Feb
11
2010

Stopping Payment On the Reality Check

  • In my earlier too-long post about Nancy Thomas and UNH's "Democracy Initiative", I quoted this paragraph from her Inside Higher Ed article that claimed a need to suppress provocative and impolite tactics used by conservative university students:
    We need to be clear about what these acts [by conservative students] are: attention-seeking tactics that intimidate faculty, students, and guest speakers, distort facts, reduce public issues to simplistic sound-bites, and inhibit the thoughtful exchange of ideas and deliberation, both in and out of the classroom. The students named in the Times are not trying to offset liberal bias - they are trying to prevent learning and chill, if not stop, civil discourse.
    By odd coincidence, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education today has an account of an actual attempt to prevent discourse by a guest speaker at UC Irvine earlier in the week.
    On Monday, a few dozen people disrupted a speech by Michael Oren, Israel's Ambassador to the United States, who was speaking at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), in the UCI Student Center for a public lecture on "U.S. Israel Relations from a Political and Personal Perspective." The lecture was sponsored by 10 campus bodies including the Department of Political Science and the School of Law, as well as the Consulate General of Israel and three other off-campus bodies.
    Indications are the perpetrators of the disuption were not local right-wing knuckle-draggers, but UCI's Muslim Student Union. Ambassador Oren refused to be suppressed, calmly waiting out the hecklers. Indications are that the disruptors might face disciplinary action from UCI, as well as criminal charges. Unlike Ms. Thomas's fantasies, actual disruptions against civil discourse in academe (a) aren't typically perpetrated by conservatives and (b) can be well-handled by existing procedures.

  • When I saw the word hyrdofracking, I was pretty sure it referred to some Cylon torture technique on Battlestar Galactica. ("We'll see if Adama doesn't talk after a few sessions in the Hyrdrofracking Chamber!") But it's a real word. (Via University Diarist.)

  • This sounds like one of those improv stunts where the performers take random shouted suggestions from the audience and build a skit around. Except in this case, they built …
    Bowlingual: iPhone app translates what your dog barks, posts it to Twitter
    Up next: an iPhone app that monitors your blood pressure, detects when you're irritated, and automatically composes a standard blog post ridiculing whatever's in your web browser window. (Via Granite Geek.)