Nick Cohen, in the Spectator, is as shocked and embarrassed as the rest of us that leaders at British universities have officially condoned separate but equal.
Universities UK is taking a momentous step, which goes against 150 years of struggle for women’s emancipation… They want to allow segregation at public meetings in publicly financed institutions. Or to put it another way, obscurantist clerics are trying to take over public spaces, and the universities are going along with them… . Rosa Parks … fought back. Naively, I assumed that her battle had been won. Now it looks like we must fight it all over again.
And once again let UD note that the very momentousness of this step, its outrageous offense to universities and to free societies, seems to have been a healthy shock to many people’s systems.
Just a little icing on the cake for the chair of African and Afro-American Studies at once-respectable University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. $12,000 for teaching a summer course that didn’t exist … A summer course for UNC athletes …
UD likes the way the campus paper puts it:
… Julius Nyang’oro has been indicted by a grand jury after a year-and-a-half-long State Bureau of Investigation probe found that he allegedly received $12,000 for teaching a class he never taught.
Yes, someone’s finally gotten around to indicting the guy for teaching a class he never taught. What can Chapel Hill say? The latest chancellor (last one resigned in disgrace) insists everything’s hunky-dory now and they’re back to being a real live university, but it sort of goes beyond embarrassing when a highly compensated chair of a high-profile department might go to jail for obtaining property by false pretenses.
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This article lists all the current sports scandals at clown-school UNC.
Clown-school seem a little over the top? The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill offered “more than 200 confirmed or suspected no-show classes going as far back as the mid-1990s, plus more than 500 grade changes that are either confirmed or suspected to be unauthorized.”
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Put Nyang’oro in my search engine for a walk down memory lane.
The petition to rescind the endorsement of sexual apartheid at British universities is already at seven thousand signatures.
Don’t let the vice-chancellors who issued the endorsement get away with the segregation of women at their universities.
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On some level, this action is so grotesque that UD continues to have trouble believing that it has happened.
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But it has happened. Aux armes.
$350 an hour for copying a clutch of Wikipedia pages: While his students go into debt and fail to get jobs, a Georgetown law professor shows everyone exactly how postmodern simulacral culture works. He gets an expert witness for the prosecution gig and lifts much of his expert report from the web. Look Ma – No hands! And I’m getting $350 an hour at the same time! Are you proud of me?
But now he’s gone and fucked up the case.
“[James] Feinerman’s pervasive plagiarism from this unreliable and error-prone source, which has been rejected by federal courts all over the country, casts serious doubt on the reliability of his entire testimony,” … said [a defense lawyer] in a court filing.
Now you know what Feinerman’s gonna say when he’s finally forced to say something. You know because for years you’ve been reading this blog on the subject of the atelier crowd, right? Feinerman’s gonna blame it on the people he hired to write his expert report for him.
Really, really look Ma no hands.
This sentence could come from a contemporary American commentary on the Kaplanization of our once-great universities; or it could come from a contemporary American commentary on the NFLization of our once-great universities.
This particular sentence happens to be about the sporty arm of the pincer movement; and coming as it does from Texas, of all places, it tells you something. It tells you something about why immense new Adzillatronned university football and basketball stadiums are full of gaping holes during even the biggest games… Why a growing branch of the digital and design industries is now devoted to making an empty silence look like a crowded blow-out on network tv…
The author of this commentary is telling you why people are leaving the American university stadium, but you don’t want to listen because you know that the problems are too basic to fix.
If college football is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the A&M – LSU game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.
… It’s hard to say what should happen with college football. Paying the players would certainly be fairer, but it would finish off whatever remains of an institution that once meant far more than money. The arcane rules put in place to protect college athletics from market forces have spawned a densely complex culture of cheating, a tradition almost as old as the sport. How long can Universities, bastions of enlightened rational values, continue this charade? What toll is it taking on the wider goals of those institutions?
College football may be a necessary casualty of a freer, more prosperous world. We are all likely to cling to the remains at least a little while longer. Maybe someday (next year?), when the Longhorns’ helmets are sporting a giant BestBuy logo and the program is playing two additional highly-paid exhibition games each year against the likes of Abilene Christian and the fighting Javelinas of A&M Kingsville we’ll finally have to give it up.
Try his first paragraph this way:
If a college education is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.
Except that in the Kaplanization case, it’s not just emotional energy that’s lacking when the professor is a coached happy face on a jiggly screen full of funny little games. It’s also of course intellectual energy.
Stadium seats will go the same way as classroom seats: Eventually all university activity will jiggle on-screen. Imagine the University of Phoenix with a sports channel.
… “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever.”
The petition condemning sanctioned gender apartheid in British universities is here.
— the Marshall University football team manages to do it all: It gives an already intellectually-challenged state the gift of a high-profile jock-schlock university; it keeps the school barefoot and poor by extorting immense athletic fees from students; it refuses to allow anyone to examine its finances; and – of course – goes without saying – its team is in and out of jail.
