Why is Pat Sajak Chairman of Michigan's Hillsdale College?

[Kid Berwyn]

by Lauren Gordon
WKFR, June 27, 2022

Now that I once again live with my parents in Allegan I've fallen into a nightly routine of watching game shows with my folks. As a trivia lover I mostly stick through Wheel of Fortune to get to Jeopardy but as luck would have it, I've come to love "America's Game" just as much.

When I found out that Pat Sajak was serving as Chairman of the Board of Hillsdale College in Michigan I had one question: WHY?

Schooling Pat Sajak

Though he has served on Hillsdale's Board of Trustees since 2003, Sajak was never a student there himself! In fact, Pat Sajak is a Chicago-man who attended Columbia College before landing a job at local radio station WEDC. I'm not even sure Pat received a degree from Columbia as he left after only three years and joined the U.S. Army.

In 2019 Pat was promoted from Vice-Chairman to Chairman of the Board of Trustees after then-Chairman William Brodbeck decided to step down. Brodbeck told Hillsdale's campus newspaper The Collegian that Sajak's lack of degree would not hinder his ability to move the school forward saying,

“Pat is a brilliant mind. He brings a sound knowledge of the school...He can dramatically move Hillsdale forward, both on campus and around the country.”

Continues…

https://wkfr.com/why-pat-sajak-chairman-hillsdale-college/



Anyone have the answer?

[Sky Jewels]

1. Sajak is a right-wing nut job, and it seems Hillsdale is a right-wing nut job college.

Beyond that, I don't know...

[Kid Berwyn]

4. Hillsdale honors Margaret Thatcher.

She was the one who gave Dim Ronnie Reagan the ideas that modern democracies need trickle-down and austerity.

[underpants]

5. And he's rich. So he donates and fund raises.

That’s part of the job. At least showing up at fundraisers.

[Bucky]

33. Their endowment is $900 million

If they just put that in 3% yield bonds they could run a nice small college on that.

[Indykatie]

2. This is Bonkers - Sajak's Not Even a College Graduate of That or Any School n/t

[James48]

8. Alternative education

Pat served in the US Army, and attended the Defense Information
School. That’s a fine institution. He served in broadcasting long before anything stateside.

[Kid Berwyn]

12. Hillsdale leading effort to destroy public education.

How this tiny Christian college is driving the right’s nationwide war against public schools

Exclusive: In the full-scale conservative assault on public education, Hillsdale College is leading the charge

By KATHRYN JOYCE
Salon, March 15, 2022

Excerpt…

If you thought that Donald Trump's 1776 Commission — a jingoistic alternative to the New York Times' "1619 Project" that was roundly panned by historians — died with his presidency, that effort is now being amplified and exported, on a massive scale, around the country. If you wonder what conservatives hope to install in place of the books they're trying to ban, the answer often lies in Hillsdale's freely-licensed curricula.

And as Republicans move into a new phase of their long-game efforts to privatize public education, Hillsdale has become a key resource. Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board members are clamoring to implement Hillsdale's proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the "patriotic education" premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools.

In late January, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, used his State of the State address to tease the most ambitious Hillsdale-inspired plan to date: building as many as 50 new charter schools in partnership with the college; using its 1776 Curriculum to foster what Lee calls "informed patriotism"; and launching a university civics institute to combat "anti-American thought."

These linked trends amount to a vision of things to come if Republicans win their current war on public education. And war is how they see it. As one Republican leader promised at Hillsdale last spring, if conservatives can "get education right," they'll "win" the country "back." Or as Hillsdale's president himself likes to say, "Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon."

In the video that introduced most Americans to Jeff Barke, the doctor stands on the steps of a municipal building in Riverside, California, in May 2020, wearing green scrubs and a white lab coat and claiming to speak for thousands of silenced medical workers who believed the experts were wrong about COVID. In Barke's improbable telling, the video was an accident: He asked his wife to take a picture of him addressing the anti-lockdown rally for their adult children, but she inadvertently hit her phone's "record" button. The resulting footage was too large to email, so they posted it to Facebook instead, and the rest was unintentional history.

The video went viral, and Barke began meeting fellow "freedom fighters" around the country. He helped organize America's Frontline Doctors, the right-wing group that became famous that July when around a dozen of its members stood before the Supreme Court, again in white coats, to call for reopening the country without delay. As later became clear, America's Frontline Doctors was organized in cooperation with the Trump campaign, and Barke's supposedly accidental activism was no more organic.

