Around Campus
Most colleges and universities seem to be in a race with each other to see who can be the most environmental. An incident at Florida Gulf Coast University shows what you can get by winning the race to have the greenest campus—a lawsuit.
“A Florida Gulf Coast University student who was chased down by a wild boar on campus is suing the school for more than $15,000,” Juan Ogles reported in the Fort Meyers News-Press on August 15th. “Donna Rodriguez, 52, filed a lawsuit in circuit court Monday that claims the school knew wild boars were creating a ‘hazard to students at the university’ and ‘an unreasonably dangerous condition,’ but chose to let the animals run amok.”
“The failure to control the wild beasts came to a head Oct. 9, 2004, the suit alleges, when one of the boars chased Rodriguez down the south side of FGCU Boulevard.”
I incorrectly reported that Peter Dawson, a security guard at George Washington University who was arrested for soliciting, taught part-time at the school. He never has, and now likely never will.
And here is an update on Johns Hopkins University. Its medical experiments are seminal but its English instructors are trying to perform major surgery on the language as well.
Ms. D. N. DeLuna “teaches writing part time at the Johns Hopkins University and recently founded the Archangul Foundation to promote the usage of the gender-neutral, or epicene, pronoun,” according to Thomas Bartlett of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “She is also the editor of The Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J.G.A. Pocock (Owlworks, 2006).” At a time when students are struggling with existing English, she wants to create new word forms.
“It is, she says, the first book to make use of what she has dubbed ‘the Hopkins hu.’”
“It ‘s h-u-h except with not as much aspiration as ‘huh,’” she explains. “For instance, in the sentence ‘The liar is his own worst enemy,’ it’s very easy: ‘The liar is hu own worst enemy.’”
It’s always interesting to see college professors, who urge the rest of us to adopt more tolerant ways, steadfastly avoiding tolerance in situations that cry out for the virtue.
Case in point: English professor Mel Seesholtz, who teaches a course at Penn State on “Religion in American Life and Thought.” He was unnerved by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of a bill that would provide lessons about homosexuality to students without parental consent.
“A very wise woman recently asked me ‘Who will rid us of the evil lunatics?,’” the professor blogged. “We will,” he vows.
“We must.” The “evil lunatics” he is referring to are Christian activists who lobbied against the bill. “‘Rid’ doesn’t sound particularly peaceful or tolerant to us,” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council writes.
Pope Benedict XVI continues to take hits for quoting a source who characterized the violent nature of some of the more zealous practitioners of Islam of long ago as just that. Meanwhile, some of the modern-day adherents of the creed are making the pontiff’s quoted source look prophetic.
“Omeed Aziz Popai drove his SUV onto crowded San Francisco streets into pedestrians Tuesday afternoon,” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council recounted in his August 15th Washington Update. “He killed one man and sent fourteen to the hospital. Relatives attributed his attack to “stress” over an arranged marriage back in Afghanistan, but eyewitnesses said Popai seemed quite calm and deliberate as he gunned his engine to drive over innocent Americans.”
“This attack follows two others. In Seattle, a Muslim went on a shooting spree in a Jewish Community Center and at the University of North Carolina, an Iranian drove his rented SUV into a crowd of students.”
Not to be outdone in the sensitivity sweepstakes, Princeton’s Peter Singer told the UK Independent that he would kill a disabled baby “if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole,” Gary Bauer reports. “Many people find this shocking yet they support a woman’s right to have an abortion,” Singer observed.
“By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct,” Singer muses.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
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