Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

If you're the sort of boy scout that likes to "be prepared," and you live in Maine, you may have a lot of equipment to move snow. At last count, I have three truck-driven snow plows, of which one is mounted on a very large truck, as well as two tractors with front-end loaders, and a large-ish snow blower (just for the awkward bits). I have snow shovels too, but only use them for the deck and front steps. But then it doesn't really snow!

Once a troop...

Among my many occupations (farmer, mechanic, carpenter, plumber, BnB operator, child-minder, cook, etc, &c), I also help edit an annual journal. 

This is for the Royal Air Force Mountain Rescue Association. This is an organization of ex-service-men and women from our small and very "special" force. 

(Perhaps we're too special. That thought has occasionally occurred to me.)

What this means, mostly, is that once I was, essentially, a professional mountaineer and rescuer. But I can't take much credit. Rescue is a team game. 

RAFMR personnel are, for reasons likely lost to history, collectively called "troops" or "MR troops." Our organization includes troops all the way from from the 1940s and 1950s to the very clean-cut and super-fit troops of today. I have the honour, with each year's publication, of helping them tell their stories.

I was also on civilian teams. I spent about thirty years on one SAR team or another between 1979, when I joined RAF Mountain Rescue, to 2020, when Covid hit and we were forced to close down the Unity College SAR team. 

There's also something about having lived through a decent interval with an organization like RAFMR that is asbestos-producing. (I did five and a half years of it.)

You can't harass me, yell at me, haze me, or subject me to brutal physical training and expect it to have too much of an effect. 

I've been harassed, yelled at, hazed, and brutally worked by experts.

I look forward to getting my print copy of the journal each year. I've read it before, of course, every word. I'm the main copy editor. But it's nice to see it in print. 

I just got the last set of proofs and the print copy should arrive next month.

Independence Inc.

After thirty years in American higher education as first a non traditional, or, as the Brits say, "mature" student (1989), then a student employee (1990-1999), then a faculty member (1999-2020), I was getting weary of the grind. I was particularly tired of all the different kinds of dishonesty I encountered. Students, senior administrators, and even other faculty demonstrated time and again that they had only tenuous ideas of truth. 

The student lying was tiresome and sapped my morale. If a student lies about an assignment or cheats on it, that's a pretty clear indication that they don't need to be in higher education, which, after all, is or should be to participate in the search for truth. I wanted students that wanted to be there. I was lucky to have hundreds of them over the years. But I also had hundreds of the other kind.

Senior administrators that are not scholars at heart should be banned from the face of the earth. I can count beans. My dog can count sheep, if not beans. Any idiot can run a cost analysis to determine if a class or a program is covering its costs. 

But is it worth teaching? Is it going to contribute to the well-being of humanity, to our understanding of ourselves and our precious planet? That's the real question.

(I was once laughed at by an administrator who shall remain anonymous (but whose reputation is increasing among the hoity-toity of the AGB) for reading a big book! I was carrying my current academic reading around campus with me that day, a big history book, it didn't fit in my satchel so I had to carry it, and I got laughed at. That should have been a disqualifying event right there.)

Then there are faculty who are lying to themselves about their teaching abilities and the importance of their research and so on. The professor whose students complain that the homework is confusing and they're never available to help. The wielders of red ink whose office door is always closed. The R-1 wannabes who can't wait to get their dream job in a research shop, trying desperately to get published in second- and third-tier journals while the students are lined up in tears down the corridors.

It's all a bit of a con, isn't it, until, one fine day, all of a sudden a real student asks a real question and you give a real answer. 

I was lucky to have that a lot. It was a great career. A lot of those students are in touch. One, a newly tenured professor herself, just wrote to thank me from her new home university, putting me again in mind of her and all the others whose honest questions I lived for at work.

But I always had a rich life outside of academia. I had the farm and my construction projects and my marriage and now my kid. I was looking forward to full independence if not yet able to enjoy it.

These days I run my farm, look after my kid, and tend to my rental. 

I still run across people that lie to themselves and others and behave badly. 

