… laptops.

What is a professor?

Read and learn.

From The Telegraph:

Sir Kenneth Dover, who died on March 7 aged 89, was considered the finest Greek scholar of his generation and seemed to have led a life of almost oppressive decorum, crowned in 1978 by his election as President of the British Academy.

But in 1994 he published an autobiography, Marginal Comment, which deliberately shattered the image. The book portrayed a spikily intelligent man who was slave to an urge to demonstrate his emancipation from bourgeois constraints. The reader is not spared the least detail of Dover’s sex life, right down to the culminating horror that at 64 he and his wife enjoyed “some of the best —– of our life”.

But the issue which caught the headlines was his account of his attitude to Trevor Aston, a History fellow at Corpus Christi, Oxford, where Dover had been President between 1976 and 1986. Aston’s disintegration into paranoia and alcoholism had proved a serious embarrassment to the college; Dover confessed to having thought long and hard about how to murder him.

“It was clear to me,” wrote Dover, “that Trevor and the College must somehow be separated, and my problem was one which I feel compelled to define with brutal candour: how to kill him without getting into trouble.”

In fact, as the text reveals, Dover acted impeccably towards Aston, who was bent on self-destruction and eventually committed suicide. What was less clear is why the author should have been the victim of an adolescent desire to shock.

But that was to misunderstand Dover’s almost brutal passion for honesty. When he was interviewed on radio by the psychiatrist Anthony Clare shortly after the book’s publication, it became obvious that Clare had never met anyone with such a commitment to telling the truth about himself, however discreditable; indeed, so disoriented was Clare by the encounter that towards the end it seemed as if Dover was the one doing the interviewing.

… The infant Kenneth was precocious and could read at three; his first passion was for insects. At St Paul’s he became competent in Latin and fell in love with Greek. He also consciously cultivated, as he explained, a stoicism impermeable to his own and other people’s emotions, a project in which he regretfully admitted to being “a little too successful”. Dover’s cold rationalism could certainly make him seem a forbidding figure and occasionally a risible one.

… Prose and poetry, history and literature, detailed textual commentaries and wide-ranging social analyses were all part and parcel of an intellectual existence that he found constantly gripping and which he was only too willing to share with others – scholars, sixth-formers and beginners at Greek summer schools alike (Dover wrote a beginners’ Greek course for use at St Andrews). He once admitted that he had never been bored for more than five seconds in the whole of his life.

… Dover had been elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1966 and was President (1978-81) when Sir Anthony Blunt was exposed as a traitor and the question arose as to whether he should be expelled. Dover tried with only partial success to hold the ring between competing factions within the Academy but the problem solved itself when Blunt resigned. For Dover, who privately thought expulsion could be justified on the grounds that Blunt had transferred his allegiance to a government hostile to the pursuit of scholarship, the whole affair was “absorbingly interesting and therefore intensely enjoyable”…

… of the aftermath of the latest shooting at a university campus — Ohio State, at a maintenance building, one worker killed, two wounded — has an eerie eloquence. The silent images of police drifting in darkness, siren lights pulsing on top of cars, ambulances sidling to the site. So familiar.

…has been murdered.

The campus paper doesn’t name him, but his students know who he was, and they talk about him to the reporter. He was apparently killed, along with his girlfriend, by his girlfriend’s ex-lover.

… Student Felicia Lopez, in the professor’s Chicano Studies class, said her teacher did not show up for his 10 a.m. Monday class.

“He would tell us before if he was going to miss class,” she said. “He was always excited and passionate to show up to teach.”

… Student Oscar Ortega said the professor canceled class three times in the past two weeks because he had to testify in court as a witness to a domestic dispute case.

“He talked about how concerned he was about the domestic dispute case,” he said. “He was constantly talking about it.”

Students in the professor’s class plan to honor him by wearing black wristbands on their right arms, Ortega said…

The Washington Post covers increasingly popular laptop bans at local universities.

A strange place, Seton Hall University.

It’s Catholic, so it features things like The Heart of the University Retreat Series:

The Heart of the University Retreat Series gives faculty and administrators of all faiths the opportunity for quiet reflection guided by four members of the University’s priest community.