UD likes the delicacy of this lede about the latest detainee:
An off-field incident has cast a bit of a pall over Marshall’s clinching of its first-ever Conference USA division title.
Oh teehee yes to be sure there was a wee incident wasn’t there? What was it… Oh yes one of our running backs beat the shit out of his girlfriend, burst a wine bottle on his bathroom floor with such force it broke the tiles, and then obstructed the police, didn’t he? My goodness. His second arrest in seven months. Dear me. But think of all the pressure he was under for the division title game! Ever heard of blowing off steam?
He’ll be back on the team in no time.
It’s deja vu all over again for NIU as police arrest a freshman storing in his dorm room the same make of weapon another student used five years ago to kill several students during a geology class.
Ah, the Glock, the Glock, gun of choice for campus paranoids…
Not that this guy only kept a Glock. Try body armor and an AR-15 rifle. A freshman can’t be too careful these days.
The petition calling for the rescinding of a Universities UK document permitting sex segregation in British universities is heating up the airwaves, having in only a couple of days attracted almost seven thousand signatures.
Manfredi La Manna, an economist at the University of St Andrews, writes to the vice-chancellors of Scottish universities:
[M]ake a stand for Scottish universities and state unequivocally that the abhorrent guidance on external speakers issued recently by [UK Universities] does not apply to Scottish
universities.
The document mandates any British university to accede unconditionally to the conditions imposed by any external speaker who demands a gender segregated audience.
Indeed, in the Orwellian newspeak language of the UUK document, it is the “imposition” of an “unsegregated” area contravening the “genuinely held religious belief” of the speaker demanding segregation that British universities should oppose so that the “freedom of speech of the religious group or speaker is not curtailed unlawfully”.
Do you really want your female students to be treated as sex
objects and second-class citizens and to be marshalled into special female-only pens so that the
“genuinely held religious belief” of external speakers is not
challenged? Would you have
acceded to the demand for race segregated audiences by the Dutch Reformed Church (before it apologised for its role in propping up apartheid)?
La Manna is quite right to note the Orwellian newspeak by which, as women are herded into pens, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
After pointing out that the document is “horrible,” “wretched,” and “stupid,” Charles Crawford goes on to sketch a non-disgraceful policy.
[For] an open event no segregation along gender or other lines is acceptable…
As with all grotesque illiberal eruptions, the UUK document is in fact bolstering freedom of speech by mobilizing people against its vileness. Sometimes people need to be reminded of the democratic basics. Fools like the authors of this document provide reminders.
They lionize him at Brown (well, they lionize always-in-trouble-with-the-law trustee Steven Cohen at Brown too) (and… well…); they made him captain of the football team. A golden boy, an Aryan from Darien, Christian Garnett’s just one more big ol’ adorable football playing SUV driving violent drunk… The sort rife at our universities, and what a blessing to these settings of meditation and reason.
Having finished with Brown, Christian now plies his trade among high school football players, modeling for them the whole big car/big man/big thirst/big swing thing. It’s unusual, however, for these guys to beat up female police officers. That’s Christian’s own variation on the theme.
It all started [with] him driving his Jeep down Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk … A police officer, Michelle McSally, noticed that he was driving at a high rate and it seemed as though one of his tires were missing. She then spotted the tire on the side of the road. As she went over to the car, she noticed he was trying to conceal something in the back. Turns out he was hiding his drug [paraphernalia]. At this point, you would think you would just give up and go with the flow. After all, you’re screwed. Not our boy Christian. He told the officer that he knew his tire was gone, he was going to get it filled with air at the nearby gas station- (How do you fill up a tire that’s not connected to your car?) His bloodshot eyes and slurred speech alerted the officer to call for back up. After he failed the first two field sobriety tests, he told the officers he couldn’t perform the third… standing on one leg.
… When [an] officer… tried to cuff him, he used his 6’2”, 240 pound frame to kick her and resist arrest. As he continued to swing his arms around like a lunatic, another officer gave him a nice, quick two blows to the face … [Unable to subdue Garnett, police Tasered him – they had to do it twice.] [He] was so unruly at the hospital that they had to handcuff him to the bed. He tried to kick a camera out of [the hand of an officer] … documenting the injuries. He slightly calmed down after a doctor threatened to give him sedatives to chill him out. It was at this point that he turned his anger to the nurses- The male nurses. Whenever one would walk by he would yell out “You must be a real Tommy tough nuts”.
Is there any moment at which the University of Nebraska takes its hagiography of Richie Incognito off the web? Might Brown replace the photo of Garnett that accompanies its awed online account of him with his more recent police issued one?
