… boat trip along the
marshes, channels, and inlets
between Chincoteague and Assateague.
A big blast coming from somewhere nearby shook our house late last night. The sound wasn’t maybe as loud as Krakatoa, but it was plenty loud – it tumbled Les UDs out of bed and into their coats.
Flashlights in hand, they checked to see whether an enormous tree had fallen on their roof. But it didn’t sound like a treefall, said UD. Sounded more … complicated than a treefall…
Garrett Park neighbors emerged, like us, from their houses, saying to one another What happened? What just happened?
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This morning, it’s all over the news. Right across the train tracks from us, in a neighborhood called Randolph Hills, a house exploded. There’s nothing left but a pile of bricks.
[M]any people throughout the upper Bethesda and Kensington areas, which are both several miles away, called 911 to report hearing and feeling the explosion.
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Karen Burkett, a real estate agent with Re/Max, told Bethesda Beat Friday morning that the house was scheduled to be for sale at a public auction at the courthouse in Rockville at 3:30 p.m. today.
…for a few days. She will blog from there.
UD has bought a new pair of binoculars for the occasion (Chincoteague/Assateague is famous for birdwatching) and will try to do some birding/photography.
But it’s okay. It was during a timeout.
What alarmed me most … was what I saw in the eyes of the [Middlebury College] crowd. Those who wanted the event to take place made eye contact with me. Those intent on disrupting it steadfastly refused to do so. They couldn’t look at me directly, because if they had, they would have seen another human being.
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Intelligent members of the Middlebury community — including some of my own students and advisees — concluded that Charles Murray was an anti-gay white nationalist from what they were hearing from one another, and what they read on the Southern Poverty Law Center website. Never mind that Dr. Murray supports same-sex marriage and is a member of the courageous “never Trump” wing of the Republican Party.
Students are in college in part to learn how to evaluate sources and follow up on ideas with their own research. The Southern Poverty Law Center incorrectly labels Dr. Murray a “white nationalist,” but if we have learned nothing in this election, it is that such claims must be fact-checked, analyzed and assessed.
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[W]hat the events at Middlebury made clear is that, regardless of political persuasion, Americans today are deeply susceptible to a renunciation of reason and celebration of ignorance. They know what they know without reading, discussing or engaging those who might disagree with them.
… probably testify for the prosecution against Graham Spanier, UD links you to her first post (in 2011) about the Paterno/Sandusky story.
Cost of the scandal to Penn State as of January of this year: “a quarter-billion dollars and growing.”
… you know more about the internal corruption of the place than I do.
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UD thanks dmf for the link.
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This blog’s Rutgers posts.
“When something becomes a religion, we don’t choose the actions that are most likely to solve [any particular] problem,” said [Jonathan] Haidt, the author of the 2012 best seller “The Righteous Mind” and a professor at New York University. “We do the things that are the most ritually satisfying.”
He added that what he saw in footage of the confrontation at Middlebury “was a modern-day auto-da-fé: the celebration of a religious rite by burning the blasphemer.”
The protesters didn’t use [Charles] Murray’s presence as an occasion to hone the most eloquent, irrefutable retort to him. They swarmed and swore.
The claim here is that a segment of intelligent American college students was – at least for the duration of a gathering – a tribe, swarming and swearing with the righteous, violent, ritually satisfying, ways of its tribe. This is the villagers of The Lottery, assuring themselves of an orderly world and a good harvest by stoning a chosen villager.
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If you’re going to go to college, and you have these tribal tendencies, they can fall roughly two ways – call them Football and Foliage. Foliage refers to private small landscaped tribal grounds, Football public large arena’d grounds. Here’s how one commentator describes and justifies the latter:
Look at the shirtless boys with faces and torsos painted in the school colors; look at the cheerleaders on the fields, the ‘waves’ surging through the stands.
American universities, those temples of reason (at their best), are tribes… If you want your students to become loyal, giving alumni, you must turn them into members of a tribe.
Paradoxically, the temple of reason, if it is to survive financially, must turn its students into a tribe. It must use all of its resources to do exactly the opposite of what universities are supposed to do — sustain and strengthen human reason. Tribal fraternities, tribal football teams, tribal fans — these are the often dangerous ritual actors some public campuses encourage.
Some private campuses offer the ritual satisfaction of enforced intellectual loyalties.
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Andrew Sullivan on religious aspects of the event.
If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you’re a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of “white supremacy,” you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can’t reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others’ souls, and wound them irreparably.
… [At one point,] the students start clapping in unison, and you can feel the hysteria rising, as the chants grow louder. “Your message is hatred. We will not tolerate it!” The final climactic chant is “Shut it down! Shut it down!” It feels like something out of The Crucible. Most of the students have never read a word of Murray’s — and many professors who supported the shutdown admitted as much. But the intersectional zeal is so great he must be banished — even to the point of physical violence.
This matters, it seems to me, because reason and empirical debate are essential to the functioning of a liberal democracy. We need a common discourse to deliberate. We need facts independent of anyone’s ideology or political side, if we are to survive as a free and democratic society. Trump has surely shown us this. And if a university cannot allow these facts and arguments to be freely engaged, then nowhere is safe. Universities are the sanctuary cities of reason. If reason must be subordinate to ideology even there, our experiment in self-government is over.
Liberal democracy is suffering from a concussion as surely as Allison [Stanger] is.
UD‘s old buddies Nathan Tublitz and Bill Harbaugh, professors at humongous jock school University of Oregon, managed to get a committee up and running there which allowed faculty a teeny bit of say about athletics. But Nathan’s and Bill’s rough rhetorical ways made the sports guys cry, so UO’s president dried their tears and killed the committee.