legal nooz

Also from the Chronic, renowned Roseville scholar Jeanne Caldwell and her husband Larry's lawsuit against UC Berkeley for hosting a web page (that's a page) noting that evolution could be compatible with religious beliefs was turned down without comment by the US Supremes.

The Caldwells are very disappointed. No word yet on whether they'll reconcile with reality at some point.

things that are unhealthy

A 4:30 am coughing fit left me unable to teach classes Monday morning. Luckily I had previously put together a group discussion that would run itself, so I set those classes to it. I came back to campus and taught my Contemporary Moral Issues class in mime. I had a brief text-to-speech discussion with my honors class, then came home, utterly exhausted.

This illness has a very strange rhythm. The mornings are terrible. I have a massive headache, I've been up since 6:30 (vast improvement over 4:30) drinking tea to keep the coughing down. By 5 pm I'll feel just about fine, but then by 10 pm I'll be back in hell. It's frustrating.

Anyway, I found an item of note this morning.

The San Francisco Chronic published a story from the Washington Post about the EPA sending a scientific finding to the Obama administration showing that global climate change does actually pose danger. The story is cast mainly in terms of the reversal of the Bush administration's environmental policy, which can be summed up briefly as: "just say no." (It's about time that slogan made a difference somewhere!)

But that wasn't the funny part. The funny part was this:

But business groups decried the move as an economic disaster.

"By moving forward with the endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, EPA is putting in motion a set of decisions that may have far-reaching unintended consequences," said Bill Kovacs, vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Specifically, once the finding is made, no matter how limited, some environmental groups will sue to make sure it is applied to all aspects of the Clean Air Act.

"This will mean that all infrastructure projects, including those under the president's stimulus initiative, will be subject to environmental review for greenhouse gases. Since not one of the projects has been subjected to that review, it is possible that the projects under the stimulus initiative will cease. This will be devastating to the economy."

Hi-Larious. That Ernie Kovacs!

Huh? Whazzat? Bill Kovacs? Never heard of him.

update; strange harmony

The hallucinations have stopped. The coughing fits have begun. I was forced from my cozy bed this morning by them, down the stairway and into two big mugs of tea. More of that to follow. I have things to get done this weekend, dammit.

Today is the birthday of both J.S. Bach and Modest Mussorgsky (or however one wants to spell it). That's pretty weird. I don't really know classical music, but I do love Bach, especially the Brandenburg Concertos, which I realize is overdone to death, but I just don't care. I still love them. I also love Pictures at an Exhibition - in particular, the 1950s Sofia concert performance by Sviatislav Richter, which crackles and zaps and gets silly and profound. Bach is 324, Mussorgsky is 170. Maybe we'll bake them a cake!

you give me fever...

... and, apparently, I hallucinate.

Tuesday night I really came down with teh Sick, and spent the better part of Lauren's annual St. Patrick's Day feast reclining, with a cool rag on my face, barely following conversation or events around me. Eventually, I had to leave altogether, and went upstairs to lie down in bed.

That night I didn't so much sleep as lose consciousness between bouts of delirium. The hallucinations went on for several hours, and as weird as it may sound, they felt absolutely real, as though I had made fundamental realizations about the nature of the world.

What happened was I lost entirely any sense of my personality or of having an ego or will. At first I struggled against this, and it was nauseating to feel - because it was a feeling, not an abstract idea.*

Instead, I was forced to recognize that I was a moving part, a necessary part that had to do its job, in a machine that makes illness. A machine part clearly has no ego or will, and although I had a bizarre memory of having once been rational and autonomous, I eventually became convinced this was a mistake, that I had always been a part in this machine, that this machine always was an illness-machine, and that I had somehow been wired up wrongly before. This convincing wasn't dialogical or logical, it was the convincing that happens as a result of a machine repeating the same mechanical motions over and over again.

Accepting that was strangely calming, and by around 2 or 3 in the morning (I guess), I was able to sleep.

