I live for coffee. Love it, adore it, want to swim in it all day long. Which is why it hurts my feelings that my coffee hasn’t even made it onto this table:

In North America, I drink regular, unmessed with coffee with two sugars. And in Europe I drink cafe con leche (cafe au lait) which is NOT the equivalent of a Starbucks latte.

Dean Saxton, a student at the University of Arizona, is hanging out on campus with a “You Deserve Rape” sign. Because you’re dressed like a whore, of course, so you’re asking for it. The University says there’s nothing they can do, because he hasn’t violated the student code of conduct. I would suggest that maybe it’s time to rewrite the student code of conduct?

Question: what is preventing a group of normal students from accompanying this freak everywhere with signs saying, “You Deserve Rape, Dean Saxton”? They could also chant this phrase at him loudly. If the campus allows him to do it, I’m sure everybody else can do the same. And if the students are too toothless to do that, then whom can they blame for their toothlessness?

I don’t get the people who complain that the university isn’t doing anything about this while refusing to do anything about this either. If he bullies people, he needs to be bullied back, hard. Everybody who stands by impotently while he is doing this is complicit in his actions. The entire campus is to blame for this.

I have seen over 20 progressive sources ask this question:

Are Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokar Tsarnaev white?

Of course, the question always gets attributed to somebody else:

Of course they are. But, that question still lingers in the air as white Americans–and some others–try to reconcile “terrorism” with a sacred view of “American” identity as benign, safe, harmless, exception, and non-violent.

It is a very cute strategy. Ascribe the worries and preoccupations that plague you but that you are ashamed of to somebody else and then denounce them passionately as a way of cleansing yourself from what you consider shameful.

I’m sure nobody gives a rat’s ass but I will still mention that, in the country the Tsarnaevs are actually from, they would not be considered white and that this is one of the main underpinnings of the relationship between the Russian Federation and Chechnya right now. But it is useless to expect Americans en masse to recognize the existence of other countries. As a result, the completely idiotic analogies that aim to Americanize the Tsarnaevs beyond all recognition (as you can see in the linked post) will continue to be made.

So do you remember these budget cuts at our university that I’ve been writing about? We were told by our administration that each department had to prepare to cuts its budget by 25% within the next 3 years. We had to engage in a “budget cutting exercise” (that’s how it was called by the administration) explaining how we would cut our budgets to accommodate this serious drop in funding. We were supposed to cut 5% in the first year, 13% in the second year, and 7% in the third year.

Since about 96% of the budget of most of the departments in Humanities consists of salaries, you can imagine how the news of needing to cut 25% of the departmental budget was greeted. We had meetings and exchanged endless emails, trying to figure out how to rearrange our budgets in order to avoid firing people. Obviously, it was not possible to avoid layoffs altogether, which made the environment incredibly tense. Coupled with the end of the academic year when everybody is swamped with work and drowning in deadlines, this budget cutting exercise made everybody’s stress levels go through the roof. Academics are human, so it’s not surprising that people started to freak out.

And then the university’s President came to campus and spoke to  the academic community at length. A brave young academic (khm, khm) decided to ask him directly whether departments were really expected to cut 25% of their budgets. The President was so taken aback by the question that he looked completely disoriented. No, he said, things didn’t work like that and he had no idea who was spreading these rumors.

Two days later, a high-ranking bureaucrat at the university sent out an email, explaining that she was the one who had invented this “budget cutting exercise” and spread the rumors of 25% cuts to departmental budgets. The bureaucrat apologized for creating stress and explained that her goal was – just consider the utter cynicism of this obviously brain-dead person – t0 promote creativity among academics. Yes, creativity, that’s the word this person used. Apparently, she believes that people’s creativity needs to be bolstered by threats to take away their livelihood and destroy the university they have worked hard to create. No consideration had been given to the fact that some of the people whose creativity was boosted with these threats were older or not in their best health.

This creative exercise is the second broad initiative this particular bureaucrat has created. The first one consisted of sending profs to clean cemeteries against their will on a week-end. (See here and here.)

I’m sure you can draw all the conclusions you need for yourselves.

N. is sharing:

“I was considering looking for a job in academia after completing my PhD. But then I read this article where a professor was saying that, for an academic, his department becomes his second family. I have enough trouble as it is with my family of origin, so the idea of having yet another family on top of the one I already had was unappealing. So I went into the industry.”