Ice Cream 101

Can any university claim to be a distinguished, quality institution of higher learning if they do not have decent ice cream in their student center/union?  Clearly an absurd question to which the answer is equally clear; no. A few universities of the ag/tech sort have dairy science departments where students in ice cream (DS 101) plus advanced studies where less common flavors as well as frozen chunks are explored, sell the products of this academic endeavor with excellent results.  OK they may not have 29 flavors, but often the ice cream is of top quality.  But even here apparently there are no advance courses in gelato, and one wonders why?  Maybe the romance language programs have fallen on hard times, especially with the aggie crowd, but this is hardly an excuse to ignore their culture's best products.  Come on people, frozen yogurt vs. gelato; it isn't even a contest.  Our university is one that cares so little for the academic enterprise, its reputation, and sugar-induced creativity that there isn't even soft serve [ice cream] frozen custard, maybe a brand like IQ.  A frozen yogurt place tried to make a go of it, and it failed for lack of business, based upon TPP's analysis, the result of a combination of high price and low quality ("it tastes ALMOST like ice cream" (my emphasis)].  So this is now the mantra for the anti-ice cream crowd, ice cream is not fiscally viable, but fiscal sacrifices are considered OK if they benefit sports, but student union space is sooo valuable, they've priced ice cream out of this market. The snack shop does have Blue Bunny ice cream bars, but they are hardly the thing to capture your imagination or interest; no theses from these for certain. So far the higher administration and the trustees seem to lack interest in this issue, which makes you wonder about their priorities. Now when polled independently, the students seem quite uniformly in favor of ice cream on campus and not just in some stupid "ice cream zone". Of course at a few very elite schools you can get espresso milkshakes made with real coffee thus taking care of two metabolic needs in one delicious dose. Perhaps if it were presented as a state educational mandate, ice cream would be forthcoming on campus, but only after an assistant provost and a committee of faculty studied the issue for a year and issued a working paper on ice cream policy to be discussed at open forums. Cups vs. cones, how many flavors, Sunday or sundae, plastic vs. real spoons, and so on.  It's the way things are done.   

New discovery of something old in Costa Rica

TPP has been going to Costa Rica for research and teaching for 20 years, so discovering completely new things outside of the rainforest happens a lot less frequently.  So it was with a bit of surprise to find La Sorbeterade Lolo Mora, a rather small ice cream shop buried in the middle of San Jose's Mercado Central warren of aisles and shops.  Far from being something new, this shop has been serving their "traditional ice cream" in all its many flavors (1) for well over 100 years.  The ice cream was unlike any other and best described as "a heady mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and vanilla with a granita–like texture".  Yep, spice ice cream that's sort of icy, but make no mistake, it's wonderful. And getting it in a cone would be a mistake; it melts pretty fast. Generally my students only get to spend an afternoon and evening as tourists in San Jose, and in the past, it was a Sunday, and most of the Mercado shops were closed.  However, Sunday shopping, including grocery stores like Super Mas, early Christmas, and even black Friday sales have all come to Costa Rica.  My dear Ticos, let TPP apologize for our cultural exports and the invasion of our fast food too.  Please do not let a DQ open anywhere within two kilometers of the Mercado.  Protect your national food heritage. 

