Penn State turns the page.
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A professor at Penn State has started a petition. Well done.
As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, Yeshiva University’s financial collapse was not the work of a day. (Go here for background.) It took a special mix of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, decades of indifference to the sexual abuse of students, and, more recently, a useless, self-righteous, and highly compensated president, to kill the school. Yeshiva’s board of trustees remains dominated by outstanding moral specimens like Zygmunt Wilf (“the judge decided that the Wilfs showed ‘bad faith and evil motive’ in a case she said was unlike any she had ever seen in New Jersey.“). Wilf and his fellow trustees have been so riddled with conflict of interest that the board seems to have been little more than “an investment club.”
How much lower can Yeshiva go?
Yeshiva, UD feels confident, is capable of falling much farther. Indeed, she anticipates that the school will have to close.
… Cormac McCarthy’s third ex-wife.
Definitely the best headline so far.
See post just below this one for details.
Don’t mess with… Whatever the fuck this guy’s name is. Is he even a guy? The beauty of online courses is that the York University student complaining about having “to meet [just once, I presume] in person with a group of classmates [some of whom may be women] for a mandatory assignment” could be a woman, a child…
Let’s say he’s a guy. His thing is, he didn’t sign up for an online course in order to rub up against the Whores of Babylon.
The professor and his department – sociology – rejected the student’s request outright, correctly noting that bigotry against women is a no-no at a public and secular university like York. Remember the humongous dust-up last month after efforts to allow gender apartheid at British universities? Same deal.
J. Paul Grayson, the heroic professor at the center of this mess (higher-ups at York told him and the department that they had to give in to the student’s demand), makes the same point they made in England:
“You have to nip this in the bud, because what you’re dealing with here is a basic hornet’s nest,” Dr. Grayson said in an interview. “What if … I said, well, my religion really frowns upon my interacting with blacks?”
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The irony of this latest effort to make universities bow to fanatics is that the student, told that his request was rejected, immediately caved. Although he had initially insisted that – as Grayson paraphrased him – “due to my firm religious beliefs … it will not be possible for me to meet in public with a group of women” – he now said
he would “respect the final decision” to deny the request, was pleased with the way it had been handled, and has since met with his learning group.
Of course, the higher-ups at York are still on their high horses, insisting that the university’s all set up to respect people who refuse to interact in the physical world with women.
And the sociologists at York who stood their ground are, I certainly hope, laughing in their faces.
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UD thanks Ian.
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Update: UD‘s pleased to say that it gets better:
In an October 18 email, the Dean specifically told Mr. Grayson that if he was worried about the “course experience of our female students” he would make sure they “are not made aware of the accommodation.”
What they don’t know won’t hurt ’em, dude. Just shut up!
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And just so we’re clear: Events like these help us understand and know how to respond to the idiocy of statements like this one from Katha Pollitt:
[R]eligion is what people make of it.
Grayson, just to be absolutely sure, consulted orthodox Jewish and Muslim religious leaders on this, and both expressed astonishment that anyone would conclude that these religions call for no appearance in the public realm for men if there are any women also in that realm.
Religion, Katha, is not what people make of it. Religion is many things, but not all things. (“What is disturbing is an apparent increasing tendency to view each claim for accommodation as legitimate and worthy of support. Indeed, the notion that not all claims should be accepted would come as a shock to the morally relativistic fingernail biters that roam the hallways in some academic buildings.”) A university dean, gripped by litigation fears when he reads the word religion in an email from a student, may believe that the mere invocation of the word religion constitutes religion; Pollitt may believe that if I happen to “make of” religion the removal of infants’ sexual organs this constitutes religion. The rest of us must follow Grayson’s lead.
It’s … good news, I guess, that Bill Clinton is not involved with Trump University. But this is just the latest example of the land mines Clinton has been planting in his wife’s path for the presidency, should she indeed decide to run. As the [NY] Times reported in a major investigation, there are a lot of questions and there is not a lot of transparency about how the Clinton Global Initiative operates. And that’s the nonprofit Clinton arm of Bill Clinton’s post-presidency. His other business dealings have been profuse and often murky, and every single one of them is going to be investigated by the press if a Hillary Clinton campaign goes forward. The Bloomberg piece [on Clinton’s heading up a for-profit ed venture] does not find any illegality in this instance, but the sleaze factor is considerable. Clinton serving as the “Honorary Chancellor” of a diploma mill that rips off young people — and doing it in a financial partnership that includes the hedge-fund titan Steve Cohen, whose SAC Capital Advisors is ground zero for insider-trading criminality — does not pass the smell test.
