Bobblehead University strikes again

Well, the Board of Regents has generated some REALLY bad publicity by offering UA President Gamble a $320,000 bonus to stay on an extra year at a time when programs, faculty, adjuncts, staff, maintenance, new facilities, and services are being cut. Naturally inspiring? Not so much. President Gamble hasn't yet accepted the money, but he would do well to follow this university president's example and at the very least refuse it. He's not exactly hurting for cash, what with full medical benefits (no copays, by the way), a military pension and a railroad pension.

But things haven't changed much at our university. President Hamilton was given a $210,000 bonus, remember? Same thing: cuts all over, to fund a bonus.

So here's a bit of entertainment for those of you who see the absurdity in UA's long and silly administrative history:

Bobblehead Leadership at Our Swell University

by Richard Seifert

The Ester Republic, Volume 10, Number 3, p. 3

During that bleakest of months, February, one can be forgiven a bit of slouching and moping about, with the fifth straight month of winter woe, and twenty below in the forecast. But even a poetic sensibility can’t mask the utter cornucopia of bad taste splashed across that other paper in Fairbanks on February 18. Bobbleheads? To improve the image of our noble local seat of higher learning? Who knew that our University of Alaska promoters could fall this far? Surely you jest, Herr Professor Seifert! “No,” I wanted to say, “This is not really happening! Please make it stop!” But there it was…

This foray into rear car window cult history was intended to raise the awareness of legislators in Juneau, and they were sent there first I suspect. 1200 of the groovy little wobblers, some looking suspiciously like major UA administrators in their youth, some female, some bespectacled, some with lab coats. It’s just so underwhelmingly cute. How many can I put you down for? That any actual adult could imagine this was a remotely grand scheme escapes me. It’s the “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Juneau’s desperate money race, only not as successful as the first Bay of Pigs. I need some sort of consolation, and right now. So I google “bobble heads”. Immediately I was quizzed, “Do you mean bobbleheads?” Well, yes I suppose I do.

I was directed to, what else, “Bobblehead World”. And what a world it is! UAF either has gotten into the wrong meds, or they discovered that the Republican elephant bobbleheads were sold out (they actually are: www.toylounge.com/politicians.html) and so they went for the ‘demean the student’ concept. There is the Donald Trump bobblehead, blue suit and all, and that “hair”, authentically portrayed. Jesus and the Virgin Mary are bobbing heads too, and they are flanked by Elvis. Any bobblehead can be customized, I see. And there is a Top Ten Bobbleheads list, which is led by Jesus. I just can’t put my arms around what that actually says about modern America, but at least UA isn’t responsible for that market. Here’s the rest of the list from www.bobbleheadworld.com:

2. Brett Favre of the Green Bay Packers

3. Homer Simpson

4. Family guy Stewie

5. Virgin Mary (How uncomfortable does this make you?)

6. Darth Vader

7. Beavis and Butthead

8. Ringtail Lemur of Madagascar (No, I am NOT making any of this up!)

9. McDonald’s Hamburglar

10. Mr. T

None of these bobbleheads actually fit the bill for a political coup that would result in the desired University love-fest. They could have chosen some actual political leader bobbleheads for the mission. George H.W. Bush, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhauer, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman are all available bobblehead emissaries. Although clearly a secular institution, the Virgin Mary bobblehead is available and actually on sale at the moment. Billy Graham’s bobblehead is available too, but both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI are sold out, alas. As for celebrity options, the field is even grimmer, only because of items being sold out. But! James Dean, Sigmund Freud, Anna Nicole Smith, and William Shakespeare are available for your image enhancement needs. Think of it as a plastic lobbying service. A few others are available but send a message that might not go down too well in Juneau. There’s John Gotti, for instance, and Al Capone. These might suggest certain subpoenas and FBI tapes now making the Youtube rounds. Ouch.

So we’re left with the $12,000 worth of fabulously campy and embarrassing Chinese toys. First place to send a set would be the museum, for this is certainly something which should go down in the public record as a unique historical moment in advertising and public relations. Who says the frontier is gone? We have just shown that our university is at the cusp of a new area of imagery and persuasion. I can see a new course in political science for the fall semester: “Bobblehead diplomacy and the legislative mind. A new frontier of plastic body language.” The textbook will be the court transcripts of the Pete Kott and Vic Kohring trials.

The future, it seems, is plastic after all. That iconic movie of the sixties, The Graduate, nailed it forty years ago. Somebody needs to tell our poor administrative publicists that it was a joke then. Unfortunately, some people never got it.

