Hymns for the Reverent Linguist—The Linguistick Hymnary SpecGram Vol CLXVI, No 1 Contents From the Archives!—SpecGram Water Purification Tablets—The SpecGram Archive Elves™

Big Ten Conference Cancels 2013 Linguistics Season

SpecGram Wire Services

The “Big Ten” Conference of Midwestern US universities announced yesterday that it is canceling the entire 2013 linguistics season.

Conference Commissioner James de la Nie, speaking at a press conference in Chicago, said “we just don’t have enough eligible schools to compete this year. It doesn’t make sense to hold the competitions when we’re so depleted, and we sure don’t want to look as bad at the LSA as we have in recent years. We’ll just have the whole conference sit out the postseason this time around.”

A record eight of the conference’s twelve member schools are on some kind of probation this year, with seven barred from participating in the postseason. All of the sanctions were handed down by the powerful National Collegiate Linguistics Association (NCLA), which governs intercollegiate linguistics conferences and meetings of all types.

The most recent casualty was Indiana University, which was cited last week by the NCLA for library holdings violations.

For readers who may have lost track of the many Big Ten violations in the past few years, here is a summary of the current sanctions. All of these institutions have been penalized with reductions in scholarships, and all but Northwestern are also banned from postseason activities.

Of the entire Big Ten Conference, only four institutions are not on any form of probation: the University of Iowa, Michigan State University, the University of Nebraska, and Penn State University. These institutions are to be commended for doing things the right way. Unless they are hiding something.

Hymns for the Reverent LinguistThe Linguistick Hymnary
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