By around noon, I started to feel human again. Last night I slept, not particularly well, and dreamed, rather than hallucinated. Much better.

* From what I've been able to gather, I'm a rare dreamer who dreams not only in color, but with all senses - particularly smell and taste. I also dream in abstract ideas, and once dreamt Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

the sick, and more banishments

My loveliest has been battling Teh Sick for a couple weeks now. I've been trying to help out, but frankly, also doing a fair amount of gleefully-not-being-sick. Last night, after a loooong day, I was coughing a bit, and chalked it up to having talked all day. I was fooling myself. I woke up this morning feeling basically crappy.

And that's about it for now: basically crappy. That is my typical mode of illness going back many a year. I get all the annoying pain, exhaustion, and muddle-headedness of being properly sick, without any of the diverting sneezing, hacking, wheezing and drippiness. Few things are more frustrating to me than being useless, but there it is: basically crappy.

On another subject altogether, Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymous Bosch, and James Ensor (not to say especially James Ensor) are not allowed in the house.

pink, but no slip

I hope I see some people on campus wearing pink today in solidarity with public school teachers across the state. Today is Pink Friday, when 26,000 layoff notices are expected to be sent to teachers, due mainly to budget cuts.

Again and again the argument is made that everyone is hurting in this depression, so public employees shouldn't be immune. My response is that cuts to state budgets still represent political choices, and the choice being made is to cut education spending.

Granted, in some districts there are compound problems - Modesto's schools have lost enrollment because families with children are being forced out of town by the house price collapse and bad mortgage crisis, for instance. But overall, the state is basically reneging on agreements to fund education at a certain level, and with certain student-to-faculty ratios. It's not as though education stops being important when the economy tanks. Some might argue that it's most important precisely when the economy tanks.

So, I'm wearing pink high-tops and a pink vest today - more to express my sympathy than as an act of protest. However, I refuse to wear a slip.

unemployment

The story in the Modesto Bee was headlined Brutal.

Stanislaus County unemployment reached 16% in January. Merced County had 18.9%.

The kicker: Unemployment rates don't count seasonal work, for instance, farm labor. So how many people are actually unemployed right now in the Central Valley?

The second kicker: Unemployment rates don't count those who have used up all their eligibility, those who for whatever reason don't apply, or those who are under-employed rather than unemployed.

The third kicker: It doesn't count students, including those who are students because they lost their jobs.

In sum: Lots of people getting kicked.

is Bleak House Norm Coleman's favorite book?

The saga continues. Norm Coleman, who narrowly lost the Minnesota senate race to former comedian Al Franken, has proposed yet another bizarre legal challenge to Franken's election. After challenging absentee ballots (which resulted in an increase in Franken's margin), and after challenging the state's standard for legality of votes (double-cast ballots, ballots cast because someone miscast a first ballot, etc., etc., ad nauseam), Coleman now wants the court to throw the whole election out and start over.

In some circles, this would draw comparisons to George W. Bush's having been declared President by the Supreme Court in 2000. But I see something far more creative going on. Coleman obviously plans to continue challenge after challenge, effectively preventing Franken from being certified by Minnesota and taking his seat in the US Senate. He'll file any kind of lawsuit he can dream up, then challenge Franken's residency, then his citizenship, then his sanity (ironically enough), then his non-feloniousness - and then he'll take the gloves off. He'll just keep that up, for 6 years, and then run in 2014 on the platform that Franken never showed up for work in the Senate. It's totally insane, but it's also genius!

it's the economy, stupid

On my short drive home from campus today (I almost never drive, but it was raining and I'm exhausted), I heard a report on American Public Radio's show Marketplace about saving money and bartering will slow economic recovery because, as it was explained, if you have your friend cut your hair instead of going to a salon, and if you cook dinner for your friend in exchange, instead of your friend going out to a restaurant, you reduce economic activity, because you reduce the demand for goods and services.

