July 28th, 2016
GOP.

Flagging.

February 12th, 2016
Emergency…

pulloff.

July 15th, 2015
“The huge salaries of our FSU football coaches were recently justified by the fame and reputation the program brings to the university. Now we see how fame can become a two-edge sword.”

How we (very very slowly) learn.

***************

Here’s another one.

“Especially after spending $65 million on a stadium, it’s always hard to say, ‘We were really stupid,’ and yet that’s sometimes what a person has to do,” she said.

January 13th, 2015
“Texas Congressman Compares Obama to Hitler, Spells ‘Adolf’ Wrong”

Hile!

November 22nd, 2014
When a university’s president decides to go overseas as perhaps the most damaging story in its history explodes into a national scandal…

… she can expect some backlash.

[University of Virginia president Teresa] Sullivan’s absence has not gone unnoticed, said Katherine Schieffelin, whose daughter attends UVa.

“She should be naming the time and date to join her at the Mall to stand in solidarity for the safety of women,” Schieffelin said. “She should be encouraging all who love UVa to join her with candles and flashlights and provide a voice to those students who feel betrayed by this administration.”

When Sullivan was ousted from her post by a faction of the Board of Visitors in 2012, she enjoyed the full-throated support of protesters who demanded and helped secure her reinstatement, Schieffelin said.

“Many people fought hard with similar gestures to keep her in office and instead of releasing this whitewashed statement she should be showing outrage and passion and fire,” she said. “She should be leading.”

Sullivan asked Charlottesville police to investigate and issued a statement Wednesday before leaving the country, assuring the UVa community the school “takes seriously the issue of sexual misconduct.”

The statement was lambasted on the university’s Facebook page by hundreds of students and alumni who said Sullivan did not go far enough.

June 18th, 2013
“George Washington did not cooperate with the organization, leaving the reviewers to collect syllabuses and course requirements through unofficial channels.”

So, nu, would it have killed you to cooperate? I mean, since you didn’t cooperate (which would have meant, far as I can tell, a not-outrageous amount of work on your part), you now have two problems: You got the lowest possible ranking on a national, high-profile, ed-school ranking; and you look as though you knew what was coming so you… didn’t cooperate.

George Washington University was among the lowest-ranked programs in the country. It received this warning from the council: “No prospective teacher candidates should entrust their preparation to these programs because candidates are unlikely to obtain much return on their investment.”

Here’s some stuff about the rankings:

Released Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based advocacy group, the rankings are part of a $5 million project funded by major U.S. foundations. Education secretaries in 21 states have endorsed the report… The review was funded by 62 organizations, led by the Carnegie Corporation and the Broad Foundation. The National Council on Teacher Quality analyzed admissions standards and inspected syllabuses, textbooks and course requirements and rated 1,430 programs on a scale of zero to four stars.

What, you said we don’t have to cooperate with that fly-by-night Carnegie Corporation… ?

Isn’t the business of being in denial about how bad they are one of the big reasons many ed schools are so bad?

So now your only option is to dump on the Carnegie and the Broad and all those education secretaries… Only we know what we’re doing… They don’t know what they’re doing…

Here’s what you should have done:

The University of Michigan’s School of Education was one of the few institutions that willingly gave its materials to the National Council on Teacher Quality. “There was no particular reason not to,” said Dean Deborah Loewenberg Ball. “This is one of society’s most important topics.”

Let UD give you some advice, not that you’ll take it: Apologize for not cooperating (or at least give some reason for not having done so that doesn’t make you look dumb) and say that while you think the rating unfair, it’s one of many useful sources of criticism available to the school, and will be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, you’re going to have a bumpy pr ride for awhile, and you should be thinking in broader terms about how to manage it. One thing to do would be to publish and defend elements of your curriculum. The head of GW’s teaching program should right now (or in a few hours; it’s 4:13 AM) be preparing an opinion piece to be sent to the Washington Post which in measured terms explains and defends the school’s curriculum, admissions philosophy, etc.