There are local anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers making life hell for the workers at the local coop for whose Board I'm an officer. Nothing quite like a screaming match with a deranged homeopathist to kick off your day's work of cashing out the punters and stocking the shelves. Better than caffeine. 

Then there are former students that are gun nuts, dreaming of the coming civil war, posting on FaceBook about what they plan to do when the lights go out. These are mostly the ones that took the law enforcement program but never made into the ranks. And thank heavens they didn't.

I'm an RAF Mountain Rescue veteran and spent thirty years on various civilian teams. I picked up dead people and their body parts from crashed aircraft. I lowered screaming, mortally-injured people off cliffs. I helped carry dozens of bodies off of mountains. I talked to the families and helped console them, which often simply can't be done. 

What is wrong with these people? No-one should ever dream of hurting others like this. Each hurt and each death is a family tragedy, a tornado that rips apart someone's life. It's wrong to look forward to something like this and they probably know it. It's politics we need, and better politics at that, not the wet dreams of some thirty year old loser with a mental age of ten.

And they should get over it already. The election wasn't stolen. It was won, fair and square, by the other guy. It's right wing media and the orange guy that are telling you this, to line their pockets with your money. 

Biden hasn't come for your guns. He won't. It's bad politics. He has enough to worry about with the virus pandemic and inflation and Russia.

But not very much of this trouble makes it into my dreams. I sleep a lot better. And I don't have to pretend to be nice to anyone anymore. I still am as nice as pie most of the time. That's how the world goes around. But it's a great relief not to have to deal as closely with the liars.

When I get to run my own life without these kinds of hassles, even when I'm just cleaning an Air BnB rental, life can be pretty good.

UATX

 Finally, some academic "disruption" I could get behind: They expect tuition (before financial aid) to be $30K: "The university would pare down costs by peeling away anything that did not have to do with the classroom, like administrative overhead and cushy amenities, he said." In other words, sack all the anti-intellectual business school type administrators (that are often only there to line their own pockets and burnish their own reputations), get rid of the fancy dorms and student centers and high-dollar sports, and get back to serious inquiry about science and social issues!

"We are old school. We believe human beings think and learn better when they gather in dedicated locations, where they are, to some extent, insulated from the quotidian struggle to make ends meet, and where there is no fundamental distinction between those who teach and those who learn, beyond the extent of their knowledge and wisdom."

Makes it just a bit harder to proclaim you're at the cutting edge when all you've really done is count beans, doesn't it?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/us/ut-austin-free-speech.html?smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR0a8Bdz1r3GyzHb4_WjUQEdDpFE5Qo5gIkeesUa5YIZSy9UoManuc-_2nk 

Bankrupt fascist thugs

I'm following this federal civil trial in VA closely because I see it as a bellwether for the future of fascism in the USA. The defendants are the neo-Nazi organizers of the riot that killed Heather Heyer and maimed and injured dozens more, most of whom have so far escaped federal criminal law because the justice department was led by Trump appointees at the time. If they lose, they'll be bankrupted and in hock for a long long time, if not for life, and the deterrence effect will be salubrious. 

But it's worth a minute to explore again just why fascism is so evil. Let's study why the allies fought WW2 for a minute. Bear with me. I'm an academic after all. History is one of my things. And after all, the British Empire was still in being at the time, a racist and oppressive institution by definition. Stalin had just gotten away with the Ukrainian Holodomor and went on to purge his entire officer corps. And the US lynched and other wise murdered and oppressed Black and Hispanic and Native people with regularity and enforced Jim Crow. None of the allies had clean hands when it came to oppression and murder. 

But we fought German fascism. Why? Some kind of peace could probably have been made in the early 1940s. The answer is because it was evil, and that Roosevelt and Churchill knew that evil would spread eventually, coming back again to attack the allies because evil can't be trusted. 

