It’s another new student registration day, and I get to spend a big chunk of it as an advisor. I hope there are no tears this time, unlike last time.

Yeah, tears. This is an incredibly stressful event for the students. There are two things that promote breakdowns during registration.

• Uncertainty. Some students come in not knowing what to expect, or thinking this is like a greased chute that will give them a job when they slide out of the end. My favorite are the students who are shocked when you tell them they are going to sign up for about 15 credits this term, which is about 4 classes, and they have no frame of reference. Is that a little or a lot? Why am I signing up for chemistry, isn’t there like a pre-med class I can just take and be done with all this? Why do I need to take a history class, I want to be a dentist!

  They don’t quite get that they’re signing on to a voyage of adventure, and they’re going to be completely different people at the end of four years. Or maybe they do. They freak out and are afraid they’ll make a mistake. I just want to tell them that of course they’ll make mistakes, this is a system to help you recover from error — it’s 4 years of dynamic equilibrium in which you learn and adjust. That doesn’t help the ones who want a stable, certain, plodding path.

  (Parents don’t help here. They’re so happy that they’re investing in turning their little girl into a doctor at the end, but she might come out the other end an art historian or statistician, and happier for it. Let ’em find the their true love in the world of the mind!)

• High school. This is the big one. Most of high schools do a fine job, but the number one shock to some students is coming here expecting to emerge with a STEM career, and we discover their schools let them coast and they don’t even have basic algebra mastered. We give incoming students a math placement test, and we know…we know they’re going to flunk out of first year general chemistry if we let them take it (we don’t). We have a remedial path that involves summer school, stuffing their first year with the general education distribution requirements, and a catch-up senior year that’s nothing but solid science courses (can you imagine taking 3 lab course in a semester? I wouldn’t want to), and students are sometimes very upset about that.

  I do wonder what the administrators at those high schools are thinking. At the very least, shouldn’t all their graduates be able to read a novel, write a coherent 5 page essay, know a little bit about their country’s place in the world, and solve a simple algebraic formula? All of their students, not just the ones looking at STEM careers. We’re not asking a lot when we say a high school diploma ought to mean something, but apparently some students and some schools take a laissez fair approach to education, and our Republican overlords like to encourage that.

  I try to let the students know I’m there to help them, and I have a plan that’ll put them right on track, but that’s like criticism, dude, and now it’s panic attack time.

But now I have to put on my positive attitude and brace myself to go in. Let’s hope all the students today are eager and enthusiastic and well-prepared, and that none of the general chemistry lab sections they need to take are not closed. We’ll get through this. I promise I won’t cry, at least not until I get home.

The first underwater film features a staged fight with a shark, and closes with the lifeless body of the innocent animal drifting away.

I’m not too impressed, JE Williamson.

I was reading this article ranking fictional cops, and I was wondering why, because I hadn’t heard of most of them, and then I hit the testimonial to Sam Vimes. Yes, this is why it was worth reading.

Sam Vimes believes that his role is to protect the powerless from the powerful, and to annoy rich people. And he does those things consistently, and works hard to keep the Ankh-Morpork police force more or less in line with that role. He’s not perfect, but we’re not supposed to think he can be, because Terry Pratchett is too awesome for that.

Sam motherfucking Vimes though. When the revolution came, he was on the barricades. Awesomely, through the power of time travel, HE WAS ON THE BARRICADES TWICE. Sam Vimes, fresh-faced young copper, joins an uprising as a young man, SEES THE REVOLUTION FAIL and then, as an older man thrown back into that era through time travel he JOINS THE REVOLUTION A SECOND TIME EVEN THOUGH HE KNOWS IT FAILED AND HELPS TO MAKE SURE IT SUCCEEDS. He BEATS UP A GOVERNMENTAL TORTURER AND BURNS DOWN THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE SECRET POLICE. He once showed up where two armies were squaring off to go to war and ARRESTED BOTH ARMIES FOR CONSPIRACY TO CAUSE A BREACH OF THE PEACE. SAM. VIMES.

Unfortunately, this had to come from a fantasy novel, because a cop who is not a thug in the service of the rich and powerful, and who has a deep moral commitment to protecting the poor and underprivileged, is a creature that can only exist in a world that is flat and resting on the backs of elephants riding a flying turtle.

