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Monday, January 31, 2005
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I KNOW I CAN'T EXPECT YOU TO
MIRROR ALL OF MY OBSESSIONS... ...but you really should, if you haven't yet, take a look at the blog Veiled Conceit, a wickedly funny running commentary on the New York Times wedding announcements. Zach, the author, is on a roll lately... |
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"While I am immensely proud
of my administrative accomplishments... ... in the chair's position over the past two-and-one-half years, it is my considered view that the present political climate has rendered me a liability in terms of representing either my department, the college or the university in this or any other administrative capacity," writes Professor Ward Churchill in a statement issued this evening, announcing his resignation as chair of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. UD wonders if, by “the present political climate,” Churchill means that if he’d made his September 11 statements during a Carter or Clinton presidency, they would have been received differently. Churchill is not a martyr to rightwing extremism or whatever he thinks he’s living under. He’s a victim of his own inhumanity. UD also wonders - Where are the letters and editorials from his students defending Churchill? He has taught and administered at CU for a long time. Surely someone should have written something by now, conceding, for example, that Churchill’s latest remarks were indefensible, but that they should not obscure the good he has done as a teacher, a role model … Anyway, the next move for Churchill is, UD thinks, clear. Withdraw from the speaking engagement at Hamilton (big crowds are now expected, and the security situation will be a nightmare), and get to work on his next Up Yours, America book, which will sell, after all this attention, like hotcakes. |
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BRAZENING IT OUT
IN COMMUNICADO " Jooste's Novel to Remain on Sale Despite Admission of Plagiarism By Aziz Hartley Cape Times Despite an admission that South African writer Pamela Jooste had copied someone else's writing, her novel, People Like Ourselves, will remain on sale. This was confirmed yesterday by Stephen Johnson, managing director of Random House. "We have no plans to withdraw copies of the book," he said. The Cape Town-based Jooste has meanwhile gone to ground in the Eastern Cape and could not be contacted. The Sunday Times reported yesterday that Jooste had plagiarised sections of an article by Wits academic Lindsay Bremner published in the paper's lifestyle supplement three years ago. "Bremner's lawyer, Claire Wright, confirmed that Jooste had infringed Bremner's copyright," according to the report. Johnson could not indicate yesterday how many copies of People Like Ourselves had been printed. Asked whether he knew of any other sections of the novel that might have been plagiarised, he said there were none. Johnson was reported to have said they had become aware of the problem after they were informed by a representative of Bremner in November last year. He said Jooste could not reached. "She is in-communicado. We expect to speak to her some time next week. "She is on holiday in the Eastern Cape," he said. According to the Sunday Times report, Jooste's lawyer, not named, had admitted she had used approximately 400 words penned by Bremner, who received the first Sunday Times Bessie Head fellowship in 2001. The lawyer had also written to Bremner conceding Jooste had failed to attribute authorship of the passages used in the book and apologised for embarrassing Bremner." ********************************************************* Embarrassing Bremner? Whatever. More detail here. |
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WARD CHURCHILL UPDATE
[For background, see various posts below.] A gun-toting hater of the United States who wishes death upon its citizens and disintegration of its political foundation holds a tenured appointment as a full professor at a public American university, where his salary is $90,000 a year. Radical fringe houses have gathered his screeds into books. In line with prevailing standards, his university doesn’t care - doesn’t know - that his books are without argument, literacy, reason, or mercy. For purposes of promotion, the University of Colorado, like almost everyone else, counts books. It doesn‘t read them, or look at who published them. Faced with the glare of national attention upon this fanatic, the Dean of Arts and Sciences says: "As a faculty member, he's spent his career talking about oppressed people's rights, and the essay [about September 11] tries to make some kind of connection ... I think his comments were ... ill-thought-out and hurtful, and I certainly don't agree with them…. It's hard to say he's overstepped his bounds. I don't quite know what the boundary is." This sort of comment has the flavor of a parent who, faced with the fact that his child has brandished a gun and threatened to kill him, says: “That was ill-thought-out and hurtful. I certainly don’t agree with what you’ve done.” With this sort of comment, we have entered the realm of Flo Whittaker, a character in Randall Jarrell’s academic novel, Pictures from an Institution: ‘Flo took nothing personally. If she had been told that Benton (College), and (her husband) Jerrold, (and her children), and the furniture had been burned to ashes by the head of the American Federation of Labor, who had then sown salt over the ashes, she would have sobbed, and sobbed, and said at last -- she could do no other -- “I think that we ought to hear his side of the case before we make up our minds.”’ Though Churchill’s Dean doesn’t see what the fuss is about, the CU Regents are upset, and have scheduled a special meeting to discuss the situation. Whatever they do or say, they know they're stuck with this man. As James Twitchell notes, in Branded Nation, “[W]hat distinguishes the academic world is a lifetime hold on employment. About 70 percent of today’s faculty have tenured or tenure-track jobs. Even ministers get furloughed. Museum directors get canned. But make it through the tenure process, and you’re set forever.” Yet one of the many destructive effects of this professor, UD predicts, will be to damage the already-shaky institution of academic tenure. In earlier posts (among them, “Smug Tenureds,” UD, 5/14/04), UD has considered the powerful arguments of people like Richard Chait at Harvard, who suggests that tenure as a universal feature of American colleges and universities has outlived its purpose, and that, while retaining tenure in some situations, institutions of higher education should offer a range of other, non-permanent arrangements as well. This rather reasonable suggestion has been met with near-total opposition by university faculty. But the anti-tenure forces are growing. If Ward Churchill did not exist, these forces would have had to invent him. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Updated Update: See? |
Sunday, January 30, 2005
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BRANDED NATION
James B. Twitchell, an English professor at the University of Florida with an engaging prose style, has written a book called Branded Nation, which argues that American colleges and universities have become consumer brands rather than intellectual communities. An excerpt from the book appears online in The Wilson Quarterly, and UD quotes from it below (UD thanks one of her readers, Bill, for the link). Readers of this blog will recognize most of University Diaries’ recurrent themes (the easiest way to "Search" UD is to put a key word up there in the Search box) in what Twitchell has to say. But Twitchell says this stuff more strongly than UD. Consider UD’s early posts about distance education (11/21/03, for instance) and the disappearance of the classroom. Those posts look anemic next to this: “From a branding point of view, what happens in the classroom is beside the point. I mean that literally. The old image of the classroom as fulfillment of the Socratic ideal is no longer even invoked. High Ed, Inc., is more like a sawmill. A few years ago, Harvard University started a small department called the Instructional Computer Group, which employs several people to videotape about 30 courses a semester. Although it was intended for students who unavoidably missed class, it soon became a way not to attend class. Any enrolled student could attend on the Web, fast-forwarding through all the dull parts. This is ‘distance education’ from a dorm room, at an advertised $37,928 a year.” [By the way, for some intriguing university branding ideas, see Fenster Moop.] Or what about UD’s more recent posts on the controversy at Harvard over its endowment and the salaries it’s been giving its money men (1/11/05, etc.)