Take cover! The Governor got out!

The South Dakota Governor's Mansion

The spike-tipped fence around the South Dakota governor's mansion cost $462,000.  (It was never made clear exactly who paid for it--tax-payers or donators or both.)  But wily as a coyote, good ol' Ditzy Kristi Noem still gets out.  A half million dollar fence ain't going to corral this gal.

Of late, she has decided to stalk the state universities.  Nose to the ground, she is sniffing out poisonous liberal ideologies she claims are lurking on the campuses.  She is really torqued that the graduation rate in the state universities is only 47 percent whereas nationally it is 63 percent.  We wonder if the universities have figures on how many students transfer out and obtain their degrees in other states.  

A lot of kids may take their fundamental courses at South Dakota schools, but go elsewhere to get their diplomas.  South Dakota universities have a bit of a reputation for being diploma mills run by political hacks rather than being full-fledged academic institutions, and good students like to hold degrees from more respected institutions.   Nobody contributes to a negative reputation more than the ditz herself.  She finally obtained her own degree when she held office as a U.S. congresswoman.  She said she took courses that she worked on while flying back and forth between her constituents and her office in Washington, D.C.  Professors and students alike question how it was possible to take senior college courses, do the study and research, write papers, and take examinations, while doing the full-time job of a U.S. congress person.  It would take heck of a lot of flying hours along with a much help from some servile faculty and some zesty amphetamines to pull that off.  However, that may well be how she came up the state slogan "Meth.  We're on it."

A good thing about South Dakota is that it has tuition reciprocity agreements with other states so that students can attend colleges in other states without paying out-of-state tuition. A degree earned in a place where some dippy governor does not intrude into setting academic standards and policy has more value and credibility. 

She did struggle to get through college.  She claims she  had to drop out of college when her father was killed in a grain bin accident and she had to take over management of the farm.  She also struggles with the truth.  She withdrew from Northern State University in 1992 and got married that year in Watertown.   Her father died in March 1994.

Apparently her surveillance of the campuses has revealed more crime, corruption, and extra-curricular diddling in the library stacks than she can deal with on her own.  She dealt with this crisis by establishing a whistleblowers' hotline.  The ringing telephone has kept her up at nights.  Apparently academic terrorists  have targeted the universities at Vermillion and Black Hills State for particularly insidious attacks. During the covid crisis, a  professor  told a student who refused to wear a mask that any deaths caused from spreading the disease were on him, her, it, whatever pronoun you choose.  Ditzy believes that any death by covid is the will of God and anything that interferes with his, her, its or their will is a desecration.  By God.

If there is one thing Ditzy can't stand, it's people interfering with open inquiry and expression of ideas.  Some years back, the faculty in state universities were organized into a union, which collectively negotiated the terms of the contracts under which faculty work.  In a letter to the Regents, she complained that professors have abandoned logic and reason and the search and the open exchange of ideas in the search for truth.  She put a stop to that nonsense.  In 2020, she signed a law banning faculty unions on college campuses.  

There was a governor named Noem

About whom was made this poem.

She hated liberals and the Chinese

and other things that made her sneeze.

She vowed to keep the state free of speech and gluten,

and run it just like Vladimir Putin.