“Lucky Hank,” starring Bob Odenkirk, based on the 1997 novel “The Straight Man,” by Richard Russo, [offers a familiar] vein of disdain, one in which characters say things like: “My book of sonnets on Jonathan Swift has become the benchmark in early feminist 18th century response poetry.”

Jonathan Brown, slavery-apologist extraordinaire, is just Part One.

You can still find Georgetown boasting about hoppin’ Shon Hopwood – sentenced just today for his latest, er, outburst – here. Veteran bad guy Shon was enacting one of those personal redemption stories of which we are so fond until his temper did him in again. Tsk.

And in the Islamic present, this reviewer notes, citing “ISIS’s and Boko Haram’s recent revival of medieval de jure enslavement practices.” That’s a nice wordy way of saying this.

And who can be surprised that an American professor/defender of slavery was the star of the show the other day, as a congressional committee wondered why Georgetown University rewarded this dude (who also called for Iranian airstrikes on American bases) with the chairmanship of a department? Does Georgetown like lecturers who shut down audience… er… misgivings about slavery with comments like “I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody, because we own lots of people all around us and were owned by people, and this obsession about thinking of slavery as property… [Muhammad] had slaves, there is no denying that. Are you more morally mature than the prophet of God? No, you’re not.”

Talk about a scold! Groveling apologies, Professor Brown! Never again will I arrogantly go against the will of the prophet and question slavery!

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Vey, vey. Here are UD‘s uncensored thoughts about slavery-apologists like Georgetown’s own.

UD‘s got nothing against the tens of millions of Americans – and other people around the world – who fantasize about sexually and in other ways enslaving others. Enslavement fantasies always fall somewhere in the top ten sexual fantasies, and fine. But JEEZ. Georgetown is a Jesuit school. You’d think it would be particularly sensitive to the possibility of hiring and promoting people who remonstrate in public against people who don’t think giving in to slavery fantasies is a good idea.

No one yet seems willing to broach the child custody dispute that was almost certainly behind the killing. But as the story picks up steam, that should start to happen.

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Wow. Okay; let’s go.

On his webpage, he announces his commitment to a “proto-feminist” “collective good.” Proto means ‘Primitive: … a basic or undeveloped state.‘ Zat really what you want?

There is something I know you want, and that’s attention. Man, you just waggled your dingus in front of an academic audience!

How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: “My fear is we’re headed to civil war.” She restates a basic truth about the US. “There’s a lot of guns. There’s a lot of gun violence. There’s a habituation to violence that’s very American, that Europeans don’t understand.” Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new “permissiveness” that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump’s indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: “You can feel that brewing.” …

[W]e talk about those US citizens who put Trump back in the White House, even though, as she puts it, they knew who he was. “Nothing was hidden. People had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose this. And that disgust, I couldn’t shake that. I thought: ‘People wanted this – and I don’t want to have anything to do with this.’”

… Wisconsin Public Radio. After all, the fact that this person chairs an English department is as much of a news story as the fact that he’s violent with students.

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UPDATE: Good call. For your upcoming search, focus on someone with basic literacy skills.

The UW-Eau Claire College Republicans identified the faculty member [who pushed over their information table promoting a conservative candidate for the state Supreme Court] as English Department Chair José Felipe Alvergue.*

“The faculty member involved has been placed on administrative leave pending [an] investigation,” [said the provost].

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Tatiana Bobrowicz, chair of the UWEC College Republicans, told Newsweek in a written statement on Tuesday that the man came up to the table about 8:30 a.m. and asked why they were so close to the polls. She said she began to explain to him that the table had been approved by the university and was in compliance with requirements, when he said, “the time for this is over,” and flipped the table.

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He has a May 7 court date for disorderly conduct. Having read his web page, I pity the judge who tries to get one coherent sentence out of the dude.

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* My project is of knowing, and in knowing––or returning sentience to the decolonialized––engaging with the ongoing care work of the self in the era of its sublimation into the expansive, polluted power of supremacist monopoly capitalism.

Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley are getting the hell out. Canada ho!

