Bunny University

During Summer, 2006, I was offered a tuition scholarship to go to the University of Victoria in British Columbia for their annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute. Although I had to pay my own plane fare, it wasn't hard to rationalize to myself that getting to go to the west coast AND benefit in my professional field was worthwhile.

When I got there I realized that the entire university campus is a home for hundreds, if not thousands, of bunny rabbits. You see them alone, in groups, hiding, in the open, waiting outside the cafeteria doors -- you name it. It seems almost as if there are as many rabbits as there are students.

I started to videotape one bunny with my husband's cell phone, only to be surprised by a particularly outgoing fellow, shown here. Not the best quality video, it's true, but you can still get the idea.

By the way, I would strongly recommend the Summer Institute to anyone interested in applying technology to the Humanities. They have a great, action packed program, extraordinary guest speakers, provide excellent mini-seminars on various topics of technology, and are just plain all around nice folk.

And the building is STILL named after him?

From the The UNC Virtual Museum:

"William Laurence Saunders is widely believed to have been the chief organizer of the Ku Klux Klan in Reconstruction-era North Carolina. In 1922, the university named its new history department building for Saunders, to recognize his later work as a compiler of historical documents . . . In 1869-1870, he became known as the chief organizer of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina and Chapel Hill, though his connection with this secret organization was never formally proved and he was never tried for a connection with Klan violence."

And no one else finds it the least bit offensive that we still commemorate him by allowing Saunders Hall to continue to be named after him?