UCLA – one of many American universities with a hell of a basketball program.

Well, it’s all over university football too.

I mean, what do you expect? Like hockey, these are very aggressive games, and you want the most aggressive people on campus playing and coaching them. So if your coach is a bully (Examples? Oh, you know. The storied names. Bobby Knight. Mike Leach. Mark Mangino.) that’s a good thing. If one of your players is a bully, that’s a good thing.

The one thing you want to avoid is some pussy from the press interviewing people, writing it all up.

And Sanctorum is worried college makes people snobs! Huh. UCLA makes them animals.

… talks about a professor at the University of Tromsø (the best Northern Lights YouTubes are from Tromsø) who has banned niqabs from his classrooms.

[The professor] quoted a parliamentary decision “that says a teacher may request to see the face of those who are taught. This is to do with covering the face, not hats or religious symbols.” [Okay, so he’s within his rights.]

The niqab covers a woman’s face apart from the eyes, and is most commonly worn in Arabian peninsula Arabic countries such as the UAE (United Arab Emirates), Oman, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.

Whilst France introduced a ban on niqabs last year, Norway’s far-right Progress Party (FrP) has also suggested penalising women who wear these and burkas in public. [So only Norwegian reactionaries think this would be a good idea?]

Labour Party (Ap) deputy leader Helga Pedersen stated, “I’m against burkas and niqabs. We don’t want a society where people are concealed from top to toe.” [Ah. At least one Labor politician agrees.]

Professor Aarsæther’s policy has been greeted with a mixture of both conditional support and discouragement.

Senior Tromsø police station officer Morten Pettersen told Nordlys it is legal to wear niqabs in public but not during demonstrations, parades and the like. [And what of the parliamentary decision the professor cites?]

Leader of Tromsø’s Muslim community Alnor, Sandra Maryam Moe, finds it “disappointing that he [the professor] chooses to exclude someone for wearing a niqab. This is neither about a disciplinary, nor a behavioural problem.” [No – it is about a pedagogical problem. Like many people, he has serious difficulty interacting with a person whose face he can’t see.]

“I hope this is just a storm in a teacup. Norway is an open and inclusive country. One should accept the people who use the niqab here because they are so few in number, as well as let them make use of the opportunities they have in our society,” she said to NRK, doubting the lecturer’s claim that the niqab creates problems with student-teacher communication. [One of the opportunities women have in Norwegian society – as opposed to Saudi society – is that they can live a normal human life, on an equal footing with men. As a Norwegian, one should not accept the grotesque inhumanity of the burqa, even if its wearers are few in number.]

Government education officials [say] such a move is neutral and non-discriminatory, but Ole Petter Ottersen, Rector of the University of Oslo says they have no power to stop niqab-wearing students from attending lectures. [So which is it? Do professors have a right to see their students’ faces or not?]

UD woke up early today (she always wakes up early) and wandered into the office – a messy space, full of books. She glanced out the windows at her front garden to see what sort of day it was (overcast) and gradually realized that her split rail fence, one section of which had long ago fallen to the ground (under the weight of a massive snow storm), had been rebuilt!

Right after that snow storm, UD had dragged the fallen rails into her woods and hadn’t replaced them. They were an end piece, and Les UDs thought the fence looked okay without its last section.

A year ago, my neighbor, Caroline, asked if she could have the rails for her new garden design, and UD said take them.

And now that section of the split rail fence had been restored! The new wood was almost yellow next to the weathered gray of the rest of the fence. It had been expertly installed.

Who had done it? When? Why did I only notice it this morning?

Because Les UDs had come home late last night. Both had had long days on campus; and then, when Mr UD picked me up at Grosvenor metro, I proposed that we continue down the Rockville Pike and have dinner at the place we call Ninja Loser (few people go there and UD can never remember its actual name), so we spent a couple of hours eating their spectacular avocado salad and shrimp tempura rolls.

By the time we got back to Garrett Park, it was too dark to notice the new rails.

But here they were, mysteriously ablaze on the end of my old fence…

Mr UD went out to the driveway to get the New York Times and he scrutinized the thing.

“Who replaced it?” he asked.

“Well,” said UD, “here are some possibilities. An anonymous samaritan. A company delivering rails to someone else in town that found itself with a few extra. An act of God.”

“Nothing persuasive there.”

