… One of my colleagues attended a media conference in Algiers last April, where post-graduate female students from the university acted as interpreters. These women, who were Muslim, were asked not to wear headscarves by the state broadcaster running the event, because it was felt they would send an anti-progressive signal to international delegates.

The young women complied, but were jeered at by men on the street as they walked bare-headed from the campus to the conference centre. Were they angered by these hecklers? On the contrary, their indignation was directed at the organiser for asking them to leave off their veils, thereby laying them open to taunts…

Martina Devlin, Independent

***************************

Meanwhile, in Iran:

Last October Iranian police in the north-eastern town of Bojnourd launched a new crackdown on attractive mannequins in clothes stores and the main bazaar, confiscating about 65 ‘hijab-less female mannequins.’

“The use of vulgar mannequins – whether male or female – is an affront to public morals and is considered to be a crime,” said an Iranian official, adding that the display of properly veiled mannequins which adhere to the national dress code would not be considered a crime.

… to have to close up shop altogether.

It has been, almost from its inception, so spectacularly corrupt, that the government can’t see funding it anymore. Its board of trustees is so suicidal that UD concludes no one on the board understands what a university is. They are utterly, utterly lost.

Senior officials from the embattled First Nations University of Canada begged for patience Friday while the school works through its problems, but students say they’ve waited long enough and are ready to take action on their own to save the institution.

Clarence Bellegarde, chairman of the university’s board of governors, said in a brief statement that people need to wait for the outcome of a financial audit and a governance review.

… The university has been under a cloud of controversy for five years and students, who met with Bellegarde on Friday afternoon, say they’re unhappy.

… The meeting came one day after the Saskatchewan government warned that it could cut off funding to the school.

Advanced Education Minister Rob Norris said Thursday that he expects a decision within days about whether to continue supporting the aboriginal university in light of the ongoing governance problems and allegations of financial irregularities.

Complaints about governance have centred around the size of the school’s board, its political makeup and its closeness to FSIN.

A governance review was due last fall. It was pushed back to the end of this month and now won’t be ready until mid-February.

The audit is to be completed by March. It was ordered after a former financial officer at the university made allegations of questionable travel expenses and paid vacation time.

… $675,000 in conditional funding won’t flow to the school until the allegations are resolved. But the big debate is around funding for the next school year – the province provides $4 million to $5 million in annual support.

The federal government provides the aboriginal school with about $7.2 million annually. However, there are conditions on a portion of that funding – including the submission of the governance report – and Ottawa is still holding back $1.2 million.

There have been longstanding concerns with how the Regina-based university is run and questions about political interference from the FSIN.

Problems erupted in 2005 when a federation vice-chief who was chairman of the board of governors suspended several senior administrators, seized the university’s central computers and copied the hard drive with all faculty and student records.

The federation set up an all-chiefs task force that recommended proper governance and operating procedures be restored at the school. The recommendations were never implemented.

That prompted the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada to put the university on probation in 2007. That probation was lifted in 2008 but later that year, the Canadian Association of University Teachers voted to censure the school for “its ongoing failure to resolve the serious problems with the governance of the university.”

A provincially funded operational review said in January 2009 that the struggling school needed a smaller, less politicized board and called for changes.

The ongoing problems have led to a drop in enrolment and the dismissal or resignation of more than one-third of academic staff and about half of the administrative, professional and technical employees.

A letter sent Friday to the Ministry of Advanced Education from the chairman of the university’s academic council also showed frustration among faculty.

“What has become clear … is that our administration is incapable of responding to the recent and rapidly unfolding developments in any meaningful manner,” wrote Randy Lundy, chairman of the academic council who is also the head of the English Department.

“For five years now, since February of 2005, the board and administration of the university have had every opportunity to enact the changes that need to be made at the university, and they have consistently refused to do so and have done nothing but fight an ongoing delaying action,” he wrote.

Lundy said the board and administration are in “no position to enact any form of damage control because there is no controlling the damage” that has been done.

James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, was more grim in his assessment.

