About Those Course Evaluations...

Curmie was tempted to write a follow-up to his post about the reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, but realizes that there is little to be gained by doing so.  Conservatives will continue to pretend that only liberals perpetrate political violence (tell that to the cops attacked on January 6, to Paul Pelosi, to Josh Shapiro, to Gretchen Whitmer, to Melissa Hortman’s family…), that Charlie Kirk was a “moderate,” that Tyler Robinson was heavily influenced by the radical leftist ideologues in the Engineering Department at Utah State University during his single semester of (online?) attendance.  And on and on.

The vast majority of the readers of this blog, however, already know that paranoia, stupidity, and mendacity are in a death struggle to be the defining characteristic of the likes of Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Dinesh D’Souza.  They also know that reasonable conclusions require evidence, but also that evidence does not cease to be evidence just because, taken by itself, it’s inconclusive.  There’s nothing new there.

So, where to turn for another topic?  Well, Curmie mentioned course evaluations in passing in his piece about FIRE’s less-than-impressive trumpeting of their free speech rankings.  And then, this morning, a Friend of Curmie posted a link to an article in The Atlantic with the portentous title, “How Teacher Evaluations Broke the University.”  And who is Curmie to ignore such a sign from the universe?

Rose Horowitz’s article is more than a little predictable: linking course evaluations to grade inflation and lowered standards.  And, of course, there’s commentary on bias: “Course-evaluation scores are correlated with students’ expected grades. Studies have found that, among other things, students score male professors higher than female ones, rate attractive teachers more highly, and reward instructors who bring in cookies.”  People in Curmie’s (former) line of work have seen literally dozens of variations on the theme over the years.

What’s curious, however, is that there is seldom anything suggested that looks like a potential solution to the problem.  So: Curmie to the rescue.

Let’s start with something basic: course evaluations have two purposes which are sometimes in conflict.  One function is to help faculty determine what aspects of their courses are or are not working.  This is useful.  Curmie made some changes based on suggestions made by students on course evaluations: increasing the number of exams so that there would be less material covered by each one, for example.  Sometimes there’s a question about “why did we have to read X?”  Well, because X is really important, and it’s important that you actually see what it says instead of just having me talk about it… but maybe I’d better spend a little more time explaining to students why that’s true.

One of the biggest weaknesses in student writers is in their failure to link the evidence to the conclusion.  Often, adding a single sentence, or even half a sentence, would improve an essay considerably.  But professors are not immune from making similar errors or omissions, and a brief comment on a course evaluation can indeed improve the quality of instruction in future iterations of a course.  Of course, faculty are, and should be, free to ignore suggestions they consider unhelpful.

The other reason course evaluations exist is the one that’s potentially problematic: the evaluation of faculty, especially regarding retention/tenure/promotion decisions.  No, 19-year-olds, even taken as a group, should not be primarily responsible for whether Professor X has a future at the university.  But that doesn’t mean that students should have no input.  So, what to do?

Suggestion #1: take course evaluations offline.  Back in the day, course evaluations were completed in class.  Curmie often had a colleague teaching in the same time slot down the hall, so with 15 or 20 minutes left on the last day of class, we’d switch rooms: he’d pass out the survey in my class and I would in his.  Sometimes, if the schedule demanded, the department admin would do the honors.  Anyway, the result was that if there were 25 students in a class, we’d get at least 22 or 23 responses.

Shifting to online meant that filling out a course evaluation became a choice, and we’d get the formula Curmie mentioned in the piece linked above: “If there are 20 students in a class—5 loved it, 3 hated it, and a dozen thought it was OK, you’ll get two positive responses, three negative responses, and two ‘meh’ responses.”  Yes, you can incentivize filling out the online form, but Curmie could never figure out how to make that not seem like a bribe for completing the eval or a penalty for not doing what the student might reasonably consider a waste of time.

Suggestion #2: stop pretending to an objectivity that doesn’t exist.  Assigning a numerical score to a question that requires an obviously subjective response is inherently problematic.  Curmie would get rid of those number scores altogether: have students write a paragraph each about what they thought the strengths and weaknesses of the course were.  Prompt them with ideas about relevant topics: knowledge of material, availability outside class, keeping the interest of students, etc., but don’t ask about every item individually.  And insist on specificity.  Don’t insist on an answer to whether a faculty member keeps regular office hours if the student never tried to go to them.  If a student’s only complaint is that the course was too difficult, that’s significant.  If the complaint is about turn-around time for essays or exams, how long did it take?  And so on.

Suggestion #3: actively compare course evaluation scores to grades.  Yes, Curmie thinks that 1-5 scale should go the way of the rotary phone, but it’s unlikely to do so, so here’s what Curmie did when he was called upon to review a colleague’s RTP documents: take the average score on that overall instructor rating and subtract the average grade in the class.  So, for example, a popular professor might get a 4.5 on that 5-point scale, and the average grade in the class might be exactly a B.  4.5-3=1.5.  That would be an excellent score.  Over 1: good.  0-1: OK, maybe.  Less than 0: terrible.  Yes, this is a quick and dirty analysis, and it shouldn’t be used in isolation, but it does at least discourage buying good evaluations with undeservedly good grades.  Our client is the society.  We need people with skill-sets, not just degrees.

Suggestion #4: when considering a major decision—one involving promotion or tenure as opposed to simply retention—the students who really matter aren’t the ones who just finished the course: they’re the ones who took that course a year or more ago.  You took the introductory course from Professor X: how prepared were you for the advanced course?  You’ve now graduated: are you ready for a job/internship/grad school?  You’ve been out five years: tell us how Professor X prepared you (or didn’t) for your current career path.

