… I have two classes involving PRS, and the bugs still haven’t been worked out. In fact, last week, the system did not work at all for my chemistry class, and in biology it took more than a few minutes until the system was up and running properly.
So, does this spending of extra money and effort mean enhanced learning? The PRS is supposed to let professors see if their lecture has “stuck” with students, and if not, adjust accordingly. It also stimulates classroom participation, but listening and interacting is still in the hands of the students. With the introduction of PRS, the focus is shifted from actually understanding the material to making sure you get an answer into the system to get credit for the day.
I see how the PRS is effective in bringing people to class, but having to sit through an entire lecture just to press a button is a bit ridiculous. The PRS does not enhance my ability in the classroom, it just makes me resent having to lug around another piece of technology while wasting time to get it to work when the professors should just be teaching. I have a hard enough time getting my lazy self to go to class. I don’t need to have to remember to bring this random clicker.
Luckily, most professors drop about 10 PRS grades over the span of the entire semester. This amounts to a lot after one takes into account how many times the system collapses on itself and forces professors to give out free points. Professors also find other ways to counteract the failings of PRS. In my biology class, the professor gave a survey for extra PRS points, and I expect other professors do the same. Professors try to accommodate … the faulty system, but it doesn’t always work.
… Fred Zinn, Sr., designer of instructional technology at the Office of Informational Technology at UMass, described possible reasons behind trouble with PRS reception in series of blogs. Although very helpful, the blogs suggest that incorporating PRS into a course is a huge burden.
According to Zinn’s blogs, PRS could be adversely affected by its receivers being too close to laptops, low batteries in the remotes of the students, and more than 200 students using the same receiver. The blogs also report faculty losing data by minor mistakes when using the system.
The web page suggests that instructors having difficulty should set up a one-on-one consultation with the Instructional Media Lab. Professors already have enough on their hands, it isn’t necessary to bog them down with even more.
As class sizes continually get larger, devices like the PRS will become more prevalent, even though this contributes to their failures. The only method of teaching proven to be glitch-free is writing notes on the board and taking notes with a pen and paper, and that is what we should be doing…
PowerPoint, laptops, clickers – universities cynically load them on “as class sizes continually get larger.” And it looks as though students are beginning to get the picture.
Are you and your professor being turned into robotic nullities?
Click A for Yes.
UD’s extremely proud to appear in the following first paragraph in an Anthony Grafton essay in The New Republic:
Morning, nowadays, means coffee and the Times, as it did for my parents. But it also means something they never experienced: a trip across the Web. Slipping from link to link, occasionally falling in and spending a few minutes in one place, I pass from TNR to NYRB to Bookforum, from Atrios to Steve Benen, from Easily Distracted to University Diaries to Tenured Radical to TigerHawk, from Historiann and Arts & Letters Daily to Cliopatria and Athens & Jerusalem, from Andrew Sullivan to Megan McArdle to Ta-Nehisi Coates—and, for perspective, to the obituaries in the Telegraph.
Talk about being in good company.
Tony’s reviewing Mary Beard’s latest book — UD and Mary are longtime mutual blog admirers.
UD thanks her friend Christina for noticing the TNR essay.
It’s just gossip. But it features one of the most important professors in the world, plus amazing quotations, like the one in my title. So why not.
Niall Ferguson, whose comments about Scotland have appeared on this blog, has left his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali human rights campaigner, currently under a fatwa.
One of UD’s categories on this blog, as you know, is Trustees Trashing the Place. It keeps her pretty busy.
But she’s elevated the category to the title of this post because she’s rarely seen an institution so trashed – a trashing that’s ongoing – as the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences.
(Is there a connection between length of name and corruption? Consider the most corrupt university in America: University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.).
Last December, this school’s crazy-over-compensated president, Karen Pletz, was, with a few brusque comments from the board, suddenly fired. (Here’s UD’s post on the subject.) Now people are beginning to talk about why.
… Current board chairman Danny Weaver [He's Jack Weaver's son. Jack Weaver was the last board chairman. It's an inherited position!], who also is the university’s acting president [The princeling is now charged with cleaning the place up.], won’t discuss why she was fired. Pletz, who says she’s proud of her work for the school, won’t get into specifics.
Danny Weaver, son of Jack Weaver, will say only that more than one person in September brought “extremely serious” issues to the board’s attention that led to Pletz’s termination.
