Simmons University plans to cut several liberal arts programs due to financial crisis

Simmons University, founded in 1902, is Boston’s only women's university. Although the school admits men to its graduate programs, its undergraduate school is restricted to women. 

Actually, that's not entirely true. Simmons admits transgender students who identify as women. Thus, an applicant who has testicles but regrets them is eligible for admission to Simmons.

Simmons boasts that 40 percent of its students identify as LGBTQ, and 34 percent identify as ALANA. ALANA is an acronym for African, Latino, Asian, or Native American. 

Despite Simmons’s niche as a women’s college and a college attractive to the LGBTQ community and women of color, the school is losing enrollment. In fact, the Simmons student body has shrunk by 11.5 percent since the fall of 2019.

Fewer students mean less revenue, and Simmons is struggling financially. The school ended its 2022 fiscal year with a loss of $14.5 million.

To reduce costs, Simmons is planning to cut some liberal arts programs, including its programs in philosophy, modern languages, and sociology. As might be expected, this move is opposed by some faculty members. One professor said, “Cutting out the humanities and social sciences is like cutting out the heart and then seeing if the body will still walk.”

Of course, professors rarely support cutting academic programs or laying off faculty members, even when enrollments are down. After all, fewer students in their classrooms mean fewer student papers to grade.

Lynn Perry Wooten, the University president, has tried to assure faculty members that their views will receive ample consideration. “[Y]es, some majors may go away,” Wooten acknowledged, “but it's [about] letting everyone have a voice in the change and then making a process that works” (as quoted in the Boston Globe).

Simmons is one of many small private colleges across the United States that are being forced to cut programs in the liberal arts and the humanities. In fact, it would be irresponsible for those schools not to eliminate academic programs that are no longer financially viable.

An undergraduate degree from Simmons University costs about a quarter of a million dollars, forcing most students to take out loans to finance their studies. A student would have to be nuts to spend that kind of money to get a sociology or philosophy degree from Simmons University or any other small private college.

 

  

 

Three women were stabbed in New York subways over the weekend: Flyover Country looks better and better

 Three women were stabbed in the New York subways over the weekend. All three were relatively young. A 19-year-old woman with stabbed in the leg while going up a stairway. A few moments later, the same assailant stabbed a 48-year-old woman on a subway platform. Shortly after that attack, he stabbed a 28-year-old woman on a subway train bound for Brooklyn.

These events were the latest in a string of subway assaults in New York City. Generally, the attacker is not apprehended. Twice in recent weeks, a subway passenger stepped in to neutralize an attacker and killed him. In both instances, the rescuer was charged with manslaughter.

Why would anyone live in New York City? Economic opportunity? Yes, salaries are higher in New York City than in other parts of the country. But the cost of living is also higher, much higher. A person living in Baton Rouge and making $50,000 a year would need to make $117,000 in New York City just to maintain the same standard of living.

New York is an excellent city for millionaires, and New York has more millionaires than any other American city. However, even millionaires are fleeing the Big Apple.  Twelve percent of them moved elsewhere in the first half of 2022.

Of course, New York has more cultural attractions than any other American locale. Do you want to attend the opera, take in a Broadway play, or look at abstract art? You’ll find more of that stuff in New York than in Omaha, Tulsa, or Chattanooga.

Personally, I hate opera, and I detest abstract art. I'm a fan of Western American art, which I can see at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth or the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. More art museums appeal to my taste in Taos, NM than in Manhattan. And remember the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and it's easy to find a parking space.

Fine cuisine? Yes, New York has more five-star restaurants than any other American town. But you can't beat Praise Dah Lard in Woodville, Mississippi, for fresh cracklins. The world's best chicken fried steak can be found at the Hitching Post restaurant in Ozona, Texas, not Gallaghers in Manhattan, and you don't need reservations.

I love America’s cities. I spent some of the happiest years of my life in Houston, the nation's most culturally diverse city. Unfortunately, however, the nation’s metropolises are in decline. New Orleans is now America's murder capital. Homelessness, rampant shoplifting, and empty office towers have laid San Francisco low, and people are leaving Chicago and New York by the thousands.