? Here’s Twitchell on the subject: “Ask almost anyone in the education industry what’s the most overrated brand and they’ll tell you ‘Harvard.’ It’s one of the most timid and derivative schools in the country, yet it has been able to maintain a reputation as the uber-brand. …Why is Harvard synonymous with the ne plus ultra? …Because of what goes in: namely, the best students, the most contributed money… Everyone knows that Harvard is the most selective university, with a refusal rate of almost 90 percent. But more important, the school is obscenely rich, with an endowment of almost $20 billion [If UD may break in here: That figure is now 22.6 billion. It's hard to keep up.] Remember that number. It’s key to the brand. The endowment is greater than the assets of the Dell computer company, the gross domestic product of Libya, the net worth of all but five of the Forbes 400, or the holdings of every nonprofit in the world except the Roman Catholic Church.... In a marketing sense, the value of the endowment is not monetary but psychological. Any place with that many zeros after the dollar sign has got to be good. The huge endowments of the nameplate schools force other schools, the second-tier schools, to spend themselves into penury. So your gift to Harvard does more harm than good to the general weal of Higher Ed, Inc. It does, however, maintain the Harvard brand. … Every two weeks…Harvard‘s endowment throws off enough cash to cover all undergraduate tuition.” And on the subject of money: recall UD’s posts (8/6/04, etc.) about legacy admissions and the emergent trend toward “developmental admits.” Here’s Twitchell: “At many schools, there’s a buried pipeline that connects the development office with the admissions office. Most academic administrators prefer that it be buried deep, but from time to time someone digs it up. In The Wall Street Journal for February 3, 2003, Daniel Golden reported on how the formal practice of giving preference to students whose parents are wealthy … has profound implications not just for affirmative action but for the vaunted academic ideal of fair play.” UD’s post on Veyron/Collegiate (10/26/04) seems, if she’s reading her stats properly, one of her most popular. Here’s Twitchell on the same subject: “[T]he cost of tuition has become unimportant in the Ivy League. Like grade inflation, it’s uncontrollable - and hardly anyone in Higher Ed, Inc. really cares. As with other luxury providers, the higher the advertised price, the longer the line.” Review UD’s post in response to Walter Kirn’s Atlantic piece on the meritocracy (1/21/05); then look at Twitchell: “[T]he elite [colleges] are not as concerned with learning as they are with maintaining selectivity at the front door and safe passage to still-higher education at the back door. … The … nifty irony… is that, among elite schools, the more the consumer pays for formal education (or at least is charged), the less of it he or she gets. The mandated class time necessary to qualify for a degree is often less at Stanford than at State U. As a general rule, the better the school, the shorter the week. At many good schools, the weekend starts on Thursday. .. Hardly anyone in Higher Ed, Inc. cares about what is taught, because that is not our charge. We are not in the business of transmitting what E.D. Hirsch would call cultural literacy… . We’re in the business of creating a total environment, delivering an experience, gaining satisfied customers, and applying the ‘smart’ stamp when they head for the exits. The classroom reflects this. Our real business is being transacted elsewhere on campus.” Or again, recall UD’s post about Gregg Easterbrook and David Brooks (1/12/05), who offer truths about the college “selectivity” hysteria that UD sees all the time among ‘thesdan parents. Twitchell’s on to that one too: “[Though] no one in the business will openly admit it, getting into college is a cinch. The problem, of course, is that too many students want to get into the same handful of nameplate colleges, making it seem that the entire market is tight. It most certainly is not.” UD’s early series on grade inflation, starring Janice Sidley (11/30/03, etc., etc.), looks longwinded next to Twitchell’s condensed version: “At the turn of the 20th century, one percent of high school graduates attended college; that figure is now close to 70 percent. This is an industry that produces a yearly revenue flow more than six times the revenue generated by the steel industry. …College has become what high school used to be, and thanks to grade inflation, it’s almost impossible to flunk out.” Twitchell doesn’t, in this excerpt, touch on the other side of the impossibility of flunking out -- the impossibility, for millions of students, of actually graduating (see UD, 5/27/04). Which has produced universities full of wandering disheveled stars… There are some fine little factoids in Twitchell’s book. Who knew that ye olde University of Southern Mississippi, magic fiefdom of Shelby Thames (12/12/04), is “planning a full-fledged water park”? |
Saturday, January 29, 2005
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FINDING EMO
UD is no spring chicken, but she exhibits that pathetic trademark professor thing where an older person cluelessly goes about thinking they’re still young… She’s on her way toward becoming the female equivalent of the moldering male professor who’s still wearing a pony tail even though it's gone all gray and wispy... One nice thing about UD, though -- she doesn’t give a shit about what young people are doing. She has zero interest in keeping up with the latest whatever. If you can’t learn about it by reading the Arts pages of the New York Times, UD hasn’t learned about it. Yet, on a recent Google News search, UD found herself intrigued by some news out of her academic home, George Washington University. Turns out there’s a student singing group on campus that’s getting a bit of attention lately. This is from MTV News: ' "[A] group of students at George Washington University is …bringing a cappella to the hoodie [UD doesn’t know what ‘hoodie’ means] and studded-belt set. They're called Emocapella (spelled with one "p," which, in itself, is way emo) [UD doesn‘t know what 'emo' means], a bunch of sensitive lads who harmonize tunes by emo faves like Dashboard Confessional, Taking Back Sunday and Saves the Day at nearly sold-out concerts in activity centers and dorm-room socials all across the GW campus. Once or twice a year, they even pack into rented vans — DIY style — [UD doesn’t know what ‘DIY’ means] and hit up colleges all across the Northeast, hoping to pour out their pain to the masses. "Actually, part of the reason we started the group was to get girls. Girls like sensitive guys," said Emocapella president (and self-described "sensitive guy") Lee Seligmann. "And it's definitely helped with the girls. We're the only all-guy a-cappella group on campus." OK, so maybe preaching the emo-gospel isn't the main focus of the group. Seligmann cops to being more of a classic-rock fan himself (Led Zeppelin are his favorite), and is hard-pressed to even define the term "emo." According to him, the whole group is only half serious. But don't tell that to Taking Back Sunday, who invited Emocapella to perform with them back in December 2002. "They opened for us at one show in Washington, D.C., and it was amazing," Taking Back Sunday guitarist Eddie Reyes said. "We are very flattered that they covered one of our songs." And don't tell it to the many, many emo fans inhabiting chat rooms and operating blogs all over the Internet. Emocapella, to put it mildly, aren't exactly their favorite group. "When we first came out, there was a lot of talk on the Internet about us. Lots of 'You guys aren't emo!' and stuff like that," Seligmann laughed. "I kind of think that people in emo and punk bands take themselves very seriously. We mainly do this for fun." But there are instances in which Emocapella tiptoe the line between fun and dedication. Witness, for example, their rigorous rehearsal