The adventures of Sunny Girl

For animal lovers only.

Sunny Girl goes to the vet and she doesn't like it much.
(Technical problems have been overcome.)



Diagnosed with "nonspecific crapulence."

God and Man at SOCCCD

1. IN GOD THEY TRUST. As you know, the SOCCCD has been and will continue to be a tiny battleground of the “culture war” between Red Meat Republicans and most everyone else. For instance, our board is fond of prayer, and, often, there is no mistaking which God is being prayed to or invoked at the start of meetings of the SOCCCD Board of Trustees.

Naturally, some object to this practice. Below, I provide a brief (1:30) example of a plea to cease the practice of prayer at district functions:

The board meetings are held, of course, at a district building on the campus of Saddleback College, and thus in the city of Mission Viejo—among the safest cities in the country, or so says the FBI. It’s also mighty conservative.

Yesterday, the OC Register reported that

Mission Viejo may become the third Orange County city to approve displaying the national motto "In God We Trust" in City Hall. 

¶ The City Council will discuss placing the motto on the walls of the council chambers at its meeting Monday. … 

¶ Councilwoman Gail Reavis placed the item for discussion on the agenda. The move comes after the Cypress City Council voted Feb. 11 to display the phrase in their council chambers. Westminster City Council passed a similar ordinance last July and began displaying the words in their council chambers in January. 

¶ Reavis said displaying the motto would be a symbol of the city's character, and that she did not expect the issue to be controversial…. 

¶ Cypress Councilman Phil Luebben, who voted against the [Cypress] ordinance, said the motto does not represent all of the city's residents…. 

¶ Jacquie Sullivan is president of In God We Trust – America, an organization that encourages cities to publicly display the phrase, which was adopted by Congress as the national motto in 1956. She said the motto is meant to include all faiths, and that it is a sign of a city's patriotism. 

¶ "This is not a religious effort, it's a patriotic effort," she said.

Perfect! South County conservatives think back to 1956 to express their patriotism—which, evidently, is the same as their theism.

(See Ceremonial deism)

2. NEW ACCREDITATION-RESPONSE PROPOSAL. As you know, our effort to deal with our dire accreditation difficulties recently yielded the proposal of a district-wide Accreditation Advisory Panel.

Things change. The latest proposal—coming from the district? From Chancellor Mathur?—is a committee per college to include various district personnel and even a trustee—as well as some faculty.

Naturally, some have expressed skepticism about the new proposal. For instance, are enough faculty on these committees?

At a recent academic senate meeting, I noted that it is one thing to endeavor to address our problems (as identified by the accrediting agency) and it is quite another to write a report on our progress in addressing our problems. I worry that this proposal obliterates that distinction and is therefore muddled.

Perhaps when we hear the details of the proposal, my concerns will be assuaged or even shown to be erroneous. Could be. Hope so. Nothing’s been decided yet.

3. SHAME? On the 26th, Sean Hill of Liberal OC weighed in on IVC’s little flag controversy:

For the last ten years a 144-flag display has hung in the atrium of the student center of the Irvine Valley College without incident. However according to an article written by Marla Jo Fisher in yesterday’s Orange County Register school officials have removed the display after threats from radical anti-communist activists in the local Vietnamese community.

The display represented the flags of the nations of the world “in a gesture designed to symbolize the diversity of the college’s student body”. It was the fact that a flag depicting the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was displayed that drew the ire of the activists. The activists threatened mass protests with busloads of protestors if the flag was not removed. Fearing this, school officials caved and removed the entire display.

Leading the charge for the radical activists were Van Tran allies Westminster Councilman Andy Quach and Garden Grove Councilwoman Dina Nguyen. Quach and Nguyen essentially threatened and coerced school officials by reminding them of what happened during the 1999 protests in Little Saigon over a shop owner displaying the Vietnam flag and a photo of Ho Chi Minh. During those protests some 50,000 people showed up and at times turned violent, going as far as attacking an American veteran of the Vietnam War who spoke in favor of the shop owners right to free speech.

It is time that this thuggery and intimidation by the radicals in Little Saigon comes to an end. These folks believe in the right of free speech. Theirs. They wrap themselves in the Constitution to protect their rights, and step on it when it comes to the rights and beliefs of the people who disagree with them. They left Vietnam in search of freedom and yet they act not too much different from those in charge of the country they fled.

Shame on Irvine Valley College officials for bowing to their threats and shame on those issuing those threats. If you believe in the freedom of speech and the freedom of expression you must be willing to defend things that may be offensive to you. That is the beauty of America, or at least that used to be the beauty of America. Clearly we have allowed the threats of a radical mob to determine what can be said or expressed.

