The Faculty of Arts & Science is searching for a new Registrar because the incumbent, George Altmeyer is retiring.

The Dean struck a search committee. I’m on it. In addition, there are two college principals, two department chairs, a couple of folks from the deanery, and a person from human resources, as well as a part-time student. That’s a total of nine people, including myself.

I’m the only non-white person on the committee. That comes neither as a surprise,
nor as anything novel for me (or, indeed, any person of colour involved in such activities).

The committee has been meeting to interview candidates for the position. Friday, there was one such meeting.

The committee members variously ask questions of the candidate and evaluate their answers. One of the members of the committee was asking the candidate about how the Office of the Registrar could be envisioned ten years from now, or such.

The candidate responded with ideas about the use of technology to make processes more efficient, and also less time-consuming for students. While students should not have to come in for most things, the candidate said, it is important nevertheless to maintain a human face, have personnel in place, for interaction with students.

That’s when the questioner said that he certainly hoped the Office of the Registrar doesn’t become “a call centre in Pakistan.”

Everyone chuckled, except for me.

When it came time for me to ask the question, I implied rather strongly — for “great minds” anyway — that I was irked. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. No one apologized, no one said anything — the person who made the comment simply avoided my gaze for the rest of the time.

I understand the context of the statement — i.e., impersonal services — but it’s still disconcerting. It made me uncomfortable, and was almost offensive. It’s certainly not something I’d expect from a senior university administrator.

How come everyone in these meetings is white? Or mostly male? Rah rah diversity.

I guess a man’s entitled to make a fool of himself if he’s ready to pay the cost.

– Malcolm X

In the fall of 2005, soon after the school year started, a representative from the Commerce Students’ Association came to speak to ASSU about his organization. He talked about how they hadn’t been interacting with ASSU for a considerable amount of time and so were like the black sheep. I said something like, “more like the Chinese sheep.”

That didn’t go over well with him, as well it shouldn’t have. I apologized rather quickly and have kept it in my mind ever since. It wasn’t the right thing to say, especially coming from someone in my position (as an Executive Member of ASSU).

(Context: before I met this person, I had met three different friends of Chinese backgrounds at three different points in the day who were cracking jokes with me about their Chinese-ness. I also have a few friends in Commerce who joke about it being dominated by East Asians. That doesn’t, by any means, excuse my comment.)

One of my goals this summer is to visit the Bloor Street Viaduct more often — that is to say, to take walks over it, and not just rides under it.

One percent often makes a lot more of a difference than one person does.

POL majors: stay away from POL323, unless you have trouble sleeping. Even when the instructors get involved and enthusiastic, the course content is more sleep-inducing than advanced calculus. It’s boring, uninteresting crap that some dead white guys wrote hundreds of years ago and we study now because — well, apparently these brilliant men had brilliant things to say, and hid it in deeper layers upon layers of meaning, because some despot would otherwise have their head. And now it is our duty to go through this stuff and contort our minds and bodies to come up with esoteric shit that only four people on the planet give a shit about — and if we don’t agree with those four and a half people then we’re clearly wrong in our interpretations (how can you be “wrong” in fucking political philosophy?). I fucking hate this course. Biggest mistake I made this year.

Nothing like three exams (almost) in a row that you know you’re going to screw up to make you feel insecure.

Last night as I came home from downtown, the driver was announcing the station names in peculiar, unique and funny ways (doesn’t happen as often as it should, I think). There were some young folks and children in the car I was in, who particulary appreciated the novel method — but the rest of us got (more than) a few chuckles out of it. I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I were going back with someone but, alas, I was alone.

I have three exams in two days (Monday and Tuesday), one of which I am sorely unprepared for –my preparation for the other two is only mediocre.

I’m screwed.

On Wednesday, ASSU held its spring social. This time around, the President of UofT, David Naylor, also attended.

Preethy and I were standing there discussing something when Naylor came up to us and started asking us about our majors. At one point his cell phone started ringing and he excused himself for a moment. He then came back to us and spoke to us about how his car was in for repairs, and he complained about his $700 rims.

That’s got to be one of the most insensitive and stupid things a university president can say to two students, after he’s quite vocally called for tuition fee increases. It’s like he’s rubbing it in. Someone get the guy a clue.

This morning, as I was going downtown, a man and his three sons got on the train. The first was about two years old, the second four years old and the third perhaps five. As I was getting off the train at St. George Station the two year old said “Bye bye, Spider-Man!”

