I would like to express my gratitude to all those members of the Washington University Pride Alliance for the work they have done to make Washington University safe for those of non-straight gender description. For too many years have male-female relations been the norm. I too feel the social constraints to conform to the standard. Protection and understanding have never been more important than they are right now, and nowhere more necessary than at Washington University. Now is the time for education and love. Now is the time for freedom of expression and experimentation. Now is the time for Safe Zone stickers on our doors to help us escape this patriarchal conformist society and live in harmony with each other!

More can be done. Even today, even at Washington University, groups live under harsh and unfair persecution. Consider those who fulfill their carnal appetites with their friends in the animal kingdom. Why should they feel cornered by society, while the Pride Alliance has opened up recognition for so many other groups and orientations? This is outrage! Even on this campus, young students long to cross this artificial “species” gap to join with our ancestors and cousins. Who can say he or she has not felt the urge? Before only a gender gap existed; fraternization of like partners was strictly forbidden by society. Today’s fight is even larger. Before, to join with another man required bucking the pressures of society. Now, such pressure has finally been released. But what if the man was a bull? A goat? A kitten? The limitations on liberty astound. The religious right, Justice Alito, and George W. Bush suppress the freedom of people to associate with each other and with other animals whenever they like.

Now is the time to gather the herd and close this gap. We have won the battle for freedom of sexual orientation; marriage will be close behind. Now is the time to join with our friends of the hoof and wing to free species orientation. They cannot speak for themselves. We must be their advocates!

I challenge the Pride Alliance and other allied groups to answer the call of the wild. Now is the time, while we are flying high! Don’t let the opportunity ride away into the sunset. The Pride Alliance just recently renovated its suite in the Women’s Building, I challenge them to put their funds and room to good use. Lesbian, Gay, Genderqueer, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual. It is the goal of the Pride Alliance to advocate GLBTQIA-friendly public policies through activism and greater awareness, to educate the WU community about GLBTQIA issues, and to build a supportive social network for GLBTQIA students. How exclusive! They should be ashamed of themselves for their omission. Soon Zoophile shall be added to their ranks, and the world shall be set aright for all orientations! No longer will they live in fear of societal pressures. No longer will they be hindered by the traditional moral standards that have crushed the freedom of GLBTQIA people before them. Teeth will gnash and fur will fly, but I have no doubt that freedom will win the day. Thank you Pride Alliance!

Like everyone else, I hate No Child Left Behind. Who doesn't?

After years of the program, and copious data on failing schools, we still can't manage to fire bad teachers. They complain that exams place undue stress on children. They complain that the program forces teachers to teach to the test. They complain that the exams are poorly constructed.

To them I propose the following program, to deal with their claims:

First of all, if the tests are too difficult to administer, I'll simply do away with them. They're not good exams anyway. When I last took one (the MAP test, in 2004), most of the test was in long answer format. Multiple choice were virtually nonexistent. Why? A computer grades multiple choice questions, and computers have a nasty reputation of hating teachers. Just ask the teachers. As a result, teachers grade the long answer test (to level the playing field, of course). That's a wonderful idea. I'm certain that they will then see the logic in allowing their pupils to grade their own tests as well. Share and share alike.

No, rather everyone will take the ACT. It's not a perfect test, but it's perfectly immune to the teacher bias to which state sponsored standardized tests are heir. Every college accepts it. Colleges have a vested interest in getting smart students. More importantly, students have an interest in taking the test seriously. One of the major flaws of state-sponsored standardized testing is not that the test stresses the students, but that the students ignore the test. Why shouldn't they? Even if they could correctly guess the incentives of the test, all the incentives of the current program would tell them to fail on purpose (after all, isn't that how your school gets more money?). The ACT removes that problem from the table, because students have an incentive to take it seriously. Not only that, but if it's good enough for rent-seeking colleges, it's probably good enough for the US government.

Do smarter kids do better on the ACT? Sure they do. But my math score increased three points (out of 36 possible) between my sophomore and junior year. Surely I didn't get that much smarter. With a wide enough range of students (say, state level data), you can wash the smart kid bias from the data. With big schools, the IQs of all the students will be evenly distributed that individual schools can be compared. With smaller schools, a researcher could compare pools of similar schools and eventually shake all the q out of the data. Smart kids in good schools do better than smart kids is bad schools.

Instructors will also take the ACT. Teachers will positively despise this, but I can't understand how a teacher who couldn't break 20 on the ACT should be allowed to teach kids in any level of school. Some people are simply not cut out to be teachers, and we shouldn't be paying them for dragging society. If I have to have a certain ACT score to go to college, they should have to have a certain ACT score to prepare me for it.

Lastly, a simply essential addition to my plan is the ability to fire bad teachers. Some teachers are bad. It's alright to admit that. My parents are self-employed, and they hire twice as many people every year as actually show up to work every day. Teaching is an easier job than working for my parents, and probably pays a little better. Why should we expect better people to apply? We can't just pay them more; everyone will work for more money. The way the system is currently run, they'll gladly work for less money. Why? Because they don't have to work that hard. Some do, and I have a list of my own teachers who put in long, hard hours at school and at home to fit their class to all manner of student. But they wouldn't have to. There's no way to know if they aren't, and even if everyone knew, they'd have to sleep with a student or show up to class drunk to get themselves booted. Don't show up to work at my farm? My sister will fire you with a baby in one arm and more work than you've done all week in the other. She won't feel bad. She won't feel good. She'll probably do it again to someone else next week. There are two parts to recruiting workers. One is pay, and the other is responsibility. More responsibility involves more pay, because firms need to attract better workers. If they only want the pay and shirk the responsibility, my sister fires them. If teachers shirk the responsibility, we offer them more money. We have to be able to fire teachers.

