Diversity Learning & Inclusive Excellence

Diversity, Learning, and Inclusive Excellence:
Accelerating and Assessing Progress :
will highlight curricular, co-curricular,
and institutional models that enable higher
education leaders to develop, implement,
assess, and continually learn from the
experience of fostering diverse learning
environments—environments in which
all students develop, in increasingly
sophisticated ways, critical knowledge,
skills, and capacities for work and
citizenship.

Association of American Colleges and
Universities: Call for Proposals

My favorite Comment from My Teacher
& Course Evaluations in response to our
check-off list of teacher-criteria labeled:

Poor Listener.

Yeah, Sam’s a poor listener;
but he admits it, so it’s ok.

And likewise similar kinds of response to
questions about CLARITY & making my
self CLEAR: some of them enjoying the
virtue of ambiguity, ambivalence, irony,
oblique-ness, juxtaposition, non-linear
constellational thinking where Failure is
Encouraged and the streets have no signs.
Confusion is considered a Mother of
Invention: these are some of my
favorite things.

And I say: don’t be taking this attitude out of
class & expect to be rewarded for it—don’t
be running down to Witherspoon with these
scissors. Or even wander around Jensen like
some loose canon.

You’re likely to blow up or cut your self.
Over to Holden & Points North, sure: you
might could get away with some tom fooling
sense, non-sense, and no-sense-at-all, but
don’t bet on it just because they call
themselves an ART dept. It’s an
institution too.



“For what should a man live if not for
the pleasures of discourse? Surely not
for the sake of bodily pleasures, which
almost always have previous pain as a
condition of them, and therefore are
rightfully called slavish.”

Plato’s Phaedrus, jawing with Socrates:
kibitzing.

Creative discontent can’t get no satisfaction
rebelling without some because- &-affect &
official explanation; civil war for civil war’s
sake, house dividing: can you see me now,
split from head to toe? It’s a good thing.

I wouldn’t be schizo-frantic if I could just
be schizophrenic: my tautological attention-
deficient hyper-binge & purge cutting edge
addictions of course: embodimentals broken
for view.

Symptomania: read my lisp.
I’m crying out loud here.
A good thing.
All good.

Check my breasts again and again.
Lumps are there: beep and I shall grind;
stick a scope up my fundamentalism &
I bet: polyps. What I pray for I get,
damnit, not so much in accord with my
terms of desire but if I try I need. I see
I am, but thru a glass darkly. .

SILLYTALK

Let that term determine ways-of-talking
that intentionally& necessarily ignore the
restraints of linear, sequential so-called
logical representation, putting contra-
addictions and paradox into play so as to
try and SAY MORE than can be SAID.

Foolish pride or abject humility?

I call it sillytalk: in deference & respect
for those who revere clarity & definite-
ness, full-cost account-ability: determined
finished product assessment-ability like
what you got to trade & exchange with
when you’re doing business with Wither
Spoon Complex & getting R done, yes?
No fooling. No wonder. Need we argue?

A math friend & me used to sit on the Spidel
Wall (I’ve told you this before), summer
mornings: “sillytalking” beyond our means &
capacities “toward frontiers yet unknown,” a
couple of “stalwart pioneers” putting IT in play,
know what I’m sayin’ know what I mean.

Workers would go by and by in golf carts
or walking with shovels & weed-whackers
& we’d be sitting: butt-farming. I’d want to
cry out LOOK, we’re WORKING HERE--
quit giving us the evil eye; but Fred knew
better, his noblesse oblige, and say:

—Don’t pay us no never mind:
we’re just bullshitting;
forget about it—

confirming their biases & belief systems
& validating their work-program &
service values so as to maybe relieve
the antagonism & defensiveness normally
generated between on the one hand
ACTION & THOUGHT
on the other hand.