UD will now check out GW’s teacher training curriculum. She’s happy to speculate about what might have set off the Council.

**********************************

UPDATE: The Washington Post is scathing:

The council’s methodology was developed over eight years, relying on a review of course descriptions, syllabuses, student-teacher observation instruments and other materials. It came under immediate attack as incomplete and inaccurate from institutions of higher education. Such criticism is rich considering that many of these same institutions fought tooth and nail to keep materials from researchers. “Tremendously uncooperative” is how Kate Walsh, president of the council, described many institutions, which refused to share textbooks or course descriptions. The council had to file open-records requests; many private institutions that are not subject to Freedom of Information requirements opted out. What were they trying to hide?

May 5th, 2013
‘”That’s what happens when you build glass boxes in climates like this. They are not sustainable,” said Spiric.’

From the mouths of babes.

Architecture students at the University of Arizona rebuke the fancy eco-architects who built the 2007 extension to their old and – compared to the new glass architecture building – reasonably sustainable brick architecture school building.

It’s some kind of best-laid green plans fable for our times that, as Tom Beal writes in the Arizona Daily Star

The 2007 glass-and-steel addition to the UA College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture – promoted by the university as “a laboratory for sustainable practices” – is one of the biggest energy wasters on campus.

In its first year of operation, it used four times the energy of the comparably sized brick building to which it is attached. Its glass walls and unshaded, exterior cooling ducts, combined with design changes made to save money during its construction, make it difficult to heat and cool efficiently.

A “green wall,” designed to shade the building’s south side, has yet to grow.

The Tucson heat, seasonal glare, reflected light and noise from traffic on East Speedway blast through its north-facing glass walls. Students say the glare can be irritating and disorienting.

Well yes, glass buildings in Tucson… Of course, they can be made energy efficient, but a lot of things have to work. Like that green wall…

“It was a great idea and it’s worked in other places, and I’ll be damned if I can explain why those vines struggle,” said [the building’s architect].

The building’s architect claims that eco-considerations were not foremost in the building’s planning, but the article featuring his work on the extension (and based, one assumes, on an interview with him) touts eco stuff first thing.

There is a kind of pedagogical genius to the building.

In a sense, the building is living up to its description as “a working laboratory for sustainable practices.”

Master’s in architecture candidate David Tapia Takaki said it is providing plenty of problems for the students to fix.

*************************

Add noise pollution to its other problems.

One of the big problems on the north edge is traffic noise, said [a student]. “It’s the cars on Speedway. If you are there one or two hours, you will not notice, but stay there all day and it can give you headaches.”

The Speedway! Named America’s ugliest street some decades ago, it remains a noisy thoroughfare.

*************************

All in all, an embarrassment.

May 11th, 2012
Over profound student protest…

… the chancellor of Syracuse University had Jamie Dimon give the 2010 commencement address. She defended her decision by saying:

It is rare that a university is able to bring a speaker with a birds-eye view of, and extensive on-the-ground experience with, a major global challenge.

Now that Dimon’s irresponsibility has produced a globally destructive two billion dollar loss at his massive bank, UD thinks it’s time for Chancellor Cantor to invite him back. Thanks to her, Syracuse already has the distinction of having been the only American university to honor this man in this way; and if her criterion for the choice of speaker continues to be someone who has immediate experiences of major global challenges, the choice of Dimon is better than ever. His bank has just created a major global challenge.

Maybe she should have invited Simon Johnson instead. He certainly had useful things to tell her.

Meanwhile, Syracuse can take pride in the fact that it did its small bit to encourage Jamie Dimon to “preen and flash along … until [his] hubris causes the next [financial] disaster.”

May 3rd, 2012
First, apply your Aristotle primer.

Other law enforcement officials who have received ethics training through Hopkins described it as largely classroom-based — and intense. The classes begin with a foundation in ethics, including a primer on Aristotle, then move on to modern applications of those ancient lessons.

