The philosopher Simon Critchley, in Truthout:
I’m convinced that the conditions which we find ourselves in give us modest grounds for belief in emancipation and hope. One of the figures I continually come back to, is the figure of passive nihilism and I think we live in a time of pervasive passive nihilism. In the face of a chaotic and bloody world, one withdraws into oneself to cultivate practices of self-perfection. This can be linked to all sorts of new age beliefs, as well as to those that cultivate a sort of literary or aesthetic pleasure. I don’t share this feeling. I feel that human beings, in concert, in the right conditions, are capable of extraordinary outcomes.
I hate cynical irony, the form of knowing irony that’s just a form of protection from any sort of engagement with the world….
Properly understood, cynicism isn’t cynical – it’s opposed to moral hypocrisy, pride, pretension, luxury and people who think that they know what they’re talking about. To that extent, I’m amenable to certain forms of cynicism.
Critchley is moderating a new blog at the New York Times about philosophy.
From an article in Newsweek on efforts to understand how to improve education in primary and secondary schools:
…[T]he scientific basis for [the choice of] specific curricular materials, and even for general approaches such as how science should be taught, is so flimsy as to be a national scandal… “There is a dearth of carefully crafted, quantitative studies on what works,” says William Cobern of Western Michigan University. “It’s a crazy situation.”
… [T]he scientific vacuity of education research [into what should be taught in science classes] is …exasperating.
… Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that when one compares the importance of education with “the frivolous inertia with which it is treated,” it is “difficult to restrain within oneself a savage rage.” That was 80 years ago.
She’s going to blame the fools on his church’s hiring committee.
Monseigneur Pastor His Holiness Rafer Byrdsong did everything humanly possible to reveal his comprehensive fraudulence to the Third Baptist Church of Suffield, Connecticut. He provided reams of obviously bogus educational and other background documentation. A local news channel reports:
… He claimed he was a Navy chaplain. When the I-Team received his service records, it was discovered he was in the Navy, but as a cook.
The Chaplain Corps said they never heard of him.
No records exist for many of Byrdsong’s former parishes, and officials in Florida and California said there were no records that the colleges and universities he claimed to attend ever existed either.
When the I-Team looked in to the school that supposedly gave Byrdsong a doctorate, it was discovered there was a school with a similar name that would give anyone a PH.D. to anyone who pays for it, with no classes required.
Upon closer inspections, all of the documents given by Byrdsong to the church when he applied to be pastor were full of misspellings.
The certificate for the doctorate even had the word diploma misspelled.
… While digging into Byrdsong’s past, his ex-wife was found. She said she divorced him and brought bigamy charges against him when she found out he was married to five other women. She said hearing what Channel 3 found made her sad, but it wasn’t a surprise.
Pamela Mann said, “Can he preach? Yes. Can he teach? Yes. Does he have the persona that would bring people to him, yes, as any good con artist would.”…
I don’t care how small your church is. If you can’t even be bothered to check one of the claims a candidate for pastor makes, it’s your fault when you end up with Elmer Gantry.
“I hold degrees in Accounting and Law,” says candidate Ron Holly on his website. He’s running for Treasurer of Monterey County, California. Yet his law degree, writes the Monterey County Herald, “comes from a non-accredited diploma mill of a law school.”
Ron Holly is not a lawyer…
I’ve watched politicians and bureaucrats in Monterey County for almost 30 years now. And I don’t believe I’ve ever been more insulted than when I heard the evasions and excuses emanating from Ron Holly when he and two other candidates for Monterey County treasurer-tax collector showed up at The Herald on Thursday to seek our editorial board’s endorsement for his candidacy.
The Board of Supervisors doesn’t care. He’s got their endorsement.
Amid all the graduation happiness, a sad event at UD‘s campus, George Washington University. A student fell from a fifth-floor dormitory window and is in critical condition with internal injuries. This story includes a video – an interview with one of the students who found him and called 911.
Police think it was an accident.
UD has covered several stories like these over the years. There are two likely explanations. One, the student was very drunk and stumbling about. Two, suicide attempt.
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Update: The student who fell from the window has died.
Police are still investigating the cause.
UD is rushing about from graduation ceremonies to senior English majors parties to other sorts of parties.
The weather is beautiful; her students are beautiful. She will return to blogging when she has finished embracing them and praising them to their parents.
