Spinuzzi’s review

Clay Spinuzzi, UT-Austin, reviews Prince of Networks, HERE.

from the Middlesex circular letter received this evening

A brief overview of the whole situation is posted at http://savemdxphil.com/about/.

We’ll be holding a rally to protest the closures and suspensions and their wider implications at the main Middlesex campus, at Hendon, this Thursday 27 May, starting at 4pm; for more details please see the site homepage at http://savemdxphil.com/, or http://savemdxphil.com/2010/05/26/rally-in-solidarity-with-suspended-staff-and-students/. Please encourage everyone who might be able to get to Hendon on Thursday to come along, and please circulate this announcement to everyone who might be sympathetic.

from the comments at the New Statesman

Here are the first two comments to that NEW STATESMAN PIECE.

Both commenters make excellent points.

As for Jakobin’s comment, everyone knows that If you want “assaults and injuries” to carry any weight for disciplinary purposes, then a valid complaint must be made to the police that such assaults and injuries have occurred. But my understanding is that every time the police have been called to the Middlesex campus, they have quickly departed after determining that no illegal behavior had occurred. And it would be unlike the police not to follow up on any legitimate complaints of “assaults and injuries.” Hence, the present evidence suggests that such assaults and injuries are a mere fiction being used as an argumentative bargaining chip.

And as for suicideally’s comment, it’s true that no consideration has been shown to those students who are entirely dependent on Hallward, Kerslake, and Osborne for the completion of their studies. And furthermore, I have heard no credible reports of “forcible entry” into the Library. The students simply remained there after hours: basic sit-in tactics widely familiar since the 1960’s, not violent action of any sort.

It sounds to me like the Middlesex administration is scraping the bottom of the barrel in their efforts to find some petty transgression of the previous court injunction in order to justify the suspensions. Even the police did not think the Mansion Building injunction covered the Library. That’s why they left the scene shortly after surveying it.

2 comments from readers
Jakobin
25 May 2010 at 15:42
The statement from the ‘board of governors’, which includes the Vice-Chancellor – Mr. Michael Driscoll – who has already made these unfounded allegations of criminal behaviour in the past continues to be based on fiction and not fact at every level. Funny how the police didn’t try to interview anyone about those ‘assaults and injuries’ isn’t it? Instead they explicitly said that they weren’t getting involved because no criminal action had transpired.

This is about the right to protest. Our protests are not illegal and Mr. Driscoll cannot change that in his delusional proclamations.

suicideally
25 May 2010 at 16:18
Forcibly entered the building? A bunch of philosophy students and some staff from other courses at the School of Arts and Education sitting around in the library and refusing to leave when it closed counts as forcible now, does it?

A further point to note is that management didn’t communicate the suspensions to students affected by the suspension of their tutors (e.g. students with MA dissertation proposals due in the next two weeks); we had to find out via the grapevine. We receive no adequate communication from management, just slurs and falsehoods.

more student suspensions coming

Hell, let’s just suspend the whole world:

“Four students were suspended on Friday 21 May: Ali Alizadeh, Nicola Goodchild, Johann Hoiby, and Hoi Yen Voong. The suspension blocks them ‘from entering any part of the University’s premises without written permission’ from management. The students have been informed by the Head of Student Services Fiona Fall (F.Fall@mdx.ac.uk) that ‘we are writing to only a few of you so far but will write to others similarly involved when they can be identified.’”

Leiter with another left hook

Against the Middlesex Administration. READ IT HERE.

I agree with this point:

“In the United States, this kind of heavy-handed behavior by the administration would result in civil lawsuits, which the school would almost certainly lose; I do not know whether there are legal remedies available in the U.K. for this kind of punitive treatment of faculty, without even a semblance of due process.”

The suspended students include 1 graduate and 3 undergraduate students. I believe their “disciplinary hearing” is on Friday.

Shaviro’s Atlanta paper

Available at THIS ADDRESS. It’s a slightly revised version of the one he gave. And yes, there’s a lot of healthy critique of me in there, though as I recall it’s less critical than his piece for The Speculative Turn.

Middlesex in the New Statesman

Posted by Mike Sweeney HERE.

The Black Angel

In a few minutes I will make a pilgrimage (or rather, anti-pilgrimage) to Oakland Cemetery to visit a certain statue.

Every locale needs its piece of mythology, and in Iowa City it happens to be the nearly Lovecraftian MYTH OF THE BLACK ANGEL.

It is a bizarre sculpture, not black at the time of creation, found atop the grave of a woman described in the following sentence: “One legend has it that Teresa Feldevert was a very mysterious woman and that her evil caused the angel to turn black.”

There are numerous legends of people coming to bad ends after disrespecting the angel. I for one refuse even to touch it.

Another twist I would add to this legend from personal experience is that the neighborhood is filled with black squirrels. These can’t have always been there, because when my youngest brother was 5 years old and said he had seen one nearby (my grandparents lived not far from the angel), no one believed him. Years later, my father told me that his physician’s friend claims to be the one to have introduced the black squirrels into Iowa City.

Leiter on Middlesex again

Read his brief but suitably astonished post HERE.

Dundee recordings up

The post says May 25, and I thought “wait a second, it’s still the 24th!” But of course, Mike in Scotland has already ventured into the next day, as Iowa lags behind in the past.

Anyway, HERE THEY ARE.