Todd Anderson, St. Joseph
I always find Ron Scarbro’s right-wing maunderings to be entertaining if predictable, so it shouldn’t surprise me he considers a liberal-arts education to be a waste of time and money, even if the people who actually have one would rarely agree. It fits his chosen persona, after all, as he pens his opinion column for the St. Joseph Newsleader: a newspaper in a small town that is wholly dependent for its economic survival upon the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, i.e. liberal arts colleges of exactly the type he deplores. Unsurprisingly, the irony has escaped his notice.
Personally, I think the Newsleader must have an agenda to discredit the conservative perspective. To provide a foil against the left-leaning viewpoint provided by the articulate, sometimes even erudite Dennis Dalman, the Newsleader offers us pundit Scarbro who, by his own admission, thinks his underwear magically appears in his dresser drawer. It’s subtle and devious; perhaps even diabolical. I like it.