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Friday, December 31, 2004
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From "The Stream"
By Mona Van Duyn, 1921 - 2004 What is love? Truly I do not know. Sometimes, perhaps, instead of a great sea, It is a narrow stream running urgently far below ground, held down by rocky layers, the deeds of mother and father, helpless sooth-sayers of how our life is to be, weighted by clay, the dense pressure of thwarted needs, the replay of old misreadings, by hundreds of feet of soil, the gifts and wounds of the genes, the short or tall shape of our possibilities, seeking and seeking a way to the top, while above, running and stumbling this way and that on the clueless ground, another seeker clutches a dowsing-wand which bends, then lifts, dips, then straightens, everywhere, saying to the dowser, it is there, it is not there, and the untaught dowser believes, does not believe, and finally simply stands on the ground above, till a sliver of stream finds a crack and makes its way, slowly, too slowly, through rock and earth and clay. Here at my feet I see, after sixty years, the welling water - to which I add these tears. |
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This Seemed About Right
For UD's First Official Story of the New Year. Jan 1, 2005 THE TAMPA TRIBUNE TWISTED ARMS, TWISTED EGOS, TWISTED POLITICS By DANIEL RUTH This is what happens when a bunch of pols get their egos out of joint. You, gentle taxpayer, wind up having your wallet - manipulated. Last year, before the 2004 Florida legislative session, Gov. Jeb Bush found himself in something of a pickle wrapped in a kerfuffle shrouded in a narcissist. For running the Florida House was none other than Speaker Johnnie Byrd, a walking series of unfortunate events. Byrd was eager to accomplish two missions during the session: 1) secure funding for his vanity Alzheimer's research institute at the University of South Florida and 2) wrap up business as soon as possible so he could hit the stump in his delusional and doomed bid to become a U.S. senator. Aside from MacLean Stevenson walking away from ``M-A-S-H,'' never has a man been in more of a hurry to become irrelevant. Prideful Pork Enter then-Senate President Jim King, who regarded Byrd with all the respect and affection of former President George H.W. Bush contemplating a head of broccoli. But King also knew he had leverage over the speaker. If Byrd wanted his vainglorious Alzheimer's center, then King insisted his own stocking be stuffed with a chiropractic school at his beloved Florida State University. There in the middle was the governor, not wanting yet another acrimonious and protracted legislative session during a presidential election year. Ergo Byrd got his Alzheimer's institute and, in the process, Bush promised not to veto the $9 million-a-year-in- perpetuity appropriation for King's equally dubious chiropractic school at FSU. So much for staunch conservative fiscal principles. So much for principles. Ah, but there was an itsy- bitsy problem with King's prideful piece of pork: Nobody ever bothered to ask either the pooh-bahs who run FSU or the state's Board of Governors whether they wanted and/or needed a chiropractic school in Tallahassee. Scrap Metal Ooooooooops. Up to a point, it's understandable why Bush, Byrd and King never thought to consult with the Board of Governors. After all, the Vichy Government was more uppity than this gaggle of political appointees. But even this collection of Muppets has gotten its dander up over being so publicly dissed by the governor and the Legislature in funding a taxpayer-supported school before the board even approved the proposal. For that matter, the Board of Governors, which heretofore had made lemmings look downright Pattonesque, also never was consulted on Byrd's $15 million-a-year conceit. But wait! It gets even more deliciously muddled. Apparently the stethoscopes at the FSU medical school are about as thrilled at having chiropractors entering their hallowed midst as Barry Bonds in discovering he's been elected the International Association of Asterisks Man of the Year. Aside from the fact that haughty medical doctors view chiropractors as little more than bone-twisting World Wrestling Federation refugees in white coats, an argument is being made that we need more chiropractors about as much as Fallujah needs more scrap metal. Indeed, in the Tampa phone directory alone there are nearly 200 listings for chiropractors, which either means we do in fact have perhaps too many chiropractors or whiplash is contagious. The Board of Governors, emboldened with all the fierce independence of Paris Hilton's Chihuahua, will meet Jan. 27 to ponder the future of the FSU Jeb Bush/ Jim King School of Chiropractic Medicine. Of course, the program will be approved if only to provide treatment for all those twisted arms, headlocks and broken kneecaps. |
Thursday, December 30, 2004
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A LOVELY YEAR-END HOLIDAY LETTER TO FRIENDS,
WRITTEN BY UD'S FELLOW BETHESDAN, NEW REPUBLIC WRITER GREGG EASTERBOOK. DAILY EXPRESS LETTER PERFECT by Gregg Easterbrook Only at TNR Online Post date: 12.20.04 " Dear Family and Friends, What a lucky break that I'm in first-class on the plane back from Istanbul, because there's room to take out the laptop and write our annual Christmas letter. My brand-new laptop receives wireless satellite Internet from anywhere in the world. While I was at the board of directors session during the Danube cruise, I pretended to be listening to the chairman but actually was using the laptop to watch Emily's oboe recital on live streaming video from Chad's digital minicam! So the world really is growing smaller. And if you haven't gotten one of these new laptops, you should. Of course, now there's a waiting list. It's been another utterly hectic year, and yet nurturing and horizon-expanding. It's hard to know where the time goes. Well, a lot of it is spent in the car. Already Rachel is in her senior year at Pinnacle-Upon-Hilltop Academy, and it seems like just yesterday she was being pushed around in the stroller by our British nanny. Rachel placed first this fall in the state operatic arias competition. Chad was skeptical when I proposed hiring a live-in voice tutor on leave from the Lyric Opera, but it sure paid off! Rachel's girls' volleyball team lost in the semifinals owing to totally unfair officiating, but as I have told her, she must learn to overcome incredible hardship in life. Now the Big Decision looms, and that is whether to take the early admission offer she has from Harvard or wait till she hears about Julliard. She is just a wreck about that; girls her age should not have to make such high-pressure choices! The whole back of her Mercedes SUV is full of advanced-dance brochures as she tries to decide. Nicholas is his same old self, juggling the karate lessons--he doesn't tell the other boys he is a Yodan fourth-degree black belt so he won't frighten them--plus basketball, soccer, French horn, debate club, archeology field trips, poetry-writing classes, and his volunteer work. Yodan usually requires nine years of training after the Shodan belt, but prodigies can do it faster, especially if (not that I believe this!) they are reincarnated deities. Doing the clothing-advertising modeling for the Gap cuts into Nick's schoolwork time, but how could I deprive others of the chance to see him? His summer with Outward Bound in the Andes was a big thrill, especially when all the expert guides became disoriented and he had to lead the party out. But you probably read about that in the newspapers. What can I say regarding our Emily? She's just been reclassified again, now as EVVSUG&T--"extremely very very super ultra gifted and talented." The preschool has retained a fulltime special-needs teacher solely to keep her challenged: Educational institutions are not allowed to discriminate against the gifted anymore, not like when I was young. Yesterday Rachel sold her first still-life. It was shown on consignment at the leading gallery without, of course, the age of the artist disclosed. The buyers were thrilled when they learned! Then there was the arrival of our purebred puppy, and the issue of what to name him. Because our family mission statement lists cultural diversity as a core value, we settled on Mandela. Chad continues to prosper and blossom now that he has gone freelance. He works a few hours a day, spends the rest of the time with the children or restoring the house--the National Trust for Historic Preservation rules are quite strict--or supervising the maids. Whose Social Security taxes we pay, not that they ever say "gracias." (I write "maids," plural, because can you hold onto to one of these women more than a month? We can't!) Corporate denial consulting turns out to be a perfect career niche for Chad. Fortune 500 companies are calling him all the time. There's a lot to deny and Chad is good at it. Me? Oh, I do this and that. I feel myself growing and flowering as a change agent. I yearn to empower the stakeholders. And this year I made senior partner, plus cashed out 825,000 stock options. I was sorry I had to let Carmen go on the same day I brought home the $14.6 million, but she had broken a Flora Danica platter and used the main house phone line for personal calls, something about a sick child! Chad and I got away for a week for a simple celebration of my promotion. We rented this charming, quaint five-star villa on the Corsican coast. Just to ourselves--we bought out all 40 rooms so it would be quiet and contemplative. Our family looks to the New Year as a continued opportunity for rejuvenation and enrichment. Chad and I will be taking the children to Steamboat Springs over spring break, then in June I take the girls to Paris, Rome, and Seville while he accompanies Nicholas to another international tournament in Copenhagen. He swears he never looks at the blonds! Then the kids are off to their camps in Maine and before we know it we will be packing two cars to drive Rachel's things to college. And of course I don't count Davos or Sundance or all the routine excursions. I hope your year has been as interesting as ours. Love, Jennifer, Chad, Rachel, Nicholas, Emily & Mandela (paw-print) " |
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FOLLOWUP or TRACKBACK or Whatever One Calls It
To the UD Post Directly Below, Titled 'THE AILING OLD BOWL.' The blog Cold Spring Shops, which UD has always liked, and whose attentions to UD lately she finds gratifying, worries that "The Ailing Old Bowl," a poem UD wrote this morning, indicates a certain falling off in UD's blogskills. "I fear," writes Cold Spring, "that University Diaries has jumped the shark." UD ran to Google when she read this, for she hadn't the slightest idea what "jumped the shark" meant, and she's still a bit vague, though she gathers the idea is that in a desperate bid for attention she wrote something over the top. This may be, but UD wishes to point out that the poem attempts to be a faithful verse transcription of someone else's argument about the college bowl system. The poem is not written from UD's point of view, but from the Washington Post writer's point of view. UD's position on the matter is less, er, jumpy. |
