Quiet Declarations

So I stop reading the news for two measly weeks, and this is what I come back to? Let’s just take a quick glance at the recent bout of Titans injuries and run-ins with the law:

Adam “Pacman” Jones, CB: Battery
Travis LaBoy, DE: Sports Hernia
Bo Scaife, TE: Sports Hernia
Chris Brown, RB: Broken Hand
Tyrone Calico, WR: Public Indecency
Ben Troupe, TE: Broken Foot

And this doesn’t even count the mess some of the other players were in prior to the last two weeks. This injury thing is getting ridiculous — I mean, we already have the youngest team in the league, why can’t fate pick on somebody like Mike Vanderjagt or Ray Lewis?

Speaking of, the way things are going now we’re going to have to hire Lewis as an outside consultant to teach our legally challenged players how to evade conviction.

I was going to wait a few more days to get my affairs in order here in DC before returning to the blogging world, but I just had to get on the record regarding the following quote from a front-page article in today’s Post:

In 1995, the government created about 3.6 million secrets. In 2004, there more than 15.5 million, according to the government’s Information Security Oversight Office.

What does that mean exactly? The article is talking about the consolidation of power since the Republican rise to power, so I suppose I can intuitively believe the increase… but where in the world did this data come from? Do government agencies have to file secrets? Does this agency spy on spies? What is the Information Security Oversight Office, anyway?

Well, here’s what the web says about the ISOO, for what it’s worth. But hypothetically, let’s suppose they were keeping their actual function a secret… would they have it on file?

Sometimes I go days or weeks without posting anything new and it’s because I’m distracted or unprepared or just plain uninspired. Lately it’s all of the above and more, but at least it’s for a couple of good reasons. This week I’m vacationing in Los Angeles, and next week I’ll be back in Nashville for a mere two days before moving to D.C. Expect my presence to be extremely scarce until at least May 23 when I plan to have myself at least somewhat “settled” in a new location. Until then, be either jealous that I’m in the sun and you’re not or content in the realization that I’ll be packing boxes and loading trucks instead of you.

A few months ago I wrote about an online debate between Jacob Grier and Joel Hart on the Confederate Memorial Hall issue at Vanderbilt University. Now it seems there is yet another chapter to the ongoing saga.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, the short version is that the United Daughters of the Confederacy contributed $50,000 in 1933 to partially fund construction of a residence hall at George Peabody College for Teachers with the understanding that the building would be named “Confederate Memorial Hall” and that female descendants of the Confederacy studying at Peabody could live in the hall free of charge. Today Peabody is now part of Vanderbilt, nearly all residence halls on campus (including the one in question) are coed, and every few years a protest ensues because a student or faculty member refuses to set foot inside a building honoring anything related to the Confederacy. Three years ago, Vanderbilt unilaterally decided to change the name of the building for campus purposes — maps, housing assignments, etc. — and initiated plans to change the name fo the façade as well. When the UDC got wind of this, they sued Vanderbilt for breach of contract.

Whenst last this issue was in the news Davidson County (Nashville) Chancellor Irvin Kilcrease had ruled in favor of Vanderbilt, determining that the UDC-Peabody contract is essentially voided by the fact that the building has been sufficiently renovated and its relationship to the university sufficiently altered so as to render the contract both obsolete and out of sync with Vanderbilt’s academic mission. However, today the Tennessee Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s ruling, finding that Vanderbilt is not at liberty to change the name of the building arbitrarily. Inside Higher Ed selects this money quote from the court’s opinion:

We fail to see how the adoption of a rule allowing universities to avoid their contractual and other voluntarily assumed legal obligations whenever, in the university’s opinion, those obligations have begun to impede their academic mission would advance principles of academic freedom…. To the contrary, allowing Vanderbilt and other academic institutions to jettison their contractual and other legal obligations so casually would seriously impair their ability to raise money in the future by entering into gift agreements such as the ones at issue here.

Interestingly, the court did not restrict Vanderbilt’s ability to change the name on paper, nor did it prohibit the university from changing the façade under appropriate circumstances. Those circumstances? To void the contract Vanderbilt must repay the UDC the present-day value of its $50,000 donation, which after a major depression followed by 72 years of inflation should be approximately 400 billion dollars.

