A special report on Duke University’s enthusiasm for Anil Potti.
A special report on Duke University’s enthusiasm for Anil Potti.
A community in Maryland has suspended negotiations over a sister-city agreement with Beit Shemesh following violence in the Israeli city against women by haredi Orthodox residents.
Montgomery County, which is home to a large Jewish population, was at the end of the process to ink the sister-city arrangement with the Jerusalem suburb when disturbances by haredim outside a Modern Orthodox girls’ school and other assaults on women in the area were reported internationally.
Negotiations over a sister-city relationship began in 2007, according to the Washington Post.
Gevalt. Who knew that UD‘s own Montgomery County, Maryland, was after linking arms with the most woman-phobic city this side of Kunduz!
Think of the sister-city events she’ll miss because of the suspension of negotiations: Stoning women wearing half-sleeves, forcing women to sit in the back of buses, erasing images of women from public signage, making women worship behind blind walls, AND (UD was looking forward to this most of all) spitting on eight-year-old girls as they walk to school and calling them stinking whores! Where the hell else but in UD‘s almost-sister-city can you get fun like that? Subsidized by the government?
Philosophers have taken to the pages of the New York Times in an effort to justify themselves; but Paul Shaffer’s comment (it’s this post’s headline) after Whitney Houston’s death does a better job of this than all of their efforts.
Shaffer’s comment has concision, modesty, and beauty; it acknowledges the existence of a philosophical (and aesthetic, and spiritual) tradition within which people have long thought and written about the almost-inexplicable disparities at war within us:
In me there are two souls, alas, and their
Division tears my life in two.
Faust’s famous complaint can be seen as the beginning of philosophical wisdom, whether we imagine that insight in terms of Platonic darks and lights or Freudian death- and life-drives … UD likes the way Shaffer says “some kind of sense,” because philosophy cautions against the possibility of making fully satisfactory sense out of this latest event in the history of human vitality/self-destruction. We all lead some variant of this energized and then at times totally-flopping-into-nothingness-and-defeat life; but when icons of vitalism, intensity, and creative energy (Houston, David Foster Wallace, Amy Winehouse, and, farther back, Lenny Bruce – our most powerful artists) run through those two currents of vivacity and void all their lives, right in front of us, and then ultimately (and early in the race) collapse, they rivet our attention to human bondage.
*************************
Les UDs were finishing dinner last night at Indian Ocean restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, with their friends Steve and Di Elkin, when La Kid called Mr UD about Houston. She was walking back from a charity event at which she and her George Washington University a cappella group, The Sirens, had performed. As UD watched Mr UD listening to her, she felt that weird maternal helpless thing where you understand how your kid feels and it’s bad but you can’t do anything about it.
… there’s always some little old lady who rises to iconic sucker status? There’s always some little old lady who explains in a tremulous voice how this nice man called her up on the telephone and was so sweet and patient with her and now he has the $150,000 she’d put away for her dotage…
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill looks like that old lady. Now that its latest disastrous football coach has retired, UNC is the sucker du jour.
Although the news came out yesterday that new Bucs coach Greg Schiano has hired his old friend and colleague Butch Davis, there have been conflicting reports about precisely what role Davis will have in Tampa Bay. And the reason for the conflicting reports appears to be an issue regarding Davis wanting to collect paychecks from the Bucs while also collecting all the severance pay he can from the University of North Carolina.
Davis has already received $933,000 of that severance, but the rest of it comes in increments of $590,000 a year in 2013, 2014 and 2015 — but only if Davis is unable to find a coaching job. If Davis has resumed his coaching career, North Carolina can deduct his coaching salary from that $590,000, and if his coaching salary is more than $590,000 North Carolina doesn’t have to pay him anything.
So Davis is apparently hoping to work out a title with the Buccaneers in which he will “serve the Bucs in an advisory capacity” rather than become a coach, and therefore he’d be able to get paid by the Bucs while still collecting his full severance from North Carolina.
Haha Butch boy put ‘er there! Gotta hand it to you!
And what a boon it is for the kiddies! No one to bother them with conversation, or, I don’t know, human activity, of any sort… Just left all alone in their rooms… For years and years and years…
Some old bugger from Boulder – Boulder! tree-hugger city! – wonders how many internet internees “survive the boredom and isolation of school on a laptop” and actually graduate (their cyber-keepers make drop-out stats hard to get). He reviews the scandals that occur when teachers are air traffic controllers and administrators hedgies.
Like a lot of people, this guy is beginning to notice the class-based nature of school on a laptop.
Slick TV ads and corporate hucksters would have us believe the online school can teach even better than the best traditional elementary and secondary schools the nation has to offer. Yeah, right. The day that Phillips Exeter Academy replaces its teachers with laptops is the day I might start to believe them.
More and more people realize that online school represents a perfect 1%/99% matchup – it makes the first group even richer, and keeps the second group in the pointless nothingness which is its lot in life.
See the images on the Exeter website? This is how I spend my day, says the featured student. Out and about in nature with my buddies, and then engrossed in fascinating classroom discussion… This is the best education possible, and your public school will in various ways of course fall short of it. But your cyber school? LOL.
… David Lynch to tell you that the weirdest shit in America goes down not in Washington DC, Land o’ Elites (Republican voters this time around seem determined to elect a President who’s never visited, let alone worked, in DC), but in what William Gass called the heart of the heart of the country (Lynch was born in Missoula).