Suggestion #5: administrators need to grow some cojones.  Years ago, student opinion factored into decision-making only on rare occasions.  Generally speaking, the only time it mattered was when the senior faculty, department chair, and dean were leaning towards a favorable result for a faculty member, but student opinion was overwhelmingly negative (the converse of that didn’t apply: overwhelming support from students never reversed a tenure denial).  But if administrators are now placing too much emphasis on course evaluations, that’s on them, not (or certainly not exclusively) on the assessment device.

Suggestion #6: look for other means of assessment of faculty.  Curmie always got at least good, sometimes excellent, course evaluations.  But what mattered to him, and what should matter to decision-makers, came not from student opinion, but from student success: his former students’ success in more advanced classes, including in grad school; their pass rate on the state content exam for prospective secondary school teachers; their subsequent lives as artists, teachers, administrators… but most of all, as citizens.

There are indeed some problems associated with course evaluations.  There are, as noted above, some things that would lessen the harm while keeping the advantages.  But the real problem is that lazy and feckless administrators don’t have a clue how to process the information they have available to them.  A lot of programs are rather like the Augean stables, and there’s no Hercules in sight.

Reacting to the Reactions about Charlie Kirk's Assassination

A few quotations from the Dear Departed

Curmie was going to write about the assassination of Charlie Kirk as part of a larger discussion about the rule of law, also discussing things like the attack on that Venezuelan boat, the co-opting of the National Guard to <checks notes> spread mulch and pick up trash, and the absurd SCOTUS ruling allowing ICE and DHS to forgo anything in the same area code as obeying Fourth Amendment protections, enabling those assholes to engage in practices that far exceed mere racial profiling and would be called unconstitutional by anyone except a political hack supporting authoritarianism.

That essay may yet be written, but the response to the killing of Kirk has taken on a life of its own, both among the yammering politicians and the complacent media.  We haven’t seen this level of coverage since the murder of another loathsome rich guy, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson… and most of that was about how Luigi Mangione, the (technically still “alleged”) killer is a rather handsome young man.

Noteworthy in the previous paragraph is the fact that the intervening attacks on Minnesota legislators and the spouses, leaving two people and a family dog dead and two other people seriously injured, received far less coverage: some, but nowhere near as much.  Those murders were, of course, clearly politically motivated, and we knew that early on.  The relative lack of coverage is attributable at least in part to the fact that the victims weren’t obscenely rich.  However liberal the media are alleged to be, the fact is they’re all controlled by the uber-rich, and those folks think wealth translates into importance… and that killing a rich dude is far worse than killing a poor one.

Please note, Gentle Reader, that Curmie is in no way endorsing any of these murders.  He is not “celebrating” the death of Kirk, although he does believe the world to be a better place without his racism, misogyny, trans- and homophobia, Christian nationalism, mendacity, and general assholitude.  Well, at least until and unless the right-wing ideologues are successful in their attempt to make Kirk into a “moderate” and therefore even more of a martyr.  He was neither, of course.  His sole attribute was his ability to sell every conceivable variety of hatred as if it were a heavenly elixir.

Curmie and Beloved Spouse are fans of murder mysteries, and we not infrequently watch a film or a TV show in which the victim is a truly horrible person, thereby providing potential motives for a number of suspects.  When this occurs, one of us (usually Curmie) sometimes adopts an exaggerated Texas drawl and proclaims that the deceased “wanted killin.’”  But we’re well aware of the fictiveness of what we’re watching.  Real life is different, and no one, not even Charlie Kirk, deserves to be shot in cold blood.  There may be little in the way of mourning at Chez Curmie, but there is precisely zero celebration.

It now appears that the suspected shooter, Tyler Robinson, did have a political, or at least quasi-political, motive.  He disagreed with Kirk on some issues.  But no one knew that when the invective started to fly.  To be fair, it was a reasonable guess, but it didn’t at the time come close to a certainty.  Moreover, although Robinson is said to have become more political of late, he is not registered with a political party and has not voted recently.  He seems to have grown up around guns, and he comes from a Republican family.  [EDIT: It now appears that Robinson thought Kirk was insufficiently right-wing for Robinson’s taste.  Yes, the shooting was political, but not in the way it was described by Trump, et al.  Go figure, right?]

Curmie has long decried the media’s prioritization of getting the story first over getting it right.  One example was that attack at a cinema in Aurora, CO; another was the (perhaps staged) attempt in Butler, PA, about which Curmie suggested that the motive may never be known, but “perhaps there’s a latter-day Jodie Foster to impress out there somewhere.”  And, of course, DJT has always been quick to blame someone unlike himself, evidence be damned: witness his screed on New Year’s Day against “criminals coming in” when the New Orleans terrorist actually turned out to be a Texas-born Army vet.

Let’s take as given that Robinson was the shooter and that the reason for the attack was that he objected to Kirk’s politics.  That rationale would have been a reasonable, even probable, surmise before Robinson’s apprehension.  But it was certainly insufficient to claim as fact.  There was the possibility of a “false flag,” of an internal division in the right-wing power structure (Kirk had been accused of insufficient obeisance to Dear Leader, after all), or the gunman had some other motive altogether.  Curmie even saw a post that suggested that since it would take military-style training to be able to shoot that accurately, and since the military is comprised mostly of conservatives… well, you get the point, Gentle Reader.  Yes, that’s a rather strained argument, but until this morning it was at least possibly accurate.

Of course, the vituperation started emanating from the White House long before any real information became known.  Donald Trump, in his usual reckless manner, bypassed any attempt at national unity and blithely accused the “radical left political violence,” and deplored “demonizing those with whom you disagree.”  A more ironic and hypocritical utterance has seldom if ever occurred in all of human history.  Demonizing political opponents is, of course, Trump’s stock in trade, to the extent that when someone else does it, we’re surprised he doesn’t sue them for copyright infringement.

