… begin.”

Various Israeli newspapers are reporting significant movement toward reforming the country’s shameful system of subsidized yeshivas for the married ultra-orthodox.

Ha-aretz:

It took the High Court of Justice a decade, since the original petition was submitted, to rule against the distribution of welfare payments to married men studying at yeshivas.

… [T]he court ruled that awarding stipends to yeshiva students but not to students at nonreligious institutions of higher education is illegal and unconstitutional.

… The ruling came about two months after a Knesset subcommittee was shown the results of an official survey indicating that about one third of the yeshiva students who applied for welfare lied about their income in order to qualify.

The implication is that Haredi cabinet ministers and MKs are about to fight for a line item that costs NIS 135 million a year – NIS 45 million of which, allegedly, is allocated fraudulently.

Not only is much of this state money awarded fraudulently; the people it goes to refuse to provide, for themselves or their children, even the sort of basic education that would make them employable.

The High Court of Justice was presented with a petition Sunday demanding that it order the Knesset and the Education Ministry to explain why ultra-Orthodox schools are not being forced to teach basic subjects, such as Mathematics and English.

… Tens of thousands of students are being deprived of knowledge, tools, and “basic training necessary for the fulfillment of human autonomy, the ability to make an honest living, and the ability to incorporate themselves in Israeli society as active, contributing, and equal citizens,” the petitioners say.

They add that the law harms the legal rights of students attending the small yeshivas, and that it “perpetuates their economic dependence on the community and welfare payments from the state”.

No democratic state, they conclude, agrees to fund a school system devoid of governmental inspection.

A writer for YNET expands on that last point:

There is no other country in the world – not even one! – where the government funds private education. There is no other country in the world where Education Ministry representatives are not allowed to enter a school whose bills they pay (and fully so – 100% of the bills.) There is no other country in the world where teachers refuse to present their curriculum to the body that pays their salary.

He describes the children of an ultra-orthodox friend:

They can’t talk about computers, literature, geography, history, or even the Bible. Yeshivas barely teach any Bible, only Talmud.

He notes that the state’s willingness to pay all expenses for private yeshivas has meant that the national education system has been starved:

[I]n the past eight years we’ve seen a 24% decline in the number of students in teacher colleges in the national education system. People don’t want to be teachers in our sector; not with the current salaries. Why are the salaries so low? Because in those same eight years, the number of teaching cadets in your sector leapt by 111% – and all of this comes from the same budget.

Meanwhile, university students work (many haredim do not), serve in the army (ditto), and struggle to pay tuition. It’s such a grotesque disparity that one wonders why it took a decade for the Israeli court to notice its illegality and unconstitutionality.

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

Update: The Jerusalem Post provides historical background. It concludes:

The haredi leadership can no longer justify devoting all of its energies to the singular endeavor of preserving tradition and insulating its flock from “evil” outside influences. It must now rise to new challenges. First and foremost among these is ensuring that while an elite few continue to carry the torch of tradition, others receive the skills needed to integrate into a dynamic labor market.

[Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n Roll] starts in a Cambridge garden in 1968 with a piper playing the Syd Barrett song, Golden Hair.

Barrett, the Pink Floyd writer and singer, appears now and then in the play, a figure for the seductive, subversive glory of art…

Golden Hair. It’s Barrett’s song, but it’s James Joyce’s poem.

The charismatic rock star undone by drugs (In Stoppard’s play, we see him in his mother’s Cambridge garden. Barrett retreated there, mentally broken, in the mid-seventies, and stayed until his death not long ago, at the age of sixty.) took the James Joyce poem, Golden Hair, from Joyce’s 1904 collection Chamber Music, and in 1969 set it to stark guitar, stark voice, cymbals, and a low drone.

Here are Joyce’s words.

Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.

Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair.

Barrett changes the words in the first stanza a little:

Lean out your window
Golden-hair
I heard you singing
In the midnight air.

