Tuesday, July 27, 2010

An Ember Reignites

Earlier this month I posted a video of Eva von Dassow, professor of Classics and Near East Studies at the University of Minnesota lambasting the Regents of that University for their poor treatment of the humanities. When I saw the traffic to that post, titled She's On Fire, shoot through the roof- it stayed there for several days, by the way-my first thought was, "Damn, who knew there were so many immolation fetishists in the world?" But that wasn't it at all. It turns out that the powerhouse science blogger PZ Myers had also posted the video with a link to Left of Centre. So today, when traffic again spiked to that post, I thought, "Hey, a high traffic site has linked to the video and to Left of Centre again." And this time I was right. I'm a quick learner.

Inside Higher Ed did a piece on von Dassow's presentation to the University of Minnesota's Regents today and linked to Left of Centre. IHE interviewed von Dassow who gave a bit of background on her motivations for speaking up and it got a reaction from an unnamed  UMN spokesperson who said that the  the bigwigs were unmoved by the presentation. The IHE piece is well worth a read, particularly for some very smart comments from John Thelin, professor of Higher Education at the University of Kentucky, and others.

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