Like perifascist Hungary, we are beginning to experience a brain drain, mes petites.

 Lee Grodzins, MIT professor, lived one of the great lives. Read the whole thing.

He got his favorite student evaluation … for a course, billed as offering a “superficial overview” of nuclear physics. The comment read: “This physics course was not superficial enough for me.”

… Early on, he joined several Manhattan Project alums at MIT in their concern about the consequences of nuclear bombs. In Vietnam-era 1969, Grodzins co-founded the Union of Concerned Scientists, which calls for scientific research to be directed away from military technologies and toward solving pressing environmental and social problems. 

… In 1999, Grodzins founded the nonprofit Cornerstones in Science, a public library initiative to improve public engagement with science. Based originally at the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, Cornerstones now partners with libraries in Maine, Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and California. Among their initiatives was one that has helped supply telescopes to libraries and astronomy clubs around the country.

[A University of Connecticut professor’s] travel expenses include three Disney trips. A travel request described the purpose of one such trip as visiting the Central Florida State Archives.

[The professor] later confirmed that she did not go to the archives, investigators say.

Instead, … she visited the park [with her children] to look at the experience of Disney and how it sanitizes American history…

[The professor] also used school money on a trip to Northern Ireland in November of 2023. [She] got married there, but claimed the entire trip was work-related, according to the compliance report.

She told university staff that she was married at 9:30 in the morning at city hall in Belfast, and that it only took 20 minutes …

[M]any of the trips took place when [she] was supposed to be teaching classes.

Senior Lecturer Alexis Jetter has an impressive journalism background, and Dartmouth seems to have hired her off the tenure track to teach the trade. But lately she’s been a bit on the loose wig:

Jetter wrote that she had lost her temper and cursed at two male students in the WGSS departmental lounge. She alleged that the students had refused to leave the lounge when asked. 

Lots of filling in needed here. How dramatically did she lose her temper? Does ‘cursed’ mean you fucking assholes at the top of her lungs, or damn fellas wish to hell you’d leave sotto voce? What hideous behaviors warranted her response – if it was warranted? Dartmouth’s thick with pissoff-artist frat boys; was one such group staging an antifeminist intervention?

But even if it were – You don’t engage. If they’re really bothering you, you leave. Maybe you ask a colleague what you should do. Maybe you call security. A shouting match is a truly bad idea.

As for the rat-as-late-stage-capitalism-icon — oy. Again, we need to fill in a lot of blanks here, but she herself writes that the lesson was about Trump as capitalism’s noxious end stage, which again you might want to be careful… Aside from the fact that you can’t take for granted every student’s agreement that Trump’s a rat, there’s the silliness of insisting – because you wish it so – that he’s the last gasp of capitalism.

Anyway, ol’ UD can’t blame her for saying fuck it when the school began coming at her with formal grievance procedures. She wisely resigned before being subjected to that shit.

From a Nebraska professor’s obit. Since he died at 85, this would make his parents at least 110, so UD‘s not sure the writer for Roper & Sons Funeral Home in Lincoln needed to include this.

“He was best known for his work in restructured pork, which led to the development of the McRib.”

The attacks are everywhere now. Here’s William Deresiewicz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

[These fields are] intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”

(The best attack on “Theory” remains Richard Rorty’s.)

For years, many of this blog’s posts were variations on this observation; and now, with the withering results of the election, we can go further than Deresiewicz and note the historical irony of a ridiculously, coercively, hyper-politicized academy (“ideological positions” trump, as it were, everything, including the aesthetic values that are, after all, the distinguishing characteristic of what we call literature) getting slapped upside the head by none other than the actual politics of this country.

Hence Deresiewicz’s stress on the unreality from which many professors continue to suffer: They just don’t get it that most people have rather conservative and traditional dispositions, and that this reality does not make people shitty reactionaries. The university is supposed to be the place where people’s traditional, inherited perceptions and beliefs are put into question (college is where you read Blake and Nietzsche); but as Todd Gitlin, a man of the left, pointed out in a defense of Allan Bloom, the academy went apeshit radical rather than humanely subversive.

… authenticate a newly discovered Chopin waltz.