“We’re now at the point where there’s a very good likelihood that the institution is going to go under …”

A diversity event sponsored by a group called Project Dialogue at Vanderbilt University generated some interesting give and take:

[Chaplain Awadh] Binhazim… suggested that he, as part of his religion, would support the death of individuals involved in homosexual acts.

“Given the recent controversy surrounding homosexuals in the military, under Islamic laws if a homosexual engaged in homosexual acts, then the punishment under Islamic law would be death,” [a questioner said]. “As a practicing Muslim, do you accept or reject this particular teaching of Islam?”

“I don’t have a choice to accept or reject teachings,” Binhazim responded. “I go with what Islam teaches.”

… Binhazim, however, calls for perspective.

“As Muslims, we don’t just go around killing gays. That is a ridiculous misconception,” Binhazim said. “There is a set of strict criteria that must be met before this punishment is enforced. The rule is in place to promote the Muslim values of family. Even in rare cases where all criteria is met, it is even rarer for this conclusion to be reached.”…

… drags its ass from one scandal to the next, subsidizing the wretched spectacle with your tuition money, what can you do?

Not much.

But all praise to the grad students at the University of New Mexico, who held a special election:

GPSA’s special election about the UNM Athletics Administration saw a record turnout, and all four questions on the ballot passed by margins of at least 30 percent.

“This is an unprecedented number,” said GPSA President Lissa Knudsen. “It is our belief that GPSA has never had this turnout.”

As for the results, 1,163 students voted in the online election, which is more than twice the turnout of the April GPSA presidential election. Students could select “no opinion” on each question.

More than 1,000 students voted to urge the Board of Regents to divert student fees from Athletics. This was the highest turnout of all the questions. Of those who had an opinion, more than 85 percent of students voted to urge the administration to divert student fees away from the Athletics Department to academic programs.

Also, 81 percent of students who voted said they have no confidence in Athletic Director Paul Krebs’ handing of the Sept. 20 Locksley/Gerald Incident.

Roughly two-thirds of graduate and professional students voted no confidence in Krebs’ overall performance as Athletic Director….

Won’t make any difference. But it’s very important to get it said. The place is a whorehouse, and students have a right not to want to get dirtied by association.

… UD writes an appreciation of his story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish.

At Inside Higher Ed.

… to Inside Higher Education. I’ll let you know when it’s been posted.

UD thanks Jeff for forwarding her the news.

I’ll write a much longer post about him later today. For now:

J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose “The Catcher in the Rye” shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.

Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author’s son said in a statement from Salinger’s literary representative. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

… (I haven’t read it yet) is getting bad reviews. Here’s the most thoughtful I’ve seen so far, in New York Magazine. It agrees with the other critics that the book’s too short, too cold, too static.

Point Omega, like 24 Hour Psycho [an art installation featured in the novel, in which the Hitchcock film is slowed down to a running time of twenty-four hours], offers many uncategorizable points of entry — which is to say that nothing much happens, and it happens very, very slowly. The book is narrated by Jim Finley, an unsuccessful thirtysomething director of conceptual documentary films. (His first movie consists of 57 minutes of old Jerry Lewis footage spliced together to a soundtrack of random sounds.) Finley has chosen as the subject of his next film the 73-year-old Richard Elster, an intellectual who has just finished helping the U.S. government plan the war in Iraq—although he’s done so in the most abstract and DeLillo-y way possible, as a kind of guru responsible for giving long oracular speeches that sound something like this:

“Haiku means nothing beyond what it is. A pond in summer, a leaf in the wind. It’s human consciousness located in nature. It’s the answer to everything in a set number of lines, a prescribed syllable count. I wanted a haiku war. I wanted a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things. This is the soul of haiku. Bare everything to plain sight. See what’s there.”

Elster has retired from the war effort to take a “spiritual retreat” in the middle of the California desert, where he fills his days with poetry, sunsets, and even more oracular speeches. Finley visits him there, hoping to persuade Elster to participate in the documentary. Speechifying ensues, much of it about Elster’s obsession with an idea he calls “omega point”: humanity’s secret collective desire to wipe out the burden of human consciousness forever with some kind of cataclysmic event.

