If the conservative commentator Mark Steyn was correct when he told your correspondent the other week that the working definition of "courage" these days is publicly saying something rude about US president George W Bush's intellect, then Canada's Lakehead University could be the world's pluckiest institution of higher learning right now, writes David Cohen
In what looks set to be one of the quirkier recruitment campaigns of the new academic year, the Canadian university has set up an offbeat website in a bid to attract potential new students. Next to a somewhat unflattering photograph of America's commander in chief is a message requiring little amplification: "Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn't necessarily mean you're smart." For those who don't immediately get it - or don't recall that Bush graduated from Yale in 1968 - a provided link takes viewers to a site for Lakehead, in rugged Thunder Bay, some 850 miles northwest of Toronto.
"It was literally a tongue-in-cheek way of getting attention," Frederick Gilbert, the vice-chancellor of Lakehead, told Reuters (so, too, presumably was Gilbert's misuse of the word "literally").
Has your university resorted to this sort of stunt yet in the drive for students? Do tell.
Still, Lakehead is hardly the first international entrant to the debate over Bush's academic pedigree. In their sharp little book, Al Gore: A User's Manual, left-leaning authors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, argue that, at Harvard University, Al Gore's "grades were mostly Cs, with not a single A to lighten the darkness. The best he could manage in a course called Man's place in nature was a D." And Bush? "Derided by Gore and many others as a blockhead," they write, Bush in fact boasted "a better academic record" as a history major at Yale. Gory stuff.
In one of the more amusing online japes of recent years, the creators of an entirely fictitious academic institution, the Lovenstein Institute, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, published what the pranksters claimed to be serious scholarly findings to do with various American presidents.
Based on exhaustive research undertaken over a four month period, the compilers found Bush was possibly the least mentally capable leader in US history - his academic ability rating was slightly above that of an artichoke - while his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, scored a Galileo-like IQ reading of 182.
Now that's definitely moving into the territory of Education Guardian's beloved Improbable Research.
Readers in the market for slightly more serious international takes on the same subject might enjoy a journal article in the latest edition of the scholarly Political Psychology, or, for easier reading, the weblog musings of one Australian undergrad.
So, are you feeling courageous? Share your favourite Bushisms - and indeed your views on any of the presidents or their opponents. We'll see if we agree.