What is clear is that as the university grew, Pletz and her associates were living large — and largely unchecked by the university’s board:
•Big paydays: Pletz’s compensation skyrocketed from $261,000 in fiscal 1999 to nearly $1.2 million — about $250,000 more than the president of Johns Hopkins University made. Members of Pletz’s executive team also enjoyed huge raises.
•Big spending: Money was lavished on travel, meals and other expenses.
But spending on the university’s primary mission — educating medical students — didn’t keep pace with the school’s rapidly growing administrative costs. From fiscal 1999 to 2008, the amount spent on educating students and other program services rose 59 percent. At the same time, administration expenses jumped 384 percent.
•Jobs for relatives: Family members and friends, including Pletz’s daughter and a top associate’s daughter-in-law, were added to the payroll in administrative positions. The university’s nepotism policy allowed a lot of leeway.
•Little accountability: University administrators kept the governing board in the dark for months at a time about important issues, Weaver said.
But it was the board Weaver has led since 2004 that approved Pletz’s salary and incentive package. The board, which met just twice a year, approved the university’s budget, but it did not monitor the way money was actually spent. And it did not routinely review key filings the university made to the Internal Revenue Service.
Although the IRS will not say whether it is conducting an investigation, Weaver confirmed that IRS agents are auditing the university’s tax records.
Junior’s trying to lay the blame on Pletz and her pilfering associates, but, you know, the point of trustees is to monitor the well-being of the university. Their main job is to notice shit like this. And remember:
Like other nonprofits, the university is excused from many of the taxes that individuals and for-profits have to pay.
That privilege comes with the obligation to use the tax-free money in the public interest, said Dean Zerbe, an expert on nonprofit organizations and former senior counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Finance Committee.
“A tax-exempt entity receives enormous tax benefits we all pay for. It’s our tax money that is subsidizing them,” he said. “They have a responsibility, a public trust, especially the board, that this money is spent appropriately for the community and not for pie-in-the-sky salaries.”
If I were the Weavers, I’d abdicate. Now. Remember Nicholas II.
UD thanks Tim for forwarding her the story.
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Update: UD’s blogpal Chas points out that Nicholas did eventually abdicate.
… an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas, attempts to nudge that institution toward a higher level of development. UD, who has studied the knuckle-draggers at UT for years, doubts they can evolve.
Excerpts from an opinion piece by Hillis in UT’s paper:
Many outside UT seem to think that we … receive positive net income from intercollegiate athletics, since the gross income from this source seems enormous (e.g., gross income for intercollegiate athletics was $105,230,260 in 2008-2009, the latest figures available, or a little less than 5 percent of UT’s total income from all sources). But athletics expenses (e.g., $107, 283,744 in 2008-2009) are even higher than its income. To make up the difference, UT has to “transfer in” large amounts from general revenue funds such as Trademark Income.
In addition, because Intercollegiate Athletics has run up an enormous debt ($222,488,000 by 2008-2009), we have to transfer even larger sums from general revenue sources to the Athletics Operations Cash reserves, so that we have enough reserves to pay our debt obligations from athletics in years that we do not go to a BCS bowl. This is necessary because when UT is not at the top of the national rankings, even the large “transfers in” to athletics from general revenues are not enough to cover our athletic department debt.
Athletics at UT is often claimed to be “self-supporting,” so does this description fit with the numbers above? It is only “self-supporting” once the transfers into athletics from general University revenue funds are added to “Income and Transfers In” account. This amounts to a huge subsidy to athletics, which comes at a cost to the rest of the University.
… The salary structure of the coaches is clearly beyond what is necessary to maintain outstanding sports programs; we pay the football coach about 10 times what we pay our hard-working University president. No other university in the world pays its football coach as much as we do, and UT drives the cost of coaching salaries ever higher.
The athletics department takes great pride in the fact that “We are the Joneses” that everyone else has to try to keep up with. And the unnecessary spending does not stop with coaches salaries; do we really need numerous luxuries such as flat-screen TVs covering the players’ locker and break rooms?
It is hard to justify this kind of excess while the rest of the campus is struggling to maintain basic academic programs; staff and faculty are being fired; tuition continues to rise; and we are making ever greater demands on faculty to bring in more and more research grants to subsidize day-to-day operations. The contrast between the Spartan facilities of most of campus compared to the opulence of the intercollegiate athletic facilities is striking. No wonder the public incorrectly thinks that the athletics budget supports the academic side of campus, rather than the other way around.
