Public universities often take their cue from private universities, so while teachers are being furloughed expect calls for similar “grossing up.”

News

Syracuse University may be on the cutting edge of promoting equity for its gay and lesbian employees. Some of the university’s straight employees, however, say Syracuse needs to focus its limited funds on benefits for everyone — and recognize that it can’t be held responsible for the inequity of marriage laws in the United States.

The battle is over “grossing up” — a human resources term for paying someone on top of salary levels so that the employee takes home the full salary amount. So if someone would owe $10,000 on a $50,000 salary, grossing up would mean paying that person $60,000 (plus whatever tax is needed on the extra $10,000 and so forth) so

Read the entire article from Inside Higher Ed here

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/29/syracuse

Cornel West at MLK commemorative service

Cornel West is no scholar; he is a racial hate-monger. 

This is a travesty.

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/worshippers-urged-not-to-277561.html

Because she is a “sister,” Dunn is allowed to command her students to “’pull those pants up, Mr. So-and-So,’” without being hauled before the P.C. panel and subjected to an inquisition.  I doubt I would be called back to teach as an adjunct should one of my students complain about such a command.  I would be charged with not only bad “customer service,” but racial insensitivity.  (Of course, I would also like to be able to tell all students to yank out their piercings, sit up straight, etc.)

So I was expecting that this professor, who envisions herself before a classroom of conservatively dressed gentlemen scholars, would be teaching the Great Works.  I would expect her scholarship to focus perhaps on the author that W.E.B. Du Bois was so enchanted by—William Shakespeare.  I thought she would be upholding the canon that is so rapidly being eliminated and replaced by popular culture.  (My colleague Mark Bauerlein in Minding the Campus reports on the disappearance of positions for those who specialize in great authors like Shakespeare–or John Milton, as I did for my master’s thesis.)

So, what would the well-dressed Morehouse man read in “Sister” Professor Dunn’s class?  Well, if her book is any indication, it would be on the theme of “Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Films.”  Professors tend to write on the subjects they teach.  Does anybody see a disconnect?

Bill Ayers is questioned about being “disinvited” to give a speech last year.  He blames the “barbarians” with the “pitchforks.”  They objected to this unrepentant bomb-throwing co-founder of the terrorist group, Weatherman, being on campus, and spell the end of “academic freedom” (according to Ayers). It was not “anything I did,” but ”right-wing ideologues,” who “created demons” (Jeremiah Wright among them).  The “essence of a democracy” is that we talk to strangers–even those we disagree with–says Ayers.  Students are cheated when he cannot speak to them, he claims.

But students do not pay everyone speaking fees, about $7,500 for campus visits, as they do for Ayers (according to his agency Evil Twin).

We “should recognize that in a wild, diverse democracy like this,” “I’m in the mainstream,” says Ayers.  As evidence, Ayers claims his positions on wanting “peace in Iraq now” and on gay rights.

This interview is as logical as his “scholarly” writing, which I’ve analyzed in detail in my reports, which can be accessed on my main web page www.marygrabar.com

Watch the video here http://www.stp.georgiasouthern.edu/

Cornel West speaks on race at Emory.  Ho hum.  “George W. Bush is a racist.”  Yawn.  “We’ve come a long ways (witness my speaking fees), but we’ve got a long ways to go (otherwise no one would have reason to book me as a speaker).”  (Just doing a little deconstruction for the folks out there.)

 No wonder the kids find school boring—and why I find most of my tenured colleagues to be so tedious.  I wonder when Cornel West last went to a local Republican meeting, Baptist church service, or a  Cajun Dance—or patrolled with police officers.  Maybe if he left his ivory tower he’d see that the real world does not live up to his theories of racism and oppression.

Yes, coming to the Decatur Library through the Georgia Center for the Book (a federal program).

I have no problem with Outwrite Book Store hosting a “Queer Literary Festival.”  But imagine another group, like the heterosexual writers of America, trying to book a room at the library that DeKalb County taxpayers’ support.  How fast can you say ACLU, LAMBDA, etc., lawsuit?

Many homosexual writers have contributed to our rich heritage of letters, but their sexual orientation was only incidental.  The writing was primary.

But this event seems to be focused less on writing and literature than on using writing to promote a gay agenda.

Read about the line-up here: http://www.atlqueerlitfest.blogspot.com/

When Flannery O’Connor’s correspondent and friend Betty Hester “came out” to her, O’Connor wrote back that that fact did not in any way diminish their friendship or her estimation of her.  O’Connor, of course, was a devout Catholic who attended mass every day.

But, sadly, the entire “Queer Literary” event marks the general degradation of literature and its relegation to a tool for groups with grievances.

This is another way the Georgia Center for the Book and the DeKalb Public Library is diminishing books and literature, and bringing us closer to being an illiterate society.

He analyzes  the coverage as “made-for-television drama series,” as he contextualizes the event into the tradition of avant-garde art.

He notes,

“By mainstream American standards, the 9/11 attack was evil. . . . However, from the perspective of performance studies, the attack on the World Trade Center was a performance: planned, rehearsed, staged, and intended both to wound the United States materially and to affect and infect the imagination.  The destruction of two iconic buildings, and the murder of so many people in one fell swoop, was intended to deliver a very specific message about the boldness of the jihad and the vulnerability of the United States.

A performance, surely, but art?  I believe that the attack can be understood as the actualization of key ideas and impulses driving the avant-garde.  Thierry de Duve writes. . . . “

Well, you get the picture.  The “perspective of performance studies” is evil too.  As for me, I’ll keep my ”mainstream American standards,” Professor Schechner.

Usually such edu-speak means that means more electronic gadgets and lessons in “social justice.”  What that means is independent thinking gives way to “collaboration,” contemplation gives way to flash and fun, and real knowledge gives way to lessons in grievances.  I’ve seen the outcomes in the college classroom.  But can we blame college students’ casual attitudes towards learning when elementary school teachers give students collaborative writing and research projects, to be done as they lie down on the classroom floor, as they would in their homes in front of the television (as I saw on the DeKalb County schools channel over the weekend).  We don’t need any more teacher training, but common sense.  Common sense tells us that students need to understand the importance of discipline.  That begins by sitting upright in their seats.  If we do that, then maybe they won’t be sprawling back in their seats in the college classroom and text-messaging while the professor lectures.