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Jacobs' arrogance is astonishing
It's the same old, same old at UT
. . . . Either Jacobs is misleading the media or he has misled the Board of Trustees. President Jacobs objected to "the general tone" of the UT-AAUP Newsletter. Many persons on this campus object to the "general tone" of the Jacobs Administration. During his tenure as President, he has introduced an administrative culture of fear and intimidation. . . . A point of logic must be raised here, with all respect to UT AAUP, the conclusions that President Jacobs has (1) misled the media and (2) the Board of Trustees are not mutually exclusive. Both would seem likely given his considerable talent at spinning "visions." |
14 comments:
1) When you don't know what you are doing or where you need to go, you plan.
2) Plans are only as good as the first day they are executed.
3) Nobody can plan for the ingenuity of fools!
You've all seen this, I presume:
http://www.toledoblade.com/Education/2012/11/26/UT-officials-say-13M-deficit-develops-in-budget.html
Reading the article, one gets the sense that these guys just don't know what they're doing.
Soon to be published:
From Bad Stewardship to Desperate Innovation: Riding the Downward Spiral at the University of Toledo, 2006-2012. New York: Routledge
Re Shortfall. Check out the Union's response, which was to publish an independent auditor's assessment of UT's financial state and bemoan the Jacob's administrations all too 'sky is falling' reporting to the Trustees (a new contract is also being negotiated - far be it for me, however, to suggest Jacobs might be trying to leverage shortfalls into union concessions). Also, check out the latest Faculty Senate transcript, whenever it comes out, where the shortfall was challenged in a recent meeting. It has also been suggested that the alleged "shortfall" is suspiciously similar to the cost of a recent Medical College project - and the conspiracy minded are speculating that Jacobs channeled funds yet again from the academic side to the medical side of campus.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/whistle-blower-profit-college-operator-allegedly-inflates-job/story?id=17810902#.ULOz_oc1lLo
oMany Ohio universities got very solid freshman classes this fall. BG got its fourth largest freshman class ever and at the same time they increased their average GPA and test scores. UT says they increased GPA and test scores and that's one reason the freshman class was smaller. BG actually published their freshman scores (Blade article), but I have never seen any numbers on UT's class. Considering it costs about $1,000 less in tuition to attend UT than BG, this is very confusing unless we are talking about incompetence.
"Good to see the football team with a least three different football helmets though....I am sure looking "cool" will help the school with its financial trouble"
This comment says it all!
Reading the comments here and at the Blade and talking to people around campus, it's clearly not just some weird minority who think Jacobs and his friends are bad for UT. I wish we could translate this sentiment into action somehow.
Perhaps this will help.
Once again it’s time to play – Who Do You Think You’re Kidding?
And so without further ado, let us proceed with today’s further exploration into academic absurdity in the form of an exotic representative postmodern theoretical “text” entitled “Law In Abandon: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Critical Study of Law.”
[Editor’s sotto voce aside: Abandon indeed – as in abandon all reason, abandon ship, abandon all hope ye who enter here…]
If you are already thinking to yourself, “This sounds like just the sort of ludicrous bullshit we might expect to hear from Dr. Previous” – well then, as former SNL great Phil Hartman doing his best Ed McMahon would say, “You are Co-RECT, sir!” Give yourself a pat on the back for your astute BS detection and identification skills.
Time and space preclude the possibility of a full scale evisceration and postmortem autopsy here of the pretentious pseudo-intellectual exertions of Dr. Previous. But we will nonetheless post a few choice morsels for the benefit of the curious and truly adventurous.
Be sure to remain fully protected by your BS Hazmat suits and respirators while reading these excerpts – for the bullshit is about to hit the proverbial fan with reckless… abandon. Everyone ready? Okay then. Let the games begin.
LAW IN ABANDON: JEAN-LUC NANCY AND THE CRITICAL STUDY OF LAW – By Dr. B. S. Previous, PhD. (Yes, his initials really are BS)
Actual journal abstract: “The ‘constitutive theory’ of law is in question in this essay. Where the task of external criticism is frequently handed to constitutive theorists of various sorts who engage in the description of ‘historical a priori’ structures that inform the subjects of law, Jean-Luc Nancy’s work leads to the possibility that at the historical a priori is a ‘site of abandonment’.”
