Pig Talk

Two porcine related items:

• The auditorium at Purdue recently named after donor and former dean Earl Butz has been renamed the Deans of Agriculture auditorium, after protest regarding Butz's racist remark years ago that still haunts him.
• On a lighter note, I enjoyed Rachel Toor's new book, The Pig and I. I have read Toor's CHE essays for a number of years. This book is a memoir, constructed mostly around her love of various men and animals in her life. Her pets are more interesting than her men, IMHO. Toor has funny things to say about academia, from vantage points of former jobs as university press editor and admissions officer. Rather scathing about ole Pops...here she is talking about her father with the "Silver Fox," a professor with whom she shares a bed and little else: "Because he asked, because I was trying to be open, I told this successful academic, who went only to the fanciest schools, had taught only at the best places in the country, about my father, an unpublished foot soldier in the scholarly army who spent his career teaching students for whom he had mostly contempt."