… “Deep in the heart of every university are the hearts of its teachers, and as we explore the university’s identity, we naturally need to explore ourselves. Ultimately, whatever our discipline, we teach who we are – `professing’ our worldview, our ethics, our values, as well as our hopes and dreams.”

Just the sort of gentle quiet reflection on values you’d expect at a Catholic school. The heart of Seton Hall is its teachers, and they are teaching values, etc., etc.

… Or maybe that’s not the heart of Seton Hall. Maybe its heart is its basketball program, a program so dirty, with a coach so violent, that it’s featured in today’s New York Times. The photo accompanying the article shows the coach shrieking like the very devil.

Or yet again maybe the heart of Seton Hall is its generous alumni?

… Business Week magazine dubbed [the university the] “Seton Hall of Shame” in 2002 for having not one but three major buildings bearing the names of disgraced corporate executives.

The trio included Kozlowski Hall, Walsh Library (named after former Tyco board member Frank Walsh, who pleaded guilty in 2002 to concealing a $20 million bonus) and Brennan Recreation Center (named after convicted First Jersey Securities founder Robert Brennan, who is serving time for bankruptcy fraud and money laundering).

Seems to be a disconnect between the priest community and the rest of the place.

A recent Drexel University graduate writes an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

… In a classroom, there is a person standing in the front of the room talking, and naively believing, or vainly hoping, that these portable-computer enthusiasts are listening to what he is saying.

To a person in the back of the room, it is plainly obvious that none of these keyboard assailants is paying any attention to the person in the front of the room. They are too involved with Facebook, AIM, Twitter, or the myriad other interactive-media outlets available to be aware of anything taking place in class. These students contribute no more to class than the corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s would have. Actually, that particular cadaver would have been much more engaged than the student with a laptop.

[These students] are vacant shells. Their presence is strictly corporeal. What’s more, their frequently furious typing is disruptive…

… has already attracted a number of thoughtful responses. If you’re interested, it’s here.

… a con coquotte… a fraud frotteur… This blog’s HOAX category is on fire with scammed credentials, faked memoirs, and plagiarized everything.

And UD always loves to put another log on the fire.

Conwise, though, it’s been a pretty cold winter. There’s been no really big bilking — the sort of thing that involves not merely made up shit in a book, but an author’s fake self-presentation, etc.

So UD’s pleased that the Hiroshima thing has happened.

The Hiroshima thing departs in one way from one of UD’s oft-stated rules about hoaxes:

In the matter of the hoax, Europe is holocausts, America addictions.

In other words, Europeans make up shit about how when they were seven the Nazis chased them around Bulgaria, while Americans make up shit about how cocaine put holes in their nose.

Yet this latest thing, this Hiroshima thing, is American.

The author of the now-pulped Last Train from Hiroshima, about the bomb’s immediate aftermath in Japan, lied about his Ph.D.

Henry Holt & Company, which stopped printing and selling “Last Train” earlier this week because of questions about the accuracy of several sections as well as concerns that some of the people quoted or portrayed in the book did not exist, had also questioned whether Mr. Pellegrino actually held a doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Yes, what about kindly old Father MacQuitty, and kindly old Father Mattias, who presided over the funeral of MacQuitty? Like James Frey’s heroin-hags, these men of the cloth were too good for this world.

NEW FINNEGANS WAKE TO BE MORE COHERENT

… from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, UD moved to Paris for a year, where she did dissertation research.

Through a mutual friend, she met Lisa Nesselson, a fellow Northwestern University graduate who, with her boyfriend, Glenn Myrent, had moved to the city to write about film.

Lisa’s friend Mark Hunter happened to be moving back to the States for a few months, and UD was able to sublet his apartment on the rue de la Grande Chaumiere, steps away from Montparnasse, and a few doors down from where Samuel Beckett once lived.

This connection to an apartment was only one of many kindnesses displaced UD received from Lisa, who went on to translate several books and work as a film critic.

Her wit and charm, and her distinctive voice, have now brought her to radio and tv.

When UD first knew her, Lisa was struggling – living in a ridiculously small seventh-floor walkup in Paris, doing this and doing that to stay in France, watch films, and write about them. All these years she’s persisted in doing what she wants to do with her life, in the city where she wants to do it, and UD salutes her.

