Women's Studies at IVC, factoidal update #1: there is no "program" now

     Oddly (and uniquely), at IVC, Women's Studies is housed in the School of Guidance and Counseling, not in Humanities or Social Sciences, where one usually finds it.
     Factoid #1: IVC once had a Women's Studies Program, but Guidance and Counseling, which only offers three courses in WS, has allowed WS to languish, and so it is no longer qualifies as a program.
     The School of Humanities, which hopes to develop an extensive, inter-disciplinary WS (and Gender Studies) program, would secure program status for WS once again.
     But Guidance and Counseling insist on retaining WS.

Yes she is!

She's Beautiful When She's Angry Trailer from nancy kennedy on Vimeo.

At a theater, well, probably not near us, but near someone.

These are a few of my favorite things... (Rebel Girl)

Yesterday in women's restrooms across campus:

The A-200 Women's Room never looked so good.

What unexpected delight.  A+!

Later Rebel Girl braved rush hour surface street traffic to get to Garden Grove for the swearing in of Bao Nguyen as mayor. Bao, a UCI grad and one of Red Emma's former students, was first elected to the Garden Grove Unified School District Board some years back.  (Historical note: Rebel Girl has nominated him as IVC commencement speaker for many years now.  He has failed to make the cut, even as a finalist despite that fact he looks quite dapper in a suit, which seems to be one of the criteria.)

Bao,  a very young 35 years old, has just made history as the country's first Vietnamese American mayor of a city of over 100,000.  It was worth the drive across the county to see him stand there, his mother who gave birth to him in a refugee camp in Thailand holding a copy of the Constitution (Bao's choice of swearing-in text) while Erwin Chemerinsky, UCI's law school dean and one of the country's leading Constitutional law scholars, did the honors.  Not bad for a Tuesday night.

Through it all Rebel Girl had to reflect that change is sometimes indeed slow but when it arrives, well, it's worth it.

The mayor!

It was a terrific scene.  SRO in council chambers and the overflow room filled as well.  As as she arrived late and did not score a seat inside, Rebel Girl had to do with hanging out in the hallway with the likes of Chemerinsky.  Tough luck. What a guy. A quick chat revealed they had friends in common, including one of his former students, Paul Davis, who studied at USC with Chemerinsky and who, Rebel Girl believes, may have taught at IVC years ago, before her time.

Chemerinsky's favorite amendment to the Constutuition?  The 14th, natch.  He recited the first section in that hallway:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The mayor and the dean and the Constitution.

It's a good one.  Poetry.

There's more to say about yesterday but Rebel Girl will close with Sarah Vaughan singing about whiskers on kittens and save the dog bites and bee stings for another time.

Home.

*
In the Huffington Post:    
Bao Nguyen, Rabble Rouser Transforming Politics in Little Saigon, OC

Tora Tora Tora!

Click on image to make it LARGER

A suggestion for a college sliding inexorably into decay and mediocrity owing to its shitty "leadership" that the goddam board seems to love

maggot: a soft-bodied legless larva, esp.
that of a fly found in decaying matter.

The A400 "Beam Signing BBQ event" is a hit

Click on photos to enlarge them

     As you know, some of us—including the long-suffering (i.e., perpetually facilities-deprived) faculty of the School of Humanities—will be moving into new professional digs in a few months.
     Some sort of milestone has now been reached in the construction of A400—the structural steel/frame is done, more or less, I guess. At today's festivities, designed to mark the occasion, someone asked, hopefully, whether the project is about half-way done. The chief construction guy said, "ish," and that got a laugh.
     Somebody (I know not who) hatched this idea of having the future denizens of A400 sign a construction beam, now that beamage is done. So a corner beam was painted white and, today, after the BBQ (provided, I think, by a local caterer—no doubt paid for by the college I'm now told that the construction folks paid for the food), we wandered over to that beam and commenced scrawlin' signatures and small messages. (Most of them, predictably, were decorous. E.g., "Give us bookshelves or give us death!")

The event was well attended. The construction folks were invited and seemed
to have a good time.

That's A400 in the background.

Vice President for Instruction, Craig Justice, was on hand, as was the Dean of
the Schools of Humanities, Languages & Learning Resources, and Social
& Behavioral Sciences.

