Arrogance and Condescension: The WSJ Editorials/Op Pages are Back

And Just as Entertaining As Ever.  Look Out Sociology Majors

After a nice holiday break, the WSJ is back publishing its great news stories and its not-so-great Editorials and Opinion pieces.  On May 31 this is what we had.

William McGurn wrote that the problem with the losing Republican candidate in the special election in NY’s 26^th Congessional District was that she did not endorse the Ryan Medicare Plan strong enough.  Really.

Bret Stephens wrote in support of Mexico’s war against the Drug Cartels.  Wait a minute, The Dismal Political Economist is actually in favor of that, good going Mr. Stephens.

The main editorial castigates Ohio’s Attorney General for going after investments that the state pension fund made that were allegedly the result of fraud.  Seems the Journal doesn’t think fraud, if committed, should be punished.

Finally, in a must read piece a Professor of Government at Harvard takes the near mystical level of arrogance and condescension of the faculty at that University to new levels.  Mr. Harvey Mansfield writes about how students who major in “sociology” and other soft, easy majors (including his own, apparently)  are inferior people whose opinions do not matter and who should not be listened to.

Really, he does.  He is a sample of the commentary.

Just as Gender Studies taints the whole university with its sexless fantasies, so economists infect their neighbors with the imitation science they peddle. (Game theorists, I'm talking about you.)

[Disclosure alert:  The Dismal Political Economist is a real Economist who has taught Game Theory and believes it to be a valuable part of the curriculum. Apparently the Nobel Prize people do also]

Now Mr. Mansfield is listed as Professor of Government at Harvard (and also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, so we know how he got his piece into the Journal), and a lot of folks think that the major in Government has many of the same characteristics as the major in Sociology that Mr. Mansfield refers to as a Meathead major (Mr. Mansfield seems to think so also but we think that is just a way of trying to temper his condescension).  The Dismal Political Economist took a look at the Government Program at Harvard, and this is what he found out.

1.      A course in Mapping Social and Environmental Space, which sounds very Sociology like to us.

2.      A course in Quantitative Methods for Political Science, which sounds awfully like imitation science (is Game Theory in there?)

3.      A course titled “What is Property?”  Well do you really need a course to tell you?

4.      The Politics of Social Policy in Brazil, another Sociology sounding course.

Now Mr. Mansfield is listed at the teacher of a course entitled, The History of Modern Political Philosophy, and one imagines that if Mike Stivic came to Archie with the news he was taking that course, the term Meathead would immediately spring forth from Archie’s mouth. 

We didn’t find that Mr. Mansfield was teaching more than one course, but then the work schedule at Harvard has to have time for the writing of pointless dribble in Wall Street Journal opinion pages.

Well, you get the picture.  Mr. Mansfield’s Government program at Harvard looks an awful lot like the “counterfeit majors” he so roundly condemns.  Even though he includes Political Science in the same category, if he really believed it belonged there surely he would do something else.  No, wait a minute, no other job has the work load of teaching one course a year.

Oh, and one final note.  This is from his school biography

He has hardly left Harvard since his first arrival in 1949, and has been on the faculty since 1962.

Who would have guessed?