Americans are fleeing the cities, and they are smart to do so. Of course, the folks living in Flyover Country don't have a view of the Manhattan skyline. Nevertheless, I can personally attest that the skyscrapers of New York are no more beautiful than a view of the bloodred sun going down over Lake Mary, Mississippi.

Froma Harrop wants more wind turbines in Texas. Why not Providence, Rhode Island?

Texas provides 28 percent of the nation's wind-generated electricity. Most of the state's wind turbines are located in West Texas, where the wind blows almost constantly. Anyone driving across the Texas plains has seen thousands of enormous wind turbines dotting the mesas and buttes. If you go west on Interstate 20 or Highway 287 at night, you will see thousands of lights blinking atop the ceaselessly turning windmills, installed, I suppose, to warn aircraft pilots that they’re flying over a hazardous area.

Some Texans are alarmed by the proliferation of wind turbines on the Great Plains. People who live on the plains are assaulted daily by the visual pollution of giant windmills that litter the horizon. Bills have been introduced in the Texas legislature to regulate the wind energy business and to assess its environmental impact on the Texans who live near wind farms.

Froma Harrop, a newspaper columnist and East Coast liberal, criticized Texas political leaders who want to get better control of the wind energy business. Texas Republicans are opposed to government regulation, she argues, so it is inconsistent for the Republican-dominated Texas legislature to put more regulatory controls on the windmills that pollute the landscape of the High Plains and the Llano Estacado.

Harrop doesn’t live in West Texas. She lives in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. She’s not bothered by the ugliness of wind turbines that scar the landscape of West Texas. After all, she doesn’t have to look at them.

I have driven across West Texas dozens of times and have seen the giant wind farms that blight the plains. Texas is producing more than a quarter of the nation's wind-generated electricity. Isn’t that enough?

Almost everyone favors renewable energy development, particularly the liberals on the East and West Coasts. They might feel differently if they saw thousands of wind turbines from their living room windows.

Scott Momoday, a Kiowa and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in literature, grew up in southwestern Oklahoma, on the very edge of the Great Plains. He wrote about the landscape of the West from a Native American perspective and believed that this landscape contains many sacred places:

To encounter the sacred [Momoday wrote] is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.

Scott Momoday and I grew up on the same landscape of western Oklahoma, a land of majestic views, blue skies, bloodred sunsets, and the Wichita Mountains shimmering improbably on the horizon. I agree with Momoday that this landscape contains many sacred places. Thus, it is a sacrilege to deface it or make it ugly.

As for Froma Harrop, she should live for a couple of years in Snyder, Texas, among the thousands of wind turbines polluting the Great Plains. Let’s see how she likes it, and when she’s completed her sojourn in West Texas, I would like to see her return to Providence, Rhode Island, and find thousands of wind turbines blotting out the seascape.

Texans should not permit more wind turbines in West Texas until a comparable number are placed off the coasts of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and the Hamptons. Let the coastal elites pollute their own visual environment before asking Texans to further desecrate the High Plains.

If you're going to San Francisco, you're sure to find some feces on your shoes

After my freshman year at Oklahoma State University, I hitchhiked to Montana, hoping to get a summer job working for the National Forest Service. That plan didn’t work out, and I wound up working in a sawmill in the little town of West Yellowstone.

That was the summer of 1966, when young people were heading west to California, where the Beach Boys sang about a little surfer girl, and San Fransisco's Haight Ashbury district promised abundant marijuana and free love. West Yellowstone, where I was stuck, was merely a waystation for youngsters headed west, a place to refuel on pizza and Olympia beer.

"Are You Going to San Francisco" was a radio hit that summer and Scott McKenzie's lyrics seem to sum up the spirit of the day. "If you’re going to San Francisco," McKenzie sang, "be sure to wear some flowers in your hair." I recall standing on West Yellowstone’s main street, listening to that song on someone's transistor radio and wishing I had the money and the courage to go to San Francisco and hang out with the hippies.  When I arrived there,  the song assured me, I would find the gentle people I had been unable to locate in Oklahoma.

