You do want to know? Okay, read these two pages (scroll down).

And now for an update, from a student writing in CMU’s campus newspaper.

[Virtually no spectators showing up for football games] is not exclusively a CMU problem. It’s the exact same problem that many other trivial Mid-American Conference schools face.

… The reported attendance at the CMU-WMU game was 10,097 people. By hand, I counted 255 people on the east side of the stadium at the end of the first quarter.

UD‘s very fond of a statement from CMU’s 2014 athletic director.

“Does it matter if you have no one at your game, or 15,000, or 110,000?” Heeke asked. “Does that somehow deem [sic] that you shouldn’t play football at this school because you can’t reach 15,000? [Like a lot of schools, CMU fudges like mad to pretend to the NCAA that it meets the minimal attendance standard.] If the school makes the decision to play football, why should it matter? It’s their decision how they want to manage the game and what they think their expectation is and what makes it a viable program.”

Does it matter that CMU paid this guy – Heeke – $300,000 a year when he made that statement? Does it matter that a public university runs an expensive and totally invisible football program? Does it matter that it has no one at its games? No! If the good people of Michigan, if CMU students and their parents, want to fund a bunch of guys (most of whom aren’t real CMU students) throwing a ball around in a huge pricey stadium GO FOR IT. We all know the state of Michigan’s so rich it doesn’t know what to do with its money.

A perennial jockshop joke on this blog, CMU is shutting down the academic apparatus of the school to put on football games no one attends. Faculty is too expensive there, which creates a drag on the school’s sports subsidy.

Explaining this to professors and students in an open forum is certainly a challenge, but UD finds CMU’s approach to it impressive and instructive (pay attention, Rutgers).

1. Provide a safe house for the president [“CMU President George Ross was not in attendance.”]. A popular variant of this is to have the president attend, but be sure she has just been appointed the most recent of twelve or so interim presidents in the last three or four years. This allows the president to be there, but to explain in answer to all questions that she doesn’t know anything.

2. In their answer to all questions, administrators in charge of the public meeting must never use the phrase “student education,” and instead always use the phrase “student experience.” The adjectives holistic, organic, comprehensive, all-around, full, multifaceted, diverse and community may precede the phrase.

3. Constant references to the infinite delicate complexity of the budget are a must; the audience must be made to understand that a vanished faculty and behemoth empty stadiums and a president who presides over this outcome always getting raises are all, according to the math, budget imperatives that keep the university in glowing health.

Desolation is too abstract. UD realizes this. UD realizes that outside of this blog you are never going to encounter a list of America’s most and least desolate universities. You will find Best Dorms, Worst Faculty – that sort of thing. But desolation… an atmosphere of sorrow and lostness… an air of wreckage and ruination…

After covering CMU for years (here are her CMU posts), and taking into account the latest news story out of that campus, UD has concluded that nowhere else among this country’s many colleges and universities are you going to find the intensity of drunken depressed spiritlessness that you will at CMU.

I mean, what part of this account of a CMU environmental studies professor who shot at two vacuum cleaner salesmen is not desolate and desolating? It’s pretty sad to contemplate being traveling vacuum salesmen making cold calls. It’s also sad to contemplate their ringing the bell at a home inhabited by an inebriated (the professor’s five charges include possession of a firearm while under the influence) professor waiting to empty his shotgun into whoever appears on his property.

This story is Desolate Meets Desolate, and the outcome of their meeting displays the seriocomic Surreal America theme of every Thomas Pynchon novel you’ve ever read. Booze, gunplay, farce, desperate escapes in trucks crammed with vacuum cleaners… This is CMU.

From Central Michigan Life:

“We as professors need to be flexible with electronic usage i[n] the classroom,” [Central Michigan University journalism professor Mary Pat Lichtman] said. “But there needs to be cooperation from the students.”

Lichtman said college should be treated as a job with professors as students’ employers, and added that if students wouldn’t text in a meeting they shouldn’t do it in the classroom either.

… is one of UD‘s favorite (translated) literary titles; despite its sad content, the words themselves have a lilting poetic something (say them out loud a few times), with their thrice-invoked or…er…or…

And everyone knows that sorrow is a beautiful word, sounding the dignity of its emotion in its soft open letters. Give a title sorrow and watch it soar: I Am a Maid of Constant Sorrow. The Sorrow and the Pity. The Sorrows of Young Werther. The Sorrow of Love. Infant Sorrow.

Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart.

Every bond is a bond to sorrow.

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UD often thinks of Disorder and Early Sorrow as she follows our collegiate football players into the big leagues. Plenty of them escape disorder and early sorrow, but some do not, as the media’s current disordered darling, Antonio Brown, abundantly demonstrates. A non-graduate of appalling (feast your eyes) Central Michigan University, the man is an absolutely brilliant athlete. Tens of millions of dollars in professional contracts have been thrown at him, and he’s pissed virtually every cent of it away. These two commentators may disagree about whether he should be allowed to keep playing football, but they seem to agree that something’s wrong with the guy’s brain.

And yet, and yet. This writer notes that in one of Brown’s many rageful Trumplike tweets he makes “an interesting point.” Brown bitches that our old friend Richie Incognito remains in the game even though he appears to be violently demented; why shouldn’t Brown, who rolls the same way, continue to play? “AB is not wrong, is something I never thought I’d say. It was absolutely confounding when the Raiders signed Richie Incognito…”

…or call it a philosophy…

As university students abandon football, coaches and presidents have at the very least a rhetorical problem. They will never of course drop football, because they can always make a profit sending their players out to play one massively losing game after another for the money. On the other hand, the fact that, for instance, at Central Michigan University, “[o]nly 102 students attended the last home game against Eastern Michigan,” does sort of need to be dealt with. The stadium’s capacity is 30,199. That was a home game.

So, you know, some new philosophy, some new rhetoric, some new position-taking is going to have to happen in response to – uh – queries about this situation. Here’s the CMU athletic director (salary: close to $300,000 a year):

“Does it matter if you have no one at your game, or 15,000, or 110,000?” Heeke asked. “Does that somehow deem [sic] that you shouldn’t play football at this school because you can’t reach 15,000? [Like a lot of schools, CMU fudges like mad to pretend to the NCAA that it meets the minimal attendance standard.] If the school makes the decision to play football, why should it matter? It’s their decision how they want to manage the game and what they think their expectation is and what makes it a viable program.”

See, to UD, this is where things start to get interesting on the American university campus. This is where there’s suddenly an intellectually generative convergence between things like philosophy and literature – as in those famous lines at the end of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” –

… the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

– and the sports program. These are difficult, paradoxical lines, easily seen, now, as expressing what you see when you look at the nothing that is Kelly/Shorts stadium.

What does it matter, asks the AD, if there is nothing?

If a quarterback falls in Kelly/Shorts, does it make any sound?

Discuss.

Readers who have followed my coverage of hapless Central Michigan University will be unsurprised by this headline in the school’s newspaper:

OTHER STATE UNIVERSITIES ARE FLOURISHING; WHAT’S WRONG WITH US?

(My headline is from the article’s comment thread.)

It’s not just those huge athletic deficits – the product of years of all-American asininity about the glories of football… oh, here’s another post about the glories of CMU football… It’s also about a truly pathetic board of trustees… a pass-the-buck president… And a general no-one’s-home aspect to the place. Of course students are beginning to notice.

Central Michigan University (go here – scroll down – if you have the stomach) is a Division I unibrewery with a losing team. The only fiscal solution to this problem is full-throttle student bacchanalia in the parking lots of games no one attends. The presidents of div I unibreweries spend most their time tweaking alcohol policies with an eye to two things:

1. maximum consumption; and

2. the mobilization of personal responsibility rhetoric.

And some, ol’ UD can’t help concluding, are just spectacularly, consistently, shockingly, stupid. You sort of feel as though they mean well, and that they have a shaky though sincere sense of what a university is… sort of… And that if you met the folks in the administration you’d say Hale fellow well met! and definitely enjoy the sincere handshake this person would offer.

But one of the trustees holds a diploma mill degree and anyway many of them never show up for meetings… And there’s just a general sense of malaise because they don’t have funds to pay faculty much of anything but they have ten million dollars to give to a new sports arena, only they lie about taking that money from university funds… until they can’t lie anymore because a local journalist won’t let them… and the new president (stupid universities have major president-turnover) instead of saying all the serious and good things he could say by way of acknowledging and trying to right things, etc., says Hey don’t look at me I just got here!