As per usual, Vanderbilt’s Public Affairs division was ready with an immediate response. The Vanderbilt Register, the publication dissemenated by the university’s propaganda machine, issued the following breaking story to all subscribers. Strangely, the link sent this morning under the title “Vanderbilt will obey appeals court decision on Memorial Hall” was resent a few hours later with a “NOTE CORRECTED HEADLINE” tag and the new title “Appeals court rules on Memorial Hall dispute”. So, as much respect as I normally have for Vanderbilt’s public relations staff, apparently somebody royally screwed up and/or somebody up high got royally pissed off. Funny what a difference a few words can make :)

Personal opinion? Honestly, I’ve never been on the university’s side here. Vanderbilt is attempting to hire a constuction company and change a name etched into the façade of a registered national historic landmark against the will of the building’s original donors primarily on the rationale that some people don’t like the word “Confederate”. To argue that adapting to the evolving standards of political correctness on this issue is not only appropriate, but is in fact sufficiently consistent with the university’s academic mission so as to justify voiding a donor’s contract without repayment, strikes me as one hell of an indignant position to take.

Peabody may have bought a lemon in agreeing to the name, and Vanderbilt may have bought a lemon in assuming Peabody’s contractual obligations, but the noble play here is to suck it up until you can sell it off, not to swindle the other party out of their contractual right by accusing their cause of being inconsistent with the commonly-accepted standards of intellectual progress. But that’s just my two cents; feel free to offer your rebuttals.

Additional reading on the ruling is available via Newsday.Com, the Nashville City Paper and The Tennessean.

[Update 5/6/05: Today’s Tennessean editorial stakes out a position I can get behind. Vanderbilt got its diversity PR and now its best interest is to drop the suit, with the name remaining on the building as a reminder of the university’s “noble” crusade against injustice that sellout tour guides will regurgitate for years to come.]

Turns out a while back, while I was out of town and otherwise occupied, Jacob memed me! Albeit belatedly, I shall now take my turn at the wheel.

Behold, the Caesar’s Bath meme! List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.”

(1) Monty Python. I’ll grant a reprieve to the first 20 minutes, which would make a great British sitcom. But doesn’t anybody notice that the most prominent continuously repeating jokes exist at progressively increasing levels of stupid? This movie degenerates from extremely clever to completely senseless at a pace too rich for my blood.

(2) American Idol. When it gets down to the final 12 one might consider it worth watching — the performance critiques get more legitimate and by and large the excruciating candidates have been weeded out. But I can’t even bear to watch the early part of the season featuring hours and hours of people who really think they can sing but are simply embarrassing themselves on national television. Guess I’m just not a fan of laughing at people instead of with them.

(3) Miller Lite. Is it bad when you’re forced to run a marketing campaign to try and convince people your beer has taste? At least with Michelob Ultra customers understand that it is in fact flavored water — that’s why girls who drink it pregame with liquor. Miller is the has-been of breweries, it’s been thoroughly out-marketed by competitors at every stage of the game, and in my opinion it’s the worst tasting of the light beers to say nothing of its comparison to beers actually worthy of the designation.

(4) Movies with Completely Random Plot Twists at the End. Primal Fear, Sixth Sense, The Others, even Fight Club… I’m calling you out! You are very good movies, but you achieved reverence with some scene at the very end that so completely altered viewer perception that viewers had to watch you twice just to understand you! A good ending can turn a 2.5-star movie to a 3-star, but a 4-star movie doth not the last five minutes make.

(5) Idealism. “It’s, like, the best thing ever and why would anybody want to settle for anything less that absolute perfection and our lives are too short to waste them on anything other than exactly what we want?” I like idealism just fine for precisely what it is: a wish list of things you work toward but only actually achieve in dreams or in heaven or at the end of farfetched book and movie plots. Unfortunately, the problem with idealism — in politics, in relationships, you pick the arena — occurs when embracing it results in a failure to distinguish between wholly unsatisfactory outcomes and outcomes that aren’t perfect yet are truly worth accepting.

Items that did not make the list but are worthy contenders nonetheless include Facebook/Friendster and cliché tourist trap beaches, for the record.

Now, hmm… who to meme that would read this blog that hasn’t already been memed? I shall extend the to-do lists of Jay, Collazzi and Ryan and consider my work here complete.