John Ingraham

John Ingraham writes from Bouquet, New York.

In November 2009, a man named either Bernard or Ernest Moore pled guilty in Federal Court in Washington, D.C. to fraud exceeding $820,000, beginning twenty years ago. Over the last six years he had used ninety false credit cards, and there was a history of aliases and false Social Security numbers in his past, as well as a conviction for credit card fraud in 1987, and a jail term. Without a Bachelor of Arts degree, he had used a false educational history to gain admission to Claremont Graduate University and Howard, where he was granted a Ph. D. last spring. He was hired in September 2008 as a visiting professor of political science at Williams College, and he was also a "visiting researcher" at Yale and a "senior policy fellow" for a Democratic congressman from Chicago. The courses he taught at Williams were Power, Politics, and Democracy in America; Race in the Criminal Justice System; Black Politics; Judicial Politics; and Black Leadership. He was scheduled to teach a course in Constitutional Law. Chiefly known for his Washington connections, where he established a program called "Williams on the Hill," he was active in securing congressional internships for black Williams students (for which the college paid stipends), many of whom looked up to him as a mentor, adviser, and role model. A very poor teacher, he managed things so that his students filled class time with reports (an old dodge of lazy teachers), he took phone calls during classes and went out in the hall to talk, he fell asleep in class, he hardly corrected papers, his grades were inflated, he told anecdotes and name-dropped.

The college fired him after they read about his guilty plea in the Washington Post.

The coverage in the college paper was revealing. Much of the story was about how he got hired in the first place, finally coming to the conclusion that the records of those hired as visiting professors are not so carefully examined as regular faculty. The student reactions were not so evasive. As I noted, the black students looked up to him as a role model, and of course they used each other: if he pushed them forward in Washington, they wrote recommendations for him and flattered him, and they came to his defense, saying he was "real," "genuine," and "sincere." One said:

The CBC [Congressional Black Caucus] "Race and the New Congress" event that Moore organized last November was an overwhelming success. Listening to the leaders of the Caucus and Governor Deval Patrick discuss the future of race in the United States a mere two weeks after Obama's monumental election was one of my most memorable first-year experiences.

A few expressed disgust with his teaching, but only one came close to the truth:

Seeing as the school was celebrating him left and right, there was no way I would speak up. If everyone else is going to turn a blind eye then I will turn a blind eye too and get my good grade and get out.

Why was this crook and conman and incompetent teacher celebrated? Why is there no revulsion now? Because he was black, and because he seemed to put the college in touch with what it thought of as gritty reality, not just with Washington contacts but especially with the radicals of the Congressional Black Caucus. Political correctness may have had much to do with his hiring, but the whiff of Chicago and Washington was the fatal attractant. His hiring was corrupt and dishonest, his career at the college was corrupt and dishonest (scheduled to teach Constitutional Law!), and the response to his exposure was corrupt and dishonest. None of this can be admitted on any level, and I even doubt if it is recognized. How can any of the many, many bureaucrats there admit that he was hired because he was black, and had promising political connections? The Political Science department cannot admit they let him teach because he was black, and because his Washington connections cast the department in a good light. Most of the students cannot express disgust because they have no moral compass in such an expedient environment, and many were complicit in the P.C. benefits of being black, and of advancing their careers.

I am a Williams graduate, but I recognized, even as I was a student there in the 1950s, that it was a bastion of smug conventional thinking. The difference between then and now is that what passes for conventional thinking today is truly poisonous, soul rotting. Its most hapless victims are the students, especially the blacks. *

"In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend." --Alexander Hamilton