All in all, it is a politicized perspective of the Fannie Mae situation and who is to blame. Which is fine; I believe in free speech. I just hope that educated people – i.e. people reading this blog – will think critically about it. (Clarification: due to a comment I received, I realize that my word choice here might have had implications I didn’t intend. I hope all people think critically, period. Also, I did not mean to imply that readers of this blog are necessarily ‘educated’, not did I mean to imply that people who don’t read this blog are not.)

The presentation has some serious factual errors, as well, which I am not going to go into here.

More importantly, I hope people are especially skeptical of email forwards. It is no coincidence — here’s why forwards are dubious: Often, there is no master source. As different versions circulate, the author loses control — the recipients can change the text however they want. Accountability is lost, because the original author hasn’t kept control. Perhaps there have been corrections or updates — but it doesn’t really matter, because it is hard to find the most up to date version.

Who is Dennis Jantz?

Being a good skeptic myself, I originally wondered if the author of the presentation (cited as Professor Dennis Jantz) really existed! I expected that a professor who was willing to attach his name to a presentation would be relatively easy to find on the Web. However, I did considerable searching but didn’t find anything conclusive about a “Professor Dennis Jantz.”

On a hunch, I emailed Instructor Dennis Jantz of the UNLV English Department this morning. I didn’t expect it to be the same guy — the title didn’t match, and I didn’t expect the author of a presentation about Fannie Mae to be at the English Department. (A clarification in response to a comment: I have nothing against departments of English or people who work at them. I am only saying that, at the time, I did not expect an English professor to spend considerable time focusing on financial or governmental issues.)

He wrote me back and claimed ownership of the presentation. He clarified something to me in the email:

For the record, I am an Adjunct Instructor at my University, not a full professor. My Masters is in Educational Leadership … The views expressed are solely mine as a private citizen, and in no way intended to represent any position of the university or its staff.

I’m glad he cleared up his title. It is not a good idea to let a misrepresentation of one’s title persist. In academia, there is a significant difference between an instructor and a tenured professor.

I wrote back to Jantz and said:

In the interests of increasing public debate, I would ask if you would be willing to:
1. post an authoritative version on the Web, preferably as a Web page where one doesn’t have to have PowerPoint.
2. take credit for it publicly, so that people know who you are and what perspective you bring
3. open it up for discussion using online tools, such as discussion boards

In order to follow the spirit of learning, sharing, and teacher, Jantz should make his writings available on the Web on a place where he takes ownership and accountability for what he writes. He should open them up to scrutiny and debate.

In this day and age, anyone who is serious about sharing their work (especially someone at a university) knows how to give it a permanent location on the Web so people can find it. Spreading information through email with no “master” source is the stuff rumors are made of.

It is going to be an interesting debate. We have found in trying to check the two vice presidential candidates that Senator Biden offers lots of factual statements that we try to verify and sometimes are right, sometimes aren’t.

Governor Palin has been a little trickier for us because .. if you look at her recent interview with Katie Couric, there aren’t a lot of facts that she states. So we’re not sure that we’ll get a lot of facts to check from her. But we’ll be watching and folks can get politifact.com and see what we found.

Another (more established, I think) fact-checking site is factcheck.org. I wonder if they will fact-check the above statement?

I could not bring myself to file this in the “Public Policy” category, so I am filing it in “Politics.” That’s the best I can do given the realities of the situation; i.e. she was chosen primarily for electability and less for Vice Presidential qualifications.