Category: Uncategorized

They’ve been doing this for a couple of years now and they’ve done it again: Will Hochman, Jonathan Alexander, and Christopher Dean are the editors of CCCC 2005 in Review, which is published as part of Across the Disciplines site, which is part of the WAC Clearinghouse site at Colorado State University. Good stuff here.

After receiving that email from the CU board of regents a couple days ago (see March 24), I decided to do a Google news search this morning. I came across two kind of interesting articles:

• “What’s Next for Ward Churchill?” in Boulder, CO’s The Daily Camera, though it’s an AP story so it will probably show up in a bunch of other places, too. In the nutshell, Churchill isn’t in trouble anymore for the 9/11 essay that started this mess in the first place. However, he is under investigation for plagiarism and for “research misconduct,” and this investigation could literally go on for years.
• “Ward Churchill: A contentious life,” by Charlie Brennan in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News. This is more or less a feature story that tells the tale of Churchill’s rather interesting and colorful life, and it covers both sides of some of the various controversies about him (is he or isn’t he a Native American, how he managed to become a tenured professor at a major research university with an MA, how he is or isn’t a great scholar, etc., etc.). I thought the piece was pretty balanced and interesting, but I tell ya, you’d have a hard time making up a better “bad guy academic” than the one portrayed here.

Well, good luck to CU and Churchill and everybody else. I think conservative commentators have moved on to the Schiavo story, so I suspect this episode will fade and Churchill will exit in one fashion or another (buy-out, retirement, or canned) relatively quietly.

Via boing-boing, I came across this article, “Bloggers Have Rights Too,” written by Detroit-city congressman John Conyers. Among other things, Conyers writes “Bloggers should be classified as journalists and given First Amendment protections based on the function they perform, not the form of their transmissions. Properly understood, the First Amendment applies to all those who report with journalistic integrity–offline or online.”

I don’t really consider myself a “journalist,” but I do think of myself exercising my First Amendment rights in a very modest way. Anyway, interesting piece.

Happy birthday to me! I’ll post more later about the joys of my birthday day, but it got off to a great start. The “big surprise” from Annette and Will is both big and a surprise: an iPod, and not just an iPod, but an iPod photo. Pretty cool! Now I need to go play with that thing….

Update:
I had a very pleasant birthday day today. We all went to the gym in the morning, but most of the day I spent hanging out and playing with my new iPod photo. You know, I knew in general terms what an iPod does and what it’s for and all that, but now that I’m actually playing around with one, I can really see the point.

It plays music, of course, and does that really well. I already uploaded the 10 gigs of music I already had on my laptop, and I’m busy importing a bunch of CDs I haven’t bothered to import previously. But it also “syncs” with my address book and my iCal(endar), both of which are applications I’ve been working with a lot lately. It has a function that allows me to upload fairly long notes, about 2 pages of MS Word text, a feature that would be good to keep track of directions or notes I need for a trip or something. Plus this one, an iPod photo, manages photos. The downside is I have to use Annette’s computer to manage the photos since the version of iPhoto on my computer is too old. The upside is, well, I get to manage a set of photos. You can kind of see the view in this photo.

Apparently, there’s a way to do a slideshow on a TV, though I haven’t figured this out yet. Plus this thing has a 30 GB hard drive which I can use as a portable hard drive: hook it up and off I go. Anyway, it’s a great gift and a big surprise from my honey and from the boy.

We went to dinner at the Common Grill in Chelesa. Always great food, though I think Annette and I both over did it quite a bit. You know that scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life where the guy explodes? Kinda like that.

I have been informed by Bloggers of America that everyone in the US who keeps a relatively up-to-date blog is required to have a post about the Terri Schiavo case. Okay, not really. But I kinda feel like posting about all this anyway since everyone else in the universe is in these peoples’ business. So here it goes:

• This case has been reviewed by like two dozen different courts and has been turned down by the Supreme Court twice, and the reason why all these courts have said that the plug ought to be pulled on Schiavo is because all the evidence says that her husband is right: her brain is liquid, she is no more conscious than a plant, and she wouldn’t have wanted to live this way. Further, I’ve heard a couple of different physicians explain that removing the feeding tube from Schiavo won’t cause her any pain because she doesn’t have a brain capable of feeling pain.

