West Virginia University cuts

From Inside Higher Ed:

Despite pleas from students, faculty members and academic organizations to change course, and despite student protesters disrupting its Friday meeting, the West Virginia University Board of Governors voted today to eliminate 143 faculty positions and 28 academic programs from its flagship Morgantown campus.

Some students wept, and an assistant math professor stormed out of the meeting room Friday morning as board members approved cut after cut, with only the student body president, the Faculty Senate president and another faculty representative consistently voting no. . . .

The university is eliminating all its foreign language degrees, which include bachelor’s degrees in French, Spanish, Chinese studies, German studies and Russian studies, along with master’s degrees in linguistics and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).

WVU will also eliminate all its foreign language minors, with the possible exceptions of Spanish and Chinese, the two languages in which it will still offer courses. There was one relevant change Friday: the board preserved two faculty positions in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics.

The current minors allow students to study Arabic, Italian and Japanese. Those will all be eliminated. The languages and literatures department will go from 24 faculty members to seven.

The university will also end its master’s in public administration program, along with its master’s degree in higher education administration and its Ph.D. in higher education. There are also cuts in the arts, though the board saved one faculty position each in art and music.

The university is also eliminating its current graduate degree offerings in mathematics, though it says the School of Mathematical and Data Sciences has been given “approval to begin the intent-to-plan process” for replacement master’s and doctoral degrees. Sixteen faculty positions will be eliminated in that school, a third of the current faculty.

University officials have said these and other cuts will take effect at various times, as WVU provides individual employees notices of planned termination, and as professors finish teaching graduate students in discontinued programs and undergraduate students who have accumulated at least 60 credit hours toward their degrees. Those with fewer credit hours have no guarantee they’ll be able to finish their intended degrees at WVU.

Some faculty members may lose their jobs as soon as May.

WVU is led by E. Gordon Gee, who has the (dubious, to my mind) distinction of having held more college presidencies than any other American. He is seventy-nine years old and is being paid $800,000 a year.

You can find the grim paper trail leading to the cuts here.

Bill Griffith in Bushmillerland

Bill Griffith. Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created “Nancy.” New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2023. 265 pages. $24.95.

Bill Griffith is a longtime visitor to what he calls Bushmillerland. He learned to read, he says, by looking at Nancy. His own work is characterized by crosshatching and density — there might be more lines in one Zippy panel than in an entire Ernie Bushmiller strip — but Griffith’s admiration for Bushmiller’s “pristine simplicity of composition” is absolute. And that simplicity was the result of extraordinary care: in his later years, Bushmiller let his assistants know that Nancy’s hair was to have 69 to 107 spikes, no more, no less.

For Griffith, Nancy is the irreducible essence of comics. As he writes, “Nancy doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it’s like to be a comic strip.” As if to prove the point, we learn late in this graphic biography that Bushmiller kept a copy of the American Heritage Dictionary next to his favorite chair, the volume opened to page 266, where a 1957 Nancy served to illustrate comic strip.

Ernest Bushmiller (1905–1982), a child of the Bronx, left school at fourteen and became a copy boy at the New York World. Work on crossword grids and comic strips followed, and in 1925 he took over Fritzi Ritz, a cheesecake strip. Nancy, Fritzi’s niece, came onboard in 1933, and in 1938 the strip was renamed Nancy. (Fritzi stayed on, ever glamorous, something Griffith ponders in a meditation on “The Persistence of Cheesecake in Nancy.”) Though Bushmiller thought of himself as producing entertainment for the “gum chewers,” he found himself in esteemed company: James Cagney, George Herriman, Rea Irvin, Harold Lloyd, Groucho Marx, and Eleanor Roosevelt are among those whose paths crossed his. By the mid-1970s Nancy appeared in more than 800 daily newspapers. When Parkinson’s began to limit Bushmiller’s ability to draw, assistants took on ever greater responsibilities with the strip.

The Bushmiller who takes form in this biography is more than slightly driven: living a frugal life in Connecticut with his wife Abby, working his way through vacations, browsing the Sears Roebuck catalogue for comic possibilities, forever looking for the next “snapper,” the gag idea from which he would work backwards to create a strip. Drawing on the recollections of Bushmiller’s friend and assistant Jim Carlsson, Griffith has many surprising details to share: Bushmiller admired Velázquez, Fats Waller, and Thomas Wolfe; he corresponded with a young Charles Schulz; he worked at four drawing boards, switching from strip to strip; he kept a bathroom plunger close at hand for inspiration (“It’s golden,” he said). Griffith now and then depicts himself as a tour guide in an imaginary Bushmiller Museum of Comic Art, making a case for Nancy as stuff for grown-ups, and suggesting largely convincing parallels to the work of Hopper, Magritte, and Warhol.