schedule ("We practice twice a week for two hours, but usually less," Seligmann said), or the long hours they poured into recording their debut album, the appropriately titled I'm Sorry. "We recorded the album in two days, in two sessions," Seligmann said. "And the album is selling pretty well. I mean, we have a lot left, but I think it's doing pretty well. But I wouldn't know. I've never really made an album before." As for the future of Emocapella, Seligmann is brutally honest. The group lost nine members to graduation last semester, and finding new (and sufficiently emo) singers to fill the void is going to be tough. Plus there's the issue of rampant tardiness at Emocapella rehearsals. But the group pledges that it'll still perform the occasional "guerrilla-cappella" concert — basically a spur-of-the-moment show on GW's lawn — because, as Seligmann puts it, "Sometimes people stop and watch. But it usually depends on when we perform and how drunk people are." But before he calls it a day, Seligmann said he'd probably like to have one more crack at GW's annual "Battle of the A Cappella Groups," which Emocapella has, somewhat improbably, never won. "Oh, we never win those. The first year, we won 'Most Energetic,' which is kind of like the 'E for Effort' award," Seligmann said. "Last year we didn't win anything. But that's OK. Not winning is way more emo anyway." ' It turns out that one of UD's recent, and very impressive, students, Brian Becker, is a member of this group, to which he has returned after a semester in Paris. Brian has agreed to be interviewed by University Diaries about emo and other things. Watch this space. ********************************************************************* INSTANT ADDENDUM: Ooh, look what UD just found! Not only is her clever punning post title actually totally old and lame, but emo is beginning to define itself! The plot thickens... |
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UH OH…
[UD Inserts Skeptical Parenthetical Commentary into the Local News Article Directly Below.] 'COLLEGE TO REVIEW KIRKLAND PROJECT Change in leadership, not speakers, cited [uh huh] Sat, Jan 29, 2005 MARSHAND BOONE Observer-Dispatch CLINTON -- Hamilton College will take a closer look at the Kirkland Project, a college committee in the spotlight recently for its selection of outspoken speakers. Kirk Pillow, associate dean of the faculty, said college President Joan Hinde Stewart has appointed a review committee to look at the programming of the Kirkland Project. But Pillow said the review is not tied to the committee's recent selection of controversial speakers. [right] Those speakers included Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who compared Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi figure; and Susan Rosenberg, who declined a lecturing invitation after it became known she had been imprisoned for 16 years for possessing explosives and linked to a robbery that left two downstate police officers dead. Pillow said the review was planned because the Kirkland Project's director, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, is going ["]on sabbatical["] this summer. "This is a fitting time to review the project, given the change in directorship has been planned," he said, "but it's also true that recent events have complicated the situation. The choices have been controversial in recent months." Pillow said the college has been receiving calls from alumni, community residents and family members of Sept. 11 victims about Churchill's upcoming appearance on Feb. 3. A few of the calls were supportive, but most have been critical, he said. "The controversy is obscuring all of the great things that happen on our campus all the time," he said. "We don't get coverage for all the great things that happen here." ' ..................................................................... [You can't accuse UD (see UD, 10/8/04)of failing to cover the great things ...] |
Friday, January 28, 2005
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WINE EMERGENCY
Campus alcohol abuse, corrupt sports programs, conflicts of interest among university trustees, political corruption in the appointment of members of governing boards: one University of Georgia trustee has managed to pack all of these elements of the badly run American university system into one news item. No doubt, as Donald M. Leebern Jr. complains in the pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it’s merely the “warped liberal agenda” of that newspaper which accounts for the attention he’s been getting -- but if only ten or twenty percent of what the AJ-C is reporting about him is true, it does seem newsworthy. Where shall we start? With a public university system whose Board of Regents is stuffed with “well-heeled political appointees” and “millionaire political contributors” like Mr. Leebern? With Mr. Leebern’s recent decision to “provide his private plane to fly six members of the University of Georgia girls’ gymnastics team and coach Suzanne Yoculan to New York, a clear violation of NCAA rules”? (Yoculan lives with Leebern; they are going to be married. “A personal relationship with an employee of the University System ought to be reason enough for a regent to resign,” suggests the paper.) And then there’s the wine Leebern’s company, Georgia Crown, marketed with the university alumni association logo on the label, “in violation of a regents policy” which prohibits University of Georgia trademarks on alcohol. Plus, “the attorney general ruled last summer that members of the Board could not do business with the University System except in special circumstances.” Wine Emergency! *************************************** Immediate Update: Despite all of this, the governor just reappointed Leebern to the Board of Regents, which he's been on for over a decade. In the words of the governor's press secretary, "Mr. Leebern is imminently qualified to serve on the Board of Regents." Okay -- we're willing to wait. But give us a ballpark figure. Another ten years? ------------------------------------------ Slightly Later Update (January 31): "You are correct. It's our typo," writes an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to UD. This lets the governor's press secretary off the hook. [UD wouldn't call a confusion between two words ("imminent" and "eminent") a typo. She'd call it a "mistake."] |
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UD SALUTES…
…the students at Hamilton College, who happened upon the same photo of Ward Churchill UD did (she linked to it in her post dated 1/26/05) and have now distributed it around campus as part of their protest against his upcoming visit: ‘Posters have gone up showing Churchill holding a machine gun, questioning whether his appearance is a good use of tuition money and repeating Churchill's "little Eichmanns" quote, school officials said.’ While Hamilton’s students have quickly grasped and acted upon the obvious -- they shouldn’t be asked to underwrite the expression of loathesome reactionary ideas -- faculty and administration are slower on the uptake. They mutter about how everyone’s gotta have an open mind and how, you know, college is about learning to handle shocking new points of view and all. ' "We try to train them to be critical thinkers and to respond intelligently to what they hear," said Nancy Rabinowitz, a comparative-literature professor and director of the program bringing Churchill to Hamilton. "I think the students should hear his whole argument before they boil it down to a few sound bites." ' Hamilton students may be boiling Churchill’s argument down, as Professor Rabinowitz suggests. But Churchill would like to boil Hamilton students alive. He is a hater. He hates white people, rich people, urban people, and a whole lot of other categories of people. American universities, like the University of Colorado, where Churchill is a department chair, are free to harbor fanatics with guns, but it’s always nice when people at those universities and in their communities recognize the haters among them and protest against them. Hamilton College is free to honor a man whose revolutionary excitements have made a hater out of him, but UD thinks it’s nice when people at Hamilton recognize what their institution has done and decide to rebel against it. |
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WARD CHURCHILL (Chair, Ethnic Studies,