[Oh dear. We don’t suppose there might be any possibility the “historical ‘a priori’ structures” that inform Dr. Previous’s position at the university might become a “site of abandonment” anytime soon. (Sigh!) Very well then. Blather on if you must, O Oracle of the Mystic East… – Ed.]
“As he (Nancy) uses it, ‘abandonment’ evokes the banishment of being – the singular, shared, openness of being, the resistance to identity that freedom designates – and at the same time evokes abundance [of bullshit – Ed.]. Abandonment is ‘the other of law which constitutes the law’.”
[Good heavens! The “banishment of being and the resistance to identity that freedom designates” you say?? “Abandonment is the ‘other’ of law which constitutes the law”? Is that anything like the (m)other-in-law of all stupidity? Pray do tell – unless of course you have already abandoned all your senses and banished your very own being… – Ed.]
“This essay addresses the importance [utter irrelevance – Ed.] of these claims [incoherent delusions – Ed.] for contemporary critical legal thought [Foucauldian crack smoking – Ed.] and concludes that by adopting a perspective informed by this sense of abandonment we approach a different articulation of law, community, and life.”
And further on… ”For Nancy, this means that we should examine abandonment at the heart of community – the presence/absence that characterizes our being-with…”
[This sort of unmitigated drivel (and indeed much, much worse) goes on for a full 25 pages. We can only hope Dr. Previous will, at his very earliest convenience, have the merciful decency to adopt his own “perspective informed by this sense of abandonment” with respect to his own “being” at the university – thus making the absence of his presence blissfully and forever after present… by way of his absence… which would itself thereby be present… his absence, that is… well, you get the idea. – Ed.]
A cursory search for the complete works of Dr. Previous on Google Scholar produced a total of only two such “transgressive” published articles (not including one reprint) and we can only hope that’s all (s)he wrote.
ICE is UT's attempt at imitiating CUNY's "Pathways" -
http://www.qc.cuny.edu/Academics/GenEd/Faculty/Pages/Pathways.aspx
Look at George Will's oped in the Washington Post this morning about the loss of freedom of speech on US campuses. UT suffers as well.
Revealing that Will's article omitted Ward Churchill's termination at the University of Colorado (from a tenured position, no less). Guess firing someone who says something Will doesn't like is okay.
The absence/presence of Heidegger...
Then of course there is the matter of the “absence/presence” of Heidegger’s culpability as a Nazi sympathizer and his unconscionable and opportunistic “abandonment” of his Jewish academic colleagues – (the subsequent effusive but unconvincing protestations of his innocence, by his dutiful student, sycophant and paramour Hannah Arendt – and his resultant eventual, if tacit, exoneration by the leftist intelligentsia notwithstanding).
If a towering (albeit deluded and misguided) intellect like Heidegger can be exonerated of Nazi complicity for the sake of ideological expediency, then what of the common German citizen during the Nazi era, who did not possess the tremendous academic privileges, profound learning and supposed all-seeing “mystical philosophical insights” of Heidegger?
If Heidegger failed to get it right – he who of all people should have presumably possessed the unerring moral compass and intellectual equipment necessary to make him immune to ideological error, thus allowing him to clearly and presciently perceive the dangers and evils of Nazi Fascism – how then are we justified in self-righteously and indignantly pointing our fingers at the entire German People and crying out – “J’accuse!”?
Last year Jacobs & company unilaterally and ham-handedly, over the wide-spread protest of faculty, decided to break up the colleges and put them back together like so many legos and tinker toys. Out of it came the behemoth Judith Herb College of Education, Health Science and Human Services. It was supposed to be good for the departments randomly thrown together to "enjoy synergism" while other departments and colleges were chopped down and isolated so that they could benefit from specialization. Now I heard it is pretty much a done deal for this college to be dismantled again? Tell me, how can even the emperor deny that he is not wearing any clothes? These folks do not know what they are doing and are destroying our once fine university.
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