Lawyers and JPs will have to ask women wearing burqas to show their faces before witnessing their signatures under tough new laws in New South Wales.

Asking a woman to show her face for a moment so you can verify her identity? This is a “tough” new law?

… UD‘s been busy today pulling together her course for Udemy’s Faculty Project. Her sister, the Morrissey fanatic, is here, helping her set up the camera and the mike and all of that. They’ve done a few brief practice videos, and these look pretty good.

At first they broadened the picture to include UD‘s deck and forest as background, but the light was weird. Plus there were all these cavorting squirrels. So now they’re working on a more interior shot.

… again.

UD has always found his 1997 essay, Cars and their Enemies, repulsive. A striking example of American entitlement, it’s also pointlessly flippant and nonchalantly incorrect.

Nowhere, in his paean to the car, does Wilson talk about any location in the world but the United States of America (occasionally he touches on Europe, in order to ridicule its system of trains). It seems not to occur to him that what the car does, it does to the globe, and so confining yourself to what it does to Washington DC and San Francisco is irresponsible.

Wilson loves the feel of the wind in his hair as he speeds through the countryside. He can’t get this feeling unless he’s alone, and only a car delivers absolute privacy.

These feelings are quintessentially American, and people who don’t like cars are unAmerican:

Cars are about privacy; critics say privacy is bad and prefer group effort. (Of course, one rarely meets these critics in groups. They seem to be too
busy rushing about being critics.) [No one says privacy is bad and insists on solidarity all the time… except … what? Socialists?] Cars are about autonomy; critics say that the pursuit of autonomy destroys community. [Ask someone who has pissed away large amounts of his life sitting in traffic how autonomous that made him feel. He’s stuck in traffic because like everyone else around him he has no option but to take the one feeder highway available to his job. Talk about personal liberty.] (Actually, cars allow people to select the kind of community in which they want to live.) [Just the opposite. Many people tend to live in very distant, less expensive exurbs because they figure they can commute a bit longer and save on the price of the house. They’re not choosing hours each day of car dependency.
This is simply the best they can do.] Cars are about speed; critics abhor the fatalities they think speed causes. (In fact, auto fatalities have been declining for decades, including after the 55-mile-per-hour national speed limit was repealed. Charles Lave suggests that this is because higher speed limits reduce the variance among cars in their rates of travel, thereby producing less passing and overtaking, two dangerous highway maneuvers.) [Critics abhor the fatalities cars cause. Note that Wilson says nothing here about injuries rather than fatalities.] Cars are about the joyous sensation of driving on beautiful country roads; critics take their joy from politics. [Does Wilson really think he’s making a point here? Is he being funny? He doesn’t care about the answer to these questions. He’s too insouciant. That’s been his tone throughout. I like cars, and you can fuck yourself.] (A great failing of the intellectual life of this country is that so much of it is centered in Manhattan, where one finds the highest concentration of nondrivers in the country.) Cars make possible Wal-Mart, Home Depot, the Price Club, and other ways of allowing people to shop for rockbottom prices; critics want people to spend their time gathering food at downtown shops (and paying the much higher prices that small stores occupying expensive land must charge).

Endless rockbottom-price exurbs full of people bumping around in cars all day — I’ve drunk the milk of Paradise.

Yale’s opening a campus in Singapore, and the move has generated an important discussion among faculty, students, and administration about the viability of liberal arts colleges in semi-democratic regimes.

One irony in the Yale-at-Singapore endeavor is the excitement its founders express about bringing back the imperiled liberal arts —

At a time when many American universities seem to be turning away from the liberal arts, Yale is reasserting their value and enduring importance.

— even though their bastion of the resurgent liberal arts will be located in a state no one would mistake for a liberal democracy.

As a commenter on one of the many articles in the Yale Daily News on the subject writes:

Our values include free speech and the open exchange of ideas – most Yalies would probably agree that much of the value of a university comes from allowing people to pursue and publish their ideas regardless of whether those ideas violate some sort of political orthodoxy. If Singapore will not let us put those values into practice, we have no business being there.

Other opponents of the idea (which is no longer merely an idea – it’s been approved and will happen in a couple of years) point out that Yale going there lends respectability to the regime; that, given the repressive laws on Singapore’s books, faculty members might under certain circumstances be arrested; and that in any case Yale’s prior strong commitment to human rights as well as academic and other forms of freedom makes it look, in this case, like a rank hypocrite. As the YDN asks in an editorial today:

What values are essential to what Yale stands for, and how will those values have to be compromised in Singapore?

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No university is an island; yet what Yale proposes does sound rather like an island… Or maybe the right image – in line with the history of universities – is that of a monastery, walled from the compromised culture around it. UD will admit she can’t quite see how the thing will actually function day to day… She envisions a kind of West Berlin surrounded by East Germany (she knows that Singapore isn’t repressive in the East Germany way). But, I mean, for instance, all universities generate adjacent streets of bars, etc. What will the rules of discourse and behavior be there? Isn’t government surveillance likely to be especially intense around the free-thinking Yale campus?

UD is pleased to see this language becoming boilerplate in writing about Ruth Simmons, whose approval of obscene compensation for people like Lloyd Blankfein will follow her all the days of her life. As Brown University’s new president is named, Simmons will rightly be remembered primarily in this way.

UD‘s buddy Carl Elliott is one of the few writers eloquent and informed and tenacious enough to worry any and all corrupt corners of the American scientific establishment – inside and outside of universities.

William Heisel, at Reporting on Health, notes that Slate magazine has pulled a recent piece Carl wrote for them because one of the people mentioned in the piece hired a lawyer to write a letter threatening a defamation suit.

Today, Slate retracted a well-researched commentary by Dr. Carl Elliott about the ethical controversy surrounding Celltex Therapeutics, a company marketing unlicensed stem cell injections, and the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB).