When I bring up these disconnects in UT budget, I often hear people say that “athletics is a completely different and independent budget.” This, of course, is simply false. UT has to have one balanced budget, and to pay for athletics, we have to transfer in millions of dollars to athletics every year from general revenue. All of the University’s spending is connected. We all want UT to be great in everything that it does: education, research, outreach and athletics. But to make this happen, especially as we face growing budget reductions, every area of UT must contribute to budgetary savings. Athletics can no longer afford to “eat everything they kill,” especially when that includes general UT revenue that is needed to maintain our basic academic mission.
The comments on the piece divide themselves equally between people who see the point here and agree with it, and the knuckle-draggers.
Hillis slowly and carefully responds to each of the knuckle-draggers, stating again, in simple language, the points he made in the piece.
… in the hallway, the sun shines bright on the Rockville Pike, and UD sits up in bed, reacquainting herself with heat and electricity.
She’s at the Legacy – a boutique hotel, all angular lamps and ochre walls. The guests are mainly, like UD, ‘thesdans thawing out. It’s been quite the blizzard, and it ain’t over yet.
The snow came down thin and sifty like confectioner’s sugar, but when it finally stopped the whole world was whipped cream.
Evergreens leaned and creaked and spilled limbs all over town.
We sat quietly in our cold houses, marveling at how precisely we could see, in winter sunlight and with a backdrop of snow, the wing patterns of birds.
For heat there was the fireplace, and pots of water simmering on the stove, and piles of throws on the bed.
We took turns shoveling the walk and the car, and we managed to keep a path to Rokeby clear.
At night we settled under the throws and held little battery lamps to our chests so that we could read. I chose A Short History of Nearly Everything, a funny, well-written scarefest (asteroids! viruses!).
Hello! This is Carolyn, the webmistress of University Diaries, here to let you know that my aunt Margaret is without an internet connection at the moment, thanks to the blizzard. She asked me to inform you, her readers, that she will resume posting once her internet connection is restored.
Umbrage, high dudgeon, the taking of offense, the mounting of one’s high horse, Up Yours!ism, Well, I Never!ism — SOS has warned you against this sort of writing for years. She has directed you to this Onion article as a cautionary tale. She has provided real-world examples of what she calls Harrumphs.
Harrumphs are often letters to the editor, in which writers, offended by bad reviews, lose all restraint (Emotion, SOS always says, is the enemy of good writing.) and let their wounded egotism rip. If you want your writing to work for you, to persuade your audience to take your side, it’s a good idea not to reveal yourself to the world as an arrogant thin-skinned fool.
Here’s a recent rather amazing Canadian Harrumph, from Victoria’s poet laureate.
An English professor from Camosun College reviewed the laureate’s latest book of poetry (It was a perfectly ok review… thorough, not particularly exciting… critical here, admiring there…), and the laureate blew a laurel.
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I wasn’t going to dignify the badly written, inaccurate and savage review of my book Muscle Memory in last week’s Times Colonist with a response. [Harrumphs always, always start like this. I wasn't going to write! I have better things to do than stoop to that! I'm busy doing the Lord's work!]
I considered the source and decided to ignore it. [Consider the source -- a playground cliche.] The record speaks for itself. It is the first negative poetry review in a lifetime of writing and most of the poems have been published elsewhere and won national and international awards. [Never got a negative review, eh? Think that's a sign of a strong poet, do you? Along with all the awards you just boasted about?]
… That the Times Colonist would publish hate mail in the form of a book review at a time when the world is focused on the devastation of lives in Haiti is in appalling taste. [Now we're right round the bend. What does this sentence mean? Can you figure out what she's saying? I can't. It's absolutely mad.] The newspaper insulted the suffering [and] insulted the city that has chosen me to be poet laureate …
Yes, well, word is getting around about semi-literate medical school professors credited with having published 2,785 scholarly articles. It just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Scientific American describes the phenomenon and summarizes a recent study of the subject:
Scientists credited for research articles that were secretly penned by ghostwriters from pharmaceutical companies often are not reprimanded for their misrepresentations; rather, their ranks and career trajectories often improve.