There’s just a no one’s home, not much going on upstairs feel to places like Central Michigan University… a laxity… as in that Dickinson poem… first chill, then stupor, then the letting go…

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

UPDATE: There are two detailed comments from CMU faculty members on this post’s comment thread. Take a look.

She doesn’t even have a job to go to. But Dr. Marilyn French Hubbard (she has no right to the Dr. title, having picked it up at a diploma mill, The American Institute of Holistic Theology) can’t seem to be there for Central Michigan University trustee meetings — and she’s vice-chair of the trustees.

And that’s just the beginning. Student editors at CMU’s paper want to know about another trustee, Gail Torreano:

Thursday’s Board of Trustees meeting was the second of the last four that Trustee Gail Torreano has not attended.

Such a record is detrimental to improving Central Michigan University, especially in a time of vital transition and economic uncertainty.

As such, Torreano should respectfully consider resigning from her position on the Board.

… How can the public take Torreano seriously if she is incapable of showing up to meetings that are planned months in advance?

… With the exception of 2009, members of the board only have to attend five meetings a year, all of which are scheduled far in advance.

If she cannot come to the majority of meetings, she should not be part of the important decision-making the Trustees are responsible for.

… Aside from Torreano, the attendance at Thursday’s board meeting was fair, at best.

Trustee Marilyn French Hubbard was available via conference call.

She spoke only to give her consent when votes were taken and did not contribute at all to discussion.

Even Trustee John Hurd left a few minutes early, so only four members were physically there until the end.

And this, only days before a new president comes on board.

Why was attendance this weak for a Trustees meeting?

This is supposed to be CMU’s governing body, the people who have the last say on any major decision at the fourth largest institution of higher education in the state.

Family emergencies and other similarly important matters are excusable, but not much else.

CMU doesn’t need trustees who are absent when they are called upon. Students are expected to be responsible for themselves. The Board of Trustees should do the same.

Really, even by board of trustees standards (UD has learned, in the writing of this blog, just how low these can be), CMU’s lot is disgraceful.

Since I’m following the faculty plagiarism case at Central Michigan University, I’m checking the local paper, where I just found this letter, from an ed student there:

Having been a student involved in the secondary education math program, I feel as though I should express my frustrations with those leading me in my schooling.

To graduate with a degree in secondary mathematics, one must take a series of cohorts that covers various math topics. While one going into the teaching field would expect to be taught various strategies and approaches to teaching math, this was not the case in several of these classes.

Throughout my course of study, I learned how to use the N-Spire, an expensive calculator that my professors expect administrators and math teachers to incorporate into the curriculum. I felt as though I was being taught to use an expensive piece of equipment to market to my future employers.

While I was not pleased with the education I was paying for, I kept my mouth shut because my professors stressed the importance of students being able to explore mathematics using tools such as the N-Spire.

They constantly reassured us that what we were learning was based on research that proved that this calculator is a crucial tool for learning through exploration…

The student concludes by complaining about the faculty plagiarists… I think. It’s a badly written letter. Very confusing. But it’s obviously got something to do with the multiple, still-anonymous plagiarists on the math faculty.

As UD scrutinized the letter, it seemed to her that the student was complaining about the commercialization of CMU’s classrooms. She seemed to be saying that, like medical school professors who in various ways hawk pharma’s newest pills to their students, some education school professors at her university turn their classrooms into extended advertising for devices a corporation is hoping Michigan’s teachers will buy for their classrooms.

So UD went here, to a page featuring Dennis St. John, one of the math professors listed on the plagiarized NSF grant.

This page, announcing a course featuring N-Spire and sponsored by its maker, Texas Instruments (you can register for the course through TI’s website), is offered at an off-campus location, but is a CMU course… St. John is pretty much described as a TI salesman:

He has presented workshops and institutes for Texas Instruments for the past twelve years. He … has published numerous activities and one book with Texas Instruments…

What’s going on?

We’ve recently seen two math professors at Central Michigan University (whoever they are; the school won’t say) plagiarize both their NSF grant application and research conducted in their project itself. CMU must now repay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the NSF.

Now there’s the Auckland University English professor who cut and pasted his way through his latest novel (and probably did something similar in earlier novels, though no one, far as UD knows, has checked):

Plagiarism was revealed in Witi Ihimaera’s newest novel when a book reviewer googled phrases from The Trowenna Sea.

… In her blog, Jolisa Gracewood said that while reading the novel, she had a feeling something was not right with parts of the text.

“Google was my first port of call – it turns out that Google Books is bad news for authors, in at least one more way than previously suspected …”

However, there was “no joy” in stumbling across 16 examples … [The author’s university department forgave him immediately, calling sixteen examples of plagiarism from a variety of sources ‘an oversight.’]

Gracewood said that as a writing teacher, “I’d occasionally come across a phrase or a paragraph that was somehow out of kilter with the surrounding text. It’s a curiously physical phenomenon: the hairs on the back of your neck go up, and your heart sinks.

“Sometimes it’s a false alarm,” she said. “But I never expected to encounter that feeling as a book reviewer, let alone with a new work by a respected writer.”

Ihimaera, a professor at Auckland University, declined to be interviewed, but he apologised for “inadvertently” using other authors’ work [in sixteen inadvertent instances].

… Listener examples of Trowenna passages put to Ihimaera include paragraphs from author and journalist Peter Godwin, American academic Karen Sinclair and works edited by Charles Dickens.

“The tragedy is that this is a very, very fine piece of New Zealand fiction,” he said. [Tragedy. Sniff.]

“It deserves to be read and it’s a terrible shame that this has happened.” [Not that he did this. That this happened.]

It wasn’t really, as Gracewood graciously claims, Google Books that outed this man. It was Gracewood’s impressive sense of prose — the way style always displays the mark, subtle or not, of one person only; the way language flows or doesn’t flow — that revealed this imposter of a book.

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

Update: Commentary in the New Zealand Herald:

… What is curious is the attitude of the university. The Dean of Arts, Jan Crosthwaite, says the university has investigated “and is satisfied there was no deliberate wrong doing”.

Excuse me? How do you plagiarise in a way that is not deliberate? How do you plagiarise by accident? If you have plagiarised, presumably you had the other author’s work next to you as you typed, knowing you were using another person’s sentences. How do you do that unconsciously?…

Pretending it didn’t happen is the sort of thing a very provincial university will do.

Someone should check through this professor’s other books. UD is pretty confident, having followed tons of plagiarism cases on this blog, that he’s done it before.

If so, it will be amusing to watch his university immediately dismiss, say, five books worth of plagiarism as inadvertent.

… the Central Michigan University math professors not guilty of plagiarizing a grant they took part in have begun to identify themselves.

One of the seven mathematics faculty members listed on the original National Science Foundation proposal that was found to be plagiarized confirmed she did not participate in writing the proposal.

Mathematics associate professor Lisa DeMeyer was one of the seven faculty members on the investigative staff for the grant proposal and was a senior staff member on the project.

She said in a letter e-mailed to Central Michigan Life she did not participate in writing the grant proposal.

“I assisted the co-principal investigators developing course materials, that was going to be my job but the project was stopped before the work was complete,“ DeMeyer said…

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

Update: The plagiarists have been revealed: Manouchehri — now sharing her gifts with another university, Ohio State — and Lapp.

Manouchehri, now a professor at Ohio State University, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

You bet.

Her winning grant proposal to the NSF was plagiarized, as was its research. The school she just left, Central Michigan University, has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars back to the NSF, and, as one faculty member put it:

“We are under budget constraints, and this is a lot of money… I’m concerned that colleagues of mine committed what is a major breach of academic integrity. We tell our students all the time that they shouldn’t plagiarize in their papers, and here we have colleagues who should know better.”

Now at Ohio State she lists on her webpage cv the very grant.

2005-2007, Co-PI (with Douglas Lapp): CONCEPT: CONnecting Content and Pedagogical preparation of Teachers. National Science Foundation.

Here she is. Ohio State’s picked a winner.

Central Michigan University’s newspaper says many important things about PowerPoint use in the classroom. The article is very strong, but the student comment AFTER the article is even stronger.

Let’s take a look.

For Robert Bailey, using PowerPoint slides for his class lectures hinder a student’s learning capabilities.

Bailey, a professor of biology, teaches three entry-level biology courses and said he tries to keep PowerPoint use to a minimum.

“I used anywhere from 30 to 50 slides per class when I first started teaching and would give students print versions of the slides, but it didn’t take long for attendance to come down,” he said. “Before Thanksgiving break one year, only 10 students showed up for our final unit on human genetics. I knew I had to do something.”   [Point One, among many obvious points: Provide the same information online and students won’t come to class. UD is absolutely certain there are professors who welcome this outcome. Most do not.]

Bailey said students cannot seem to decide what is important from a PowerPoint presentation and think everything posted is golden.

“It’s convenient to use PowerPoint slides for large lecture classes, but students get caught up in trying to write everything down and spend their time writing instead of listening,” he said.   [Point Two, equally obvious: Too much information. The student who comments below will elaborate on the point.]

It can be useful, however.

“We just need to remember that less is more. Slides should contain the most useful information. I try not showing more than 10 slides per class. I believe active, not passive, learning is the most beneficial,” Bailey said. “By active learning, I mean group interaction, where we all can get a better understanding of what the issues are and solve them.”   [Point Three, yet more obvious. Turn people into confused sheeplike herds and they’re unlikely to learn anything.]

… [S]ophomore Brett McMahon said he does not like when PowerPoint slides are used in his classes.

“I like when teachers physically write on the board what they feel we need to know. PowerPoint presentations don’t make classes harder, just confusing. I never know what to write down and how much,” he said… [Point Four: Not only some discussion is crucial; clear signals about what the professor considers important to know are crucial. The things we go to the trouble of writing on the board with our very own fingers are the important things, not the twelve bullet points some book has provided for your slide. Physically writing on the board is also letting the students watch the professor’s brain operate right there in front of them. PowerPoint of course makes professors just as passive as it makes students.  Everyone reads off of a nice neat packaged page. Writing on the board is messy, human, dynamic — thought in motion. Active.]

[F]reshman Erika Schrand said knowing what to copy is easier when professors write directly on the board.

“Sometimes teachers put too much information on the slides and I can’t sort what is important from all the other excess information,” she said.

[Now to the comment.]

One Response to “Some CMU faculty moving away from PowerPoint presentations in classroom”

Antonio says:

Professors trying to use Powerpoint for their lectures has been my biggest pet-peeve while attending CMU. It’s a waste of paper, ink, and time, and only increases tuition to cover the cost of the paper and ink wasted when students print out full slides of black background presentations.

No offense to the professors, as I’ve had many great ones over the years, but I’ve never had a professor who provided notes correctly by use of a computer. (Ok, maybe one). Most of the time, the idea of outline organization has been non-existent.

I do realize professional seminars and events such as TED seminars often use Powerpoints, but the environments there are completely different than a classroom.

To the professors: Anyone can remember and regurgitate information given to us on pre-made Powerpoint presentations, but if it’s information we could have critically and actively filtered through while simply listening to you speak, why make a Powerpoint for it? Why not just give us the ideas and concepts you want us to understand without dividing our attention away from listening to instead focusing on a big projector with the SAME thing you just said, just in different wording?

This makes even less sense when you take into account how much professors usually dislike all the new technology, anyway. Why give us Powerpoint notes, base exams solely on those notes, and then mark us down for not coming to class? What do you honestly expect to come of that?

The only bigger interest killer I’ve seen is when professors spend 5-10 minutes trying to project a piece of paper that everyone already has. Why do we need to see it in two different places? We know how to follow along.

Contrary to popular belief, it is very possible to give a lecture without all these external visual aids. Every time a new semester begins, or there is some problem with the computer network, up to 5-10 minutes or more is wasted trying to figure out the technology, and if it doesn’t work, the professor acts like he/she doesn’t know what to do. For some reason, it seems academic administrations have forgotten the simple tool of speaking outward to a classroom without all this technology mumbo jumbo.

Conclusion: Step away from trying to fumble with the technology and tell us what you want us to know. If the technology is absolutely necessary for your lecture, figure it out beforehand instead of during class time.

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

Teach us something.

Speak to us.

Outwardly.

BE.

THERE.

NOW.