Longtime readers may know that I attended two universities here in the Cincinnati area: Northern Kentucky University (NKU) and the University of Cincinnati (UC).
I have pleasant memories of both of them, but I especially enjoyed my time at NKU. I was a student there during the 1986-1987 academic year. The university had been founded the year I was born (1968). NKU felt like a dynamic academic institution that was rapidly growing.
Oh, what a difference 39 years can make. NKU is now suffering from a budget shortfall and declining enrollment. The university recently announced that it will eliminate 1% of its existing workforce. An unspecified number of vacant positions will also be eliminated.
I saw the news on Facebook, where the rule of thumb is: Don’t read the comments. But of course I did. There were plenty of people blaming both Donald Trump and “woke” professors. Continue reading “NKU staffing cuts, and my college days”
Writing on X, Democratic Party activist and occasional horror writer Stephen King describes himself as “the most banned author in the United States”.
“I am now the most banned author in the United States–87 books. May I suggest you pick up one of them and see what all the pissing & moaning is about? Self-righteous book bannersdon’t always get to have their way. This is still America, dammit.”
I am now the most banned author in the United States–87 books. May I suggest you pick up one of them and see what all the pissing & moaning is about? Self-righteous book banners don't always get to have their way. This is still America, dammit.
I discovered Stephen King as a high school student in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the mid-1980s. His books were in my school library. If he wasn’t banned in that time and place, then he isn’t banned much of anywhere.
If you are near any population center in the United States, then you are almost certainly within a mile of a Stephen King novel or two.
King also has an estimated net worth of $500 million. He has pleased many readers over the years, and his success is well-deserved. But his attempt to portray himself as the victim of a mass rightwing censorship campaign is a tad pathetic.
The folks at Viceare befuddled because members of Gen Z are more concerned with “body count”—i.e., the number of past sexual partners a potential romantic attachment has had—than members of Gen X or the Baby Boom generation were at a similar age:
“For a generation raised on sex positivity and non-traditional dating apps, Gen Z is surprisingly hung up on sexual history. According to a new survey by Lovehoney, 41 percent of Gen Z respondents said a partner’s “body count” would bother them. That’s higher than any other age group, including Gen X and Boomers, and well above the national average of 29 percent.”
CNN informs us that, “reading for pleasure has fallen drastically over the past 20 years”. This will shock no one.
According to the report, reading rates have declined about 3 percent per year since 2003, for a total decline of 40 percent since then.
As is always the case when dealing with a country as diverse as the United States (and over two decades, to boot), aggregate numbers provide an incomplete picture.
The greatest reading declines have occurred among African Americans and rural Americans. No big surprise there, considering that these two groups are the most dependent on public education.
I also suspect that some of the decline can be attributed to the dying off of older generations. Since 2003, millions of members of the Greatest Generation (the WWII generation) and the Silent Generation have left us. My maternal grandmother (born in 1922) was a very avid reader. She might have been counted among our readers in a 2003 survey, but not in 2023. Continue reading “Reading rates down again: are we just distracted, or not quite as smart as we used to be? “
More details are emerging about the deranged inner world of Robin Westman. He/she/whatever is the transgender gunman who shot up a Catholic church filled with kids last month, on the first day of classes at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.
It seems that Westman had a girlfriend named Abigail Bodick, who was a “furry”. For the uninitiated out there, a “furry” is a person who identifies as an animal, usually a dog or a cat.
Yes, this is completely insane. And this brand of insanity certainly didn’t flourish in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was a kid. This is a Gen Z thing.
But who is to blame for Gen Z? Certainly not the much-disdained Baby Boomers. The Gen Z birth years run from 1997 to 2012. A Baby Boomer born in 1947 turned 50 in 1997. That was a little old to be having kids. Continue reading “Gen Xer = bad parent?”
I think it’s time that I,a 50-something GenXer, admit that I do not understand TikTok culture, and never will. I am hopelessly out-of-touch with the younger generation. No matter how I contort my brain, I can’t understand how these youngsters think. Young people were a lot simpler in the days of heavy metal and mullets—though perhaps my grandfather would have disagreed. Continue reading “Sorority TikTok, and my decision to stay as far away from today’s youth culture as possible”
Xavier University was one of the universities I actively considered back in the mid-1980s, when I was a high school student shopping for a college. XU has long been one of Cincinnati’s major institutions of higher education, along with the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University. I’ve met many people over the years who attended Xavier. All of them have had good things to say about the school.
But Xavier University is anticipating a 17% drop in incoming enrollment during the 2025-2026 academic year. The university will be making some cuts to cope with the shortfall.
Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division, penned a 1994 letter to the Harvard Crimson, stating that African Americans have “superior physical and mental abilities”.At the time, Clarke was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the president of the university’s Black Students Association.
Clarke based her letter on…race science.
Here are some excerpts from the letter:
“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.
“Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.
“Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].
“Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”
Obviously, this is complete hooey, dressed up in the sort of pseudo-scientific language that passes for erudition at places like Harvard.
Obviously, the mainstream media would be shrieking, Twitter would be exploding, if a white nominee to any senior federal government post had made similar claims about whites, based on “race science”.
Nevertheless, I’m of two minds on this one.
Clarke’s age is not available online, but her Wikipedia entry states that she graduated Harvard in 1997. Backing into the numbers, this would mean that she was about 19 years old when she wrote the above words.
Kristen Clarke
Most people don’t reach full adulthood until they are about halfway through their twenties. (This is why I would be in favor of raising the voting age, rather than lowering it, but that’s another discussion.)
This doesn’t mean you should get a blank check for everything you do when you’re young, of course. But there is a case to be made that all of us say and think things during our formative years that will make us cringe when we look back on them from a more mature perspective.
This is certainly true for me. I was 19 years old in 1987. I am not the same person now that I was then—both for better and for worse.
Secondly, let’s acknowledge environmental factors. Being a student at Harvard is likely to temporarily handicap any young person’s judgement and intellectual maturity. Even in 1994, Harvard University was a hotbed of pointy-headed progressivism and insular identity politics.
Clarke was also involved in the Black Students Association. There was a Black Students Association at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergrad there during the late 1980s. Members of UC’s BSA were known to write whacko letters like the one above. Most of them, though, were nice enough people when you actually talked to them in person. They just got a little carried away when sniffing their own farts in the little office that the university had allocated for BSA use.
What I’m saying is: I’m willing to take into account that 1994 was a long time ago. A single letter from a 19-year-old, quoting pseudo-academic race claptrap, shouldn’t be a permanent blight on the record of a 47-year-old. And I would say the same if Kristen Clarke were white, and had taken a very different spin on “race science”.
We all need to stop being so touchy about racial issues, and so preoccupied with them. That goes for whites as well as blacks, and vice versa.
I’m willing to give Clarke a fair hearing, then. But I’m skeptical. Her 1994 Harvard letter isn’t an automatic disqualifier; but it’s a question that needs to be answered.
I’m also skeptical of Biden. Biden may be a feeble old man; he may be a crook. He is not particularly “woke” at a personal level. In fact, some of his former positions on busing and crime suggest that he’s anything but “woke” on matters of race.
Yet Biden is now head of a Democratic Party that is obsessed with race. This means that Biden may try to overcompensate, by filling his government with race radicals. This recent selection supports that concern.
Given the time that has elapsed between the present and 1994, given Kristen Clarke’s age at the time, I want to hear what she has to say in 2021 before I outright condemn her as a hater or a looney. But this recent personnel selection doesn’t make me optimistic about the ideological tilt of the incoming Biden administration.