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THE AILING OLD BOWL
[UD makes a poem out of an article in yesterday's Washington Post] For I considered the frailty of the system: That a field goal kicked by a schoolboy is worth fourteen million; That the ill-gotten Bowl won’t send a penny to tsunami victims. And once my queasiness at 93 million in payouts subsided, I wracked my airy little head and decided. Congress should not be soothed, or fooled Into considering the big football schools Some sort of academic endeavor. For they are of corruption a sewer, A sculptured and blazered buffet, A vote-swapping, kickbacking, cash-grabbing trophy Scheme without a single redeeming quality. Their hoarded revenues, I thought, should go to charity. For I considered the system, and its frailty. |
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
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15,000 books and no television set …
… that’s what the inside of Susan Sontag’s New York apartment looked like. It’s hard enough to imagine an American interior with no televisions; it’s much harder to imagine an American space with so many books. But Sontag was more European - high modernist European, at that - than American, UD thinks. Sontag complained, in “Against Interpretation,” that American culture “is based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness -- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities … that the task of the critic must be assessed.” Forty years later, our strongest novelist, Don DeLillo, writes about the “narcotic undertow” of the televisions his characters watch all day and all night. More than ever, critics should, if Sontag is right, awaken and excite our deeply sedated senses so that we can see the world more clearly. Sontag’s work, now subject to fresh reading because of her death, stands as a timely rebuke to much of what’s happening at the meeting of literary critics now wrapping up in Philadelphia. Sontag’s attack on content-driven interpretation, which “poisons our sensibilities … like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere,” targets the deadly ideologies of her day - Freudianism, Marxism - but describes equally well the prevailing race/class/gender industrial zone. Sontag mentions Randall Jarrell's essay on Walt Whitman as an exemplar of the sort of criticism that “suppl[ies] a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art.” Jarrell’s essay is able to “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” One of the things Jarrell says about Whitman in that essay makes me think of Sontag herself: “When you buy him you know what you are buying. And only an innocent and solemn and systematic mind will condemn him for his contradictions: Whitman’s catalogues of evils represent realities, and his denials of their reality represent other realities, of feeling and intuition and desire. If he is faithless to logic, to Reality As It Is -- whatever that is -- he is faithful to the feel of things, to reality as it seems; this is all that a poet has to be faithful to, and philosophers have been known to leave logic and Reality for it.” |
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GIFT RETURNS
Regular readers know that UD has been following a couple of university-related stories throughout this year, both of them involving the tricky etiquette question of how to turn down an enthusiastically proffered gift. In one case, the state of Utah is pleased as punch to extend its conceal/carry laws to its university campuses, but the campuses keep turning the gesture down. Bitter and disappointed, the state is now threatening legal sanctions if its universities don't get with the gun laws. In another case, Florida State University is to be the beneficiary of a local political operative's largesse in the form of the nation's first school of chiropractic medicine. Yet FSU medical school faculty and other interested observers are not only condemning the corruption that allowed the operative (who is also a chiropractor) to get the idea through the legislature; they are also heaping scorn upon the "pseudo-science" of chiropractic itself: " A growing number of professors in the Florida State University College of Medicine are saying they will resign if FSU administrators continue to pursue a proposed chiropractic school. "I would no longer wish to volunteer my teaching energies to FSU medical school, should it encompass a school of chiropractic," wrote Dr. Ian Rogers, an assistant professor at FSU's Pensacola campus, in a Dec. 15 e-mail. "This is plainly ludicrous!!!!" The threatened resignations - at least seven to date, all from assistant professors who work part time - reflect a belief among many in the medical establishment that chiropractic is a "pseudo-science" that leads to unnecessary and sometimes harmful treatments. Professors are even circulating a parody map of campus that places a fictional Bigfoot Institute, School of Astrology and Crop Circle Simulation Laboratory near a future chiropractic school. But the professors' stance has a political aim, too. Opposition is clearly mounting as the chiropractic school heads for crucial votes in January before the FSU board of trustees and the state Board of Governors. In fact, the school is now seen as a test case for the fledgling Board of Governors, which critics have accused of kowtowing to Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature on the higher education issues it is supposed to oversee. FSU was closed for the holidays Tuesday. FSU president T.K. Wetherell, provost Larry Abele and John Thrasher, chairman of the FSU board of trustees, could not be reached for comment. But Sen. Dennis Jones, the Treasure Island Republican who spearheaded legislative support for the school in the spring, said the professors were "overreacting." He accused anti-chiropractic groups from outside the state of stirring faculty opposition at FSU. "If they resign, so be it," said Jones, a chiropractor himself. The instructors don't deserve to teach at FSU, he said, "if they're putting their credentials with people known for promoting professional bigotry." The Legislature appropriated $9-million annually for the chiropractic school, which was pushed by Jones and then-Senate President Jim King, R-Jacksonville, an FSU graduate. It would be the only school of its kind in the country. As supporters envision it, more than 100 new faculty members would train legions of chiropractors, with a special emphasis on Hispanic and African-American students. The school would also draw lucrative federal grants in alternative medicine. Planning began years ago, but criticism didn't ramp up until after the legislative session. Some opponents see the school as an end run around the Board of Governors, which oversees the state's 11 universities but has yet to consider the chiropractic school. Last week, a group headed by former university system chancellor E.T. York filed a lawsuit against the board, accusing it of failing to flex its constitutionally granted muscle and pointing to the chiropractic school as a prime example. But some FSU faculty members are upset, too, fearing the school will shatter FSU's academic reputation. The list of critics include FSU's two Nobel laureates - Robert Schreiffer, a physicist, and Harold Walter Kroto, a chemist - and Robert Holton, the chemistry professor who developed the cancer-fighting drug Taxol, which has brought FSU tens of millions of dollars in royalties. In recent weeks, more than 500 faculty members have signed petitions against the chiropractic school, including about 70 in the medical college, said Dr. Raymond Bellamy, an assistant professor who is leading the charge against the proposal. The medical college has more than 100 faculty members. Some of them say they're willing to do more than sign a petition. "I teach wonderful medical students from Florida State University here in Orlando," Dr. James W. Louttit wrote in an e-mail to Bellamy, who shared it with the St. Petersburg Times. "If they decide to start a chiropractic school I would no longer be able to support this program." "It should come as no surprise that no major medical institution in this country, public or private, has embraced chiropractic medicine," wrote Dr. Henry Ho, a Winter Park physician and FSU assistant professor, in another e-mail. "If Florida State University were to do so, its fledgling attempt for credibility as a medical institution of stature would be severely jeopardized." " UD finds both of these stories - Utah's and Florida's - heartening. Under the comedy, they are really about the slow evolutionary processes by which shitty state university systems drag themselves out of the muck and become respectable. Anti-intellectualism and political corruption have to be seen for the poisons they are, and FSU in particular has begun to do that. Its legitimate scientists are rejecting the gift of quackery undiplomatically, to be sure. But maybe there's no other way. |
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
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MORE ON SONTAG
It used to seem to UD that Sontag, Susan appeared in the index of every book UD owned. Now that Sontag has died, UD finds remarkably few Sontags, at least in her library at home. When she’s back in her office at GW, she’ll look there, especially for “Against Interpretation,” the Sontag essay UD first encountered in Lionel Trilling’s 1970 anthology, Literary Criticism. That hip little number had much to do with UD’s decision to get serious about literature. Here was a way to be serious without being dry; here was, as Sontag put it in the essay, an erotics of reading. UD read “Against Interpretation” again not long ago, and she saw the less savory aspects of Sontag -- her arrogance, her humorlessness, her rhetorical excess. But the power of the prose was still there; the shimmer the essay had given off in its first reading, of energy and clarity and lofty polemic all at once, had survived. Beyond her enormously attractive analytical style, Sontag’s openness to travel, exoticism, languages, and all sorts of cultural movements, drew UD. Sontag’s politics seemed to UD pretty absurd; but her aesthetic and social curiosity, her wandering into odd corners of European writing, for instance, was inspiring in its generosity and sympathy. Above all, UD loved Sontag’s lack of sentimentality and narcissism. Sontag was an intellectual. She was interested in thick descriptions of human experience, descriptions that would have broad relevance. If her own experience of cancer illuminated the larger metaphors through which illness is filtered, then Sontag would make use of that experience. But it never felt personal. Sontag had the inestimable gift of infusing consciousness with truth. |
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SUSAN SONTAG...