Of course, all this hand-wringing and pearl-clutching casually ignores the attacks on Paul Pelosi, Josh Shapiro, and Melissa Hortman, and the kidnapping plot aimed at Gretchen Whitmer.  But it’s only those on the left we need to worry about, correct?  What utter bullshit!  True, we expect this kind of crap from the usual suspects: Trump, Vance, Miller, Musk, Loomer, Mace, et al.  They are uniformly devoid of actual ideas (or at least good ones) and have nothing but rage and self-righteous hypocrisy to offer.  But it is terrifying that even once reasonable conservatives are buying into this nonsense.  (There’s a reason Curmie abandoned Ethics Alarms, for example.)

Name a nationally-known Democrat—Obama, Biden, Harris, Newsom, Whitmer, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdami, the list goes on and on—and you’ll find a message of sorrow, empathy, and sometimes outrage about the murder of Charlie Kirk.  Of course, some of them may have been pro forma or even insincere, but Curmie’s challenge on his Facebook page remains: name a prominent Republican who offered similar sentiments over the death of Melissa Hortman, who was an actual legislator as opposed to a talking head. 

One more thing crossed Curmie’s mind when he woke up in the middle of the night.  A little over 50 years ago, Curmie was a freshman in college, taking a course called “Political Ideals.”  One of the key differences identified in that course was the tendency of conservatives to think in terms of the individual and liberals to think of groups with something in common (race, gender, economic class, etc.).  It’s an over-simplification, but it isn’t, or at least wasn’t, inaccurate.

But when it comes to these attacks on politicians or quasi-politicians, those characterizations no longer hold.  There is little if any attempt by liberals to blame all conservatives for the deaths of Hortman or the torching of Shapiro’s home, but all of a sudden all liberals are responsible for Kirk’s death.  There are even insane, and yes, Curmie does mean that term literally, rantings from the likes of Congresscritter Clay Higgins, who wants to violate the First Amendment and censor both individuals and corporations because some people think Charlie Kirk wasn’t all that great a guy, after all. 

We’re already seeing a variation on the theme, as the list of people—teachers, state university administrators, restaurant employees, writers, coaches, even firefighters— fired or suspended for what clearly should be protected speech is long and growing.  FIRE, which Curmie criticized only yesterday, is actually all over this one: here’s a list of literally dozens of incidents, already (!).  This is, as FIRE’s headline rightly points out, the embodiment of “cancel culture”: you know, Gentle Reader, that horrible plague the right always complains about… except, of course, when they’re the ones doing it.

But we aren’t talking about the jobs report, or Russia attacking Poland on Trump’s watch, or the Epstein files, so at least there’s that.

There are problems here, and the solutions aren’t easy.  The political right will cheerfully abandon the 1st and 4th Amendments to bolster the 2nd, but the kind of gun control labelled by liberals as “common sense” wouldn’t have saved Charlie Kirk, at least if, as seems likely, Tyler Robinson was indeed the perpetrator.  He had no record of mental illness or criminality, and the weapon was neither a handgun nor a semi-automatic rifle. 

It is sadly ironic that one of Charlie Kirk’s most famous lines was “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”  But even calling attention to that quote is seen by some of the more fragile snowflakes of the right as a firing offense.  Yet another reason Curmie is glad he’s retired.

Note: one particularly unfortunate outcome here is that the Tyler Robinson Foundation, named for a different young man, will probably take a hit because of this because, in the words of a beloved former student, “people are stupid, y’all.”  The TRF is a charity offering support to families dealing with pediatric cancer.  Seems like a great cause, especially if you’re also a fan of the band Imagine Dragons, who have been involved with the foundation since its inception. Maybe send them a few bucks if you’ve got some to spare, Gentle Reader?

FIRE's Failure and Curmie's Happiness in Retirement

 

One of the more troubling survey results.  Probably.

If FIRE, the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression is known for anything by the general public, it’s for their annual Free Speech Rankings of colleges and universities.  The new (2026: apparently they’re like model years for cars in this regard) list dropped this week, and it reveals some troubling information.

Nearly 2/3 of the 257 colleges and universities studied received a failing grade from FIRE, and none got better than a B-.  Of course, if what you want to do is to show the need for your organization, you’re likely to paint a rather gloomy picture of the status quo, so perhaps a grain of salt is called for.  Still, it’s chilling that FIRE President Greg Lukianoff’s could comment that, 

Rather than hearing out and then responding to an ideological opponent, both liberal and conservative college students are retreating from the encounter entirely. This will only harm students’ ability to think critically and create rifts between them. We must champion free speech on campus as a remedy to our culture's deep polarization.

A third of college students surveyed agreed that violence is acceptable, at least “rarely,” to stop speech.  A majority said they would oppose their school’s inviting any of six controversial speakers (three from the left and three from the right) to campus.  Note: these are not specific individuals, apparently, but hypothetical people who are quoted as saying something controversial, e.g., “children should be allowed to transition without parental consent” or “transgender people have a mental disorder.”  You get the picture, Gentle Reader. 

Of course, some of this gets into areas of fungible definitions.  Is grabbing and restraining someone who is inciting violence (i.e., engaging in non-protected speech) perpetrating violence against that person?  Or is the term limited to punching out someone you disagree with?  Does “rarely” mean “only in extremely rare circumstances” (such as just described) or just “not very often”?  And what is meant by “invite”?  Is that my tuition money that’s being spent on bringing in this person whose views I abhor, or is it the Young Republicans/Democrats/whatever footing the bill?

Similarly, it’s also difficult for a university to legitimately be blamed for students’ reluctance to discuss controversial issues in entirely social atmospheres outside the classroom.  If, for example, a student hears another student advocating a position on abortion or the conflict in Gaza which is radically different from their own, choosing not to express a contrary view may be appropriate if that decision comes not from fear but from simply not wanting to be bothered. 

Similarly, Curmie has three different responses to those who disagree with his posts, both here on the blog and, considerably more frequently, on the Facebook page.  (No one has really taken issue with anything he’s posted on BlueSky; that bridge will be crossed if/when reached.)  Usually, the comment simply remains with no counter-argument.  Curmie isn’t afraid of detractors, but sometimes they’re just not worth the trouble.  Sometimes, Curmie responds with a clarification or further argument.  Rarely (there’s that word, again), he’ll ban someone.  (He hasn’t done that in several years.)

For all this, FIRE’s work, whether arguing against speech codes, protecting research from government interference, or working to eliminate loyalty oaths (including towards DEI advocacy), is unquestionably a net positive, and the free speech rankings contribute towards this utility.

FIRE is, to be sure, enormously and not infrequently smugly proud of their work, and Wednesday’s webinar to hype the new rankings showed that off.  Curmie does not begin to profess to any expertise in surveying, data collection and analysis, and the like, but he does come by his soubriquet honestly, and there was more than one instance in which his eyebrow raised in skepticism. 

A couple examples, paraphrased to what Curmie was hearing (perhaps not what the speaker thought he was saying).  “Well, we have this totally subjective green/yellow/red light analysis, and we’ll give you points if you’re green and take them away if you’re not…. We don’t really pay any attention to the good things you’ve done unless you pro-actively tell us about them before the rankings come out….  If you sign on to the Chicago principles, you get points for that; actually following them is (apparently) of less importance….”

The whole process seems to be an attempt to make a fundamentally subjective analysis seem objective.  Curmie has been guilty of the same; he’s not pretending otherwise, but he at least tries to let the audience in on the extent to which the evidence is or is not trustworthy.  And he’d definitely be interested in how self-selecting respondents were.  He knows how course evaluations work, after all.  As soon as they became optional, they lost pretty much all credibility.  If there are 20 students in a class—5 loved it, 3 hated it, and a dozen thought it was OK, you’ll get two positive responses, three negative responses, and two “meh” responses.  How FIRE’s methodology addresses this problem would be worth knowing.

More problematic was the avoidance of the proverbial elephant in the room.  That’s a particularly apt expression, since the elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party, which, at least in states like Florida and Texas (there are others, no doubt), is the greatest threat to free speech on university campuses. 

As many readers of this blog know and others will have surmised, Curmie is a retired professor at a state university in Texas.  That makes him both a little more knowledgeable and, admittedly, a little more biased in his interpretation of what is transpiring.  But he finds it difficult to understand how a student’s willingness or unwillingness to discuss controversial subjects in a purely social setting is more relevant to free speech concerns than is a professor’s ability to determine what should and should not be taught in a course in their area of expertise.

This summer, Greg Abbott and his simpering acolytes in the Texas legislature passed SB27, which is as anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and generally reprehensible a piece of legislation as Curmie can recall, anywhere, ever.  Curmie hopes to write a longer essay on this, but let’s just say that articles like the ones linked here and here pretty well reflect Curmie’s thinking. 

The bill strips faculty of the right to elect their own representatives, de facto grants state government the right to overturn any decision made at a state university, and gives whatever local authority remains exclusively to the president.  The president is appointed, often unilaterally, by the regents, who are appointed by the governor.  In the over two decades that Curmie has been affiliated with the university from which he is now retired, not a single regent has not been a hard-core Republican.  Indeed, their political affiliations have often been trotted out as if they were credentials for the job.

But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, “Wait!  That’s not all!”  SB37 is, more than anything, an assault on academic freedom and, by extension, of freedom of speech.  Political hacks are scouring every syllabus, looking for anything that might challenge right-wing ideology or even suggest that different points of view might not only exist, but reasonably exist.

And now we circle back to that webinar, in which viewers were encouraged to submit questions.  So Curmie did so.  He can’t reproduce his question verbatim, but it was something like this: “In an environment in which state legislatures are exercising what amounts to absolute control over curriculum, why are you surveying only students and not faculty about free speech issues?”  His question was ignored, while the moderator cheerfully moved on a softball questions from someone she identified as her friend.  OK, there were probably more questions than could have been accommodated in the time frame, and the answer to my question, pretty much “it’s hard to do that,” was sort of hinted at in response to a different question.

But it wasn’t the avoidance of Curmie’s question that really stood out.  Someone asked about the news out of Texas A&M, where a single narcissistic and reactionary student circulated a surreptitious video of challenging a professor for including a discussion of verboten (by Trump/Abbott) topics like gender identity and transgender people.  A grandstanding pol got involved, and soon the professor was fired, the dean and department chair demoted, and the president at the very least under fire.

Edicts about what can and cannot be taught in a university classroom are clear violations of academic freedom and evidence of authoritarianism. Firing a professor without even the pretense of due process is illegal, or at least would be in any state with a governor or state legislatures that weren’t so proudly anti-intellectual.  Curmie is loath to use terms that exaggerate the gravity of a situation, but if this isn’t fascism, the footwear sure does seem to be the correct size.

Anyway, whoever asked the question didn’t go into any details, just that a professor at A&M had been fired.  Someone from FIRE acknowledged the situation in about a half a sentence, didn’t explain the context to listeners who might not have heard about the incident, and then proclaimed in the Q&A link that the question had been answered.  NO, IT FUCKING WASN’T!

FIRE still, as of this writing, hasn’t addressed the situation at A&M, just as they never addressed the question of religious charter schools in Oklahoma, but they did get out a brief statement about the shooting of Charlie Kirk, leaping to the conclusion that it was politically motivated.  (It might very well have been, but they certainly didn’t know that when the statement was released.)

PEN America, however, responded swiftly and surely.  Here’s Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms Managing Director of U.S. Free Expression Programs: 

We are witnessing the death of academic freedom in Texas, the remaking of universities as tools of authoritarianism that suppress free thought.  The decision to remove these academic leaders to satisfy politicians’ demands is an excessive punishment for the alleged violation of transparency requirements. When university presidents have little choice but to dismiss faculty members’ expertise and enforce ideological edicts, the space for free speech and open inquiry on our campuses is undeniably being suffocated.