Barrett makes of this poem (which, in its pull toward the passion of art and away from the chill anxiety of intellect, has much in common with the Yeats poem about Fergus that echoes through Ulysses) a very private chant. His notes go nowhere; he ventures only one or two changes. His song is musing, minimalist, hesitant, circular, self-absorbed, even though the poem’s content is clearly celebratory, the speaker energized by the fire of the woman’s singing to throw away his book, leave his room, and beg her to lean from her window, so he can see her.

Barrett isn’t going to the woman. He isn’t going anywhere. He even brings his voice down, decisively, in the last line, as if to close out any possibility of release from his trance.

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

With Bloomsday coming up, UD ponders not only the generativity of art, the way Joyce’s work sings through the work of Syd Barrett, Samuel Barber, Kate Bush, John Cage, Jefferson Airplane, and many others (to note only his musical influence), but also the suffering of the artist, the suffering out of which art emerges. Stephen Dedalus, on June 16, 1904, is going the way of Barrett, after all, drinking himself to an early grave if he doesn’t watch out… Like Barrett, he’s acting outrageously, self-destructively, getting into fights…

And certainly part of what our hero Bloom attempts to convey to Stephen is how deadly intellect, understood as a kind of arrogant self-absorption, can be to the creation of art. Art’s passion is a human passion, and Dedalus isn’t human enough yet. Hasn’t loved. Holds himself aloof from humanity. Bloom humanizes Stephen by embodying for him the capacity for selfless love. Bloom barely knows Stephen, but intuits, as a compassionate and perceptive human being, the depth of his suffering. He follows him around late at night in Dublin, worried that Stephen will get into trouble.

Stephen duly gets into trouble, and Bloom gets him out of it, takes him to his home, gives him hot chocolate, talks to him late into the night, escorts him out of the house (Stephen politely declines Bloom’s invitation to stay the night), and watches with him, from the yard, the quiet spectacular starry sky. This night sky watching produces one of the most famous lines from Ulysses:

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

The line incorporates much of what one loves in Joyce’s prose: Neologisms (Nightblue is a kind of partner to skyblue; and, no, night isn’t black, or it’s not always black. Night and day aren’t always all that different; in Key West, I was amazed at how white clouds appeared in the sky late into the evening…Heaventree is heavenly. We might also hear lemontree. ). Assonance (humid nightblue fruit). Metaphor (The constellations make trees; each star is a fruit on the tree). Alliteration (heaventree, hung, humid.)

More deeply, there’s something exhilarating about the implicit humanizing, naturalizing, worlding, call it what you will, of the entire universe in this sentence. The distant, enigmatic, intimidating stars which make us feel small and transient are in this sentence gathered into our earth, made an extension of our trees and forest, our earthly garden. There’s a sort of heady insolence about this Romantic gesture, this pulling of the heavens down to earth, this re-sizing of the cosmos to fit us. This is Walt Whitman, claiming the universe, embracing all in his human arms.

More than anything, perhaps, we love the way this famous line seems ineffably balanced, as the stars seem balanced on the heaventree; somehow in the very composition of the sentence, in its smooth stately self-control, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

But of course this is the power of the artist, the power of art, that we’re registering. To be lifted up by a perfect phrase or sentence is to hear the piper in the Cambridge garden and follow him. It is to hear the woman singing through the gloom and follow her.

Barrett and Dedalus — and Bucky Wunderlick, the rock star in Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street (a character in part inspired by Barrett) — these people, these fictions, draw our attention not so much to our own experience of aesthetic rapture, as to the cost to the artist of aesthetic creation.

The University of Waterloo football team has been suspended for the entire 2010 season following the revelation that nine of the 62 players on the roster have committed doping offences. The coaching staff has been placed on paid administrative leave.

… “We have a total of nine possible anti-doping violations. Two violations have been confirmed to date and the sanctions have been accepted. We are in the results management process as it relates to the other other seven potential violations,” [said one official].

… Waterloo athletic director Bob Copeland decided to test the entire team following the arrest of a member of the team, Nathan Zettler, for possession and trafficking of anabolic steroids.