...inspired essayist, moralist, and aesthete, is dead. |
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PAY-TO-PLAY
Restless with a four-year imposed ban on corruption in its basketball program, the indefatigably corrupt University of Georgia has turned to that other mainstay of academic malfeasance, corporate stuffing of the chancellor's salary. UD's readers may recall the long farce of UG's basketball program (see UD posts dated 11/16/04, 8/7/04, and 3/7/04), temporarily halted by the NCAA, which, after inventing a new category to cover the breadth of UG's "recruiting inducements, unethical conduct, academic fraud and extra benefits" ("Because the violations found in this case occurred within five years of the starting date of penalties associated with the 1997 Georgia football infractions case, the institution is a repeat-violator and subject to repeat-violator penalties."), shut down the program for four years. Now, with the help of the Attorney General, who recently overruled the university's eagerness to keep secret the financial relationship between corporate donors and corporate vendors (they are often the same people, with donations tending to appear days after the awarding of contracts), the University of Georgia is in trouble again: REGENTS' FUND FATTENED BY FIRMS THAT DEAL WITH COLLEGES headlines the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which points out that nearly half of the chancellor's compensation comes from a very private, very exclusive university foundation ... "This has all the appearance of a pay-to-play thing," says Bill Bozarth, a director of Common Cause, who attempts to clarify the problem with a couple of analogies: "If the head of the Department of Natural Resources was getting a supplement to his salary from Waste Management, what signal would that send?" And: "This is just as disturbing as it would be if Governor Perdue were getting money from state contractors." The university insists it hasn't got the slightest idea who the people giving the money are... |
Monday, December 27, 2004
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"EGGHEADS' NAUGHTY WORD GAMES"
The New York Times has written its obligatory article about the MLA convention, which is going on in Philadelphia even as we blog. You can sense the dread the Times writer felt when he realized he'd drawn this assignment, this event whose ridicule he calls a "holiday ritual for journalists." For lo his prose is weary, Lord... it seemeth in each sentence to pray for deliverance... nay even to be full of thankfulness as its final paragraph descends... The writer reminds us of desperate MLA titles of years past, and he updates the roster with this year's desperadoes. His take on the MLA convention is that English professors are "naughty" immature people (the article is titled "Eggheads' Naughty Word Games") whose annual gathering resembles a "hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups' conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can't be made to stop." He quotes another writer who sees no way out of the "arrant foolishness that has turned literary studies into a laughingstock." Yet if you look at the titles the Times cites, few of them are remotely literary. Even if some novel seems involved, it's really not -- a few lines or images from the book will be pressed into an argument that has nothing to do with literature. Or again, a poem or a play may appear, but it turns out to be a work not of art, but of propaganda. When you edit down the MLA convention, the problem isn't infantile provocativeness, as the Times writer suggests, but ideological non-deviationism. The papers are displays of party discipline. |
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FROM YESTERDAY'S ACROSTIC PUZZLE IN THE NEW
YORK TIMES: Clue: "Joking nickname for a person seemingly learned." Answer: PROFESSOR |
Sunday, December 26, 2004
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TENTING TONIGHT
It's been a slow week at University Diaries, of course, but it's never too early to scope out next year's Ig Noble Award nominees. (She'll link to this year's Ig Noble ceremony when she gets home to a friendlier computer.) Although at the moment she's sitting only blocks away from the MIT/Harvard ideopolis from which flows the Ig Noble, UD has no influence on the nominations process... but perhaps someone, somewhere, may learn of the work of Professor Ralph Pettman through her weblog. For UD, that will be enough. A professor of international relations at Victoria University in New Zealand, Professor Pettman has already received some thousands of dollars from his university to set up a website devoted to stamping out sex on Mount Everest (see www.stuff.co.nz). Pettman argues that one of the many things climbers apparently do to keep warm offends the Sherpas, for whom the mountain is sacred. ("I find that claim rather questionable," comments one veteran guide. "Sherpas have a very raunchy sense of humor.") UD awaits details from Pettman's website as to how he will enforce the No Sex on Everest rule. Celibacy pledges? A Sherpa in every tent? Of all the places where you'd think you'd be allowed a little privacy... |
Friday, December 24, 2004
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HARVARD SQUARE
UD is currently located in the epicenter of Blue State Cool: Tealuxe at Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She and her daughter are taking a break from last-minute Christmas shopping. As always, UD finds Tealuxe a well-observed ripoff of the Mariage Freres tearoom on Rue du Bourg-Tibourg in Paris. Narrow, dim. High walls lined in tea tins. "Tealuxe Corporation has gone out of business," she could swear the guy with a mohawk behind the counter just said to a customer. Well, then, how cool can Tealuxe be? Another sign of the Blue State crisis... |
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HARVARD
UD sits in her small Cambridge hotel's lobby late at night, checking the news online while a few steps away from her, at the front desk, the night clerk gently snores. As usual, the weather around Harvard Square is wretched -- high winds and rain -- but earlier in the day it wasn't so bad, and UD and her daughter checked out the tilted Graduate School of Design Building, the circular Le Corbusier Carpenter Center, and then the quads, full of Asian families taking pictures of themselves in front of Widener Library. For UD, Harvard has always had a disappointing prestige-to-ambiance ratio. Unlike Stanford, for instance, which really wows you, Harvard's physical actuality seems incapable of keeping up with its immense international aura. Its series of quadlets, each rounded or squared with arbitrarily thrown together, conventional buildings, fails to add up to HARVARD. "They filmed 'Legally Blonde' here!" UD's daughter enthused as they entered the largest of the quads. Then she shrugged. "Looked more interesting in the movie..." |
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
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UD DOES CHRISTMAS
UD has the vaguely diffused holiday season you get when you grow up an assimilated Jew and marry a Catholic. Hanukah, never very firm in her mind beyond its association with gelt in fishnet, has pretty much vanished. Christmas is a big deal for her husband’s Polish family (much wafer-breaking), but less so for spiritually on-the-fence UD. No, for an aesthete like UD, the holiday season is about singing and listening to great music (except for the Hanukah songs, which can be really bad), walking with her daughter around chilly, greened Harvard Square (UD’s husband’s family home is nearby), and mooning over the beautiful photography books everyone gets and gives as presents. The larger culture of academic Harvard, into which UD has dipped every December for the last twenty-five years, has always seemed to her both enigmatic and stifling. She has been to many ponderous old houses inside of which campus eminences (John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Pipes, Stanislas Baranczak, Harry Levin) reclined on couches and held forth. She was never particularly happy to be in these houses, all of them underlit, slightly cold, and full of anxious milling people, but she is grateful to have had the experiences. It is not, after all, Harvard’s fault that UD only goes up there in what Quentin in Absalom, Absalom calls the “iron New England dark” of Cambridge in December. |
Monday, December 20, 2004
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VARIETIES OF BEARDEDNESS
