Then the rains came: mandatory evacuation of Modjeska Cyn.

WHILE I WAS teaching my morning class, I got word from the Reb and her crew: they'd been warned that they'd likely be evacuated from Modjeska Canyon. Good grief!

Well, by midday, that's just what happened, so she and Limber Lou headed to my place, while Red stayed behind to clean out gutters, help out the neighbors, etc. I made it home by maybe 3:00.

By late afternoon, at Reb's request, Red finally made it over here, too. So here we are, the whole Dissent crew, at my place in Lambrose Canyon, eating pizza, watching House, and wondering when the rain will stop. At this moment, it's coming down hard.

Ah, but all is well.

Tomorrow: locusts. (Pics of Modjeska Cyn. by Red.)




(Young Debsy is enjoying the visit.)


(Young Paco, the intellectual, is dubious, however.)

• Storm brings mud to fire areas
• Mandatory evacuations cancelled in burn areas

“The Lord said, ‘don’t do that’ ”

From this morning's Inside Higher Ed:

Richard Roberts, who resigned last week as president of Oral Roberts University, amid a series of allegations against him and his wife, told students in a brief talk Wednesday that he didn’t want to quit, but God told him to, the Associated Press reported. Roberts — who denies wrongdoing — said that he wanted to “strike out” against those who were opposing him, but “the Lord said, ‘don’t do that,’ ” and the next day, Roberts quit.

Ouch!

Rebel Girl was pleased to discover that Reuben Martinez, bookseller and community activist extraordinaire, promoter of literacy and recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, was on campus on Wednesday, addressing students visiting from a local continuation school. Rebel Girl couldn't make his talk (she was teaching at the time), but she hustled over in between classes to greet him and check the scene out.

And what a scene it was, enough to warm her oft-chilly end-of-the-semester-heart. Nice. The counselors were doing what they do best, making the teens feel at home, encouraging them about possibilities, the future, how higher education was for them. Nice. Frank Marmolejo was working the tables of students who were busily eating slices courtesy of Papa John's pizza. Nice. Reuben was holding court talking about hanging with Carlos Fuentes and Gloria Estefan. His table of students was transfixed. Nice. All in the deep shadow of the new performing arts complex (PAC).

A counselor approached Rebel Girl and gushed about Reuben. Wouldn't he be a great commencement speaker? she asked. Funny you mention that, Rebel Girl replied

Rebel Girl remembered the sad story about last year's commencement speaker committee. Reb was on the committee and showed up with proposal for three candidates, including write-ups. Reuben was the top of her list for all the obvious reasons. Suffice to say he was, apparently, not nearly as impressive as many others. She remembers someone pointing out his age: ouch! And another comment had to do with the fact that he had not gone to college himself: ouch! (At least no one mentioned that he was Mexican-American (ouch!) though Reb was waiting for that one, but maybe it's not said aloud anymore. Still, Rebel Girl can't think of a single Latino who has ever had the opportunity to address the graduating class as the commencement speaker, not in 15 years. But maybe she is a just a bit too sensitive on this point. And women? Don't get her started. You know what she's like. What a bean counter. Ouch! Holy Frijoles!)

Despite these "concerns," Reuben's name was forwarded to the college president as, if she remembers correctly, the last on the list. Needless to say Reuben wasn't chosen. Some of you may recall who spoke to us last year. Rebel Girl will allow you to wallow in your own memories of that event. Some of you may even want to go back further than last year and recall all our recent stellar speakers...

Before she left, Rebel Girl stopped by Reuben once again and asked if he ever did the commencement speech thing. "Oh sure," he replied, "I'm already getting booked for next year. Cal State Long Beach and then Columbia. At Columbia," he went on, "I'll give the commencement speech for the Department of Education."

Ouch.

In the hours that followed, Rebel Girl worked with a record 45 students in the Humanities Center. It's the UC application season plus the end-of-the-semester crush. Ouch! It's nice to be wanted but sometimes students get impatient. One young student was particularly so, complaining about the wait. Rebel Girl apologized, then began to review the work at hand.

