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Well, this is annoying. Last April, HBO announced that it was creating a series set in a college Women’s Studies department. It was pitched as a feminist comedy, and it was going to star Julie White, who was fantastic as the funeral home chain executive on Six Feet Under. The co-creators were a veteran woman television writer and an executive producer for the Daily Show and Colbert Report.

But now it’s apparently not happening.

Jezebel has a story up today about how guy-oriented HBO’s post-Sex and the City lineup is, and down in the seventh paragraph it mentions that a flack told their reporter that Women’s Studies “is no longer in development,” which is TV-speak for dead. Oh well.

At least David Simon‘s Treme is coming to HBO this spring. And on the higher-education-sitcom front, I’m glad I turned out to be wrong about Community, which hardly sucks at all.

At the University of Alabama at Huntsville this afternoon, biology professor Amy Bishop apparently opened fire at a meeting at which she was told that she would not be granted tenure. Three of her colleagues were killed, including the chair of her department, and three more were wounded.

Bloggers started weighing in on the meaning of the incident almost immediately, of course, as they always do. And as always, their posts said much more about them than about the incident itself.

The Blog Prof took a tack that I suspect we’re going to be seeing a lot of at academic blogs — blaming the stressfulness of the tenure process. There’s already been plenty of gun control posting too, of course, both pro and con.

But it’s the right wing that has burst from the gate biggest and hardest … and weirdest.

At the anti-feminist site antimisandry.com, one poster suggests that women rarely commit this kind of violence because they don’t need to — “the law sides with [women] irrespective of facts and evidence,” he says, so they’re never driven to murder.

Even that, though, pales in comparison to this weirdo, who calls the alleged shooter an “Ivy League bitchess” and an “affirmative actioned flooz[y].” Oh, and a Maoist.

Morning Update | Someone got around to checking Bishop’s reviews at Rate My Professor, and discovered that one student characterized her as a “liberal.” Now the conservative blogosphere is lighting up with posts like this one calling Bishop a “Harvard-trained Left-wing Professor.”

City police in Hanover, New Hampshire, home of Dartmouth College, have come up with plans to send undercover cops into campus parties. The plans have been shelved temporarily in response to campus opposition, but remain a possibility for the near future.

The department announced the initiative, designed to curb underage drinking, last week, but it met with overwhelming disapproval from Dartmouth administrators, faculty, students, and alumni.

The plan calls for teams of two people — an officer and an underage plant — to go to the parties. If the under-21 operative was served alcohol, the officer would arrest the person who served the drink and issue a summons to the house’s owner. Fines for homeowners could be in the tens of thousands of dollars.

In announcing that there would be no raids for the time being, police warned the college to conduct its own crackdown. If they didn’t see a significant drop in alcohol-related issues “in a fairly short time frame,” the chief of police said, the department would begin conducting undercover operations as originally planned.

Students at Britain’s University of Sussex occupied a conference center on campus for 29 hours earlier this week, in opposition to coming cutbacks and in solidarity with campus labor actions against those cuts.

One hundred and six students were present at the start of the occupation on Monday, and two hundred more reportedly joined the group the following afternoon.

The students ended the occupation voluntarily. There were no arrests and no immediate reports of disciplinary action. The students made no demands over the course of their action, and did not seek to negotiate with the university administration.

One class scheduled to be held in the occupied space was canceled, but the cancelation came at the insistence of the university, over the objections of the course’s professor and students.

The Sussex protest and other similar actions prompted the weekly magazine The New Statesman to ask this week whether Britain’s campuses are seeing the beginning of a new wave of student protests and strikes.

We’re three weeks away from March 4, and the planned Day of Action to Defend Public Education keeps growing from coast to coast. Late last night I got word about a new blog out of Louisiana State University, joining the action and calling for a general strike at LSU. Here are some excerpts from their blog’s first post:

The University is in crisis.  And not just our university.  The University System.  Public higher-education itself.

This crisis is not caused by the global recession.  Rather, it is caused by the the leadership of our educational institutions, who have cynically used the pretense of financial pressure to pursue their own narrow agendas.

Through their decisions (eliminating faculty and programs while continuing unnecessary large-scale construction projects; laying off custodians while giving athletic coaches massive raises), university policymakers have made it clear that their priorities share little in common with those of the teachers, students, and workers who make our school great…

The call has gone out for an International Strike and Day of Action in defense of education for Thursday March 4, 2010.  Students, faculty, and staff of LSU will of course participate.  On this day, we are calling on all LSU professors to cancel class, all students to skip class, and all workers to call in sick.  Instead of business as usual, we will begin a constructive discussion about the future of our school – a discussion that is ours to have.