University of Colorado at Boulder) ON IRRITATING CELL PHONE USERS: “The individuals in the buildings that they hit were being far too busy acquiring the best cup of cappuccino in New York or Washington DC and arranging dinner dates on their cell phones, eternally braying like mules at the top of their voice and disrupting everybody’s else’s public space. This was a certain gesture of social ecology that [the 9/11 pilots] were engaged in that day. Okay, there are fewer of these folks around now frankly, and, well, I’ll leave the dot dot dot after that one.” |
Thursday, January 27, 2005
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FLORIDA, VIRGINIA, NEW HAMPSHIRE, KUWAIT
Lots of news, UDites, even if you don't count the fact that UD's kid is slated to sing with her chorus at a benefit this March at the Kuwaiti Embassy, at which the guests of honor will be Colin Powell and ... ANGELINA JOLIE! (Apparently Jolie has forgiven UD for that little post [UD, 3/29/04] awhile back...) In other news: ** The Florida Board of Governors has just decisively voted down the chiropractic school that politicians tried to impose upon Florida State University. UD is happy, but not surprised. ** There's a murky tale growing murkier by the minute out of the University of Virginia, involving allegations of sexual misconduct with students by a professor there. He was apparently summarily dismissed from various positions at the university, and of course his name is permanently besmirched, etc. But what has he done? To whom? According to his account, he has done nothing wrong, and he hasn't been told what he's been accused of. He was just told he'd done wrong and the following unpleasant things were about to happen to him... ** Another developing university story, a kind of younger brother to the Summers mess, involves a Dartmouth adminstrator having said (or rather written) something just as obviously true as the statement that men and women have innate differences -- and getting into just as much trouble as Summers is in. The Dartmouth story demonstrates that boys are just as touchy as girls. In the Summers case, the National Organization of Women has demanded his resignation; in the Dartmouth case, a bunch of jocks have demanded this guy's resignation. His sin? He wrote a private letter a few years ago to a fellow college administrator in which he said the following: "I am writing to commend you on the decision to eliminate football from your athletic offerings. I wish this were not true but sadly football, and the culture that surrounds it, is antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours." |
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
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THE MIGHTY ENGINE OF PROFIT
It’s not that hard to be happy (to continue the theme of the post directly below). Not as long as the Kirkland Project at Hamilton College exists. You can sort of trace their line of thought at Kirkland. Having failed to appoint Susan Rosenberg (see UD, 11/13/04 and 12/8/04), they sought revenge upon the New York City policemen and others who blocked her appointment. They came up with the idea of bringing to campus a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado who will discuss an essay in which he writes that because the people in the World Trade Towers on September 11 worked for “the mighty engine of profit,” they were not “innocent civilians” but “little Eichmanns.” One look at Kirkland’s latest find tells you what Kirkland sees in him. Kirkland’s tactic has worked. People are again upset. A Hamilton College spokesman says: “To deny students the opportunity to encounter people outside the academic community is to fail to provide a liberal education.” UD finds this a peculiar statement. The latest Kirkland find is not from outside the academy, but is a department chair. If the spokesman means outside the academic mainstream, there’s nothing more mainstream than professors using language that would make Leonid Brezhnev blush in order to denounce capitalism and deconstruct its sponsor: "I don’t want other people in charge of the apparatus of the state as the outcome of a socially transformative process that replicates oppression. I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether. …[So] let’s just start with territoralities often delineated in treaties of fact—territoralities of 500 indigenous nations imbued with an inalienable right to self-determination, definable territoralities which are jurisdictionally separate. Then you’ve got things like the internal diasporic population of African Americans in internal colonies that have been established by the imposition of labor patterns upon them. You’ve got Appalachian whites. Since the U.S. unilaterally violated its treaty obligations, it forfeits its rights—or presumption of rights—under international law. Basically, you’ve got a dismantlement and devolution of the U.S. territorial and jurisdictional corpus into something that would be more akin to diasporic self-governing entities and a multiplicity of geographical locations." The mighty profit engine currently values these sorts of comments at about a dime a dozen. But will Kirkland’s strategy backfire? Sure, they’re smiling now, they got a little of their own back … But what happens next? If the free market’s maw chews this guy up and spits him out the way it did Rosenberg, then what? There’s really only one Contestant Number Three, UD thinks, and she should be available in six months or so. |
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"THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
IS MAKING ME MISERABLE..." “The pursuit of happiness is making me miserable,” announces a Canadian journalist in the Toronto Star, by way of introduction to a long article surveying the burgeoning field of “positive psychology.” It doesn’t make UD miserable. On the contrary, regular readers know [see UD posts dated 9/25/04, 7/15/04, and 7/13/04] that, for UD, extensive reading in the science of happiness is a hoot. She’s even written a poem - an update of a Renaissance poem about happiness - demonstrating the strides we’ve made in the definition and understanding of happiness in our time. To refresh your memory, she’ll first record the original poem. Then, drawing upon sources in the literature, she’ll offer her own. Sir Henry Wotton THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE (1611) How happy is he born or taught That serveth not another’s will, Whose armor is his honest thought, And simple truth his highest skill; Whose passions not his masters are; Whose soul is still prepared for death, Untied unto the world with care Of princes’ grace or vulgar breath; Who envies none whom chance doth raise, Or vice; who never understood The deepest wounds are given by praise, By rule of state but not of good; Who hath his life from rumors freed, Whose conscience is his strong retreat, Whose state can neither flatterers feed Nor ruins make accusers great; Who God doth late and early pray More of his grace than goods to send, And entertains the harmless day With a well-chosen book or friend. This man is free from servile bands Of hope to rise or fear to fall, Lord of himself, though not of lands, And having nothing, yet hath all. University Diaries THE CHARACTER OF A PSYCHOLOGICALLY POSITIVE LIFE (2005) How high on the State-Trait Cheerfulness Inventory does he score Among whose signature strengths is self-realization; Whose most buildable component and societal contributor Derives from his context of experience-optimalization; Whose Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Not his masters are; aye, whose Inspiration Scale Prepares him to undergo mood elevations Equal to his Psychological Well-Being Scale and Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale. He envies none whom chance doth raise, But aces his Gratitude Questionnaire; Upon whose Happiness Formula (H [happiness] - S [set barriers to happiness] + C [circumstances] + V [voluntary variables]) the Lord does gaze To see impressive Personal Growth Initiative there. Yea, though his VIA Strengths Inventory His Psychological Well-Being Scale doth trail, No matter: God knows the greatest glory Lies in the Subjective Happiness Scale. In sum, his happiness set point, Measured by the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, Doth all his earthly days anoint With excellent surcease of care. |
Monday, January 24, 2005
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UD HASN'T DONE DIPLOMA MILLS IN AWHILE...
