Why

Why is the University spending millions on a new Students' Union building while saying it needs to cut jobs?

Now is the age of the discontented- Frank Furedi

'At times the very act of making a complaint - regardless of its validity - is interpreted as evidence of the fact that universities must change their ways. How many times have you heard the refrain that "students feel they must get their money's worth" or that "consumerminded students are more and more aware of their rights"? Consumer consciousness and the impulse to complain are invariably associated with the sacred concepts of "rights". As Rob Behrens, the Independent Adjudicator, has noted, "The bottom line is that students are today more assertive in thinking about what their rights are and what things they can get from the commitments they make." Such representation of student consumerism represents its implicit affirmation. According to Behrens, it is "not a bad thing".'

Frank Furedi
Times Higher 4 June 2009

If I just walk, with no particular intention, I end up at your department. I get there and I am shocked at myself. Normally I just check to see if the bike is there. It sees me and remembers our fun. It looks sad. I understand what it is like to be sad. I am sad in the middle of me. You won't come out for me, but will you wait? You have waited a long time.

yippee!

I start my PhD in July!

only the children cry about it

I filled my Sunday evening by reading To Kill A Mockingbird again, for the first time since being a child. I don't have it here, so I can't quote my favourite bits, but what it has left me with is a feeling that our way of being in the world can be absurd (now I am saying absurd absurd absurd to myself, it has stopped having the same meaning as it did when I first thought of it, so I am no longer sure it is the word I want to use). What I think I mean is that when we are children, injustice seems obvious and unacceptable - and we are incredulous about it (if, for example, our brother got a bigger slice of cake than we did). And when we are adults we accept a lot of injustice all about us - I think I do too - it's a huge part of my society. In the story, the little boy (Jem? or was it Dill?) is the only one who cries at the injustice in the courtroom, even though everyone else is aware of the injustice. Everyone else, even if they are sad, accepts it, and didn't expect any different. This is like the quote about fear of death (below) and the slow decline of questioning - just going along. Getting squashed by all the mundanities so that justice doesn't seem as important anymore.

That's all, I think.

Joseph Rowntree Report Trust report on the Database State

Of 46 Gov't databases investigated, about a quarter are likely to be illegal under human rights or data protection laws.

Madness.

death and questions

Much of what I fear is really about death (or perhaps being old). Things are not as they were. I am frightened that the brightness will go from my eyes. I am scared that my wonder and my questions will go.

Like this? -

"I can tell you, then, that I am afraid of death. Not of what we imagine about death, for this fear is itself imaginary. Nor of my death whose date will be recorded in the civic registers of the state. But of that death I suffer every moment, of the death of that voice which, out of the depths of my childhood keeps asking , as yours does: "What am I?" and which everything within us and around us seems bent on stifling. When this voice does not speak - and it does not speak often! - I am an empty carcass, a restless cadaver. I am afraid that one day it will fall silent forever, or that it will wake up too late - as in your story of the flies: when you wake up, you're dead."

- Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue, 1981 (taken from http://www.gardendigest.com/death.htm) bold added by me.

There's a Leunig cartoon that says just the same thing.

How do I stop it? Love?