Updates on UCSD’s Dominguez

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new piece about UCSD’s Ricardo Dominguez. Here is an excerpt and a link.

His field, variously known as new-media art, tactical media, or digital art, emerged in academe in the past few decades. The first generation of new-media artists who migrated to academe include Mark Tribe, now at Brown University, and the social-activist pranksters the Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum (real name: Jacques Servin), at Parsons the New School for Design, and Mike Bonanno (real name: Igor Vamos), at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They are, like Dominguez, “deeply anti-establishment,” says Grant Kester, chair of San Diego’s visual-arts department. As one journalist put it, Dominguez has spent a lifetime “utilizing electronics and the Internet to piss off just about every high-level administrative authority in the U.S.” So it was perhaps inevitable that he would eventually grate on the mores of a large institution like the University of California system.

Read more here http://chronicle.com/article/Digitally-Incorrect/124649/

After the article went to print, the editors posted this note:

Shortly after this article went to press, the University of California and Ricardo Dominguez settled the investigation into the March 4 “virtual sit-in” at the Web site of the university system’s office of the president. Dominguez will stay in his current position and has agreed not to interfere with the server of the office of the president or use university resources in any way that “might result in permanently or temporarily damaging the integrity or availability” of other Web sites.

But as of now there is no updated information about the case on the b.a.n.g Lab’s website or anywhere else

You can find out about virtual sit-ins for this upcoming October 7th day of action here: http://october7thecd.wordpress.com/

Value of Education?

Just revisiting this article “The Humanities Really Do Produce a Profit”, By Robert N. Watson (Chronicle of Higher Education March 21, 2010) and appreciating this quote:

No sane citizenry measures its public elementary schools by whether they pay for themselves immediately and in dollars. We shouldn’t have to make a balance-sheet argument for the humanities, either, at least not until the balance-sheet includes the value, to the student and to the state, of expanded powers of personal empathy and cross-cultural respect, improved communication through language and other symbolic systems, and increased ability to tolerate and interpret complexity, contemplate morality, appreciate the many forms of artistic beauty, and generate creative, independent thought.

Robert N. Watson is a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles.