Notable Alums
UIUC alum Robert Novak has been busy close to home:
“Although certainly the non-Western cultures have a lot to offer, I think that our country owes so much to its straight-line descent from the culture in all fields, starting with the ancient Romans and Greeks and through the European civilizations,” he said. “People often say to me, particularly my conservative friends, ‘Are you sure that when you are dead and gone they aren’t going to be teaching Central African basket-weaving and East Asian volleyball?’ . . . I’m going to have to have faith that the university will stick to that description.”
Funding a Chair in Anti-Eastern Western Culture is no mean feat, to be sure. Yet today I notice another UIUC alum:
Ecuador is poised to join the tide of Latin American countries voting for left-wing leaders after Rafael Correa, an economist, took a resounding lead in exit polls over Alvaro Noboa, a billionaire.
Mr Correa, a former finance minister with an economics doctorate from the University of Illinois, has promised to renegotiate the country’s foreign debt and focus spending on relieving intense poverty in the Andean nation.
I coulda told ‘em it was the untenured ones that they shoulda been watchin’ out for.