Wednesday's News

Too much news, too little time.  

• Jyotsna Kapur's letter in the DE: Cheng's promotion of doublethink.
• DE: Faculty work conditions linked to student success. 
• DE: University 101 made mandatory (I here find myself somewhat troubled by the same thoughts expressed by Geology Professor Ken Anderson in the story: see my post Who's Afraid of University College?)
• Southern: Cheng at the faculty senate. (Worth more comment than I can give it here: those in attendance are hereby encouraged to provide commentary.)
• Southern: Mortenson attacks low higher ed funding as "intergenerational cop-out".
• NY Times: Survey finds small increase in faculty pay.

Uncoronation Event Planned

All four IEA unions on campus (ACsE, NTTFA, GAU, and FA) are working together to present their unions' collective bargaining message at Chancellor Cheng's Installation ceremony at Shryock Auditorium on Friday. Those interested can meet at 1 p.m. in front of Anthony Hall, whence they shall walk together into the quad in front of Shryock to be there before the ceremony is scheduled to start at 2:00.

"Cheng to Go Through Chancellor Installation"

From this morning's Southern.  The headline caught me, perhaps because I supplied an additional preposition: "Cheng to go through with installation."  The lede is bizarre:

Chancellor Rita Cheng will have her traditional installation this week but don't expect it to be Woodstock.

Bearding authority

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.  

So Thomas Jefferson, as quoted in today's supplement on SIUC research in the Southern (the original context from a letter of 1814 can be found here; Jefferson is there apologizing, or at least pretending to apologize, for his youthful rejection of the claim that scripture is part of the common law). Showing remarkable restraint, I will not ask what percentage of the Southern's readership understands this use of the verb beard. Who cares what it means, it's a quote by one of the Founding Fathers on research, so let's run with it!  Perhaps the person who selected the quote didn't understand it, either.  As to SIUC's willingness to support a researcher confronting authority—here in the guise of corporate authority, the new church— I'll content myself with a brief response: Dr. David Gilbert.  

Sunday's Southern

Two big chunks of SIUC coverage in the Southern, in both of which (believe it or not), our administrators come off quite well (not to worry: I'll find something to attack in a separate post). A front page story and special section on research publicize a variety of research accomplishments, and don't equate research with grant dollars, one of my least favorite administrative tacks (any such equation in the story seems largely to be the reporter's doing).  And the Chancellor rather ably disputes a guest columnist's anecdotal argument that campus safety needs to be improved in order to attract women to campus.  

My own guess, for what it is worth, is that the campus safety issue is largely driven by people who expect Carbondale and SIUC to resemble a small town with a homogenous student body drawn from the surrounding area (i.e., not including lots of people, including lots of black people, from Chicagoland).  There are, by God, even lots of Arabic speakers on campus (with my window open the other day I heard their voices drifting in from outside Faner, giving me a delightful feeling that I was at someplace international--but not all will find this delightful).  Hence I think the Chancellor started her reply exactly in the right way, by making campus diversity a plus (though she spoke mainly of international diversity).  I'm not sure how we can better attract people who want Carbondale to be less, well, other, save by playing up diversity as a positive, and citing the figures that the Chancellor cites, which show that crime at SIUC is no worse and no better than one would expect from a university this size.