… but it’s rare, and therefore newsworthy, when it happens during the summer.

[A] University of Idaho senior died of respiratory arrest, apparently due to alcohol poisoning after a night of drinking to celebrate his 21st birthday.

Emergency personnel responded to a report of an unconscious man at Sigma Nu fraternity at 2:42 a.m. Tuesday. They located Benjamin Harris of Burley on the third floor and began CPR. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Gritman Medical Center.

Assistant Police Chief David Duke says Harris may have had as many as 15 shots in two-and-a-half hours as he celebrated his birthday Monday night…

UD looked up why it is that you can stop breathing when you drink too much. Alcohol depresses everything, including the central nervous system. Drink enough, and you’ll simply be too weak to breathe. Eventually you’ll go into heart failure.

… very much enjoying the Vancouver Sun’s analyses of the Gibson Tapes.

The Assemblée Nationale passes the burqa ban.

From CNN:

The vote was 335 to 1, with 339 lawmakers not voting. [Why would you not vote?]

… French people back the ban by a margin of more than four to one, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found in a survey this spring.

Some 82 percent of people polled approved of a ban, while 17 percent disapproved. That was the widest support the Washington-based think tank found in any of the five countries it surveyed.

Clear majorities also backed burqa bans in Germany, Britain and Spain, while two out of three Americans opposed it, the survey found.

… The bill envisions a fine of 150 euros ($190) and/or a citizenship course as punishment for wearing a face-covering veil.

Forcing a woman to wear a niqab or a burqa would be punishable by a year in prison or a 15,000-euro ($19,000) fine, the government said, calling it “a new form of enslavement that the republic cannot accept on its soil.”

The measure would take effect six months after passage, giving authorities time to try to persuade women who veil themselves voluntarily to stop…

Amnesty International cautions that some women completely annihilate their public existence “as an expression of their identity.”

A conundrum worthy of Jacques Derrida.

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Update: One advantage of all the attention the burqa has been getting lately: Thoughtful feminists are revisiting the issue. Here’s an example, from a blog written by a group of British feminists. One of the bloggers who has until now opposed burqa bans notes that

Mona Eltahawy’s comments have really given me pause for thought as a feminist.

She’s particularly responsive to these comments from Eltahawy:

I often tell (feminists) that what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything. We’re talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I’m really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women’s right to do this, because it’s basically the only kind of “right” that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.

She’s president, as the New York Times puts it this morning, “of the entire University of Michigan.” Yet in the years I’ve kept this blog, I’ve never known her to issue a direct statement, let alone appear in public… I mean, she must appear in public… convocations and all… But she’s so withdrawn that UD figures she’s either very shy or very queenly…

And frankly, given that university’s problems – many of them involving Rich Rodriguez, and therefore of her making – it comes off as regal rather than inhibited when Coleman says nothing, or appoints one of her mouthpieces, to deal with the latest accusations against him and his program.

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

Now she’s getting all of this attention from the world’s newspaper of record because of her corporate directorships – the Johnson and Johnson one in particular, where, in exchange for attending a few meetings, she gets close to $250,000 a year – and yet again she makes one of her serfs do the talking.

Responding to questions on Ms. Coleman’s behalf Monday, Kelly E. Cunninghan, a spokeswoman for the university, said the president satisfies policy by disclosing her outside work.

Who says? I mean, who says that’s enough?

The situation calls for transparency, which Michigan has, [one expert] said, and a specific policy and approval process which do not appear to exist. Ms. Coleman is required to report her outside work to a vice president, who works for her.

“Disclosure is a step down and not equal to approval,” [Thomas] Donaldson said. “I think it’s important in an instance like this where there’s a possible conflict of interest for a responsible group to say yes, to think about it, and not just have it reported to them.”

It will be interesting to know President Coleman’s response to this point as soon as she designates a courtier to speak on her behalf.

Meanwhile, the Times notes the prevailing hypocrisy:

The University of Michigan medical school became the first in the nation last month to say it would refuse any funding from drug companies for its continuing medical education classes. The decision could cost it as much as $1 million a year, but it was worth it, the medical school dean said, for education to be free from potential bias.

At the same time, Mary Sue Coleman, president of the entire University of Michigan, sits on the board of directors for the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson…

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Update: Coleman comments on the issue:

I think it’s my duty to be out there understanding what the commercial world is doing and I think if it perfectly aligns with what we do in terms of our engagement in economic development, I think it’s important. …I don’t treat patients, I’m not an MBA, I have no control over any interactions or anything…

Why does Johnson and Johnson pay President Coleman $200,000 a year to understand the commercial world? She doesn’t do anything there, as she notes. Since she’s basically there to learn, why isn’t Coleman paying Johnson and Johnson?

Tuli Kupferberg has died. I will never get the Fugs singing the Nothing song out of my mind. I never want to.

His Wikipedia page.

… was found dead this morning, in his lab.

College of Engeering professor and Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Chairman Francesco Cerrina was found dead in a laboratory on the fifth floor of the Photonics Center Monday morning, Boston University spokesman Colin Riley said.

