I thought it might be worthwhile to reintroduce myself, as I've been absent from Liberty and Power for about a year.

My intensive blogging about the situation at the University of Southern Mississippi (and, no, it's not completely over...) led to temporary burnout last summer.

Then I was in a bicycle accident at the end of last October, in which I hit the brakes too hard on a downhill stretch trying to avoid a car coming around a blind corner. I succesfully avoided the car, but went straight over the handlebars and crunched both wrists. I'll take a bilateral wrist fracture over the alternatives (e.g., hitting the pavement headfirst) but, all in all, I can't say as I recommend it. I couldn't teach classes at all for two and half weeks, and wasn't entirely back to normal classroom activity till well into February. I couldn't type with two hands until mid-March.

Although I have some residual trouble with my left wrist, I am functioning just about normally now (orthopedics and physical therapy have made tremendous advances in recent years, and I needed all of them).

I will catch everyone up on USM later this week. Suffice it to say for now that Hurricane Katrina did some damage to the main campus in Hattiesburg and rendered the Gulf Park campus unusable, but the wounds inflicted by President Shelby Freland Thames are worse... and the search for his successor doesn't begin till October.

I also plan to write about the curious world of Ayn Rand scholarship, where one must thread one's way between detractors who consider her ideas unworthy of study, and zealots who want to keep the unworthy from studying them.

And I may throw in a few things about psychology from time to time.

Robert Campbell