Month: September 2020

“This has nothing to do with money.”

That claim was made by University of Oregon President Michael Schill during a Zoom press conference on September 24th, when the PAC-12 announced that it would indeed have a fall football season, after previously saying that it would not do so because of the pandemic.  

What occurred next in the press conference can only be described as bizarre:  Schill’s image on the Zoom screen became increasingly fuzzy, and then gradually transformed itself into a crystal-clear depiction of a proboscis monkey, the one with a huge nose.  Schill’s voice continued to be heard, but now the words were coming out of the monkey’s mouth.

What had just happened?  Emory University primatologist Natalie Savoir-Faire offered a compelling explanation:

“Many people believe that when a person utters a falsehood, his or her nose grows longer like Pinocchio’s.  There IS a grain of truth in that belief, since lying is associated with a surge of adrenaline, and adrenaline can stimulate cartilage growth in the nasal region. 

“In this case, however, President Schill apparently told a lie that was SO outrageously huge that the foundational molecular structure of his body was totally reconstituted, with an emphasis, once again, on the nose.  This is a rare event, to be sure, but it does occur once every decade or so.”

Will President Schill eventually return to his human form?

“He might, but as long as he sticks to his story about the money, it’s highly unlikely.  You can deceive the American public, but you can’t fool your own protoplasm.”

University Life is on hiatus this week.  Our lead reporters are on assignment in Washington, DC, covering the unfolding Greek tragicomedy surrounding the Supreme Court.  For interested readers, here are links to the two stories they have published in the Washington Post:

https://humoroutcasts.com/2020/mcconnell-promises-to-torch-reputation-of-u-s-senate-once-and-for-all/

https://humoroutcasts.com/2020/mitt-reaches-quota-resets-for-2021/

We are so proud of Gretchen and Hector for their fine work.  University Life will be back next week, bringing you the trenchant analysis that has won awards for higher education reporting from the National Football League, the Vatican, and Sha’nelle’s Nail Salon and Shoe Repair Shop.

Thanks so much for your continued support.  Spread the word.  

 

 

 

 

 

The University of Chicago’s English Department is getting considerable heat on social media for its decision to accept “only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies” during the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle (see departmental homepage).  

Relax, everyone.  Doctoral programs across the country expand and narrow their foci all the time.  A few notable examples:

—  The English Department at Harvard has not allowed its students to write doctoral dissertations on Shakespeare since 1998.  According to a senior faculty member there, “we had to face the fact that there’s absolutely nothing new that can be said about this man’s work.  We knew it was time to flush the toilet and lower the lid on his oeuvre when one of our students proposed a thesis entitled ‘Sneezing as a Transgressive Discourse in Shakespeare’s Minor Comedies’.  For the love of God, enough is enough.”

—  At the University of Mississippi, dissertations on William Faulkner are now verboten.  As the English Department Chair put it, “we simply got tired of students misspelling ‘Yoknapatawpha County’, Faulkner’s fictional kingdom.  It’s a shame, because the final Faulkner dissertation we approved in 2018 was an excellent piece of scholarship: ‘Unacknowledged Influences of Wakanda on Faulkner’s Early Work: Oversight, Racism, or Both?’.”

—  Dissertations on Iraq and Iran are no longer permitted in the Political Science Department at Duke University.  “Students were constantly getting the two countries mixed up,” says a professor who wished to remain anonymous.  “Admittedly, part of the problem was the notoriously loose supervision provided by our doctoral faculty.  Students could proceed down the wrong path with their proposal drafts for months before being informed of their error.  But, ultimately, it’s the student who has to take ownership of such a mistake.  We have been unsuccessful in getting tenured professors to monitor their advisees more closely.” 

—  Finally, there is the Chemistry Department at UCLA, which in 1991 began to require that all doctoral theses focus on hydrogen, and no other element.  In the words of the Department Chair, “hydrogen is the workhorse of our universe.  It’s the most abundant chemical substance by a large margin.  Literally, it’s Element #1.  We need to find out everything there is to know about this baby!  A couple of years ago, a student came up to me and wanted to write her dissertation on terbium.  Seriously?  TERBIUM???  Terbium is the 90-pound weakling of the elements.  I threw her out of my office.  Someone told me later that she ended up transferring to the Art History master’s program.  I hope that worked out for her.”

Stay strong, Chicago.  The trolls will soon find another target to torment — probably Texas A&M University, which plans to offer Esports as its only undergraduate major beginning in Fall 2021. 

No joke:  According to a recent article in the Lexington Herald Leader (Sept. 3rd online), the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky “was asked to sign a pre-typed resignation letter in exchange for a ‘generous offer’ that would immediately expire if he didn’t sign.”  The Dean refused to sign, and without further ado UK’s Provost proceeded to relieve him of his duties.  

