -- and conservatives tend to be stupid (not a direct quote; see the web site).

How about an Unintended Self-Parody Award, the USPA. Well, perhaps Pollies sounds better.

A recent discussion in the NY Times Book Review about an author who had not been heard from in years, mentioned that he was working on an academic spoof. One of the commentators noted that this is always a sure sign that the poor author had run out of material.