Back to the WIC doctor’s
… went the children yesterday. Daniel is in the 99th percentile, height-wise, and Samuel is in the 42nd; when he was Daniel’s age, he was in the 5th or 8th or thereabouts, so he is coming up nicely. We collected our WIC points and, to celebrate, bought McGriddles and hash browns (not with WIC points). Later my parents came over for Daniel’s birthday, and we ate burgers and chocolate cake. Daniel received cards, motorcars, dinosaurs, and books; Samuel, whose birthday it wasn’t, received a road map of Kentucky. And The Hobbit. Today I scolded him for coloring over Tolkien’s maps.
Samuel’s Hobbit is a gift for me, in a way, because I get nervous whenever he pulls my Hobbit off the shelf, which he started doing after he watched the cartoon starring John Huston and Orson Bean. I bought myself an extra Hobbit, too, just in case.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
“Indiana Bill Threatens Faculty Members Who Don’t Provide ‘Intellectual Diversity’ ” (Inside Higher Ed).
Ours is the latest state to have its universities meddled with.
In John Williams’s novel, Stoner (1965), a young academic ruminates with two colleagues about the purpose of the University:
Samuel’s Hobbit is a gift for me, in a way, because I get nervous whenever he pulls my Hobbit off the shelf, which he started doing after he watched the cartoon starring John Huston and Orson Bean. I bought myself an extra Hobbit, too, just in case.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
“Indiana Bill Threatens Faculty Members Who Don’t Provide ‘Intellectual Diversity’ ” (Inside Higher Ed).
Ours is the latest state to have its universities meddled with.
In John Williams’s novel, Stoner (1965), a young academic ruminates with two colleagues about the purpose of the University:
“And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm. It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that’s just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.”The speech is recalled later in the book:
“Gordon, do you remember something Dave Masters said once?”Is it a good idea to sponsor a refuge for brainy misfits? Maybe; maybe not. But force it to look like the world, and it’s no longer a refuge from the world; it’s no longer a university. It’s just another department of the world, doing the same things the world does (but issuing lots of publications). Which makes it redundant, inefficient, and certainly not worth paying for, doesn’t it? I see what you’re really up to, GOP.
Finch raised his brows in puzzlement. “Why do you bring Dave Masters up?”
Stoner looked across the room, out of the window, trying to remember. “The three of us were together, and he said – something about the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled. But he didn’t mean Walker. Dave would have thought of Walker as – as the world. And we can’t let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal, just as … The only hope we have is to keep him out.”