Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!bizet.Berkeley.EDU!matloff
From: matloff@bizet.Berkeley.EDU (Norman Matloff)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Student and Course Integrity
Message-ID: <18325@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 15 Dec 88 03:34:53 GMT
References: <15759@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <18237@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <863@quintus.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff)
Organization: EECS, UC Davis
Lines: 33

In article <863@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

>>My DEPARTMENT CHAIRPERSON laughed uncontrollably at that cartoon  --
>>but you would NEVER find such a "laugh-at-the-eggheads,-who-totally-
>>lack-common-sense" cartoon in Asia.

>You may possibly be doing your department's chairbeing an injustice.

Based on other comments he has made, I don't think so.

>I too laughed at that cartoon, and your interpretation of it came as a
>complete surprise to me.  I thought the kid in the cartoon looked a
>total drongo -- definitely _not_ an "egghead" -- and that the point of
>the joke was that he didn't belong there.  

I later noticed the cartoon posted on the campus at Berkeley, with 
the school's sign altered in the picture, from something like "Jones
School for the Gifted" to "Stanford School for the Gifted" :-)
For those readers who may not know, Berkeley and Stanford are  
"friendly rivals", so that altered cartoon was intended as a dig
at Stanford, with the implication being that Stanford is full of 
students who couldn't tell "push" from "pull".

In other words, the people at Berkeley took the meaning of the original
cartoon the same way I did, i.e. that this **school** was full of
people who had no common sense.  I believe that's the way Larson
intended it.

I laughed at the cartoon too (both versions), because the way it was
drawn WAS pretty funny.  But nevertheless, the point remains:  Higher
education and intellectual activity in general are just not respected
in the U.S., compared to the respect these things get in Asia.

   Norm