Month: April 2021

In early April, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an executive order prohibiting public colleges in the state from requiring students to get vaccinated for COVID-19 (Texas Tribune online, April 9th).  

Yesterday, the plot thickened. 

The Governor has now issued a second executive order, which mandates that every student attending a public college in Texas “must carry a handgun while on campus.” 

“It just makes sense,” Abbott insisted in an Associated Press interview.  “People who contract the COVID virus almost always become rabid within three days, foaming at the mouth like a freshly poured glass of Guinness Stout.  What are you supposed to do if you encounter a raving, infected student as you walk across the school quad — just say hello and let him bite your neck in half?  I don’t think so.  What you do is shoot the poor bastard between the eyes.  It puts the diseased victim out of his misery, and it saves your ass.  

“Killing with compassion is much safer than taking some goddamned Communist vaccine that’ll screw up your genetic code, causing your future children to look like furry tadpoles with five nostrils and elbows where their eye sockets should be.

“In Texas, we’re all about keeping kids safe.”

Governor, we’ll tip our Stetsons to that sentiment any day. 

TRUE FACT:  In the aftermath of its worst cheating scandal in decades, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point is terminating a program that gave a second chance to cadets who violated the school’s honor code.  Expulsion is now back on the table after the first offense.  (New York Times online, April 16th)

Among those who disagree with this decision, perhaps the most surprising is Vice Admiral Sean Buck, Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.  

“This action sends exactly the wrong message,” claims Buck, whose school jettisoned its honor code over a decade ago.  “Deception, cheating, deceit, and duplicity win wars.  Did Eisenhower provide the Nazis with the Allies’ plans to invade Normandy on D-Day?  No, he did not.  Did Truman call Hirohito and say, ‘Mr. Emperor, tell your countrymen to get out the charcoal and toss a few hot dogs on the grill, because tomorrow there will be some major-league barbecuing going on in Hiroshima’?  HELL, NO!

“If the soldiers of tomorrow don’t learn to lie and dissemble while they’re in school, when ARE they supposed to learn these crucial skills — on the battlefield, with their throat exposed to the business end of an enemy’s bayonet, and it’s too late? 

“I’m sick and tired of all the bulls**t I hear nowadays about how important it is to be honest and ‘transparent’.  ‘Transparent’, my ass!  You don’t defeat the Taliban by sending them a text message with the date and time of your next drone attack on a stronghold in Helmand province.

“West Point, I’m begging you.  Please abandon this misguided endeavor.  Do the right thing: consign your honor code to the dustbin of history, where it belongs.  Cheating 101 should be a required course at your institution.  Let’s get back to winning some wars.”

 

 

The 40 folding chairs are arranged in neat rows in the Parish Room of St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church in downtown Boston, near Government Center.  Nearly all of them are filled on this Wednesday evening at 7:30 pm by men and women in sharp, professional, business attire.  No one looks even the slightest bit scruffy.

A man, probably in his late 40s, stands up and walks to the lectern at the front of the room.  

“Hi, my name is Frank, and I’m…..I’m a…..I’m a rankings addict.”

“Welcome, Frank,” the other attendees respond warmly. 

This is the weekly meeting of Rankings Anonymous (RA), a loosely organized group of high-level enrollment and media-relations administrators from colleges and universities throughout the greater Boston area.

Every one of them is addicted to institutional rankings. 

Frank (not his real name) continues.  “Four months ago I hit bottom.  Hell, I hit the sub-basement of bottom.  We had just published an ad in The Chronicle of Higher Education bragging that Toilet Studies Quarterly had ranked us #3 in New England in enrolling 1st-generation college students from public high schools that lack indoor plumbing.  I was so ashamed.  When I got home that night, not even the dog would look at me.  He can smell when I’ve been ranking.”

“Amen, brother,” comes the reply from several in the audience.  

Ranking addiction has become the opioid epidemic of the higher education community.  It is an insidious illness, with a predictable gateway drug: a high ranking of one’s institution on a dimension publicized by U. S. News & World Report.  

“It all started in 2017 when they ranked our cafeteria’s French toast the 3rd best in the Northeast,” says Frank.  “Oh God, what a rush!  I couldn’t sleep for four days.  I’ve been chasing that high ever since.”

The American Psychiatric Association places ranking addiction in the same category as sex addiction in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  Both are incredibly difficult to treat, and the relapse rate is high.  