Although this practice of undisclosed authors (with undisclosed commercial interests) writing articles under the pretense of unbiased scientific inquiry raises serious concerns about academic integrity, few institutions have policies to discourage it.
… Once medical publishing’s “dirty little secret,” ghostwriting is no longer under wraps, thanks in part to a 2009 federal court decision to release 1,500 documents describing the strategic placement of marketing messages into peer-reviewed medical literature. In their article [the authors] say these cleverly crafted advertisements from pharmaceutical companies shape the literature in subtle but important ways, and can even affect how clinicians perceive and prescribe treatments.
“Your typical family practice physician is bombarded with glossy reprints,” [one author] explains. “The more prestigious the university and the researcher’s name on it, the more weight that’s going to carry with the doctor.”
Ah yes. If Cardinal Newman were writing The Idea of a University today, he’d write The idea of a university is to gain enough prestige to make its medical faculty worth ghosting.
From the Bowdoin College obituary for professor of mathematics Steve Fisk, who died at the age of 63:
Fisk’s love for mathematics… continued to the very end of his life.
“He was a person who loved mathematics more than anybody I know,” said [a colleague]. “And I know a lot of mathematicians.”
When [this colleague] visited Fisk at the Gosnell Memorial Hospice House in Scarborough, Maine on Friday afternoon, Fisk asked [him] for a particular math book called “Roots to Research.”
“I came back and I tried to get a copy—I didn’t have one myself, and couldn’t find any copy anywhere. Amazon could send it, but it wouldn’t arrive until Monday, and I sensed that was too late.” …
Instead, [he] called Visiting Lecturer in Mathematics Leon Harkleroad, who drove two hours from Brunswick to deliver the book early Saturday morning.
“Steve did read from it that day,” [he said]. “His wife told me later that he actually had left it bookmarked on the fourth or fifth page, where the authors describe the concept of length of game.”
Fisk’s obituary, written by his family, considers the concept of length of game symbolically.
“While Steve’s length of game may have been shorter than most of us would wish, the numbers he chose along the way gave him—and all of us—great joy,” it reads.
UD’s buddy Jon sends her this ‘thesdan dispatch:
[Bethesda resident] Paul Pickthorne [hosts bondage and discipline parties] … in the castlelike, 3,600-square-foot McMansion he rents… The cost: $20 for a basic ticket, $50 for VIP treatment.
… [His neighbors] convened a meeting in someone’s living room last week, then fired off indignant e-mails to county council member Roger Berliner (D), whose district includes their Merrimack Park subdivision.
“I share your sense of outrage that a sex club is operating in your lovely neighborhood,” Berliner wrote back. “I want you to know that my office has been advised that our County has moved aggressively to put an end to this blight on your community.”
The county moved all right. Pickthorne got a written warning from a zoning inspector Monday. But hold on. Suppose Pickthorne stops charging admission, as he says he might? Suppose he complies with the inspector and hosts all future BDSM gatherings as strictly noncommercial functions in accordance with Section 59-C-1.31? What then?
“Well,” says Berliner on the phone, hesitating. “Certainly one has to respect everyone’s constitutional rights.”
In other words, if no money changes hands, and the kinky people don’t cause a noise or traffic nuisance, the First Amendment would ring clear: Party on!…
… at Portland State.
It’s early in the story, but apparently an economics professor there, in class a few days ago, suddenly launched a long and elaborate verbal attack on one of his students.
… John Hall, who has taught at PSU for 24 years, began the class with a lecture relevant to the course material but about halfway through the two-hour long class, he began to describe his experiences with law enforcement in places including Eastern Europe, according to a student who wished to remain anonymous.
Hall claimed to have been surveilled at times throughout his life and then told the class that an FBI informant and agent provocateur was in their midst. Hall said this person served as a sniper in the Israeli army and called him a killer with access to a personal arsenal.
He then pointed at Bucharest and identified him as the informant in question, according to the unnamed student.
Bucharest, a student at PSU since the fall of 2006 … sat silently throughout the ordeal, according to students in the class.
… Hall accused Bucharest of trying to organize students to participate in violent acts against the university, according to the unnamed student.
Hall also said he believed that Bucharest is at times armed while on campus. He then put a letter on the document projector that he wrote to the FBI’s Portland Field Office. In the letter, Hall claims to know Bucharest’s identity as an agent. He then handed Bucharest a copy of the letter and told him to give it to his superiors.
