Quick Update on Faculty Moves and Likely Changes to the Deviant Rankings

Prominent deviant Laozi has moved to the Department of People Who Never Existed.  This is big news likely to shake things up quite a bit.  Look for the Department of People Who Never Existed to make a run at the top 10, possibly even the top 5, now that Laozi’s there.

The addition of the Kyoto School has made Heidegger way more interesting than he ever was on his own.  Look for Heidegger to break into at least the top 15 in the specialty category “Things that Just Got Way More Cool.”

The Daoists and Primitivists both have what we are told are very high dollar offers out to Zhuangzi.  If either should snag him, they’ll of course make significant strides into Deviant-rific territory.  Most likely scenario, though, is that Zhuangzi will stay where he is, in Uncategorizable.  We’re told he’s unwilling to lose his happy close working conditions with Borges there.

Requisite Note on How to Interpret the Rankings

The rankings are developed based on the results of a snowball fight held annually in the DoD’s parking lot.  In advising prospective students how to read these numbers, we spoke with Chair of the Advisory Board Joshu, who had this to say: “Nothing.”

Colloquium This Friday: Qing Dynasty European Thought*

It turns out that the Qing Dynasty Era in Europe was not entirely Normal.  Lurking around the edges of much touted and oft studied Normality, there were women – deviant by definition of course – and in this colloquium, we’ll explore how Modern Normality missed out on them.

Reception to follow.  And apologies again for the stale institutional cookies we’ll eat.  Our petition to get booze allowed at these things failed again.

*Colloquium title inspired by Stephen Angle.

DoD Analogy Contest

Since the DoD perennially fails at defining what it is, what makes good deviance good, and how deviants ought to go about all things deviant, we’ve decided to forego further efforts at exact definition.  As many have pointed out, disciplinary integrity was being compromised by trying.  If we kept at it any longer, we were bound to become indistinguishable from Normality – start getting preoccupied with drawing tight conceptual and methodological boundaries and next thing you know, standards will have slipped and you’ll end with nothing but Normality.  So we’ve decided to host an analogy contest in which we attempt to assemble as many possible candidates for “what deviance is like” as possible.  We haven’t yet determined how the winning candidate will be selected but another snowball fight in the parking lot is looking pretty good.

DoD Code of Conduct

We here in the DoD strive to have a collegial environment since our life-governing project, or at least the mission statement we’ll submit to the dean, is to find out more things.  We have a “be nice” rule not because our sensibilities are delicate but because the person you chase off with rudeness and disrespect might know stuff we’d very much like to find out.  She might be the next Nagarjuna.  Better still, she might be some order of deviant the world has never seen before.  So don’t mess that up for us, ok?

DoD Opens New Library Lounge

The department is very pleased to announce the opening of our new library and lounge area.  The library has been christened The Labyrinth owing both to the seemingly endless canon of deviance it will eventually include and as a way to make the cheap shelves we got on sale at Big Lots seem just a little enchanted as they tilt and cant in every direction.  New scanners and computers for the Labyrinth were funded by a grant from the NEH Digital Deviance Preservation Project, an effort undertaken to save what remains of deviant learning and thought as Normality increasingly dominates the more well-heeled and better connected institutions.

Proseminar on Deviance Enters its 28th Consecutive Semester

Defining deviance is turning out even harder than we expected and we are collectively prolix in our delighted confusion.  This semester we will further explore the thorny complexities of metadeviance.  By our own sound practice of maximum effort at knowing things and specially privileging things that can’t be counted as Normal, we must include in our study all that Normality rejects.  But it turns out that’s a hella lot of really disparate stuff!  It also leads to some rather mind-bending inversions:  Calling Confucianism “deviant” cracked us all up so much we wasted a whole seminar session making lame jokes about it.  But we are resolved to return to as much seriousness as our next topic - Zen deviance - will allow and redouble our efforts at an intelligible taxonomy of deviance.  We’ll surely fail but at least we’re being honest about it.  And besides, if we stay at it long enough, we’re looking forward to the rare treat of Bodhidharma tearing off his eyelids to stay awake.