United States of America.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The remarkable synergy between the values of universities and the values of big-time football is there for all to see: Commitment to free, independent thought, to dissent, to reason over violence, to sober deliberation over intoxicated impulse, to academic seriousness leading to the completion of advanced degrees, to academic integrity, etc., etc. And nowhere is that synergy on clearer display these days than at Washington State University, whose athletic director has compiled an enemies list of people who aren’t “on board and believing in what we’re doing.” No bowl game tickets for those people. Dissenters have been placed on a no-tickets list.

The list is based on “a crimson-letter file of any particularly snarky emails that haven’t properly embraced the new way.” As another true believer – this one from Rutgers – writes in one of Scathing Online Schoolmarm‘s favorite pieces of prose:

Great organizations have culture, and culture only comes from a set of shared attitudes, goals, and values that every individual within that organization believes in.

It’s the ethos that’s made North Korea such a success, and you’ll find it at almost all of America’s great football schools too – get with the game or get fucked.

One local writer doesn’t quite get it:

This is inspired marketing for a program that’s had almost as many empty seats as occupied ones for its last two home games.

Most schools rank donors for ticket eligibility on a priority list.

The place that’s foisted a decade of bad football on its audience suddenly has a blacklist.

[The AD] means it when he says he has to change the culture. But who knew what he had in mind was vindictiveness?

No, no, no – it’s not vindictiveness. And it’s not a moronic marketing strategy. No, no, no.

You are looking at it the wrong way. The Democratic People’s Republic of Washington State University is a benevolent, misunderstood state. It seeks, via shunning, to educate dissenters so that they may join the glorious new way.

This is also what re-education camps are for, and UD is certain the AD has these in mind too. Otherwise it would look vindictive.

The stadium could be at least a third empty Saturday, considering the combination of anticipated bad weather, a holiday weekend with students away from campus, and the relative insignificance of the Minnesota game in relation to the final standings

And that’s why they pay the coach almost two million dollars! Let’s not hear any more bellyaching about overcompensated football coaches!

The faculty of Yeshiva University, through all these years of scandal almost entirely moribund, begins to stir.

UD has no idea why they let shady trustees and their useful tool president fuck over the school for so long.

It’s too late, in any case, to avert disaster. UD recommends faculty stop calling themselves professors and start moving the word facilitator around on their tongues. It’s University of Phoenix time.

… many of them distinguished. Whew. I always worry that people won’t get their act together when things this bad happen. Women will not be segregated by bigots in British universities. Not if the rest of us have anything to say about it.

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

Already over five thousand people have signed the petition. That was fast.

More and more people are paying attention to those complicit with the silencing of women in British universities. See my posts here and here. Now Sarah Khan lends her voice.

Universities UK’s new published guidelines suggest side to side segregated seating is acceptable as “both men and women are being treated equally” and therefore women would not experience “less favourable treatment.”

Universities UK clearly cannot see the wood for the trees. The idea that both men and women are equally segregated and therefore treated equally is highly erroneous. Perhaps one could argue such a point if so many [campus Islamic groups] weren’t such patriarchal constructions; shaped, structured and led by men.

So let me spell it out for Universities UK. [S]egregation results in ‘less favourable treatment.’ It enables the unequal distribution of power between men and women, resulting in gender based discrimination and inequality. It manifests itself in few female speakers being invited to speak to a mixed audience, limited decision making powers by female members, and how there has never been a female president of an Isoc.

Segregation perpetuates discriminatory social norms and practices, shaping male attitudes about women and restricting the decisions and choices of women. By allowing gender segregation, Universities UK are complicit in the gender inequality being perpetuated by Isocs; [Universities UK’s approval of gender segregation] will only make it easier for Isocs to treat socially unequal groups, in this case women, even more unequally.

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

Preacher Haitham al Haddad, who has spoken in approximately twenty Isocs in the last two years, argues that women should withdraw from public life. [He hopes] to disempower them by denying them their economic self-determination and to silence them through their invisibility…

Universities UK are not only giving speakers like him a green light to say these things but are also preparing the gender segregated seating for him to say it.

Watch Britain’s universities carefully. They will show you how to hand your school over to vile demagogues.