… you know you’re a for-profit.

That’s what the guy who runs Phoenix University made last year. And who cares? He can give himself whatever he wants, even if graduation and student loan repayment and job placement rates are shit. Even if his entire industry is under major legal and federal government scrutiny for squalid recruitment practices and false claims.

In January 2009, a commenter at Insider Higher Ed – the thread is in response to an interview with Harold Shapiro, once president of Princeton and now chair of DeVry, another for-profit outfit – wrote this about horrid snooty non-profit universities and refreshingly egalitarian for-profits:

Consideration for and impeccable service to the customer is gradually becoming the market’s expectation in higher education. [H]igher education’s customers are losing their tolerance for prissy Mandarins.

And, you know, you hear this rhetoric a lot among the for-profits… Those non-profit snobs… Yet doesn’t $6.5 mil sound way more Mandarin than the few hundred thou Harvard’s Drew Faust takes in? Especially considering that she’s not too above it all to make sure she graduates almost every one of the people who pay her university’s tuition?

I mean we are not kidding around here! When Kaplan’s last CEO resigned in 2008, he “receive[d] his base salary, which was not disclosed, and incentives, in addition to $46 million related to the Kaplan stock option plan. Honoring the noncompete clause of his contract will net [him] an additional $30 million by November 2011.”

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Anyway. As with the pharmaceutical industry, when it’s all about money, unsavory things can happen. Unattractive compromises tend to get made. Here are two recent examples.

UD’s friend Jonathan sends her this Barron’s piece (scroll down) about the Washington Post’s relationship to Kaplan:

The Post’s education business, anchored by the Kaplan for-profit college and test-prep businesses, contributed 58% of 2009’s revenue and all of its $195 million of operating income.

Within that operation, all the growth is from the “higher education” segment, where revenue grew 33% in 2009 and operating income grew almost 60%, to $275 million. Higher education enrollment last year grew 32%, online enrollment 47%.

Outcomes at Kaplan higher-ed, however, don’t compare impressively with other for-profit education enterprises. The online Kaplan University segment (about half of the higher-ed unit’s revenues) gets 87.5% of its receipts from some $780 million worth of government student aid. That’s close to the federal program’s 90% limit, and higher than many other for-profits. [Recall this earlier UD post. The place is a tax-siphon.]

Student-loan default rates are one inverse measure of the benefit received by students. Kaplan higher-ed’s numbers have been getting worse. In the first two years after graduation, defaults at four of the school’s 33 reporting units were above 25%, which is the level at which they are at risk of Department of Education sanctions. At the online Kaplan University, defaults rose from 6% for 2005 grads to 13% for 2007 grads, with preliminary numbers for 2008 worse, around 16%. [Simple cause and effect. Admit anyone with a pulse, and defaults from dropouts are a heartbeat away.]

Most intriguing in the [Post's] 10-K [filing] is the passing (and first) mention that the Education Department has been conducting a “Program Review” of Kaplan University’s main offices in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., since September. The Post business desk seemed not to notice any of this, but Post investors might want to.

He means that while the Post is an important and responsible newspaper, it falls down badly on coverage of its sugar daddy…

Fiddle dee dee! I’ll think about that tomorrow!

Even more striking, Stephen Burd at New America Foundation just went after the Chronicle of Higher Education for soft-pedaling its coverage of the for-profits, from some of whom it receives not only significant advertising revenue, but also conference sponsorship.

Burt tells his reader stuff about the for-profits that the Chronicle fails to mention:

[L]ess than one third of first-time, full-time students who attend the University of Phoenix graduate within six years…

[T]here have been widespread allegations of fraud and abuse throughout the sector, particularly at the nation’s largest chains of proprietary schools. But you wouldn’t know it from reading the Chronicle stories….