Continues…

https://www.salon.com/2022/03/15/how-this-tiny-christian-college-is-driving-the-rights-nationwide-against-public-schools/

Lackadamia thy name is DeVos.

[catbyte]

3. Because he's a famous uber-MAGAt and Hillsdale College is, well, Hillsdale College.

I'm so embarrassed that it's in Michigan.

[Kid Berwyn]

16. It's a historic UFO landmark.

https://www.clickondetroit.com/all-about-ann-arbor/2017/03/15/the-michigan-ufo-craze-of-1966/

Hear you about our Michigan. Hillsdale also was a very different place, before War Inc took over.

[catbyte]

17. That figures.

[chriscan64]

6. It has to be something other than his academic credentials.

As far as I can see, his knowledge is limited to his ABC's.

[Kid Berwyn]

20. Like Magnuts. Who knows how they work?

Link to tweet

The philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior must be abandoned and discredited permanently, to borrow a phrase.

'Wheel of Fortune' Facing Backlash Over Racist Puzzle Days After Pat Sajak Slammed For Controversial Photo

[dalton99a]

22. +1

[dchill]

7. Obviously, they feel that, like Thatch, he's a good fit...

...for their particular brand of education.

[Kid Berwyn]

24. The anti-public education education.

Ask the good people of Tennessee:

The fallout over Hillsdale College, charter schools and Tennessee school districts, explained.

by Damon Mitchell
WPLN.org, July 24, 2022

In the last month, three proposed charter schools affiliated with the conservative Michigan-based Hillsdale College were rejected by Tennessee school districts. The denials come on the heels of insulting remarks about teachers made by Larry Arnn, Hillsdale’s president and an ally of Gov. Bill Lee. The fallout could have broader implications for the future of charters in the state.

A secret recording is leaked

It all started when Gov. Bill Lee announced a partnership with Hillsdale during his 2022 State of the State address back in January.

“For decades, Hillsdale College has been the standard bearer in quality curriculum and the responsibility of preserving American liberty,” Lee said. “I believe their efforts are a good fit for Tennessee, and we are formalizing a partnership with Hillsdale to expand their approach to civics education and K-12 education.”

Hillsdale was supposed to provide curriculum and training to charter schools that taught what Lee called “informed patriotism.” The governor said he hoped to open upward of 50 new charters with Hillsdale’s “1776 Curriculum,” which has come under scrutiny for whitewashing Civil Rights history.

Soon after, the Hillsdale affiliated charter management organization, American Classical Education, submitted applications to open schools in the Rutherford, Jackson-Madison and Clarksville-Montgomery school districts.

Hillsdale comes under the microscope

But, in June, NewsChannel5 revealed a secret recording of Arnn at a private event in Williamson County.

“Teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country,” Arnn said, as he sat on a stage with Gov. Lee.

CONTINUES…

https://wpln.org/post/the-fallout-over-hillsdale-college-charter-schools-and-tennessee-school-districts-explained/

The emphasis is on the “Western” in Western-focused classical education, in the European Age of Empires sense of the word.

[blm]

9. Longtime RightWinger. Became obvious by the 90s.

And full-on fascist after 9-11.

[Brainfodder]

10. Ego stroking & minimal effort for sizable income?

What's with the covered up M. Thatcher plaque photo from the article, doesn't fit?

[Kid Berwyn]

29. It really does add to it. The cardboard.

She’s golden.



They conflate freedom with the ability to own property.

Nostalgia: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/margaret-thatcher-a-legacy-of-freedom/

[kskiska]

11. Same reason why Josh Duggar

was executive director of the Family Research Council.

[Kid Berwyn]

28. The position calls for connections.

Apart from his kids and TV, Duggar has his fellow haters in righteousness.

Pat Sajak is connected to a nationwide body of power and money: America’s Oligarchs, who fund the think tanks and educational institutions like Hillsdale. DeVos, Koch, Thiel et al. all benefit from tax cuts and fascism.

[brooklynite]

13. I serve on the Board of Trustees of a school; being Chair has nothing to do with academics...

The job of the Board Chair is primarily to raise endowment funds, publicly promote the school and manage a handful of administrative tasks (budget, election of the school President or Chancellor, etc). Someone who believes in the college's ideological goals and philosophy, who ideally has deep-pocketed contacts, would make a sensible choice.

