> On 2/15/13 3:04 PM, Carrol Cox wrote: >> The phrase "corporate greed" reduces capitalism from a menace to mere bad >> people. >> >> > > Can you imagine what Carrol's students would have written about him on > Rate My Professor if he was still teaching then? > > "Professor Cox--avoid his classes like the plague. Sarcastic, > ill-tempered, arrogant, and condescending. I turned in a paper on Ezra > Pound he returned to me covered with red ink and an F. When I went back > up to him after class for some feedback, he slapped me in the face with > a mackerel."
-------------- Something like this happened to me in English Composition my senior year in high school. I wrote a term paper on the Arab-Israeli crisis and the background of the 1956 war. This was in 1960. I got an F covered in red ink. It was too late to get a time to see the teacher. I asked my mother to go to see the principle. She came back and said Mr. Horwitz thought it was anti-semitic. All the quotes were footnoted and came from UN reports on the war and Israel's actions in the next four years. There would be no change of grade. So I repeated the class and got a B from another teacher. However the F seriously fucked up my grade average as well as completely undermined my appraisals of my own academic skills. I went to junior college for a semester before I transfered into the State College system where my average was good enough to get into the UC system for grad school. I am sure plenty of kids get bad grades especially in English because they take a line of thought that the teacher doesn't like. I studiously avoided all English classes and only took the bare minimum. I took foreign language literature courses instead and got A's and B's. Dear Mister Horwitz did an amazing job of ruining my interest in going further in school, not to mention a lot of soul searching on my attitudes about Jews. Since most of my school friends were Jewish and politically left it was a bit rediculous. During the period Israel still had a lot of credibility since the Arab world that surrounded them was uniformly hostile. The PLO were engaged in outright terrorist attacks. Was the terrorism justified? No, but it was tactically understandable. And I read enough history back then to discover the 1948 civil war was full of terrorists attacks back and forth. The PLO made a profound mistake to think they could develop military support for their cause from regional powers. It was clear even then nobody wanted a war just to defend Palestinian claims for justice. So the point is that Mister Cox has no doubt done more than his share of damage to hundreds of students with his obnoxiou puritanism and equally turned away dozens of would be liberals on the cusp of turning further to the left. It seems elementary common sense that people respond to support and praise and not to ego crushing hostility. I had a job arranging trainings and regional conferences in the waay back and it involved travel and meetings with big hotels who would host the meetings. It gave me a lot of insight into how hotels and chains run their businesses and was remarkably similar to LP's column on the cruise liner to hell. Hotel workers are heavily brutalized and very low paid, with bad working conditions, and have to deal with an asshole public more than willing to rat them out---as a matter of right to demand `service' for their dollars. If you want a fabulous read on sea going capitalism try Traven's, The Dead Ship. Thanks to Joanna for suggesting it. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