I thought my email inbox was full of crap, but this is just ridiculous.

how is he a nazi you know jordan b peterson isn’t even right wing right neither is he on the left now i i know in your ideology anyone right of Stalin is a nazi but he’s in this place called the center he despises any side that gets to much leverage and becomes extreme be it the right or left both are despicable once they get to much power the right and left need to be balanced for any real progress to be made both side’s need each other but once one side gets to much power and influence like the left has now he gets a whole host of problems and the divide is so great we can’t even talk to eachother anymore and nothing good could come from that and yes the professors are brainwashing their students i’ve seen way to much evidence to say other wise just look at what happen at evergreen college with bret weinstein for example this shit is going to far now look if you guys keep calling everyone you disagree with a nazi and keep crying wolf your going to make real nazi’s witch is already happen with the alt right a response from your nonsense they don’t even try to hide it all i hear is you saying he’s a lair he’s a white supremacist talking about how he’s misrepresentation the collage campuses while your misrepresentation every word he says and putting words in his mouth while as far as i could see is that you are the lair or are just in complete denial blind to whats really going on

Back in the good old days when we had to carve our words in stone with a chisel, people put a little more care in their compositions.

He hasn’t changed a bit. He’s posting on alt.atheism under a new name, “prophetofrevengerXX”, with “XX” a couple of random digits to help avoid searches. Then how do we know it’s Markuze? Take a look at one example of a post. Classic.

He harassed me for a couple of decades. I’m just mentioning this because, while he’s not pestering me now (I don’t think…but I have so many email filters to block him), his usual pattern is one of rising obsession and increasingly lunatic lashing out at the people he hates.

The University of Minnesota, Morris has received approval from the legislature for a $4.5 million investment in…the humanities.

We’ve also been awarded a $137,000 Mellon grant to strengthen the place and the understanding of … the humanities.

Speaking as a STEM sort of guy, and one who was recently informed in a comment that The hard or natural sciences are mostly safe. Most of the corruption is in the humanities. That’s where most of the danger lies for student radicalization, I’m going to say “EXCELLENT!” We need more education in the humanities to correct these ninnies who think both that “hard sciences are safe” and “humanities are corrupt”. We need students to learn dangerous ideas, and that’s where the most dangerous ideas are found.

I changed my plans about what to talk about, and was uncertain about what to do, and then I realized, “It’s freakin’ Fathers’ Day, duh!” So go ahead, bring your tales of great dads and bad dads to the discussion today at noon central time.

That’s the conversation starter, anyway. I imagine we’ll degenerate into random topics before the end of the hour, and that’s OK.

It’s also OK if you skip it altogether because you’ve just been reminded to call your dad or be a dad.

At least Clyde Magarelli isn’t molesting students, I don’t think, but William Paterson University in New Jersey has a real clunker in their sociology department. He’s teaching conspiracy theory nonsense instead of sociology. It’s the usual stuff: the Holocaust was exaggerated, the moon landings were faked, etc.

“We can’t land on it [the moon] and get back. We’ve never landed on it, you didn’t know that?” he says in one clip.

Magarelli also claims that the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, only engaged in torture during the “last part of the war.”

In another video, he tells his students that Native Americans are not indigenous people.

“We call them Native Americans but those that have their own government outside — they were never considered part of the system,” he mumbles. “They had their own tribal system.”

Magarelli also believes that the Irish were the first slaves in America — a theory debunked by Irish experts who said their indentured servitude was “in a completely different category from slavery,” according to the New York Times.

Video clips of the guy saying stupid stuff can be found on this Twitter thread.

He is a full time, tenured associate professor at the university, and has been teaching there since 1967 (!!!).

Now this is a case, though, where academic freedom does come into play. He’s saying stupid, wrong, ignorant things, but the whole point of tenure is you’re protected — you can defy the orthodoxy in all sorts of ways. He’s doing it. You can’t fire him for that.

But the flip side is that he has a job — he’s supposed to be teaching young people sociology, and he’s failing to do that. Academic departments have ways to deal, though: from the clips, it seems he’s teaching a first year course called “Social Problems”, which is almost certainly not part of the core curriculum. I’m going to guess that what the functional part of the department has done is shunted him off into non-critical electives, because you certainly can’t expect him to prepare students for other courses in sociology, and are limiting the harm he can do as much as possible. The curriculum can be thought of as a network that routes around damage, and deadwood faculty — he looks like the very definition of the term — are interpreted as damage and shuffled off to the side until they get around to retiring, or die.

The students should view him as a practical exercise in dealing with bad ideas.

The greatest harm he is doing, though, is that he’s taking up space that could be used more productively and creatively with a new faculty member — and he’s probably getting paid more than he’s worth. But that’s one of the inherent flaws of the tenure system.