Remember that Mickey Rooney trope?
The twenty first century version of that appears to be Let's burn up the town!
Just imagine spending years of your life attaining higher degrees. Undergraduate, master's degree and then a PhD in 2005.
You spend years writing important stuff.
You know. Stuff about diversity, LGBT causes, education.
You're so successful in your career that you win honors and prizes from various groups.
You're a Google scholar and your themes are always inclusion, race, sexual orientation and its impact on education, workplace diversity, leadership and empowerment in federal organizations.
Your opinions are widely sought from federal, local and state authorities. You are on numerous editorial boards, because your opinion matters.
In fact, you are:
.... a public management and policy scholar with a primary focus on workforce diversity and representative bureaucracy. His research examines how diversity among public officials can alter policy design and implementation, particularly when those policy changes affect target population outcomes and organizational performance. His research focuses on diversity in public schools, on how racial/ethnic diversity among school board members and teachers can affect student achievement and discipline outcomes. Pitts received the 2009 Robert Bailey Award for the Best Paper in LGBT Politics and the 2006 Leonard White Award for the Best Dissertation in Public Administration, both from the American Political Science AssociationThen one day, a day when you've achieved the utmost at 37 years of age and have become the chair of your department at a prestigious university, you get arrested.
Pitts has provided technical assistance to organizations at the federal, state, and local levels, particularly on human capital issues, and serves as PhD program student development coordinator for the Department of Public Administration and Policy
For what?
Burglary.
Setting fires.
Oh, and there was that illegal entry into a pharmacy and, one might imagine, therein will lie the justification for Dr. David Pitts's behavior.
Because he undoubtedly could not help his behavior. Because it's not his fault he's an _____ **addict**whisper**
Because he was "disoriented," the Washington Post reports factually and without astonishment, Dr. Pitts:
According to an arrest affidavit, about 1 a.m. Thursday, Montgomery officers saw Pitts set a chair on fire near a guard shack at his apartment complex’s parking garage. Then, the documents state, he lit a newspaper on fire in front of a Starbucks and then set a fire in the woods off Embassy Park Drive. Police said they then saw Pitts force his way into the mall, giving him access to a pharmacy, bank and several doctors’ offices. The officers called D.C. police, and Pitts was arrested after a brief chase from the third level of the mall into the parking garage.Investigating his apartment, officers discovered " 5,431 prescription pills, including 2,310 Cialis pills, sedatives to treat insomnia and oxycodone."
That's a lot of Cialis.
So why should this case interest the public, in addition to its remarkably bizarre details?
Having acquired higher degrees myself, I've noted repeatedly throughout my education that many so-called educators are completely out of touch with society in general.
Many are vain, solipsistic and so driven by ideology that they can never be truly successful in their teaching.
That lack of success, in their minds, is the hallmark of their success.
The only "students" in which these "teachers" have any interest are the easily persuadable. Those who accept their "teachers" as divinity and mirror their opinions, particularly politically.
Pitts is an excellent example of a person who has so surrounded himself with his own propaganda in the vaunted Ivory Tower that he cannot or will not relate to the real world around him.
Of course, I'm painting with a broad brush.
The problem is that we've seen this pattern among university employees over and over; it's not hard to anticipate Pitts's defense: he will have excuses for his behavior, shrouded in poor me rhetoric and evidence that someone somewhere treated him meanly because he's gay or something and, thus, he's turned to pills and illegal behavior to ventilate his tortured emotions.
He'll appeal to the university for a suitable period of probation as long as he attends some sort of program to get himself clear of drugs and promise never to set a fire again.
And he'll probably stay employed at this or another university because universities are very accepting of bombers, murderers, frauds and fantasists and slanderers.
They accept everyone except political conservatives.
And Christians. Christians are terrible people, compared to Marxists and the anti-semitists.
Universities are also tough on white males.
But then there's that problem of Pitts's Twitter account and the conference he attended at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel where someone set several fires.
What a thrill it was to see all those "political scientists in their nighties."
I remember looking at the lineup when I received my degree, thinking, "Geez, anybody can get a degree."
Actually a few screw ups do make it in private industry. I forget the gentleman's name but he was the founder of the Columbia Record Club. He was a horrible alcoholic but when sober he was charismatic enough to walk into CBS with an idea and talk them into financing the whole operation with himself in charge. He got canned when he flipped off Bill Paley at the Christmas party. I knew a man who knew him tangentially and he had enough stories about him for a mini series. He died sober.
ReplyDeleteI think it hit me in grad school--not just the pretentious doctoral students--when the chair of the department (an ardent feminist) screamed at me over her shoulder when I asked when History of the English Language would next be taught. "Why are you asking me? Get out!" She never even looked me in the face.
DeleteAnd SHE was in charge of scheduling.