The number of times I have heard Saudi women here, who are conditioned to believe that covering is an unquestionable issue, sigh as they watch uncovered women on TV and say لهم الدنبا ولنا الأخرة (they get the world and we get the afterlife).

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

Kill the whore!

… she was in the last cohort of tourists to see the actual Lascaux caves. Her family was on its way to England, where her father had a fellowship at London’s National Institute for Medical Research, and among the places they visited were the caves full of paleolithic drawings of animals (and a few people).

The press of people wanting to see the caves began destroying the paintings, so in 1963 the original caves were closed to the public, and a series of nearby replicas were created. The latest replica, just opened, is the biggest and the best.

In the aftermath of Merkel’s call for a German burqa ban, it was inevitable that someone would write the following:

Such actions toward a religious group are not new for Germany, and one might believe that lessons learned long ago would be transferable to new times and circumstances.

Put aside the pissy prissy style in which the writer, more in sorrow than in anger, instructs Germans not to be Nazis again; think rather of the world of fascist burqa-banning states the writer conjures up, those other notorious Nazi regimes – Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, France, Switzerland – that have passed partial or full bans.

UD also finds remarkable the writer’s claim that since some women have been kept masked and swaddled all their lives, it would be an unkindness to unwrap them:

It is simply what they have been taught that decent women should do in public. It has been the practice of all the women they know for as long as they have been alive. For these women banning the veil has several possible effects. At best it makes them profoundly uncomfortable when they are forced into the public realm. It would be like passing a law that says I can’t wear a shirt in public. I don’t have a religious rational for shirt wearing, but having always worn shirts I’m quite uncomfortable with making my body an object for public viewing and quite possibly public judgment… It is difficult if not impossible to change a lifetime of learning reinforced through practice. Even if these women changed their minds, changing the emotional response to their own behavior would be nearly impossible. And frankly no one is trying to change their minds. The result for these women will simply be to drive them indoors, to keep them from going out in public.

Let’s unpack this, shall we? Note that the writer has suddenly decided he’s not talking about veiling the face – and this whole argument is about face, not body, veiling – so that really just as he gets to wear a shirt, they get to wear burqas, see?

And anyway, once you’ve been raised inside a cloth cage, you get comfortable with that and you find you don’t want to be uncaged. Again we’re treated to the writer’s pissy condescension:

It is difficult if not impossible to change a lifetime of learning reinforced through practice.

I don’t know… The Germans managed to de-nazify, didn’t they? … But wait! Maybe not…

One begins to discern a philosophy of life here, ja?

And here’s the kicker.

Even if these women changed their minds, changing the emotional response to their own behavior would be nearly impossible. And frankly no one is trying to change their minds.

Again, it’s “nearly impossible” for people to change so fuck it. And anyway… What does the writer mean when he writes that frankly no one is trying to change their minds?

Well, let’s see. We could take this frank admission of the frank truth a couple of ways.

1. These women live in Salafist environments and that’s just the way it is and that ain’t gonna change so leave them alone. You can’t change Nazis and you can’t change Salafists. Taking off their burqa would simply make these women hypocrites.

2. These women don’t live in democracies where everyone every day – from the baker on the corner to their children’s teachers to lawmakers – is in fact in various overt and covert ways trying to change their minds. Where the very legislation at issue is about trying to change their minds. No, no. Democracies do nothing to establish, protect and affirm themselves; they do nothing to teach the values of democracy to their citizens. Frankly no one’s trying with these women – and with the men who in many cases are the real problem here – so let it be.

Faced with a famous, high-level plagiarist/physicist, a person the government just put at the head of an important scientific panel, France’s education minister has opened an inquiry into the curious cuttings and pastings of Etienne Klein.

We will see if UD is correct in identifying the source of Klein’s problem. UD suspects he hires people to write his books for him, but fails to read what they write before he puts his name on it.

If UD has said it once, she’s said it a hundred times: Keep an eye on the help.

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

That panel he’ll be heading?

… the mission of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology (IHEST) … is to restore trust between scientists and society.

When Baylor first hired Art Briles
The prez and trustees were all smiles.
But there’s just no escapin’
A teamful of rapin’–
Get ready, get set, for the trials.

**********

And remember, kiddies: Baylor’s already paying Briles six million dollars or so a year to go away.

Truly, truly a blessing.

***********

Baylor University: Toxic Christianity.

While a lawsuit was almost certainly expected, if Briles thinks people at Baylor conspiring against him is why he doesn’t have another job, he’s clinically insane. Anyone associated with Baylor, its athletic department and its football team is toxic right now. Briles wouldn’t be considered for any jobs at any level even if he was carry a sack full of recommendations from Baylor’s administration.

