I don’t think any Bush is qualified to understand how higher education works. Jeb!s latest gaffe:

There are a lot of beautiful buildings being built on college campuses, but you can’t get a course on Friday afternoon. And a professor, tenured professor, may not be teaching many more courses than one per semester.

Those lazy liberal elites! Except that he’s all wrong.

Some professors do teach one course, or even less, per semester. But those faculty have instead exchanged teaching responsibilities for greater research, lab management, and grant-writing responsibilities. Many universities allow you to buy out of teaching obligations with grant funds, but that isn’t escaping any work at all.

Anybody who knows anything about how universities work would know that what matters in the accounting is contact hours — I’m supposed to have a certain number of hours working with students directly every week, in class or in lab. It doesn’t matter when those hours happen, although we try to distribute them to meet student demand. We teaching faculty, in the hours we aren’t engaged with students, are tied up in lecture prep, grading, etc. (also, office hours don’t count as contact hours). If I get a lighter class load on Friday, it means I’ve got a heavier load other days of the week.

My current load is: two 65 minute lectures on Monday and Wednesday, three 50 minute lectures on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and two 3 hour labs on Tuesday and Thursday. I also work with our senior seminar students, which is an additional two hours a week. All those classes require additional hours of prep, and fluctuating amounts of work on grading. The lab requires lots of set up time — I started setting up fly crosses back in December. I was doing prep work on Christmas.

This is also work that gives many people the heebie-jeebies — public speaking? Seven times a week? That would horrify a great many Americans. One of the few jobs that probably requires more public speaking is politician, but there’s a difference between that and professorial work. We’re required to know what we’re talking about, and be accurate.

My wife watched the Democratic town hall meeting last night — she’s becoming a fierce Sanders supporter. I mostly ignored it, so I missed this comment by Clinton, on Abraham Lincoln:

You know, he was willing to reconcile and forgive. And I don’t know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered, but I bet that it might have been a little less rancorous, a little more forgiving and tolerant, that might possibly have brought people back together more quickly.

But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction, we had the re-instigation of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.

Ta-Nehisi Coates noticed it, though. And I learned something: this version of American history has a name.

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I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok? It’s, like, incredible.

And his audience laughs?

Now that is chilling. The man thinks he’s above the law.

Of course, if he did shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue, he might not lose any voters, but he’d be arrested and tried, right?

Right? Tell me he’d go to jail for a crime.

Please.

David Koch, right-wing extremist and obscenely rich promoter of destructive policies, has resigned from the board of the American Museum of Natural History, citing a need to “prioritize other commitments”. That’s good, he’s got no credibility in supporting science, but I do have to wonder what those other commitments might be — tainting the next presidential election, perhaps?

The Bundy Militia are trying so hard to present themselves as defenders of the country’s heritage.

In a new video posted to the Bundy Ranch’s Facebook account, several ranchers search boxes of artifacts that belong to the Paiute tribe. As members of the group sift through documents and objects, holding them up to the camera, LaVoy Finicum talks about how poorly the artifacts have been stored and proposes a dialogue with local Paiute.

“We want to make sure these things are returned to their rightful owners and that they’re taken care of,” he says, noting rat droppings in some of the boxes. “This is how Native Americans’ heritage is being treated. To me, I don’t think it’s acceptable,” Finicum concludes.

It’s not acceptable, huh?

What about this then?

The armed occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge continue to use government equipment inside the complex.

One militant, who refused to give his name, again plowed dirt with a refuge bulldozer Wednesday. He wouldn’t say why he was operating the machinery, but in several places, sagebrush and vegetation had been newly removed, leaving wide patches of bare mud within the complex.

Taking a bulldozer to it is apparently their way of ‘respecting’ the land.

I don’t think their claim of want to protect native American heritage is credible, either. Ask the Paiute.

Bundy supporters have damaged Native American archaeological sites before, most notably, when they drove ATVs through a canyon trail in Utah in protest of protected federal lands trampling the ruins of homes belonging to the ancient Puebloans. Also, the Southern Paiute tribes in Nevada have accused the Bundy family of defacing ancient Paiute petroglyphs in Gold Butte. Incidentally, Southern Paiute community members held a rally last week in Las Vegas in support of the Burns Paiute tribe.

“I understand they took a bulldozer and built a line around the refuge headquarters,” Roderique said. She notes that in the past when a water line was put in at the refuge the tribe’s cultural resources department oversaw the work done to make sure no artifacts or sites were disturbed. “We have a good working relationship with them. That is, the relationship has evolved for the better.”

They also claim to be there to support the Hammonds…a couple of jerks who abused the refuge, shot coyotes from the air, and made death threats to refuge employees.

These people are wreckers. When is the government going to step in and arrest these people and put them in prison, where they belong?