Just another spring day on campus

Here is a typical gathering of UMM students, honoring the god of electricity.

UMN Morris is a clean energy leader and destination. We are carbon neutral in electricity. UMN Morris produces more clean electricity per student of any campus in the United States.
-100% carbon neutral electric status achieved in 2020
-1,000,000 lbs + of organic waste diverted from landfills by campus and community
composting program
-10 Million kWh electricity produced each year by two wind turbines
-Gold STAR rating (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher
Education)

I am stumped by the logistics

I honestly tried to give this Netflix movie, Rebel Moon: the Scargiver, a chance. I made it about halfway before giving up in boredom.

It’s a sci-fi fantasy story about a rag-tag group of deadly warriors defeating an empire…prosaic enough so far. But what totally killed it for me, besides the deadly dull characters and ridiculous stakes, was the logistics. There is the gigantic, ultra-powerful galactic empire, you see, and the local governor sends this gigantic starship crewed entirely by psycho Nazis, to collect…grain. That’s the macguffin here, bags of grain. This grain is the output of a small village of maybe 30 vaguely North European farmers who harvest it over the course of less than a week, so we’re not even talking about megatonnes of vital foodstuff to feed a planet or two. Nope, just a bunch of sacks of grain that the farmers can pile into a single building in their village.

An immense starship appears, so large that it looms over the village while hanging in low orbit, and then the stupid slow-mo fighting with swords and clubs and farm implements and a few rifles against a robotic army of multi-barreled tanks and armies of space nazis and I see from the synopses that the peasants win.

None of this makes any sense, but there are two movies in this series and a third threatened. There are also going to be “director’s cut” versions of this thing released, as if it deserves further attention. This is garbage of Hugo Gernsback quality, illiterate hackery. How does Zack Snyder get away with it?

You know, the first thing a good science fiction movie should have is a competent, compelling writer generating the ideas behind its premise and execution. I guess since Star Wars got away with neglecting that component, though, nobody thinks it’s necessary any more.

Mondays are for disillusionment

Me, right now

I am all caught up on my grading — until Friday, when it starts all over again — so I could have used some happy, wholesome news. Instead, I got this:

Mr Macartney, a former motorcycle gang member who previously spent time in prison, ran several chat groups for monkey torture enthusiasts from around the world on the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

The groups were used to share ideas for custom-made torture videos, such as setting live monkeys on fire, injuring them with tools and even putting one in a blender.

The ideas were then sent, along with payments, to video-makers in Indonesia who carried them out, sometimes killing the baby long-tailed macaque monkeys in the process.

I mentioned this horrible monkey torture ring before. Does it count as good news that several people are going to prison over this activity, or is it bad news that such horrors exist at all? This is a better question than whether the stupid cup is half empty or half full — should we regard the existence of monkey torturers as an indictment of humanity, or the existence of anti-torture laws as an example of humanity’s virtues? I can go either way.

Unfortunately, then I read about 764, the torture ring that’s all about kids torturing kids. We should probably all just get off the internet.

That’s my boy

My son, Major Conlann A. Myers, has been published in Army Communicator, with a short history and current status of the 51st Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced (ESB-E) (his unit) on page 35, if you’re interested. I know I am. This is the best we get, though – vague statements about the broad general area of deployment, next to nothing about timing.

The 51st ESB-E is postured to deploy to the United States Central Command area of operations (AoR) in 2024 as the first full ESB-E, taking over a mission that has previously been filled from ESBs and providing new capabilities to the area of responsibility. The mission will provide the Army the opportunity to improve the tactical network supporting U.S. forces in the AoR with the newest equipment and prove out the ability of the ESB-E concept to fully replace existing ESBs.

We know it’s soon and it’s the Middle East, and we’ll be worrying the whole time.

The Columbia administration is totally out of touch with academic principles

If I lived a good bit further east, I’d be here this afternoon:

There have been several days of peaceful pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and Barnard College, which is not surprising. That’s what students should do; if other students want to rally for Israel, that’s fine, too. Unfortunately, the administration does not understand free speech at all, adopting the right-wing definition that says you are only allowed to freely agree with them.

