You get a degree, and you get a degree, and you get a degree! Everyone gets a degree! All you have to do is show up and, incidentally, cough up for a continuously increasing tuition.

Nathaniel Bork was recently fired from his philosophy position at Aurora community college. There are two things going on here. One is that he was an adjunct, like the majority of instructors at Aurora, so he had virtually no power or authority, and was easily firable — there are damn few protections for temporary instructors, and that’s exactly the way the administrators like it.

The other problems is that those administrators on high have fewer concerns about the quality of an education, and are more concerned with the number of tuition-paying bodies shuffled through their doors, and also listen too carefully to those tuition-payers who want the guaranteed outcome of a certificate at the end of their “education”. They created some program optimistically called “Gateway to Success”, where “success” was defined as getting a degree rather than learning something.

Just days before Bork was terminated, he says, he drafted an email to the state’s Higher Learning Commission, complaining about Aurora’s new Gateway to Success initiative. The goal of the program was to increase pass rates in these gatekeeper courses but, Bork said, in reality, he’d been asked to cut 20 percent of his introductory philosophy course content; require fewer writing assignments, with a new maximum of eight pages per semester; offer small-group activities every other class session; and make works by women and minority thinkers about 30 percent of the course.

Bork said he was told to keep teaching this way until 80 percent of all student demographic groups were passing the course, which in his view violated the spirit of Colorado law on guaranteed transfer courses to a four-year institution.

I approve of the idea of insisting on more diversity in the course material — a philosophy course would benefit from having more perspectives represented. Small group activities, also fine, since philosophy students should be able to communicate with each other and share ideas. But the rest…that’s simply dumbing down the course. Only 8 written pages total per semester? My impression of philosophers is that they can produce that much text while comatose and drunk after lunch.

I’m at a university with almost no temporary faculty, and talking to them you get a completely different set of concerns. We all want to increase the amount of learning students do — I’m actually talking to my discipline this afternoon about bumping up student math exposure and focusing a little more on quantitative biology, for example. Our goal isn’t to make it easier to graduate, but to make sure our students know the material well enough to succeed in a biology career.

So maybe it’s really one problem, the reliance on faculty the administration considers expendable and a reasonable sacrifice to enrollment goals. Problem solved by giving Nathaniel Bork and his colleagues tenure track positions, instead of firing them.

That might cause some other problems, I admit. Those might be solved by state governments investing in education to a degree they deserve.

I’ve hiked hazardous routes along the Washington coast — it’s a beautiful place with these gorgeous crescent beaches separated by spectacular rocky headlands — and before you set out you have to heed all the warnings. If you get caught on those headlands when the tide comes in, you may have to choose between going straight up a jagged, overhanging cliff or swimming out to sea in a swirl of complex currents. There are also bears.

I don’t think I’d want to hike the Broomway in England, though.

For one, at low tide, it’s a long gray mudflat. It’s not exactly scenic.

For another, the destination of your walk is a place called “Foulness Island”. This is not a name that would have been chosen by any tourism board. Saying you live on Foulness Island conjures up images of surly, decrepit villains hiding out in hovels and scheming bitterly to murder visitors and steal their shoes to enable escape. It sounds like a place infested with ticks and anthrax.

It’s worse. It’s deadly.

Depending on the time of year, you have a window of three to four hours to explore the Broomway before the tide returns. Unlike other tidal flats where the water gently rises, the speed of the incoming tide is described as faster than a person can run. Even worse, the rising waters interact with outflow from the nearby Crouch and Roach rivers to create deadly hidden whirlpools.

Nearly every site I’ve visited warns that no matter how good a swimmer you are, if you’re caught on the Broomway when the tide comes in, you’re likely to perish.

Still interested in taking a jaunt down the Broomway? You’ll first need permission from Britain’s Ministry of Defence. The military took over much of Foulness Island in the early 20th century for artillery exercises and still controls access. Adding to the path’s notoriety are large signs near the entrance warning “Do not approach or touch any object or debris as it may explode and kill you.”

In case you’re wondering, it’s the first week after Spring break, and I was already fantasizing about exotic island getaways, and this was one of the places that turned up in my google search. I think I need to come up with better search terms. Or erase my contaminating search history somehow.

I’ve always thought I was incredibly lucky to have such incredibly stupid enemies, but John @Scalzi has topped me. Scalzi has just come out with a new book, The Collapsing Empire. The guy who thinks he is Scalzi’s nemesis, Vox Day, has a small publishing house, and so he rushed into print a book, The Corroding Empire, to compete. Wait, you say, they just have similar titles, that’s not enough evidence to be plagiarism or an attempt to siphon off Scalzi’s sales, could it?

But then you see the covers.

Pathetically obvious, don’t you think?

Even more obvious, Vox Day openly announced his intentions.

When Beale announced pre-orders for The Corroding Empire, he made his mission very clear: He wanted his publishing house to do better than Tor Books and thought outperforming Scalzi with a near-identical book cover would twist the knife, adding What would be more amusing than for The Corroding Empire to outsell and outrank The Collapsing Empire? Then again, Beale’s never shied away from promoting himself or his publishing house through controversial means, including getting his followers to nominate himself and several Castalia House books for Hugo Awards during the Rabid Puppies heyday.

Beale has since announced a reprint that shortens the title to Corrosion, and changes the author’s name to Harry Seldon, parodying a character from Foundation. Some of his followers have also responded by giving Scalzi’s book negative reviews on Amazon.

That’s just sad and pitiful and weak. He’s basically admitted a desire to cling to Scalzi’s coat-tails.

If only we had video of this daredevil stunt.

By daylight, it was clear what happened: The man blew through the stop sign at a T in the road, barreled through a yard and launched his car off a 35-foot to 40-foot embankment, clearing a span of open water on Lake Le Homme Dieu. before landing on the season’s remaining ice, Armstrong said.

The man, James Sundby, 38, of Wadena, had no drugs or alcohol in his system and he doesn’t remember what happened, said Alexandria Police Chief Rick Wyffels.

The guy then staggered into a nearby stranger’s house, turned on all the lights and the TV, and proceeded to relax until he was chased away.

I’m just impressed with how far his car had to fly to clear that open water.

(Alexandria, by the way, is the next big (pop 9000!) city to the north of Morris — we go there fairly often. Now I’m feeling challenged to try the Sundby Leap, though.)

On the penultimate day of Spring Break, I cleaned up my office! It looks…majestic!

Philistines and non-academics may look at that and complain that there are still an awful lot of heaps and piles and what they would call “clutter” everywhere, but the cognoscenti will be more impressed that there are multiple clear surfaces there.

And…ermagerd! The ghost of Charles Darwin has manifested in the room! He’s…smiling! Clearly, my efforts have been blessed.

It’s been 37 years today, which is a prime number. Her age is also prime, to match her quality, while mine is a nice round number to go with my figure.

We have no exciting plans to celebrate, other than to be comfortable together for a few more years.