See this post for background.
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UD thanks her sister.
Very thoughtful essay on the big new Diagnostic and Statistical sampler, bursting with psychiatric diagnoses for everyone in the family. Like Adam Phillips (“[H]appiness is the most conformist of moral aims. For me, there’s a simple test here. Read a really good book on positive psychology, and read a great European novel. And the difference is evident in one thing — the complexity and subtlety of the moral and emotional life of the characters in the European novel are incomparable. Read a positive-psychology book, and what would a happy person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy and the difficult passions.”), Patricia Pearson perceives the philosophical destitution of a culture that’s handed the task of self-consciousness over to clueless family physicians — nice people desperately paging through the DSM for tranquilizers. To be sure, the difficult passions are difficult. That doesn’t mean you should pill them away.
… you’ll enjoy the fact that the thing gets funnier and funnier. Watch the Colbert interview with Thomas Herndon.
More update here.
Even as she writes, UD is watching multiple Priuses, BMWs, and pickups gather across the street from her Garrett Park house. An important civic ceremony is about to be held there. If UD knew how to take pictures, she’d take pictures of it.
But, you know. Use your imagination. Glamorously redone farmish house in one of the richest counties in the richest state in the country. Pleasantly cool wet weather. Modest news media presence. Spectacular spring blossoms everywhere. Insane colorful lushness.
UD knew about this event because her sister, Morrissey fanatic and MOOC-producer, works for the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection, and told her about it.
Twenty people in trench coats are smiling and shaking each others’ hands while standing atop a semi-permeable driveway. County Executive Ike Leggett, elegant in a really good suit, stands in the middle of this semi-circle getting ready to say a few words.
About what? What’s the deal?
Well, the county is announcing a new program that financially compensates citizens who put in water gardens, semi-permeable driveways and God know what else along the lines of eco-mindedness. They’ve chosen UD‘s neighbor’s place for the announcement, which makes sense because she’s definitely put in all of that plus one of those absolutely no lawn (contrast to this UD‘s dandelion-rich expanse) cottage gardens.
Man – ANOTHER Prius. Wow.
Is the thousand dollar check or whatever my neighbor’s about to get a nice thing?
I guess so…. I mean… How to say this… We Rokeby Avenue folk are not exactly hurting financially; and my neighbor’s garden easily represents tens of thousands of dollars of expense… “Maybe they should target the program a little differently,” suggests Mr UD…
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Ike is about to climb them well-worn stairs (that’s George, to Martha, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and say a few words of thanks to my neighbor for allowing the event to take place at her place (as if the rest of us wouldn’t jump at the chance for this sort of attention… Over here over here! Look what I’ve done with my pachysandra! Sure she’s done this English rural thingie and it’s all environmentally correct blah blah but I’ve got a well-established Japanese garden over here without all those garish colors… A study in greens and textures over here! Maybe you can’t appreciate it because it’s quiet, subtle, tranquil, Japanese tea room kind of thing… Contemplative stroll garden over here!!… No one’s listening…).
We’ve already noted on this blog that since Australian universities stand for nothing, they have no trouble allowing gender segregated events on their campuses. MEN IN FRONT; WOMEN IN THE BACK. AND KEEP YOUR MOUTHS SHUT.
Fine, fine. Different strokes for different folks, says the University of Melbourne vice-chancellor, quite on the defensive after everyone, including the opposition leader and the Minister for the Status of Women, expressed shock at his university’s nonchalant collusion with what are arguably the most reactionary forces in the world today. After all, the university explained, this was an “external organisation.” Not my business, man!
So the v-c’s backtracking a bit, now that everyone’s squawking, and he’s pointing out some niceties in the discrimination law — without noting that the discrimination in this case is coming from that external organization about which his university cares not a whit. Without noting that universities not only have a right – they have a duty – to stand for the principles of democracy, and to bar (which, the v-c hastens to add, Melbourne will in fact start doing from now on) organizations founded on discrimination.
But tut-tut, says the v-c. All religious organizations deserve respect and consideration.
It’s anti-democratic, that is, to be intolerant of any group that calls itself religious, no matter what that group believes and does. And certainly no university has the right to “impose” what the v-c calls its “preferences” on anybody.