...and there's always something happening on that front. For instance, Wyoming has recently made it clear, reports The Casper Star-Tribune, that it intends to retain its crown as Queen of the Mills: "CHEYENNE --- If the Wyoming Department of Education wants to remove the state's image as a haven for diploma mills, it apparently will have to take action on its own. Earlier this month the Joint Interim Education Committee voted against introducing an accreditation bill supported by the Department of Education to require private degree-granting, post-secondary universities to become accredited in the state." Wyoming is now among the few places in America that welcome diploma mills. Make a note of it. Note also this nicely written piece of advice - part of a list of recommendations for the new year - from Matt Simonton, a student at Washington University: " 9. Buy your Ph.D. from a bogus diploma mill Here are your options. (1) Remain in school for another grueling decade, slavishly writing your pathetic doctoral dissertation while working a part-time job at Applebee's. (2) Pay a measly $3,600 for a Ph.D. from prestigious Hamilton University, where you can work at a leisurely pace in one of their 'self-based external programs.' All you need is the money, the time to take online courses and a 2,000-word thesis. Plenty of diploma mills, or 'correspondence schools,' exist, ranging from Hamilton, a converted Motel 6 in [drumroll...] Wyoming, to Adam Smith University, which operates out of a hostel in Monrovia, Liberia, to Stanford University (of Arkansas). Sure, many of these institutes of higher learning have been discredited as fraudulent, but hey, if you can pull the wool over the eyes of some corporate interviewer using a degree you purchased for three months' pay at Blockbuster Video, what's stopping you? Earn your Ph.D. in 2005! " |
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SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME
Little Foxes UD, as you know, lives in Bethesda, an almost-urban suburb of Washington DC. Almost-urban… yet, as she writes this, she is feeling the awe and wonder of just having witnessed, from her living room windows, two foxes “tying.” Yes, mere yards away from her, on the snowy hillocks of her wooded acre, a pair of orange foxes … |
Sunday, January 23, 2005
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MAMA REALITY II
In her first Mama Reality post (see UD, October 27, 2004), UD described her masochistic craving for Reality Instruction (the term is taken from Saul Bellow) in all things. She just got a big satisfying wallop of Reality Instruction from Michael Lewis, in the business pages of The Providence Journal . He's writing about the Harvard story that dominated the news until Lawrence Summers began pondering aloud the vas deferens between men and women -- the story about the compensation of Harvard's soon to depart money managers (for background, see UD posts dated 10/17/04 and 1/1//05): “We have arrived at a point in the money-management game where the going rate for the people who play it well is indefensible even to the people who understand it. No one wants to be seen thinking it is normal for someone to make $25 million a year. But there's another reason for Harvard's reticence, touched on by the class of 1969. The modern university still likes to pretend that it is not a business. Or, rather, that it is a business when it is a seller, and a university when it is buyer. It charges people huge sums of money for its services, but then, when it employs them, invokes its special nature as an excuse to pay them as little as possible. Harvard can decline to pay its money managers market rates in the same spirit that the University of Oklahoma can decline to pay its football players anything at all -- because to do so would violate the sanctity of the university. Most of the time this above-it-allness is a convenient pose for a university. But this time it is a very expensive pose, as even freshman money managers can turn pro.” The gist of the reality instruction here is that there are two possibilities, and two possibilities only, for a university: 1.) The university may assume an arrogant, cynical, above-it-all pose and assert that it has some "special nature" or "sanctity" that absolves it from market forces; 2.) or it may get real and play along with the market in all things, since it knows the university is just another business. What's striking is that for Lewis there is nothing in between #1 and #2. There's not even a whiff of a hint of an intimation in what he has written that a university is indeed a special sort of thing, different from a profit-maximizing business; and that it is precisely the glory of excellent universities like Harvard that they produce the sort of alumni capable of posing, with clarity and a sense of responsibility, basic moral questions about limits. |
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TIMOTHY BURKE TAKES A STRONG STAND
ON SCHOLARLY OVERPRODUCTION "The drive to scholarly overproduction which now reaches even the least selective institutions and touches every corner and niche of academia is a key underlying source of the degradation of the entire scholarly enterprise. It produces repetition. It encourages obscurantism. It generates knowledge that has no declared purpose or passion behind it, not even the purpose of anti-purpose, of knowledge undertaken for knowledge’s sake. It fills the academic day with a tremendous excess of peer review and distractions. It makes it increasingly hard to know anything, because to increase one’s knowledge requires every more demanding heuristics for ignoring the tremendous outflow of material from the academy. It forces overspecialization as a strategy for controlling the domains to which one is responsible as a scholar and teacher. You can’t blame anyone in particular for this. Everyone is doing the simple thing, the required thing, when they publish the same chapter from an upcoming manuscript in six different journals, when they go out on the conference circuit, when they churn out iterations of the same project in five different manuscripts over ten years. None of that takes conscious effort: it’s just being swept along by an irresistible tide. It’s the result of a rigged market: it’s as if some gigantic institutional machinery has placed an order for scholarship by the truckload regardless of whether it’s wanted or needed. It’s like the world’s worst Five-Year Plan ever: a mountain of gaskets without any machines to place them in. You could try to contest this if you wanted to measure academic productivity by looking to the importance or significance of particular scholarly work. But even that inevitably will lead to some ghastly results, whether you use a citation index or Google Scholar. So my simple suggestion is this: stop. Administrations and faculties need to stop caring how much someone writes or publishes or says, or even how important what they’ve published is according to some measurable or quantifiable metric. Not only because trying to measure productivity in terms of scholarship destroys scholarship, but because it detracts from the truly important kind of productivity in an academic institution. What really matters is this: how different are your students when they graduate from what they would have been had they not attended your institution, and how clearly can you attribute that difference to the things that you actively do in your classrooms and your institution as a whole? What, in short, did you teach them that they would not have otherwise known? How did you change them as people in a way that has some positive connection to their later lives? That can be about income. It can be about happiness or satisfaction. It can be about civic or political contribution to their communities. It can be about competence. It can be about imagination. Not all these things can be quantified, but all of them can or ought to be made as concrete as possible. Many colleges and universities, public and private, have gotten lazy about this essential task. They’ve relied on evidence of the income gap, and on hazy assumptions about the interior impact of a college education on character, personality, and ability. We fall back on profiles of our accomplished alumni and so implicitly claim credit for their being what they now are—but our collective ability to account clearly for such particular results in terms of particular things we do is often far weaker than we let on. Truthfully, alumni for most colleges and universities do that job for their alma mater better than the alma mater can do for itself. I can tell you what difference I think going to Wesleyan made for me, but if I were going to be skeptical about my own recollections, I might wonder if I would be attributing to a coherent institutional design the accident of my encounter with particular individual professors and a certain amount of auto-didactic effort which was made easier by the ambiance of the general environment and associated resources. Hanging around with a bunch of smart peers and smart teachers in a materially bountiful environment might help most people to form and sharpen their intellects and skills, but I’m not entirely sure that most colleges and universities are entitled to strongly claim that the good results of that process systematically derive from the careful design of their four-year programs. Reading Walter Kirn’s “Lost in the Meritocracy” in this month’s Atlantic Monthly [for UD's take on this article, see UD, January 21, below], describing how in his years at Princeton he and his friends shammed their way through classes and began to have the terrible suspicion that the professors and administrators were shamming right along with them, my doubts redoubled. It’s the only productivity that matters, however we try to measure or account for it. What do we do by design that we can reasonably say produces a positive, identifiable difference in the lives of our students and our wider community? Scholarship enters that question somewhere, but hardly at all in the ghastly spew of excess publication that contemporary academia demands." |
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GREGG EASTERBROOK'S POINT EXACTLY.