Frank notes that he had once gone 7 months without using rankings in his school’s advertising: “I felt so clean, so pure, almost virginal.”

But then he was notified by Splash, an official publication of the United States Navy, that his college’s ranking as a “welcoming place for veterans who had served on cruise-missile submarines” had risen from 72 to 47.

“I became so aroused that I immediately drove home and…..well, let’s just say that the next morning my wife went out and bought me flowers.”

Frank’s ecstasy was short-lived.  Within a week, he was ordering billboard advertisements filled with rankings of his school for the entire length of New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway (e.g., “#8 in Outdoor Ads Among All Colleges on the East Coast”).  

“I loathed myself.  I really and truly did.”  Murmurs of “we’ve all been there” could be heard at the back of the room. 

Frank shares with the group that he’s thinking about leaving higher education to become a shepherd, a job where there is nothing to rank. 

“Don’t go Little Bo-Peep on us, Frank,” someone in the audience says.  “Let the Lord be your shepherd, and you’ll find the strength you need.  Remember: our chapter has the 2nd-lowest relapse rate of any RA group in Massachusetts.”

A collective gasp, then silence.  

 

TRUE FACT:  Every member of the University of Virginia volleyball staff was fired three weeks ago, with UVA Athletics Director Carla Williams saying that she was “unable to comment on the details.”  The team will resume play next season.  (The Cavalier Daily, March 18 online).

Now the mystery has deepened.

Yesterday, all of the team’s volleyballs — over 60 in number — received termination notices.  This includes volleyballs with game experience, as well as those that had only participated in practice sessions, along with unused balls that had never been taken out of the box.

“This is a real head-scratcher,” observes veteran Las Vegas volleyball oddsmaker Isidore “Izzy” Del Fuego.  “It raises the question of what did these volleyballs know, and when did they know it?  Are all of them being punished for the actions of a few?  Or is this just a case of one volleyball looking like every other volleyball, making it impossible to identify who the real offenders are without a ball coming forward?”

Volleyballs are notorious for their unwillingness to “jump the net” — the sport’s slang for snitching on one’s peers — and it is rumored that UVA police deflated several balls in an attempt to intimidate the others into speaking.  

Adding to the intrigue is the discovery this morning of a deceased UVA volleyball with multiple puncture wounds in a wooded area on the outskirts of Charlottesville.  It is unclear whether the wounds were self-inflicted, and no note was found in the immediate vicinity.  

Del Fuego is confident that the truth will eventually come out in this noir saga.  “It always does,” he asserts.  “I guarantee you, there is a volleyball out there with a story to tell, and it won’t be pretty.”

 

Irritated faculty members routinely take no-confidence votes in their leaders, such as the one that preceded the recent resignation of the embattled President at Oregon State University. 

Unfortunately, as a linguistic device the phrase “no confidence” is lame.  It lacks intensity, evoking an image of disinterested parents watching their nerd-child attempt a free throw in a middle-school basketball game and thinking, “yep, we have no confidence that our kid is gonna make this shot.”  Yawn.  

With this limitation in mind, the Faculty Senate at the University of Vermont has decided to bring some bona fide roid rage to the table.  On Wednesday it introduced a hard-hitting no-confidence indicator that is destined to become the gold standard for such judgments at colleges and universities across the country.  

Dubbed the Get the Hell Out of Dodge Scale, it allows faculty to repudiate a deficient President at any one of eight levels of intensity:

1.  “You Suck at Your Job”

2.  “You Suck at Your Job, and You’re Arrogant”

3.  “You Suck at Your Job, You’re Arrogant, and You Lie Most of the Time”

4.  “You Suck at Your Job, You’re Arrogant, and You Lie ALL of the Time”

5.  “All of the above, plus You Drive a Cherry-Red Tesla with ‘The Prez’ Stenciled on its Doors, Trunk, Hood, and Roof”

6.  “All of the above, plus You Once Told a Reporter that You Consider Tenured Professors to be the Dinosaur Poop of the University: Ancient and Useless”  

7.  “All of the above, plus You Helped Drug Lord El Chapo Escape from Prison Twice”

8.  “You’re Satan; We Recommend that the Board of Regents Strip You Naked, Tie You to a Stake in the Desert, Cover Your Body with Honey, and Let the Fire Ants Do Their Thing.  This Event Should be Celebrated Annually as a University Holiday, and include a Parade and Student/Faculty Softball Game”

Laminated copies of the scale may be obtained from the University of Vermont Faculty Senate.