“No, look, here’s the deal. I think. The town did it. The town’s crew did it. They do all sorts of sprucing-up jobs around town, and they eventually noticed our less-than-complete split rail fence. It’s our Garrett Park taxes at work.”

“That’s probably it. But there’s a bit of complexity here…”

“Yes. That land is owned by the town, not by us. The town owns a bunch of feet of land in front of every house. We paid for the fence, but it’s really the town’s, since it sits on land that belongs to Garrett Park. So the town has the right to do whatever it wants with the fence, I guess. Even fix it.”

… Scroll down to Colbert Report clip. Start at 2:41 and realize the emptiness behind your religious delusions.

A commenter responds to Texas Tech coach Tommy Tuberville’s latest run-in with the law:

… Texas Tech head coach Tommy Tuberville has now been linked to two [fraud schemes] in the past year. Tuberville was listed as an investor in former Georgia coach Jim Donnan‘s “retail liquidation company”, GLC, which turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Now, Tuberville is the subject of Huntsville Times report that lists him as the focal point of a fraud case involving an Auburn-based investment company.

What the commenter overlooks is that you can’t make TTU look bad, because TTU has been way, way worse than bad for years. Tuberville? Texas Tech recently announced that they’re raising his salary by $500,000. Good timing! He’s got a lot of investors to pay off! Plus attorneys to hire!

Texas Tech hired disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – paid him $100,000 to teach one course.

Texas Tech hired mad Mike Leach, then fired him when he allegedly concussed one too many players, and is now the object of an incredibly expensive lawsuit he filed against the school.

You don’t make sewers like TTU look bad.

——————-
UD thanks Dave.

A writer for The Atlantic applauds Santorum’s attack on universities as secular, amoral indoctrination machines.

What can UD say to this? Her love for the liberal arts college dare not speak its name! For who would listen to UD?

UD! The very incarnation of the enemy! A denizen of the darkness – Washington DC. A woman who works outside the home. A woman who thinks state-mandated transvaginal ultrasounds are a bad idea…

Well but okay, let’s perform a transcranial ultrasound on UD – right here, right now. Let’s ask UD‘s head to respond to the claim that professors value reason more than faith, and intellectual achievement more than moral achievement.

Moving the wand around… Hold on… Left brain, right brain…

Here’s the deal. Liberal arts universities are founded on reason and intellectuality. Reason and the exercise of the intellect are constitutive of the university.

Morality? These constituents are seen to be profound goods. The capacity to appraise your world in an informed, flexible, dispassionate way tends to give you greater depth, sympathy, and agency in your dealings with various aspects of that world.

So universities don’t value intellectuality more than morality; they are intellectual institutions whose foundational commitment – a moral one – is to free thought, and thus they will study every idea and belief of significance, including ideas having to do with morality and faith. While they are studying these things, they will bracket – to the extent possible – the personal contingencies of the people in the room. This one’s a Christian Scientist; that one idolizes Christopher Hitchens. Fine. For the purposes of understanding together a worthwhile object of study, we will put those differences and affiliations aside.

Professors will not indoctrinate you into trashing your convictions, but we will engage you in exercises that ask you to step outside of them for a little while.

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

Let’s get more personal. Do I, Madame Professor, value intellectual achievement more than moral achievement, reason more than faith?

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

You know what? None of your business. When I’m in the university classroom, I value the life of the mind, I value modeling for my students “learning for the sheer joy of it, with the aim of deepening their understanding of culture, nature, and, ultimately, themselves.” (That’s Andrew Delbanco, in an otherwise tepid recent defense of liberal education.) The Atlantic writer’s job is not to follow me out of the classroom onto the subway and into my church, synagogue, coven, brothel, gutter, sleazy pickup bar or monastery so as to determine the relative value for me of faith and reason and intellect and morality. His job is to judge me, and my university, in terms of what our peculiar institution is.

A university is – among other things – a hideout from people who don’t understand what it means to make an effort to be intellectually dispassionate.

… (“Thickening Our Receipts”) from Garrett Park, Maryland.

The professor only talked about things on the PowerPoint, and after class he posted the PowerPoints on Blackboard.

After we figured that out, no one took notes.

We didn’t have a single homework assignment due in the class. We only had six papers, and in all of those papers, we were allowed to use the PowerPoints as sources. So each day, I showed up physically, but not mentally, ultimately wasting both my own time and the professor’s. And I still received an A in the class… If you’re worried about students not showing up, it’s time to up your game.