Johns Hopkins University is teaching Secret Service guys not to fuck prostitutes.

—————–

UD thanks David.

May 2nd, 2012
“Everything depends on which ‘nothing’ you are talking about.”

I suppose it’s all, at bottom, a category error; but UD is enjoying following the Krauss/Albert fulminating dust-up about science and philosophy.

I’ll admit I’ve never gotten far beyond scaring myself when thinking with any depth about why there’s something rather than nothing…

Not really scaring myself… Feeling very sharply the impossibility of moving my mind to the cosmological back-of-beyond.

As a literary type, though, I’ve loved nothingness poems and prose all my life. I’ve loved writing that captures the conviction and the feeling all thoughtful people occasionally have, that – in the words of Leopold Bloom, struck down for a moment in a Dublin pub by absolute nihilism – no one is anything. Everything depends on the nothing you are talking about, and I’m not talking about the nothingness that a field without particles might represent; I’m talking about the “death in the soul” Albert Camus felt in Prague. What Don DeLillo in Libra imagines Lee Harvey Oswald feeling in Texas:

He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down.

What James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, felt, also on a Sunday, in Alabama:

… the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south… nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth…

In my next Faculty Project Lecture, I’m talking about three great nothingness poems – Auden’s Brussels in Winter, and Larkin’s Absences, as well as his Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel. And of course there’s Elizabeth Bishop’s Cape Breton.

I find a curious reassurance in these evocations of … psychic vastation? What to call it without sounding pretentious, ponderous? Everyone laughs when people say things like If you remember the ‘sixties, you weren’t there. But, you know, the business of not being there… that sense of suspension from yourself, the world, everything… It feels like a serious business, one with insights in it that might compete with quantum field theory.

April 4th, 2012
Those with a taste for the details of how…

… America’s top college students are nihilized into the power elite will recall Walter Kirn’s classic Lost in the Meritocracy, where he chronicled his transformation from an earnest person who loved literature to “the system’s pure product, clever and adaptable, not so much educated as wised-up.” At Princeton, he learned to hone

more-marketable skills: for flattering those in authority without appearing to, for ranking artistic reputations according to the latest academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the background of my listener, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” work of “literature,” for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if the consensus changed.

Now there’s this year’s account of the ‘“intoxicating nihilism” that dominates campus social life’ at another corporate feeder.

At the sports factories, it’s one-and-done. In the higher precincts, it’s four-and-whore.

April 4th, 2012
Annales d’histoire

“I was just reading something last night from the state of California that … seven or eight of the California system of universities don’t even teach an American history course [Rick Santorum said at a campaign stop]. It’s not even available to be taught.”

MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow on her Monday broadcast called the Santorum statement “100 percent untrue” and “hysterically wrong.”

She then read from the University of California, Davis, course calendar naming several courses from the Davis catalog and the classes’ instructors.

Courses include “History of the United States,” “The Gilded Age and Progressive Era” and “War, Prosperity and Depression, 1917-1945.”

Davis officials said they were pleased with the unexpected exposure.

“We were thrilled that a national TV audience was able to see the breadth of our course offerings in a very important subject,” UC Davis spokesman Barry Shiller said Tuesday.

All campuses teach multiple American history courses.

March 16th, 2012
“Investigators found that Leite had completed sexual-harassment training three times in recent years, but she told the university she was unaware her actions were wrong.”

LOL.

January 12th, 2012
“It is time to start considering options to antidepressants.”

Hey. New year and all. You’re going to read tons of these articles and opinion pieces in 2012, as the evidence pours in about placebos. The other side has all the money and will keep bombarding you with ads, just the way do-nothing, charge-everything for-profit online schools do. Resolve to think seriously about these come-ons.

October 5th, 2011
Gotcha.

A young mountain lion sleeping in a tree on the University of Colorado campus has been captured and “will be fitted with a collar and become part of the Front Range Mountain Lion Study.”

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