Friday, April 21, 2006

Ugh. Maybe I should repudiate my Cornell connection?

I was looking through a PR e-mail from Cornell and it turns out that Ann Coulter '84 is an alumna. I either didn't know that or blocked it out.

OK, I'm not going to repudiate my affiliation over this, but I am ashamed that we share this association. :) Maybe all the bad weather affected her world view adversely...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ann Coulter is from my hometown in Connecticut. I have not been able to determine if she went to my high school...

I would repudiate my New Canaan connection, but I think by moving to Berkeley and being a liberal Democrat I've already done so.

Mason said...

Dude, you do realize that this means that you have permanent cooties?

Anonymous said...

So I gather New Canaan would be one of the places where Lieberman is popular? :-)

Mason, is Cornell bragging about Coulter?? Or is she blackmailing them and they're trying to raise the hush money from other alumni?

If you think about it, almost no top tier private university will be without some sort of wingnut connection. Frist for Harvard, Alito for Princeton, Bush for Yale, Rice for Stanford, etc. Rich people go to expensive prestigious schools, and some subset of rich people always turn out poorly... Fortunately Caltech (and MIT, for that matter) seems to have avoided this noteworthy reprehensible alumni problem so far, presumably due to the narrower institutional focus.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I imagine New Canaan is one of the main sources of Joementum. The congressman for that district is the fairly moderate Republican Chris Shays.

For reprehensible Tech alums, one need look no further than Admiral John Poindexter, PhD '64. (His thesis adviser was Mossbauer!)

Mason said...

Cornell is advertising a seminar that she's giving. Of course, universities tend to brag about famous alums, no matter how bitchy and conservative they are.

I completely agree about the wingnut connection, but I would rather think of Cornell as the university of Bill Nye rather than be reminded that it's also the university of Ann Coulter.

I'm sure Caltech and MIT have some bad applies too. They're just not usually in the political world, so we don't hear about them. (I do tend to agree that these types of institutions are less likely to have them simply by drawing from the scientifically minded crowd, but it's also true we don't hear about the ones they do have. Millikan Man and his kind provide a much more amusing form of insanity.)

Mason said...

I wrote my comment before Gazebo's showed up. John Poindexter... now there's a name from the past.

Hmmm...what should we do with these arms?