Reflections of a stormy petrel

One of the most internationally renowned American universities is MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One expects services provided by MIT to be of good quality.

MIT runs an online Classical Greek library called The Tech Classics Archive. I have not used it after a while, because I noticed that all the longer files (=texts) were cut off at a given point. Another web site just told me why: "this site crashed some time in 2000 and not all texts have been fully restored ever since. Due to the way they restored the site, using archive from Google, dialogues whose size led to a file greater than about 100K, the maximum size of Google archive for a page, are now incomplete." Talk about cheapjack! This is the kind of online library that the great MIT feels able to offer? And in FIVE YEARS they have done nothing to improve the situation? Clearly to put in the necessary resources would have cut into the senior table's dinner budget.

That, and my own alma mater, Oxford, has just given a visiting fellowship to the worst intellectual pirate and jihad promoter in the world, Tariq Ramadan. (He is, I believe, a grandson of Hassan Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a distant cousin of Arafat. In the Arab world, these connections count.) Of course, it is only a one-year fellowship, and of course it is from one of Oxford's less ancient and prestigious colleges, St.Anthony's; but no matter, in the eyes of the rest of the world it is a teaching post at Oxford, and it validates a man who has been refused an entry visa into the US as a manifest supporter of terrorism.