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

Nice comment on IHE‘s coverage:

This is such a step backward in civil and human rights, I am almost rendered speechless. “Separate but Equal” worked so well during the Jim Crow South or during Apartheid. Good on you, Britain, for working to bring this long-discredited viewpoint back into vogue…

If your university is inviting speakers who demand gender-segregation, perhaps you should start seriously looking at the sanity of those who bring these speakers [to] campus…

Or is it just beginning?

[N]o one could possibly be that good given the volatility of the markets. “As we know, markets go up and down, and his only went up.” … [Harry] Markopolos noted that during his tenure at Rampart, he traded with some of the biggest derivatives companies in the world, and none of them dealt with [Bernard] Madoff because they didn’t think his numbers were real.

Markopolos is talking about the year 1999. It wasn’t until Bernard Madoff was arrested in 2008 that Yeshiva University – under cover of night, without comment – erased his name as chair of its business school. This was farcical enough, but Yeshiva went farther: It invested huge sums with the financial criminal of the twenty-first century. “We thought he was God,” said his fellow trustee, Elie Wiesel.

One appreciates Wiesel’s honesty. He is willing to state openly just how stupid, just how grossly negligent, were the conflict-of-interest crazies running Yeshiva University.

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

The excellent Gavriel Brown, who writes for YU’s student newspaper, provides a detailed account of the manifold ways in which the very same fools, who continue to run Yeshiva, have now run it into the ground. The column even provides an edgy graphic (scroll down) complete with smugly grinning President Richard Joel. Brown concludes:

YU can no longer be an empire and President Joel can no longer be an emperor.

Yes, especially since he turns out to be Nero.

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

But the farce deepens yet more. The comments on Brown’s column are from outraged Yeshiva insiders who cannot believe that anyone in the Yeshiva family has the shamelessness to air this dirty laundry. How dare he! The next thing you know, someone will point out that the family that endowed an entire Yeshiva campus – the Wilfs – just got convicted of racketeering. That Ezra Merkin held as powerful a position as Yeshiva trustee as his partner in crime, Madoff. That the board of trustees has long been farcically rife with conflict of interest.

Of all the investment managers in New York City and around the world, the board chose one of its own to manage a significant portion of the university’s endowment. Given the conflict of interest, the trustees who approved the decision to invest endowment with Madoff should be held accountable if they failed to perform adequate due diligence.

Do you think anyone has been held accountable? Well, put it this way. Do you think that Zygi Wilf has been removed from Yeshiva University’s board of trustees?

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

You want farce? An American university priding itself on its piety as the higher education arm of the orthodox Jewish community resembles a criminal enterprise. It seems to be run by an emperor. It is cheered on to annihilation by idjits. That’s farce.

The FBI’s Files on Camus and Sartre Confirm the Utter Meaninglessness of It All

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

[S]tarting in 1945 and 1946, the FBI kept tabs on famed philosophers and authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in hopes of discovering whether existentialism and absurdism were just communism in disguise… While existentialism and absurdism were subversive theories, in their way, they never posed any imminent or long-term harm to America, unless you consider a rise in the number of pretentious comp lit grad students to be a threat to national security.

A Guardian writer describes a new report approving gender segregation in British universities.

Good grief. The compromise is that women can’t be put at the back: “The room can be segregated left and right, rather than front and back.” Depressingly, the National Union of Students has endorsed this. What’s wrong with “side by side” segregation? Just ask how that would look if universities allowed speakers to demand separation by race.

This sickening report – which UD hopes self-respecting UK universities will ignore – caves to what the Guardian writer calls “the sexist eccentricities of some religions.” If only they were as innocuous as eccentricities. They are profoundly encoded convictions, excruciatingly out of place in liberal democracies.

If liberal democracies don’t fight back in places devoted to intellectual and social freedom – places like universities – they are making the world safe for theocons. UD is proud of the way her country has decisively rejected theocons at the polls (Rick Santorum, Ken Cuccinelli); for contemporary Britain she feels sorrow and alarm.

The campus in on lockdown: People report seeing a man with a gun, and the school received word from someone saying that his roommate (it’s unclear whether this means a Yale student) said he planned to come to campus and shoot people.

Here’s the message when you go to yale.edu right now.

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

UPDATE: Things seems to have calmed down, and the lockdown has for the most part been called off. Police are suggesting that sightings of someone with a gun were most likely people seeing first responders to the scene.