Letter to the Editor: A is for Armed

March 6, 2014

To the Editor:

In the news is “Campus gun bill before committee.” There is nothing more important in the world for a student to get an A in their class. An armed student is in a much better position to negotiate with the teacher to get an A in class than an unarmed student. A student has to do whatever they have to do to get that A in class. Alaska needs their students to get as many As as possible and if that means arming students to get an A, well so be it.

John Suter 

Chugiak, Alaska

A bit of silliness from my day job

Here's some annual craziness: Flying Axes: the Farthest North Forest Sports Festival, sponsored by the UAF Resource Management Society and the School of Natural Resources & Agricultural Sciences. The video is from the 11th annual fest, last year. This year's is tomorrow, October 3, at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm (the birling happens at Ballaine Lake later in the afternoon).



And here's a story about it from the News-Miner. My favorite line: "Plaid shirts are not required." Good warm wool felt and/or other suitable lumberjack wear is recommended, however.

Bar blogging, books, and music

Well, the below two posts were a little rough; I'm not used to this live blogging thing. Missed parts of the conversation between Don and Mike (where Mike explained that yes he had heard of the bag ordinance and no, he'd voted against it).

I spoke with Pete Bowers during Mike's musical event about the possibility of bringing the Into the Woods cabin to the library land; that would be nifty to get that historic building back in action again. From Everything2.com:

An excellent coffeeshop/alternative bookstore located in Fairbanks, Alaska very near UAF and next to the Oaken Keg. Yours truly slaved there one summer cleaning books and pulling espresso for darkness starved poets, celtic musicians, drunken carnies and your average itinerant Alaskan workers.

Into the Woods paid $7/hr. in books and a portion of the evening tips. The other portion of the tips went to the mandatory 11:55pm run to the Oaken Keg for Into the Woods Afterhours, a key reason to work there indeed. There's nothing like drinking beer with your employer at 2 in the morning and wishing it was dark so you could actually get some sleep.

And an entry on the end of its existence as a bookshop and indeed, a cabin in the woods where it was built:

A small town bookstore/coffee shop died too quietly January 1, 2001. Into the Woods was the renegade bastion of human evolution; set neatly off from the road it was hidden from everyone by old and cool Alaskan forest.

I worked there off and on for a few years and in that time we had weekly Celtic jams, French classes and films, a G'wichin table, Green party meetings, song writing workshops, poetry readings and several surprisingly well-received concerts. Open noon to midnight every day we could find a willing worker the bookstore was one of scant few businesses in this mostly frozen (frozen in so many more ways than literal) town that didn't encourage the sterilely generic Seattle-Starbucks look that is growing so hip up here.

Our last year was too much of a struggle though. The owner had to take a job up North to keep the shop open and summer light-all-the-time mania burned out our over-worked employees at a monthly turnover. Finally an unfortunate and overly principialed brawl with the land owner (the University of Fairbanks) left us owing back rent, no access to the bank roll and a letter of eviction.

So, we rallied the troops and wrote a petition, spoke with the President of the University, raised money to cover back rent, cleaned up the land and worked on the shop itself. Then we asked for another chance. In retrospect I think we were too idealistic to think that the University would take our bid over the possibility of renting the land to some commercial business that would bring in far more money than our beautiful no-profit.

We moved 8 years of books and life out of the cabin then decided to take the shop with us. In an endeavor unlike any other people filed diligently out of the proverbial woodwork to help move out and move the building. The actual structure of Into the Woods is now 3 miles out of Fairbanks waiting empty in different woods.

Last month the University evicted the neighbors on the old land and razed their house, taking quite a few old trees out with it. We resorted to civil disobedience and took 5 dead stumps back to the University in time for Earth Day. We left them at the Commons, the cafeteria, the dorms and at the office of the President. Nailed to each stump was a signed letter stating our disbelief of their total disrespect for the originality and heritage of the land and a high class glossy photo of an amanita from the land. A couple days later we spoke with the President to gauge his reaction... he smiled blankly on a said he had absolutely no idea of what we were talking about.

The university didn't end up leasing the land to anybody. The trees are still standing, the property remains an empty lot. But the cabin was rescued, along with the manuscript that describes its history. Pete Bowers and John Goodhand have had it, still ready to move, on property near Cripple Creek Tire & Auto (now known as Everything Auto, I think, but nobody calls it that). Pete wants to use it as a place for music and poetry slams, which I think is just fine. We could move the library books associated with both, open it up as a place to practice or jam, put out a donation jar to pay for electricity and fuel, and keep it going in the spirit it developed as a bookstore and coffeehouse back when Connie Huffman was running it.