During the news conference Copeland defended the university’s decision to suspend the entire team…

National Post

Slovak voters have dumped their government, prompting one nationalist firebrand to warn that the country would now be run by “homosexuals and Hungarians.”

Usually students miss more lectures than their professors, but in week five of the spring 2010 term, Eric Hudson, popular instructor of 8.02: Electricity & Magnetism, would have given chronic class-skippers competition.

“I think I’ve been gone five of the last seven weeks or something,” he said with a light chuckle, seeming awed at that fraction himself. “It’s really been terrible,” he said.

Hudson found out this past December that he did not receive tenure. In those weeks away from MIT, he had been in England, Sweden, and the country of Georgia interviewing for a new post as professor…

This is sort of one of those Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? statements. It comes from a University of Florida official responding to a scathing state audit of the university’s handling of federal grant spending.

The arrest of nuclear engineering professor Samim Anghaie and his wife, Sousan, in October on federal fraud charges resulted in an internal UF audit that is also part of the report.

The couple face a July 6 trial in federal court in Gainesville on charges they fraudulently obtained $3.7 million in government contracts and diverted money into personal bank accounts to buy cars and homes. The audit found internal controls failed to prevent nearly $58,000 in inappropriate salary costs from being charged to two federal projects.

In another case, an audit found $890 in moving expenses for an employee who relocated to Gainesville from Georgia were improperly charged to a federal project.

Okay, Anghaie, and his wife, and the relocating employee aside, there’s absolutely nothing to see here.

Feminists in Canada defend the right of a person testifying in a trial to hide her face behind a niqab; Muslims in Canada oppose the feminists.

A precedent-setting case that could determine whether a woman can wear a niqab while testifying in Canadian courts has a leading feminist group and a national Muslim organization on opposite sides of the contentious debate. But their respective positions, outlined in written arguments filed with the Ontario Court of Appeal, may come as a surprise.

The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) is arguing that an alleged victim of sexual assault must be permitted to wear the Muslim veil if it is part of her religion.

… Requiring a Muslim woman to remove her veil while testifying “could very well be seen and experienced as an act of racial, religious and gendered domination,” [said LEAF].

Before we hear what the Muslim organization has to say, let’s stop there for a moment. Listen to what LEAF is saying. Asking a woman to show her face, even for a few minutes while testifying in a trial, is a form of domination over her.

In contrast, the Muslim Canadian Congress maintains that religious freedoms are not absolute and must be balanced against the long-standing right of a criminal defendant to see his accuser in court and assess demeanour. As well, the Muslim group argues that … “The covered female face is a reminder to the wearer that she is not free and to the observer that she is a possession…”

The founder of the organization, Tarek Fatah, said yesterday that it is not trying to make it more difficult for Muslim women to testify in sexual assault cases. “They should be treated like any other woman and receive the same protections,” he said. (The Criminal Code provides for witnesses to testify by closed circuit television or behind a screen where they can be seen, but they cannot see the accused).

… LEAF counters that fair trial rights are being used as an excuse to justify stereotypes. “In the current political climate of fear and distrust of veiled Muslim women, courts and juries need to be alert to existing prejudices that a Muslim woman who covers her face cannot be believed,” writes [a lawyer representing] LEAF.

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

UPDATE: Doublespeak.

According to written arguments filed by one of her lawyers, she is on par with female heroes of the civil rights movement: “Henrietta Muir Edwards just wanted to sit in the [Canadian] Senate. Rosa Parks just wanted to sit at the front [of the bus]. N.S. just wants to sit in the witness box wearing her niqab.”

Comparing N.S. to Ms. Edwards, Ms. Parks or any women who fought for sexual or racial equality takes us to heights of doublespeak. These women struggled to escape the shackles of discriminatory laws that kept them out of their chosen professions, restricted their ability to vote, forbade them from owning property, or banned them from even drinking at the same water fountain. Now, a woman who wants to cover herself from head to toe in a manner that excludes her from the mainstream of society is striking a blow for women’s equality?