Yet the mother of a Reed College student who died of a drug overdose (background on Reed’s drug problem here) makes a telling complaint:
In [Barbara] Tepper’s … letter [to the Reed campus], she … urged Reed College to provide more counseling to students struggling with stress, to expel and not just suspend students who use or distribute illegal drugs and faulted college counselors for prescribing sleeping pills to her son who had trouble sleeping.
“I was very upset because that’s sending a very clear message if you don’t feel good, chemicals will solve your problem,” Tepper said in an interview Thursday. She said that when she learned her son was given sleeping pills by a campus psychiatrist, she was furious.
“I told Sam, ‘You’re 20 years old. I don’t want you taking sleeping pills. Go out and run around the block. Make yourself physically tired, and you’ll fall asleep.”
The larger point here, about America as a profoundly pill-dependent culture, and about the way easy recourse to pills can predispose people toward overuse and abuse as well as weaken their ability to solve their problems non-chemically, is a terribly important one.
The IRS mailed 400 questionnaires to nonprofit colleges and universities in October 2008, seeking data on endowments, compensation and income from businesses unrelated to their missions of teaching and research. It picked more than 30 institutions to audit on the basis of answers and is reviewing an additional 13 that failed to respond, the agency said.
This is all about Senator Charles Grassley’s complaint (he’s the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee) that many extremely wealthy universities, holding billions of dollars, hoard their endowments. Since non-profits get all that money in large part because they get amazing tax breaks, they’re obliged to use it… To spend it, reasonable amounts of it, so that, for instance, students aren’t priced out of an education, or made to take on outrageous debt.
The IRS survey found that 344 institutions had an average spending target of 4.7 percent to 5 percent of their endowments each year on operations.
… Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said he’s concerned that 5 percent has become a “ceiling” for colleges and that wealthier institutions should be spending more. The finance committee held hearings in 2007 on rising tuition costs and growing endowments at colleges including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, prompting the institutions to provide more financial aid.
… Forcing universities to spend more of their endowments would discourage diversified investing and push them toward more conservative portfolios, said James K. Hasson Jr., a lawyer at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan in Atlanta, who represents tax- exempt institutions.
“A mandate would remove flexibility and creativity from the tools available to colleges,” Hasson said. “There doesn’t seem to be a crying need for a legal mandate.”…
Right. With a mandate, Larry Summers, when he was president of Harvard, wouldn’t have been able to put together those clever credit default swaps.
As I write, a wood thrush is in its second hour of hurling itself against one of our tall windows in a match of wits with its reflection.
This writer witnessed the same thing:
[The thrush’s] incessant battles with its own reflection would seemingly wear out the bird as it energetically attacks the windows, then sits back as if attempting to figure another way to get to the rival that’s invaded its territory. It may then disappear for a few minutes or as long as an hour before returning to continue the one-sided battle – not realizing that its foe is really its own reflection.
Apparently this can go on for days.
Eric, a reader, links UD to Novel-T,
an online store that features
literary sportswear.
Here’s a player for the Bartlebies:
Graeme Wood describes teaching at a totally burqa’d university in Yemen:
… When I entered the classroom and saw fifteen students who looked identical in every way, I burst out laughing, and never totally regained composure. The utter neutrality of their aspect was disarming to say the least. After a few minutes, I started asking them questions in English about their lives and why they wanted to learn English. “I am a pharmacist!” chirped one of the bolder students, so I turned to look through her eyeslit and ask whether she thought Yemeni honey had medicinal properties. Instantly fourteen black-gloved hands shot out to point at one of the other women in the room: I was talking to the wrong student, six desks away. This drill happened about twenty more times in the next hour, and even though my sonar triangulation improved a little, even by the end I could narrow down blurted answers at best to a clump of five or so students. I ended up accidentally excusing women with no cars to check on their parking, and letting women with empty bladders go to the lavatory. In every case the errors lasted only seconds, but the experience was still totally bewildering.
Only Samuel Beckett, or perhaps Monty Python, could do justice to this scene.
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Beckett’s friend James Joyce captured the inner truth of these students, each one of them “a batlike soul, waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.”
… columns and letters that go out under her name. At her termination hearing, she explains:
… [Terry] Kinavey …addressed the plagiarism charges against her. She said the text for the letters that she published under her name came from examples that she received in several binders full of information that she received at the New Superintendents Academy held by the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.