Into the Woods revived!

Zombie Walk for ending world hunger

O boy. Here's the latest from our beloved Bobbleheaded University (only this one's got some merit!):

Zombie Walk, part of the World Zombie Day fight to end world hunger, takes place Sunday, Oct. 26 from 3 – 6 p.m. Dress up as a zombie and walk from the West Ridge parking lot to Wood Center, then enjoy the free 1969 movie Night of the Living Dead. Bring canned food donations to help the fight against hunger.

Zombait.org ("Attracting zombies since 2007") is an Alaska site celebrating World Zombie Day.

Sooo....should the zombies be bringing canned brains? ('Tis the season, fa la la la grunt snarf lurch...)

More on ocean acidification

This is the topic of the moment, apparently. The university is hosting a talk on carbon dioxide in the seas, featuring Richard Feely, chemical oceanographer with NOAA. Here's the press release from UAF:

One of the world's preeminent experts on ocean acidification will visit Fairbanks next week and hold a public lecture on the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels in the ocean.

Richard Feely is an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle.

The public lecture will be held at 7:00 pm, Wednesday, September 24, at the Princess Riverside Lodge in Fairbanks.

According to Jeremy Mathis, a chemical oceanographer at UAF's School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, Feely has been a leading expert on ocean acidification for at least twenty years.

In his abstract for the talk, Feely says that today's record high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are the "direct result of the industrial and agricultural activities of humans over the past two centuries."

Feely adds that carbon dioxide levels are "now higher than experienced on Earth for at least the last 800,000 years." Feely believes that these levels will continue to rise.

Feely will discuss the short and long term implications of ocean acidification on marine mammals, fish species and the economies that depend on the world's marine resources.

"Ocean acidification is probably the most imminent threat to the oceans today," said Mathis. He adds that ocean acidification is particularly harmful in Alaska, where cooler waters can speed up the rate of acidification.

Cruising the net, I found a blog all about the problem.

Yup. End times--but only because assholes like Bush won't do anything about it, or, like Palin, sue to prevent protections from being put in place. We HAVE A CHOICE. We can let the world go to hell, or we can clean up after ourselves. Too many religious fruitcakes seem to want to make it go to hell. Don't think the gods, assuming they're out there, will think too kindly of that.

More sensible thinking from UAF

Dang. If this keeps up I'm going to have to have some label for UAF other than "bobblehead U." Now the borough and UAF are planning on a cooperative program to encourage use of public transportation! Here's an excerpt from the Zoo of A's publicity release about it:

The plan, which is slated to come before the Borough Assembly for review this month, would institute a Large Employer Subsidized Transit pilot program on the borough bus system. Under the program, UAF's PolarExpress student and employee identification cards would serve as passes on all borough buses.

The program stands to benefit both the campus and Fairbanks community, according to UAF Chancellor Brian Rogers. "We hope this partnership will help improve our air quality, as well as reduce the number of cars on campus and free up parking spaces. It could also offer students and employees a real savings on their transportation costs."

The PolarExpress card would, in effect, be a free bus pass.

Now, if we can only get the borough to add a bus line out here to our little republic...

Sanity at UAF

FINALLY! Somebody who's thinking with his brain! Brian Rogers, Interim Chancellor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has revised the stupid parking policy on campus. This announcement just came out from the chancellor himself:

As you all know, UAF has a wide variety of community events beyond the classes we teach. We have lectures, ball games, music and movies and we want the Fairbanks and Alaska communities we serve to feel welcome and a part of what we are doing.

Many people are telling me that parking is getting in the way of UAF’s campus being an inviting destination for people who live here. Not knowing where to park, having to pay for parking and getting parking tickets make UAF a lot less welcoming and a whole lot harder to visit again.

I want to change that. I want Fairbanks community members to feel welcome when they visit UAF. I want UAF to be a place people want to come back to after a visit. So today, at the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce meeting, I am announcing one small step in moving UAF and Fairbanks closer together: free visitor parking.

There will be free visitor parking in the Taku and Nenana visitor parking lots on UAF’s campus starting with the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, Sunday, July 13 and continuing through the summer. Shuttle bus service to all campus locations will be available from those two lots.

At last! I'd say Rogers has a bright future at UAF if he keeps this kind of thing up. Let's hope this is extended indefinitely--there are a lot of events in the wintertime, too, and it is incredibly obnoxious to try to come to campus for some speaker or festival or movie when you know you have to deal with the parking Nazis and their byzantine policies and stupid machines.

