Academic Business
I remembered there being considerable discussion in academe about our C students and Bush. I also remembered that Al Gore was no straight A student. I also thought I remembered that no one has seen Kerry's Yale transcript.
I went poking around. I found a jog for my memory at the Wikipedia entry (academic record is section 1.2) -- though the article still has some confusion about Gore's sophomore year at Harvard, when he might have worked at some other paper, and his 2nd year at Vanderbilt Divinity School, when he was working for the Nashville Tennessean. I'd like to see the cumulative GPA, but the Washington Post website isn't cooperating. Anyone have a link?
Kerry is a different matter. I turned up a Boston Globeprofile of Kerry as young man that makes it tricky to think he was good at class work. He was a great debater, but the high school Latin teacher doesn't remember anything about classroom performance. The introduction to the article implies that he slacked off mightily at Yale his senior year (having been tapped for Skull & Bones his junior year he, in his own words,"majored in flying").
I found a September 10th, 2004, link that says flat out that there's no transcript for Kerry yet. It's from a college paper in Texas, but in the next entry down we see that Ralph is feeling queasy about distributed journalism as practiced by the blogosphere, so I'm linking to a"print" source for his sake.
By the way, I don't particularly care, other than to deflate the grade-interest. I am one of those faculty members who has figured out that some students who really weren't very good at the material I care about have grown up to be quite good at other things."Good at school" is far from a perfect predictor of"good at life." Let's talk about Iran or North Korea, not Vietnam and Yale.
Let's also not assume in the absence of evidence that attributed brilliance equals A average. It didn't for Al Gore.
crossposted, with more speculation on the law school admissions side of things at The Cranky Professor.