Without going into too much detail, it quickly became obvious that the student had submitted a plagiarized work. Then it became obvious that the plagiarized work was not even the student's own work – that the student was in the center submitting the plagiarized work on behalf of a friend, another student. Then it became obvious that the student had used another student's enrollment in the center and falsified records in order to receive the attentions of an instructor like Rebel Girl on the plagiarized essay.

Ouch.

Rebel Girl declined to work further with the "student" who didn't really seem to care at all. When last seen, the student was busily punching away at some electronic device.

Rebel Girl continues to stew over what her next step, if any, should be.

The policy disappearance mystery, part 3, and I do hope this is the end of it

OK, so, evidently, it’s like this. Trustee Marcia calls up and says, “Hey, morons, you’ve got typos in the 4011 (administrative hiring) policy,” and so the word goes out: 4011 is supposed to get pulled. Only somebody pulls 4011.1—that’s faculty hiring—instead. In the meantime, somebody else, not sure who, rolls this big rotten pumpkin onto the third floor, and nobody thinks too much about it, but, at a certain point, it starts to stink and the county hazmat boys are called in, cuz you can't be too careful, what with terrorists under every rock. And so—don’t ask me how—a fragment of pumpkin gets lodged between some classified employee’s teeth, and that causes her to grab a toothpick, and that’s pretty much how 4011.1 gets replaced with 4011 on the district website. But then somebody takes a big dump in the executive washroom, and Mathur hurriedly evacuates the entire 3rd floor (methinks he doth protest too much), and somehow, in the mad scramble, the original 4011.1 gets lost and maybe rolls into that pumpkin, which, natch, gets carted off with the bomb squad, which comes along with the hazmat crew, which is headed back, by this point, to Santa Ana or wherever. So, later in the afternoon, somebody says, “Good Lord! These faculty are screamin’ bloody murder over that stupid faculty hiring policy, and we need to get it back up there!” But, by then, 4011.1 is in that pumpkin in Santa Ana, and there’s no getting’ it back without a court order or at least some pumpkin papers. Natch, everybody's in a panic and goes hunting for some copy, any copy, of 4011.1, and they find one, only they don’t realize it’s the wrong one. I mean it’s the wrong one like a lit match is the wrong thing to stir your tub of gasoline with. So they stick that up there and that causes the faculty to achieve 150 decibels of sheer freakazoidal schriekatude. That’s when somebody brings in some Sweet Potato Pie, and that gets passed around, only it makes Gary sick, so when he shows up this morning, he’s seriously unprepared for Carmen and the Devil waiting in his office with a big bloody steak knife. But it all gets straightened out, which is good, cuz, you wouldn’t believe it, but this hiring policy SNAFU is nothing compared to all the other stinking pumpkins and anxious, desperate employees in this goshdarned district.

And, oh, the Accreds are coming tomorrow (at SC). Are you ready? Hope so. Good luck.

(I do believe that the CORRECT version of the faculty hiring policy--4011.1--is now posted at the district website.)

The policy disappearance mystery, part 2

THE GOO THICKENS. Yesterday morning, just when faculty were being encouraged (by colleagues wary of Mathurian shenanigans) to access and read the faculty hiring policy (BP4011.1), that very policy disappeared from the district's board policy website. (See yesterday's post: The mystery of the missing policy.)

Some of us immediately smelled a rat. Later that afternoon, we were told that the situation was the product of an innocent SNAFU. According to the story, a classified employee had simply removed the policy in order to fix some typos. But then she couldn't get the policy back onto the site. (But why remove the policy to change it? Odd.)

Later, BP4011.1 seemed to reappear on the site, but, in fact, the wrong policy was placed there (namely, the hiring policy concerning administrators and managers, not faculty).

THE LATEST & THE GREATEST. Today, I again went to the board policy website, whereupon I discovered that its contents had changed yet again. This time, a version of BP4011.1 was posted (a Word file), but it was not the version that was posted (as a pdf file) last week! Last week's version began

Preface: The hiring of highly qualified full-time faculty is essential to the educational mission of the South Orange County Community College District.