Craig noted that some of the faculty who await the opening of A400 were
compelled to deal with "wildlife" this week, a sly reference to our notorious
dead rat episode. Dean Feldhus declared that A400 will be "the most
beautiful building on campus."

Here's the actual beam signing. Diane Oaks was on hand to take a group pic.

Rebel Girl made a point of inscribing the names of the original faculty of the School of Humanities and Languages (1979)

Construction, early this morning

ET CETERA

The maggoty rat, part II

From a DtB post of nine years ago

     Late Monday, I related the adventure of the maggoty dead rat, which played out here in our dreary corner of Irvine Valley College on Monday morning (there is no older and more decrepit zone, at IVC, than that ramshackle addition cobbled onto A200 about thirty-five years ago).
     Naturally, one of the asynaptic cretinoids who persist in monitoring our blog, and who seek to torment us with the occasional illiterate and idiotic "quip," weighed in with the unpleasant suggestion that our ratty fate was our own fault, the result of our leaving out food. But, in fact, the Reb and I are vegetarians and are pretty fussy about food. Further, owing to our aversion to ratitude (and maggotude and mousitude and various other itudes) we are routinely careful not to leave out food. Hence, we long ago acquired a little refrigerator for perishables and a hermetically sealed container for everything else.
     So there.

Wall repair made Thursday morning
Scene of the rat slime

* * *

     Today, I found that our little adventure was a topic of conversation throughout the halls of our benighted little college. One or two instructors informed me that they had discussed "the maggoty rat" with their students, who were much amused. Others with whom I spoke had run into administrators who seemed curiously up to speed on the whole business.
     “Really? They knew about our rat?”
     Yep.
     Today, as I returned from my 9:30 class, I found two colleagues climbing around the dirt and plants just outside my office window. Their eyes were trained on the outside correlative to the inside corner of my office, where I found the aforementioned rat-'n'-maggots blob Monday morning. “Yes,” announced one colleague, “this office is easily accessible to rats right there.” He pointed downward.
     I, of course, was staring at these colleagues from the inside. I glanced down at the portion of the office wall in question: yes, there was something like a hole there. Big enough, it seemed, for rat entry.
     Later, my dean came by. She, too, had heard about the rat episode from various colleagues. She had not, however, read my DtB account.
     “You should read it,” I said. “In my post, I made a point of singing the praises of the maintenance crew who helped us out and saved us from stinkitude and ratitude.”
     She nodded. “That's good.”
     Throughout the day (I stayed until nearly 5:00 p.m.), various colleagues came by to inspect the now-legendary maggot zone, which, in truth, betrays no indication of its recent repulsive state. One colleague said, “Yeah, I popped in yesterday morning, and I saw at least 300 maggots wriggling on the floor there where you grabbed that dead rat.”
     I thanked her for the detail. I hadn't noticed all those maggots on the floor. They were sucked up by the maintenance crew before I had returned to the scene after having grabbed and disposed of the odious rat bundle.

A year or so ago, lots of "cricket shit" was found in some A200 walls.

* * *

     Two or three years ago, during a rain storm, a puddle actually formed in that very piece of real estate now known as the rat zone. At the time, the problem was addressed via large fans placed in the hallway with the air directed outside through the rear door. Those fans roared all day long.
     People said: “OK, that'll dry out the carpet. But why don’t they fix the cause of the problem? The building clearly leaks like a sieve!”
     Supposedly, "they" did fix the problem, but I have my doubts.

* * *

     A year or so ago, our office (along with one or two contiguous offices) were surrounded by red or yellow police tape. Upon these office doors were affixed official notices alerting passers-by to the grave mold dangers within.
     That was, of course, the notorious 2013 A200 mold scare, not to be confused with the even more dire 2005 A200 mold scare (see).

It never ends

* * *

     Naturally, this "rat" business has been a source of amusement more than alarm—largely, I think, because we in the School of Humanities (and the School of Languages & Learning Resources) are all looking forward to being moved to a brand new building (A400) in late Spring or Fall.
     We are assuming, of course, that our new digs will be rat- and mold- and puddle-free.
     Yeah.