Wrongo! Bartering is economic activity! The Missourian they discussed on the program had a demand for a service, and produced a good in exchange. In fact, I had a friend cut my hair in exchange for a dinner once in graduate school, and we constantly bartered to one another our goods and services - growing food, brewing beer, moving, pet care, child care, even construction, plumbing, electrical work, mechanics. None of us had any cash, because we were impoverished grad students. We had no lack of demand for goods and services, and we engaged in a great deal of economic, productive activity to meet our own and one another's needs. I spent several summers during grad school "unemployed," but without collecting unemployment or welfare. I didn't try to set a dollar value on the amount of my productivity and how much I "earned" in that way, but I do know I rarely needed to buy vegetables, for instance.

What they mean to say, properly put, is that the more we produce for ourselves rather than consume from another source, and the more we exchange with one another rather than purchase, the less monetary activity there is. Money is not equal to economy.

Amazing how easily these ideological words and ideas about economy are rolled out in our culture, and how easily we forget, or neglect that the basis for economy is production and exchange, not just money or share prices.

two days in the life of a conference-goer

I'm taking a couple moments to note that academic conferences make for terrific arm-chair sociology and cultural anthropology, by which I really mean terrific arm-chair psychoanalysis. Here at the 11th annual conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, there are about as many such opportunities per capita as one might expect, but maybe somewhat less.

I was scheduled for first thing Thursday morning. On the way here, I finally returned a message to the conference organizer, who asked if I would be willing to present later that day. I said I was, and I was grateful, because my loveliest and I had been up since before 4 am, and would be traveling for more than 12 hours, etc., etc. (it's not longer from Turlock to DC than from Helsinki - where our furthest-flung participant comes from -, but you can't get anywhere from Turlock). I was shifted to Thursday afternoon sometime. That didn't sort out, by the time we arrived at the conference, so I was put in a slot Friday over lunch at a café where they do poetry readings and such, as a weird addendum to a panel my theme didn't fit. The problem there was that I wouldn't be able to connect my laptop's audio jack to their sound system to play the ads that are central to my presentation (on political campaign ads and news coverage).

So I would be "sometime in the afternoon," which turned out to be right after a paper, without any warning. I was a little flustered, but got Yaptop (my laptop's nickname) up and running without too much ado. I felt like I was visibly shaking. It took all of my introduction, and showing the first ad and news piece before I settled into the stuff I was doing and could relax (this same thing happens before every single class session, with the significant difference that I usually know when class starts). The ads and coverage went over well. The ads were from the Elizabeth Dole-Kay Hagan NC senate race from 2008, in which Dole, in the final days of a losing campaign (she had to explain why she supported the Bush agenda, which was unpopular even in NC), disseminated ads on TV that insinuated some connection between Hagan and a group called Godless Americans.

The whole trip is pretty insane, and can be seen (along with another, randomly selected news story montage about atheist ads) in a youtube playlist I put together (I can't seem to get youtube to save them in order, so it's not in the order I presented them).

I won't get into the analysis here. It seemed to go over pretty well, too, and generated some good questions and feedback, for which there wasn't time to discuss.

Then we went to a brew pub so loud it was difficult to hear the person sitting right next to you, and which was gigantic in every way - the size of the store, the size of the kettles behind the bar (no doubt as props), the size of the portions and prices, the faces of patrons, the TVs above their heads tuned to various sports and newz channels. It struck me, at the time, as incredibly oppressive. I didn't want to be in noise after my two days.

Whew.

I'm also thinking about the difference in the way I prepare for a day of teaching and the way I prepare for a day of conference-going - the kinds and levels of tension I feel, where it locates in my body, how it focuses attention, how I dress, how I arrive (walking in both cases, thankfully), and what my expectations are.

the budget to end all budgetsuh-oh

Early Thursday morning, the state legislature finally voted for a budget deal through 2010. It raises income tax 0.25% and raises sales tax 1% - both regressive taxes - and cuts about $15 billion in spending, including cuts to education funding.