How evil? The Hitler regime imprisoned and murdered all it's enemies, not only the millions of Jewish people and communists we usually hear about. It also killed innocent people and children just because they had birth defects or mental illness. The deaths were not easy ones either. Can you imagine a gas van full of terrified children, suffocating with the exhaust from the engine? They punished and even executed kids for reading the wrong books and distributing pamphlets. They forced women, including "Aryan" German women, to have sex with soldiers and in some cases to bear their children, sometimes multiple children. And they enslaved most of Europe, forcing the conquered people of Europe to work for them for no pay and meager food. 

If you are one of my former students and you still didn't get the message I tried to teach you, over and over over, that oppression and slavery and murder are wrong, and you're still fondling your guns, dreaming of the new civil war, having wet dreams about shooting libs, just understand that unleashing forces as evil as this means they will some day come for the people you love and even for you, just as they came for our people during WW2. Oh, yes, one last thing I couldn't say when I was employed to be your teacher: Just fucking grow up. You may not like the Dems because you're afraid of losing your sexy guns, but that's no excuse for supporting racists and calling for violence in the streets. It's not rocket science. Go out and find a decent politician who will support the second amendment without also supporting fascism and civil war.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/11/04/charlottesville-lawsuit-nazis-heimbach-trial/?fbclid=IwAR1HonltoZNt7FzHewJCE_I61NKRXhvW1Iovf8rNNwi1IPP5-GSOwvDksKs

Some good old pictures from the good old days (2009)

What did you do with your semester? This is a cross section of what my students were doing. These are in reverse chronological order. What these pictures have in common is that they are all "action shots" and unposed, although some of the subjects knew they were being photographed at the time and struck funny or silly poses. You can click on an image to enlarge. Narrow or widen your browser window to make captions line up with photos. "Dead-eye Dierdre," ready to shoot. Snorri, the Womerlippi Farm rental ram, ramming it up for the camera. Me, working on the decibel-linked anemometer for the Fox Islands Wind project Ervin, one of our local Amishmen, climbs his turbine. He needs to get a safety harness. Ervin concentrates on some welding Kaylee and Heather board some boarding boards SAR team students on a mock evacuationTeaching the horizontal lower using the tandem system. My favorite classroom setting Getting ready for the lowerLearning to rappel Spreading "mud" for the barn foundation: a dance choreography Tough customers: Who you lookin' at? A trenchant Unity character. Cody on the tower at our Charleston wind assessment site Et moi Worm's eye view of a Freedom turbine An Aaron in the wet

The case of the disappearing professors

At nine am on that fateful August day when the college kindly notified us (via email – the formality of old fashioned paper termination letters being apparently passé) that it would lay off all of its most uppity faculty – including Aimee and I as suspect ringleaders – all as a prelude to becoming an (almost) entirely online, virtual, and essentially stateless institution, it gave us three hours’ notice and then terminated said email accounts at noon that day. 

No courtesy mail forwarding for us! And a recent inquiry from a former student suggests that there may not even be automatic notices stating that the person emailed no longer works at the college. That alum, who also happens to be an uppity academic, was forced to resort to old fashioned snail mail. 

I can obviously test that notion, just to be sure and will. 

But if you have been trying to find us, you may have been emailing a ghost. A ghost of a college and a non-existent professor. I’m a civilian now. Again. In case you didn't know. The correct emails for the both of us are appended below. 

Mind you, they were probably wise to fire us. We would never have allowed them to become purely online, had we had any faculty power left. The power grab happened in small pieces over the preceding few years. It was a work of art in terms of coups d'état – the CIA itself could not have snuck up any better, as far as many of our shocked colleagues were concerned. 

More cynical, neither Aimee nor I were shocked. Aimee, in fact, had been predicting it for several years. I'd been making plans to pursue other ways of making a living and other interests. 

It will be interesting to see what the NECHE visiting team makes of all this in the coming months, as the time for the ten year accreditation review draws near. Word of the coup has of course, gotten out. Do the Board and the administration not understand that academics know other academics and frequently talk to one another? 

If you want to talk to us, student or visitor, here we are: womersleymick8984@gmail.com aimee.phillippi@yandex.com