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Friday, October 06, 2006
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A Few More Notes From the Roundtable Should have added to that list of obligations to one's university the administrative side, which can involve working on formulating a new honors course in art, chairing awards committees, applying for faculty/student research money from the university and then working with the awardees on their projects (to take a few examples from the sort of thing UD's doing lately), and many other non-teaching and non-research activities.... Back to the roundtable, which I should say at this point, now that it's over, was terrific -- I learned a great deal about, well, university governance, as well as free speech issues, trustee responsibilities, and curricular debates. I was impressed by the whole thing -- ACTA put on a great conference. They even happily fed me when I showed up for lunch inexcusably late, having fled back to my hotel to do some blogging for most of the lunch hour. It did get weird at points, though. Into this rather stuffy crowd, for instance, stepped a professor from Hamilton College who gave a very loud speech which kept getting louder and louder... and more obscene. He read from the way graphic work of naughty Annie Sprinkle, whose guest appearance at his college, though it happened rather a long time ago, still infuriates him. This speaker, and Candace de Russy, and Allan Dershowitz, took, UD thought, quite the wrong rhetorical and emotional approach to the event. They were hot, while the setting and subject seem to me to have called for cold. Like the professor from Hamilton, Dershowitz got all dirty in his talk, showing us a blown-up cartoon of himself masturbating over some dead Arab bodies... the work of one of his enemies... Although he's a very smart person, he's also, like de Russy, an ideologue; he's vulgar and narcissistic and insistent about his issues. He thinks his vile endless fights with an ideologue on the other side of some divide or other are representative of the way things are in academia these days, whereas they're only representative of what happens when you put two foolish people together and let them scream at each other. |