AMONG SENIOR ACADEMICS Via The Cranky Professor, UD notes with interest the following article in The Telegraph: WOMEN IN ACADEMIA LOSE OUT BY A WHISKER By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 17/12/2004) A correlation between having a beard and being a professor has been uncovered by scientists, suggesting a reason for discrimination against women in academia. A study of 1,800 male academics has revealed professors are twice as likely as lecturers to have bristles. The survey, which appears today in The Pharmaceutical Journal, was done by doctoral students Sarah Carter and Kristina Åström who were inspired by an "impressively hairy" supervisor at the University of London. "Sixteen members of our 18-strong research group are female. Would we, and do we, face discrimination?" they asked. The answer appears to be yes. While 10.5 per cent of lecturers were bewhiskered, the figure rose to 13.6 per cent for senior lecturers, 16.7 per cent for readers and 21.4 per cent for professors. One theory is that being unshorn makes men more likely to be appointed to professorships, as facial hair is linked with high testosterone and aggression. First, let us dismiss with the contempt it deserves that little testosterone theory tacked on at the end of the piece. When you look at a bearded professor, you do not say 'Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair.' UD offers eight varieties of beardedness among senior academics (some categories blend into others), in alphabetical order: I. BUM. This professor believes himself to be, wishes to be, jimmies his life so that he is, more or less, poor. Despite a goodish salary and no wife or kids to support (too shy to date), the Bum lives like Jeremy Irons at the end of that horrible Louis Malle movie, Damage. Remember? Subsisting in a North African slum and with infinitely pathetic meticulousness reusing the same crinkly Baggie… II. CAVEMAN. Cavemen is a wild untrammeled force who growls and shakes his mane at his students and shouts SHIT and FUCK. Blind to the desperation behind his acting out, Caveman’s students adore the wooly wacky ways of this fraudster. III. DRUNKARD. The endpoint of academic despair (see UD post dated January 30, 2004 for a discussion of this) may be the bearded Drunkard, whose beard is one of many emblems of his inability to look after himself. There is indeed a testosterone angle to the Drunkard, whose core affliction usually involves self-hatred at being a sissy professor when he could have been something manly. IV. LEATHERMAN. Closeted for years, now that he’s senior he’s out with a vengeance. A slim man in jeans, he has a sculpted beard that follows the same jaw lines as a helmet strap. V. OGGSFORD -- as Meyer Wolfsheim calls it in The Great Gatsby. The Oggsford beardman went to a British university and introjected Bernard Berenson. A cultured, judgmental aesthete, Oggsford is buffed and studly. As studly as professors get. VI. ORTHO. An Orthodox Jew. VII. PIRATIC. Libertarianism run amok, Piratic is often seen being escorted out of his office by campus security because he won’t stop smoking his cigar in there. While lecturing on Wordsworthian daffodils, the Piratic bearded professor makes random references to the Derringer he keeps in his desk. VIII. RADICAL FRINGE. Abbie Hoffman sans suicide. |
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THE VOICE OF THE ALPHA MALE BLOGGER -- II
[for I, see UD, 12/19/04] Wednesday, December 15, 2004 "How dumb are academics? Part XXIII: Today's N.Y. Post reports on a Harvard School of Public Health Study that found "men tend to do less exercise and put on weight" after they remarry, even though they eat healthier diets. The explanation, offered by Dr. Patricia Mona Eng: "Time demands of a new spousal role may preclude routine exercise." Alternative non-Harvard-approved explanation for why they exercised more before they remarried: They wanted to get laid. ... On second thought, that theory may be crude and inappropriate. Sex isn't a big factor in male motivation. We all know that. Stick with the "time demands of a spousal role" business. Yes, that's the ticket. ... 4:37 P.M." Mickey Kaus, kausfiles.com |
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MORE BLOGGY-MINDEDNESS FROM UD
[for earlier navel-gazing on the subject of blogging, just look down the page a bit] “I don’t see the point of privacy. Or rather, I don’t see the point of leaving testimony in the hands or mouths of others,” Harold Brodkey wrote in his spectacular memoir, This Wild Darkness. UD is inclined to agree, and she would add that the current anxiety about government and technological threats to American privacy that people like Jeffrey Rosen are expressing (he’s a colleague of hers at GW, in the law school) is somewhat misplaced. In particular, in line with a certain emphasis UD and many other bloggers have lately been placing on the subject of blogging as such, UD proposes to lightly fisk (yes, split infinitive… but it sounds okay, doesn’t it?) a recent essay of Rosen’s in the New York Times magazine [for the article, go to crookedtimber.org and read the current post by Eszter] on the subject of blogs and the way they threaten our privacy. Rosen wants to highlight the danger that irresponsible blogging about other peoples’ personal lives represents. In so doing, he extends far greater publicity to certain examples of this than they’d have gotten otherwise. Although he’s naming names in the spirit of exoneration, he’s still naming names, repeating calumnies in the huge-circulation pages of the New York Times. He is also giving an immense sales boost to the sex-blog spinoff books he mentions. Rosen tut-tuts quite a lot about “Internet exhibitionism,” but he’s promoting it in the nation’s most high-profile newspaper. Indeed, like the sensationalistic bloggers themselves, Rosen goes in for scary hyperbole: “In the age of blogs, all citizens, no matter how obscure, will have to adjust their behavior to the possibility that someone may be writing about them.” Sounds bad! What could it really mean, in practice? Well, later in the article, Rosen gives us one chilling example: A fellow law professor about whom some students blog has decided to “start an anonymous blog of his own.” Shiver me timbers, me hearties. Rosen is also hyperbolic - and misleading - in describing the amount of play blog rumors typically get. He counts hits, not unique visits, in citing the bigtime traffic many irresponsible bloggers get, with one, for instance, experiencing “900 hits a day.” Hey baby - UD gets upwards of 2,000 hits a day, but you don’t hear about it here, because she knows, like all responsible commentators on the subject, that it’s a meaningless number. Rosen concludes his privacy pensees petulantly: “Now that I know that students may be reporting my after-class comments without my knowledge, I’m more likely to be circumspect in private conversations.” Talk about having to adjust our behavior! Rosen is announcing no less than the end of the wild bohemian babble that we associate most strongly with law professors. The beginning of “circumspection” among this most verbally carefree and irreverent group will be a heavy burden to bear. |
Sunday, December 19, 2004
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ADDENDUM TO MOI, MARGUERITE BLOGGIERE...
[Look two entries down for Moi ... ] THE VOICE OF THE ALPHA MALE BLOGGER: "The bloggers are conduits, forums, niches, designed to unleash the broader wisdom of the online crowds. That's one reason a Hayek-Oakeshott Tory like me loves the blogosphere so much. Not so much spontaneous order as the endless pursuit of a million intimations - a constant conversation, with peaks and lulls, discourtesies and jokes, outbursts and rants, meditations and quips, and all going nowhere in particular. And in the end, some truths do emerge, if you have the balls to acknowledge them. It's the purest form of democratic discussion yet devised. It's a big fucking deal. But if you're reading this, you probably know that." --- Andrew Sullivan |
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SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME:
A Regular University Diaries Feature LUMINARIA Last night, UD joined about twenty fellow Garrett Parkers on a cold clear night and went caroling door to door. In her red-gloved hand she held a flashlight from Sharper Image which burned blue. For an eerie and elegant effect, everyone in town had lined the street in front of their house with luminaria, stenciled paper bags inside of which had been placed an inch or two of sand and a lit votive. The evening’s air of wholesome bonhomie stirred up the angry ghosts of Ambrose Bierce and Evelyn Waugh, who, along with many other writers, lodge quietly within UD but can be roused on these sorts of occasions. Throughout the greeting of neighbors and the exchange of good wishes and the choruses of We Wish You a Merry she heard them grumbling. She heard the many cutting and witty things they said and she laughed with them as they shed their dark radiance on the luminaria. Yes, yes, of course… And yet, and yet, and yet (to quote once again a favorite locution of one of UD’s college professors, Erich Heller), in the midst of their rancor she heard as well the voice of John Cheever, who understood the setting better than those other two, and had an affection for it. UD decided to go with Cheever. |
Saturday, December 18, 2004
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MOI, MARGUERITE BLOGGIERE...