After Briles gave an incredibly weak apology for the out-of-control program he ran at Baylor, did anyone think he would be getting a job any time soon? The guy just doesn’t seem to understand the havoc players wreaked under his watch and just how awful the culture he promoted was.

If Briles was smart, he’d have laid low for a few years, then mounted a comeback with some very serious apologies. Instead he’s out there suing his former employer and acting like he did nothing wrong.

… restaurant in Dublin where her office
Christmas party is happening right now.

The same Picasso reproduction hangs in
our Garrett Park house. It’s one of
our many homages to Munro Leaf, author of
Ferdinand the Bull, who lived here
before we did.

Famous French popularizer of science Étienne Klein is apparently a serial plagiarist. Like Cary Grant in that movie, he is a very classy thief, his pinches revealing un homme très cultivé – Zweig, Zola, Bachelard… AND… UD is thrilled to add… Klein steals from an old friend of the Soltan family! Roman Jakobson was a Harvard colleague and Cambridge neighbor of Jerzy Soltan’s. Even after death the two men remain neighbors – their graves lie a few feet away from each other in Mount Auburn Cemetery. And even after death (especially after death – all career plagiarists know it’s better to steal paragraphs from people not in a position to complain) Jakobson is making himself useful…

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

Recalling UD‘s typology of plagiarists, Klein is clearly an Atelier, done in, I’m going to guess, by one of the many little people he hires to write his books for him.

There are enough overt racists among the students at Texas A&M to make the appearance of white nationalists there not that scandalous, not that surprising.

“When I heard about the Aggie European Alliance, I was disgusted; however, I was not surprised,” said graduate student Lia Epps.

Wonder why not.

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

The school has responded strongly (counter-demonstrations) to this guy’s appearance, but there’s no denying that, if you’re an American fascist trolling for recruits, making Texas A&M – rather than, say, Hampshire College – the first stop on your speaking tour is a good career move. Texas A&M specializes in worshipping naughty naughty naughty white boys.

Angela Merkel joins the chorus.

UD is thankful for her strong statement. We’re getting there.

And by the way. The full veil is not appropriate anywhere.

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

You can watch the reaction she got here.

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

But Burhan Kesici, the general secretary of Germany’s Islamic Council, criticised Merkel’s comments. “The government should carefully study similar moves in France, and ask themselves if one side-effect of such a ban is that it can actually lead to women feeling more excluded from society,” he said.

Wirklich? More excluded than if they walk around completely covered in a black sack – down to their fingertips? Their mouths covered by cloth for enforced silence and difficulty breathing? Vitamin D deficiency for them and their babies because no sunlight?

If this describes, for you, any sort of “society” at all, let me know.

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

A voice from the left.

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

This symbol would divide humanity between those of glorious body, graced with no less glorious a face, and those whose bodies and faces are an outrage in the flesh, a scandal, a filthy thing not to be seen but hidden or neutralized.

A classic take-down of the pro-slavery position.

Comme vous le savez trop bien, ma gentille, UD does not bother reporting plagiarism stories unless they are really really big. Plagiarism is boringly internationally endemic, and now that everyone’s got detection software it’s all too much of a muchness. But Redscar McOdindo, a Kenyan poet still in his twenties, makes the cut.

And paste. The man has been raiding ladies’ panties all over the world (he steals women’s poems about things like female genital mutilation, and basks in the praise of poetry judges who marvel at his ability to write with intimate sensitivity to the other gender’s point of view), and he’s been doing it for years.

As is common in these stories, no one in the international poetry establishment suspected a thing as McOdindo collected one award after another. A sharp-eyed reader of one of his victims exposed him, at which he immediately shut down his blog and disappeared from the face of the earth.

Today we drop in on Oregon State University, which just last year was crowing about its football attendance numbers being way high, and now this year is keening over its ticket sales being way low.

Truth and illusion – who knows the difference? Eh, Toots? as George says… And anyway… the money people “expect OSU athletics to be operating in the black within the next three fiscal years,” so just you hold on to your hat! We’re gonna be tearing up the pea patch in no time don’t you worry and meanwhile we’ll just pinch this here eight million dollars to tide us over…

In 2007, [Humboldt State University] switched the Athletics Department’s primary funding source from the state General Fund to revenue collected by the student Instructionally Related Activities fees, which are currently the highest in the California State University system, according to Strategic Edge. HSU’s student fees have increased from $278 per semester per student in 2010 to the current $337 per semester rate, according to the university. [AD Tom] Trepiak said raising the fees any higher is not an option.