As for "why is Pat Sajack a right-wing kook?": who knows? But his being a TV celebrity seems irrelevant.

[Kid Berwyn]

30. Television is very powerful. It spreads bad ideas far, wide & fast.

For instance, the worlds of conservatism and reaction have established a global system to disseminate and institutionalize their awful ideologies and perversions.

[brooklynite]

34. Unless you think they're hiding conservative messages in the puzzles...

...Sajack's job is completely non-political.

[gibraltar72]

14. And they built him his own jet pad at the airport.

[Kid Berwyn]

32. That is so nice.

Vanna White invested in aviation.

Although Vanna White has built a career as a television celebrity, not many know that she operates two charter Learjet 35s that fly almost 1400 hours a year.

By Grant McLaren
Professional Pilot Magazine June 1996

Excerpt…

Over the years psychologists have attempted to understand what inner forces drive 100 million weekly US viewers to watch Pat Sajak and Vanna White spin a big wheel and flip letters every day.

According to New York-based psychologist Dr Joyce Brothers, “You can play it mindlessly, you can play it competitively… and you can fantasize about having this stuff fall into your lap.”

Dr James Fletcher, a professor at the University of Georgia, postulates, “After people have been through stressful days, and have misfortunes and haven’t achieved anything, they can come home, watch this, and see how easy life could be.”

Despite elusive psychological motivations which snare viewers in droves the “Wheel of Fortune” is an unqualified commercial success and Vanna’s white-on-white Learjets represent some of the fruits of her labors in logging an estimated 443.18 miles since 1982 turning letters at the puzzle board.

Continues…

https://jeteditor.ca/wheel-of-fortune-costar-invests-in-aviation-1996/

Television, the drug of the nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation.

Brought us Pisswig, too.

[brooklynite]

35. A good game show is a good game show...

My college roommate appeared on JEAOPARDY; a close friend appeared on the $10,000 PYRAMID

[whistler162]

15. Simple..... in 2003 he and the college

wanted some way of ticking you off! Took 19 years but they finally succeeded.

[Kid Berwyn]

25. Glad you brought up The Scandal.

Conservative Christian Hillsdale College: From 1990s Sex Scandal to Peddling COVID Disinformation

Bill Berkowitz
Daily Kos, December 20, 2021

Established in 1844, Hillsdale College a small conservative Christian-based institution, which suffered a major sex scandal in the late 1990s, is now becoming a go-to institute for COVID disinformation. Located in Hillsdale, Michigan, the College, a factory for conservative thought and Christian values, was rocked by a sex scandal in the late 1990s, when George C. Roche III, then president of Hillsdale, was accused by his son of having an affair with his wife. Roche III, called a “conservative celebrity” and ''a hero to the movement,'' by The Weekly Standard, was forced to resign in disgrace (https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/15/us/scandal-rocks-a-conservative-campus.html).

Some twenty-+ years later, Hillsdale is embroiled in a controversy of a different sort: COVID denial, and peddling disinformation about the pandemic and its variants. To pursue these aims, the institute is establishing an Academy for Science and Freedom, that will operate out of Hillsdale’s campus in Washington, D.C. According to the Hillsdale website, the Academy aims “To educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”

The three men appointed to spearhead the operation, Scott W. Atlas, M.D., of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, also known as Trump’s guy, Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., of the Brownstone Institute, “are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures,” according to Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch, writing for The Center For Media and Democracy, in partnership with The Daily Poster (https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2021/12/22/how-the-koch-network-hijacked-the-war-on-covid/).

According to Bragman and Kotch, “The trio also has ties to the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked yet influential missive that encouraged governments to adopt a ‘herd immunity’ policy letting Covid-19 spread largely unchecked.”

Snip…

“What we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic was a silencing of scientific inquiry in favor of policies absolutely hostile to freedom,” said Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn in a Hillsdale Press Release. “Liberty is the common good that defines a free society. Policy and science should seek to preserve it whenever possible.” Arnn chaired Donald Trump’s highly flawed 1776 Commission, which sought to craft American history curriculums around America’s strengths.

