The following email was received by us from a UCSB student using a valid UCSB email address.  

"im just curious why you can rag on the Students and UCSB for partying and the whole top 5 of party school things.  there is one crucial factor that you constanly forget to talk about and im just curious why. You dont ever mention that UCSB is  in the top 3 of the UC's which are all nationaly respected, UCSB is in the top 5 of research.  They are respected byt the UC system and many other systems so much that they spent half a billion dollars on a Nano-tech building which was designed by Venturi and densie scott brown.  I dont understand why you have to play like the rest of Americas media and only focus on negatives.  Think about it this way, if you went here this should eb really simple its not complex, For every Postivie in the world there is a negative, all matter (+) has antimatter(-), electrons and protons; but you insist on focusing on the Bad, only a fraction of what the school has.  Why? Why do you feel the need to Hurt what the school and the students have done.  If some fuckers just screw up in IV they get kicked out for acadmeics and possibly wont be abelt o support there habits change, the school should not kick someone out who has a IQ ot 180 but drinks on thursdays and burnt a couch in te street, they should pay a fine and thats it. Why would you focus on the fact that they only paid a fine and didnt get kicked out although they were a good student and was leading a research team in Physics?  why do what you do?"  

This email is representative of hundreds we get every year and is worth dissecting.   Where do we start?  First, our reader  could not have read our website.  If he did, he would have seen that the lead article for the month of May was entitled UCSB Rankings.  It is true, we focus on the problems that UCSB refuses to address; however, we have always acknowledged that the vast majority of students and employees at UCSB do great work.  

The first premise of the email is wrong; we do talk about the good people and UCSB's high rankings.

The second premise that our writer expounds upon is the concept that for every negative there must be a positive.  Ugh?  Let's hope the clown is not actually serious.  If his hypothesis were true, half of all the articles written about UCSB (including their own publications) would have to be negative.  His premise is beyond laughable – let's hope that he does not intend to have children or become a teacher.  

His third premise seems to be that one should be entitled to go to school regardless of one's criminal conduct.  First, we have never suggested that people be expelled for merely drinking.  We have focused on those who commit felonies and who are dangerous.  A good example is the administration's complete failure to take action against violent felons is their response to the crimes of  Cervin Morris, former A.S. president.   Morris committed a felony assault with a weapon and a misdemeanor assault while under the influence and under age while on probation for other serious offenses.   He stayed in school and remained A.S. president.  So much for UCSB's claim of setting a high standard.  It is clear to even a casual observer that UCSB tries very hard not to take any action against its students who are criminals.  UCSB tries not to be "judgmental."  Of course, this non-judgmental approach applies  only to criminals and the raunch culture cretins who infest UCSB.   Try commenting publicly about any UCSB shortcoming and you will see how judgmental they can get -- they get litigation judgmental!

As we look at emails like the one above, we are forced to consider something: maybe, just maybe, the emperor has no clothes.   How is it possible that we receive hundreds of emails from UCSB students that demonstrate a level of  literacy equal to an eighth-grade student from the worst inner city in California?  How can UCSB maintain such high rankings when a segment of its students cannot read, write, or function at an eighth-grade level?  A review of how the rankings are established may shed some light on the issue.  None of the rankings test the graduates.   Nor do they attempt to determine if graduates actually learned anything.  The rankings are mostly based upon money spent by the school and how good the local weather is.  Perhaps while the UC system has been spending hundreds of millions to get high ranking by becoming "Education, Inc,"  it has stopped educating students.  Perhaps the schools have become big business and it is their financial strength – not the quality of the education they are dispensing that gets rated.  Perhaps it is time to follow the lead of California high schools and make all UC grads pass a competency test before they are awarded a degree.  

To be fair, there is another explanation for all the incredibly stupid emails we get from UCSB students:  the writers are merely drunk or stoned.