That’s why UD said in her last post about this that if you’re fed up with British universities and their intolerant respect for democratic principles, go to Australia.
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Jennifer Oriel gets it said.
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A professor at Melbourne who specializes in Islam sets the vice-chancellor straight.
[I]n the most sacred place on earth, the sacred mosque in Mecca, there is no separate section for men or women. Millions of Muslims visit the mosque and pray each year without the need to separate men from women.
…
Gender equality and associated values are fundamental to Australian society and those values must be respected by all, including those few Muslims who may not necessarily agree with them.
I find it very troubling that there are some who feel that they have a right to send women, whether Muslims or not, to the back of a lecture theatre as though this was the most natural place for women in such a setting.
For the men who organise public events to require women participants to go to the back of the facility is a breach of trust and a misuse of the facilities of the university.
It is also demeaning to women. I’m sure most Australian Muslims would also be deeply offended by such practices and would indeed question the connection between the practice and their understanding of Islam.
Yes, it’s grotesque that this man must clarify basic human rights and the proper use of his university to the vice-chancellor. But I’m afraid that’s where we are now. At least in Australia.
Starker has died, at age 88.
Starker was known for being tough on his students. Former IU basketball coach Bobby Knight, himself known for the demands he placed on his players, asked Starker to come speak to his team.
Afterward one of the players came up to Starker and asked if he could tell Starker a joke.
“Mr Starker there was a car accident and three cellists died and they all tried to get to Heaven,” the student said. He then goes on to explain the joke. St. Peter asks the first two with whom they studied. They answer they studied with Mstislav Rostropovich and Leonard Rosen. St. Peter tells both of them they have to go to Hell.
The third one tells St. Peter he studied with Starker. Then comes the punch line.
“St. Peter says ‘You may come in. You already went through Hell.’”
Tee-hee. Well, state legislators can’t do anything about these two, uh, power centers of the modern American university, so in desperation you sometimes see them – here it’s a guy from Minnesota – issue these sorts of statements. The mental image you should have accompanying Pelowski’s remarks is a frustrated one-year-old kicking his feet against a wall. Except that in this case all-grown-up Gene Pelowski has very accurately and eloquently identified the sources of his frustration.
It’s only frustrating, though, if you think your state university system should be – by some non-athletic standard or other – good.
And why be angry at the idea that spending that money on Tubby is an investment in the future? In the future, the University of Minnesota will be even more strongly – perhaps someday to the point of exclusivity! – associated with basketball.
It is – and always has been – curious to UD, as an observer of universities, that the most violent and mindless game out there totally dominates America’s universities. Universities, where the main thing, you figure, is the mind, get positively orgasmic about, and spend themselves into bankruptcy over, a game which we now know pummels the mind to mush.
Forget the body. Of course we know – quoting John Kass again here –
The game is not just a contact sport — it’s a high-impact collision sport. It is about exploding into your opponent, refusing to break, while breaking others to your will and knocking them senseless.
But Kass also notes that “football scrambles the human brain.” He notes the massive and growing numbers of lawsuits coming from high school, college, and professional teams, as players literally lose their minds. Kass predicts football itself will die in the next few decades.
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UD, however, doubts it. Why? Here’s Kass again:
Make no mistake. I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…
Universities, at least according to this guy, can’t survive without a foundation of violent tribal ritual:
It is irrational and tribal love. It is intense emotion, not a vague sense of obligation or philanthropy. [Students and alumni] want to beat State.
Read his heavy-breathing about “shirtless boys” and ask yourself whether passions like these can ever be tamed. Whether the American university can survive without them. Already – in coach buyouts alone – university football is destroying the financial foundation of many schools. Those same schools will not hesitate to pay out hundreds of millions more in personal injury claims.
The model here will be big pharma. As a corporate endeavor, pharma cheats and injures, but as long as it can afford to pay out billions every year in legal settlements and still make a big profit, it will continue to do so. Universities will hit up students for higher and higher athletic fees, and students – even more subject to these passions than alumni, it seems – will willingly give.
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UD thanks mwm.