Worse yet is the logic employed by the feminist legal advocates LEAF (the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund), which is intervening in this matter in support of N.S. Because she is Muslim, they question the entire value of her “demeanour evidence” (the usual in-person testimony which allows the court to judge a witness’s body language and facial expressions). LEAF submitted that “In this case, the sexual assault complainant is a woman of colour from a stigmatized racial/religious minority. The value of her demeanour evidence, already deeply suspect as a sexual assault complainant, is thrown into further question by the inevitable influence of prejudices (whether overt or hidden) relating to these additional markers of discrimination.”

By this logic, why should any woman have to testify in person in a rape case, particularly if she isn’t white or Christian? Why not put all women in a niqab so that their demeanour won’t be held against them in court?

Tasha Kheiriddin
National Post

[The] Big Ten Commissioner [says] that academics are a top priority [in the upcoming expansion of various university athletic leagues].

“Of course they’re going to say that,” Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist said of the Big Ten’s repeated emphasis on academics. “What are they going to say? ‘We’re going to prostitute ourselves?’ ”

If the Big Ten truly valued academics, it would not [add] Nebraska, Zimbalist said. He notes the school’s academics aren’t on par with those of Michigan, Illinois and other Big Ten schools.

“What’s happened over the decades, more so in the last two, commercial value has trumped academic value, and that’s decidedly wrong,” he said.

Yet in a slumping economy, it stands to reason that schools are looking to improve their bottom lines.

“It’s understandable there are certain financial pressures and they’re trying to sustain themselves,” Zimbalist said. “It doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do to subject yourself to the needs of TV and media.”…

… is the title of my latest Inside Higher Education post. It’s here.

Two male Edinburgh University students have been found dead in a Scottish hotel, in a laptop suicide pact.

UD doesn’t understand how you set up a laptop to inject drugs for you.

[They] used a laptop to deliver lethal overdoses – and may have broadcast their final moments using a webcam.

Police are probing the possibility that the harrowing footage of their deaths may have been aired over the internet.

Last night, a source said: “It looks like this was meticulously planned.

“The room was tidy and they seemed to have set up a laptop so they didn’t have to inject the drugs directly – they appear to have had a reasonable level of medical knowledge and skill.

“It also looked as if they had set up a camera to film what was happening…”

Debra Moriarity, the courageous University of Alabama Huntsville professor who confronted Amy Bishop as she tried to kill everyone in the room, will replace the murdered chair of the biology department.

This year, she’s reading parts of the Sirens chapter from Ulysses — the one that begins with hoofirons and ends with farts.

The reading is open to the public and jointly sponsored by the Harvard Club of Washington and American Independent Writers. Details here.

Sirens is the most musical chapter of the novel — and the novel is full of music. Little bits of two songs are featured in UD‘s reading. The songs are:

Martha (In English.)

This version of The Croppy Boy

She will try to sing them, as Simon Dedalus and then Ben Dollard sang them.

Here’s the Washington Post announcement of the event.

Bloomsday, New York City.

Those pesky night games, during which wasted tailgaters turn the campus into a reeking dump, will go on. After all:

Athletics director Damon Evans said Wednesday that he hoped to find a healthy balance between the early kickoffs and the games under the lights …but said television contracts with CBS and ESPN would ultimately outweigh many of the school’s desires.

A new crackdown on even minor alterations of the hijab is taking place in Iran. Guards are appearing at the gates of universities. They turn away insufficiently hidden women.

“I believe Hijab is an invisible political tool for the stagnant, patriarchal politics… a view that gives priority to woman’s sexuality over her other human dimensions,” [a student said] in a telephone interview from Tehran.

“Undoubtedly, the totalitarian system’s patronising way of thinking encourages people to deny their bodies, wear unkempt clothes, and gravitate toward sadness, and it has no room for human health and development. This thinking cannot be effective in reducing abnormal behaviour in the society,” she said.