UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow has issues with sifting and winnowing.

A geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Rachel Slocum, made the mildly controversial point in an email to her students that Republicans in the House of Representatives had brought about the partial closure of the US government, and had therefore brought about the closure of the US Census web site.  This closure prevented her students from completing their assignments.  She never used abusive or offensive language.

Her point raised howls among the conservative blogasphere and media; when confronted with this, her boss, UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow, publicly reprimanded her for expressing a factually based opinion to her class.  In my view, it was his job to back her--not to agree with her opinion, but rather to defend her right to express it.

The irony is that Wisconsin is the very state that in many ways laid the foundation for academic freedom in state supported universities.  When Richard Ely was attacked more than 100 years ago for advocating in his classes on behalf of labor unions, the Regents of the University of Wisconsin rose to defend him.  As the Wisconsin Historical Society writes:

In 1894 Ely was teaching economics at Madison, including the various socialist and communist economic theories gaining popularity at the time. When this was discovered by Oliver E. Wells, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ely was attacked in the press not just for teaching left-wing theories to Wisconsin's youth but also for supposedly advising radical activists who were organizing a strike in Madison. When his dismissal was demanded, the university regents investigated his activities. 

After a series of witnesses had testified, the regents found no cause to fire Ely. Instead, they issued a famous statement defending the importance of academic freedom in a democracy. "Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere," they wrote, "we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found." That statement has become one of the foundation stones of intellectual freedom in America, and a hallmark of the University of Wisconsin.     

One wonders what Chancellor Gow would have done with Ely.  

Full disclosure: this is personal for me.  I was on the faculty at Wisconsin for 12 years (after getting my Ph.D. there), and was always proud to teach there, in part because of the plaque on Bascom Hill that memorialized sifting and winnowing.  It just made me feel good to walk by it, because I believed that the place I worked believed it.

But even more important, my mother taught at Wisconsin-La Crosse for decades, serving as chair of the English Department there for many years.  She also began the Women's Studies program there--surely, a controversial thing to do at the time she did it.   I can't help but wonder whether Chancellor Gow would have had the vision and the fortitude to support her important work.

welcome

welcome...

The Windy City and The Foggy City

Hannah Green writes:

ERNEST HEMINGWAY famously wrote of Paris, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." For half a century, Hemingway’s nostalgic vision of the city of lights has made undiscovered literary geniuses wish that they could be unemployed in Paris in the 1920s instead of unemployed wherever they live, now. Last year, Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City, offered a different kind of literary city. The main character, Julius, who resembles Cole, wanders the streets of New York, conversing with the city’s residents and falling into reveries about music, history, and literature. Most of the people he speaks with are immigrants, among them investment bankers and prisoners, shoe shiners and Columbia professors. Each conversation is evidence of the many layers of humanity that make New York the constantly fluctuating city it is. Cole’s New York is too much in motion to be moveable....

Dr Patricia Harris on Healthcare Exchanges

It is here:

Hannah Green interviews Josh Oppenheim Asia Times Online :: Skeletons in Indonesia's closet

Asia Times Online :: Skeletons in Indonesia's closet

INTERVIEW
Skeletons in Indonesia's closet
By Hannah Green 

LOS ANGELES - Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing is a transformative film. It presents a glimpse into one of the 20th century's lesser-known political mass killings: the extermination of suspected communists in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966. Unlike many other documentaries, however, The Act of Killing tells history through the eyes of the perpetrators. 

Oppenheimer said that when he first started working in Indonesia, he was shocked to hear former executioners boasting about their many killings. The paramilitary groups that helped perpetrate the genocide still had power, and society continued to uphold them as heroes. In order to understand their boasting, Oppenheimer and his crew asked Anwar Congo, a retired executioner, and other members of the paramilitary group Pancasila Youth, to tell their story by reenacting their killings on film. 

The result is as haunting as it is absurd. Anwar, the film's central figure, jumps from genre to genre as he struggles to capture his past. He casts himself first as a tough guy in a riff on American gangster films, then later as a bloodied corpse in a nightmare scenario where one of his victims seeks post-mortem revenge, and later as a victim of the same violence he perpetrated against others.... 

How I wish I could get an unbundled subscription to the Wall Street Journal

I cannot do my job without reading it, and its reporters are still excellent, even in the Murdoch era.  And in general, I have learned to ignore the rantings of the editorial page, which basically say that if a policy is first-order good for poor people, it is bad for poor people, and if a policy is first-order bad for poor people, it is good for poor people.

But there is one worthy in particular, sitting high in his aerie at the tip of Manhattan, whose misogynistic braying should be issued (if at all) from his parents' basement: James Taranto, the eager defender of sexual assaulters.  That I am sending any money at all his way is a constant annoyance.

Hannah Green writes on the problem of how victims of rape who are college students are treated

In Open Magazine (an Indian newsweekly), she writes:

Angie Epifano always wears the same necklace. It is simple—a round blue stone set in silver on a silver chain. When something reminds her of her rape, she holds the pendant in her palm and concentrates on how it feels. This brings her a sense of calm.

“It’s called ‘grounding,’” she says, touching the pendant during a Skype interview. It’s a technique psychological counsellors teach those who have experienced rape or other types of trauma: when something occurs in their daily life that reminds them of what happened—whether it’s seeing their rapist, or a certain smell or sound—they must concentrate on something else that will bring them back to the present.

“Some people have a memory that they think of, or a place that they felt safe in, like a wooded space. Or they’ll think of their favourite food or just anything that will bring them back to reality. If you were to run into or see your rapist—that’s the kind of tool that will help you get through the encounter.”

Read the rest here.