There's a big ol' discussion going on at Crooked Timber about the relative scarcity of women bloggers. UD thought it might be useful to review some aspects of her own blogging experience, since she is herself a bona fide woman. Who blogs. TEARS, TRIALS, TRIUMPH: ONE WOMAN BLOGGER'S STORY Everyone but everyone is on about the gender gap in blogging -- tons of men blog, and few women do -- or rather, few women who blog get serious readership and serious attention. UD isn't sure what truly serious readership is; she assumes her own readership of roughly 500 unique visits a day (visits have fluctuated a lot this month, from 1600 one day to 300 another), plus a little under fifty links, is respectable for a sole proprietor who's been in business for a year… She's also worth almost $11,000 on that meaningless Blogshares fantasy market thing! Anyway, she hopes this means she is respectable enough to say a few things about the situation. I don't know how much of what I have to say pertains to being a woman, or just being a human being, or just being the peculiar human being that is me and me alone. But here goes. Make of it what you will. I: TECHNOLOGY I am totally non-technical and in fact pretty actively hostile to or indifferent toward a good deal of technology. If it were not for the fact that my niece is a brilliant computer science undergraduate willing to be bothered by me night and day for help with everything imaginable I would not have been able to open shop. I still can't figure out how to put images on my site (though now my fourteen year old daughter does that for me). Nor have I developed much of an affection for or interest in the endless technical thingies I could be learning to enhance my site, increase my readership, whatever. I do find that I'm competitive about my site - I want it to be noticed - but not to the extent that I'm willing to futz in any serious way with technology. I do what I do, with help from my niece (she even designed and ran an ad for me! I couldn't have done this at all.), but I'm aware that it's not all I could be doing. In short, technically I remain pathetic - every time I add a new blog address to my Blogger template I'm incredibly proud of myself. Pathetic. II: COURAGE People who blog get ridiculed, attacked, etc. I don't know whether, as a woman, I'm less inclined to allow this to happen than a man would be, but I know that the prospect of cruel remarks slowed down my decision to blog. Like many people, I can dish it out, but I don't take it very well. A couple of things got me over this fear. One was the realization that of course all public writers of any kind who take strong views can expect to get shat upon on occasion, and if I were serious about the state of the American university (the subject of my blog) I'd just have to learn to take it. Yet my fear of what people might say kept me from making my site comments-enabled until only about a month ago. And when a satire I wrote about Isaiah Berlin generated a lot of comment on Crooked Timber awhile back, I was so afraid of what people might have said that I made my husband filter out any nasty remarks (there weren't any, as it turned out) and only read pleasant ones aloud to me! I've advanced a bit since then, as I say, but I'm still nervous about the very public nature of my blog. In fact, I intended originally for it to be anonymous, but my niece went ahead and opened the account with my real name on it, so I figured what the hell. In retrospect, I'm glad I'm not anonymous; I respect, however, anyone's decision to run an anonymous blog. III: WRITING Although I've always worried about I and II - technology and courage - I've always been pretty confident about my ability to write, and I've adored the daily business of getting some prose down on things that matter to me. Because all of the "how to write a successful blog" articles I've read insist that readers want some personal data, I provide some of this, but unlike a lot of women bloggers I've seen, I'm rather reluctant to do so (here, as in many other matters, I'm on Ophelia Benson's wavelength - she's the proprietor of Butterflies and Wheels), and when I do so, I try hard for most of it to have some relevance to larger university or more broadly social issues. I do think that the assumption of some women that the details of their personal lives are of interest to people is an unfortunate one and perhaps undermines the effectiveness of some of their blogs. A good writer, of course, can make anything interesting to readers, but it's not at all easy to carry this off, and running a photo of your cat with a couple of paragraphs describing his treatment for diabetes is probably not that keen a move for an ambitious blogger, unless you do it very seldom, or can make the whole thing uproariously funny. I also think that in the business of having strong political and social views, men tend on average to be better about striking the right range of tones, seem more comfortable keeping up an engaging, serious flow of commentary about the world. Plenty of women bloggers are good at this, too, but some of them are too emotional. Blogging, it seems to me, is a cool medium; you need to modulate your voice. |
Friday, December 17, 2004
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A COUPLE OF 2004 MLA CONFERENCE PAPER TITLES
“Eating Indians: Benjamin Rush, the Circularity of Stagism, and a Pharmacy of Race” “Tolkien and the Other: Gender and Race in Middle-Earth” |
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SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME: A Regular University Diaries Feature The Common Ground of Hummering UD, as you know if you've been listening, lives sort of in Bethesda, Maryland (her little incorporated town, Garrett Park - where UD grew up by the way - is, despite its autonomy, part of the Bethesda area), a rich close-in suburb of Washington. She and a good friend who also grew up here have evolved over the years a sort of shorthand with which to talk about the place -- its Hummers, malls, and real estate agents. It all adds up, for UD and her friend, to 'thesdan Culture, and, like anthropologists, they enjoy mapping its ways. Key to 'thesdan culture is a depth and breadth of affluence unimaginable outside of the Atlantic seaboard and certain pockets of Palo Alto. Most places in the world have some rich people (example: Rupert Murdoch just spent 44 million dollars on an apartment in New York City), but here it's pretty much everybody. Everybody drives a late-model LandRover with Josh Groban pouring out of it. Everybody adds 10,000 feet to their house for a second entertainment den. 'thesdan women are slim and paranoid, 'thesdan men bulkier and more paranoid. Due to lawsuits, bankruptcies, botched plastic surgeries, and divorces, they live in gated communities where it's hard to find them. The conceit is that they're being exclusive. In reality many of them are hiding from creditors. Two locations dominate the mental and physical world of the 'thesdan: treeless fields with empty houses, and long avenues of gas stations. These are the lodestars of their lives. They orbit the first in search of a television, and the second in search of a five cents per gallon savings. The 'thesdan is almost always driving, and, when driving, talking on his cell phone. Let us listen in: "Amoco is a dollar eighty-five! Fuck that! I was in Kensington the other day and Exxon was a dollar eighty!" |
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PROFESSOR PLUM
Why, you ask yourself day after day, does UD go after psychology, creative writing, and women's studies in American universities and not the obvious --schools of education? Franchement, she ain't got the stomach for it. Some things are too much for high-strung, highly acidic (she puts Tabasco sauce on everything) UD. Fortunately, there is Professor Plum, to whom (glance to your right and down) UD has now linked. The abysmal-to-the-point-of-surreality realities in America's schools of education are his whole thing. Due to this relentless focus, Professor Plum is in a constant overheated sputtering volcanic rage ... which UD will admit is not her favorite rhetorical mode ... but on the other hand, someone's got to do it, and Professor Plum seems able to read reams of edutrash without slowly scratching his eyeballs out, which is what UD would do. |
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IDENTITY, TRAGEDY, AND AGON IN MODERN PLAGIARISM