Such a breath of fresh air! Rogers will do more good for the university with this one move than a ton of feel-good glossy full-color flyers ever did cluttering up my mailbox.

UAA: a partially owned subsidiary of ConocoPhillips

UAA is actually proud of turning their science building into an advertisement for corporate giant ConocoPhillips:

ConocoPhillips Alaska, Inc. has pledged $15 million to support science and engineering programs at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA). This gift is the largest the company has ever made in Alaska and is also the largest single corporate gift that the University system, including UAA has received.

In honor of this pledge, and in recognition of the $20 million dollars in unrestricted support that ConocoPhillips has contributed to the University of Alaska since 1999, UAA’s new Integrated Science Building will carry ConocoPhillips’ name. Four million dollars of this gift will fund equipment for the state-of-the-art ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building which is due to open its doors in fall of 2009; $11 million will establish the ConocoPhillips Arctic Science and Engineering Endowment.

Sort of an expensive ad and employee-training program, but what the hey, after those 89 percent quarterly profits in 2005 (post-Katrina), and the continued ridiculously good to really good profits in 2006, 2007, and the first quarter of 2008, they've got a little change to throw around.

'Course, it's hard to tell exactly how much money they're making, because oil companies are notoriously secretive and tricky about their accounting. At least, as secretive as they can get away with.

But aside from all that, it's just bothersome to me when individuals or companies donate money and then get their names on buildings or institutes or some such at a university. It just seems wrong, as though they are buying the university, converting it into a subsidiary of the company or subsuming the mission of the institution, converting it into cheery adverts and marketing for a money-making machine. Forget education and knowledge! Let's just use universities as the good PR outlets they are (and maybe brainwash a few students while we're at it)!

Ayn Rand sucks.

Bobblebeheaded!

So I come into the office today, and there's a cute little box on my chair, addressed to me from the statewide Office of Public Affairs, University of Alaska System. The outside of the box reads, "AK Hire Solution Enclosed. (Handle with care)". And guess what's in it?

A "Career Transformer"! plus a sheet of cool stickers with the University of Alaska campuses (all of them, including places like Chukchi and Bristol Bay and, um, KPC and KuC--?) Also a color flyer explaining that UA is Job U. and that the thing enclosed in styrofoam is, in fact, a Career Transformer and not actually a dorky-looking stereotypical engineer-shaped bobblehead. (Of course, any good bobblehead is SUPPOSED to look dorky, so that's all right, but the stereotype? dunno about that). Not sure if he's an engineer, actually, could be a construction dude of some type. He's got a cute yellow hardhat and a clipboard and what might be a radiophone or a walkie-talkie.

But wait! it's only the picture on the flyer that is the dorky-looking construction dude! I am privileged to have a dorky-looking female (judging by the hair bun) scientist! How can I tell it's a scientist? well, it has a couple of test tubes, it's wearing a white lab coat, and it has some neato-keeno silvery safety goggles on (sans lenses)!

Oh boy.

I'm not sure I like this one. She's got a rather sinister smile, if you ask me.

So yep, I've been bobbleheaded. They're not showing up yet on eBay, but it's only a matter of time, if you ask me.

Bobblehead U

Oh, good grief. The university decided, in its infinite wisdom, that $12,000 should be spent on 1,200 silly plastic bobblehead dolls to send as toys to "legislators, business leaders and other powerful figures in Alaska." Why? so that the Legislature is reminded in "an eye-catching way" that the university provides workforce training in high-demand professions.

It's quite obvious that training isn't in public relations.

They could have spent that $12,000 on funding, oh, I don't know, something useful that shows what we do and is informative at the same time, like a research and news magazine with lots of color pages, and sent it out free to thousands of people across the state. Oh, wait, they already do that, only without the color and in limited print runs because there isn't enough money available in the budget to do more.

Or, let's see, maybe they could have used that money to fund a few student jobs or internships in visible positions, so that those students could afford to go to school or could learn on the job. Or send a few grad students to various national conferences. Or maybe they could have used the cash to make sure that KUAC has a little wiggle room--that would surely have reached thousands and thousands of people. Or paid for an instructor or two to teach some more courses that would help students learn some of these useful careers.

I dunno, just seems like there are lots of places in the university that could have benefitted from even $2,000 more, and that could have reached even more people. Cute little dolls seems like a real waste of money.

....Although, come to think of it, I bet they'll be worth a lot more than $10 each on E-Bay pretty soon. This story's going international: it's now at the International Herald Tribune in France!

What a way to advertise our university: Bobblehead U, where dolls speak louder than words.

Sheesh.