Fazil Say’s the name today, the name Christopher Hitchens, if he were alive, would be invoking. A brilliant pianist who performs around the world, Say’s regular run-ins with Turkey’s increasingly ideologically rigid government have now produced a suspended ten-year sentence. Crime? Writing critically about Islam.
“We are sad for the country,” says his lawyer. Say has shut down his Twitter account. Turkey’s efforts to suppress free speech are working.
An orthodox rabbi named Broyde
Has created an internet droid.
The job of ‘Goldwasser’
Is to kiss Broyde’s asser
So that Broyde may most fully love Broyde.
He’s a professor at Emory law school.
It’s hard to know what to do with university newspaper columns that start in this way. I guess the best thing to do is stop reading.
…. which seems to be going down a stupid-violent-corrupt-university To-Do List.
The Washington metro is jammed with people visiting the cherry trees down the block from UD’s Foggy Bottom office. After class last Tuesday, she asked a cabbie to drive her around them. He said it would take forever – sightseeing traffic was at a standstill.
There are cherry trees everywhere around here, including at the front and back of UD’s house.
Months ago a rainstorm took down a massive cherry at the back of UD’s half-acre wood. Its three branches look very beautiful, very rested, on their sides. Their mottled charcoal barks are spun with old vines.
Some of the tree’s root system must have stayed in the earth, because it’s not dead. Smaller branches have suddenly produced bouquets of yellow-studded white flowers.
So there’s this froth of cherry blossoms at eye level. UD will collect some of it and put it in the biggest vase she can find.
*************************
Done.
… and now geese at the University of Waterloo.
… takes no risks.
Though sometimes this strategy can backfire. As it were.
Surrealistic layering, I guess you’d call it, in this story involving a grad student scheduled to teach a course called Health and Illness who is herself so unwell that rather than meet the class she phoned in bomb threats to empty the building.
You don’t want well-written and well-reasoned letters like this one fucking with your core business.
After doing absolutely everything he could to hold onto his job – lying, blaming his plagiarism on his ghost writer, lying low and hoping it would blow over, smearing a dead man, pompously claiming that quitting would be “desertion” – France’s chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim has been pushed out.
… can be found here, at Inside Higher Education.
James Barseness, an art professor at the University of Georgia, interacted with one of his students in a town in Costa Rica – during a UGA study abroad thingie – and is in the process of losing his job because of it. Sex with students is one thing; sex in public, in front of other students, is another.
“You are charged specifically with engaging in sexual activity with an undergraduate student … under your supervision in a public area during the Costa Rica 2012 Maymester study abroad program held on the UGA Costa Rica campus. This sexual encounter was witnessed by students and caused substantial disruption in the program,” Mick wrote in a February letter to Barsness. “You later told (the student) that she should not tell anyone about the sexual encounter and you were going to deny that it occurred so that you would not lose your job.”
The frustration is all too evident in this editorial, written by the head of Youngstown State’s student government. Recent statements by the associate director of athletics about where and how athletic money is spent anger him. Scholarship money doesn’t come out of ticket sales, as the associate director implies; it comes from students:
All of the scholarship money is paid for out of the $810 per student (roughly 10 percent of overall tuition) that goes from our tuition through the general fund to athletics.
The associate director also talks as if the budget is in good enough shape to fund capital projects, etc. The SGA president notes:
Athletics brings in $2.9 million in revenue and spends $11.96 million, resulting in a deficit of more than $9 million.
Youngstown State athletics boasts a 300 percent deficit.
No, YSU athletics isn’t dramatically awful, like Rutgers. It’s just typically cheesy.