The guy the University of Illinois chose for – among other things – outreach to high school student prospects “was convicted of battery in 2004 and served a year of probation.” It was a drunken brawl, and Matthew Sinclair apparently beat a fellow brawler very severely. More recently – couple of days ago, in fact – a witness watched him stick a gun out of his car window and aim it at another car. “Officers found an unloaded firearm, a loaded magazine with 16 rounds of ammunition and a set of brass knuckles in the vehicle Sinclair was driving.” Brass knuckles! That’ll keep the lads in line!
But if you really want to discipline the young, there’s nothing like pointing weapons at them.
“[A]lthough [Matthew Sinclair’s] gun was uncased and unloaded, ammunition was accessible, and Sinclair didn’t have a concealed carry permit.”
Pish posh. A mere “lapse in judgment,” says UI’s head coach. So the guy likes to beat the shit out of people. So he likes to point guns out of cars. So he doesn’t give a crap about concealed carry laws or ammunition storage. So he’ll probably do jail time and not just probation on this go-’round. So what. Lapse.
If a local judge or jury jails Sinclair, UD has just the replacement for him.
Richie Incognito ain’t doing nothing these days. Sittin’ on his hands filing grievances is all. Richie knows how to do Sinclair’s job real good.
I’m giving thanks for what I just saw.
Just now, 7:33 in the morning, Thanksgiving Day, Rokeby Avenue, Garrett Park, Maryland:
I was sitting in the office reading, on the screen, E. B. White’s very short story, “The Second Tree from the Corner.” As I finished its last lines, I looked up to see a walloping big orange fox in my driveway.
She walked slowly – she loped – her nose somewhat to the ground, her eyes calm and thoughtful.
For the first time in my years of fox-watching… fox-glimpsing… here was a large slow meditative one, generously giving me a long shot of her glossy body, her elegant snout. She pondered, pondered, pondered, along my driveway, me all agog gazing, her thick tail grazing the paving. She pondered maybe the mice and voles and rats she’d rid us of that evening…
She loped then along the side path of flat gray pavers; wound along the curving mulch I packed down to make a trail through the back lawn…
And these paths that I’d made – they were hers… She knew them, used them, the paths I’d made for her dreaming feet (see Sunday Morning, the thanksgiving poem), and for my dreaming feet.
Finally the fox entered yet another path of mine, this one created by clearing leaves and twigs in a curving line through a little wood that dips and then rises toward the very back of my forest, where I’ve long known the foxes live.
Instead of disappearing into her den, she paused at the last place on the path my eyes could follow her, and she pondered again and placed her snout along the path and shook her tail. And then she went up into the deeper woods.
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Thus she is, by the sheer coincidence of my happening to read White’s story in such a way as to have summoned her (I read it in search of a Thanksgiving story to which I could link you), my natural disturbance in the lovely scene, my gilt-edged excellence.
It was an evening of clearing weather, the Park showing green and desirable in the distance, the last daylight applying a high lacquer to the brick and brownstone walls and giving the street scene a luminous and intoxicating splendor. Trexler meditated, as he walked, on what he wanted. “What do you want?” he heard again. Trexler knew what he wanted, and what, in general, all men wanted; and he was glad, in a way, that it was both inexpressible and unattainable, and that it wasn’t a wing. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep, formless, enduring, and impossible of fulfillment, and that it made men sick, and that when you sauntered along Third Avenue and looked through the doorways into the dim saloons, you could sometimes pick out from the unregenerate ranks the ones who had not forgotten, gazing steadily into the bottoms of the glasses on the long chance that they could get another little peek at it. Trexler found himself renewed by the remembrance that what he wanted was at once great and microscopic, and that although it borrowed from the nature of large deeds and of youthful love and of old songs and early intimations, it was not any one of these things, and that it had not been isolated or pinned down, and that a man who attempted to define it in the privacy of a doctor’s office would fall flat on his face.
Trexler felt invigorated. Suddenly his sickness seemed health, his dizziness stability. A small tree, rising between him and the light, stood there saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy. Trexler’s spine registered an ever so slight tremor as it picked up this natural disturbance in the lovely scene. “I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands,” he said, answering an imaginary question from an imaginary physician. And he felt a slow pride in realizing that what he wanted none could bestow, and that what he had none could take away.
… which has had its share of upheaval lately:
An assistant professor of English there has died in custody after being arrested (for fighting with officers) during a domestic violence incident.
UD speculates that Samuel See killed himself in jail.
Details of the arrest here.
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Yet more details here, including:
The 34-year-old is not believed to have taken his own life. According to New Haven Independent, the young educator had had recent run-ins with police.
This from Yale Alumni Magazine:
On September 18, he was arrested on misdemeanor charges of assault and breach of peace.
He was on a leave from Yale which apparently had been hurriedly arranged, since he was reportedly signed up to teach his regular roster of courses.
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There are a number of possibilities in this sad unfolding story. One is that during the fight he was more badly hit than thought, and that he died, for instance, of an epidural hematoma, the sort of brain injury that killed Natasha Richardson.
