… titled EVERYBODY MUST GET STONED.

…in this interview about MOOCs.

If you’re the faculty at Western Michigan University, you’d really like to know.

Or, I mean, you do know.

“Every department is hurting — bleeding faculty,” said [history professor Lewis] Pyenson. “We’re not going to be able to hire brilliant young professors. Older professors who know how to teach are going to retire. There likely will be shotgun marriages for departments.”

Pyenson contrasted the cuts in the College of Arts and Sciences with the amount spent on men’s football, saying that in a time of financial crisis, “what goes on in the classroom is clearly more important than what is going on at the 50-yard line. We should be fostering the mind instead of knocking kids senseless on the football field.”

… is as powerful as Saudi Arabia’s.

… keeps his job as superintendent of schools despite a domestic violence incident, and despite sending out a series of disgusting tweets about the state’s education secretary. The school board loves him and is keeping him until at least 2016. Although it’s not extending the contract, it has made clear that because it continues to love him, it will review its non-extension decision.

Why does it love him? Because he fanatically opposes the ed secretary’s efforts to do something about the fact that New Mexico perennially ranks close to dead last for educational achievement.

Don’t nobody get to fuck with that.

[Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss] are among the most outspoken of the “new atheists”: scientists and other intellectuals who have tired of having sand kicked in their faces by the priests and mullahs of the world. So the scientists are indeed mobbed like rock stars at glamorous sites like the Sydney Opera House. Inside, they sometimes encounter clueless moderators; outside, demonstrators condemning them to hellfire. At one event, a group of male Muslim protesters are confronted by counterprotesters chanting, “Where are your women?”

Don’t think for a minute that the gender apartheid we’ve seen in British universities isn’t an ongoing issue in the United States. Don’t think that our homegrown equivalents to the segregationists over there aren’t always trying – trying to segregate buses, trying to segregate parks.

A pharm-loving doctor named Stossel
Is a fervent free market apostle.
But Glaxo’s stopped bribing
For over-prescribing,
And Stossel’s upset is colossal.

… Christmas in Washington.

(She’s the blonde.)

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Oh, plus: Turns out she’s

shorter than Charles Barkley.

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Backstreet Boys.

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Click on photos
for better view.

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UD thanks her sister.

“The glass broke and I picked up the pieces, almost weeping with rage. Such white liberals from left to right need to grow up. By Friday UUK had shed its overconfidence and seemed to be wavering. I predict the guidance will be binned.”

And so it will be, though the glowing self-righteousness with which men and women will lecture people like Yasmin Alibhai Brown (2002 winner of the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism) about how unenlightened she is to defend equality will persist, glowing ever brighter as one venue for discrimination after another shutters.

Eventually the lecturers will constitute a tight morally superior flame of burqa boosters and women to the back of the room and shut up enthusiasts. How appalling, they will say… How appalling that Europe is voting down burqas and bitching about backbenches…

In Britain, segregation of the sexes is viewed as a tool of the patriarchy. It traditionally reinforced a system in which women were deemed to be second best. For women to “voluntarily” opt to sit apart may be their religious right in a place of worship but in a public institution it undermines the hard-fought civic rights of women who, for generations, have battled for equality – and are still battling.

… [W]hat the controversy has again revealed is a profound concern about interpretations of Islam that conflict with a modern civil liberties agenda. Further, political correctness, sensitivity to charges of Islamophobia and commercial considerations (it has been suggested that segregated meetings appeal to overseas Muslim students vital for university finances) block discussions about what should and shouldn’t be inviolate in British society.

Well, thanks to the Orwellian language of separate but equal in the (now-withdrawn) Universities UK document, discussion is entirely unblocked. For years now, in a semi-underground way, women at some British universities have been treated like dogs. UUK, in seeking to normalize this treatment, instead made it very, very public. And when a practice as ugly as this one becomes public, that’s all it takes. Decent people will put a stop to it.

… adds another distinction: It has America’s first publicly-financed sex segregated park.

Oh, and even though your tax dollars built it, you can’t go there.

… and you’ll find our old friend, Harvard University’s Joseph Biederman. Go here for prior posts about this man.

… issue. UD has read pretty much everything, and continues to read pretty much everything, that’s being published. So far, the best bit of writing about it is by Matthew d’Ancona in the Telegraph.

d’Ancona rightly begins and ends his piece by recalling Christopher Hitchens, because if Hitchens were alive he’d be writing the best bit. In this enlightenment-warrior’s absence, it’s right to recall him and imagine what he would say.

d’Ancona writes:

[T]his is a test case about much more than fringe events on provincial campuses. It is about the very basis of a pluralist society and what philosophers call “value incommensurability” – the clash between principles, and the dilemmas that such conflicts pose. As a ferocious opponent of theocratic creep, Hitchens argued that secular society was becoming far too emollient and unwilling to defend Enlightenment values against attack. Diplomatic immunity, equality before the law, the right of the novelist to free expression: all are now weighed against the risk of upsetting the theological apple cart.

