… roared.

It’s hard to put the big guys away (just ask John Hammergren), but they did just get Laurence Doud, and that ain’t chopped opioids.

He got the pharmacist award the same year he was indicted, which means that the Pharmacists Society has now had, uh, five years to stop boasting about him.

The criteria for this award is very selective and discerning… He has provided creativity, innovation, and moral support for decades to his true passion: pharmacy. Doud also received an Honorary Doctorate from Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Science in 2016.

That’s six years the Albany College has had to mull its decision to honor CEO Inmate Number One.

So much still to say about the curious case of UCLA philosophy lecturer/psychotic would-be mass killer Matthew Harris. For UD, the crucial question is – who hired him at UCLA? Simply put, how did a guy who apparently was a known problem — maybe even a danger — at his previous school – Duke – end up in front of a classroom at UCLA?

How long did UCLA keep him in the classroom?

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Here’s the bit on his time at Duke.

Harris received his PhD from Duke University in 2019. It has been alleged that while there, he engaged in a some inappropriate actions with or in regard to students, and that some faculty in the Department of Philosophy at Duke were aware of issues with his behavior; it has been alleged that some Duke faculty recommended that he not be left alone with students.

So far the above can’t be confirmed; and since everyone with any connection to Matthew Harris is currently running scared (he might be released on bond or sent to a low-security mental health facility), I wouldn’t expect anyone to say anything for awhile. But let us assume this information about his behavior at Duke is true. Let us assume that his madness definitely began to manifest at Duke, that the peril of the man was something of an established fact at Duke. How can we account for UCLA hiring, and for some time keeping, him?

Here are a few thoughts.

1.) Just as GW’s Jessica Krug had institutionally powerful enablers, so perhaps Harris had influential cheerleaders at Duke and/or UCLA. Sometimes it only takes one pivotal/assertive/aggressive advocate to tamp down misgivings other colleagues might have.

2.) Harris’s aggressivity, sense of grievance, and general strangeness might have been filed under “wounds of race” – just as Jessica Krug’s similar emotional profile — when people were under the impression she was black — was perhaps interpreted/mainstreamed in this way.

3.) Harris had great credentials – Duke, a respected thesis director, fellowships, prizes. I’m assuming he had strong recommendations. Nothing on paper argued against him, and it looks as though no one at Duke – formally or informally – shared anything worrisome. Or did they? Again, a strong enough advocate might find a way to neutralize worrisome information. (Interestingly, Duke was both Krug’s publisher and Harris’s graduate institution.)

4.) Once in the classroom at UCLA, Harris benefited from the praiseworthy tendency of universities to give professors enormous freedom in what and how they teach. But as a novice at the trade, Harris should have encountered more oversight than he apparently received. To make matters worse, the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries in the humanities means the absence of anything like an agreed-upon canon of readings to assign in any particular class. “[A] final exam … included an essay question about the hate-filled manifesto of Christopher Dorner, a former LAPD officer whose 2013 shooting rampage killed four people and wounded three others. Students were asked to consider the ‘oppression, disrespect and loss of dignity’ suffered by the homicidal ex-cop.”

Exactly the sort of assigned reading you’d expect in an undergraduate philosophy course. Before Hegel and Arendt, Christopher Dorner.

… puts his trust in God.

When students are contacting the FBI about one of their instructors, it’s a subtle hint that maybe something’s wrong with the instructor.

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This is a drip-drip-drip story. We’re starting with information from his students; eventually we’ll work up to his dissertation committee and the administration at Duke University.

[The instructor was] speaking haltingly, changing his syllabus willy-nilly and spending the first four weeks of his “Philosophy of Race” class without once showing his face over Zoom.

Things got weirder as the term progressed, students said, leading up to a final exam that included an essay question about the hate-filled manifesto of Christopher Dorner, a former LAPD officer whose 2013 shooting rampage killed four people and wounded three others. Students were asked to consider the “oppression, disrespect and loss of dignity” suffered by the homicidal ex-cop.

… here’s some required reading on the subject.

So nu? How did Harris get to UCLA? Does his dissertation advisor, Andrew Janiak, have anything to contribute?

Were there other faculty in the Philosophy department who may have known, or suspected, that they were handing along a dangerous person to UCLA?

For him to land at that distinguished school, his letters of recommendation must have been excellent. All written by people with no negative knowledge of him?

Did this bit from his brief autobiography at the end of his dissertation not seem strange to anyone?

[H]e also gave lectures about his innovative philosophical research to crowds at Stanford University, Cornell University and Princeton University.