In many years of blogging about universities, UD’s never seen one more unsettling, more surreal, than North Dakota’s Dickinson State. Here’s a post, from last year, about this school – its president at that time was hiding out from administrators trying to boot him from his office (his physical office – though fired, he refused to go)… The same president pioneered the ‘physical capture’ enrollment technique (maintain healthy numbers by enrolling anyone who, for whatever reason, even for a second, crosses into campus territory — a kind of eminent domain for the state of North Dakota involving human bodies instead of private property)…
Dickinson State fell out of the news for a few months – they seem to have convinced the president to get out – but crazy shit was still churning away, and now it’s hit the fan. For ten years the place has had a program for Chinese students – actual name, not kidding, Top Up, and Disney – where they bring these people over for seven months at Walt Disney World, and six at Dickinson State … dueling surrealities… I mean, imagine someone from China whose only exposure to the States is Dickinson State University, North Dakota, and Walt Disney World, Orlando…
Although Dickinson got rid of the eminent domain guy, the same enrollment approach – rope ’em any old way – has pertained, with Dickinson-deputized agents trolling China, telling people who can’t speak English that they can go to the United States and play in a theme park and get a degree.
That ain’t all. Things have taken on a real Blue Velvet tint with the suicide of a guy who’s maybe been running the show:
… Douglas LaPlante, 59, dean of education, business and applied sciences, was … found dead near a city park, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the Dickinson police said in a statement.
From Andrew Sullivan:
Oklahoma legislators introduced a bill yesterday that says “the life of each human being begins at conception.” But state Sen. Constance Johnson, a Democrat, decided that the bill, SB 1433, didn’t go far enough to protect unborn children. Johnson added an amendment to the bill, posted online by The Lost Ogle, that says life actually begins at ejaculation: “However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”
From Virginia:
Irked by abortion bill, Va. senator adds rectal exams for men
The state Senate this afternoon gave preliminary approval for legislation that would require pregnant women to undergo ultrasound imaging before an abortion, but not before rejecting a Democratic senator’s attempt to add what she described as “a little gender equity” to the bill. Democrat Janet Howell of Fairfax County proposed requiring men to undergo a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra. “This is a matter of basic fairness,” Howell said…. “It’s requiring [women] to have unnecessary medical procedures, it’s adding to the cost and it’s opening them up for emotional blackmail,” she said on the Senate floor today.
And now Mississippi:
Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland, a Democrat, introduced a bill in the state’s lower chamber calling for the part of the Gulf of Mexico that borders his state to be renamed the “Gulf of America.” A local Latino GOP organization called on Holland to withdraw the measure. “If this bill passes the legislature and is signed into law, perhaps it is time to rename the Mississippi River,” wrote Bob Quasius, Café Con Leche’s president, in the letter. “After all, sharing a name with a state that wants to rewrite maps out of disdain for Mexicans would be a disgrace to the rest of the nation.”
…deep bench.
[Dr. O.P. Murthy is] accused of plagiarism when he printed a book on ‘crime scene investigation’ by allegedly lifting from various books.
However, ironically, Dr [R.C.] Deka, who has been asked to take action against Dr Murthy by the [Medical Council of India], was himself at the centre of a plagiarism controversy.
The University of Minnesota newspaper’s editorial board isn’t happy about huge sums of money going to a bogus administrative position for a retired football coach.
But I’m sure thousands of other UM students are honored to be burdened with debt and a cut-rate education for the sake of football.
In the middle of my Don DeLillo seminar this morning, a ceiling light flashed and a very loud alarm sounded.
And sounded and sounded.
“Guess we’d better get out of here,” I said to my students as a colleague popped his head into the room. “Should we get out?” he asked. Yes, said UD. Time to get out.
As we tromped downstairs from the fourth floor, we were joined by ever-swelling masses of humanity.
Everyone was thinking the same thing: It’s effing cold out there.
UD had been discussing the many senses of “plot” in Libra, and she just kept doing that — as they tromped the stairs, as her group gathered around her outside the building, and as they were told to get away from the building! by a security person. Talk, talk, talk. UD never stopped. “At $50,000 a year tuition,” she explained to her class, “I think you deserve seamless instruction.”
She’d brought her little brown leather notebook out with her. She checked her list of recurrent themes in the four novels we’ve so far read and talked and talked and talked. The class talked too.
They let us back in after fifteen minutes and we all enjoyed the feeling of warming up as we reentered the fourth floor classroom. Once everyone got settled, UD started up talking again.
[V]ideo [has] surfaced of Indian ministers watching what appeared to be video of a sex act on a cell phone during a debate in the house assembly.
Two Karnataka State Ministers C.C. Patil and Laxman Savadi are being accused of watching porn when they were supposed to be doing the people’s work.
A third minister who resigned allegedly owned the cell phone with the lewd images on it.
It’ll work as well as this chick’s Prozac defense worked.
The Romney/Cantor argument about income inequality sweeps the nation.
Charming post by UD‘s buddy Carl Elliott on the burgeoning culture of ghosting (which has a tendency to shade into plagiarism) in the American university bureaucracy.
The trend is getting pretty embarrassing. On more than one occasion, UD has felt that various officials of her own university would lend more dignity to important events if they read their speeches beforehand, so that we didn’t have to watch them struggle through new words and phrases.
But there’s something Carl overlooks in his review of ghosted speeches and columns by university administrators and faculty, and that’s credit. If Carl had agreed (he’s notoriously burdened by conscience) “to lend my name to an article which the public relations office would ghostwrite, but which would be published under my byline,” he’d have been able to list this publication, and many others (he was asked to underwrite a series) in his annual report to the dean, on his cv, etc. Med school professors do this all the time – they take credit for research articles written by other people in and around their labs. Which is why high-profile faculty members of this sort will list, I don’t know, 7,000 publications on their cvs. An entire industry of ghosted books, ghosted articles, and ghosted speeches written by pharma-paid copywriters, public relations people, and grad students, churns away for these people.