The segregation row has forced us to confront the friction between religious sensitivities and core aspects of our common citizenship. The heart of the matter is the word “freedom” and its abuse. The original [UUK] guidance claimed that forbidding segregation by gender on campus might infringe “the freedom of speech of the religious group or speaker”. This is babble, but it is dangerous babble. It implies that upsetting the religious sensibilities of an individual or congregation – and it is possible to take offence at anything – is a form of censorship.

… Nicola Dandridge, the chief executive of UUK, has said that “where the gender segregation is voluntary, the law is unclear”. Voluntary segregation? Pull the other one. Hobbes teaches us that fear and liberty are consistent – but only in the sense that “as when a man throweth his goods into the Sea for Feare the ship should sink, he doth it neverthelesse very willingly, and may refuse to doe it if he will.”

I do not believe that the gender segregation under discussion is freely practised in any meaningful sense. It is an expression of theocratic patriarchy that a free society leaves alone in the home and the place of worship – as long as the law is observed – but cannot possibly countenance in the public square.

The crucial thing here is d’Ancona’s disbelief that “the gender segregation under discussion is freely practised in any meaningful sense.”

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When you see an eight-year-old girl in full burqa, do you think her behavior is freely practised? I don’t. When you see an eighteen-year-old woman in full burqa – what about that? In what sense is this physically self-destructive behavior (studies show what is obvious: depriving your body of sunlight does irreparable harm) which radically diminishes a person’s capacity for speech, touch, unrestricted movement, and the fundamental human experience of being recognized as fully and equally human by other human beings, of being identified as an individual – in what sense is this freely practiced in any meaningful sense? I have no trouble understanding it in Hobbes’s terms – throwing your human goods into the sea because if you don’t your husband will drown you. I can also make it sort of meaningful in psychological terms, as a subset of masochism. But in social terms I can never make it anything other than a nihilistic challenge to “core aspects of our common citizenship.”

What’s nice about this rather typical appraisal of America’s many football schools is that the writer names names. I mean, he doesn’t say this school and that school are no longer schools. He simply provides the data and lets you arrive at the obvious conclusion.

So the standouts, the almost-entirely-without-discernable-academic-missions, are:

University of Arkansas
University of Nebraska
University of Oklahoma
Auburn University

These are the Big Four, the prime nullities, that this particular author highlights – schools that spend huge sums on games and stadiums and all, and vanishingly little on education. So little that their academic mission is pretty much gone. There are plenty of other such places, including almost every school in West Virginia.

These four schools naturally take up a lot of air time on University Diaries, each of them a massive military industrial academic fraud violence against women drunk driving plus all them other naughty big boy thangs complex. Nebraska loved to death two of America’s current high-profile bad boys – Richie Incognito and Dominic Raiola – so that place (along with the University of Florida ’cause of loved-up Aaron Hernandez) is at the top of Google News lately. But Auburn, with its long tradition of massive cheating, and its board of trustees packed with former Auburn athletes, is perennially in the news, as are vastly corrupt Arkansas and Oklahoma…

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Speaking of tradition — that whole tradition thing, so important to all of these schools, can really backfire. Just like Penn State, all four schools on this guy’s list seem to think they have these glorious traditions…

When things go wrong in nullity schools, when the essential scumminess of what they’re about becomes too public, they often try to play this tradition card, as if the act of reminding people of the essential glory of what they’ve always been about will make people’s backs straighten… Yet these places forget that although they might have won many games over a long period of time, the scumminess was always there and everyone knows it…

So – here’s an example of the problem.

Louisiana State University is trying to get its students to stop commanding their game day opponents, in unison, on national television, to suck their dicks. How to go about this?

LSU decided to initiate something called Tradition Matters, which is essentially a series of notices all over campus, signed by the president of the school, asking students to stop saying suck my dick in unison on national television.

An LSU student journalist writes:

I didn’t realize how sleazy [the cheer] made my university look until I sat in a press box last season and watched my professional colleagues shake their heads in disgust.

Yet in what way will an appeal to LSU’s traditions help the matter? LSU qua football school has always been pretty sleazy… Indeed sleaziness is kind of a point of pride for the entire state of Louisiana... traditionally… It seems fully in keeping with Louisiana’s traditions that the president of an academic institution there would devote his time and the institution’s money to plastering campus with a plea that its scholars not get drunk and invite a national television audience to suck their dicks…

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So you see the problem. Nullity schools cannot make an appeal to their academic traditions, to the ethos of reason and moral reflection at the heart of non-null universities; they are forced to make an appeal to their athletic traditions. But athletic traditions at schools like these are as much about decades of publicly pleading for people to fellate you as they are about clean-limbed sportsmanship.