In the 1970s, when California was the future, the state spent more on education than any other in the US. California schools were also the envy of every other state, renowned worldwide, and understood by politicians, government officials, and the public at large as the best investment we could make in the state's economy. Now, California's per-student expenditure on education is 49th among 50 states. Sometime soon, spending on prisons will exceed education.

The budget deal also calls for a special election on propositions allowing the state to eliminate the requirement that lottery funds all go toward education, and to impose a spending cap on the state. If the spending cap passes, and since there is no political will to cut spending on prisons, and the prison population continues to increase, one of the few discretionary parts of the budget - education - will have to be cut more as prison spending goes up.

I'm not an economist, so the logic of this escapes me. Spending on the CSU, we've learned, ultimately repays the state more than four-fold, because people with college educations earn more, thus they spend more, and also pay more personal income tax, property tax, etc. So, I'd think, funding education, including higher ed, is a way to increase the state's revenue. But apparently, for reasons I can't fathom, putting money into prisons, where inmates don't earn incomes, where they don't contribute to the productivity of the state's workforce, is somehow a higher budget priority.

That's not to say I'm necessarily anti-prison. I don't think I'm an abolitionist. I imagine that there are people who are deliberately criminal, rather than out of desperation or insanity.

But really, is this the best we can do for our society?

Anyway, it's Friday, and I'm off to cellblock H campus.

if you like the global economic depression, you'll love...

... the global drought. Of particular interest to me:

And talking about drought gripping breadbasket regions, don't forget northern California which "produces 50 percent of the nation's fruits, nuts and vegetables, and a majority of [U.S.] salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes." Its agriculturally vital Central Valley, in particular, is in the third year of an already monumental drought in which the state has been forced to cut water deliveries to farms by up to 85%.

Observers are predicting that it may prove to be the worst drought in the history of a region "already reeling from housing foreclosures, the credit crisis, and a plunge in construction and manufacturing jobs." January, normally California's wettest month, has been wretchedly dry and the snowpack in the northern Sierra Mountains, crucial to the state's water supplies and its agricultural health, is at less than half normal levels.

It has rained a lot this week, and it looks to continue to rain later this week and the weekend, but seasonally, we're down about half of our normal precipitation, following two years of similar conditions.

The quotation above misstates, or, better, hyperbolizes, regarding the reduction in water deliveries. The state has taken some fairly draconian measures - like 85% cuts in deliveries - but most ag areas get most of their water from local irrigation districts. Mass-scale fallowing of land is restricted to only a few areas, mainly in the Southern Central Valley, particularly in the Western portion of Kern County. From what I understand, that's not terribly good or vital ag land anyway. Up here is where we should be concerned, especially those of us who like almonds, peaches, apricots, grapes and grape products (if ya know what I mean). Water deliveries by irrigiation districts have been cut here too, but not nearly as much.

There's another side of this, too. When you wander around the San Joaquin Valley in the morning, between, say, April and October, you see field after field and orchard after orchard covered in several inches of water. Because, you see, they still use flood irrigation here. I don't know what it would mean here, but a study comparing drip irrigation to furrow irrigation in Uzbek cotton fields concluded the increased water use efficiency of drip irrigation was (depending on local conditions) between 34 and 104%.

Maybe we'd consider doing something like that in the most important agricultural region in the nation, and perhaps the world? You know, to avoid turning it into a dust bowl? Anyway, it's a refreshing change of pace from the usual news of fiscal disaster and political obstructionism.

Meanwhile, California agribusiness thanks you for your patronage. Please enjoy our nuts.

California's budget

HAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLPPP!!!!!!!!!

an open letter to a concerned California teacher

Dear Jeanne Caldwell,

I see you and your attorney husband are appealing to the US Supreme Court to hear your lawsuit against UC Berkeley for violating the separation of church and state. Berkeley has a web site presenting information on evolution, and from that site one can link to a page which presents an argument that evolution is not incompatible with religious positions about divine creation. That, according to you and your husband, is a violation of church and state.

I realize that your argument is that the violation is that it contradicts a your religious position that evolution and (your) religion are contradictory - that is, that it says something about the relationship of science to religion that your religion disagrees with. But I think you've hit on something much deeper.