She said the administrators who conducted sessions at the academy said that any of the information in the binders could be used and that she chose letters or parts of letters that she felt reflected the district’s mission and philosophy
“Some of these things they said they didn’t even know where they got them, they got them from booklets. There’s been a lot of programs where you can buy canned letters,” Mrs. Kinavey said…
… died in the plane crash in Libya.
An Irish author, Bree O’Mara, who was on her way to London hoping to finalise a publishing contract for her second novel, has been named among the 103 who died in the Libyan air crash.
… A publishing deal for her second novel, Nigel Watson Superhero, set in London where she lived in the 1990s, would have been her most significant career break. It should have been signed last month, but she missed the London Book Fair because of the flight ban after the volcanic ash cloud hit, and had to postpone her trip.
… She had worked for many years as a flight attendant in the Middle East, but moved to London in the 1990s to work in film production. She then spent a period living with the Masai tribes in Tanzania, and was discussing a documentary on the Masai with her South African publishers…
“None of this went reported. We were able to confirm there were no restraining orders, no reports. But just sort of the campus buzz — just the buzz, the campus grapevine — if you’re coaching a team and a player is assaulting a sleeping teammate, wouldn’t you prod around? There were just too many episodes that were almost foreshadowing this.”
A CBS reporter pulls together the latest reports of George Huguely’s violence – toward Yeardley Love and toward others – leading up to her murder.
Having covered, on this blog, quite a lot of on-campus and off-campus violence, I’d like to speculate a little here, about this case.
Let’s start with the coach. It’s contemptible that, knowing Huguely was dangerously violent, the coach said nothing to anyone about it. But it is unsurprising. Why?
1.) Coaches go to incredible trouble, and get paid large sums of money, to recruit and retain aggressive young men. These men are rewarded for their aggression on the field, and rarely punished for that same aggression off the field. Sports heroes like Huguely have been rewarded all their lives for being rude and crude. Their coaches are part of the reward system.
2.) From the coach’s point of view, Huguely is part of a crowd. There are several pretty wild drunks on the team, and it’s going to be hard to single any of them out as not merely wild but pathological.
3.) Coaches tend to have intensely paternal relationships with their boys. They think like fathers, and fathers don’t report their sons, or call the police on them.
4.) The coach is unlikely to come from same the privileged background as his players. If he did, he’d be a lawyer, not a coach. He will perhaps, when considering action against a player, be intimidated by the money and power the player’s parents have.
5.) He will also be intimidated by thoughts of fans and alumni who expect victories and who adore Huguely as a big part of the team’s victory delivery system. A coach’s job is always very shaky — recall that Duke unloaded its lacrosse coach long before the innocence of his players was finally established.
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What about Yeardley Love herself? She was obviously being bombarded by threatening emails and by escalating physical violence from Huguely. She must have known about his jealousy-fueled attack on a male friend of hers on the team. Why did she do nothing, beyond locking her bedroom door?
1.) She might have done something. She might have talked about it. She might even have lodged a complaint — something short of a restraining order, let’s say, but maybe something. We don’t know yet.
2.) She might have thought along the same lines as the chair of Amy Bishop’s department: Yes, this is a scary person, but the school year is almost over. If I can just get to the end of the semester, she’ll have to go away, because she didn’t get tenure. Love might have thought We’re a few weeks away from graduation. If I can just wait that out, he’ll go his way and I’ll go mine.
3.) The crowd thing again. She saw him as one of the guys, part of a very close-knit team. Maybe he was crazier than most of the other guys, but they embraced him, loved him, didn’t throw him off the team. He could be seriously shitfaced, but so could they. He could also probably be charmingly apologetic about his obnoxiousness the next morning.
4.) Finally there’s pity and fear.
She wanted to help him. She understood he was a terrible drunkard about to enter an unforgiving world of work, and she wanted to help him. She pitied him, not just because he was an alcoholic, but because he loved and needed her so much. He roused her compassion.
Just as much, though, he roused her fear. He was a powerful man, and a very mean drunk. His love was sick and obsessive, and now that she’d rejected him, it was all wounded ego and vicious rage. Perhaps like his coach she deluded herself that Huguely was under it all still a little boy given to tantrums, rather than a man capable of murder.
