Another Think Coming

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REBEL GIRL STILL languishes deep in the kingdom of winter headcolds and so, instead of offering her own cogent observations about the state of our little college in the orange groves, she will instead quote from Jane's Smiley's novel Moo, first published in 1995 and read by Rebel Girl shortly thereafter. Reb remembers liking the book well enough then, but her revisit to its pages this weekend left her laughing and reading aloud certain passages to those friends and relations who visited her sickroom.

For those who don't know, Moo is in the tradition of academic satires, those books that send up the ivory tower (Hey! Where's our ivory tower?) and provide comfort to ailing professors of English and their comrades everywhere.

From Moo, chapter 4: The Common Wisdom:

It was well known among citizens of the state that the university had pots of money and that there were highly paid faculty members in every department who had once taught Marxism and now taught something called deconstruction which was only Marxism gone underground in preparation for emergence at a time of national weakness.

It was well known among the legislators that the faculty as a whole was determined to undermine the moral and commercial well-being of the state, and that supporting a large and famous university with state monies was exactly analogous to raising a nest of vipers in your own bed.

It was well known among faculty that the governor and the state legislature had lost interest in education some twenty years before and it was only a matter of time before all classes would be taught as lectures, all exams given as computer-graded multiple choice, all subscriptions to professional journals at the library stopped, and all research time given up to committee work and administrative red tape. All the best faculty were known to be looking for other jobs, and this was known to be a matter of indifference to the state board of governors.

It was known to the secretaries in every office and every department that the faculty and administrators could, in fact, run the Xerox and even the ditto machines. They were just too lazy to do so.

It was well known among the janitorial staff that if you wanted to maintain your belief in human nature, it was better never, ever to look, even by chance into any wastebasket, but to adopt a technique of lifting and twisting the garbage beg in one motion and tossing it without even remarking to yourself that it was unusual in weight or bulk or odor.

It was well known among the students that the dormitories, like the airlines, were always overbooked, and that temporary quarters in corridors and common rooms happened by design rather than accident. It was also well known to the students that there had been three axe murders on campus the year before, that the victims' names had started with "A" or "M" and that the murderer had never been found, and that the university would do anything to hush these crimes up….

It was well known to all members of the campus population that other, unnamed groups reaped unimagined monetary advantages in comparison of one's own group, and that if funds were distributed fairly, according to real merit for once, some people would have another think coming…

More to follow, perhaps. Now to sleep, perchance to dream.

"I have a lot of stuff going on," he said.

*
• TINY SKULLS AND BONES. From this morning’s OC Reg: Visiting the Tustin hangars:

The first hangar I went into was the base's south hangar. It was empty, dark and very quiet. The floor was littered with tiny skulls and bones that, from what I assumed, were from raptors that once perched high above. Doorways were covered with cobwebs. Paint was peeling off the walls. Signs of the Marines' tenancy was apparent everywhere.

The north hangar was my next stop. Inside, to my surprise, was the Goodyear blimp. It seemed dwarfed sitting on the floor of the enormous hangar. This hangar appeared in more usable shape, and movies and commercials had been shot in it over the years.

• HUSH-HUSH. A commentary in this morning’s OC Reg: [Orange] Diocese continues its evasions:

…I'm left with the sinking feeling one gets whenever there is a miscarriage of justice. Most of those priests and teachers who committed abuse have paid no penalty for it. Many of the same church leaders who protected the abusers and stonewalled the public are still in influential positions within the diocese. The D.A.'s office has far more excuses than convictions. And the diocese is still fighting to keep matters quiet, apparently having kept secret several alleged abuse cases even as it was championing its new policies and financial settlement.

• ONLINE HIGH SCHOOL CLASSES: TIDAL WAVE? From this morning’s LA Times: Online classes go mainstream:

[There are] 1 million kindergarten through high school student enrollments in virtual schooling across the nation, according to the North American Council for Online Learning….

…To deal with the growth, the University of California is launching an extensive effort to make sure applicants' online high school courses are on par with traditional classroom instruction.

Nearly half the states offer public school classes online, and last year Michigan became the first in the nation to require students to take an online course to graduate from high school….

Online learning "is going to reinvent high school in the United States," said Ken Ellwein, executive director of Lutheran High School of Orange County, which created its online school last year.

…Paul Riscalla, 17, a senior at Orange Lutheran who lives in Orange, splits his time between online classes and the traditional school so he can work 40 hours a week at two jobs and play drums in a rock band. "It was a way for me to have more time outside school, because I have a lot of stuff going on," he said.

…Orange Lutheran's online school, created because enrollment at the 1,150-student school was at capacity, began accepting students in the fall of 2005. Currently, 243 are enrolled in 21 courses offered in eight-week semesters. More than half the students have never set foot on the school's 12 1/2-acre campus, while the remainder are Lutheran High School students who split their time between the traditional school and online learning.

Virtual students at Orange Lutheran must log into their classes daily and read lectures, answer questions, participate in class discussions on message boards and do homework. Students are free to schedule their schoolwork whenever it suits them, as long as they log in daily….