Harvard Sucks

The professor at work.

Niall Ferguson - Harvard professor - did some writing about Obama in Newsweek.  Since he is a professor, he presumably applied academic standards to his writing.

Or, you know, not.

I especially liked the smackdown James Fallows delivered.

Ferguson has always been something of a contrarian gadfly, enjoying the outrage his statements can elicit.  But as the numerous criticisms of his article have pointed out, he's just been lazy and misleading and willfully deceitful with the facts.

And that is inexcusable as a teacher.

The point - the very point - of learning history is to look at facts, not invent them.  It is not to learn what year the War of 1812 began, it is to learn how events come to pass.  And in order to understand that, you have to look objectively at the facts.  Now, the world is complicated and trying to determine why things happened the way they did is hard.  And that's why history is interesting.  Because you get to argue and counterargue about why the US went to war in 1812.  What motivated the US? Great Britain?  What was accomplished?  What role did key figures play?  All of that is up for argument.

But not the freaking facts.

A few years ago, "Stephen Colbert" lamented that "facts have a well known liberal bias".  This was in contradiction to the Ron Susskind interview that noted that the Bush Administration "makes its own reality".

Apparently, the GOP has adapted.  They have simply denied the truth, warped the facts and distorted reality.

Don't believe me?  Ask Todd Akin.