This leaves me to ask should Cuban-Americans be able to demand the removal of the Cuban flag because they don’t agree with the government there? What about Persian-Americans and the Iranian flag? Should we only allow the display of flags of countries we like? Should we ban the display of all flags except the American flag?

So what do you think?

A Masters degree in bullshit

From Bob Park’s What’s New:

A strong editorial in today’s issue of Nature warns that the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), which moved from San Diego to Dallas last year, has applied to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for the right to grant online master’s degrees in science education. An advisory board has recommended acceptance.

Founded by Henry Morris in 1972, the ICR regards the Bible as an inerrant source of scientific and historical fact. The Board had been expected to vote on the application in January, but requested additional information. The vote is now expected at the boards 24 April meeting.

Steven Weinberg, Physics Nobel 1979, who five years ago defended the rights of Texas school children to learn the natural laws that govern our existence (see), has urged the board to deny accreditation to the Creation Research Institute.

Every Texas scientist should do the same.

Drills, skulls, the DOE

●.....As you know, our new Accreditation difficulties stem, in part, from the DOE’s cracking down on our accrediting agency, WASC/ACCJC. With that in mind: From this morning’s Inside Higher Education: A Little Help From Its Friends?:

.....In the year and a half since the report of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, the U.S. Education Department has invested significant time and energy on pressuring accrediting agencies to prod colleges to more effectively measure and more transparently report the academic outcomes of their students. In many ways, the accreditation war has been at the center of the department’s effort to carry out the commission’s work.
.....Which has made it all the more frustrating to Secretary Margaret Spellings and her aides that Congress is poised to shut them down. Bills that both the House and Senate have passed to renew the Higher Education Act would bar the Education Department from promulgating federal rules to guide accrediting agencies on what and how they should assess colleges’ efforts to measure student learning. The measures would also make clear that colleges, rather than accreditors, have primary responsibility for setting standards for student learning.
.....College leaders, who last spring fought tooth and nail against the department’s efforts to impose a set of new regulations governing accreditation, lobbied Congress hard to limit the department’s work on accreditation. But department officials strenuously oppose the approach lawmakers have taken in the Higher Education Act legislation and have expressed their objections in many venues: interviews with reporters, White House letters outlining their problems with the legislation, and, most recently, a harshly worded op-ed in a Washington political newspaper in which Spellings lambasted for having been “persuaded to block the U.S. Department of Education from overseeing the quality of institutions of higher education by special interest forces determined to keep the accreditation process insular, clubby and accountable to no one but themselves.”
.....“While business leaders embrace the future, Congress is vigorously defending old structures and outdated practices in higher education at the behest of entrenched stakeholders who advocate the status quo,” Spellings wrote in the Politico.
.....Department officials have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to persuade leading members of Congress to drop or soften their prohibition. As House and Senate lawmakers and staff begin work on a compromise version of the Higher Education Act legislation, they may get a little help from a friends — former members of the secretary’s higher education commission.
.....This month, Sara Martinez Tucker and Diane Auer Jones, respectively the department’s under secretary and assistant secretary for postsecondary education, held a conference call for former members of the Spellings Commission to, as a spokeswoman characterized it, update them on the department’s efforts to carry out the panel’s recommendations. The spokeswoman said that the department has done so occasionally, although she could not say when or how often.
.....By all accounts, department officials — who like all federal officials are barred contacting or encouraging others to lobby Congress — did not in any way encourage the participating members of the Spellings panel to urge lawmakers to reconsider their approach to the accreditation issue. According to several participants on the call, Tucker and Jones updated the members on a wide range of recent administration and Congressional initiatives, including the renewal of the Higher Education Act, and they did make clear that they were unhappy about the outcome of the accreditation issue.
.....“Sara said something like, ‘We’ve been beaten up on this accreditation issue,’ and she may have said that the department had been ‘emasculated’ or something to that effect,” said Richard K. Vedder, a commission member who is an economics professor at Ohio University.
.....Vedder and Charles Miller, who chaired the Spellings panel, insisted that department officials “did not in any form or fashion ask us” to advocate on the agency’s behalf, as Miller put it. But someone — Miller, Vedder and Arthur J. Rothkopf, another former commission member, all said it “may have been” them — asked Tucker whether there was anything the panel’s members might do.
.....“I may have initiated it,” said Rothkopf, a former Lafayette College president and now senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Some of us wondered, If we don’t like what the Congress is doing, maybe those of us who are commissioners could say, ‘We think this is going in the wrong direction.’ “
.....Vedder, who like Rothkopf describes himself as generally sympathetic to the department’s position on accreditation, said that Tucker responded along the lines of: “We are constrained by the law, we cannot lobby Congress. but you people can do whatever you want.”
.....And they just may, says Rothkopf, who notes that he is speaking as an individual capacity and not for the Chamber of Commerce. “I think that most commission members felt that the accreditation process was a way to get more outcomes out there, to give students and parents and the public more information. Congress’s approach would seem to cut the accreditors loose and cut the department loose. What Congress has done here runs counter to our recommendations and will make it harder to achieve the results we would like to achieve. It’s a possibility that some members of the commission will express their views.”….