This University of Nebraska student notes the latest trend in the morgue classroom: Mandatory attendance policies. No one wants to be in a morgue, so no one shows up. The coroner, glancing up from his slides, takes umbrage: I will not be left alone in the dark! To stand here in blackness listening to the sound of my own voice reading a textbook – it is too terrible! So he forces the students to sit – formaldehyded row after row – or they flunk the course.

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

Really – if you don’t make the morgue mandatory, no one will show up. A student at the University of Texas Arlington thinks his psych and algebra classes have around fifty students in them, but

it’s hard to tell when no one comes.

… Attendance isn’t mandatory, and my instructor posts all of the PowerPoint presentations to Blackboard. So rather than have a PowerPoint read to me, which I can find online, I’d much rather meet with my Freshman Leaders on Campus group or get some actual work done.

My math class runs on a similar dynamic.

Is dynamic quite the word?

Trevor Hodge, professor of ancient technology, seems to have had a good life.

… this side of … eh. I’m thinking nothing compares. For sheer vulgarity, sheer classlessness, sheer idiocy, SIUC can’t be beat. UD has watched in disbelief over many years as this campus, with its plagiarizing, political hack leadership, its tanking student body (who would want to go there?), its mindless, grandiose “Saluki Way” sports expenditures, and its empty stadium, just keeps scratching its balls. (Scroll down on this page for earlier posts.)

Yes, the machinery grinds on – coaches still get overpaid, games take place, student and state money is sent down the drain… and President-for-Life Glenn Poshard smiles on, a Brezhnev unaware the USSR has been dismantled…

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

The athletic director senses that student anger has now morphed into apathy, and it makes him nervous:

“I can live with anger even though it’s not pleasant. I think what is happening now is we’re slipping into a little bit of apathy, and that’s a little more dangerous. Our fan base has kind of turned, my gut tells me, from anger to a little apathy and that’s what concerns me.”

Right now, the school is giving the molto sucky basketball coach

$762,500 per year, and SIUC would have to pay Lowery twice that amount to buy him out of the final two years of his contract.

But no worries: They’re in great shape to make a payout.

[W]hen the losses started coming, attendance straggled. SIUC averaged 3,299 fans in an arena that underwent a $29.9 million renovation two years ago, down from a high of 7,743 in 2006-07. Additionally, [the AD] said season-ticket revenue is down considerably and the scholarship fund has taken a hit.

Statement from Florida Representative Allen West:

President Obama is …very adept at promulgating deceptive language masquerading as policy, actually just insidious political gimmickry. This “tax policy” is an example as well as today’s speech on his “energy policy” shall be. Here is the bottom line, last night it took 70 dollars to fill the tank of my 2008 H3 Hummer…

Just how much more are Americans supposed to put up with?

It’s down to Anne Sinclair and Cambridge University.

They’re the last entities willing to hang out with Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Documents released by South Carolina State University reveal it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring big names to homecoming last year, and only made tens of thousands in return.

… University officials did not respond to questions Thursday asking for insight into the documents, but they appear to show S.C. State spent more than $250,000 to bring Young Jeezy, Charlie Wilson, Chrisette Michele, Ace Hood and Future to campus for an Oct. 7 concert.

That doesn’t include about $30,000 university departments say they’re owed for their work on the event.

But the documents only show S.C. State receiving about $70,000 in revenue from the event…

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

… On February 10, school president Dr. George Cooper fired eight university workers in a one-day firing frenzy.

… [T]he documents released Thursday … include pages and pages of talent contracts, financial agreements and event logistics for last fall’s Homecoming concert. The agreements the school brokered with musical acts like Young Jeezy and Charlie Wilson, among others, document thousands of dollars in expenditures for the event. The fired employees’ names and/or signatures appear on the documents.

A cold sunny morning.
An old orange fox appears
Along the deer path.

Suddenly I realize
All of the squirrels in the garden
Have disappeared.

… runs the headline, but the cause of death of MIT undergraduate Brian Anderson simply hasn’t yet been determined. No foul play, and no clear signs of suicide.

Here are two other possibilities:

Maybe Anderson had an underlying health problem – weak heart, epilepsy. He may have had a condition of which he himself was not aware.

The other possibility that has to be considered is alcohol/drugs.