  And yet, all of a sudden, all these knucklehead protesters and congressional grandstanders who want to somehow turn this into a case about pro-life versus pro-choice, all of a sudden, all of these right-wing commentators and protesters and politicians (including the freakin’ PRESIDENT) know better than all kinds of doctors and all kinds of judges who have actually reviewed the facts of the case. Just stupid, and another example of how images and medical descriptions can confuse people who don’t know anything about this stuff.

• Right and left wingers alike agree though that this is an example of why everyone (including me and the Mrs.) need a living will.

  While I don’t think this blog entry is enough to make it legal, I’ll write it here anyway: if the doctors say that I am in a “persistent vegetative state,” please pull the plug and let me die in peace.

Update:

This is funny, and it ties into what my friend Mary is saying about the power of images in this case. Apparently, US Senate majority leader Bill Frist (who is a heart surgeon, btw) said he can tell just by looking at the pictures of Schiavo that she isn’t in a “persistent vegetative state.” Anyway, so this post suggests that people tag photos as flickr with “frist” and to submit them to the good senator/doctor for diagnosis. Here are the results.

See this article available via m-live from the Ann Arbor News, “Food Network plays Santa.” Essentially, the Food Network– no, not just the Food Network, but Alton Brown from the Food Network– came to town and gave these folks in Ann Arbor a complete kitchen makeover that probably cost in the $70,000 range of things.

Lucky luck bastards.

Actually, it sounds like the couple that won this put together a good video entry to the Food Network contest and seem (from the newspaper article) like good people and all of that. So congrats.

Quite a while ago, I sent an email to the CU board of regents about the whole Ward Churchill thing. In the nutshell I urged the board of regents to uphold Churchill’s rights for free speech and to defend the concept of academic freedom. Just this evening, I received this email:

From: collect@colorado.edu
Subject: CHANCELLOR’S EMAIL TO PREVIOUS WRITERS
Date: March 24, 2005 7:55:33 PM EST
SUBJECT: CHANCELLOR’S EMAIL TO PREVIOUS WRITERS
FROM: Office of the Chancellor
SENDER: Collect@Colorado.edu
DATE: March 24, 2005

Dear Friend:

You were one of many citizens who wrote or called the University of Colorado at Boulder concerning the controversial essay about 9/11 written by Professor Ward Churchill. Because of your interest, I am writing to share with you the outcome of our review of allegations concerning Professor Churchill’s conduct and scholarship.

In short, our review team found that Professor Churchill’s controversial essay on 9/11 and other public comments are protected by the First Amendment, but that other allegations of plagiarism, misuse of others’ work and fabrication may constitute research misconduct.

The report also points to possible research misconduct related to allegations that Churchill misrepresented his ethnicity to gain credibility and attract an audience for his scholarship. Research misconduct, if proven, is subject to university sanctions.

We take these allegations very seriously and will address them through established university procedures that require due process. I have determined that the allegations of research misconduct should be referred to the campus’s Standing Committee on Research Misconduct for thorough investigation. Appropriate action will be taken upon completion of the committee’s work.

More information and a copy of the full report are available on the campus web site at www.colorado.edu/news. Thank you for your continuing interest in the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Sincerely,

Chancellor Phil DiStefano

As I’ve mentioned here (I think) and in other places, the more I have learned about Churchill over the last couple of months, the less adamant I’ve become in defending him. If these allegations about Churchill plagiarizing turn out to be true, well, then he probably deserves whatever it is he gets.

Supposedly, this is going to lead to a review of tenure in the Colorado University system. Well, we’ll see. Churchill or not, I think the basic premise of tenure is still important and still intact.

We bought a “new” used car yesterday, a 2000 Saturn SL1. Here are some of the (potentially) interesting details:

* Now that we’ve more or less decided that we’re staying here, we needed to get a car to replace the previously stolen minivan. Living off of one car was getting pretty old. In theory, we can both walk to work. But since Annette is always carrying around about 40 pounds of books, she rarely walks. Neither one of us likes walking to school a whole lot when it is icy and cold, pretty much the case in Michigan for 4 to 6 months. Besides that, I teach quite a bit at night and I’m not interested in walking home at 10-ish. And besides all that, our very involved and active 7 year-old kid requires being carted around quite a bit. So four or so months with one car was enough.

* Annette absolutely hates car shopping. I don’t like it much either, but Annette hates it so much that she gave me carte blanche to buy whatever I wanted in our limited price range. Kidding around, I asked if that meant I could buy a pickup truck; “I don’t care,” she said. I played around with the idea briefly. As many of you know, I look good in a pickup, and a vehicle that would allow us to haul stuff around would be a good thing. But we also needed something that all three of us could ride in if necessary, so I decided we needed to go the more conventional car route.