UD is beginning to worry about herself. She has read so many stories about professorial plagiarism lately that she’s developed a shameful obsession with the lamest excuses offered by the plagiarists. But they have to be truly lame. Simply saying, like Thomas J. Woodall of Boise State University, that anything appearing on the internet is “free and clear” is insufficient (though Woodall gets points for having plagiarized a letter to the editor and sent it to the BSU student newspaper). No - for UD to offer any real credit, your excuse must be outstandingly, heart-stoppingly shameless. As in: I: MAN’S IMMORTAL QUEST FOR IDENTITY Most shameless so far is Professor Charles J. Amtzen of Arizona State University, who, on being accused by a furious graduate student of having stolen his work (Amtzen “lifted whole paragraphs of my work and represented it as his own”), said the following: “I take the blame in that I didn’t fully comprehend Dwayne’s search for identity here.” Here are Amtzen's rivals for the crown: II: THE TRAGIC VISION Roger Shepherd, a now-fired professor of fine arts at the Parsons School of Design, plagiarized freely from a variety of books for his (now shredded by the publisher) work on significant modern buildings. When cornered, he referred darkly to a naughty research assistant, and then called the incident “a tragedy.” III: SAMSON AGONISTES The prodigious George O. Carney of Oklahoma State dismissed all of the complaints his raft of plagiarees have made against him as, in the words of the Chronicle of Higher Education reporter who interviewed him, motivated by ‘academic jealousy’ or even in-state football rivalry.” |
Thursday, December 16, 2004
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HE SAID IT; I DIDN'T
"...high school sports will continue to fester into shameful overemphasis in too many places, will continue to emulate the college sports model that is America's educational shame." |
| BASEBALL THREAT LOWERED |
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ING
It’s just UD and a sleeping construction worker this morning at the little red tables in Penn Place, her town’s one commercial building (she’s waiting for the 8:40 train to Union Station.) The town post office is here (residents have successfully fought home delivery for decades), as is the town archive, the town administrator, the town restaurant, and the town therapist. The amount of activity around this just-renovated and enlarged building (delivery vans, street stripers, pickups with cherry trees in the back) reminds UD of the vocal minority of townspeople who were opposed to this change. One of them, on the day the Town Council passed a motion to go ahead with it, taped a piece of cardboard up in the old post office lobby on which he’d written, in morbid calligraphy, IF YOU HAVE TEARS, PREPARE TO SHED THEM NOW (Shakespeare). One can swing this sort of small town data Barbara Pym’s way, grinning at its absurdity, but UD is disinclined. There was a slightly thready privacy about life here once, now replaced by a natty something which has us closer to quaint fakes like Middleburg and Burlington than we’d like. UD is heading into DC (she’s now on the MARC train) to give the first of her two final examinations - this one on Don DeLillo, who writes about precisely this sort of American success story, the series of events by which a real place becomes a concept. UD has now transferred from the MARC to the Metro. Her ride is free, courtesy, as the conductors keep announcing, of ING Direct, a new bank in town. How much would it cost, UD wonders, for her to do the same? “Your free ride today is courtesy of UNIVERSITY DIARIES, a blog about American university life…” |
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
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WHAT CAN UD SAY,
EXCEPT THAT PROFESSOR CARNEY IS HAVING A BUSY WEEK? [for background, see UD post titled "Stroke of Genius," dated 12/14/04, below] " DA FILES CHARGES IN OSU EMBEZZLEMENT CASE Cass Rains Managing Editor Charges were filed Tuesday by District Attorney Rob Hudson against Bonnie Leann Jones, former Oklahoma State University senior staff assistant for the geography department. According to documents obtained from the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network, Jones “fraudulently appropriated to her own use, certain money, to wit: $18, 659 for a use and/or purpose not intended or authorized by the proper owner, Oklahoma State University, with the fraudulent intent to appropriate it for her own benefit under a common and ongoing scheme of deception.” According to OSCN documents, the felony charge of embezzlement is punishable by imprisonment for one to 10 years. Listed among witnesses in the case are geography department members Dale Lightfoot and George Carney, and BancFirst of Stillwater. Judge Donald Worthington has been assigned to Jones’ case, however no court date has been set. " |
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THE GOLDEN BOWL
While the ongoing Bowl Championship Series controversy has brought out some bad writing in the nation's sports journalists ("The thievery has been done, the dreams have been diced. The University of California's outstanding season has been ransacked, ravaged and reduced, shrunken and shriveled like a raisin." "Do they even understand the lessons they really teach with their transparent greed and pompous twists of the truth?"), it has also inspired at least one scribe to writing that rises, in UD's opinion, from mere journalism to classic American ethnography: " OPEN SEASON ON BOWL GAMES By Steve Dilbeck Tuesday, December 14, 2004 Been doing those thumb exercises for the remote? Made the annual Costco run for the super-sized bags of Doritos and oversized bottles of caffeine-filled soda? Readied the overstuffed imitation-leather chair? Warned wife and children you are not to be disturbed over the next 29 days, excluding an unexpected act of God, and then only if of Biblical proportions? Then you were there Tuesday night, excited as Mike Tyson on a car hood that the bowl season finally got under way. Propped right in front of your overpriced big screen, watching North Texas and Southern Mississippi kick off the bowl season, happy as a pig in slop. It is the silliest bowl season ever, or at least since last year, but no matter. If you failed to get chills over North Texas-Southern Mississippi in the New Orleans Bowl, then you don't know consomme from gumbo. Incredibly, it was the Mean "Don't Call Me Joe" Green's fourth New Orleans Bowl. Can you believe it? They lost Patrick Cobb, the nation's leading rusher last season, to a knee injury in the second game of the season. Replaced him with unheralded freshman Jamario Thomas, who naturally led the country in rushing this year. Which school is Tailback U? Matched against a Southern Mississippi team so tough that even when it lost to Cal in the final game of the season, it somehow knocked the Bears out of the Rose Bowl. Who can't get excited about directional schools going at it in a bowl game on Dec. 14? What, you have embalming fluid for blood? It was the first of a mind-boggling 28 bowl games. That means every eligible school in the country but one, not counting self-banned South Carolina and Clemson, made it to a bowl game. Nothing for the Akron Zips. Not one lousy bowl watch. Not one chicken dinner. A team that never in its history has made it to a Division I-A bowl. But with the scene so action-packed with thrilling matchups, who has time for sympathy for the Zippos? Coming up next, the Champs Sports Bowl, where the players not only get to play in a bowl game in exciting Mobile, Ala., but receive a free jersey of the steroid-invested NFL player of choice. The Champs Bowl used to be the Tangerine Bowl, but these games change names faster than a con man on the lam. Alas, compassionate types are apparently in short supply these days, the Humanitarian Bowl this year morphing into the MPC Computers Bowl. The San Francisco Bowl had a shorter run than tech stocks, this year becoming the Emerald Bowl. Sponsorship changes make for great fun, too. Not sure which was the bigger surprise, learning that it was now the Vitalis Sun Bowl or that they still sold Vitalis. Coming soon, the Brylcreem Las Vegas Bowl, because you can never be too slick in Las Vegas. There are always games sponsored by someone whose product you can only guess at. It's the EV1.net Houston Bowl, which I guess means Elvira has her own cable channel now. It's the PlainsCapital Fort Worth Bowl and the MasterCard Alamo Bowl, which goes to show that football-crazed Texas can never have too many obscure bowl games. All-time holdover fave: The Chik-fil-A Peach Bowl game. Fried chicken and peaches -- can it get any better than this? And the matchups in these babies! It's 6-5 Alabama vs. 6-5 Minnesota in the Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl. It's 6-5 Georgia Tech vs. 6-5 Syracuse in the Champs Sports Bowl. Not to mention 6-5 UCLA vs. 6-5 Wyoming in the Pioneer PureVision Las Vegas Bowl. Remember last year when you said the Silicon Valley Classic couldn't lower itself any further than 6-6 UCLA and Fresno State? Are you ready for Northern Illinois vs. Troy? What is that, USC's JV team? The only non-BCS bowls that are truly interesting as games are the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl with Cal and Texas Tech (get out the calculator) and the AutoZone Liberty Bowl with unbeaten Boise State and 11-1 Louisville (get out the main frame). The BCS is such an unmitigated disaster that even its bowl games leave you crying for an intriguing matchup. Poor, unbeaten Utah deserved a chance to prove itself worthy, but the Utes instead drew 8-3 Pitt in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. Unbeaten and No. 3 Auburn deserved Cal, Utah or Texas, but the Tigers drew 10-2 Virginia Tech. The Rose Bowl deserved Cal-Michigan. The best is saved for last, so don't blow all the cashews by the Continental Tire Bowl. USC and Oklahoma, the top-ranked teams in the nation, will settle it on the field, which will be something of a new experience for the Trojans. The FedEx Orange Bowl will offer a fitting finale. Get out the eye drops, fluff up the Superman slippers and settle in for the long haul. Bowl season is under way, and it's a special time, no matter how silly the games. " |
