This has to be a joke.

UIUC alum Robert Novak has been busy close to home:

WESTERN CIVILIZATION, CULTURE

“Although certainly the non-Western cultures have a lot to offer, I think that our country owes so much to its straight-line descent from the culture in all fields, starting with the ancient Romans and Greeks and through the European civilizations,” he said. “People often say to me, particularly my conservative friends, ‘Are you sure that when you are dead and gone they aren’t going to be teaching Central African basket-weaving and East Asian volleyball?’ . . . I’m going to have to have faith that the university will stick to that description.”

Funding a Chair in Anti-Eastern Western Culture is no mean feat, to be sure.  Yet today I notice another UIUC alum:

Ecuador is poised to join the tide of Latin American countries voting for left-wing leaders after Rafael Correa, an economist, took a resounding lead in exit polls over Alvaro Noboa, a billionaire.

Mr Correa, a former finance minister with an economics doctorate from the University of Illinois, has promised to renegotiate the country’s foreign debt and focus spending on relieving intense poverty in the Andean nation.

I coulda told ‘em it was the untenured ones that they shoulda been watchin’ out for.

Prompted by a leaked list of corporations that refuse to run advertisements on Air America, I wasted time today by starting a thread over on Metafilter about the troubles of Air America and my belief in the usefulness of starting up a PBS Newschannel.  You might have a look over there, at my brilliant fpp, and at the resultant comments.

Two questions:

1) Are you an academic in the humanities?

2) Do you you wish to utterly transform and redeem your life?

If you answered yes to both, click here.