Dumb Down

A few professors at Southern Illinois University and the elite campus of UIUC are in trouble for being too smart. Actually, the trouble is that they did not act dumb.

The brilliant minds who run the state ethics training course know how long it takes a person to answer the questions in their on-line test. They know better than a professor at one of the state universities, and since all men are created equal, no one is smarter than anyone else. Therefore, everyone must take the same amount of time to complete the test. Or else.

All state employees have been required since 2003 to take the test, which covers such issues as how to blow the whistle on corruption, what political activities are prohibited, etc. And hasn't it been a brilliant success? Illinois must be the most politically corrupt state in the union, despite the training that the state has ordered. Clearly, the problem is people who breeze through the test too quickly, so Gilbert Jimenez, the deputy inspector general, has gone after that 10% of employees who are responsible for this excessive test-taking speed.

All the other state employees took about thirty minutes to complete the material, but the speed demons finished up in ten minutes. Professor Marvin Zeman got his wrist slapped for covering the topic in 6.18 minutes. His punishment? He was told to sign a confession, admitting that he agrees to face disciplinary action if he fails to complete the training in a timely manner. He even was supposed to agree that he could be fired for being too fast with his mouse.

Unfortunately for Mr. Jimenez, the man who thinks that everyone is equally dumb, Professor Zeman has filed a lawsuit against the state. As it turns out, the punishment to be doled out to the swift violates the university's collective bargaining agreement, and the inspector general's office cannot do that legally. And then there's the question of the inspector general's mandate, also part of state law, that permits the office to act on a complaint, but not start one on their own.

Jimenez has an answer for that last one, though. It's Professor Zeman who's not complying with the ethics training, and he's disrespecting the inspector general's office. So the office is complaining, and now they're acting on their own complaint.

Ah, Illinois. By thy rivers gently flowing....anyone investigating Patti Blagojevich's ties to Tony Rezko and K.K.Bio? Maybe the wrong people are being made to take the ethics exam.