Sunday, September 16, 2018

Kavanaugh Accuser Goes Public

Poor Chuck Grassley, chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee and looking at 35 year-old he-said/she-said allegations against a teenaged Brett Kavanaugh. Like you, I have no idea what is true here, or whether perhaps both are lying or mistaken.

We know Kavanaugh's fine record as a Federal jurist, it is an open book. And many women have spoken and written to support his candidacy and vouch for his character, both as a person and as an employer.

What do we know of his accuser - Christine Blasey Ford? We know she has had a couple of months to scrub her social media and Facebook trail. We know some things about the school where she teaches - Palo Alto University, the former Pacific Graduate School of Psychology founded in 1975. As psychology faculty she is almost certainly a very liberal Democrat.

As a state university professor whose career in CA overlapped PGSP's first quarter century, I can say that its reputation was of a less-than-academically-serious trade school for working clinical psychologists who needed the supposed legitimacy of "Dr." before their name.

PGSP didn't sell degrees but I suspect few of its grads became faculty at real universities. My knowledge is admittedly somewhat old, not of the last decade or so, and things can change.