… The Boston Police Department arrived at the scene, but after investigation have declined to take the case on themselves.

BPD Sergeant William Ridge said that BPD would only take on the case if there were a chance that it was homicide.

“They don’t think there is any foul play,” Ridge said, adding police were not sure about the cause of death.

“[This] leaves it up to accident or suicide,” Ridge said.

Or natural causes.

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More information here.

… in Uganda to do relief work has been killed in the terrorist attack there.

As UD anticipated, businessmen (well, one… there will be others) are stepping up to handle the fines burqa-wearing women in France – or their husbands – will soon have to pay.

UD anticipated that the Saudi government would be the first to make such a move, and she continues to hope that it will, because however rich one businessman is, he can never hope to compete with the endless resources of a country.

There is no question in UD‘s mind that, what with the growing popularity of burqas in Europe, and the very great need of countries like France for revenue, this is a fiscal marriage made in heaven. If UD were debating the ban in the National Assembly right now, she would urge lawmakers to designate the money for use in the education of young women.

She would also urge fervent American defenders of the burqa to make a contribution. Talk is easy.

Ain’t gettin’ anything out of her, though.

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Update:

First line of Radio France International’s coverage:

The burqa, the cloth bag which some Muslim men find it reasonable to keep their women inside, is facing a ban here in France.

Don’t mess with the big boys.

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UD thanks Frank for the link.

Plus it comes from the student newspaper. Multimillion-dollar enterprises don’t care about student newspapers.

Still. It’s worth noting the intensity of disgust on the part of a sports writer for the University of Georgia paper.

Thus far, seven football players and the highest-ranking athletic department executive have been arrested this off-season. In 2008, eight players were arrested.

Thus far. We’re only talking off-season. These guys haven’t even put their cleats on yet.

These scholarship athletes pay nothing to attend classes here. They merely ride the coattails of being able to play a game and milk it for all its worth.

Lose the mixed metaphor. Otherwise, you’re on a roll.

As a fourth-generation Georgia student and an ardent supporter of the Bulldogs, it pains me to see shame brought to this university.

But I would rather see the team miss a bowl game than this disgraceful parade in handcuffs.

Because at least then something would have been changed for the better.

Here’s your problem. Michael Adams. Your president is deacon of the First Church of Jocksniffers. Your president was first runner-up in the Miss Head of the NCAA pageant. You are screwed.

… of a new school.

UD has already blogged about Moscow’s new suicidal metro stop. Now, riders respond to the station.

Vladimir Supkin, a professor of Russian literature at the International University in Moscow, says he is completely against the murals.

He says the station is not a happy one. He says when he saw it, he was very scared because the station isn’t light, it’s very dark. He says the murals aren’t calming and that they are very strange, and he adds that they put people in very bad moods.

Supkin goes on to say that he doesn’t understand why the author was even chosen to be the face of the new station.

He says that first of all, people don’t read as much as they used to and people know his name, but they don’t read his novels. He says he thinks that Dostoevsky isn’t a very popular author now and that people like to read Tolstoy more.

With Tolstoy you get a choice: Ivan Ilych on his deathbed or Anna Karenina at the train station.

PowerPoint Karaoke, which UD has covered on this blog in the past, moves to Canada.

A Folger librarian describes the British dealer in stolen goods who showed up at the Shakespeare library in Washington in 2008 with a First Folio and asked that the staff authenticate it.

The startled staff instead called the FBI and — as Raymond Scott settles in to his prison cell – the rest is silence.

Background here.

That’s Rep. Lois Kolkhorst of Texas, where the first consideration in choosing a university is the football team.

Texas has a new law that will put online a school’s attendance costs, plus published work, syllabi, cvs, and salaries of all professors at public universities in the state. It had bipartisan support.

The AAUP isn’t happy.

… The Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors requested a repeal of the law in its June newsletter. The group said the law is an unfunded mandate that would have a chilling effect on classroom discussion of controversial subjects.

If professors are required to post detailed descriptions of class material online, those opposed to the discussion topics would be able to target specific classes and professors, the association said.

“As far as any of us can tell, this is an attempt by cultural conservatives to identify course content they might view as undesirable, and is thus clearly an attack upon academic freedom,” a previous newsletter said.

Murray Leaf, speaker of the Faculty Senate at the University of Texas at Dallas, said that despite the bill’s portrayal as a measure promoting transparency, it displays “an insulting mistrust of higher education faculty.”

“Faculty in the United States decide the curriculum,” Leaf said. “We are largely autonomous. The people behind this bill are opposed to that and are trying to undermine it.”

A law requiring professors to post their résumés online suggests that they’re not qualified to teach their classes. And the higher education system depends on peer review by other educators, which is a better method for judging professors’ qualifications than review by the general public, Leaf said.

“The law really isn’t primarily about giving students better information, but about giving people who want to attack higher education better information,” he said. “We’re not against transparency. We’re against being attacked by our enemies.”…

This isn’t a very good argument. Professors should be fine with giving attackers better information, shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t that make the attack better informed, and therefore perhaps fairer? Putting this in terms of “our enemies” makes professors sound like Richard Nixon.