But today's version begins

Preface: The Board of Trustees derives its authority from statute and from its status as the entity holding the institution in trust for the benefit of the public.

Further, last week's pdf file ends with: "Adopted: December 12, 2005." That made sense. That's about when it was adopted (after successful litigation by the Academic Senates).

Today's Word file does not include that language. That's very odd.

I don't have time right now to look more carefully at these versions. But I do know this. It would be highly illegal for the district to unilaterally change this policy.

Check it out.

P.S.: I've had a chance to peruse the hiring policy currently posted on the district website. It is indeed the wrong policy, an iteration that does not reflect important changes that were later made at the insistence of the faculty's representatives and that were incorporated in the policy approved by the board in December of 2005. -CW

Historians for Obama

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: Historians Team Up to Back Obama:

In the weeks approaching the 2004 and 1992 elections, among others, groups of educators issued formal statements of support for the Democratic nominees for president, taking public stands as members of their profession. In recent elections, groups of scientists have also weighed in — after the party nominations were settled.

But in a move that is unusually early and specific, a group of prominent historians on Monday issued a joint endorsement of Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency. The endorsement, released through the History News Network, was organized by Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University, and Ralph E. Luker, a historian who is one of the leaders of the popular history blog Cliopatria. The scholars who signed included two past presidents of the American Historical Association — Joyce Appleby of the University of California at Los Angeles and James McPherson of Princeton University — and many other A-list scholars in the field.

Officials of the AHA (which was not a party to the endorsement) and several other long-time observers of the discipline said that they could not think of a comparable example of historians collectively taking a stand in a political race in this way….

In our rodent world: the mystery of the missing policy

AS YOU KNOW, Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur has screwed up bigtime (see A Mathurian fiasco), for he has allowed the district to trend toward severe noncompliance with the 50% Law (which requires that at least half of district expenditures be on instruction). Mathur has responded to his huge f*ck-up with a massive hiring initiative. At the recent board meeting, he explained that he hopes to hire 45 (or 40) full-time faculty ASAP. (Note: even if that occurs, it will do nothing to bring us into compliance this year, since the new hires won’t start work until the fall of 2008.)

Even before the board meeting, it was clear that Mathur was determined to push for these hires. Further, it appeared that he and his crew were intent on violating provisions of our new (and hard-won) hiring policy, BP4011.1!

The latter situation, Senate officers told us, was being addressed.

Last Wednesday (the 21st), we, here at Dissent the Blog, suggested that faculty, especially faculty who expect to serve on hiring committees, bone up on that policy (see Our hard-won hiring policy). Faculty knowledge of that policy, we reasoned, was the best defense against abuse by you-know-who. (That point had already been made on campus by some senate officers.)

The blog post included a link to the district website at which board policies are posted. At the time, I made sure that the policy (i.e., the correct and current policy) was posted there. It was.

But then, this morning, someone discovered that the policy was no longer listed at the site. I checked. Sure enough, it had disappeared, without explanation.

I smelled a rat.

IVC’s Academic Senate President immediately made inquiries. In the afternoon, she reported what she had learned: that a classified employee had removed the policy in order to correct some minor typographical errors but that, somehow, she was having difficulty returning the corrected policy to the site. The Senate Prez was inclined to believe this account. I.e., she was inclined to think that there’s no rat.

Well, OK. I decided to leave the matter at that.

But, just now—more than five hours later—I returned to the district site. The listing for BP4011.1 had reappeared. Great.

I downloaded the file. What's this? It isn't 4011.1. Rather, it is 4011—Employment procedures for administrators and managers.

What’s it all mean? Dunno.

I’m smelling rodent again. Lots of people are. That wouldn’t happen, of course, were our Chancellor to be an honest man. In that hypothetical world, we’d all say, “Hey, mistakes are made. No big deal.”

But in our rodent world, such talk seems foolish.