They turned the police loose on the students. Protest leaders were summarily dismissed from the university, and evicted from housing, given minutes to clear out and get out.

They attempted to shut down the campus radio station. They prohibited students from putting posters on their dorm room doors. They colluded with conservatives to silence any protests.

The students sat on the ground and sang as police in riot gear approached them. Eventually, more than 100 of them would be arrested; their tents, protest signs and Palestinian flags were gathered into trash bags by the police and thrown away. One video showed officers and university maintenance workers destroying food that had been donated to the encampment, making sure it would be inedible. According to student journalists reporting from WKCR, Columbia University’s student radio station, one arrested student protester asked the police to be allowed to go to their dorm to collect medication and was denied; as a result, they went into shock. The arrested students were charged with “trespassing” on the campus that they are charged more than $60,000 a year to attend.

The day before her administration asked the New York police department to storm their campus and arrest their students, Minouche Shafik, the Columbia University president, testified before Congress, saying that she wanted her university to be a safe and welcoming environment for everyone. But Shafik, who was called to testify after missing a hearing last year where the presidents of Penn and Harvard were each grilled on their insufficient hostility to pro-Palestinian students, appeared eager to please the Republican-controlled committee. The Penn and Harvard presidents who had testified each lost their jobs soon thereafter; Shafik clearly entered the hearing room determined to keep her own.

A “safe and welcoming environment,” hah. Shafik and others made a knee-jerk over-reaction to the existence of opinions that their moneyed conservative interests disliked, and suddenly they’re the Gestapo. Students have since occupied one of the lawns at the university with tents and banners flying, and you can guess how the administration is reacting.

In yet another sign of the ongoing division between students and faculty on one side, and administrators on the other, the Barnard and Columbia faculty members of the American Association of University Professors have loudly deplored the actions of the administration.

Joint Statement by the American Association of University Professors,

Barnard and Columbia Chapters

April 19, 2024

The American Association of University Professors has defined two central pillars of higher education in America: academic freedom and shared governance: the freedom to teach and do research without interference from entities external to the profession; and the “inescapable interdependence among governing board, administration, faculty, students.” In the last three days, Columbia University President Shafik and her administration have seriously violated both. We are shocked at her failure to mount any defense of the free inquiry central to the educational mission of a university in a democratic society and at her willingness to appease legislators seeking to interfere in university affairs. She has demonstrated flagrant disregard of shared governance in her acceptance of partisan charges that anti-war demonstrators are violent and antisemitic and in her unilateral and wildly disproportionate punishment of peacefully protesting students.

President Shafik’s testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee on April 17 has profoundly disturbed us. In the face of slanderous assaults on Columbia faculty and students and of gross interference in academic practices by Congressional inquisitors, President Shafik not only did not object—she capitulated to their demands. Academic freedom was formulated from its very beginning to safeguard faculty from political or other non-academic sources of intrusion. President Shafik, the co-chairs of the Board of Trustees, and the former Dean of the Law School allowed this freedom for Columbia faculty to be publicly shredded. They effectively pledged, on the Congressional record, to end academic freedom at Columbia.

President Shafik’s decision on April 18 to call upon the New York Police Department to arrest over one hundred students for engaging in a peaceful protest is a grotesque violation of norms of shared governance. Section 444 of University Statutes, put in place after the police attacks of 1968, requires “consultation” with the University Senate executive committee before anything so drastic as yesterday’s attack would be permitted. President Shafik’s administration did not consult; they informed the committee of its decision. “The Executive Committee did not approve the presence of NYPD on campus,” said the Executive Committee Chair, adding that the Committee came to their decision “unequivocally.” President Shafik’s decision to invite the NYPD to campus was thus undertaken unilaterally, disregarding the very idea of shared governance.

