Larry Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College and the man to whom Gov. Bill Lee wants to give over curriculum development at many Tennessee schools … or at least, he did before Arnn got caught insulting teachers and the universities that train them.
OK, hold on just a second. I’m going to get back to Arnn. But let’s stop to appreciate the fact that Gov. Lee may be the first Tennessee politician whose most damaging scandal was the time when he sat around doing nothing. Most governors have to sell pardons or take a teenage bride to draw the ire of their fellow Tennesseans. Those things, though, require effort. Sure, you can just sit at your desk like Gov. Ray Blanton selling pardons, but that’s a lot of work ahead of time getting the word out to the right people. Plus, you have to physically sign the pile of pardons you’re selling. And Gov. Sam Houston had to go clear up to Gallatin, which was not an easy commute at the time, and when Gallatin got pissed at him, he had to flee the state in disguise. Say whatever else you want about Blanton and them, but they put in the legwork to have good scandals. Bill Lee? Not so much.
Where were we? Oh, right. After pissing off a bunch of people by insulting teachers while the governor sat by meekly, Larry Arnn has popped up in The Tennessean to explain that it’s not he who is wrong, but we who are too stupid to understand the fancy words — like “dumb” — he uses when out elocuting.
In his op-ed Arnn writes:
At a recent event with Gov. Bill Lee, I remarked that “Teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.” I’ve made similar critiques of the education bureaucracy my entire career.
This does not contradict my deep and abiding affection for teachers. After the students, the most important people in the college where I work are teachers (the maintenance workers are third — and I tell everyone this often).
Dumb can mean “unintelligent,” which I did not mean. Dumb also means “ill-conceived” or “misdirected,” which is, sadly, a fitting description for many education schools today.
I’m genuinely curious which dictionary Arnn got that second definition from, as neither Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, the Cambridge Dictionary nor any of the dictionaries aggregated on the Free Dictionary website include “ill-conceived” or “misdirected” as a definition of “dumb.” So either: 1. Arnn is just making up definitions to the word “dumb” and trying to pass it off like he’s just so smart that he sometimes accidentally uses obscure meanings for words, forgetting that dumbasses like us wouldn’t know those obscure meanings or know that he was obviously using the obscure meaning and not the common meaning, or 2. he scoured multiple dictionaries to find one that would give him a meaning to “dumb” that wasn’t as harsh an insult as he clearly meant.
Either option is hilarious. He could have just apologized, but instead he’s going to twist words until he can convince someone, maybe just himself, perhaps also the governor, that he doesn’t disdain teachers.
My favorite part of this excerpt, though, is his little aside about how maintenance workers are the third-most-important people at his college. I get that he brings this up to indicate that he relates to and appreciates regular people, that he’s not like the stereotypical college president who favors the educated, elite faculty over the staff.
Jesus says ...
OK, we have to stop again. How hilarious is it that, in a supermajority-Christian state with a bunch of theocrats running everything, that a chick who refuses to go to church and wouldn’t identify as Christian, can illuminate the doofus nature of all these dingleberries by simply quoting Jesus? What is going on, Christians? Like, you know there are a ton of other gods out there, right? If you wanted to be powerful and manipulative and hurt people, you could just align yourself with Zeus.
If Arnn was all “I’m a Zeusian” and then bent the definitions of words and insulted people and expected them to just take it, there’d be no contradiction. You’re not going to find many stories of Zeus that indicate he’d expect anything else from his followers.
But Jesus said so many things that Christians actively contradict, and then they excuse it by saying it’s a part of their religion. This is not a new insight or unique to me, but it is funny as hell.
Anyway, yes, so Jesus says, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” This means, in its most simple terms, that regardless of what a person says, the things that get their time, money and attention are the things they love. You can say that you care about the poor, but if you have a pile of money in the bank, we all know you don’t actually care about the poor.
So here’s Arnn telling us that his heart is with the maintenance workers his university employs, that he understands their value and that they are the third-most-important group on campus. Wow. Damn. If that were true, it would be revolutionary. Could you imagine if maintenance workers were paid like they were the third-most-important group on campus? They’d have to be making six figures, right?
Hillsdale College doesn’t list their salaries, but both Indeed and Glassdoor estimate that such jobs pay about $30,000 a year. Arnn pays lip service to their importance, but neither their lives nor his life reflects that he actually believes that’s true.
And it’s clearly the same with teachers. If Arnn actually had great affection for them, he wouldn’t be calling them dumb.