● Also in IHE: Drill Terrifies Students:

.....Elizabeth City State University, in North Carolina, is offering counseling to students and faculty members after a mock safety drill in which someone pretended to be a killer and entered a classroom with a fake gun, The News & Observer reported. An e-mail and text message had alerted the campus to the drill, but there were not full details and many at Elizabeth City State apparently didn’t read the message. The unknowing professor whose class was the target of the fake drill said he was “prepared to die” as the events took place.

● From yesterday’s OC Reg: Saddleback College's Rapid Tech program makes industry partners:

.....Two days before last Thanksgiving, a young woman in the Sacramento area was in a horrific car accident that crushed the right side of her face. The next day, engineers at Saddleback College were building a large-scale model of her skull to send to surgeons at UC Davis Medical Center.
.....The skull was built by the college's National Center for Rapid Technologies, part of its Advanced Technology Center. The center has existed since 2005, but only last October did it receive a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation. It then assumed the name "RapidTech" and became the only center in the country that specializes in rapid prototyping and additive manufacturing, said Ed Tackett, the program's director.
.....Instead of starting with a large block of material and shaping it down, machines at the center build parts or prototypes from scratch − a much more efficient process, Tackett said.
.....The technology has existed since the late 1980s, but newer processes and materials have made the technology more economically viable. That means companies need engineers who know how to use it.
....."From an educational aspect, what (RapidTech) lets see is where the technology's going in the future, and it lets us develop coursework that will train the new generation of technicians and engineers," Tackett said.
.....Saddleback offers a certificate program in using the technology. It keeps the class size to about 10 – mostly because of the building's lack of physical space, which Tackett and his colleagues are hoping to change by finding a generous donor.
.....In addition to education, the center has also partnered with several companies, including Pixar, Ford, Honda and Boeing, by developing prototypes and specialty parts for new projects.
.....Tackett said as the technology progresses, Saddleback will lead the industry in the creation of new ways to utilize it. New jobs come from new technology, he said, and the manufacturing industry should focus on America's strengths – creativity and the ability to specialize – instead of trying to bring back mass-manufacturing jobs lost to outsourcing.
....."Let's be realistic about U.S. manufacturing: a lot of it has been moved offshore," he said. "We need to be progressive, not regressive about our manufacturing and our capabilities."

● From this morning’s New York Times: School Board to Pay in Jesus Prayer Suit

.....A Delaware school district has agreed to revise its policies on religion as part of a settlement with two Jewish families who had sued over the pervasiveness of Christian prayer and other religious activities in the schools.
.....One family said it was forced to leave its home in Georgetown because of an anti-Semitic backlash.
.....The settlement, which was approved Tuesday, includes payments to the families that both sides would not disclose. Although the settlement resolves many complaints in the suit, against the Indian River School District, the parties are proceeding with litigation over the school board practice of beginning its sessions with prayer....

The little Vietnamese flag story is out there

From Inside Higher Ed: 

“Irvine Valley College has removed the Vietnamese flag from an atrium display of flags from all over the world, in response to threats by Vietnamese immigrants in the area to hold a protest of what they view as an inappropriate honor for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, The Orange County Register reported. A spokeswoman said that the college was trying to be ‘considerate.’” 

See also: LA Times. The story’s on the AP wire. Saw it on MSNBC website, etc., yesterday. A brief video of IVC's SSC flag issue:

Communist flag vs. Republic flag

Some background on the Vietnamese Flag issue: From Wikipedia: the flag of the Republic of Vietnam (i.e., the flag of South Vietnam, pre-1975) and its importance to Vietnamese Americans:

• When a Vietnamese American video tape store owner displayed the communist [i.e., the current] flag in front of his store in Westminster, California in 1999, a month-long protest against it climaxed when 15,000 people held a candlelight vigil one night, sparking the Hi Tek Incident (Hi Tek was the name of the store).
• A faux pas by the United States Postal Service in using the current Vietnamese flag in a brochure to represent the Vietnamese American community that it serves cause some outrage among Vietnamese Americans and resulted in an apology.
• In 2004, some Vietnamese American students at the California State University, Fullerton threatened to walk out on their graduation ceremony to demand that the university use the former flag of South Vietnam as well as the current flag of Vietnam to represent its Vietnamese students. This resulted in the university scrapping all foreign flags for the ceremony.