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
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SHROOMY
Occasionally -- very occasionally -- UD stumbles upon superior undergraduate writing, as she did in the recent case of Adam Cooper, a student at Tufts [see UD post dated 12/1/04, "Sporting"]. Now she's pleased to feature the equally promising prose of Bridget Sharkey, at the University of Illinois: 'The Daily Illini - Opinions Issue: 12/13/04 Opinion column: THE DICKS ON THIS CAMPUS By Bridget Sharkey After three and a half years on this campus, I have learned many things. Of course, there are the obligatory lessons on Shakespeare and the Cold War. But aside from those unimportant facts, I also became an expert on a little something I like to call Guy-ology. There are many guys on the Quad these days, and they sometimes can be hard to read. Because it's finals week and most of us are reading enough as it is, I have broken these men down into four simple categories: Pain McSorrow - As an English major, I have had many close encounters with this species. Pain McSorrow is a brooding lad who fancies himself as a deep, dark, emotional guy. He usually can be seen wearing dark colors and purposely ugly clothing, generally topped off with a wool scarf and a Parliament cigarette. He often makes cynical and sarcastic remarks about "society" and "the idiots on this campus" - all while secretly checking out his reflection in a nearby mirror. His known habitat is smoky coffee shops, like Cafe Paradiso, and he will generally quote Bright Eyes or Tool on his away messages. This kid is in pain, people, and boy does he love it. If you want to hook up with him, be prepared for his emotional outbursts and his wandering eyes. After all, he's just too deep to be monogamous for long. Frat McAbercrombie - Frat McAbercrombie can be identified by his Hollister sweatshirt, Corona visor and by the Greek lettering on his flip-flops. McAbercrombie generally hangs out at KAM's and C.O's, but he also can be seen at Station. McAbercrombie most likely is from the Chicagoland area, and even if he isn't, he pretends to be. He usually majors in sports management or perhaps business. McAbercrombie loves Maxim, The Man Show and Adam Sandler movies. If you want to date him, be prepared to be on his back burner. Even if he only shows up for the final exam, he still is busy every night, generally engaging in homoerotic Taps with his frat bros. Chi-Town McGoombah - We should consider ourselves lucky because McGoombah is only found in his natural state in the central Illinois area. McGoombah also claims to be from Chicago, even though he most likely lives an hour away. He also pretends to be Italian, even if his last name is MacMorris. He can be identified by his unseasonable tan, his unnaturally white teeth, his wife beaters and by the silver or gold chains around his neck. McGoombah goes to any and all bars, but he usually is seen on the streets fighting with another McGoombah over who gets to take home Miss McGoombah. If you are lucky enough to snag a McGoombah, be prepared to hear him repeat "Fugettaboutit!," "Do it, Do it," and "Lil' bit" ad nauseum. Townie McPotHead - McPotHead, as his name suggests, can be recognized by his bowl and his vintage Mr. T-shirts. McPotHead might have at one time attended the University, but now he works at Silver Mine Subs and hangs out on his balcony or in his basement all day. McPotHead usually is in a shroomy haze, and his primary passion is Burger King spicy chicken sandwiches. This guy is too stoned to date, but if you are looking for an unimpressive three minutes in a room that smells like the inside of a pirate's leg, McPotHead is your man. Of course, some might claim that my list is a little biased. Some might even accuse me of being a bitter man-hater. But those people probably fall in one of these four groups. And for those who feel their lame ex-boyfriend was skipped over, I'm sorry, but I ran out of room. Stay tuned for part two next semester.' |
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STROKE OF GENIUS
[For background, see UD post below, dated 12/13/04, titled "Oklahoma State University: Pioneer in Plagiarism Credit"] "OSU Investigating Plagiarism Allegations Against Professor STILLWATER, Okla. 12/14/04 (AP) _ Oklahoma State University officials have launched an investigation into whether an award-winning geography professor plagiarized several publications. An article released Monday in The Chronicle of Higher Education, cites seven instances when George Carney allegedly lifted material without crediting the authors. Carney copied the topic, structure and research methods of one paper in 1979, lifted several sentences from a book for an essay in 1996 and copied sentences from two essays and a textbook for several essays in a collection last year, the article alleges. "A close examination of several of his papers and book chapters reveals that the professor has plagiarized both frequently and brazenly," the article said. Carney, who has been with OSU since 1969, told The Oklahoman on Monday that he had a stroke two years ago and doesn't remember the circumstances of some of the articles in question, particularly those several years ago. "Everything that happened during that time period is all kind of foggy and cloudy," he said. "It might be that I did this, but it was back in the days before word processing." OSU spokesman Nestor Gonzales said the case was turned over to Stephen McKeever, vice president of research, who has assembled a three-member committee to examine the allegations. McKeever wouldn't comment on the investigation or say when it may be finished. Carney, a regents professor, is continuing to serve as a professor and is scheduled to teach three classes next semester. "These are only allegations contained in a newspaper article," said Gonzales." p.s. : This could prove more than ordinarily embarrassing for OSU. The University has an annual lecture series in this man's honor: The George O. Carney Honorary Lecture in Cultural Geography. |
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OMIGOD. FIRST THE ACADEMIC BILL OF RIGHTS,
AND NOW THIS... Monday, December 13, 2004 ACKERMAN INTRODUCES RESOLUTION TO DISSOLVE BCS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Associated Press SACRAMENTO -- The Republican leader of the California Senate has introduced a resolution calling for the dissolution of the Bowl Championship Series. Sen. Dick Ackerman, an unhappy alumnus of California, is only half-kidding with the measure, which even if approved could not force the breakup of the BCS. Ackerman, a 1964 Cal graduate, is furious that his school lost a chance to play in one of college football's big-money games despite ranking among the top five in the polls most of the year. "The BCS has proven in its seven-year existence that it is a failure," Ackerman said. "It has failed at the expense of California and other Pac-10 teams that have lost millions of dollars in revenue." There's no word yet whether the Texas legislature will seek a resolution endorsing the BCS. Texas slipped past Cal in the BCS standings in the final week and received an invitation to play in the Rose Bowl, even though the Longhorns were previously ranked behind Cal. Ackerman blamed Cal's loss on last-minute lobbying efforts by Texas officials. "Politicking and campaigning have no place in college athletics," he said. "Teams should be judged on their performances on the field and not by the success of their PR campaigns." |
Monday, December 13, 2004
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UD feels compelled to say something ...