SEE ALSO:

• Mathur: the case of the mysteriously missing reference check
• Mathur: the case of the mysteriously missing "threats" (See esp. section 25)
• Mathur: the case of the mysteriously missing plaque (See Jeff's remarks)
• Mathur: the case of the mysteriously appearing agenda item

Another loose right wing cannon, this one at Dartmouth

(See YouTube: Dartmouth trustee)

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: Speech Hits a Sore Spot at Dartmouth:

[In] … a speech given last month — and posted recently on YouTube — … a trustee slams a former college president, says that many academics don’t believe in God, and evokes the Spanish Inquisition in a comment about Larry Summers, the former Harvard president. ¶ Todd J. Zywicki, the trustee and a law professor at George Mason University, gave the address at a John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy conference. Zywicki says he regrets the way he phrased some comments but adds that portions of the speech have been taken out of context. ¶ Much of the address is a call to arms for those who think academe is infused with leaders who preach the dogma of “environmentalism and feminism.” ¶ Zywicki says the “establishment” at elite colleges is “vicious” and that “if it were the case that there was no morality and no values being taught in the academy, that would be better than what we have.” …. ¶ “Those who control the university today, they don’t believe in God and they don’t believe in country,” he continues. “The university is their cathedrals…their entire being. Both those who fund it and those who teach within it are tied up in the university.” ¶ Commenting on campus culture as a whole, Zywicki told the audience, “We have the Spanish Inquisition, and you can ask Larry Summers whether or not the Spanish Inquisition lives on academic campuses today.” ¶ Discussing a late former president of the college, highly regarded by many faculty members for extolling intellectual life, Zywicki said in the speech: “They then brought in this fellow, truly evil man, James Freedman, who basically, simply put, his agenda was to turn Dartmouth into Harvard,” he said in the speech, according to a transcript from the IvyGate blog (Zywicki said he didn’t question the accuracy of the passage.) ¶ Freedman died last year of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and critics say the comments are in poor taste. Zywicki said he apologizes to anyone who came away with that sense, and that he meant to attribute “truly evil man” to a colleague who had previously used that characterization to describe Freedman. ¶ “That’s one of the dangers of speaking from notes rather than from text,” Zywicki said in an interview. “I didn’t mean many things to be taken literally. Obviously I was speaking in perhaps an inappropriately informal manner. If I had known the remarks would be taken out of context, I would have been more thorough in fleshing out that idea.” ¶ Zywicki said he intended to criticize Freedman for what he described as a belief in political correctness at all costs. “Perhaps it was unduly flip, but I have serious concerns about the way he dealt with students while he was president. Someone who bullies and attacks undergraduates in the manner he did is somebody for whom I have absolutely no respect,” he said in the interview. ¶ Revisiting the speech, Zywicki said he regrets the “God and country” comment, which he said was unduly casual. ¶ “I’m not trying to imply that liberals do not believe in God and country,” he says. “The point I was trying to make is that for many people who control the modern university, that modern orthodoxy which is intolerant of many views has taken the place of religious orthodoxies of the past.” ¶ On the Summers comment, Zywicki said that he has consistently expressed concern about any orthodoxies that interfere with free inquiry on college campuses. “That includes incursions from the right and concern about orthodoxy from the left in the form of political correctness and restrain on free speech such as speech codes.” ¶ “I was hoping in a brief set of remarks to illustrate why modern orthodoxies are just as dangerous as ancient orthodoxies.”

How I Spent My Thanksgiving

AT 4 AM Saturday morning Rebel Girl awakes when Red announces that there is someone screaming "fire." It's one of her reoccurring dreams, she thinks, then she thinks, no, it's Red's dream, not hers, but it was neither. The plaintive voice calls again: fire.

No power. They stumble around in the darkness: shoes, clothes, flashlights that work as opposed to flashlights that do not. Rebel Girl gets out and sees it first: the gabled roof of Red's uncle's cabin, two doors down, ablaze. The winds are howling. It's a long story involving hoses and water, smoke and firefighters, the dawn that finally came. We were lucky once again: no one was hurt. The fire didn't spread.


