in praise of DePaul University

DePaul always did seem like a happy, positive, fair-minded institution as a whole (barring occasional abuses and occasional psychopaths), but this one takes the cake for positivity.

After finishing my Ph.D. in 1999, DePaul gave me a one-year faculty position in 1999-2000, just before I came to Egypt.

And now… DePaul has sent a letter saying they’ve decided they cheated me on some benefits inadvertantly, and are sending me a check for $3,000.

FROM TEN YEARS AGO!!!!!

My reaction is: “Classy move, DePaul. You could have swept that under the rug and I never would have guessed.”

a candidate sentence

And I just realized, that opening sentence is surely one that will never be uttered again under any circumstances in the history of the human race:

“At the last Senate meeting (though I was standing at Stonehenge at the time) they mocked and rejected everything we proposed.”

It won’t be found in any English as a Foreign Language textbooks soon, I don’t think.

on the unpredictability of people

At the last Senate meeting (though I was standing at Stonehenge at the time) they mocked and rejected everything we proposed.

Today, we proposed equally controversial things (in fact, a couple of them were repeats from last time), and it all sailed through without a peep of protest. 4 resolutions passed in under an hour! A record for us.

yes, this should be interesting

And this arrived just as the bad music was ending.

*******

Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Graham Harman, Associate Professor of Philosophy, has agreed to serve as the first incumbent in a newly-created position, Associate Vice Provost for Research. He will be working with us, with the faculty across the University, and with the units that support faculty research, including the Office of Sponsored Programs, to assess the range of support and incentives available to faculty to conduct and disseminate research. We have asked him to provide us with an assessment of the kinds of initiatives we might take, both immediately and in the longer term, to create a climate in which faculty research is encouraged, celebrated and rewarded.

We are very grateful to Dr. Harman for his willingness to take on this important project–particularly since it will undoubtedly take time away from his own active research portfolio!–and we hope that you will join us in welcoming him to his new post.

Thank you,

Ali Hadi
Vice Provost

Lisa Anderson
Provost

another pop culture observation

Sitting in a Zamalek café, which for some reason is playing a bunch of Blues Brothers songs, first time I’ve heard them in years.

And… John Belushi’s voice sounds utterly atrocious to me now. The reason that’s interesting is because it never sounded that bad to me when I was around 16-19, even though that’s precisely the age at which I was listening to lots of the original stuff that I can now detect that Belushi is completely butchering. If I ever should have been offended, it was in my late teens. And yet I wasn’t.

The moral probably has something to do with increasingly refined critical capacity in all fields as one ages. My practice is simply to record unusually intense reactions to anything whatsoever on this blog, regardless of whether I yet have an explanation for it… Why? Because much of what gets said on this planet is completely insincere, and the only way to avoid that disease is to build philosophy out of things to which you have genuinely strong reactions.