… and the news that does get out from this corrupt regime — so corrupt that the people laboring under it are in full revolt– is available to us only by uncertain internet outlets like anonymous blogs.

This blog, emanating from what the intelligentsia has renamed Texas Antediluvian and Mediocre University, seems to UD one of the more reliable sources of information about America’s most nakedly politicized campus.

Even as Rod Blagojevich-stuffed boards of trustees and administrations in Illinois falter, Rick Perry-stuffed places like A&M thrive, modeling the carefree, sporty, hack-run campus that has been the hallmark of higher education in Texas for so long.

What’s been dubbed the
white revolution in College
Station features white
ribbons and pieces of
paper hung from trees
in front of houses around
the university —

— symbolizing, say professors,
students, and alumni, the
gutting of any form of higher
level thought.

But if you go here, you’ll find the best summary yet of this season in university sports.

Biggest scum schools this year:

University of Alabama
University of Kentucky
University of Memphis
University of Southern California

A recent Columbia University grad is confused:

… In [Columbia University] student housing, where I lived for four years, the water in the showers was either scorching or glacial but rarely tolerable. Infestations might be part of New York’s charm, but our cockroach and mice roommates were amazingly abundant. I sometimes awoke at 4 a.m. to find my roommate chasing mice. He was more successful than our traps at catching the little guys.

At the library, I might wait 20 minutes to print something out. During finals time, it might be an hour to get a nook at a desk in which to study.

I’m not sure where the money is going…

Hint: Check out your president’s salary.

… Canes Times (Complete Coverage of the Miami Hurricanes). I hope you also enjoy my recent posts on Jurgen Habermas and Ralf Dahrendorf.

He led a life of intense activism and intense meditation.

Throughout, he worried about humanity’s desire and capacity for freedom. Here’s a good interview with him.

When Mr UD was working for the United Nations in East Timor, he got to know, a bit, Dahrendorf’s daughter Nicola, who was also working there.

From this interview: “[A]s Director of the London School of Economics, [I] have always regarded it as my job to protect academics from the obsession with realities, even the obsession with funds. That is to say, if you do administer, if you are in charge of an academic institution, you really have to see to it that those who are there as academics can do their job. So you have to relieve them of some of the burden of living in the real world.”

But here it is, in South Dakota. Bravo.

Austin Kaus, The Daily Republic:

A state senator says that if the Board of Regents doesn’t take care of a potential conflict of interest involving the president of South Dakota State University, the Legislature will.

Sen. Frank Kloucek, DScotland, a family farmer, said he is concerned about SDSU President David Chicoine’s appointment to the board of directors of the Monsanto Company, which produces crop seeds, herbicides and pesticides. For his role on the board, Kloucek said Chicoine will receive nearly $400,000, an amount that surpasses Chicoine’s salary as SDSU president by $80,000.

Kloucek said he wouldn’t object to Chicoine’s dual roles if the money from Monsanto went to the university. Chicoine’s private acceptance of the money, however, “leaves a foul taste in the mouth.”

“It’s just totally inappropriate to give that money to an individual rather than to the university for research,” Kloucek said. “It appears pretty clear-cut that they’re trying to buy influence at the university by buying influence with the president.”

In a letter that appears on Page 4 of today’s Daily Republic, Kloucek calls upon the state Board of Regents to resolve the issue.

“If the board does not act,” Kloucek wrote, “this issue will be presented to the South Dakota Legislature for a more permanent solution that will address it fairly and reasonably.”

In a telephone interview Thursday, Kloucek clarified, saying he and other legislators already are at work drafting potential legislation to deal with the issue.

“There will be at least one bill,” Kloucek said. “I just think it’s better … to make it clear the we’re not in that kind of game at South Dakota.”

The appointment of Chicoine to the Monsanto board negatively affects the credibility of the university, Kloucek said, since crop research reports from SDSU could easily be assumed as skewed.

“This research must not be tainted in any way, shape or form and this certainly taints that research,” Kloucek said. “It … jeopardizes the integrity because it makes it look like we’re in the hip pocket of Monsanto.”

Until the session begins, Kloucek said he’ll be taking input from other South Dakota residents on potential solutions to a problem that he said “smacks very hard of … conflict of interest.”

“It’s a tough issue, but I just think it’s wrong and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure to correct it in one shape, way or form,” Kloucek said.