I turned around and smiled and waved at the boy.

And as if that weren’t enough to make my day, as I was heading back home and walking through Sears in Scarborough Town Centre to my car, I came across a young family with two children aged about five and six. As I walked by, the six year old girl got excited and pointed at my head and said “Look at the hat!”

Again, I turned around waved at the children. And they smiled back, as did the parents.

And pretty much everything that happened today in between those two occurrences was fantastic as well. All in all, a good day.

I parked my car and I was walking into the mall. I heard a little girl’s voice cry out, “Spider-Man hat!” I looked over to see a mother pushing a stroller with a baby boy in it, being helped by her daughter who was no older than four, followed by a grandmother. I held the door open for them as they walked into the mall and I smiled at them as they said “thank you.”

And it felt good.

And I thought it was going to be a beautiful day.

Something broke.

I typically dislike Barbie products, but when I saw this in Wal-Mart (which I also typically dislike) I couldn’t resist buying it for my niece:

It’s a Barbie as Mary Jane Watson doll, and as all of us should know, Mary Jane is Peter Parker’s wife. In fact, this doll is wearing the wedding dress that was featured in the comic where the two got married (Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, 1987).

I’ve been attending a few of the Betar Tagar‘s “Know Radical Islam Week” events. Overall I think the way Betar is handling this is remarkably stupid. I don’t see anything constructive, at all, coming out of this event — if the aim is to start a dialogue with Muslims. There are very few Muslims at these lectures, indeed most of those attending seem to be Jewish.

Much of the content of the events is actually meaningful — at least, the lectures I’ve attended were — but the medium (“Radical Islaaam”) obscures the message. I’ve told them that a much better title would be “Extremism within Muslim society,” and they acted as if that were a novel idea (and don’t they wish I was in their planning committee) but I find it hard to believe that the issue of alternatively naming it didn’t come up.

How much more meaningful would it be if they had the MSA on board to condemn radicalism in Islam? Probably a lot more. I’ve spoken with several members of the MSA, including the President and the Academic Affairs Coordinator, they both told me that a) they were not calling for a boycott, and b) they were never consulted at any time throughout the organization of this event. Betar e-mailed certain members of the MSA in the days leading up to the events, though, to receive mixed messages that they touted as “cooperation.” From what I’ve heard, members of the Thaqalayn Muslim Association are also unhappy about the way things are being carried out.

The kinds of organizations that are on board? The UofT Objectivist Club, the Toronto Secular Alliance, Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, etc. That really seems like a group dedicated to fostering meaningful discussion (I’m being sarcastic).

Moreover, how can you even begin to describe radicalism within Islam — a religion of over a billion — as some kind of hegemonic entity? It’s not. Different factors have contributed to the rise of radicalism in Islam in various regions of the world. Taking the historical and sociological context into consideration is tremendously important for any analysis. This is sorely lacking in Betar’s activities.

Anyway, today I attended one of Betar’s lectures given by Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh. Abu Toameh reports for the right-wing Jerusalem Post.

What he said, though, completely undercut the message that the Betar folks were trying to get across. It seemed to me that they were trying to depict “radical” Islam as somehow censoring the reporting of things in Palestine. Abu Toameh quite unequivocally stated, several times, that it was not Hamas and Islamic Jihad that censored journalists, nor would they, but it was the Palestinian Authority (run by the PLO — Arafat and Abu Mazen’s folks) every single time, and the West supported this.

That made me want to laugh and clap out loud.

He also talked about how Arafat was a big hypocrite, sitting in mosques while stealing billions meant for Palestinians.

Also, in a remarkably stupid move, Jyllands-Posten has apparently offered to publish cartoons that a remarkably stupid Iranian newspaper is aiming to publish that make fun of the Holocaust.

It’s stupid enough of the Iranians to want to do something messed up like this, and stupider still for the Danish to want to reprint those cartoons. How stupid do people get? I imagine we’ll see extremist agenda-driven Muslims torch the Iranian embassies in protest for printing such offensive cartoons? I think any decent and right-thinking human being would find it even more offensive to make fun of the deaths of six million people than to make fun of a prophet. I suggest all Danes engage in a meaningful boycott of Jyllands-Posten and demand that the editor be replaced with someone who is less remarkably stupid (and that’s the theme of my post).