The groves of academe

Are mostly inhabited by moonbats as Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr. demonstrates in - Confessions of a Military Student:

My reward for surviving the Battle of Hamburger Hill was graduate school. The Army offered me two fully paid semesters away to study a subject of my choice and my choice was military history. My dad was a professional soldier and veteran of three wars so I grew up listening to war stories from a colorful and rich collection of war veterans. I walked battlefields in places we lived overseas like The Philippines and Germany. My mother told me that I read The Red Badge of Courage when I was eight and Grant’s Memoirs at twelve.

I arrived at Duke in the summer of 1971 on what was a pilgrimage to the Mecca of war studies. Something like sixty generals have advanced degrees from Duke. Two chiefs of service, Ron Folgelman, Air Force, and Rick Shinseki, Army, earned master’s there before me. Second year officer students greeted me with the warning that Vietnam had changed the atmospherics at Duke mostly for the worse. Their advice to the new guy was unambiguous: take courses only from that terrific cadre of esteemed professors who joined the faculty after serving in World War II. Men like Ted Ropp, I B Holley and Richard Preston quite literally invented the discipline of war studies during the fifties.

I chose one. Unfortunately shortly before Labor Day, he died. In his place marched into the classroom the first of the History Department’s young Turks hastily tenured in fear after the student riots in the late sixties. Professor “X” was about four years older than me. He was a Marxist on the make when Marxism was the rage on campus. His first group of graduate students would be the clay that he would mold to become an edifice to his brand of dialectical scholarship. He changed all the pedagogical rules. Only one four hour session per week; each would be a student’s hell with brutal show and tell exercises during which we would learn just how stupid we were. We would get a grade every week. Immediately, half the students bolted. But not me. After all I’d survived an AK -47 in my face. Could this be any worse?

Well, actually, yes it was.

Been there, done that.