iowa underground blog

There’s discussion on who will be the next president of the University of Iowa on the forums today. TH privied us to a discussion being broadcast over WSUI.

Sousy chimes in with the following distillation:

I’m listening off and on.

The things I’m gathering:

1) The U of I community is not happy.
2) There seems to be a split of opinion in terms of ‘where to go next’.

and…

3) While it seems that the panel members have stated ‘all the candidates we selected would have made an outstanding president’, it doesn’t sound like there was a lot of enthusiasm for “the candidates” themselves. Most of the anger here seems to be that the University of Iowa faculty/staff representatives were not allowed to simply choose their own candidate.

It’s obvious that there is a difference of opinion over the type of candidate that the University staff committees want, and the type of candidate the board (or “Michael Gartner”) wants to hire… and a lot of frustration.

The only thing that baffles me: the seeming silence (for the moment) on the part of the Board of Regents in terms of the ‘reasoning’ for rejecting the slate. I’m sure there were good reasons – but I’d like to know what they are, and what happens next.

See also: UI faculty, students move ahead
on ‘no confidence’ votes

• pdx

As has been the lead national story on NPR this morning, tornadoes ripped through Iowa City. Some of our “locals” on the forums have contributed news and pictures.

I’m a bit torn that the Dairy Queen on Riverside drive – the last “walk up” location that I knew of – is now probably 30 miles downstream on the Iowa River.

• Sousy

Michael, of the exceptional Iowa Liberal blog, was kind enough to provide the following audio of Noam Chomsky’s lecture in Iowa City. The event was held at The Englert to a capacity crowd – and then some.

Also, noneed4theneed has a recap of Chomsky’s Ames appearance at Century of the Common Iowan blog.

• pdx

Mike and his guest-bloggers are, excuse the phrase – new kids on the block. Having been in existence for just a few months now, the quality and variety of writing is nevertheless quite excellent. This week, Mike’s friend Ali, currently visiting family in Pakistan, is chiming in:

People here are taking to the streets and rioting, because of some cartoon they have never seen or read. They are destroying their own government buildings, they are destroying their own buses, attacking their fellow men who have nothing to do with the situation they are supposedly protesting about.

Now the focus of their hatred are the Danish and Norwegian embassies, to the point that the government of Pakistan has recalled their ambassador from at least one of those countries. What is interesting to note is that these countries do a lot of developmental work in Pakistan. They send millions of dollars in aid to NGO’s who are doing relief work for the victims of the earthquake.

It is also important to note that it is countries like this who send their NGO’s or money to the local NGO’s, who are the ones that have developed a lot of the rural areas of Pakistan. They have brought education to a lot of areas neglected by every government of Pakistan that has been in power at least since my 30 years of life.

So by rioting and burning down embassies, recalling ambassadors from countries such as this, what do people hope to gain?

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world……..

Indeed it is. And of course the offensive cartoons are just the tip of the iceberg when trying to piece together what lurks behind current Islamist rage. More on that in the forums here.

Visit Iowa Liberal early and often!

• tristero

What better way to demonstrate compassion for the poor during this time of year than to donate $5,000,000 to attract a new dean to the University of Iowa’s business college. A charitable donation, indeed:

—loquacious

Business leader Tippie donates more to U of I.

The man whose name is on the University of Iowa business college has given the college $5 million to attract a new dean to the school.

Henry B. Tippie of Austin, Texas, said he hopes the gift will help the university find a well-qualified candidate to succeed Gary Fethke, who is retiring as the college’s dean in 2006. Tippie gave the college $30 million in 1999 for a variety of uses.

“Henry understands the concept of transformational philanthropy – that is, generosity designed to help already excellent institutions take huge strides forward into greatness,” said David Skorton, university president.

From the Des Moines Register