Three students displeased with the University of Ottawa med school decided to sue it. For one hundred and fifty million dollars.
Howsomeever, a Superior Court judge decided that depriving generations of Canadians of medical care by bankrupting a medical school was a tad over the top.
Far as I can tell, two of the three are still enrolled in the school. A bit awkward…
… like the one about Anna Nicole Smith… Musicals full of weird pop culture juxtapositions and unlikely people singing arias… Imagine a once-famous, now-imprisoned, professor of computer engineering. Make him Japanese. Make him married to Rita Coolidge, who will sing of her fidelity to him (“If it takes forever I will wait for you!”). Occasionally Coolidge will enter a reflective mood and sing of her long-ago wacky ‘sixties life with ex-husband Kris Kristofferson (“Your love kept liftin’ me higher!”). The opera will flash back to the professor’s years of thievery at the University of California Irvine, where he double dipped with such intensity that he eventually became the first UC system professor to spend eight years in jail for conflict of interest. The chorus will be composed of frightened graduate students plotting how to report their mentor to the authorities without destroying their own careers…
“If you are making $3 billion a year on Gleevec [a cancer therapy], could you get by with $2 billion?” Dr. [Brian] Druker, who is now director of the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University, said in an interview.
A group of cancer researchers and physicians calls for reductions in some drug prices.
Here’s another good one:
Dr. John M. Goldman, emeritus professor of hematology at Imperial College in London and a co-author of the commentary, said he knew several researchers who declined to become authors because they feared losing research money from the industry.
Dr. Kantarjian, the lead author, said that was a risk.
“I am sure I am going to be blackballed,” he said. “My research career will be hurt.”
But he said it was time to speak out. “Pharmaceutical companies have lost their moral sense,” he said.
Diederik Stapel just got a long write-up in the New York Times, complete with color photo of the man in jeans plus bummed-I-got-caught look on his face. He’s sorry, he’s mentally ill, he’s written a book. Go to it.
That’s disgusting enough, but the email he sent about it (he doesn’t think he should be fired) is even more disgusting.
Turns out when he rewrote student comments he was “in a very dark and vulnerable place.”
Poor baby.
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Hm. Things have been bumpy in that department for awhile.
Brits are protesting gender segregated events at their universities. In response, universities which have in the past allowed it to happen are beginning to ban the groups that do it.
If efforts to maintain equality at British universities are annoying to you, be aware that Australian universities are much friendlier to the stash-the-girls-in-the-back boys.
At an April 13 lecture on Islamic Jihad in Syria, signs directed “sisters” to the back of the theatre, and “brothers” to the front.
Gender segregation was also encouraged at an information session for prospective Australian Islamic Peace Conference volunteers held by the Islamic Research and Educational Academy at the university’s Public Lecture Theatre on March 10.
The university said the events were held by external organisations and it would not intervene to prevent the practice.
Yes, in Australia, universities don’t stand for anything, so you can bring your organization and do anything you want on that nation’s campuses. As long as you’re “external.”
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Someone managed to dig up some old gender studies professor to squawk about this.
University of Melbourne gender politics professor Sheila Jeffreys said she was shocked to learn that this “form of subordinating women” was taking place on an Australian university campus.
“There needs to be great outrage about this,” Professor Jeffreys said. “It is a Rosa Parks moment . . . Making women sit at the back in lecture theatres is sexual apartheid. This is a new practice in Australia, whereas apartheid against black Americans was an old practice. But it should be challenged strongly so that it goes no further.
“Religious ideas that so blatantly make women into second-class citizens are not worthy of respect. They should not be allowed to undermine people’s justified rejection of discrimination against women.”
Who in the hell allowed that woman to speak?
…non-filthy rich.
George Washington University, “a place known for its beautiful cars,” it says here, has taken a hit: A new BMW M5 parked on campus got hammered by a tree.
Unbelievably, the tragedy was compounded. A man, desperate to reach the car (perhaps he is the owner), crossed a police line around it and got arrested.
My office window is steps from this crash scene. It will be a difficult day for me. I hope they’ve cleaned things up by the time I get to campus.
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The only headline I can think of for this is AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY.