Hat tip: Donna at Right Angles
The Durham News reported today:
Now Zhang is part of a group protesting a decision to lay off two of the center’s four staff members, including longtime director Julian Sanchez. Students say they don’t understand why Duke wants to merge the Multicultural Center with the International House, which serves mostly foreign students.
Assistant Vice President for Campus Life Zoila Airall prefers the word integration to merger. She proposed it after researching methods to bridge cultural divides.
“I thought it was something new and cutting edge,” she said. …
The layoffs of Sanchez and his secretary, Juanita Johnson, will stand as Duke looks to conduct business on leaner budgets, Airall said. …
A new student organization, the Self-Determination Council, has evolved out of the dissent to protest the changes.
I have previously referenced Umberto Eco’s School of Comparative Irrelevance (from Foucault’s Pendulum), and reading about that new student group brought it to mind again. This group exists to protest Duke cutting funding to its members’ favorite centers ? centers which are reliant upon the university for its funding. They called it not “Duke Students for Continued Dependency” but instead “the Self-Determination Council.”
The only question is, in which SCI department does it belong? It belongs in neither Tetrapyloctomy nor Oxymoronics. No, to answer the famous question ? “would that go with Potio-section or the Adynata?” ? the answer must be the Adynata.
As the character Jacopo Belbo said, “the essence of the discipline is the comprehension of the underlying reasons for a thing?s absurdity”; in this case, the absurdity of a “self-determinism” group seeking to remain as firmly clenched as ever to the institutional teat.