In Wednesday’s hearing, President Shafik repeatedly claimed that she was inaugurating a new era at Columbia. Her actions thus far suggest that this era will be one of repressed speech, political restrictions on academic inquiry, and punitive discipline against the University’s own students and faculty. As the protesters’ chant rightly states, “Protest is democracy; this is a travesty!” AAUP Barnard and Columbia pledge continued support for our students’ right to protest and to speak freely, and for our colleagues’ right to teach and to write freely within their domains of expertise. We have lost confidence in our president and administration, and we pledge to fight to reclaim our university.

The administration is selling out the university and betraying faculty and students.

“It’s the most appalling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor who was on the school’s lawn when the police entered. “The students were extraordinary. Chanting. Crying. It felt like a total violation of everything an academic institution is supposed to be.” She said the arrests were political theater aimed at appeasing Congress without concern that students were collateral damage.

“Palestine was always going to be the issue that broke this university,” said Ry Spada, 24, a history major who is Jewish and was part of the pro-Palestinian protest Thursday night, identifying as non-Zionist. “This year and this topic.”

James Applegate, an astronomy professor who is part of the executive committee of the Columbia University Senate, said he is more concerned about what happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the ongoing loss of academic freedom and the culture on campus than he is about police making peaceful arrests of student protesters.

I don’t even understand that last comment. Students are being arrested, dismissed, and evicted — it’s important to stand on principle, but these are young people who are being actively harmed. I stand with the students and a liberated Palestine. This isn’t stopping, and shame on any college professor who supports the tyranny of Columbia University and Barnard College.

Two weeks to go

I made a brilliant planning decision way back at the beginning of the semester. Bless you, Fall Term PZ!

My big course this term is EcoDevo — big ol’ textbook, lots of papers from the scientific literature, all new lectures, etc. One part of the course is that the students have to do presentations on aspects of eco devo that interest them, and I scheduled that for the last two weeks of the class, which is coming up. That means I have no new lecture prep coming up! My weekends have been frantic this year: Saturday is dedicated to reading and studying, and Sunday is spent assembling those one hour lectures and putting together lists of concept questions. But not this weekend!

My second biggest class is called BioComm, and it’s a course in which I shepherd students through the exercise of writing a formal research paper, and this term by a terrible miscalculation I have 8 students. It’s too many. Never again. The problem is that I have to personally read these long papers in multiple steps of their development, and it’s a hell of a lot of grading and criticizing and revising. And here it is, the end of the semester, and there’s a pile of 20+ page papers sitting in my in-box.

So this is where I planned brilliantly: the weekends where I don’t have to work to make content for my eco devo course, are these final weekends where I instead have to read and mark up a monstrous mountain of student writing assignments! Perfect dovetailing! Two courses meshing smoothly together to bring me to the brink of insanity, but not quite over the edge into a gibbering breakdown!

My biocomm students get another chance to address my criticisms next week, so next weekend will be similarly consumed with a returning pile of papers, but then, in two weeks…FREEDOM! Spider time! Also I get to spend the summer preparing for yet another new class in the fall, so even my relatively free months have wicked shackles holding me back.

Daniel Dennett has died

The last time I met Dennett was at a Darwin Day event where we were a double bill. We had a good time, he told me stories about his heart surgery, mentioned that all he really wanted to do was get away to his farm and make apple cider, we got to talking about evolution, and I told him I didn’t care much at all for his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea — it was naively adaptationist. He asked my opinion of free will, and I told him I never argue about it, because it was all an illusion and it didn’t matter whether minds had it or not. We got along famously, and corresponded for a while afterwards, until the fact that I was disenchanted with Dawkins, despised Harris, thought the whole idea of the “four horsemen” was disappointing jingo, and that sexism was poisoning everything, made me persona non grata among prominent atheists. Oh, well, we were friends for a while.

Now Dennett has died. That’s a sadness, because he was a good guy and brought a thoughtful, humanist perspective to atheism. I hope someone is taking care of his apples.

With Hitchens and Dennett dead, and Dawkins doddering on the edge of irrelevant crankiness, I guess that leaves young Mr Harris, the least of the quartet, holding the legacy of the Four Horsemen, and that propaganda concept can now fade away, unlamented. Dennett’s legacy will continue and his books are worth thinking about, even when I disagree with them.