Rebel Girl liked how the firefighters carried out the furniture and assembled it on the lawn.

It was as if they would all sit down once again around the big table and eat.

Yellow Bird, Golden State

ONE OF THE BAY AREA'S CHARMS is the ubiquity of cheap motels along the coast. I’m told that European vacationers love these places. Germans especially—they’re just nutsig about the cheesy architecture, the modest accommodations.

In their minds, evidently, it’s all quintessentially American.

Heimat Land!


Some of these places offer music and dancing.

Fannie’s good friend, Grant, is the music guy for Nick’s Sea Breeze, a restaurant and motel in Rockaway Beach, a cove in Pacifica, just south of San Francisco. Said Fannie, “we should take in Grant’s band, Friday night. I think he’d like that.” So that’s what we did, me, Fannie, and Elroy.

Nick’s lounge/dance hall, which has been in operation, I think, since 1927, is pretty cheesy all right. The classiest thing in the room is the Naugahyde.


Last night, for some reason, most of the customers at the periphery of the tiny dance floor were members of the motorcycle club The Henchman. Most of the rest were geezers in their best dance outfits. Regulars maybe.

I wondered if I counted as a geezer yet. Not quite, I figured. But soon.

Grant’s mom, Roberta, was there. She came over and sat with us. She’s a great lady, 97 years old, originally from Minnesota. She came out to the coast in ’42, started some businesses.

I think she’s got big money. She dresses like it anyway.


And she dances!

Poor Grant. He’s obviously a terrific musician (piano), and his mates seem accomplished enough. His girl singer, a leggy blond, is talented, albeit green. (Grant told me she’s a loan officer by day. “Sweet girl,” he said.)

Mostly, Grant and Co. offered a set of auditory Cheez Whiz—a predictably incoherent mix of pop standards, rock chestnuts, disco schlock, etc.

The crowd loved it, and so did I.

THE DAY BEFORE, Grant had come by for one of his occasional free haircuts. He and Fannie were yucking it up about that silly old song, “Yellow Bird.” Fannie seems to like just about anything that can be played on a ukelele. She’s a bit of a kitschaholic, I think. Grant, on the other hand, is a jazz musician, so I figure he hates just about everything he hears, though he’s wise enough to hide it. He listens to Weather Report.

Nice guy.

Still, while perched on Fannie’s bronze chair (nobody seems to know why the word “hell” is etched into it), he commenced mocking this particular song. Jamaican, I think. 1957.

So, last night, Grant and Band suddenly broke into “Yellow Bird,” complete with vibes and, at one point, Grant’s lunatic kazoo.

We were in on the joke and laughed. Meanwhile, the crowd didn’t notice anything different. Not the Henchmen, not the old hoofers, not the nearby barflies.

I looked over at the bikers. I kept hoping Grant would do “Tequilla.” I know he knows it.


FROM NICK’S, you can see and hear waves crashing dramatically a hundred yards to the left. The Nicksters train searchlights onto the waves to make sure nobody misses ‘em. Maybe they amplify them, too. Not sure.

“Look at the size of those waves!” shouted Elroy.

Roberta sipped her coffee, while Fannie sipped her ice-water and I sipped my Stella Artois. Fannie and Roberta seemed to have a lot to say to each another. I just smiled.

I’m pretty deaf, so I have no idea what anybody said to me, but even Fannie was having trouble communicating, what with the noise. At one point, Grant shouted out the name of his next number: “Mack the Knife.”


“Macro Knife?” asked Fannie. “What? Are they gonna do a cooking demonstration?”

“No, ”Mack the Knife,” shouted Elroy. But it was no use.

We left there pretty happy. Went home to watch Dexter. Lots of cool Cuban music.

Fannie woke me early this morning for my long trip home. She slowly mounted the stairs, warbling: “Yellow bird, up high in banana tree. Yellow bird, you sit all alone like me.”

ESSENTIALLY, the state of California is Cheez Whiz smeared onto natural magnificence. At least, so it seemed to me today, as I entered cheapy gas station markets and blew past Magic Mountain, Knotts Berry Farm, and Disneyland whilst listening to White Stripes, Neil Diamond, and the Be Good Tanyas.