You see, you're absolutely right that religion and the state should be divided by a wall of separation. In fact, the UC Berkeley web site should not have mentioned the issue at all, since there is no scientific controversy about evolution: evolution is the only scientific theory of the development of life. Religious views have no place whatsoever in the discussion, as your law suit helpfully points out. You no doubt support the independence of all public schools from any incursion of religion, too. For instance: no instruction on creationism in biology classes. I'm right, aren't I?

The only way the state can protect your religious freedom is to keep the state free from any religious affiliation at all. Equal protection, right? Which of course means removing "under god" from the Pledge of Allegiance - another move I'm sure you're ready to support, since obviously the mention of god in the Pledge affiliates the state with religion.

While you're at it, maybe you should sue the federal government for granting tax money to faith-based social services groups that discriminate in employment, which would be a violation of federal equal opportunity statutes for a public agency to do. That's an obvious case of a violation of the separation of church and state, innit?

Wow, there's a lot for you great activists for liberty and the constitution to do! I can only wish you the best of luck, because there are lots of people who seem to think the separation of church and state is a principle they can bend and twist in all sorts of shapes to basically any particular outcome they want.

Yours in the Jeffersonian spirit,
Doc Nagel

relaxing and enjoying my shoes

I gots me new shoes.



Last Christmas, my loveliest gave me a pair of hot pink high tops from a sweatshop-free clothing company called, obviously enough, No Sweat Apparel. There stuff is 100% union made - including not only the people sewing stuff together, but the vendors who sell them the materials - all the way down. The pinks were a limited-edition breast cancer awareness and research item, and I really love them. I love them so much, I decided to look into getting a couple other pairs from No Sweat. Sadly, once I got to their shoes, I found that they are sold out of my size (which is 13) in any color but red and pink - which they are closing out. So I picked up two spare pairs of the pinks, and the red ones featured here.

They're dandy. They're also my MoJo shoes, as you might be able to read on the label. The tongue spells out the MoJo connection for you: Mother Jones, the great muckraking and activism rag. Brilliant!

And now I can put them on and declare to the world: I got my MoJo workin'! Even more brilliant!

what I learned at Disneyland

I learned a few things at Disneyland, mainly about myself, but also about Disneyland.

1. I don't like roller coasters.

After getting in the car to drive back from Disneyland to Harbor City, I told Lauren, "It turns out that if you want to make me miserable, you can put me in a vehicle I can't control, stop be from being able to see which way it's going, and then make the ride turbulent and really loud." Basically, a roller coaster is everything I hate about air travel (except for 'security') and everything I hate about going to the movies, rolled into one.

Lauren suggested this was mainly a psychological issue about control, but to me a key factor is perception. If I can look forward and out of a vehicle, I don't mind it. I like boats, for instance. I enjoyed being in a teeny tiny two-seater prop plane. I don't mind being a front-seat passenger in a fast-moving car, as long as I can predict where the vehicle will go and can see where it's going and it's not incredibly rough. Take one of those away, and I'm less happy. Take all three away, and you've got a foolproof recipe for making me miserable.

2. I really like carousels.

I had no idea. I'm not certain I've been on an honest-to-Moose carousel before, because I think I would have remembered. Carousels always looked like pleasant, but rather dull, rides. Indeed, it wasn't thrilling riding the big Mary Poppins carousel, but it was much nicer than it seemed it ought to be, if that makes any sense. For as simple and un-thrilling as it is, just going in a circle, it was inordinately pleasant.

3. Disneyland's main purpose is to sell you Disneyland.

I suppose I should've seen this coming. After all, I'd read Peter Steeves' "A Phenomenologist in the Magic Kingdom" before, and remembered his sense of the packaging and sale of experience as a fundamental feature of Disneyland. But I wasn't prepared for the full reality. Every major ride ends in or immediate in front of a souvenir shop selling you ride-related crapola. Famously, Space Mountain ends at a video display of stills of you riding the thing, and a booth where you can plunk down 15 bucks for a copy of the image - selling you your own experience.

