10/20/13: A good piece on the Duck’s alcohol promoting billboards. And an Open letter to the class of 2017 passes on some hard-won advice to our incoming freshman. I’ll add it to my syllabus for next fall. Then there’s an interesting cost-benefit analysis of a fake ID.
You might also enjoy this piece on the DSM-V from The New Inquiry, written as if it were a review of a novel by Kafka or Orwell:
… It’s also not exactly a conventional novel. Its full title is an unwieldy mouthful: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. The author (or authors) writes under the ungainly nom de plume of The American Psychiatric Association – although a list of enjoyably silly pseudonyms is provided inside (including Maritza Rubio-Stipec, Dan Blazer, and the superbly alliterative Susan Swedo). The thing itself is on the cumbersome side. Over two inches thick and with a thousand pages, it’s unlikely to find its way to many beaches. …
The review on the new “disorders” manual is excellent and thanks for the link. Love the title: “Book of Lamentations”. But the last paragraph is most significant — the determination that anything ‘deviant’ be pathologized … demonized and removed, like always. This increased need for specific control and a certain hierarchical ‘order’ is everywhere.
I second quackd’s plea that the university speak to their profiting from alcohol sales. Although, it is probably more likely to be the athletic department profiting, so it should be Rob Mullens we hear from.
Doesn’t the IAC have people on their who research alcohol? How did this ever make it past them?
Clearly it is not going to be in the university’s best interest to have students blogging, or thinking independently, or both. How long will it be before Gottfredson hires an outside firm to do Quacks.com fact “checks,” or attempt to cut them down to size by labeling them anti-university?