The elusive, lost "Craig Justice" lecture

Craig at Chaffey

     Chaffey College is in Rancho Cucamonga. I've never been to that town, but its name won't do. Makes me think of jungles. But they've got no jungles, not even close. (The name actually refers to a tribe of Native Americans.)
     Anyway, Chaffey's Faculty Senate has a website, and it lists, among other things, past winners of “Faculty Lecturer of the Year.” The list goes all the way back to 1969, identifying thirty or so lectures. (The lectures ceased during some of the Carter/Reagan years. Hopelessness, I guess.)
     The site explains the "Faculty Lecture" honor, revealing it to be impressive and striking:

     Faculty Senate elects a Faculty Lecturer for each academic year. In the spring the Faculty Senate seeks nominations … of a colleague to become the Lecturer for the following year. … The individual selected is notified and receives one class reassigned during the upcoming year to research and write a paper and prepare for their lecture/presentation. The paper is published as a journal and distributed at the event. The individual chosen selects his or her own topic for presentation to the campus community.
     This event was initiated in 1969 by the Faculty Senate. All campus constituencies are invited and formal invitations to attend are extended to college administrators, members of the Governing Board, and the lecturer's guest list.
     Faculty take this award very seriously. To be selected is an honor, carrying with it a significant responsibility. ... Many of our Faculty Lecturers have been interviewed and highlighted in local and regional papers….
     This … program … is highly valued on our campus. It draws a capacity crowd every year. ... It shows us at our best. ... We are all, faculty, administrators, and classified caught up in our daily routines and work isolated from one another. This gives the academic community an opportunity to "see" the talent and dedication that usually occurs behind closed doors. We come together to celebrate what it is that we are about.

Chaffey College of Agriculture, 1885

     Wow. Hopefully, none of the honorees has gone on to defraud taxpayers or invent homeopathic office products.
     At least given what I see here, this honor and series is indeed impressive. For instance, refreshingly, the lecture titles skew toward the serious and the academic:

• Signals Through the Flames…Resiliency Theory and Chaffey College (Communication Studies)
• Auschwitz and After: Moral Philosophy in the Shadow of Birkenau (Philosophy)
• The Biological Adaptiveness of Lying (Biology)

     Golly. (Years ago, one of our Math instructors gave a presentation during Flex Week on how to build a bookcase.)
     In recent years, IVC’s Academic Senate has managed to sponsor some serious and academic lectures, including some by our own faculty. That’s a change and a very good one.
     Still, Chaffey’s tradition is particularly impressive. Imagine! Granting someone a course release for two consecutive semesters just to write the lecture! That would never happen at IVC—unless, of course, the instructor were an important Republican or a curvy sports figure—or maybe a successful taco entrepreneur. We’d throw money at that hooey all day long. Then we’d bestow certificates or plaques on everybody who had anything remotely to do with it. We’d take lots of pictures. Then we’d display pics and artifacts in a big dumb glass case in BSTIC.
     Meanwhile, everything else would go to hell. Maybe the library would fall into itself, leaving a pile of rubble and porn printouts.
     Another impressive aspect of Chaffey’s lecture series is the availability of each of the lectures—there’ve been thirty of them—in digital form! The links are right there on the page! All the way back to 1968-9! (“Who’s Listening?”, philosophy)

Cucamonga, 1884

     WELL, ACTUALLY, there’s one exception. It turns out that the recipient of this honor for 1996-7 was one “S. Craig Justice, Economics.” Why, surely, that’s our Craig Justice—i.e., the current Vice President of Instruction at Irvine Valley College—who is known to be from Chaffey and whose degree is in Econ. (I think I heard him quote Adam Smith once.)
     Craig’s lecture was entitled:

Fact, Fantasy, and Faith in Economic Analysis: Is Economics Truly a Science?

     First of all, let me say that I am impressed—and not at all surprised—that Craig received this honor. My hat’s off to the dismal fellow.
     The title of Craig’s lecture is intriguing. Who doesn’t have an opinion about the dismal science and whether its practitioners really have anything to offer? I’d love to read or hear about that. Who wouldn't?
     For some reason, however, it is Craig’s and only Craig’s lecture that isn’t available. “No booklet,” it says right there on the page, in black and white among all the brownish red.

     I’ve got a theory. Maybe he nailed it and there’s a conspiracy to protect us from the awful truth!
     Bring on the full horror, I say! Inquiring minds wanna know!

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "a grafted pulse, an inventory of the world"

"Full Flight"
by Bill Hickok

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building.
It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers
is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin
a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud
inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire
and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right
resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers
came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it
and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape
it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind
of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight
variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water
and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth
of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America.
People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee,
sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern
of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations
and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest
we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone,
I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top
fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos
and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling
I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders
are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word,
a motion the brain requires for which there is
no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped,
when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause
when we could have been perfectly American,
could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million
bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge
into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact
and more convincing for its precision, an expression
of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt.
We've lived in the sky again for some years and today
on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies
stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles
about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children
turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even
with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves
I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem
in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches
are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know—
switches of humor, of faith—but the men are musical
in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi
and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh
of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory
of the world, and just as the idea of embrace
moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed
as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces
we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.

*

Perry: a Man of the Stupid People

They voted, see

Divining Perry’s Meaning on Galileo Remark (New York Times)

     In one of the more curious moments in the Republican debate on Wednesday night, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas invoked 17th-century science in discussing his doubts about climate change. He cited the astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei — often called the father of modern science — in suggesting that the current thinking that climate change is a result of human activity could be overturned. “Galileo got outvoted for a spell,” he said.
     On the surface, though, his example seemed to illustrate the opposite of the point that Mr. Perry might have been trying to make. Galileo, whose astronomical observations confirmed the Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun, was basing his assertions on empirical knowledge and faced opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, which supported the Ptolemaic view of an Earth-centered universe.
     Mr. Perry, by contrast, has said repeatedly that he does not believe the empirical evidence compiled by scientists in support of climate change, but that he does adhere to faith-based principles.
     Was Mr. Perry trying to depict Galileo as a maverick among scientific thinkers of his time? If so, the governor was wrong, says one historian who has studied the trial of Galileo.
     “If Perry means to say that at some point some body of scientists said Galileo was wrong, that didn’t happen,” said the historian, Thomas F. Mayer, who teaches at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill.
. . .
     Perhaps, then, Mr. Perry was referring to the church’s trial of Galileo on charges of heresy, in 1633, in which the astronomer was convicted and sentenced to house arrest. In that case he was “outvoted” not by other scientists but by church leaders.
. . .
     The 1633 trial was not really about science, many historians say. It was about Galileo’s disobeying a 1616 order to abandon Copernican views….

Check out Rick "Dunce" Perry's college transcripts. A sampling:

An F in organic chemistry--the second time around.

Perry greets our own trustee Tom Fuentes, et al., Thursday