How could any adult American, let alone a school superintendent, say this? Little kids take out their ghost guns and execute each other on the sidewalk in front of your school, and you tell your community it’s hard to understand the “incident”?

No event could be more pedestrian, more transparent, and more expected. It happens very, very frequently – more and more frequently – in the junior high schools and high schools of the United States. (I’m afraid this list is not up to date, but it will have to do.) Happened a few days ago at a high school nine miles from my house.

There are about four hundred million guns in the US, and some of them are in the hands of the parents of the superintendents’ students. They’re all over their living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. How many is the superintendent herself hoarding?

Some of these households have fifty guns and more. These are arsenals, and children are growing up around them. Guns, these children come to know, are there to solve problems. And they are ridiculously accessible, either by taking them from one’s home arsenal, ordering a ghost gun and assembling it, or borrowing one from a friend.

Teenage guys fight all the time. One of the most amazing accomplishments of this country is that while until recently they’d deal with these utterly routine “incidents” with their fists or a pair of scissors or something, we’ve now made it that they can pick off a couple of the folks’ Glocks and kill their enemy.

Get with the program, superintendent. People are going to start laughing at you if you keep saying stupid things.

… feeds a bird brioche in Cozumel.

Michiganders, vote for Soldano and make sure not one sperm is wasted.

Nice as a bomb on the Fourth of July!

No more a smart little girl with no heart,
I am on a mass-murdering high!

I am in an atrocity dither,
With an atrocity star in my eye.
And you will note there’s a lump in my throat
When I think of that wonderful guy!

I’m as tight and as packed as a suicide belt

A bloodbath just for you.

I’m fanatic and fucked as a loon

And real soon a grenade’s coming due!

I’m as corny as ISIS in August,
Nice as a bomb on the Fourth of July.
If you’ll excuse an expression I use,
I’m in love, I’m in love,
I’m in love, I’m in love,
I’m in love with a wonderful guy!

1.) A dismissed faculty member has had a psychotic break and has issued death threats against faculty, students, the whole school really. How well has the campus responded in terms of security?

2.) When did the school become aware (through student complaints, his Rate My Professor page, his social media, etc.) that Harris is a violent, mentally ill person? Did it act quickly, or did it drag its feet?

3.) How well has the administration kept students and faculty informed about the ongoing threat, and what people should do about it?

4.) The acutely psychotic condition of Harris makes me suspect that his madness was visible long before he began ranting about mass murder. Did anyone warn the philosophy department about him before they hired him? Did the department have reservations about hiring him which they decided to overlook?

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Oh. And don’t forget. 5.) “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.” UCLA must certainly proceed on the assumption that Harris enjoys a massive violent arsenal to match his massive violent mental illness.

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UPDATE: “[A] former instructor in a philosophy department is alleged to have sent members of the department threatening messages and was revealed to possibly have a history of problematic interactions with students, and possibly was observed in the past as problematic by superiors at institutions which (for reasons unknown) do not appear to have effectively responded to the situation or informed relevant others of it.”

… Opening day of Allison Fluke-Ekren’s trial, complete with the mug shot heard round the world.

Really spoils the party.

… Day! A wonderful opportunity not to toast the covering of sexually provocative women’s, girls’, and of course babies’ bodies the world over.

On the same date as World Hijab Day, you can instead celebrate No Hijab Day, when you express solidarity with millions of women and children around the world desperate for freedom and autonomy.

When you give thought (and this Yale student is right to worry that you’re not giving thought) to your freedom not to veil, and, more importantly, to the ongoing withdrawal of that freedom for huge numbers of people in other countries, you are less likely to consider the hijab – and other marks of submission – something to celebrate. It’s something to tolerate, to be sure – but we do not set aside annual holidays to celebrate – and even wear! – that which we tolerate. Freedom is something to celebrate, and No Hijab Day celebrates it.

Free women and men of the secular west most recently had their say after the Council of Europe’s ill-fated attempt to foist a celebrate the hijab advertising campaign on them.

Reminding that women are free to wear the hijab is one thing,” [French] Socialist Senator Laurence Rossignol said, “but saying freedom is in hijab is another. It’s promoting it. Is this the role of the Council of Europe?”

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Gabriel Attal, [French] government spokesman, said after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the campaign defied common sense “because one shouldn’t confuse religious freedom with the de facto promotion of a religious symbol”. Such an “identitarian” approach was “contrary to the freedom of conscience that France supports in all European and international forums”, Attal said.

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Don’t celebrate women who force their eight year old daughters under hijabs. When you wear one, you’re saying that this is okay. Celebrate No Hijab Day.