Fifty years later, I don’t think many people go to San Francisco to find gentle people or put flowers in their hair. The city is a mess. Homelessness is out of control, and deadbeats shoot dope and defecate in the streets.  Office towers suffer from a 30% vacancy rate, and retailers are moving out. Whole Foods, Nordstrom, Office Depot, and Walgreens, are fleeing Frisco to escape crime and rampant shoplifting.

San Francisco is the poster child for the downfall of American cities. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major metropolises suffer the same malaise.

Every American should be alarmed by this trend because American cities are where creative people go to find opportunities. As Michael Marotta wrote in a blog essay, “The city is literally civilization. Cities--not nations or American 'states'--are the engines of creation and progress." Indeed, Marotta argued, "the American republic is culturally a very large city."

Unfortunately, most major American cities are run by idiots and race hustlers. They think they are showcasing their liberal values by enacting policies encouraging homelessness, shoplifting, and random muggings. They equate anarchy with personal liberty when in fact our individual freedoms are best protected in a society that respects the rule of law.

So if you’re going to San Francisco, don’t expect to find gentle people with flowers in their hair.  In today's San Francisco, you are more likely to find feces on your shoes.

 

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

Ukraine attacks Moscow; Americans obsess on transgender participation in women's sports

The movie Shane, released in 1953, is a classic Western movie that depicts the struggle between good and evil. The good guys are homesteaders who want to establish farms and peacefully raise their families. The bad guys are cattlemen who hire an assassin to drive off the homesteaders.

Stonewall Torrey (played by Elijah Cook, Jr.) is a hapless homesteader who boasts to his friends that he’s not afraid of the assassin, and he straps on his revolver and rides to town. In the town's saloon, Torrey meets the assassin (played by Jack Palance). The killer taunts and insults Torrey until he foolishly goes for his gun. The assassin kills Torrey with one bullet.

America is replaying the movie Shane. The United States is the foolish and bombastic Torrey, and Russia is the assassin waiting for an opportunity to strike.

A couple of days ago, Ukrainian drones attacked the suburbs of Moscow. Who believes the Ukrainians took that provocative action without the approval and cooperation of the United States? 

What in the hell are we doing? Does our government believe it can arm the Ukrainians with sophisticated weapons that have killed perhaps 100,000 Russian soldiers without suffering repercussions?

America’s media elites, intellectual elites, and government technocrats may think it’s fun to poke the Russian bear. If war breaks out between Russia and the United States, it will be the kids living in flyover country who will do the fighting. 

But perhaps the boobs who are running our government have miscalculated. Have they forgotten that we’re messing with a nuclear power?

Meanwhile, Americans obsess about transgender participation in women’s sports and drag queens in school libraries. How long will the Russians put up with our foolish dabbling in Eastern European affairs?

I oppose American involvement in the Ukraine war.  I can see no positive outcome for anybody.

Our Lady of Guadalupe miraculously appears at a railroad crossing on Houston's Kirby Street

I subscribe to the Houston Catholic Worker, the official newspaper of Casa Juan Diego, the Catholic Worker Hospitality House in Houston, Texas. My copy arrived in the mail yesterday, and I was disturbed to read that someone had stolen Casa Juan Diego’s ancient food delivery truck. Fortunately, the police recovered the vehicle, but thieves had removed the cargo box leaving the truck naked down to its frame.

I first saw that delivery truck in 2003 or 2004 while teaching at the University of Houston. I was driving down Kirby Street when I stopped at a railroad crossing so a train could pass. While waiting in my car, I saw the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe rising out of the traffic ahead of me. I was startled and instantly thought that I had been privileged to see an apparition of Mary, who has appeared from time to time in places like Fatima, Lourdes, and the little Irish village of Knock.

Staring intently, I realized that the image of La Virgen Morena had been painted on the rolling steel door on the back of the truck. After the train passed by, I caught up with the mysterious vehicle. I looked over and saw two ordinary men sitting in the truck cab. I spied nothing that would explain why the Virgin of Guadalupe was painted on the truck’s cargo door.

