Consensus on Global Warming at WSU?

Not if you saw the June 10 edition of WSU Today online. The original headline of a photo story by Shelly Hanks and Robert Frank on Tuesday's Pullman snowstorm read "Global Warming? R-i-g-h-t." You can view the Google cache of that version here.

After the story was linked to Tom Nelson's blog (a well-known global warming skeptic site,) and a link to Tom Nelson's blog was surreptiously embedded into the WSU Today headline, the headline was changed to read "Global warming? Not today." See for yourself here.

As April commented on the Tom Nelson blog:

Recheck the headline at the WSU site. It's been politically corrected. I'm not surprised, just sickened. The writer probably has to go through retraining so as to embrace the "empirical evidence" that the morally corrupt leftists at WSU have to offer. We wouldn't want any dissent, now would we?

Education or Proselytization?

The following comment was left by "bmartin" on the "Livin' in the AmeriKKKa" thread.

I have personally taken a class from Kelvin Monroe and it was one of the best classes I ever took. I used to have conservative views but after taking his class he taught us a different way to think opening our eyes to the truths of this world. He at no point forced us to take in his beliefs. He taught us how to think and no form of indoctrination took place. I find it funny that some undergraduate students think they know better then KJM or Hentges. The more you learn, the more you know just how dumb you are. Obviously, this isnt the case for college republicans. I think you guys need to take in Monroes advice and stop sipping the kook-aid fellas

peace and spread the love

I'm sure Mr. Monroe is a wonderful teacher. But let's imagine for a moment that he was teaching a religion class and bmartin had been a Muslim, Jew, atheist, etc. What if bmartin had become a born-again Christian as a result of Mr. Monroe's influence? I wonder how long he would be teaching classes after that?

I'm sorry. I'm not buying this whole "my eyes were closed until they were opened by the CES department" spiel. As the father/stepfather of five children ranging in age from a sophomore in college to a pre-schooler, I have seen firsthand the leftist, politically correct, "white men are evil" version of social sciences taught in our public schools. My kids can't tell you much about Pearl Harbor or D-Day, but they sure know about the Japanese-American internment camps. One kid even thought Martin Luther King had squared off against Robert E. Lee in the Civil War and saved the world.

"WSU makes itself issue in Moscow council race"

I love liberals. They engage in every form of logical falllacy known to man. For example, in today's Lewiston Tribune, leftist Jim Fisher, engages in the fallacy of "begging the question" in his editorial. "Begging the question" or Petitio Principii is a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true.

Fisher just ASSUMES that their is a water crisis on the Palouse but offers no proof other than a quote from a raving anti-everythinger
and a letter to the editor. He makes no mention at all of the science conducted by the Palouse Basin Aquifer Committee that has concluded there is no consistent trend in aquifer levels. Nope. According to Fisher, there's a water crisis, so therefore Queen Nancy and the Moscow City Council are right and the Greater Moscow Alliance and WSU are wrong. Fisher also left out the rest of the GMA ad which states that "Forward thinking on water means a smart conservation plan, cooperation with neighboring communities, sound research to identify the extent of our situation, and creative ways to use surface water." Fisher is an unabashed left winger, but he often does make salient points and is not afraid to sometimes go against conventional liberal groupthink. But he should be ashamed of this pathetic propagandistic defense of Queen Nancy.

The Washington State University administration should have seen this embarrassment coming. After many years looking for ways to conserve Palouse water across campus, WSU's prodigality in irrigating its new golf course has become an issue in the Moscow City Council election.

That prodigality is being used by pro-growth candidates as evidence that concern for declining water supply is no reason to limit development.

"Water? The anti-growth politicians are all wet," the headline on a newspaper ad supporting candidates Dan Carscallen, Wayne Krauss and Walter Steed reads. Carscallen, Krauss and Steed are running with the endorsement of the Greater Moscow Alliance to counteract the current city council's reluctance to authorize new big box stores and new big water users.

"What does Moscow's current city leadership know that water experts and neighboring communities don't?" the ad asks. "In Pullman they're developing a new golf course. In Moscow we've raised water rates to cut consumption. Soon we'll be cutting down water-starved trees."

Last week, during a candidate forum sponsored by the Moscow Chamber of Commerce, Krauss also pointed to the WSU course as he said he objected to "the idea for us to try to save water here in Moscow so it can be used downstream."

WSU's new 18-hole course, which will replace the school's former nine-hole course, will indeed use a lot of water, at least for the first two or three years of operation after it opens next year. The school plans to employ a water-reclamation system to use treated wastewater for irrigation, as the University of Idaho already does at places like its aboretum, but it is awaiting money for the project and predicts it won't be online for up to three years.

In the meantime, WSU is already pouring gallon after gallon of water on the course's new turf.

It is not doing that with the unanimous consent of the Pullman community, however. Several Pullman residents have raised vocal objections to the school's determination to move ahead with the course before the water-saving system is in place. One, Cheryl Morgan, has accused the school of displaying "unconscionable disregard" for its neighbors in doing so.

WSU administrators might prefer that, however, to politicians from nearby Moscow using their extravagance as reason not to safeguard water, and to elect policy makers who will pursue growth with scant regard for the region's aquifers. It makes them look less like leaders of a center of enlightenment than just another set of property developers.

Contributing to that appearance was a Sept. 4 letter to the Moscow-Pullman Daily News from U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Wayne Olson of Moscow. Lamenting WSU's failure to find alternatives to high water use at its new golf course, Olsen asked if it were possible for the school to "think a little more outside the box, do a little research here, at a research institution?"

Party Schools. WSU Not On The List

I don't mean to sound like a spoil sport, I'm pleased to learn that Washington State University shows up nowhere on the Princeton Review's top twenty list of party schools.

Hat tip: The Blogfather.



Top 20 Party Schools
1. West Virginia University
2. University of Mississippi
3. University of Texas, Austin
4. University of Florida
5. University of Georgia
6. Penn State University
7. University of New Hampshire
8. Indiana University, Bloomington
9. Ohio University, Athens
10. University of California, Santa Barbara
11. Randolph-Macon College, Va.
12. University of Iowa
13. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
14. University of Maryland, College Park
15. University of Tennessee, Knoxville
16. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
17. Arizona State University
18. Florida State University
19. University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
20. State University of New York, Albany Source: The Princeton Review