Obama Flunks Race Relations

So much for our post-racial president. It was the one solid excuse we had for putting this man into office: to repair race relations. Obama flunked big time.

And, at the same time, another of Obama's radical friends comes to light. In the coming weeks, there will be reporters digging into Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s life. What is likely to emerge will not be pretty. The public will wonder how a man like that could be paid by a once esteemed institution like Harvard to teach our kids.

Most of us have not yet reached the point where we link academe with our current problems. The Gates affair will go a long way toward illuminating that particular link and expose academe's role in what some see as unsustainable public policy in any number of areas.

Even here in India, I cannot escape the corrosive reach of modern American academe. My wife works as an editor for a huge firm here in Chennai that receives mostly outsourced materials from American universities. Many of the topics are banal and often shocking to the highly disciplined and educated; well brought up; reasonable; responsible young people (cybercoolies, as they jokingly refer to themselves) who must endure this line of work. One of the papers recently described in numbing detail a man breaking wind and defecating on his nuptial bed before engaging in sex with his wife on their wedding night. This came from the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Virginia.

I also ask myself how, with unemployment in America unacceptably high and rising, is it not possible to find Americans to do this kind of work? The company my wife works for has recently built no less than three modern campuses in the city and is hiring like crazy – all, in an effort to accommodate the ever increasing volume of untreated sewage that continues to flow from America’s ivory towers. I no longer believe it’s a matter of money alone.