Sunny says hey.

Another one bites the dust

From today’s New York Times: President of Evangelical University Resigns:

Facing accusations that he misspent university money to support a lavish lifestyle, the president of Oral Roberts University has resigned, officials said Friday.

The resignation by Richard Roberts was effective immediately, according to an e-mail statement from George Pearsons, the chairman of the university’s Board of Regents.

Mr. Roberts, the son of the televangelist and university founder Oral Roberts, came under fire with the university after three former professors filed a lawsuit last month that included accusations of a $39,000 shopping tab for Mr. Robert’s wife, Lindsay, at one store; a $29,411 senior trip to the Bahamas on the university jet for one of Mr. Roberts’s daughters; and a stable of horses for the Roberts children.

Mr. Roberts had been on temporary leave from the evangelical university, fighting the accusations. In a recent interview, he and his wife denied any wrongdoing.

…The professors [at the university]…said in the lawsuit that Mr. Roberts had required students in a government class to work for the campaign of Randi Miller, a candidate in the 2006 Republican primary for mayor of Tulsa. Mr. Roberts has denied that.

Tim Brooker, one of the plaintiffs, accused the university of forcing him to quit after he had warned Mr. Roberts that requiring students to work on Ms. Miller’s campaign jeopardized the university’s tax-exempt status.

Mr. Roberts received a vote of no confidence last week from the university’s tenured faculty….

Science news from Bob Park

From Bob Park's What's New?:

SCIENCE ADVICE: WHO IS ADVISING THE CANDIDATES ABOUT SPACE?

Recognizing that the only direction is up, WN has tried to stay clear of the nomination battle. It was a jolt, however, to read in the Washington Post today that the Democratic front runner supports key aspects of the Bush space plan, hereafter referred to as the Lunacy Program. It calls for a return to the Moon in the multibillion dollar Constellation spacecraft to prepare for a vastly more expensive human mission to Mars to do that which robots do better. Barack Obama would delay Constellation for five years to provide funds for education. We’re all in favor of education, but there are vital science programs in space that are getting squeezed out for this money sink. Let's consider climate change:

(Theater across the street from Joe's Grill, Geary & 18th)

CLIMATE CHANGE: A MAJOR GAP EXISTS IN QUANTIFYING THE CHANGE.

Solar radiation is partly absorbed by the Earth system and partly reflected back into space. The reflectivity is called the albedo. In addition, the planet radiates back into space in the infrared. Both the albedo and Earth radiation must be known to determine the energy balance. But as Francisco Valero at Scripps and Robert Charlson at U. of Washington have pointed out, comparisons of satellite radiometers from CERES (Cloud and Earth Radiant Energy System) and ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Program) do not agree. Data from DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) would provide a calibration to resolve the matter - unfortunately DSCOVR, built and paid for, never got launched. There are those who would rather not know.

(Near the Cliff House)

BIODIVERSITY: WHO DECIDES WHAT WE SHOULD LET GO?

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book "Silent Spring" resulted in the environmental movement and a decade later the Endangered Species Act. As the biologist Paul Ehrlich argued, we don’t understand ecology well enough to know which genes are essential, so we tried to save them all. With the Earth facing crisis, an article by Emma Marris the 8 Nov 07 issue of Nature has the courage to finally ask out loud, "What to Let Go?".

Black Friday, San Francisco

In Joe's Ice Cream and Grill, Geary and 18th

Most of these are taken from Lincoln Park and around the old Cliff House.







Gratuitous Tiger Ann photo.

Fannie took this one while we were driving home. Check out the surfer dude.

Thanksgiving in Pacifica

It's been good. Thanksgiving dinner was great (see tofurkey below), Tiger Ann has been loads of peevish furry fun, and the weather has been perfect. And in Pacifica!

Thinking about heading up to Lincoln Park today (San Francisco), checking out the oil damage. Or just the beauty. Later!