The closest the book comes to real action is when Elster’s daughter shows up—although “shows up” is a strong phrase to use for a character who hardly seems to exist at all. “She was sylphlike,” Finley tells us, “her element was air.” Or, as her father puts it: “She was imaginary to herself.” When she disappears, mysteriously—the only major event of the novel—it seems like a formality.

None of the reviewers has mentioned Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit philosopher who originated the term and concept omega point. I’m wondering if the novel gets explicit about Teilhard. I’m also wondering, given descriptions of the novel, whether anyone has made a connection between Point Omega and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which also features a young man battling to encounter an older man (DeLillo puts the older man in a desert; Conrad puts him in a jungle) who speaks to him about horrors.

According to the Senate Council’s Resolution of Early Dismissals of Classes, the Faculty Senate “stands in strong opposition” [to] professors canceling classes prior to holiday and semester breaks for the purpose of accommodating early departures from campus. The resolution starts that such conduct is “professionally inappropriate” and “demoralizing to other members of the teaching staff.”

This description of a recent resolution passed by the Penn State faculty marks a small moment in a much larger story University Diaries has been chronicling for years — the physical disappearance of the American university, and various forms of resistance to this process of disappearance.

Physical classrooms with human beings looking at and talking to each other retreat from the national university scene a little more each day, as downloadable lectures, PowerPoint séances , and personal laptop play either empty classrooms altogether, or people them with mentally absent students and robotic, slide-reading professors.

Add to this, at a sports-mad school like Penn State, plenty of skipping for games, and there may not be much going on in some of its classrooms…

So what the hell. Might as well add more room-emptying, and cancel classes three, four, five days before each holiday….

The results of these industrious efforts to make rooms, students, and professors disappear must indeed be demoralizing to the losers on campus who actually schedule, hold, and teach classes. They are the Left Behind, a thin, ragged cohort at the end of days…

… hard-charging leftist historian, as famous for his running battles with Boston University president John Silber as for his People’s History of the United States, has died.

Boston’s Crappy Law Schools
Oppose Crappy State Law School

Italy’s firefighters may “tame the flames” but they could have trouble extinguishing a Latin expert’s objections Tuesday to their new motto.

The motto, unveiled with great fanfare in a nationally televised ceremony last month, contains a grammatical error, the punctilious Giuliano Pisani told AFP.

The Latin motto reading “Flammas domamus donamus cordem” — literally, “We tame the flames, give the heart” — contains the masculine ending on the Latin word for heart — “cordem” — which is in fact neuter, he said…

Yes, yes, of course. This be the link.

… have been sending UD novels set in universities. UD‘s been reading these novels and thinking about them, and she’ll be posting soon, probably over at Inside Higher Education, about these and other academic novels.

Curbs on wearing the full Muslim veil come a step closer in France today with a report that will call for a ban on the dress in post offices, universities, hospitals and state-owned premises, as well as public transport.

In case you missed me.

At four AM, all the electricity in the house – in the town – went out.

PEPCO said it’d be back on at eleven this morning. It’s still out.

I spent the day waiting for electricity and reading To the Lighthouse for my independent study group on postmodern fiction tomorrow (we’re starting with a modernist novel for comparison). I’ve read this novel many times – taught it often – and enjoyed it. This time, however, I found it tiresome, mannered, and depressing. Go figure.

When not reading the novel, I played happy Haydn pieces on my just-tuned piano, and went around and around my acre picking up twigs and branches from last night’s windstorm.

A rather frustrating day. I did get a poem out of it.

***************************

At Four a Windstorm Blew the Lights

At four a windstorm blew the lights.
I slid a door and hauled out of night
Florida air that purpled the sky
And made the dark house stand by

For some fireworks. Death flared!
I scanned the ceiling, scared:
Streamers of nothingness!
Infinite means measureless

I said. Measureless to man, like Xanadu.
So take the measure of infinitude
Just as it is, unsparked and uncandescent,
Unelectric charge inside the head, incessant.

The sparklers drifted and arc’d,
Their spectacular bursts unmarked
By carillon, spinet, or choir.
The only holies in that unholy fire

Were human faces.
Firing up the cosmic spaces.