Steeves also points out the obvious self-referentiality of the place, which if anything is apparently on the increase (Small World now includes Disney characters, for instance). But more than that, what Disney sells you is your trip to Disney, your being in Disney - at every single moment. It's rather like ads on TV telling you to watch TV, or ads in the mall for the mall, telling you how great it is being in the mall. The big tagline all over the place was "Celebrate Today."

4. Ultimately, amusement parks don't have anything I need.

This is rather sad for my loveliest, because she grew up with and adores Disneyland. I can see that, I really can. I didn't grow up with it, or with other amusement parks. We went to Cedar Point in Ohio all of two or three times when I was a kid. I went to Disneyworld sick as a friggin' dog when I was 9 or 10. I don't have warm childhood associations with it, and unlike Mexican restaurants (the only childhood memories of which were of traumas at my parents' favorite dive in Toledo, called Loma Linda), there isn't something inherent to amusement parks that I can learn to love.

I don't mean that it was a terrible experience, or even mostly bad. I liked Pirates of the Caribbean. It wasn't disturbingly Disneyfied to the point of being hard to take. I was never accosted by a guy in a Mickey suit.

Plus, you know, it's $69 to get in to the place.

goin' to Disneyland

In all frankness, I can hardly believe that I'm going to Disneyland on Wednesday. (If you're there, say hi!) And that about sums it up.

certainly better than last January

January, and Winter Term, are coming to a quick end. For a variety of reasons, it hasn't been a really terrific January. I'm more than a bit anxious about the depression (or is it depressed about the anxiety? who can tell?), for one thing. I've had to deal with an unspeakably angering faculty rights case, which has cost time, energy, and some little anxiety as well.

But you know what, so far this Obama guy looks to be trying to do some good. Plus, I haven't had to euthanize anybody. I made two exemplary meatloaves and numerous terrific batches of bread. Guerin's beer should be just about ready to eat. Good stuff.

I'm plodding along with re-learning fundamentals of fingerpicking, to adapt my playing to the kind of fingerstyle guitar I have aspired to, and admired from afar, and which is frequently very badly represented in guitar tabulature to be found online. (I found a tab for John Fahey's number "Sligo River Blues" that was apparently transcribed by a tone-deaf music-hating arhythmic maniac just prior to overdosing on barbiturates. Thankfully, helpfully, some French dude videocapped himself playing the thing and youtubed it. I'm about 1/4 of 1% done learning it.)

I'm getting around to the presentation I have to prepare for the Society for Phenomenology and Media's 11th - count 'em! - conference, next month near DC. It'll be nice to go to DC again. The last time we were there was just after the 2004 election, and we spent a lot of time explaining away our disparaging remarks about the Bush administration, speaking clearly and distinctly into various lamps, lightswitches, bedside tables, Gideon's Bibles, and ceiling tiles that, we felt certain, had no doubt been wiretapped For The Safety Of The Homeland And In Support Of Our Troops. We'll at least feel like things have changed.

That's where I am at present: I at least feel like I've helped a faculty colleague, like the new president has good ideas and intentions, like I'm advancing my guitar playing, like it's been a better January. I hold my final judgment in abeyance. Time will tell.

I wonder if this is how it felt to be Nick Drake.

proud to be union, plus, pain

Friday I cut class short, to drive us up to Sac ("The Town So Nice, They Named It Sac") for the CFA Joint Council meeting of the Lecturers and the Affirmative Action* councils. There was the usual dinner-n-speaker on Friday, then the all-day meeting of the Lecturers' Council on Saturday.

It wasn't a meeting chock full of epiphanies. For one thing, there's been a bit of turnover among the council personnel, which is good - new blood, even if it's not exactly young blood, is always a good thing. So some of the meeting's agenda was set with that in mind.