* Our price range was $3,000-$5,000; ultimately, this thing cost almost exactly $5000. I looked at the “budget wheels” section in the paper and a bit on autotrader.com, and I am pretty sure I could have come up with something for closer to $3000. But the problem is that just about everything in that price range was 10 or more years old and/or it had 100-125K miles on it. Granted, this is for just around town and just for basic transportation, but I didn’t want to get something that was going to fall apart in a year either.

* I bought it from the Saturn dealership in Ann Arbor and I have nothing but good things to say about them. Unlike our experience with buying the minivan, the Saturn guy didn’t do anything to yank my chain at all. We had a little tiny bit of bargaining, but after that, it was small talk over the paperwork. And these folks took the time and effort to give me two sets of keys and an owner’s manual (I don’t think the pricks who sold us the minivan did either one of those things).

* It’s got 85,000 miles on it, the color is “blackberry” (when you get up close to it, you can see that it isn’t quite black, but rather, it’s a really dark kind of purple), and it’s got a manual transmission. It took me a few minutes to remember how to drive a stick, but I caught on again pretty quick. It’s got a few scratches and such on the outside, but it still looks good. The interior is black and grey, and with the exception of a sort of mysterious-looking bleach stain on the floor in the back seat, it is extremely clean and “new car-like.”

* This car also has one of those things that allows you to lock and unlock the car remotely, a feature that we don’t have on our Honda Civic. I never thought much of not having that, but I am already beginning to see the appeal of the automatic door opener thing-a-ma-bob.

* I’m almost certain that something is going to happen in the next six months with this thing that will cost us $500 or so to fix. This has been the case with the other two used cars Annette and I have previously owned. Fortunately, I know have a mechanic who I like and trust, and who also works on Saturns.

I had almost forgotten about this, but there was a good story on NPR during last Sunday’s “Weekend Edition” about the dangers of email. It was called “Workers Grow Wary of Office Emails.” Essentially, it was a story about a fact that is well-known and widely ignored: other people can– and, in some cases, will– read your email, and what you write might get you into trouble. But it did mention one thing that I didn’t know that I thought was interesting. You know the guy who was the CEO (or something like that) of Boeing and who got fired as a result of an affair he was having with a subordinate co-worker? The reason he got caught was he was sending “love letter” emails to this woman.

Anyway, the two pieces of advice I always have for students and co-workers:

• If you are in the process of comitting a crime or doing something else you shouldn’t be doing, you probably shouldn’t be using email to make those arrangments. But I think most of my students know this. Five or six years ago, I think it came as a surprise to my students that some IT person might be reading their email; it doesn’t seem that surprising now. Of course, I’m sure that doesn’t stop them from sending inappropriate email messages….
• Get an alternative email address for your own personal uses– a Yahoo! account, for example. I think EMU’s “fair use” policy for email and web publishing is typical of a lot of colleges and universities: it is both open-minded, embracing the concept of academic freedom, and unfortunately vague, opening the door to all sorts of questionable “prosecutions” and/or limitations in use (it is probably “against the rules” for me to conduct business via my EMU email account). I decided to pay for my own server space a few years ago, and I use the email that comes with that service for email with friends and family.

  Of course, the email and web site services that I pay for out of my own pocket are so much more reliable than what I get from EMU, I’ve often thought of just moving everything I do over to that server space. In fact, the web sites for this semester are available on this server space. But that’s a slightly different issue.

Via Collin’s blog, I found the link to the call for papers for the CCCCs 2006 (it’s a PDF file). Collin’s post about this is a reading of the problems of the proposal itself (problems I agree with, by the way), but I just wanted to point out a couple of things, especially for the EMU grad students who might stumble across this post:

• Next year’s CCCCs is going to be March 22-25 in Chicago at the Palmer House– probably my favorite big city and one of my favorite conference hotels. And, worth noting, a convenient four to five hour drive from the Ypsi/AA area.
• Paper proposals are due April 25; online proposals are due May 2.
• The stated theme is “Composition in the Center Spaces: Building Community, Culture, Coalitions.”

I don’t want to make any commitments just yet, but I think it might be kind of interesting if we had a little workshop around here for grad students (and part-timers and lecturers and just about anyone else) about how to put together a proposal for the CCCCs and what the experience is like. Might be fun….