Open letter to a new president

Dear New President,
Welcome.  TPP has lost track of exactly how many presidents this university has had in his academic career here; that's because most of them were pretty forgettable.  You always remember the good ones (exactly one) and the really terrible ones (my first), but most of them were inbetween.  If they managed to do one or two good things before moving on we considered ourselves lucky.  Our last one has done quite a few good things, mostly on the financial and PR side of things, areas where presidents tend to be pretty influential.  Try to do the same.  Most of the administration is competent and tries to help you do your job. At times the business office and provost seem bent on the opposite, mostly by failing to understand that a university does not actually run like a business.  This will not be a rant about the provost's pseudo-business policies other than if you want units to be financially responsible for everything then you have to give those units the fiscal resources they generate.  You're not a new president and you've been around the block a few times, so it's no news to you that coaches and ADs lack institutional loyalty, period.  So why do they always get golden parachutes when they stiff the university?  My advice is hire a lawyer that knows how to write a contract that will screw anybody that screws the university.  Glad you got a raise in salary; boy, those northeastern state colleges must really pay crap for top administrators if coming here to Lincolnland is a good fiscal move.  While on this subject, us faculty could use a decent raise, all of us; it's been a good long time since we had one of those and believe it or not, we got expenses.  Makes TPP wish it were as easy to move on as it is for administrators, coaches, and ADs.  It's hard to know where exactly you should start.  Everyone, like TPP, will offer you advice.  Us old-timers know what the bad old days were all about, so don't change anything that's actually working.  However, you need to do something positive to get the ball rolling, so here's my advice: get us some decent ice cream in the student union.  How can you be any kind of half-way decent academic institution without ice cream?  And not that frozen yogurt stuff that can't make up it's mind if it's a health food or not, we been there, tasted that, and voted with our pocket books.  It folded.  There's no shortage of good ice cream locally (have them tell you about Carl's), but the rent in the student center is such that a good business man knows a bad deal when they see it.  So screw the money, we need ice cream.  This would be a good way to make your mark on the university and improve the institution.  TPP has been complaining about this for over 2 decades, and clearly lacks any clout what so ever.  Hope the move goes well.  You got a lot to learn about the great midwest and Lincolnland in particular.  People out here didn't even know what bagels were when TPP arrived all those decades ago.  Lots of people from up East don't like it here.  They get depressed when they go outside the city limits and experience the maize and soybean desert.  Well, that's all for now.  Truly your success matters to us and you can count on us to let you know how you're doing. 
Best regards,  TPP.

Academic prestige in jeopardy

Circumstances well beyond the control of the Phactor have placed the academic prestige of our institution in jeopardy.  Yes, we have suffered fiscal cuts at so many levels, and at a certain level, the academic prestige of the entire USA's higher education system is in jeopardy.  You cannot withdraw support from higher education for three decades and it not have some negative impact.  Yes, yes, fiscal matters are important, but what looms larger, a matter of much greater significance, is that our institution has no ice cream available in the student union!  Sorry, but no institution of higher learning without ice cream amounts to a damn thing.  Naturally the Phactor brought this matter to the attention of our President who opined that Ben & Jerry's would be just the thing.  Now if some significant action isn't taken, then he's become part of the problem rather than being part of the solution.  A previous attempt to placate the Phactor involved a substance called "frozen yogurt", and having sampled it, pronounced it non-ice cream.  As predicted not enough of this substance was sold to make the enterprise successful, and the people of little imagination who manage our student center have determined that such tenants are not viable.  Another way of looking at this is that they charge too bloody much rent for a small business whose customers inexplicably disappear at the end of every semester.  So now just before new students and family show up for orientation, there is no ice cream and what are they to think?  What kind of institution have we selected?  If your are a trustee of an institution of higher education, ask yourself, "Do you know whether there is ice cream in the student center?"  Well?  Do your job.  Do something important.  Get Ben.  Get Jerry.  Get Berry Garcia.

Know your tropical fruit

Last night a chance encounter with the Food network program Unwrapped caught my interest because it was featuring passion fruit rose petal ice cream from Out of a Flower in Dallas TX. Anything with passion fruit in it is better than things without, a belief the Phactors came to have while living in the tropics where we rented a passion fruit vine that came with the apartment option. Well, let's just watch this a bit and see the goodness. So the fellow explains, "We start with fresh fruit." And the video shifts to hands peeling, wait for it, mangos. Then they show the mango being pureed and the rest of the whole thing, and not once, not for one second, did they show or work with a passion fruit. Now quite likely the mango rose petal ice cream is great, but passion fruit it ain't unless someone at the food network screwed the pooch and inserted the wrong footage. In a few weeks a trip will take us for far northern Queensland and about 70 km north of Townsville sits the Frosty Mango, the purveyor of some of the world's best tropical fruit ice creams, yes, including passion fruit, although people in the know say the black sapote ice cream is just magic.