MAILBAG:

Daily Pilot columnist Steve Smith apparently fancies himself nanny to us all. I’ve just finished reading and re-reading his most recent attempt at the enlightenment of the populace (“Drake lacks faith in students,” Sept. 25). You can chalk it up to my steady march to geezerdom, but I’m having a tough time finding a point in all his verbiage.

I’m guessing the point of his piece was to let UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake off the hook for the way he botched the hiring of Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of the new UC Irvine law school. If his point was, as he says in his first paragraph, “...smart people can do dumb things,” he should have stopped right there, because much of what followed was just plain tough to comprehend. For example, in his seventh paragraph he says, “What Michael Drake did was not bring ridicule to the school, or hire the right or wrong dean, he exposed himself as a weak manager, as a flip-flopper, so to speak.” What?! Did he mean to say, “Michael Drake brought ridicule to the school by vacillating on his choice of a dean for the new law school, plus he exposed himself as a weak manager?”

If so, why didn’t he say it?

Further on, referring to kids in college now, he says, “The fact is that by the time they get to college, most kids already have their core beliefs established. By the time they get to college, these kids are either doing drugs or they are not. They are either drinking to excess on occasion or they are not.”

Really? While I’m sure many kids go off to college fully grounded in those values we think will contribute to their success, many of them do not. Many arrive at a campus far from home with new-found freedom without a clue how to handle it. One recent high-profile case provides a perfect example.

That would be the case of Todd Marinovich, the “roboquarterback” so finely tuned, molded and controlled by his father that, once at USC, he didn’t just fall off the deep end — he took a running start and leaped as far as he could! Once away from his parents’ influence, he left a trail of drug abuse and other crimes in his wake which cost him a very promising future in professional football. Those behaviors follow him to this day — 20 years after he left home for college.

College is a time for growth, both academically and emotionally. It may also be a time of experimentation — a time to spread those wings and attempt to fly. Some kids use chemical enhancement to boost them to new “heights.” I suspect there are many parents reading this today who would be shaken to the bone if they knew what their kids are actually up to during their college days.

Once again, the preachy Smith attempts to overlay his “pristine” life experience — the one without television, among other things — onto a real world situation.

Once again, he fails to make his point. I’m always grateful for small favors. In this case, it’s only getting one dose of Smith per week.

GEOFF WEST

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