We’re not in that kind of game at South Dakota.

Kiss the man.

… And… uh… where’s the response from the president? This story has been kicking around for weeks. If there’s no problem with what he’s doing, why isn’t he defending himself?

… this morning. They didn’t like the sound quality on my lecture, and want me to do it again.

Later.

… that Les UDs have a little country house with big Catskill views near Cooperstown, New York.

They own this
house, its twenty
acres and its
pond, because
this man —

— Wojciech Fangor,
lived up there
and asked his
friend, Jerzy
Soltan, to buy
some land
adjacent to his.

Fangor has been back in Poland for years (he said he got tired of spending most of his time chopping wood for the winter). Mr UD visited with him not long ago.

Fangor, among others, is featured in a new documentary about Polish poster art. The film’s producer is an art professor at Oregon State.

He looks a little gruff, doesn’t he? He’s enormous — very much over six feet — with a barrel chest and an insanely deep voice and the big rough hands of an outdoorsman who can build anything. But he’s sweet and affectionate and hilarious. He adopted every stray cat in Schoharie County and let them crawl all over him.

… talks about universities.

“Ahmadinejad has taken revenge on the students of Iran during these violent days. The regime’s aim is to damage universities, since they are the first base of change, movement and protest.”

… some of his thoughts about religious tolerance and the state.

Every religion is originally a ‘worldview’ or, in Rawls’s terminology, a ‘comprehensive doctrine,’ also in the sense that it claims the authority to structure a form of life in its entirety. Religion must renounce this claim to structure life in a comprehensive way that also includes the community once the life of religious groups becomes differentiated from that of the larger political community within pluralistic societies. …

For the believer who travels with heavy metaphysical baggage, the good enjoys epistemic primacy over the right. The validity of the ethos on this assumption depends on the truth of the worldview in which it is embedded. The exclusive validity claims of the underlying worldviews are accordingly bound up with different ethical existential orientations and competing forms of life. As soon as one’s conception of the good life is shaped by religious notions of salvation or metaphysical conceptions of the good, a divine perspective (or a ‘view from nowhere’) opens up from which (or where) other ways of life appear not only different but mistaken. When an alien ethos is not merely evaluated in relative terms, but is judged in terms of truth and falsity, the demand to show every citizen equal respect regardless of his ethical self-understanding and his way of life represents an imposition….

[T]he spread of religious tolerance, which we have already identified as a pacemaker for the emergence of democracies, has also become a stimulus and model for the introduction of further cultural rights within constitutional states.

Between Naturalism and Religion

From the obituary in the Tallahassee Democrat:

A devoted Marxist, Hodges was an organizer for the Communist Party and labor organizations as a young man. At FSU, he inspired a cadre of students who formed FSU’s controversial Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter in the late 1960s.

Many were students in a short-lived interdepartmental program Hodges created called social philosophy, which taught “anarchism, Maoism, Trotskyism, anything except capitalism,” said former FSU activist, … Jack Lieberman.

“He was keenly aware what he was doing would not meet the approval of the administration,” said Lieberman, now a Miami businessman. “But it was some of the best studies of my life and I learned a lot.”

Hodges was infamously cantankerous. Before his 2003 retirement, he lived more than 20 years in the Miccosukee Land Co-Op, where “He was not much involved in the community because he was not interested in anyone telling him what to do,” said Mitchell.

Hodges never learned to use a computer, imposing constantly on the philosophy department secretaries. He spent six years as chair of the philosophy department, until colleagues voted him out for spending the department’s entire travel budget on one of his research trips.

… “He could be a pain in the butt, no question about that,” said longtime FSU philosophy professor Russell Dancy.

An article in the Jewish Daily Forward notes many Jewish executives who’ve taken pay cuts in harsh economic times.

But not Joel. He’s rewarding himself for having kept both Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin in positions of power at his university until they were hauled off by the authorities.

Gross negligence of the sort that permanently soils a university doesn’t come cheap.

Read Mark Scroggins’ amusing post about the president of the University of Florida and his Clemson-like approach to the US News and World Report rankings.   The proprietor of the fine blog Culture Industry is a faculty member at Florida Atlantic University.

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Update: BERNIE MACHEN THINKS YOUR SCHOOL SUCKS

Gloomy glamour shot. She took it herself. Leaning into her Mac.