Dickinson State is the new WVU

Steve Easton, president of North Dakota’s Dickinson State College (and critic of tenure) is looking to cut and cut and cut. From Inside Higher Ed:

Easton told the Faculty Senate in an email Aug. 9 that he was considering cutting undergraduate degrees in English, math, political science, communication, music, theater, chemistry, environmental science and computer technology management, including the teaching tracks for those subjects, such as math education. Left would be degrees in history, biology, elementary education, computer science and other areas. . . .

Earlier this year, Easton expressed opposition to common tenure protections. He said that he drafted a version of a “Tenure With Responsibilities” bill for North Dakota’s House majority leader.

The bill the majority leader introduced would’ve let Easton and the Bismarck State College president fire tenured faculty members based on those presidents’ own reviews, with no possibility of appeal.

Related posts
Emporia, firing : West Virginia University cuts

Google to delete inactive accounts

I now see that I received the e-mail about a change in Google policy in July and August — and looked right past it each time. So I’m glad that I follow the Blogger-centric blog Too Clever by Half, which makes the e-mail’s importance clear.

Long story short: if you want your Blogger blog to outlast you, you need to make your, uhh, arrangements.

Here are the Google policy and the announcement. More helpful: Too Clever by Half’s advice about how to keep a Blogger blog online.

Textise

Textise can be a handy tool for navigating the Internets. There’s an ample explanation here.

Thanks, Ben.

Builder’s tea

I learned this term from Michael Mosley’s BBC Radio 4 podcast Just One Thing. From the Oxford English Dictionary:

British colloquial. In builder’s tea and similar compounds: designating robust, full-bodied black tea, brewed until very strong, and usually drunk with milk and often sugar.

Wikipedia: “It takes its name from the inexpensive tea commonly drunk by labourers taking a break.”

Ah, so that’s what I’ve been drinking. (Almost always black, no sugar.)

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

Squirrel with avocado skin

It’s a grey rainy day. So here is a squirrel enjoying an avocado skin, as seen outside Boston last month.

[Photograph by me. Click for a larger, cuter view.]

A related post
KNUT winter schedule (Squirrel TV)

“Thick with virtual dust”

From a New York Review Books e-mail:

In 2016, Phillip Lopate, who has been writing essays and thinking about the essay for decades now, turned his attention to one of the essay’s offshoots, the blog, a form by that time already thick with virtual dust. Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about, really, whatever over the course of a year.

And now it’s 2023, and those blog posts (themselves thick with dust?) are being sold as a book. Except that they’re not really blog posts. Lopate was writing what might better be called a weekly column for The American Scholar. Some blog!

[If the word blog applies, Lopate committed, really, to writing a weekly post. A phrase in his final entry — “what my next week’s blog will be about” — suggests that he used the word blog to refer to both the whole and the part.]

Seeing and smelling

“The judge was smart enough to smell a rat when she saw it”: Representative Tom Tiffany (WI-35), mangling an old idiom at the Merrick Gatland show trial just now.

Tiffany voted against accepting the results of the 2020 presidential election. He also voted against making Juneteenth a national holiday. I smell a rat.

[The first citation for smell a rat in Green’s Dictionary of Slang : c. 1529.]

Travel by plane and book

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

The “you” of this passage is a character in the novel, a reader who is now reading On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon by Takakumi Ikoka. That novel is one of ten (imaginary) novels that the reader in/of this novel encounters, each in the form of a few pages.

Postmodern play aside, this passage captures what flying always feels like to me: it’s not being anywhere.

Also from this novel
The formula : Novels and theories : “A fairly precise notion of the book”

[I am not now flying.]

Got stamps?

[Dustin, September 20, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Dustin: Paterfamilias Ed is looking for stamps. Snarky Meg wonders who still uses them. Some of us do, Meg. And we mail early in the day and use ZIP codes.

Related reading
All OCA mail and stamp posts (Pinboard)

[I have heard from reliable sources about college students who don’t know how to send a piece of mail. Meg is in high school.]

Facts and truth

Reading about Russian-textbook “history” made me recall this observation, from Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing (New York: Knopf, 2019):

While I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.

Related posts
Barack Obama on facts : “Facts are stubborn things” : Longhand and a Smith-Corona : Taped to the lamp