As he writes this, Curmie is a member of FIRE but not of PEN America.  Both those situations are likely to change in the relatively near future.

Back when he was teaching, Curmie assigned texts by the likes of Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Augusto Boal, and Irish drag queen Panti Bliss (Curmie encourages you to look up any of these folks who are new to you, Gentle Reader): not to get students to agree with their ideologies, but because you can’t understand the entirety of the way theatre and the larger culture interact without acknowledging the voices that may be on the periphery in one way or another.

If he were still teaching, Curmie wouldn’t change his syllabus or his teaching style one iota to accommodate the dictates of petty tyrants like Abbott or Trump.  It’s a good thing he’s retired, then.  This way, they won’t have to fire him.

Columbia v. Columbia

 

This story has been around for over a month, and Curmie got most of this essay written weeks ago, but couldn’t quite push it over the finish line.  It’s interesting enough, though, to try again, even if we’re not exactly talking about breaking news.

It’s not a surprise that Curmie learned about this very American news item from the British newspaper, The Guardian.  He confesses that when he first saw the headline, “Columbia Sportswear sues Columbia University for trademark infringement,” he thought the article was from Andy Borowitz or Not the Onion.  It isn’t.

What’s particularly interesting here is not merely that the clothing line has a point, but that this is yet another example of administrative incompetence at one of the nation’s premier universities.  There may have been earlier examples, but the incident that stands out is the response to student protests in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israeli (and other) citizens in October of 2023.

The university’s administration managed to make about every conceivable mistake then: stifling First Amendment protected demonstrations while simultaneously taking little or no action against people who really were breaking the law (blocking access to buildings, holding staff against their will, etc.). 

Then came the utter mishandling of the finals-week protest in the library and the ongoing capitulations to the Mad King of Trumpistan’s various whims.  Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi’s “open letter” to Interim President Claire Shipman, despite being a bit overblown in places, makes some legitimate points, especially about using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.  The problem is that although that the IHRA describes it as a “working definition” and states explicitly that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic,” there are a lot of other places where that document infringes on free speech rights. 

More problematically, it is these parts of the definition that have been foregrounded of late, to the point at which Kenneth Stern, one of the authors of that policy, objected to the way it is now being employed, saying it “was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.” 

But all of those stories involved decisions that seem to be based on a lack of ethical fortitude.  The recent lawsuit stems from something more fundamental: garden-variety stupidity.  Every college and university in the country has a policy regarding the use of the name of the school on clothing, glassware, and so on.  Everything goes through the marketing folks, whose job it is to make sure the school is presented positively and that all the legal requirements have been met.

Curmie has a rather large collection of show t-shirts and some from advising an honor society, every one of which went through the approval process.  (We had to fight for one of the show shirts, but it was because the image showed broken doll parts.  No, Curmie is not kidding.) 

We can reasonably object to the ability of a sportswear company to trademark a term that was associated with a university for nearly two centuries before the corporation even came into being.  Suing for damages instead of sending a “cease and desist” seems a bit much.  And if Curmie reads just the word “Columbia,” his first thought is of the university, and his second thought is that someone spelled the name of that South American country incorrectly. 

All that said, there was an agreement signed a couple of years ago.  One presumes that the contract specifies that the relevant gear would be limited to things available to the public, as opposed to, say, athletic uniforms.  Anyway, all the university needed to do was to put something on their hats and t-shirts and so on that clearly indicated that the “Columbia” in question was the school and not the company.  This could be the word “university,” or the insignia, or the lion mascot, or a specific academic department, even the year the university was founded. 

These stipulations do not strike Curmie as oppressive.  But, says the company, there were items listed on a university website that had none of those identifiers.  The image shown above would be an example.  It’s especially significant that the blue color is associated with both the university and the company. Note: Curmie didn’t find that photo on an official website, and it may date from prior to the contractual agreement; it’s intended to suggest the kind of thing under consideration, not necessarily to be construed as evidence.

What’s significant here is that even the most litigious corporation isn’t going to bring a lawsuit against a university unless they have some pretty convincing evidence.  They may be a bit on the over-zealous side (what harm have they actually suffered, even if all their allegations are true?), but to say the university doesn’t come out of this looking good is to err on the side of understatement.  When someone like Curmie is even tempted to side with a big corporation against an Ivy League school, well…

Boy, Is This Not Greatness

Mitchell Hall, where (presumably) Boy My Greatness
was to have been performed

A grad school friend of Curmie’s now lives a few miles from the University of Central Oklahoma, which recently suppressed the production of a play that had been scheduled to be produced this month.  He posted about this story on his Facebook page, and Curmie became interested, in part because there is so little press coverage (more on that below).

Curmie doesn’t know the work in question, Zoe Senese-Grossberg’s 2024 play Boy My Greatness, but he did immediately recognize one of the most famous lines from Antony and Cleopatra, in which the Egyptian queen, now captured by Caesar’s minions, predicts that “Antony / Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’ th’ posture of a whore.” (That’s V.ii.265-8, if you’re playing along at home, Gentle Reader.)

The line is not only metatheatrical (there are other examples in Shakespeare, but this is probably the best known), but also, of course, self-referentially ironic: the actor saying that line at the Globe (or perhaps the Second Blackfriars?) Theatre in c. 1607 would almost certainly have been a boy.  Indeed, this speech is one of the major pieces of evidence that boys, rather than adult female impersonators, played the women’s roles. It’s possible, of course, but unlikely, that there were adults roughly equivalent to the onnagata in Kabuki in some of those parts.  But this would almost certainly create an even “squeakier” Cleopatra, as higher pitches do not come naturally to post-puberty males.  The point is taken, either way.

It comes as no surprise, then, that a play titled Boy My Greatness deals with boys playing women in Shakespeare’s plays.  It’s set in 1606, and one of the plays currently in rehearsal is indeed Antony and Cleopatra.  (Yes, it’s probable that the play hadn’t been written yet in 1606, but it’s not like the Bard himself didn’t play fast and loose with historical accuracy.)