...about Tom Wolfe’s having been declared this year’s winner of the Bad Sex Contest, a British competition for the worst writing about sex in a novel. After all, Wolfe won it for a university novel, and this is University Diaries, etc. But UD is disappointed in this year’s decision, which seems to her to have been cynical and corrupt. Wolfe’s bad sex writing is unimaginative, unmetaphorical, unmetaphysical. It is not artistically bad; it is just bad. In year’s past, the prize committee has judged among the contenders based on their literary worth, not on the fame of particular authors, and the result has been a short list of fantastic hardcore crapola. This year this committee seems merely to have gone for a big name, with no concern for first-rate bad sex writing. Perhaps they saw this as a way to publicize the award. UD thinks they’ve lost a lot of credibility. |
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OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY:
A PIONEER IN PLAGIARISM CREDIT One of the ways universities judge the research-activity of their professors is through citation-searches. If your work is routinely cited by many other scholars, this indicates a high stature in your field, and it adds significant points to whatever point-system your institution uses in their evaluation of you for the purposes of salary and promotion. Now that scholar-to-scholar plagiarism is rampant in American universities (see the article in the December 17 2004 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education), one university is leading the way in thinking creatively about the problem. If professors are rewarded when they are cited, should they not receive even more credit when they are plagiarized? Oklahoma State University has been embarrassed by recent revelations that one of its highest ranking, most beloved, professors has for decades been a majorly shitfaced plagiaristo. While OSU has no intention of even talking about, let alone punishing this man, its provost has announced that “in the interest of leveling the playing field,” OSU will now extend research-activity credit not only to faculty whose work has been cited (and of course to faculty who have plagiarized their work), but also to those whose work has been plagiarized. “We see our new Plagiarism Credit Initiative, or PCI, serving as a model for universities all over this country which want both to right a wrong and acknowledge work whose high quality is such that other scholars are writing it too,” says one high-ranking OSU administrator. Details of the PCI have yet to be worked out, but this administrator was able to sketch a few of its features for UD. “Obviously, the better known your plagiarist, the more points you will receive for having been plagiarized. The committee will be less impressed by some graduate student plagiarizing you than by (to take a recent case) Charles Ogletree. Similarly, the degree to which the plagiarism is word-for-word will count. Vague reiterations of your ideas in language that echoes, in a Proustian way, your own argot, even if these ideas are presented in strict sequentiality, will not make the cut. On the other hand, if, as in the case of plagiarist Neil Winn of the University of Leeds, your plagiarist has retained your words but Anglicized them, it will still count as verbatim plagiarism.” Other universities, including Harvard, are beginning to take notice of OSU’s leadership on the issue. “Yes, we’re aware of what they’re doing at OSU,” says Harvard’s president; “but until we have a critical mass of faculty plagiarism cases at Harvard -- say, twenty a semester, rather than four, which is about where we are now -- we’re going to take a wait and see approach.” |
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GRAVESIAN
Louise Horn, a widow four doors down, died last month. Her house sold right away, and her daughter had to scramble to set up an estate sale and clear the place for the young couple moving to our town from the city. A fellow pianist, Louise had already given UD a lot of her old sheet music, most of it popular songs of the ‘thirties with strange titles (“The Irish were Egyptians Long Ago”) and banal tunes. Art Songs for School and Studio was different. Its editor, Alfred Spouse of Rochester, NY, announced his intention to “engender in the student, aside from the music, a more conscious aesthetic sense, from having lived intimately with an art subject.” Among the songs, UD found one whose title seemed almost as silly as the Egyptian one: “My Love’s an Arbutus.” A red, red, rose, yes. An arbutus? She gave it a whirl on the piano, though, and loved its stately Irish lines: My love’s an arbutus by the borders of Lene, So slender and shapely in her girdle of green. And I measure the pleasure of her eye’s sapphire sheen By the blue skies that sparkle thro’ the soft branching screen. But tho’ ruddy the berry and snowy the flow’r That brighten together the arbutus bow’r, Perfuming and blooming through sunshine and show’r, Give me her bright lips and her laugh’s pearly dow’r. Way sentimental, of course; but there was a bit more: Alas, fruit and blossom shall lie dead on the lea, And Time’s jealous fingers dim your young charms, Machree. But unranging, unchanging you’ll still cling to me, Like the evergreen leaf to the arbutus tree. “Unranging, unchanging” was nice. Sang well, too …. Eventually UD noted the odd antique name of the lyricist - Alfred Perceval Graves - but thought no more of it until, singing the song again a few days ago in honor of Louise, something clicked. UD got out her copy of Goodbye to All That and read Robert Graves’s description of his father: “That my father is a poet has, at least, saved me from any false reverence for poets. I am even delighted when I meet people who know of him and not of me. I sing some of his songs while washing up after meals, or shelling peas, or on similar occasions.” So UD had come full circle, as she often did, taking a circuitous path back to one of the handful of writers she obsessively rereads … She thought of the chasm between father and son, and the Great War which stopped Perceval Graves’s sentiment: “We waited on the fire-step from four to nine o’clock, with fixed bayonets,” writes the younger Graves later in his memoir, “for the order to go over. My mind was a blank, except for the recurrence of '‘S’nice ‘S’mince Spie, S’nice S’mince S’pie … I don’t like ham, lamb or jam, and I don’t like roly-poly…’ The men laughed at my singing. The acting C.S.M. said: ‘It’s murder, sir.’ ‘Of course it’s murder, you bloody fool,’ I agreed. ‘And there’s nothing else for it, is there?’ It was still raining. “But when I sees a s’nice s'mince spie, I asks for a helping twice …’" |
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Does This Look to You Like a
Comfortable Florida Retirement? 
Far be it from UD to impugn the research of any fellow humanities professor, but, thanks to an alert reader, she must take issue with the finding of the person a few posts down (see UD post dated 12/11/04, titled "Countdown to the MLA Convention"), who describes an enviable fun-in-the-sun type retirement for the "space chimps." No, the reality is that the chimp named "Able" (and who knows how many of his cohort) finds him/herself (there's some confusion as to gender in the sources this reader and I have consulted) stuffed and put on display in the Smithsonian Museum. How many other empirically ungrounded claims could we find if we subjected all MLA papers to this sort of scrutiny? |
Sunday, December 12, 2004
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THAMES REDUX
“Southern Miss is a world-class institution with faculty members and an educational experience that are among the best in the nation,” says America’s most delusional university president, Shelby Thames. UD has been tracking with fascination the ebbs and flows of Thames (see UD posts dated 3/29/04 and 9/19/04) as he allows USM to meander into something much worse than mediocrity. USM’s latest outrage is something it hasn’t tried before. It isn't the persecution of its faculty, or political corruption, or nepotism (“The school already has been shaken by faculty bickering with Thames, an enrollment scandal last fall and a money squeeze. Thames also reorganized USM early in his administration, with nine deans suddenly dismissed.”). No, this time USM has gone and got itself placed on probation because of simple rank administrative incompetence. It has failed over a long period of time to provide documentation to the state of its educational activities. As a result, the school could lose its accreditation. As UD noted in a previous post (see UD, 4/10/04), university corruption is so widespread in certain southern states that you now see hometown newspapers arguing that their schools ain’t so bad onaccouta it's just as bad coupla states over: "It is worth noting that just before it was learned that USM was being placed on probation, it was announced that Auburn University over in Alabama was being taken off probation by the same accrediting association. Did Auburn's probation taint its degrees? Of course not. And neither should USM's. Maintaining academic accreditation is a complicated process, as is restructuring an established university. USM is trying to do both and, we still believe, will do so successfully." Hoowhee. Yes. Maintaining academic accreditation is complicated. President Thames is hard at work figuring out how to do it, but while he’s learning, USM will have to put up with the paralysis and humiliation of being a university on probation. As ever, in the eternal tides of human affairs, the great poets were there before us. Here's Wordsworth: Glide gently, thus forever glide, O Thames! that other schools may see Your school drown softly while you bide Your time, fair river! Glide, fair stream, Thy turbulent soul its powers bestowing, ‘Till all good minds and souls outflow, Leaving you up shit’s creek, rowing. |
Saturday, December 11, 2004
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TOO RESEARCH-ACTIVE
" ONLINE SEARCH CITED Slaying suspect's computer used in researching 'perfect murder' By Tim Carpenter The Capital-Journal LAWRENCE -- In the month before Carmin Ross-Murray was slain, research on "how to murder someone and not get caught" was performed on a computer owned by the man accused of killing her, a prosecution witness testified Thursday. Thomas Murray, professor of English at Kansas State University, is charged with first-degree murder in the Nov. 13, 2003, beating and stabbing death of his ex-wife, Ross-Murray. The preliminary hearing in Douglas County District Court to determine whether Murray stands trial for murder is expected to conclude today. Detective Dean Brown, a forensic computer expert with the Lawrence Police Department, said dozens of searches associated with causing physical harm were conducted on computers in Murray's home in Manhattan or in his faculty office at K-State. Other phrases typed into search engines on his computers between Oct. 17, 2003, and Nov. 12, 2003, were "murder for hire," "perfect murder," "how to make a bomb," "best way to kill someone," "drug overdose" and "eye drops and murder." Searches for information extended to odorless and tasteless toxic substances capable of being lethal to an adult, Brown testified. There were searches that led to a page on Jack the Ripper and a drug tied to instances of date rape, Brown said on the fourth day of the preliminary hearing. He said that on Nov. 12, 2003 -- 24 hours prior to the time prosecutors believe Ross-Murray died -- a search on a computer in Murray's possession was done to find a map of highways connecting Manhattan, Topeka and the Kansas City area. Ross-Murray, 40, was living in a farmhouse northwest of Lawrence at the time of her death. Murray, 48, lived in Manhattan. " |