I could not get this seemingly trivial incident out of my mind, and I mentioned it to John Burke, a Catholic friend of mine. John said the truck belonged to Casa Juan Diego, the Catholic Worker homeless shelter and food pantry just off Kirby Street in West Houston.

I had an unpleasant job at a local university at the time and looked for ways to escape from vicious campus politics. I volunteered to help haul food from the Houston Food Pantry to Casa Maria, Casa Juan Diego’s food distribution site located in one of the barrios of southwest Houston. Every Thursday morning, I joined a group of volunteers who traveled in Casa Juan Diego’s food delivery truck to help load and unload four tons of donated food to Casa Maria. Occasionally we would stop at a Mexican food wholesaler, picking up several hundred pounds of rice and pinto beans.

This volunteer work was a blessing to me. I was doing something useful for at least a few hours every week. As a result of my vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Kirby Street, I was introduced to the Catholic Worker movement and the writings of its founder, Dorothy Day. I also learned about the seven corporal works of mercy, which form the mission statement of the Catholic Worker movement.

Perhaps most importantly, I came to know Mark and Louise Zwick, who founded Casa Juan Diego and devoted their lives to assisting the poor, particularly the undocumented Latin American immigrants who reside within the sheltering folds of a welcoming and generous metropolitan Houston. Someday, Dorothy Day will be canonized by the Catholic Church, and I believe Mark and Louise will be canonized as well.

In the meantime, the Catholic Workers of Houston have replaced the stolen cargo box. Soon, they will paint a new image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the rolling backdoor of Casa Juan Diego’s venerable food delivery truck, thereby invoking the protection of the Little Brown Virgin, the Patroness of the Americas.

 Listen and understand, my littlest son, let nothing frighten and afflict you or trouble your heart … Am I not here, I, who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow? 

 

 

 

 

Blue Plate mayonnaise rolls out a new label and gets at least one new customer. Meanwhile, Budweiser loses its fan base

Liz Faul, who writes for my local newspaper, reported a charming story about Blue Plate mayonnaise, made by a New Orleans company that's been in business since 1927. As Faul’s story explains, Blue Plate recently rolled out a new label that will likely attract new customers.

Why is the New Orleans mayonnaise company named Blue Plate anyway? The name refers to Blue Willow plates, which were popular in the South in the 1920s. Blue Plate's version of the plate features depictions of a pelican, a river steamboat, and Magnolia blossoms. These words appear across the top of the label: “A New Orleans family tradition since 1927.”

I love the new label, and as soon as I finished reading Liz Faul’s story about it, I told myself Kraft mayonnaise, you are dead to me.

What makes the Blue Plate mayonnaise label so appealing? It's because it seeks to bond with its customers. The label reminds grocery shoppers that the mayonnaise is made in New Orleans, America’s foremost food city. The Blue Willow plate design, with its images of a pelican, a steamboat, and magnolia blossoms, signals that the company is proud of its regional heritage.

Compare Blue Plate’s new label with Budweiser’s disastrous advertising campaign designed to make the company appear woke by putting a transgender influencer’s mug on its beer cans. That harebrained scheme cost Bud Light about a quarter of its customers in just a few months.

Insulting corporate customers is like cheating on one's wife. The relationship may survive, but it will never be the same. Several of my Louisiana relatives were loyal Bud Light customers until they saw Dylan Mulvaney’s endorsement of their favorite brew. I don’t think any of them will ever drink a Bud Light again.

Bud’s boycotting customers are not transphobes or homophobes. They’re just people who like to drink beer and associate beer with bowling, fishing, golfing, and watching football games on television on Saturday afternoons. And when they're relaxing with a brewski, they don't want to talk politics.

And Budweiser knows that. If you look at vintage Budweiser advertisements in old magazines, you will see nostalgic scenes picturing people having a good time in casual settings. And when they’re having that good time, they certainly don’t want to be virtue signaled by their beer company.

What will my relatives drink now that they’re boycotting Bud Light? Maybe they’ll switch to Modelo, a Mexican beer company that promotes itself as a beer for fighters.

This Bud's not for you, you transphobic son of a bitch.