It is simply a fact that all women’s roles in public performances (court masques were a different category) in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in England were played by male actors.  Even the most ignorant of university officials must surely know that.  Ah, but two of the boys in this play are, or at least have been, in a romantic relationship.  One presumes that is what rattled the chain of the homophobic idiots censorial asshats university counsel’s office.  

OK, let’s take this one step at a time.  There’s a stupid law at the state level and a directive (not a law) from the feds that forbid the use of public funds to support “DEI” initiatives.  Curmie disagrees with these restrictions, but acknowledges that in a perfect world they would be sensible.  (He also gestures broadly, wearing an expression readily translatable as “does this look like a perfect world to you?”)

But if the laws themselves are problematic, the idea that staging a play in which gay (or curious) characters exist is somehow endorsing DEI is ample evidence that, to borrow a felicitous phrase from Ken White of Popehat, universities should cease hiring legal counsel from the back of a bait shop. 

Showing something onstage is not endorsing it, as ought to be painfully obvious to anyone who can out-think a turnip.  Even portraying a character favorably falls well short of supporting everything about that individual.  Curmie once directed a production of Jean Racine’s Phaedra; that doesn’t make him (or his actors) either a Jansenite Catholic or a monarchist.  He’s directed Mishima Yukio’s Lady Aoi; he’s neither a Buddhist nor a believer in demonic possession.  He’s directed Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold… and the boys”; he does not endorse the racial animus perpetrated (briefly) by the title character.  But you, Gentle Reader, already knew all of this.  That’s because you’re considerably smarter than UCO’s legal staff (or president, or trustees, or whoever really made this decision). 

True, the university’s official statement reads “After a review of the requirements outlined in the contract from the national production company with legal counsel, the university’s theatre department decided not to support the local production of the show with university resources at this time.” 

Gentle Reader, if you believe the decision was de facto made by the theatre department, Curmie has some ocean-front property in Kansas he’s willing to sell to you for cheap.  This has every earmark of a top-down decision made by administrators.  Curmie’s friend, who may have information that hasn’t been made public, says there were threats of firings, which prompted faculty and students to “back down.”  Of course, any theatre faculty member who willingly capitulated to this nonsense without being somehow threatened should indeed be fired. 

But, as Curmie has suggested before, there is a lesson here: Don’t Fuck with Theatre Kids, who are an industrious and creative lot.  The good news, or at least the promising news, is that a Gofundme campaign raised considerably more money than the $2000 goal, and plans are afoot to find an off-campus venue for the production.  As of this writing, such a space has not yet been secured, but hopes are high.

As noted above, there is remarkably little press coverage of any of this.*  There’s a single story from a local TV station which does, at least, seem to have been picked up by yahoo.  The lack of press about the incident suggests that the censors will get away with their bigoted and authoritarian bullshit without the widespread humiliation they so richly deserve.  This post is, perhaps, the proverbial voice crying in the wilderness (Curmie did go to Dartmouth, after all, where Vox Clamantis in Deserto is the college motto), but at least it’s something.  Gentle Reader, you should, of course, feel free to make your voice heard, too (even if you disagree with Curmie).

Curmie closes by turning the floor over to his friend: “Show will be done. UCO will lose theatre majors/students. Faculty and admin will retain their jobs. And the state legislature will gain confidence in their fascist policies.”

What he said.

* This statement was true when this piece was posted.  There is now a piece by Howard Sherman and an article in Playbill.  This is good news.

Will the Release of the Epstein Files Matter? Sort of. Maybe.

The top stories of the last few days all revolve around the “Epstein files.”  Well, them and the myriad frenzied attempts by 47 and his minions to get us to focus on literally anything else: the bullshit deployment of National Guard troops to DC to pick up trash and spread mulch, threats to do the same to New York, Chicago, and New Orleans despite court decisions that such missions are illegal, the unquestionably illegal destruction of that Venezuelan ship that may or may not have been carrying narco-terrorists…  Those distractions have failed bigly, not least because it’s all over but the final score.  The names will come out, and we have GOP Congresscritters Massey and Greene (yes, really!), among others, of course, to thank for it.

More to the point, anyone paying the slightest bit of attention has now determined that the likelihood that the President of the United States is not merely a con artist and an authoritarian bully but also a pedophile and rapist has moved out of “preponderance of the evidence” territory and into “beyond reasonable doubt.” 

Few criminals have ever acted more guilty.  The Trump administration can’t even keep its lies consistent.  The files were on Pam Bondi’s desk, but they don’t exist.  The whole thing is a Democratic hoax, but Bill Clinton’s name appears.  Curmie’s recent appreciation of Luigi Pirandello notwithstanding, anyone with the analytical skills of the dumbest kid in kindergarten knows that all of those statements can’t be true at the same time.  The only question is whether any of them are.

Certainly, moving Ghislane Maxwell to Club Fed was sufficient evidence of rampant corruption to convince all but the well and truly brainwashed, and asserting that survivors’ testimony at the press conference is “irrelevant” or that Republican legislators who exhibit even enough backbone to want the truth to come out are “hostile” certainly should have clinched the issue even for the stragglers who hadn’t long since come to that conclusion.

Of course, those who drank deep of the MAGA Kool-Aid don’t care, and those of us who dare suggest that Dear Leader is anything less than a literal godsend will continue to be called Trump Deranged, irrespective of evidence, even by people who know better (or ought to).  But the hard-core MAGAs seem to be losing at least some of their suasion in the Republican party: when you’re revealed as too big of a sicko for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the proverbial writing is on the wall.  Special elections are showing huge gains for Democrats: breaking the state legislature’s GOP super-majority in Iowa by gaining an easy victory in a district that voted for Trump by double digits a few months ago is but one example.

