The Return of Movie Friday

Last night, I went to see Serenity at the IMAX theatre at the Telus World of Science.  This stand-alone film is a spin-off of the much-loved SF-Western TV series created by Joss Whedon, Firefly.  I love that series, and had watched the movie a couple of times on my home TV.  To be honest, I had been underwhelmed.  But I decided to go in order to see if viewing in a (REALLY) big screen made any difference.

Short answer:  Yes.  I highly recommend seeing this in a real theatre if you have a chance.

Here is the trailer:

Dare to Dream

When I received the e-mail below earlier today, I thought of our now-retired blogger-in-chief, Jeremy Richards.  What say you, Jeremy?

Also, am I the only one who finds these "ACTION REQUIRED" subject lines on e-mails from Central extremely annoying?

Ruh Roh

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign made an offer to Steven Salaita, then rescinded last August it after he made several intemperate tweets regarding Israel's bombing of Gaza.  The university has stonewalled all attempts by Salaita to learn who may have influenced this decision.  A judge has now ruled that they must provide the requested documents.  Could get very unpleasant for UIUC.

University CEO Pay

With respect to the previous post ("Is There Anything the Modern University President Won't Do for Money?"), here is a column from Frank Bruni in today's New York Times on the alarming trend of escalating salaries for university presidents.  The huge paycheques and golden parachutes awarded to people like Yale's Richard Levin ($8.5M lump sum retirement nest egg) or Ohio State's E. Gordon Gee ($6M cash-out package) make me wonder what our own fearless leader will take with her when she departs this summer.  By the time we find out, she'll be long gone, and it will be water under the bridge.  But how many times must our BoG throw huge sums of money around for upper administrators, while doing everything they can to screw the rank and file faculty of AASUA before we acknowledge that these people are both incompetent and evil?

Is There Anything the Modern University President Won’t do for Money?

The title to this post is the tag line of Erik Loomis' takedown of NYU for its abysmal labour practices in Abu Dhabi, where it is building a branch campus.  This is the logical outcome of the "internationalization" that we keep hearing about.  In the end, always follow the money.

What's the Point of a Professor

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, wrote a New York Times op/ed criticizing what he identifies as the deteriorating level of commitment to educational rigour demonstrated by today's faculty members.  It's a fairly fatuous piece, and this retort from Erik Loomis at LGM nicely highlights its deficiencies, including a significant excerpt from a much longer diatribe by the Tattooed Professor.  As they say, read the whole thing.

It Can't Get Much More Blatant than This

Here is an article on the bankruptcy filing of for-profit Corinthian Colleges, outlining the way they used the tuition money paid by duped students (and coming from taxpayer-funded student loans) to influence the political process so as to shut down any enforcement of regulations design to prevent the scams they were permitting.

Question Answered

In response to my previous post, I would say that after last night's rout the answer is a definitive "Yes, yes he should."  The main argument senior University people have implicitly made for cozying up to the PC party is, "They're the only ones who will ever hold power, so we should do what we can to placate them so that they don't nuke our budget."  That worked really well a couple of years ago, didn't it?

Anyway, having publicly rebuked the NDP, Goss now needs to step aside for the good of the University, and let someone who does not have his baggage take over on the BOG.