Continues…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/12/22/2070713/-Conservative-Christian-Hillsdale-College-From-1990s-Sex-Scandal-to-Peddling-COVID-Disinformation

It’s not just hypocrisy that killed more than a million US citizens. It’s GOP disinformation.

[Samrob]

18. Oh, please people, go read about Hillsdale college and all the scandals over the past 20 years.

It surely would make a great novel...

Pat must be one of them?

[Kid Berwyn]

27. Maybe it's the ever rightward lurch America's been on since 1981?

Reagan made racism “Acceptable Again” in the good ol' USA. Starting in 1980, when Reagan declared his candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the "community" where three Civil Rights marchers were murdered in cold blood.

Reagan, White As Snow

by Alec Dubro
www.tompaine.com/, May 13, 2007

EXCERPT...

Domestically, he opposed every legislative remedy for African Americans, betraying a meanness of spirit and an open racism. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote in The Guardian in 2003:

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South", and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan traveled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights."

It's hard to believe now, but in 1965, a higher percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Voting Rights Act than Democrats. Reagan, then, wasn't following party tradition; he was making a grab for the white racist vote-and it worked. Southern Democrats abandoned the party en masse for one more welcoming to white supremacy. No wonder so many loved, and still love, the man: He validated people's whiteness.

It's true that Reagan knew enough to occasionally disguise his racism. He appointed Samuel Pierce to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where Pierce presided over the halving of housing subsidies. No matter. Reagan couldn't remember the man's name. Once, at a reception for the nation's mayors, he greeted Pierce with a '"Hello, Mr. Mayor." Despite this, a few black conservatives, such as Armstrong Williams, were willing to validate him as someone who knew better than the "civil rights establishment" what was good for African Americans.

But it was in foreign affairs that he showed that he could rise above mere opportunism and flaunt his racism for all the world to see. He was the best friend that South Africa's apartheid government had in the developed world.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/Reagan_WhiteAsSnow.html

Corporate McPravda didn’t say “peep” and went right along as he conflated "food-stamps, vodka, Cadillacs, and welfare queens.” So it’s no surprise when President, Reagan allowed his staff to refer to the slain civil rights leader as "Martin Lucifer Coon."



Is it any wonder why the United States has rotted from the head down?

[Genki Hikari]

19. Because he's always been a right-wing loon

I thought everyone knew this.

[Kid Berwyn]

26. Not everybody.

Wheel Of Fortune Under Fire For Televising Racist Puzzle

The outrage comes days after host Pat Sajak was seen in a controversial photo with right wing politicians.

by Candace McDuffie
The Root, September 27, 2022

Can y’all buy a—damn clue? The long-running television show Wheel of Fortune has recently come under fire for televising a racist puzzle. “Rhyme Time” was the category it was featured under and the answer turned out to be: “EENIE MEENIE MINY MOE CATCH A TIGER BY THE TOE.”

The dark nursery rhyme has racist origins, where the word ‘tiger’ was swapped out for the N-word. It didn’t take long for Twitter users to call out the disturbing episode and implored Wheel of Fortune to do better, according to The Sun.

This is the latest controversy to follow host Pat Sajak. Earlier this month, a photo came to light of him alongside Right Side Broadcasting Network personality Bryan Glenn and Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The picture was shared on the Twitter account PatriotTakes, which according to its bio consists of “dedicated researchers monitoring and exposing right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been covered previously by The Root for her hateful rhetoric and featured in “9 Political Karens Who Spew Nothing But Trash:”

“She was banned from Twitter was banned for a reason. The QAnon Queen has been famous (and not in a good way) for spewing racist, homophobic, transphobic trash online. Her tweets are polluted with spreading COVID-19 misinformation, boasting about participating in the insurrection and accusing trans people of buying up the tampons. She’s been openly and repeatedly racist while simultaneously insisting the party she belongs to is not. Greene been the model conservative, standing hatefully against anything associated with the Left.”

Continues…

https://www.theroot.com/wheel-of-fortune-under-fire-for-televising-racist-puzzl-1849586248

PS: Welcome to DU, Genki Hikari. Look forward to reading your posts.

[Marcuse]

21. $$$$&$

[BradAllison]

23. It's a phony college.

They do this to irritate liberals.

Ignore them. They aren't worth it.

[Bucky]

31. For his contributions to the study of the English language

You know, literature and rhetoric get all the attention in the belle lettres, but good spelling is just as important