[see UD, 9/3/04] ‘[Monica] Saumoy, [a] pre-med student [currently at Princeton], said she is not sure that [graduating from Princeton] will help her get a spot in medical schools, where top students from schools with less prestige than Princeton will also apply. "I've heard that med schools don't really care what school you came from," Saumoy said. ' |
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THOSE OF US IN THE THICK OF THE FSU CHIROPRACTIC CONTROVERSY…
…know what this journalist means, and know that he’s right [see many January UD posts, below, and archived]. His mixed-up metaphors, however, would confuse anyone else... “But asking wimpy trustees to take point in shooting down what the Legislature already had approved and financed is typical of the kind of political calculus from which the Board of Governors is supposed to insulate the universities.” |
Saturday, January 22, 2005
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BLOGOSCOPY
JVC Comments is back (under a new name), after a short break from blogging. He's put up a series of beautifully written posts about the travel he did while he was away. |
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PURE INSTANCES
OF HYPOCRISY ARE RARE. HERE'S ONE. ' 2 ARTISTS QUIT UCLA OVER GUN INCIDENT By Mike Boehm Times Staff Writer January 22, 2005 Internationally known artists Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins have retired abruptly from their longtime professorships at UCLA in part because the university refused to suspend a graduate student who used a gun during a classroom performance art piece, a spokeswoman for the artists said Friday. "They feel this was sort of domestic terrorism. There should have been more outrage and a firmer response," said Sarah Watson, a director at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, which represents Burden and Rubins. "People feared for their lives." Neither Burden nor Rubins would comment when contacted by The Times. They submitted their retirement paperwork Dec. 20, over the school's winter break. The handgun incident occurred Nov. 29 at UCLA's graduate art studio annex in Culver City. The brief performance involved a simulation of Russian roulette, in which the student appeared before the class holding a handgun, put in what appeared to be a bullet, spun the cylinder, then pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger, according to one student's account that was confirmed by law enforcement sources. The weapon didn't fire. The student quickly left the room, then the audience heard a shot from outside. What ensued is not clear, but police said no one was hurt. The incident prompted investigations by university police and the dean of students' office into whether the student violated criminal law or student conduct codes. There is some confusion over whether the gun was real. The Los Angeles County district attorney's office determined Friday that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal misdemeanor charges, spokeswoman Jane Robison said. Lawrence Lokman, UCLA's assistant vice chancellor for communication, said the dean of students' office was continuing to investigate whether university rules against weapon possession were violated, which could lead to disciplinary action. University officials said no action had been taken and that the student was continuing his studies. Lokman said students can be suspended immediately, without the usual process of hearings and appeals, if the dean of students' office considers them a safety threat to themselves or others. In this case, he said, after an assessment by "qualified psychological experts," the dean's office determined that suspension was not warranted. Watson, however, said Burden and Rubins felt that the student should have been suspended while the investigations were continuing. Burden made his name in the early 1970s with influential and controversial performance art. In his best-known piece, "Shoot," performed in a Santa Ana gallery while he was a graduate student at UC Irvine, Burden had an assistant stand 15 feet away and shoot him in the upper arm with a .22-caliber rifle. Watson said Burden's work was controlled and that the audiences never felt in jeopardy. The UCLA case is different, she said, because it was a surprise action and "there was genuine fear." Even before the incident, Watson said, Burden and Rubins were unhappy at UCLA because of budget cutbacks and bureaucratic issues that "got in the way of them adequately running an art department." Burden headed the new genres program, which includes performance, installation and video and digital art; Rubins oversaw sculpture instruction. What they perceived as university officials' lack of urgency about the handgun incident, Watson said, "was sort of the last straw." Burden, 58, and Rubins, 52, are married. He had taught at UCLA since 1978, and she since 1982. Burden stopped doing performance art in the late 1970s and transitioned to sculpture, often making pieces that reflect on political issues or creating erector-set-like works inspired by the world of civil engineering. Rubins is known for huge assemblage works made from parts of scrapped vehicles and appliances, including a sculpture of steel wire and old airplane parts that dominates an outdoor plaza at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. Burden, whose annual salary was $128,300, and Rubins, who earned $88,300 per year, both were scheduled to teach courses and advise master's degree candidates during the current winter quarter and coming spring quarter — duties Carolyn Campbell, a spokeswoman for the School of the Arts and Architecture, said are being assumed by other faculty members. University officials provided no details about the handgun performance, which took place at the Warner Building, a warehouse-like structure where graduate art students have studios. The student who did the performance is Joseph Deutch, 25, according to the campus police log entry on the case. Campus police said that in the course of the investigation, Deutch handed over a gun that was not a real firearm. Robison, the district attorney's spokeswoman, said there was "insufficient evidence to show a gun was discharged or any bullet fired." Barbara Drucker, who chairs the art department, and Ron Athey, a visiting instructor who taught the course and was present during the performance, conducted a meeting at the Warner Building a week after the incident to dispel rumors and allow students to air any concerns, as well as to emphasize rules against possessing weapons on university property, a university spokeswoman said. Athey, known for piercing and cutting his body as a form of performance, did not return calls. A graduate student who attended the meeting said a few students expressed safety concerns but more were alarmed that the university, if it disciplined the artist, would be cracking down on freedom of expression. UCLA has 11 remaining tenured art professors. Those contacted declined to comment about their colleagues' retirement; others did not return calls or referred them to university spokespeople. Christopher Waterman, dean of the School of the Arts and Architecture, said Friday that he didn't foresee the art department losing stature despite the abrupt loss of professors he described as "world-renowned artists, great creative forces." "Change is a natural thing, and we're looking forward to conversations" about strategy for shaping the department's future in the search to fill the two vacant professorships, he said. ' |
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JAN NOWAK-JEZIORANSKI
UD’s father-in-law, now 91, went to high school in Warsaw with Jan Nowak, a great defender of freedom who died yesterday. Nowak’s book, Courier from Warsaw, detailed his regular harrowing trips between London and occupied Poland to alert the world to the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the Polish underground. But in his long life Nowak also headed Radio Free Europe, advised American presidents on how best to support Polish dissidents, and generally took eloquent stands on any number of issues involving democratization, social justice, post-war Polish/Jewish relations, and internal Polish politics. ' "He served the nation in the most difficult moments of our history," former Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek was quoted as saying by the PAP news agency. "I have a feeling of great loss." ' |