So, I've fixed No Child Left Behind. Want to do away with the weeks of state tests of students? Great! Begone! Four hours on a Saturday (and about $30 per student) for every student and teacher, and fire the teachers whose students fail or who fail themselves to meet the standard. If they're so great, they'll have no trouble finding work elsewhere. 

I'm a student at a top twelve university. They like to tell us we're top ten, but it's just not so.

That's fine, though, for freshman year all I heard was "work hard, play hard." As if that isn't the motto of every single college campus in America.

I spent most of my time irate. For example, I would love to take a class in American History dealing with that little event we call The Founding. Can't be done here, they don't have time for that.

That being said, we have enough Women's and Gender Studies classes that one of my friends takes five of them a semester. I'm an economics major and I can't get five classes a semester. I can hardly get five classes above the 300 level. And she had five women's studies classes in one semester. Outrageous.

Here, the Classics' department has been gutted. You can take "Not Members of the Club," a class about how assorted ancient civilizations suppressed women and slaves. Here's the description:

   Both the Athenian Democracy and the Roman Senatorial Oligarchy were societies in which political power was the exclusive property of free, citizen males. With very few exceptions, the astounding accomplishments of those societies were also the creations of free, citizen males. This course examines the lives of two disparate but comparable groups of outsiders within Greek and Roman society. The status, rights, and accomplishments of Athenian and Roman women are explored and placed in the context of other pre-modern societies. Likewise, the institution of slavery in Greece and Rome is explored and compared with other slave-holding societies, ancient and modern.

Outstanding. That'll be $34,500 please. Want to take an American History course? Check out this excellent option:

Through primary sources, including films as well as narrative accounts, this course will investigate the context, causes, content, and consequences of the political and cultural upheavals in American society between 1950 and 1975. Domestically and internationally, the events of the period were rooted in developments during the preceding years of the late 1940s. We will, therefore, explore relevant precursory threads as well. The focus of the course will alternate between national and local settings. Why did what happened in these years happen and did any of it matter or make a difference? What changed and what did not? Were those engaged in activism unrealistic in their assumptions, discontent, dissent and protest? Were those years "unreal?" Or was it a time when many Americans, even those who were passive or who opposed the protesters, in fact reflected upon issues of privilege and political, economic, and social power in the United States and in the world? Discussion sections are required. This course satisfies the modern course requirement for history majors.

Oh, yes. What was I thinking trying to learn about Hamilton, Jefferson, and Franklin. Who are those guys? I ought to be in "Intro to Women's Studies," where one of the assignments is to take on a traditional role of the other gender. For men, there are lots of options. They can shave their legs, paint their nails. For women, it's more difficult, because there are no traditional male roles left. I have a friend who says they could "try to fix something," but he doesn't have much of a political future ahead of him.

I just stay in economics and math courses. A language course one in awhile is probably ok, but anywhere else is simply begging for pain, at least if you're a white male. We're the only ones who've never ever been oppressed.

I always feel like I'm being punished for the fact that Rome, Greece, and America were founded by white males. I'm sorry that's the way the culture was, but you can't very well go around dumping on other people's cultures. If they were a culture of moon worshippers who force their men to drink urine and cover their faces, it would be ok. White men who give speeches and lead armies? That would be a serious breach of the academic standard.

No fancy introduction for me.

I'm getting married in 46 days. Everyone tells me that I'm too young, and I simply don't understand that. I did the dating thing. I had my own fifty first dates. I suppose I went about it all the wrong way. See, I thought that dating was a sort of preliminary step to finding a mate. What was I thinking? The good news is that college enlightened me. Now I understand that dating is about beer, about random hook-ups at the frats, and about burying emotions with physical sensation. It's not about marriage, and it certainly isn't about finding an appropriate mate with whom to start a family.

I'm a baseball fan. I like to joke with my friends about having enough kids to field a baseball team. That's why early marriage is such a key, because I'd rather watch than play. I'm kidding, of course, but one of my friends (at a top ten school!) told me that having so many kids was socially irresponsible. Really? Four or five children born in wedlock to someone with a guaranteed job and a shiny new college degree? If anybody ought to be reproducing, it's me. The best argument for my withdrawing from the gene pool are my looks, but my future wife (God help her) is beautiful, so with any luck we'll have a whole flock of young ladies with their mom's beauty and wit and their dad to meet boyfriends with a shotgun. Take note, gentlemen.

But my friend's real problem isn't an overly active social conscience (as if those exist), but an overly active ego. Of course he doesn't want to have children; they are hard. They require work. They require money. They require attachment and roots and responsibility. He doesn't want any part of that. But I do.

My parents settled down to a shack on the bottom of one of our rented farms in my hometown. They married young and had kids young and now have barely broken fifty before they have four grandchildren. Nice, conservative grandchildren, who will work hard and throw down roots and have a whole flock of nice conservative great-grandchildren, whom my parents will likely live to see.

I'm not upset about my friend withdrawing from the gene pool, because his kids would likely end up voting for four-hour work weeks, public school starting at age two, and mandatory hybrid cars. Not mine. If I can't field my own baseball team, I'm at least going to get to vote four or five times in the 2028 presidential election.

But for the next 46 days I'm just going to keep my head low and speak when spoken to. I learn quickly.