Global Crisis

"For 2015, the Sentra lineup has been simplified and we've added value to all grades," said Derrick Hatami, vice president, Sales - U.S., Nissan North America, Inc. "The Sentra's most popular trim, the SV, now comes standard with great features such as RearView Monitor, Bluetooth, USB port that we are certain Sentra buyers will enjoy. SV also includes Nissan Intelligent Key®, which our primary competitors do not offer at this price point."

• Nancy McCrea Iannone: Keep Abortion Politics out of the Pro-Information Movement (I wrote a followup blog here - On being pro-choice, pro-information, and anti-eugenics).
• Ellen Arnold: The Human Scale: What we miss when we compare disasters like Ebola and the Black Death
• Amy McNally: What do you do when someone tells you they are thinking about suicide?

• Hidden Disabilities - Or; You have no idea what you are seeing. I respond to some critical reader mail on my Kanye West piece and talk about accessible parking and why it seems to always be first on people's mind.
• The "Pencil Test" for people in wheelchairs - Florida cop throws a person in a wheelchair to the ground to see if they can get up, testing if they are really disabled.
• Trigger Warnings and This American Life - In which David Sedaris uses the "r-word" repeatedly to get a few cruel laughs.
• Cute is not enough - World Down Syndrome Day, 3/21/14. Why and how I'm playing "the long game."
• After Elliot Rodgers went on his killing spree, I responded to the debates about race, mental health, misogyny, and other categories by suggesting interectionality as the pathway through these debates: I call it "fighting the shrug."
• A piece in which I argue that "the last acceptable prejudice" is not a helpful way to elevate your cause above others, whatever that cause may be.

• Edwin O. Roman-Acevdo - He was killed by a second assailant with a firearm while the first assailant struggled with Roman-Acevedo over his service weapon.
• David W. Smith was shot and killed with his own service weapon.

• Deputy Sheriff Christopher Smith was killed from ambush. .40 caliber handgun might not, to me, equal "heavily out-gunned," but let's count it. Also it's right-wing terrorism of the sort that needs more attention.
• Danny Oliver and Michael David Davis Jr. were both killed by an AR-15, the latter during the manhunt for the killer of the former. 
• Bryon Keith Dickson II - Walked out of barracks and killed from ambush. This was Eric Michael Frein, a "survivalist," which took shape as an anti-government terrorist ideology in this case.
• Deputy Sheriff Joe Matuskovic was killed by AK-47-style rifle, fired through the door and penetrating his bulletproof vest. The killer was Michael Donovan Oswald.
• Melvin Santiago was killed by the service weapon of a private security guard. A thief had broken into a building, beaten the guard and taken his weapon.
• Perry W. Renn was killed by semi-automatic rifle fire.
• Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck were killed by the two right-wing terrorists, execution style, in Las Vegas. They had hundreds of rounds of ammo with them.
• Sergeant Cory Wride was killed from ambush by a high-powered rifle.

Picture by @deray on Twitter. Used with permission. "I have a mental illness. Am I next"

In his memo, Manney wrote that Hamilton had a “muscular build” and “most definitely would have overpowered … me or pretty much any officer I can think of, to tell you the truth. He was just that big, that muscular … I would say he would be impossible to control if you were one-man.”
Manney also described Hamilton as being “considerably younger than me, in much better shape than me, and much stronger and more muscular than me.”
But the autopsy results do not support Manney’s description. In the report, the medical examiner said that at the time of his death, Hamilton was a 169-pound, 5-foot-7 “well developed, overweight … adult-black male.”

• The Learning-Centered University (Chronicle Vitae, 7/1/2014)
• An Academic "Working Dad" (Chronicle.com, 5/19/2014)
• Ferguson and the Cult of Compliance (Al Jazeera America, 8/15/2014)
• Psychiatric Disability & the Police: The search for reasonable accommodations (CNN.com, 8/26/14)
• Fighting Gender Norming One Backpack at a Time (Huffington Post, 8/26/14)
• Catholic Universities and Undocumented Students (Chronicle.com, 7/21/14)

On Sunday, it emerged that Mr. Brinsley might have had mental health issues.
During an August 2011 plea hearing in Cobb County, Ga., he was asked: “Have you ever been a patient in a mental institution or under the care of a psychiatrist or psychologist?”
According to a court record, he responded yes. The record did not provide any other details.

In the nineteenth century, Emerson urged students to “resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism.” He emphasized that a true education would help one find one’s own way by expanding one’s world, not narrowing it: notice everything but imitate nothing, he urged. The goal of this cultivated attentiveness is not to discover some ultimate Truth, but neither is it just to prepare for the worst job one is likely to ever have, one’s first job after graduation.
Instead, the goal of liberal education is, in John Dewey’s words, “to free experience from routine and caprice.” This goal will make one more effective in the world, and it will help one continue to grow as a whole person beyond the university. This project, like learning itself, should never end.