Friday, January 21, 2005
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WALTER KIRN ON PRINCETON Hokay, UD’s husband ran out this evening to the local Borders and elsewhere to stock up on stuff before the big winter storm (well, six inches or so are predicted) that’s about to hit DC. The lines were too long at the movie rental place, so he gave up on that. But he brought back from Borders the latest Atlantic magazine for UD, because she wanted to read “Lost in the Meritocracy,” by Walter Kirn, about which a lot of academic bloggers are blogging (scroll down to January 13). There are lines in Kirn’s essay which echo almost perfectly lines in an earlier essay on a similar subject by Gregg Easterbrook. For instance (as UD quoted in an earlier entry titled "Being Bland," and dated 1/12/05), Easterbrook argues that The college admissions process has become almost entirely a test of your ability to please adults — or specifically the sorts of adults who are college admissions officers. There's nothing wrong with pleasing such people. But once you get out into the world, where there are no rules and things are not structured and your own initiative is more important than your ability to please, then everything changes. I do think we've seen that the top schools increasingly are producing extremely conventional people. Not that there's anything wrong with producing conventional people, but you might think that graduates from Yale or Wellesley or Amherst would be the ones to go on to be really artistic and creative or become great engineers or inventors and make important discoveries. You're seeing instead that the important discoveries and the artistic creativity are coming from people out of places like Colby and Colorado College — because they haven't gone through this process of sacrificing their lives to conventionality. Similarly, Kirn describes chatting with a friend from his ordinary Midwestern town one summer between Princeton semesters, a friend who, despite his modest education, has been reading Emerson with seriousness and is eager to talk about him with Kirn -- a person he assumes (Kirn’s a Princeton English major, after all) to be just as eager and more knowledgeable: I didn’t know how to tell him [that] I couldn’t quote the Transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone. I’d honed more-marketable skills: for flattering those in authority without appearing to, for ranking artistic reputations according to the latest academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the background of my listener, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some ‘classic’ work of ‘literature,’ for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if the consensus changed. … If my schooling had taught me anything, it was how to mold myself - my words, my range of references, my body language - into whatever shape the day required … Unfortunately, Kirn’s essay ends up arguing for something that I don’t think Kirn intended to argue for. One reasonable conclusion to draw from “Lost in the Meritocracy” is that only extremely rich people should go to schools like Princeton. Kirn describes a college culture in which the vast majority of the students -- rolling-in-dough Percodan-snorters -- are happy and well-adjusted, and the tiny minority of middle-class students like Kirn are miserable and alienated. Why wouldn’t they be miserable? Kirn describes the rich majority as unceasingly sadistic toward the middle-class minority on campus. Kirn’s eagerness to be truly educated at Princeton, for instance, marks him as a serf who deserves to be spat upon. It bothers Kirn that he feels like a fraud in his literature classes, whereas the rich students take to intellectual fakery with the insouciance they have brought to the many other forms of fakery in their lives. Their affectless irony, honed over two decades of school and domestic existence, allows them to sail through the poses and hypocrisies of the classroom setting, but Kirn has trouble adopting their ways. In a kind of Nick Carraway -- Tom Buchanan dynamic, his earnest Midwestern ambition keeps making a fool of him. Kirn says he only began to be educated, intellectually as well as morally, when he left the feudal world of Princeton behind. To which more than one reader, reflecting upon Kirn's essay, might say: What a waste. An extremely rich student could have taken Kirn’s place and gotten all sorts of wonderful things out of the experience. |
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HARVARD MUM ON PROF…
…headlines the Boston Herald in today’s follow-up article to yesterday’s piece about Stephen Goldsmith, a former mayor of Indianapolis and a current professor, specializing in privatization, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Whether or not he is, as the Herald claims, in flagrant conflict of interest, Goldsmith is a busy man. He is a “top domestic advisor to President Bush,” a senior vice president of a firm that makes its money off of privatization, and a Harvard professor. [Wait a minute... lemme check something... WOW! Look at his website! He's even busier than I thought! A guy this good at scholarship, government, and business ought to be sized up for the next President of Harvard -- especially now that Summers's lease hath a shorter and shorter date.] “This guy is the patron saint of privatization… Harvard, which promotes this guy as a scholar, should have full disclosure of his conflict of interest,” says Jeff Waggoner, whose job involves arguing against public contracts being awarded to private companies like the one Goldsmith runs. “One local professor,” writes John Strahinich, the reporter for the Herald who’s trying to make something of all this, “said he wasn’t surprised. ‘I’ve always felt the Kennedy School is an ethically challenged place,’ said William Mayer, a noted author and professor at Northeastern. ‘This is the sort of thing that ought to be revealed. I don’t know why they don’t.’ ” |
Thursday, January 20, 2005
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WORTH QUOTING IN FULL
In today's USA Today. FORT WAYNE, Ind. - Landing at Fort Wayne International Airport, you don't sense anything is amiss. In fact, it's all quite pleasant. Grandmother-types hand out sugar cookies to arriving visitors. The Avis clerk is downright friendly and efficient. And driving into town you pass golf courses and garden apartments, high schools and one of the locals' favorites, The Oyster Bar. But once you arrive downtown, you start looking at the natives with a keener eye. Are they really as dumb as people say? Hard to tell, although the local hockey team is called the Komets. Yes, with a K. This heartland city of 255,000 has been dubbed the dumbest town in all the land by Men's Health magazine. It came in dead last, losing out at the bottom of the heap to the likes of Laredo, Texas. The survey is the talk of the town or at least among those who read, and there appear to be thousands. More on the readers in a bit. A front-page column in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel last week came with the bold, all-caps headline: SO THEY SAY WE'RE NOT THE BRIGHTEST BULB IN THE THE BOX ... WHAT DO THEY KNOW? Columnist Kevin Leininger suggested their "F" was basically "an evil Liberal Media Conspiracy." He threw out the fact that 8 of the 10 smartest cities were in blue states, and eight of the dumbest were in red states. He doesn't think it's a coincidence that "a certain amount of cultural elitism was at work here." While it would be understandable if Fort Wayne residents were seeing red these days, most are taking their newfound reputation for stupidity in stride. "I always thought we were the fattest, not the dumbest," says Angela Jurczak, 