Plus, at this point, given the economic straits, given the impasse in the re-opener "negotiations" with the CSU on salaries (of which more in a sec), the proper focus is on technical matters of contract enforcement, and building the union's capacity. "Capacity building" is the new watchword, a broader notion than recruiting membership, because it involves recruiting activists, improving communications, creating political power - a large-scale, multi-layered, munificently-hyphenated effort.

I like it. I've been getting really upset about the coming economic apocalypse, and now I feel like I've got specific things to do. I'm starting with the spring. Actually, I'm starting this week.

So, okay. We came within a week of striking for the first time, but finally won the best contract in the history of CFA, two springs ago. We got raises that would give us salaries slightly more in keeping with other faculty in comparable institutions (and raises for the first time in years). Then the economy, predictably, tanked, and the CSU, predictably, re-opened the salary article in response. Their first offer was to eliminate the raises we bargained. Their last, best offer, tendered last week, was to eliminate the raises we bargained. That's CSU bargaining.

In any case, the CSU is saying that they have money, and could pay the raises, but there are "competing priorities" for spending the money. Which, I think, means "we could pay you the raises you bargained, but we're not gonna."

Now, I'm totally sympathetic to the needs of the staff, and the need to try to keep student fees lower. My problem with the CSU's move at this point is that once again, this public institution is refusing to be transparent, or even forthcoming, about its books. Someone this weekend put the absurdity and insult of it pretty well: not only is this a violation of the public trust, but it's also ignoring the presence, right here in the CSU, of expertise the CSU administration could consult about budget management. (Locally, the admin at Santa Claus is moving toward being more forthcoming, and relying on the expertise of a faculty-majority committee for budget advice.)

Anyway, back home Saturday night after a quick trip to a hoidy-toidy yarn store and the Sac IKEA, then off this afternoon for the Townsend Opera Players's production of The Magic Flute. Then back home, to grade papers. I'm pretty tired. And my wrist and little fingers on my left hand have hurt for three days. I think driving is aggravating my previous bout of carpal pain.

*"Affirmative Action" is not a legally recognized model for achieving diversity in public institutions in California, per a ballot initiative passed by voters many years ago. However, the CSU and CFA jointly put together a policy which continues to acknowledge affirmative action as an important value in hiring faculty and staff, and in enrolling students. I don't think CSU does a great job (and the numbers demonstrate that), but the population of CFA is sure getting more and more diverse and interesting.

the news story everybody is talking about today

The CSU is drafting information security and system use policy for all the 23 campuses, and today the academic senate of CSU Stanislaus (a.k.a. the ork-o-demic senate at Cow State Santa Claus) discussed the draft policy. I would characterize the senate's mood as unimpressed.

I was vaguely insulted by the draft policy, as I scanned through it, because it seemed to contemplate, if not actually assume, that the main info security issue the CSU has is that users (i.e., faculty and staff) treat information access like a personal playground for nefarious and illegal deeds. I hadn't put it together before the meeting, when one of my colleagues pointed out that the basic flaw in the draft policy is its failure to address universities as though teaching, research, and scholarship happened there. In the corporate environment, he noted, the assumption is that the corporation owns all information users may have some access to. In a university environment, that's not really the case, especially when faculty enjoy (as we still do, to a limited extent) academic freedom.

More to the point, it's another example of the way university administrations look at the life and work of universities: as problems, mainly generated by faculty (when not generated by students), that can generate chaos and create civil liability. As another colleague put it, sotto voce, during the senate meeting, the CSU is looking for one pedophile in San Bernardino, and we're all going to pay for it. (This is not to suggest that there is a pedophile working for or attending CSU San Bernardino. My colleague was making what is usually called a joke.)

Local experience suggests something quite different. The main problems with information security we've had have involved accidental release and insecurity of personal data. About five years ago, while changing servers, employee data were for several hours left on an unsecured server. About three years ago, our food-service concessionaire used unsecured internet access for credit and debit card transactions.

What the new CSU info security policy seems to aim for is to identify and exploit every avenue for limiting the university's potential liability.

Our mission? Eh.