*Sarah-gate* : The Scandal-mongers Are Burning the Midnight Oil

DISCLAIMER: this piece was intended to point out the strange/semi-humorous reaction to McCain's choice for VP. This piece should not be construed to be an endorsement of said candidate, but merely commentary on a few political bloggers. Thanks. Trillium.


Ahhhh. The gleeful sound of computer keyboards clacking: the liberal bloggers are going bonkers flooding the internet with anti-Sarah blogs. “Baby-gate.” “Book-gate.” “Trooper-gate.” “College-gate.” They are desperately looking for scandal everywhere, and, lacking facts, they have to settle for casting aspersions and spreading rumors.

Today, let’s look at “college-gate.” Some liberal bloggers (e.g. “Daily Kos”) have actually tried to spread a rumor that Sarah Palin didn’t actually get her 4-year college degree. (Insinuating that she is an airhead who couldn’t possibly have earned a degree, and that she was lying on her resume.) When it became clear that she had indeed graduated, they then proceeded to sneer at, mock, and insult her degree in journalism from the University of Idaho. They so wanted to wave Obama’s law degree from Harvard under our noses. (Yes, intellectual snobbery is alive and well in liberal-ville.) It really makes the “Kos” cranky if you point out that George W. Bush also has a law degree from Harvard.

Nevertheless, the “Kos” are still trying to make hay of the fact that Palin attended 5 different colleges and that it took her 6 years to get her degree. Their purpose in endlessly pointing out these things is to smear Sarah, implying she was an incompetent, inept student. But here are some inconvenient facts: (1) Back in the 1980s when she was a student, it was not uncommon for most students to need five years to get a 4-year degree. This is a fact. (And may still be true in many universities today.) The problem was that courses required for graduation were not always offered on a timely basis. Even BYU had this problem. Consequently, the Church’s Board of Education told BYU to fix it. They didn’t want kids hanging around for five or six years at BYU, trying to get a 4-year degree and becoming “professional students,” all because they couldn’t get the classes they needed to finish the degree requirements.

(2) Now, add in the fact that when you transfer from one university to another, colleges don’t automatically accept all the credits you have earned from another college. Sarah transferred five times, and may have “lost” credits every time. (3) Next, consider that changing majors also means having to take additional course work, further delaying completion. Sarah changed majors at least once, I think. Your father estimates that he “lost” five years’ of time working on his PhD. because he transferred from USC to Purdue.

So, there you go: taking 6 years to complete a 4-year degree is no big deal. It happens . . . . *Poof!* . . . No more “college-gate.”

Seriously, I don’t know what kind of a student Sarah was. It’s possible that she was a typical co-ed, more interested in her social life than in her history assignments. If so, that was more than twenty years ago, and is now old news. Since then, she has shown herself to be one savvy lady.

One last fact: Merely having a college degree or even many of them, does not prove that you are “educated.” Nor does a college education necessarily bestow on its students wisdom. The truth is, attending college is neither the beginning nor the end of education. How many college-educated people, for all their education, are still “ignorant”? The answer to that is all of them. A college education can do no more than dent the surface of “knowledge.” Becoming truly educated is a life-long endeavor.