Search This Blog

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Sound Familiar?

Different administrators, same scam:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsIZAFOd-c

8 comments:

horns n' fins said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
horns n' fins said...

Thank you E.P., for posting this glimpse into the similar travails being experienced at another university. Here's my initial reactions to the video.

First, apparently the University of Minnesota Regents holds open forums at which faculty (and I assume other members of the university community) may speak directly to their Regents. Here at UT all links between faculty and the BOT were severed with the merger. Last year the BOT granted a faculty representative on three of their subcommittees and chair Summons announced to Faculty Senate a "dotted line" connection between faculty and the BOT. Many senators spoke for the need for a permanent, structural, direct line of communication between faculty and the BOT to chair Summons during her visit, but to no avail. Of course it is entirely possible the UM Regents don't listen to concerns of UM faculty any better than UT Trustees listened to the concerns of the UT faculty expressed in the recent evaluations of the President and Provosts - I have no way of knowing. Yet I was still impressed that UM faculty have some mechanism for directly addressing their Board.

Secondly I was impressed with Professor von Dassow who makes excellent points with facts, logic, and some biting wit. I think my favorite line is, "This is how to achieve excellence? This is how to guarantee an extraordinary undergraduate education? This is how we become one of the top three universities in the universe?" Apparently faculty in UM's College of Liberal Arts have to deal the same disconnect between the rhetoric and the actual behavior of their upper admin that we have here at UT.

And for the "haters" (as the young people say) who are about to pounce, she does provide facts and logical arguments, not just the occasional barb like the one I chose to repeat here. I encourage readers to view the video.

Anonymous said...

Actually, it doesn't sound familiar.

The prominent female voice coming from behind the podium around here unfortunately offers no brave and articulate critique of the shameful privatization of our own public university.

Nor does she speak out in the slightest against the Jacobs Administration's well-documented top-down orchestrated plan to dismantle our A&S College and disenfranchise its tenured professoriate.

Instead she utters nonsense and is instrumental in promoting the entire toxic neoliberal agenda seeping from the depths of The Dark Side at UT.

Unknown said...

More bullshit.

It’s so sad to see the predictable responses of liberal academics whenever anyone says something really true that threatens liberal orthodoxy – like my On Bullshit post, which has been quickly shuffled off the front page of this blog onto the back burner by more of the same old drivel.

Here’s the standard routine:

1) Most people are too busy in their narrow little worlds to even know anything has happened.

2) Most of those who do get wind of it simply ignore it. Academic freedom after all means the freedom to be completely ignorant.

3) Those who do take umbrage may try some condescending attempts at subversion: “Now, now – we all lose our way sometimes. Wouldn’t you rather just renounce your foolish errors and come back into the fold of the Great Marxist-Feminist-Postmodern Cult?”

4) When that doesn’t work: “HERESEY! HERESEY! RECANT OR RELINQUISH YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL TO THE HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION OF EXCOMMINICATION FROM THE HOLY MOTHER CHURCH OF MARXIST-FEMINIST-POSTMODERNISM AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS!

5) When THAT doesn’t work – resort to dead silence and simply get back to work spreading liberal disinformation and propaganda behind the scenes.

Very, very sad.

sir lawrence said...

ah, my dear tutor-
if truth is real, then we all must be automatons, and my opinions have diverged from yours only due to the non-linearity of chaos theory. i can live with that. how about you?

Anonymous said...

Do I sense that zoroxyz10 is feeling ignored? so sad.

Anonymous said...

Zerox. Your lumbering paper airplanes don't fly around here so you sink into your couch with your Budweiser and laptop and blame the weather.

There are medications readily available to reverse your sadness. I recommend medical marijuana. Talk to your physican. Buy a Bob Marley CD.

Unknown said...

ME feel ignored by YOU? Don't flatter yourself.

Chaos and dope smoking are for you guys - not me.

Bob Marley's music I can appreciate - but not his lifestyle or politics.

And I don't buy your pseudo-intellectual non-linearity bullshit either. Do you? Honestly?

See my reply to Sir Lawrence under the Dilbert Cartoon above (may not be posted yet).