Ireland

Snap-Apple Night by Daniel Maclise portrays a Halloween party in Blarney, Ireland, in 1832. The young children on the right bob for apples. A couple in the center play “Snap-Apple,” which involves retrieving an apple hanging from a string. The couples at left play divination games.

Halloween is a significant cultural event in Ireland; it is widely celebrated. It is known in Irish as Oche Shamhna (Irish pronunciation: [ih haun] ee-hah how-nah), literally “Samhain Night.” In the Irish language, Samhain is the name for the month of November. Pre-Christian Celts had an autumn festival, Samhain (Irish pronunciation: [saun], from the Old Irish samain), “End of Summer,” a pastoral and agricultural “fire festival” or feast, when the dead revisited the mortal world and large communal bonfires would hence be lit to ward off evil spirits. Costumes and masks being worn at Halloween goes back to the Celtic traditions of attempting to copy the evil spirits or placate them. Samhnag Candle lanterns carved from turnips, were part of the traditional festival. Large turnips were hollowed out, carved with faces and placed in windows, also used to ward off harmful spirits.

History

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Something massive happened.  The trouble is it happened in a remote portion of Canada so the reverberations are taking some time to reach the rest of us.

What happened is that Richard Homburg, the Executive Chairman of the multi-billion dollar Homburg actual estate conglomerate, walked away from negotiations with a university president over a significant donation, and he decided instead to found his own private university.

Hang on, you may say, there is nothing novel in this.  Private universities across the United States had been founded by private interests with their own money.  Accurate.  But what we are seeing here is a organization starting a specialized university in its own field of company, in this case, Actual Estate Development.  That is novel, and when the word gets out, people are going to be debating whether it is an evolutionary step.

Universities have been around for about a thousand years and they have taken several forms.  They have been religious, founded by monks.  They have been national, founded by governments.  They have been political, founded by political parties.  The genus of university that ‘modern man’ associates with the term is the ‘free’ post-Enlightenment university.  Today’s universities, both public and private, are broadly of this genus, although there is a selection of species: co-ed, predominantly minority, ‘techs’, and so on. 

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