Just met a professor at a small MD college,

[elleng]

St. Mary's. He has written In the Great Maelstrom, Conservatives in Post-Civil War South Carolina http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2002/3476.html and The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC, http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=2601#.VHoA9NLF_Ss

He's head of the history department at St. Mary's, and I asked him about his students, academically. He likes them, thinks they're intelligent and engaged, but without prompting from me, he bemoaned that they're products of 'teach to the test,' they can't write or analyze, not, he notes, because they're not smart enough, but because these aspects of education were omitted from theirs. I was afraid he'd tell me something like this, and he did. It's true even for the seniors in his classes. He spends time coaching them.



Very interesting, he and 2 others are embarked on writing a book about Spiro Agnew as a preface to the tea party. They wrote this recently for the Baltimore Sun, re: Agnew, relating to Ben Bradlee.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-bradlee-agnew-20141029-story.html

Charles Holden is a professor of history at St. Mary's College of Maryland; his email is [e-mail]. Zach Messitte is the president of Ripon College in Wisconsin; his email is [e-mail]. They are writing a book about Spiro Agnew and the birth of the modern Republican Party.