The funding model switch was made to free up funds for more academic purposes, according to a 2007 university memorandum of understanding.

But Trepiak argues that athletics are a form of academia.

“The job of a coach is to teach a student athlete how to do their sport, so part of that is a perception thing with people looking at it with their own special interest rather than the big picture,” he said.

In the wake of the most recent killing of a professor by a graduate student, one thing’s clear: Universities need to work harder to publicize their protocol for reporting troubled and troubling people on campus.

UD assumes no one contacted the University of Southern California’s counseling office about the graduate student who yesterday stabbed his faculty mentor to death. If someone did, we’ll find out about it; but it looks as though no one did, despite worries about his stability.

Of course reporting him would not necessarily have kept the attack from happening; but he would have had some monitoring. Maybe his mentor would have been alerted.

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

You might argue that universities are uniquely bad places for the identification of unbalanced people.

There are simple logistical reasons for this. Unlike offices, universities are loosely run, with people on leave, seeing each other one day a week, finished with coursework but still sort of around, etc. It’s hard to perceive patterns or evolutions of behavior.

More deeply, universities are committed to the tolerance – even the championing of – freedom and non-conformity. You get zero intellectual culture in, say, Saudi Arabia – in repressive, conformist, strictly doctrinal, universal-surveillance societies. You get America’s spectacular system of universities when you offer exactly the opposite: individual freedom, radical self-fashioning, secularism, and privacy. Universities are hands-off zones, and indeed to the extent that they’re intrusive it’s often intrusion in the name of further hands-offism: seminars in the practice of tolerance, for instance.

But the problem goes beyond this. The combination of the valorization of eccentricity with a fierce commitment to personal privacy may mean that you think you’re respecting someone’s autonomy, and someone’s right to be different, when in fact you’re overlooking pathology.

And wait. The problem goes beyond even this. Years ago, UD got to know a fellow participant in a summer seminar for professors well enough to worry about her mental health. She said disturbing – self-destructive, delusional – things to UD, and UD was worried and didn’t know what to do. Eventually, with great delicacy and in the most tentative language, UD said something to one of the seminar’s organizers. The organizer fixed UD with a nasty look and said “Oh. Aren’t you healthy. I suppose you think you’re so healthy…”

“Uh, no,” UD replied, taken aback. “I don’t think I’m so healthy. I just worry B. is having difficulties.”

“Ugh.”

That was the end of the conversation. That was the end of the smackdown. And that was the beginning of UD deciding she’d better keep her trap shut on the matter of people at universities who seem troubled. UD vividly recalls not enjoying being made to feel like an East German Stasi agent by the seminar organizer. Being made to feel like a prison guard in the land of Michel Foucault’s panopticon. How dare I direct my smug hegemonic gaze anywhere other than at my own fucked up self …

So all I’m doing here is drilling down to what I take to be some of the underlying difficulties with identifying and reporting troubled people at universities. I fully acknowledge the vexed problem of distinguishing between fruitful, exemplary, odd, against the grain, selfhood, and mental problems. But I also think one should acknowledge the specific ways in which the university setting makes acting on your suspicions about someone’s mental health peculiarly daunting.

Michelle Herren used to be on the University of Colorado faculty, but the school seems to have decided to let her go.

UD kinda understands why, because Herren called Michelle Obama a ‘monkey-face’ and put it all over the web. Then when the university dumped her and also I guess when she started getting some… unfriendly feedback, she

… explained that her comments were taken out of context. [Also] she claimed that she had no knowledge that the phrase “monkey face” was an offensive term.

UD has explained endlessly on this blog how this happens so often at university medical schools. Universities have immense numbers of people vaguely affiliated with their medical faculties, and these people are rarely vetted in the ways other professors are vetted. They just show up with a white coat and start teaching. When you take many people on and do very little vetting, you can expect a few morons to slip through.

A Sydney woman “refused to take off her burqa in court to give evidence in a civil case, where she is suing the police over a terrorism raid at her house.” (As a result of that raid, her old man’s in jail.)

BALLA: Are you proposing that she would have her face covered while she’s giving evidence and being cross-examined?

LAWYER FOR THE WOMAN BRINGING THE SUIT: I’m afraid so. Yes. It’s not very satisfactory, your Honour, but it’s something we have to live [with].

BALLA: It’s not something I have to live [with].

Indeed, the judge has ruled that the woman cannot give evidence wearing the burqa (several accommodations were offered to the woman; she refused them all).