We established a faculty task force to examine how to evaluate “non-traditional scholarship.” The impetus came from wanting to acknowledge public and engaged scholarly work. There was genuine buy-in by the tenured faculty, though we still have not determined genuine formulae for quality. There probably aren’t such formulae, in my view, and we will have to proceed with evaluators and metrics on a case-by-case basis.

It is probably important to have had some time in administration, just so one is informed about budgets, fundraising.. and the other systems of governance. Most faculty never have to deal with these things.

Most administrators never have to deal with teaching, and this can be a big problem in the presidential role. Presidents should see themselves as educators as well as administrators. Faculty members can surely do this. I suppose most wouldn’t want to, and many faculty leaders see themselves as antagonists vis a vis the administration. I certainly did. Perhaps this is why some boards of trustees are skeptical about faculty members as presidents.

But university leadership is educational leadership — and I wish that more professors would be interested in it. A friend said to me when I took my first job as president: "you’ve written books, how about trying to build a bookcase?" You don’t build a bookcase if you don’t love books.

"Grigsby then allegedly made an aggressive move towards the officer while carrying a metal object. The officer said he ordered Grigsby to stop but he continued to approach, forcing the officer to fire a shot into Grigsby's chest."

"He was real sweet. He would never hurt anybody. He had a mental illness," said Evelyn Grigsby, Dennis Grigsby's Mother.
She was asleep inside their home when the shooting happened and she says she didn't know her son had left home.

I used to hang out on a Facebook page filled with interesting people from diverse political perspectives. We’d debate issues, disagree, and kept it all pretty civil. But then Voldemort, my nickname for a fanatical right-wing historian, would show up and start baiting me. I was, at the time, easily baited. Again and again, I would find myself writing profane responses, my temper flaring, my fingers slamming down on the keys. I never sent them, at least not the worst ones. I never told him to “Fuck off and die.” I never called him any offensive epithets.  But I was close, too close, too often. Eventually, I had to cut myself off from that community, just because I spent too much of my day being angry.

Had I lost my temper, what implications should that have for my job? Voldemort could have screen-captured my comments and sent them to my university or to the press. The right-wing blogosphere is always eager for example of left-wing misconduct and angry or violent rhetoric. It could easily have become an issue.

Last week Deborah O’Connor, a senior lecturer at Florida State University, was pushed to resign after making racist and homophobic comments on a public Facebook page. She said some pretty horrible things, like blaming Europe’s troubles on “rodent Muslims.” She also told a well-known gay hairstylist to “Take your Northern fagoot [sic] elitism and shove it up your ass. ”

I am revolted by her remarks. However, I spent quite a lot of the fall arguing thatimpassioned political speech on a personal social-media account did not justify the “de-hiring” of Steven Salaita. As has been well reported, Salaita was hired for a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when stories about his angry tweets regarding the war in Gaza reached the trustees and chancellor of the university. They canceled his appointment. Every time I encountered someone justifying Salaita’s firing by emphasizing what they considered the gross anti-Semitism of his tweets, I responded with the following: If we do not stand on principle for people with whom we disagree, we have no principles.

You know what I am going to say, Where is disability and GBLTQ? "A bill passed by both chambers of Congress and headed to President Barack Obama's desk will require local law enforcement agencies to report every police shooting and other death at their hands. That data will include each victim's age, gender and race as well as details about what happened."

SEC. 2. STATE INFORMATION REGARDING INDIVIDUALS WHO DIE IN THE CUSTODY 
OF LAW ENFORCEMENT.

    (a) In General.--For each fiscal year after the expiration of the 
period specified in subsection (c)(1) in which a State receives funds 
for a program referred to in subsection (c)(2), the State shall report 
to the Attorney General, on a quarterly basis and pursuant to 
guidelines established by the Attorney General, information regarding 
the death of any person who is detained, under arrest, or is in the 
process of being arrested, is en route to be incarcerated, or is 
incarcerated at a municipal or county jail, State prison, State-run 
boot camp prison, boot camp prison that is contracted out by the State, 
any State or local contract facility, or other local or State 
correctional facility (including any juvenile facility).
    (b) Information Required.--The report required by this section 
shall contain information that, at a minimum, includes--
        (1) the name, gender, race, ethnicity, and age of the deceased;
        (2) the date, time, and location of death;
        (3) the law enforcement agency that detained, arrested, or was 
    in the process of arresting the deceased; and
        (4) a brief description of the circumstances surrounding the