The University of Kentucky now joins a growing number of higher education institutions that have engaged in personnel actions over the past few years that are bizarre enough to inspire true-crime podcasts.  Here are a couple of others that have quickly attained legendary status:

• In 2019, Vern Pontchartrain, a professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana, was promised a toaster oven by the Provost if he would resign as Chair of the Chemistry Department.  He accepted the offer:  “I had recently gotten divorced and was living in a studio apartment that had no kitchen appliances, not even a microwave.  The Provost must have known that, since he was sleeping with my former wife at the time. 

“It turns out that the toaster oven was defective, and one day it triggered a fire that burned down my apartment building while I was at school teaching an honors seminar on what makes Mountain Dew so ‘dewy’.  Fortunately, the only party injured in the blaze was Squawky, Mrs. Dinsmore’s pet parrot on the 6th floor.  He lost a wing and has a singed beak.  Now he spends about 7 hours a day screeching, ‘FIRE!!  FIRE!!  IT’S A F**KING FIRE!’

“I’m suing the University on the grounds that they should have known that a toaster oven is likely to be deeply flawed if it’s purchased from a street vendor in Indianapolis whose entire inventory is housed in a baby carriage.”

• When University of Nebraska Psychology professor Everett Fingerling walked out the front door of his home to go to work on the morning of October 9, 2018, he had no idea that three campus police officers were crouching beside his car, out of sight.  They apprehended Fingerling, put a burlap sack over his head, and drove him to Osceola, a town 70 miles away.  Once there, they deposited him in a half-filled kale-chip silo on a cabbage farm.   

Nebraska’s Provost had ordered the abduction, claiming that conventional procedures for firing a poorly performing tenured professor were unduly cumbersome and consumed an excessive amount of his time in meetings with faculty committees, the HR department, and University counsel. 

It took Fingerling eight months, but he eventually ate his way out of the silo.  (“Now I’ve got the cleanest colon in Lancaster County, Nebraska!  Not a polyp anywhere.  Go ahead and take a look!”)  The Provost was arrested and convicted of “conspiring to assault a senior faculty member with trendy roughage.”  He was sentenced to three years of working the grill at a Texas Roadhouse restaurant in Omaha during the day, while confined to a halfway house for ex-offenders at night. 

Sometimes, justice does prevail.   

 

Like many scholarly groups during the pandemic, the American Historical Association (AHA) has cancelled its annual face-to-face convention, which had been scheduled for January 7-10, 2021 in Seattle. 

What is distinctive about the AHA decision is the seismic shift it has precipitated in the way historians view their discipline, a shift that will reshape future AHA meetings.  

According to AHA President-elect Jacqueline Jones of the University of Texas (Austin), “a ‘Eureka’ moment occurred as we deliberated the cancellation.  For the most part, our field focuses on the activities of people who are long dead.  Do we really need to come together in person every year to discuss the actions of individuals who can’t be present?  I don’t think so.  Consider the panel that was held at last year’s convention on the impact of the 1789 Women’s March on Versailles on the French Revolution.  None of the women who participated in the march are still alive, so we had no representatives from that group who could speak their truth in the session.  Not even a grandchild or great-grandchild was available.  It was embarrassing!

“And don’t get me started on sessions that address any aspect of the Roman Empire.  Let’s take a quick scan of some of the emperors from that era:

• Aurelian:   dead
• Constantine the Great:  deceased
• Romulus Augustulus:  like, TOTALLY dead
• Justinian I:   teaspoonful of dust
• Basil II:   half of one tooth (a molar) remains; otherwise, dust

“You get the picture?  There’s simply no justification for cheek-by-jowl gatherings of historians to pontificate about these guys when Instagram and TikTok are available.  

“We’re not political scientists.  They can go to a convention and at least talk about the living, and maybe even invite some of them to show up.  Who wouldn’t want to see Mitch McConnell and Yale superstar Robert Dahl debate the relevance of post-modernist gun-control legislation to American democracy in the 21st century?  Oops, scratch that.  Dahl died in 2014.  But you see what I’m sayin’, right?”

NOTE:  Beginning with its 2022 conference in New Orleans, the AHA annual meeting will include no academically oriented sessions — paper, panel, or otherwise.  Conference activities, all involving LIVE participants, will include bowling, hot tub karaoke, and beginners’ workshops in Cajun cooking and beignet dusting.  The Job Fair will be held from noon to 12:20 pm on the second day of the convention in the alcove housing the ice and soda machines on the 14th floor of the Ritz Carlton Hotel.  Please bring a hard copy of your CV, notarized summaries of student evaluations of your courses over the past three years, and a harmonica.  The New Books Exhibit, sponsored by Coursera, will occupy the counter space to the left of the cardboard divider at the Concierge Desk in the Main Lobby.       

In the event the host city is submerged at the end of 2021 due to aggressive glacial melting, the conference will take place at Henderson’s Petting Zoo in Enosburg Falls, Vermont.