Trump, Laureate, and Brown University’s highest-profile trustee, Steve Cohen. The story of today’s university, all in one short paragraph.
… UD‘s beloved Henry Purcell’s Cold Song.
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Its meaning? The long-dead – frozen-dead – Spirit of The Cold has been called back to life by Cupid (the song appears in Purcell’s opera King Arthur, first performed in 1691). Having been comfortably dead for a long while, however, The Cold finds thawing into life again excruciating. Having enjoyed
A Quartz contentment, like a stone
The Cold is not at all sure he wants to “rise unwillingly and slow from everlasting snow.” He’s no longer “fit” to bear the “bitter cold” of human life; he prefers to “freeze again to death.”
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Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow
Same deal.
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Or, as Adam Phillips more prosaically says:
The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery.
(Don’t just read the transcript; watch the video.)
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A related article, and an expression of Okie pride:
[Y]ou don’t have to be literate to play and graduate from OSU.
Fighting in the public realm for your right to have no presence in the public realm is a conundrum.
The Frenchwoman appealing her conviction for wearing a burqa sent her husband to court, or her husband insisted on going in her place or whatever…
This seems to have annoyed the judge, who was apparently ready to hand down a much lighter sentence (the woman – or rather the group of males acting on her behalf – lost the appeal) if the complainant had demonstrated even a faint personal commitment to her own case.
Kevin Carey lifts discussion of jock school University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to the higher, existential level that was always implicit in nihilistic events there.
Like all universities, particularly those with prestige, [UNC] depends on the idea that it actually exists…
Yes. But this is postmodern America, and the school might be a simulacrum. Lots of universities – all the online ones – are simulacra.
The writing that follows Carey’s words about the non-existence of UNC is so strong that I would like to quote it in its entirety.
UNC Chapel Hill is not a coherent undergraduate institution. It’s a holding company that provides shared marketing, finance, and physical plant services for a group of autonomous departments, which are in turn holding companies for autonomous scholars who teach as they please. This is the only possible explanation for the years-long, wholly undetected operation of the African and Afro-American Studies Department credit fraud scam. Or, rather, it’s the only possible explanation other than a huge, organization-wide conspiracy in which the university administration, department, and football team colluded to hand out fake grades to hundreds of athletes.
The university, of course, vehemently denies that anything resembling the latter scenario is true. Despite damning emails between [Julius] Nyang’oro and the athletic department, UNC is desperately selling the story that the entire credit fraud operation was the work of just two people–Nyang’oro and an assistant–and involved no athletic department wrongdoing of any kind. That’s because while academic misconduct gets you nothing more than a wrist-slap from your accreditor and [a] year of sad/absurd “monitoring” in which the university administration randomly checks classes to make sure they actually exist, athletic misconduct can cost the university things it actually cares about, like money, bowl appearances, and athletic scholarships.
In other words, the only way for UNC administrators to avoid blame for gross academic misconduct is to admit that academic conduct was never their concern.
Meanwhile, the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.
The cynicism and dishonesty inherent to that seep into the cracks of university life, occasionally as outright criminality but far more often as mediocrity and simple indifference. If Julius Nyang’oro had simply bothered to show up in a room on campus from time to time, say something–anything–to some “student” athletes, and hand out a bunch of A-minuses, he never would have been caught. In the modern non-university, he wouldn’t even have been doing something wrong.
Rush University medical center has on its faculty Alan Hirsch, creator of a magic powder of interest to the Federal Trade Commission.
Pish posh. The man is currently the highest-profile trustee of one of this nation’s great universities. How dare you say he deserves prison.
[Interviewer] – [T]he accusation is that this goes back as many as 200 classes into the 1990s and that this department was being used to inflate athletes’ grades. But at this point, has there been any clear connection made between this department, this professor and higher-ups in the athletic department?
[News and Observer Reporter] – No. There haven’t been. The connections have been with the tutoring program for athletes. We obtained, you know, correspondence that showed that the tutoring program, you know, they knew that these classes weren’t meeting.
See how we all have to wait and pretend to be idiots until events force the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to admit the full conspiracy? You know what UD would like to see, just for the fun of it? An interview with UNC trustee and official trustee sports booster Dwight Stone. Dwight heads The Educational Foundation, aka Ram’s Club, and UD‘d love to ask him about what he’s been ramming through that organization … But Dwight’s the top and the tutoring program is the bottom, and it’ll be quite a while, and many bureaucratic layers, before we get to what the most responsible body of all – the board of trustees – was doing while the University of North Carolina went from a university to a punch line.