And that’s significant.  Curmie may find the political stances of the current crop of GOP pols more problematic than those of their predecessors of a few decades ago (yes, they’re considerably worse than Nixon or Reagan), but there are relatively few of them outside of the Manchurian Cantaloupe’s appointees who could legitimately be described as evil.  There are some, of course: Mike Johnson (aptly described by Curmie five years ago as “a hitherto unknown little turd”), Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton come to mind.

Most, though, are simply amoral (as opposed to immoral), cowards.  Some, like Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Lisa Murkowski, will occasionally offer a bit of token resistance before ultimately capitulating every damned time to whatever whim takes shape in what passes for a brain in the Mad King of Trumpistan.  These people cannot be trusted, full stop. 

But others—those who may not have a lot of core beliefs but sure would like to be re-elected—are beginning to recognize that servile obeisance to POTUS just might cause more problems than it solves.  The Astroturf support of billionaire mega-donors is nice, no doubt (or at least Susan Collins thinks so), but the disillusionment of the citizenry is real.  Distancing oneself from a party leader who is underwater on literally every issue, and on some of them even among Republicans, comes a little easier under those circumstances.

Curmie isn’t celebrating an imminent return to power for the Democrats, at least not yet.  The GOP’s willingness to be completely forthright in their declarations that they have no interest in representing their constituents, only in maintaining their party’s control of the government, is concerning.  The leftie press is suggesting that the Trumpsters wouldn’t be so openly seeking to gerrymander if they weren’t afraid of the results in a fair election.  Whether that’s true or not is, of course, a matter for conjecture.  It could be that the GOP seeks a supermajority, or that they’re confident in victory (remember Trump’s almost-admission that Elon Musk had manipulated the 2024 election?), anyway.

None of this is new, of course.  Curmie remembers a dozen years ago when Greg Abbott, then the Attorney General for Texas, cheerfully declared in a court document (!) that of course their most recent gerrymandering was designed specifically to increase the power of the Republican Party, but, you see, it wasn’t racially motivated (note: it was, of course), so it was OK.

And no, Gentle Reader, Curmie is not pretending that the Democrats aren’t perfectly willing to play the same game.  Indeed, they have.  But as the New York Times’s Sam Wang wrote about the 2012 election, “Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.”  And, of course, Democrats voted 220-1 for the 2021 “For the People Act,” which would have required non-partisan commissions rather than state legislatures to establish Congressional districts; Republicans opposed the bill 209-0, with two not voting.  It was then blocked from even receiving a vote in the Senate by Mitch McConnell.

But this piece isn’t about gerrymandering… although we may return to that topic in the future.  What matters here is the extent to which the Epstein affair matters.  The answer, Curmie suspects, could be anywhere on the continuum from “a lot” to “not much.”  As noted above, everyone already knows that Trump will be implicated if that material ever becomes public.  The only question is how significantly.  But knowing in one’s brain and one’s heart that such evidence exists and being unable to deny that evidence’s existence are two different things.

Still, Trump’s boast early in the 2016 campaign that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and [not] lose voters” may be a little more true than we’d like to believe.  Certainly, anyone who ever would have actively supported Trump—as opposed to despising him less than the other candidate—is indeed sufficiently lacking in morality (or even humanity) that the only thing that would make such a person change their mind would be for Trump to stop being a racist, sexist, anti-intellectual, plutocratic homophobe.

Still, whereas such people are willing to excuse his lies, his felony convictions, his open grifting, and his incoherent bluster… they might just draw the line at raping junior high girls.  The MTGs of the world will tell the tale.  At the moment there’s a trickle of dissent.  If it stays that way, we’ll have to wait until at least next year’s midterms to see how things play out.  But even one or two significant defections could open the floodgates. All bullies—and Trump is unquestionably in that category—are cowards.  If he stops scaring people, he’s powerless, because he’s too fundamentally stupid and narcissistic to convince anyone to come around to his point of view without at least an implicit threat. 

There is another possibility, of course: that we have the distraction backwards.  If, hypothetically, the files reveal that Trump was less complicit in the Epstein/Maxwell sexual exploitation ring than we had believed, then all the attention given to the files was itself the distraction from other illegal or unethical activity.

Ultimately, though, there is one central question: will the Republicans whom Curmie once disagreed with but respected stop bowing and scraping to the Grifter-in-Chief?  It’s possible.  After all, Trump has already secured the title of Most Corrupt President in US History.  He’s not only won the race, he’s lapped the field, leaving Nixon, Harding, and Grant looking at each other wondering how to even compete with that.  But the average GOP Congresscritter demonstrates, shall we say, invertebrate tendencies. 

Will the courageous and patriotic survivors of Epstein, Maxwell, and Trump who addressed the world this week save the country?  They just might.  Unfortunately, they could be our only chance.

 

Luigi Pirandello and the Mad King of Trumpistan

 

Luigi Pirandello, 1867-1936

Over the years, Curmie has called upon his knowledge of dramatic literature on several occasions to address topics that aren’t really about dramatic literature.  He may be forgetting something, but there are plenty of examples, not including references to novels, philosophical essays, films, television shows, songs, paintings, or other such works… or, of course, essays about censorship of plays or similar phenomena.

There’s a list of Curmie’s linkages of dramatic literature to contemporary events at the bottom of this essay.  Feel free to browse or ignore as you wish, Gentle Reader.

There are actually two plays that come to mind in terms of what Curmie wants to discuss here.  One is Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says No!, in which the central character is injured during a historical re-enactment and wakes up believing that he really is the Irish hero Robert Emmet.  Curmie is going to concentrate, however, on Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV (Enrico IV).  It’s better known and came a little earlier: the short story on which it is based was published in 1915; the dramatic version was first produced in 1922, seven years before Johnston’s play.  It’s also a little closer to the point Curmie wants to make.  Henry IV is probably second on the list of Pirandello’s most significant plays: definitely behind Six Characters in Search of an Author, and probably a little ahead of Right You Are! (If You Think You Are). 