• In 2006, Vietnamese American students at the College of Engineering, UTA [University of Texas, Arlington] requested that the university add this flag in addition to the communist flag as a part of its student diversity in the Hall of Flags, Nedderman Hall. After several weeks of protests from the Vietnamese-American community in the area, the president removed all the flags from display in its Hall of Flags.
• Prior to President George W. Bush's visit to Vietnam in 2006, the White House website briefly displayed this [i.e., the old Republic of Vietnam] flag before replacing it with the current flag of Vietnam.
• The lobbying efforts of Vietnamese Americans resulted in the state governments of California and Ohio to adopt it to symbolize Vietnamese Americans in 2006.


The infamous Hi Tek incident, 1999

“They are our enemies,” said the trustee

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: How Offensive Can a Trustee Be?:

.....Nationwide, colleges have been bolstering their programs in Arabic and the study of the Middle East, responding to growing student interest and awareness that Americans benefit from better understanding the region. At the College of the Siskiyous, in California, such a plan prompted a tirade of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim comments from a trustee, disturbing many on the campus. The trustee is refusing to apologize or resign.
.....The community college is planning to offer its first credit courses ever in both Arabic and Middle Eastern history. At a board meeting last month, the additional courses were included among the “consent” items for the board — non-controversial items that are typically approved collectively at the start of a board meeting, unless a board member objects.
.....Dorris Wood, the board member, objected last month, with the following comments: “When I look at this proposed class, my one thought is that we know all we need to know about the Arabs and Islam. They are our enemies: pure and simple.... They have declared war on the United States and are committed to our destruction.... When our schools fail the citizens of this great country by undermining the basic principles of democracy and support the sworn enemies we will fail completely.... Study history and understand how the Muslims have over the centuries invaded other countries and forced their religion by killing, plundering, and ravaging... Now they are invading Christian countries of the world from inside, one method being through our schools and universities.... If you want to give yourselves to Islam, you have the right and freedom to do that. But don’t give my country to them.”
.....The statement didn’t sway the board and the courses were approved, but the fact that a trustee would describe Arabs and Muslims in this way (without any distinctions among Arabs and Muslims, who are not monolithic in their views) stunned those at the meeting, and many who heard of the comments later.
.....Concern over the statements prompted the college president, Dave Pelham, to meet with Wood and then to apologize to everyone associated with the college for her statements. In an e-mail he sent to students and professors, Pelham said that after talking with Wood, he had a better understanding of her perspective. “She raises the concern that the impact of religion in the development of our country is not dealt with in the same manner as it is when we teach courses about other cultures. In other words, her argument is that the impact of Christianity in the formation of the United States does not receive the same focus in our American history classes as the impact that Islam had in the development of the Middle East will receive in the proposed course on Middle Eastern history. Regardless of your opinion on this issue, it is a valid concern for discussion/debate.”
.....However, Pelham continued in language that is unusually harsh for a president (even one who happens to soon be leaving for another position) to use about one of his board members. He said that her comments on Arabs and Islam as “enemies” demonstrated a “logical fallacy has been used many times throughout history to marginalize, isolate, and in extreme cases, eliminate large groups of people.”
.....He continued: “As logically flawed as I find these remarks in the abstract, I am incensed by the fact that they classify members of our own staff, faculty, student body and community with the terrorists that attacked this country on 9/11. These people love and support our country AND are of Arab descent and/or follow Islam. It is to these members of our campus and community that I offer my most sincere apology. They deserve better treatment, especially at an institution of higher education.”
.....Wood did not respond to messages seeking her comment. But at this month’s board meeting, local press accounts said, she rebuked Pelham for having sent out his apology, saying that she is “an elected official, elected by the voters of Siskiyou County and not by the staff of the college.” She added, according to the Mount Shasta Record, that “when I speak about an item or an issue I am speaking on behalf of the public based on my judgment of that issue.”
.....Further, she told Pelham that he should not apologize on her behalf, saying “this is way beyond your authority.”
.....A coalition of student and faculty groups, including the Academic Senate and the Associated Student Body, presented a joint resolution asking Wood to resign immediately, saying that her comments violated the anti-bias rules of the college, and that her seeking to block new courses based on those views amounted to an infringement of academic freedom. Wood ignored the request.
.....Pelham said that Wood has indicated that she plans to run for re-election to the board this fall.
.....A spokeswoman for the Association of Community College Trustees said officials there could not comment on the situation because they have a policy of never commenting on anything said by a board member during a meeting.

Michael Scheuer on "the enemy":