[S]ome of the largest publicly-traded for-profit higher education companies have in recent years come under intense scrutiny from federal and state regulators and have faced numerous lawsuits by former employees, shareholders, and students over allegations that they have engaged in misleading recruiting and admissions tactics to inflate their enrollment numbers. With all of the glowing praise for the University of Phoenix throughout the package, one would expect that there would at least be some mention of the $78.5 million settlement that the university’s owners reached recently in a False Claims lawsuit that accused the institution of routinely violating a federal law that aims to prevent schools from aggressively recruiting unqualified students…

[The] U.S. Department of Education [has started] a process of rewriting its student aid regulations to strengthen a federal ban on colleges compensating recruiters based on their success in enrolling students. Department officials are also planning to add teeth to the rules requiring for-profit colleges to show that graduates are finding “gainful employment” in their fields of study and to regulations that forbid schools from willfully misleading prospective students. Incredibly, the Chronicle articles make no mention of the Education Department’s efforts. The Chronicle has dutifully reported on the recently completed negotiated rulemaking sessions on these topics — so this omission is absolutely mind-boggling. In a package of stories that runs nearly 7,000 words, the federal government’s concerns about many of these institutions certainly merit attention.

… Corinthian Colleges recently announced that nine of its Everest College campuses have 2008 cohort default rates exceeding 25 percent, including two topping 30 percent. In other words, an alarming number of the schools’ former students who entered repayment on their federal student loans during the 2008 fiscal year defaulted on them within two years. Moreover, Corinthian expects that 56 to 58 percent of the private loan funds that the company provides to high-risk students with sub-prime credit records will eventually end up in default.

… Last summer, when the publication was looking for financing for its annual “Leadership Forum,” a “must-attend event for the executives who run American higher education,” it turned to the University of Phoenix, which became the forum’s sole sponsor. According to marketing materials that the newspaper posts on-line, sponsors of this event are promised “hours of networking opportunities with Forum attendees and Chronicle editors and reporters,” as well as “exclusive access” to the higher education leaders who “control billions of dollars in spending.” Even more ominously, sponsors are promised “significant exposure among the nearly 325,000 readers of the Chronicle in print and the more than 1.5 million visitors to Chronicle.com.”…

A student at the University of Wisconsin River Falls talks about clickers.

What happened to raising your hand? What happened to being able to answer out loud? Reliance on technology may be the reason people with doctorates resort to PowerPoint and point and click in order to manage their classes. I understand the application in rooms of over 200 students. However, if no one else has noticed, our school holds a 30-1 ratio.

… female…

The BBC reports on this shocking revelation.

This short paragraph from a Wall Street Journal profile of one of the world’s worst financial criminals allows UD to say to you once again (she says it all the time, most recently in this discussion of Amy Bishop) that being highly intelligent and getting a great university education has little – sometimes nothing – to do with morality.

Clifford Orwin, a professor of political philosophy, makes the point:

[G]ive me Mr. Madoff for one, two or three courses of ethics instruction and he would still be Bernie Madoff. Would he have learned anything from the experience? Yes, he’d talk a much better game of ethics. Thanks to my teaching, he’d be an even greater menace to society.

This year, I’m teaching 500 students about justice, and I’m not making a single one of them a better person. Those who already aspire to justice may refine their understanding of what it is. (They may also come to see that everything has its problems, even justice.) Those already minded to be good citizens may become more thoughtful ones. I believe strongly in what I do – I just don’t think that what I do is to improve the moral character of my students.

Students indifferent to justice just aren’t going to be won over to it by anything that I could say. Or that anyone else could say. A university course is not a revival meeting. I don’t cure palsies and I don’t plead with students to come forward to declare themselves for ethics. And if I did – and if they did – it wouldn’t mean a thing. Talk is cheap. Talk consisting of high-minded oaths and declarations of one’s moral seriousness is even cheaper.

By the time a student arrives at university, and a fortiori several years later when he ambles on to his MBA, his ethical character is already firmly set. Whether virtue can ever be taught was already a thorny question for Plato. Whether it can be taught to adults, in a classroom, shouldn’t be a thorny question for anyone.

Stanley Fish overstates the case, but he gets at it too:

Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. [Humane] texts [are] concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.

One of the corollaries of these truths is that business schools waste all sorts of money and generate all sorts of cynicism among their students by adding ethics courses to their curricula.

Business school catalogues should title these courses what they are: sops.

SOP 101
ADVANCED SOP
STUDIES IN SOP
CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SOP
ADVANCED INDEPENDENT STUDY: SOP