So our university’s president is retiring. I don’t know what the story is but he has been battling the Board of Trustees for at least a year. Maybe they finally managed to push him out.

I know it’s fashionable to despise this president (I don’t want any names here, people) but I like him. Yes, he is no scholar and his thesis (or probably both theses) was plagiarized. But in the current environment a state university in a perennially broke state cannot afford a president who is a scholar. We need a politician and a hustler. And this president was both. He fought like an animal in the state legislature for every penny the state owed us.

He carried us with almost no losses through the economic crisis that toppled educational giants. We were hiring massively for tenure-track positions just as everybody else was freezing tenure lines and adjunctifying. So yes, he doesn’t really have a doctoral thesis. But the 150+ scholars our university hired in the toughest economy for a long time all do. As Cornell cut professor’s phone lined and fired people in absentia and Yale made adjuncts pay for photocopies of class material, at our university we continued to travel to conferences and expand our TT faculty.

Given that the Chancellor we recently hired is the kind of person who thinks it’s a good idea to quote Lean In to scholars and students, I fear our new president might also be a disappointment.

Once again: we can discuss this without any names or addresses.

OK, I can’t help myself. I just need to share this joke that seems to have been made about Weiner even though it’s older than he is.

A man walks into a doctor’s office, unzips his pants, and plops his penis onto the doctor’s table.

“Does it hurt?” the doctor asks.

“No.”

“Does it itch?”

“No.”

“Is it too small?”

“No.”

“Too big?”

“No.”

“Then what???” the doctor finally explodes.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” the man asks wistfully.

Sorry, this is the last one and I have to run. But I couldn’t fail to share it because it’s too good:

 You can’t believe him, and he’s also shown monumentally bad judgment. How can you trust his judgment as a mayor? I think that the problems that Anthony Weiner — like Eliot Spitzer — exhibited while in office, and after, pose fundamental problems to the serious governance of New York. They both exhibit a fundamental dishonesty, they both lied repeatedly, and show monumental errors of judgment.

So Weiner exhibited something monumental. I’m suspecting the author of the quote has seen the sexting pictures and is trying to tell us something about them.

OMG, this is getting really bizarre. I have never seen such a collection of completely idiotic posts as the one that has been provoked by the Weiner scandal. They just come one after another in an unrelenting flow of complete and utter idiocy:

One thing I find a bit weird in our DIVORCE IS EVIL CULTURE is how quick we are, as a culture, to think that a spouse sticking with cad of whatever type is somehow doing it wrong.

Capital letters, no less. In the meanwhile, 62% of all marriages end in divorce in this country, but who cares as long as a blogger has a strawman to pursue?

What is it about photos of an ageing politician’s lonely penis that makes people lose the last shreds of rationality?

I’m now kind of wishing that my blogroll had not been repaired because all it is regaling me with today is evidence that nothing much has changed in the minds of the sex-deprived puritans since the times of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

 I don’t need or want my political leaders to be monogamous; I don’t care if they are.  But I do want to know if they can be trusted.  When they say what they intend to do, we as voters often feel like we’re going to be played for suckers by unscrupulous self-servers who run for office largely for personal self-aggrandizement.  Because we usually are.  But one really material way to know if that’s what’s going to happen is whether the politician in question remains true to the people who they know best and have the longest, closest relationship with.  That’s often their spouses.  I don’t care that they promise monogamy, but if they do and ignore that promise, I hold it against them.

Alternatively, you could grow up, work on your own sexual fulfillment, and resolve your Oedipal issues. Anybody over the age of twelve should have the intelligence to realize that this emotional investment into the sex lives of authority figures is nothing but an echo of a childhood trauma created by the realization that Mommy and Daddy do secret things in the bedroom that one is excluded from.

The Old Reader was down for 3 days and that means I have been separated from my newsfeed. As a result, I missed the new round of Weiner sexting drama and can’t now even figure out what the following attack of prissiness is about:

Because we’re still all pretending that this is a “sex scandal” and carefully avoiding identifying Weiner as a predator.

Which is also why Pelosi can say something truly incredible like “they don’t even realize, they don’t have a clue.” Because of course predators realize that what they’re doing is disrespectful of women. That’s kind of the whole point.

Why is Weiner a predator rather than a really sad loser who tried to do what in this country people are not supposed to be doing, namely, have both a career and at least a semblance of a sex life? Does anybody know what happened to provoke all this outrage? (Other than Weiner sending messages, I mean.)