After a time of silence, Bucharest got up and said that some of Hall’s claims about his military background were true, but that other claims the professor made were not. Bucharest left the classroom after being told by Hall to leave and not to come back to PSU, according to students…
Let’s pause there for a moment.
One of many strange aspects of the story is that this account, published in the PSU newspaper, is no longer available. I got it from a blogger who reproduced it on his site. Why did the paper take it down? Is the student on whom the reporter relied for the account in fact not reliable? Bucharest apparently has a lawyer – does the paper fear legal action? Has it been asked by the university’s administration to take the piece down?
Anyway. Here’s something we can say with some confidence, assuming we’re getting something reasonably close to what went on. Whatever the background of this student, the professor’s behavior is paranoid and outrageous.
Hall, who has been removed from the classroom — indeed, from the campus — while PSU investigates, has issued a comment to the newspaper (again, I’m assuming the comment indeed came from him, etc.) which does nothing to weaken suspicion that he’s paranoid:
“I decided to take a stand. I observed the situation becoming extremely dangerous, not only for me but for about eight of my very finest students…. I felt that what I had to do should not have been my responsibility. …I understand the students’ privacy is to be respected, as defined by the codes governing PSU… I felt the level of danger had grown to such an acute level that I felt it fully in order to engage in an ‘emergency exemption’ of student privacy.”
This is nuts. The student might be malsain, might talk violence, might even carry a concealed weapon, but you respond to all of that, if it scares you, by going to the administration. Worst case scenario, you go to the police. You don’t stage a tribunal in front of the class.
So here we go again – D.A. Powell’s poem.
My first post about this poem is directly below this entry.
Click on the link over Powell’s name – or look at the post below – for the poem unhampered by UD’s commentary.
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coal of this unquickened world
[We've already talked about the source of this title in Philip Larkin's poem, Night-Music. But while Larkin's focus is mainly on the natural world, with subtly gathering implications for humanity, Powell's will turn out to be very personal. The coal is himself, his mind, his spirit, a dead, dull, blackened substance unable to lend itself the least bit of brightness. This is a poem about depression.]
midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
[Midnight gradually establishes itself as total blackness. The poet, let us say, sadly holds his head in his hand as one would hold an obsidian arrowhead. His bleak thoughts - painful, sharp glass is what an obsidian arrowhead amounts to - wound him.]
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last
[Notice how the word india is almost embedded in the word obsidian - the poet plays with words, with near rhymes.]
must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head
[The poet tries this and that metaphor to convey his reduction to a burned-out deadhead; his olive eyes are empty (pitted) and share the shiny inexpressive blackness of the obsidian arrowheads. His past is pitted - saturated - with black holes. These holes designate the memory hole of bitter recollections.]
dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney
[The self-hatred of the depressive. My worthless mind, once innocent as a dove and now filthy with bad thoughts and motives, blackens itself.]
this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot
[I'm nothing. Nothing special. No diamond in the rough. I'm plain old soot, animated dirt. Carbon of the lowest form.]
dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot
["A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. ... The first fullerene to be discovered, and the family's namesake, was buckminsterfullerene C60 ... The name was an homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles."]
a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above
smothering in the walrus suit,
[He describes himself as a bubble of crude covered in a walrus suit -- a ridiculous, but also catastrophic image, since - I suppose - once the bubble bursts, the oil spill will destroy the walrus. This is a very endangered, on the edge, person.]
the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke
[Well, there you go. The bubble bursts in a cloud of smoke, and the black liquid chokes the poet to death. He's blitzed.]
Notice a couple of fascinating things about Powell’s style here. Though you don’t really register it, this is an exceedingly formal poem, a fourteen-line sort of sonnet complete with end rhymes and a final couplet. You don’t register this formality because of the very loose graphic style of the poem, which plays against the tightness of its rhyme scheme. There’s no capitalization, little punctuation, and sometimes there’s just guttering unrelated words: blitzkrieg black sun choke.
These final words suggest a concluding explosive chaos, everything blown to bits; yet the hyper-controlled structure of the poem works against total disintegration…. In other words, there’s an exciting tension in a poem like this one between a content which conveys flat-out clinical melancholia, and a form which shows the creative mind working at full capacity.