Curmie knows the latter two plays a little better, having directed them both, but has taught Henry IV a couple of times when the anthology he was using chose that rather than Six Characters as its representative Pirandello work.  The three plays all illustrate what Pirandello called “juxtaposed planes of reality.”  That is, rather than showing a single, distorted view of the world as occurs in, say, expressionism, Pirandello presents the reader/spectator with different perspectives which logically cannot be simultaneously true, but seem to be so.

In Six Characters, figures from an unfinished play interrupt a rehearsal looking for a playwright to finish their stories.  As such, they are simultaneously real and unreal, physically present and completely imaginary.  Consider that an audience seeing the play is watching actors playing actors playing characters from a different play altogether, and you’ll get an idea of the kind of philosophical gamesmanship in which Pirandello indulged.

In Right You Are!, and man (Signor Ponza) and his mother-in-law (Signora Frola) both declare the other to be insane.  According to him, she became distraught at the death of her daughter, and the only way to calm her was to pretend that his second wife was actually his first.  She, on the other hand, asserts that her daughter was in an asylum, not dead, but Ponza became convinced of her death, so Signora Ponza humored her husband’s delusions and married him again.  At the end of the play, Signora Ponza appears, declares herself to be Signora Frola’s daughter, Signor Ponza’s second wife, and for herself, “nobody” and “who you want me to be.”  It is truly a play in which you can’t tell the players without the proverbial scorecard, but that’s the point: truth is ambiguous, contradictory, and ultimately unknowable, as the raisonneur Laudisi laughingly points out in the play’s closing speech: “You have the truth! But are you satisfied?”

The title character in Henry IV had fallen off a horse several years ago, again in an enactment, and now believes himself to be Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor of the late 11^th century and into the early 12^th.  His colleagues set up an elaborate plan to maintain his fantasy, complete with period sets and costumes.  There are subplots aplenty: a new arrival who researched the wrong Henry IV (the French king who reigned about 500 years after the emperor Henry believes himself to be), a little unrequited love, an attempt to shock Henry back into reality, and so on. 

But the signature event is Henry’s revelation in Act II that he had come to his senses years earlier but chose to keep up the pretense of madness.  By the end of Act III, however, he appears to have reclaimed his madness, grabbing the sword from one of his counselors and stabbing (fatally, we presume) his present-day rival.  He then lapses back into his illusory world as the final curtain falls.  Or does he?

And now we start talking about the US in 2025.  A pedestrian (at best), paranoid, narcissist becomes convinced that he is the king of all he surveys.  A collection of sycophants and enablers cheerfully support his delusions (until he inevitably turns on them, of course).  He is an authoritarian monarch who seems to have little grasp on reality, makes decisions based on petty jealousies, and shows little regard for anyone but himself (or, from time to time, those very much like him).

The incoherent babble he spews, the obvious lies, the puerile strutting: do they mean he is delirious, or are they part of a strategy to test the extent of his associates’ willingness to dance puppet-like to his every whim?  Claiming he’s reduced prices by 1500% is the stuff of lunacy, but his followers, many of whom know better, and the same folks who loudly decried President Biden’s (less frequent and less egregious) lapses, are content to pass that off as “exaggeration.”  N.B., Curmie completely understands that literally everyone makes mistakes like this occasionally—Barack Obama didn’t really think there were 57 states—but normal, sane, people don’t do this with this level of regularity, and they sure as hell don’t double down on their absurd claims.  It is one of the signature characteristics of the Mad King of Trumpistan that he never admits that he made a mistake, even that he misspoke.

Is he as unhinged as he appears to be?  Is he lying, or does he really believe the nonsense he belches forth?  The real cause for concern is that we don’t know for sure.  Curmie has suggested before that intelligence and shrewdness are different things, and whereas this particular despot-wannabe has always been short on the former, he is more than amply supplied with the latter.  It boggles that mind that anyone this obviously self-serving, obviously mendacious, and obviously ignorant could draw a single vote from a reasonably sensible citizen, let alone get elected… but here we are.

Is it time to invoke the 25^th Amendment?  Well, that will never happen, as the entire Republican party has proven itself invertebrate, and SCOTUS is pretty well implicated, too.  Are the antics of the likes of Gavin Newsom unprofessional and distasteful, or are they the only hope of saving a tattered but still breathing democracy?  Curmie fears that the answer is “yes.”  Pirandello would certainly understand that seemingly contradictory ideas can co-exist.  He might even write a play about it.

Oh, wait.  He did.

Previous entries linking dramatic literature with contemporary events:

· W.B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen in a piece on the Catholic Church’s excommunication of a nun/hospital administrator who signed off on an abortion to save the life of the mother (the fetus would have died, anyway, by the way).

· Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida to discuss yet another example of the anti-intellectuality of the Texas Board of Education.

· Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in thinking about a standoff between Minnesota’s Democratic governor and Republican legislature.

· Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People to comment on multiple sexual assault allegations against jocks at the University of Montana.

· Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit to talk about a case in which the idiot repo guys stripped the wrong house and the homeowner wanted appropriate compensation.

·  John Lyly’s Gallathea and Phillida and Alexander and Campaspe in a piece about the debate over student loan forgiveness.

·  Aeschylus’s Oresteia, especially the Eumenides, to comment on President Biden’s pro-active pardon of his son, after promising he wouldn’t do so.

·  Shakespeare’s As You Like It (and some traditional Asian forms) in an indictment of Iowa’s heinous anti-drag proposal.  (Good news: the bill was ultimately defeated.)

·  Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to call attention to the craven insidiousness of the GOP’s decision to declare that there were no “calendar days” remaining in the 119^th Congress.

· Euripides’ Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis to discuss President Trump’s unfettered narcissism, mendacity, and duplicity… and the unlikelihood of a solution that doesn’t involve direct action.