This biography is, of course, full of art, with full-page illustrations and many smaller panels depicting places and events in Bushmiller’s life. Dozens of original Nancy strips serve as exhibits. Many other Nancy strips and single panels are repurposed to tell parts of the story, with Griffith keeping characters as Bushmiller drew them and adding new dialogue and backgrounds. The repurposing of Nancy images reaches an emotional and imaginative peak in the book’s final pages, with “Professor Griffith” visiting a United Feature Retirement Facility to meet the aging Nancy, Sluggo, Dagmar, Plato, and Spike. But you’ll have to read to find out what happens.

[A representative composite panel: Nancy and rocks by Bushmiller, mise en scène by Griffith.]

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

OCA blog-a-versary

Orange Crate Art is nineteen years old today. How did that happen?

[The obligatory Muddy Waters reference goes here.]

Novels and theories

Silas Flannery meets a reader.

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1981).

Also from this novel
The formula (Shades of AI)

My proof that I never knew phonics

I learned to read before kindergarten, picking it up at home. I was one of the fortunate kids who learn to read without formal instruction. In the Brooklyn school of my childhood, we had Dick and Jane books and were taught reading by way of the look-say or whole-word method. But how do I know that I was never taught phonics?

Here’s how. When we moved to a New Jersey suburb at the start of my sixth-grade year, my class had, as a regular feature, an exercise with words and sentences projected on a screen for rapid reading. It must have been an exercise in pronunciation, because I remember frequent references to the schwa. Schwa this. Schwa that. I never knew what schwa meant, and my guess is that I must have felt too embarrassed to ask, “What’s a schwa?” That would’ve been just one more way to look like an outlier. I did, however, know how to pronounce the words we were reading.

These days I understand the importance of phonics in reading instruction. See the podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

Going to church

I was at a church service, a Protestant service of some sort, sitting in the front pew by myself, with my guitar, uncased, at my side. The people that I was supposed to have played with — elsewhere, not at the church — hadn’t shown up. I was sitting next to a red-haired young woman named Hannah. She was the daughter of a churchgoing family but a non-believer herself.

As I didn't know what I was doing, I stood and sat by following the movements of the congregation. At one point I realized that I had been standing with my eyes closed and that everybody else had already sat down. So I sat down too.

During intermission, most of the congregation left. The pews were now mostly empty. A minister in a red robe appeared on the altar platform (if that’s the right term) to perform prop comedy. He began to place a plastic bag over his head and mimed that this was not something to do. A skit began, with several dozen members of the congregation circling the altar platform. A white woman on the platform walked over to a Black man in the circle and pointed at him angrily.

At some point during this service I noticed an illustration on my guitar that I’d never noticed before, down by the tailpiece: a cityscape of tall buildings with stylized windows — something that you might see in a Nancy cityscape.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). My guitar is a replica National Style O: it has illustrations etched on the front and back — palm trees, volcanoes, water, a canoe. The little Nancy cityscape is from August 1, 1950.]

A Frasier Mongol

Bebe Glazer (Harriet Sansom Harris) and a cup of pencils.

[“Agents in America: Part 3.” Frasier, May 9, 1995. Click for a larger view.]

Those other pencils? Maybe Dixon Ticonderogas. But the Mongol ferrule is instantly recognizable, in black and white or full color.

Elaine and I are watching Fraiser in the spirit of old-time moviegoing: we walked in in the middle of things (fifth season), watched to the end, and are now picking up at the beginning. I’m not sure that we want to sign on to Paramount Plus for the reboot.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Mind the gap There’s someone — maybe two people? — doing laundry in that photograph.

The formula

A visitor calls on the novelist Silas Flannery to warn of unauthorized translations. The visitor shows Flannery a volume in Japanese, with Flannery’s name on the title page in Roman letters.

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1981).

Silas Flannery needs to meet Jane Friedman.

A message on an egg

From The Washington Post: a handwritten message on an egg, and, seventy-two years later, a reply.

[Gift link, no subscription needed.]