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The Daily Show vs. Arizona State
Thursday, May 14th, 2009Saw this when it aired the other night. Pretty funny.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Arizona State Snubs Obama | ||||
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6 Responses to “The Daily Show vs. Arizona State”
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Even their law school is a party paradise:
http://subtledig.com/rankings/full-rankings/
eh…no one goes to college just for the learning.
99% of colleges would look just as bad.
As a University of Arizona alum, I got a kick out of this segment. GO CATS!
As an ASU alumni (BSE, MSE, soon to be PhD), I’d say they nailed it.
Unless he can log a 40-second keg stand and prove that he’s nailed at least one 5-9 blonde, I don’t think he should get an ASU degree.
The Daily Show has that shooting-fish-in-a-barrel gag down pat. The sad thing is that it probably wouldn’t be hard to find college students on any college campus who didn’t know that Franklin and Hamilton were never U.S. Presidents, or even that, yes, Barack Obama is a head of state. Of course, it’s an utter red herring with regard to the controversy, since those students don’t even decide who is going to give the commencement address, much less whether the university is going to print out a degree to hand him.
FWIW, I don’t like the idea of any university giving out honorary doctorates. It’s meaningless and, to the degree anyone takes them seriously, they do devalue the university’s actual degrees. You want a PhD? Take the GRE’s, spend years becoming an expert and doing novel research in an academic discipline, pass a qualifying examination based on post-graduate understanding of every area of study in your field, and then convince three or four PhD experts on your committee that you have the skills and have done the work to be their peer. Easy enough, right? I guess it’s a little tougher than giving a graduation speech, though. Oh, well.
To listen to the sycophants who were so up in arms that ASU decided against giving something meaningless (the honorary degree) to someone for something that almost meaningless (the speech), it seems like they were really deeply offended that people wouldn’t always just give the President whatever he wants… My only complaint about ASU’s stand is that they acted like they were holding off until Obama had done more as President. To hell with that. Universities don’t have degree programs for being elected President or even for being a successful President. It would be like saying that if Obama gives a speech to the Nobel committee that they should give him an honorary Nobel prize. Bullshit. There is no Nobel prize for being President and they shouldn’t make one up. Ditto for the university degrees.
BTW, Michelle Obama is giving a commencement address tomorrow in my area. I wonder if she’ll get an honorary doctorate? The school is new enough that they might not have even graduated any legitimate PhDs yet, so she might be the first one to be awarded one there.