Celltex recently hired the editor of AJOB, Glenn McGee, and other bioethicists have charged that McGee has been running the journal while working for Celltex. Following the criticism, McGee announced today that he has quit Celltex.

The company works in a medical and ethical gray area, harvesting adult stem cells from fat and injecting them into other parts of the body without solid evidence that the procedures work. Bioethicist Leigh Turner at the University of Minnesota has suggested that the company’s work looks exactly like something that would prompt action by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

Heisel’s post contains links to all of the relevant documents, articles, and letters. He points out that a libel suit, given McGee’s public profile, would be almost impossible to win; but, as this case demonstrates, the threat is sometimes enough to chill speech.

… critical condition. They were driving to the airport, on their way to spring break, and were hit head-on by a person going the wrong way on the interstate.

…Binghamton, a part of the State University of New York system, has been cleaning up — and paying out millions — ever since [2009] . The president, provost, two top athletic officials and the men’s basketball head coach have been replaced amid a scandal that proved costly to both university’s reputation and its bottom line. … Binghamton, like any number of universities, gambled on too many high-risk high school recruits and transfer students with histories of arrests and academic problems.

UD proposes a moratorium on the word “gamble” in this context. They didn’t gamble. Gamble would mean that they were routinely irresponsible, childishly hoping against hope that all those rap sheets didn’t mean shit, pressing their eyes shut real tight and praying that everything would be okay… That maybe for the few seasons they’d have these guys (before they transferred or flunked out or went to the majors) the stars would align just so and they’d refrain from misbehavior, or not get caught, or something.

Massively paid, highly experienced coaches know perfectly well what’s up and what’s going to happen. As with conflict of interest at universities, it’s not about avoiding it; it’s about managing it. Bringing a certain rhetoric, a certain je ne sais quoi, a certain style, to it. What they’re hoping is that when the naughty thing happens they can get away with feigning surprise and heartbreak and insisting that the kid deserves a second chance. Think of it not as gambling, but as a kind of dance –

Do you love me (do you love me)
Now that I can dance
Watch me now

(work, work) now work it out baby

Work it.

The real point of the dance is to change the nature of the university. UD will never forget being at a Knight Commission meeting and listening to a professor from the University of the District of Columbia insist that coaches should be professors.

Lois DeFleur, [SUNY’s] president, retired. Mary Ann Swain, the provost, stepped down to return to teaching.

Etc. etc. The Binghamton scandal brought down the most important academic administrators and compromised quite a few professors. Why? Because like Clemson and Auburn SUNY was well on its way toward becoming a thorough sports factory and not a university. The coach dance is about corrupting professors to pass flunkies so they stay eligible, corrupting admissions committees so they’ll take in people who can’t do university level work, corrupting presidents so they’ll look the other way while paying the coach millions.

The only thing that got in the way of Binghamton’s devolution to Auburn was some surviving sense among some people on campus of what a university is.

Maybe SUNY’s coach will have better luck next time.

The pride of the University of Montana.

K-12 and university online for-profit education – always an incredibly trashy business model – is collapsing left and right as people and states begin to realize that their education taxes are going to the schools’ CEOs and advertising budgets, while the dupes the schools talk into enrolling are dropping out (“these [K-12] cyber schools might as well have a turnstile as their logo for the volume of withdrawals they experience”). Cyber university students get the added benefit of dropping out burdened with huge loan repayments.

Kaplan’s closing a Florida campus “that opened to great fanfare two years ago, but quickly lost students after a federal investigation raised questions about its admissions practices.”

Boohoo! But see that’s the business model there – you take in anyone with a pulse and syphon off all the tax dollars they come with and then … fuck them! You got their money. They can twist slowly in the wind.

You want to understand this business model? Read Glengarry Glen Ross.

Now investors are pissed because word’s out about the utterly shitty education on offer and how all the students are dropping out and all.

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But why are people so obtuse when it comes to understanding how markets work? You set up a tax-syphoning enterprise. You take most of the money that pours in for yourself and your investors, and you set aside some dollars for blitz advertising (you need a steady flow of money-bodies). Oh, and you devote a bit to greasing the hands of politicians.

With the seventy five cents or so left over you hire a teacher to handle hundreds of students per class… Maybe some faceless unqualified drudge in India… Much cheaper to outsource…

Oh, but here come headlines like EDUCATION ON THE CHEAP and articles predicting that “these companies probably won’t have much luck if they continue to offer shoddy educations while raking in profits.”

So now you’re kind of tinkering with the business model. Your basic philosophy – take the money and run – hasn’t altered, but there are many things you can do around the edges to look respectable enough to continue to attract investors and student dupes.

UD has confidence in you. This is only a temporary setback.

… the drug’s manufacturer.”

Yikes!

“No punitive action” will be taken.

Whew!

Wouldn’t want to disrupt the ghostwriting-for-pharma flow.

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

UPDATE: A reader notes: “The poster boy for conflict of interest in psychiatry, Charles Nemeroff, was first author on the article in question.”

Nemeroff! Always Nemeroff! Your name from hence immortal life shall have.

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

Why no punitive action? Because at the time Dwight L. Evans and Laszlo Gyulai put their name on a paper on which they did no work, there were no written rules at U Penn saying you shouldn’t put your name on a paper on which you did no work. A bioethics professor comments: “[S]tudents in grade school are taught the basic ethics of plagiarism.”

Remember: These are the sophisticated experts in whose hands you are placing your mental health.

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Droll comment thread at CHE:

This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode in which George was being fired by his boss for having sex with the cleaning lady on his desk. George’s paraphrased response: “Was that wrong? I gotta tell you, if I knew that wasn’t allowed here, I never would have done it.”

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.”