26, a junior at IPFW, which stands for Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. The elementary education major says it's hard to believe her hometown came in dead last in the smarts department. "I would have guessed we're at least a C. Not an F. That's kind of sad." Sad, yes, but many residents also think it's dead wrong, questioning how the magazine came up with its findings. "In each case, we try to gather enough statistics from good sources to get what we think is an accurate snapshot," says Matt Marion, who oversees the monthly MetroGrades page for Men's Health. "We feel pretty confident that what we're showing is the state of the city, where it is, how it's doing." Marion even offers a little advice for city residents. "If any of this resonates to be true ... look inward to see what you can do to make yourself better." Dan O'Connell, head of the Fort Wayne/Allen County Convention and Visitors Bureau, admits Fort Wayne is "sort of a vanilla city" but says he was "floored" by the study, citing the number of museums, colleges and universities that call Fort Wayne home. "We're spending $40 million-plus ($64 million, actually) on a new library," he says. "I think that says something about our citizens. We're building a library, not a stadium." Jeff Krull agrees. As head of the Allen County Public library since 1986, he is overseeing the expansion, which will house 2.6 million volumes, more than three times the national average for a city its size. Fort Wayne long has been known for its library system, including a genealogy section that rivals that of the Mormons in Salt Lake City. "We're the largest public genealogical collection in the nation," says Krull, a Williams College grad. Last year, 2 million people used the library, borrowing 5 million books, he says. And that was with two of the 13 branches closed. Judy Zehner of Fort Wayne's Science Central, an impressive hands-on children's museum, wasn't as politic as Krull, asking questions left and right about the survey. "I mean, how many cities do have one?" she asks, referring to the survey's Nobel Prize winner criterion. "You're getting my dander up. I'll tell you that!" Zehner admitted the city is still recovering from the "manufacturing mentality." And, she adds, "our school system is hurting from budget crunches ... but we have to move on from that." Mayor Graham Richard is putting a good face on the survey, too, but he realizes the potential damage to the city's long-term reputation. "It's unfortunate these things come out, and you try to find out how they did this," says the Princeton grad over tea in his ninth floor offices overlooking the city. The mayor talked of the city's blue-collar roots and the hard work of citizens to build Fort Wayne into the second largest city in the state, behind Indianapolis. But the days when Fort Wayne manufactured the first washing machines, TV sets and refrigerators are long past. Richard looks upon the study as a "rear-view mirror," saying he's more interested in the future and in getting the city's "best and brightest" to come back, a trend he sees slowly happening with the arrival of a few small high-tech companies. "We're in the transition period." But Gerry Prokopowicz, who served as Lincoln Scholar for nine years at Fort Wayne's Lincoln Museum, says more needs to be done to get the city out of the dunce corner. "Some people in Fort Wayne are aware that the steady diminishment of its intellectual capital is directly connected to the town's stagnant economy and are trying to do something about it," says Prokopowicz, who teaches history at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. "Unfortunately, they face a strong current of anti-intellectualism mixed with complacency and ignorance that characterizes much of the local business leadership." Prokopowicz says what discouraged him most about the study was a recent quote he read from a Fort Wayne official who said he didn't pay much attention to these things. "Maybe it's time to start paying attention to these quality of life issues," he says. "Maybe it's not always the messenger's fault." John Commorato Jr. at Hyde Brothers Booksellers on Wells Street hasn't yet fled but, like Prokopowicz, he admits he's tempted. He'd like to see the city be more welcoming to the arts underground which, he says, is thriving despite little encouragement. As for the intelligence of the residents, he has solid proof it exists: the used books that come and go from the cluttered store, which has volumes stacked from floor to ceiling. "Used bookstores are usually only as good as the people locally, and most of what comes in the door is local," he says. No one was reading at Cindy's Diner ("We serve the whole world, fifteen at a time") one morning last week, but all customers lining the counter had heard about the survey. When John Scheele, the affable owner and short-order cook, announces a reporter is in their midst looking for intelligent life in Fort Wayne, Stephen Hinkle, president of the local Easter Seals organization, pipes up immediately. "That's an oxymoron!" Which he then points out is a pretty big word for such a stupid city. "A lot of people here play "dumb, says Darrell Jaggers, president of the Salin Bank and Trust Company. "He's like the farmer who says he doesn't know anything when the city slicker shows up. It's a quiet kind of thing. It's very interesting." Gloria Diaz, a Fort Wayne native and columnist for the Fort Wayne Reader, the local arts and entertainment newspaper, thinks the city suffers as much from low self-esteem as low grades. "I tend to agree with the study," says Diaz, arguing that the city has failed to emphasize such attractions as its inexpensive real estate, for example, as a lure for new blood and business. (The median price for an existing home in Fort Wayne is $99,700, compared with $188,500 nationwide, according to the National Association of Realtors.) She also thinks residents are unwilling to spend on what's important, like education. "You have to spend money to make money." Russ Choka, the 81-year-old owner of the Coney Island hot dog shop ("Our Buns are Steamed"), is more circumspect. "What do you expect me to say?" he asks. "I've traveled all around the world, and nothing tops (Fort Wayne). They may be bigger but not better. Why do people always come back here to die if it's so bad, if we're so dumb?" He pauses, then wonders: "I don't sound stupid, do I?" ****************************************************** [ps: Guess this is the Men's Health magazine they're talking about. Looks really dumb.] |
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STUDENTRY
Laura Bush and UD are reading the same thing. Today’s New York Times has a front page feature about her in which the reporter asks what book she has on her night table at the moment. The ‘really, really wonderful’ Essays of E.B. White, she answers. UD picked up the essays at Louise Horn‘s estate sale (see UD post dated 12/13/04) a few weeks back, and she’s been reading one or two of them every evening. She likes White’s description of William Strunk, Jr., author of the iconic Elements of Style: " [The book] was known on the Cornell campus in my day as ‘the little book,’ with the stress on the word ‘little.’ I must have once owned a copy, for I took English 8 under Professor Strunk in 1919 and the book was required reading… [It] was privately printed (Ithaca, N.Y.) and …copyrighted in 1918 by the author. It is a forty-three page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English. Its vigor is unimpaired, and for sheer pith I think it probably sets a record that is not likely to be broken. …From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor, his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into strong light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile shuttling to and fro in a carefully edged mustache. …He despised the expression ‘student body,’ which he termed gruesome, and made a special trip downtown to the Alumni News office one day to protest the expression and suggest that ‘studentry’ be substituted, a coinage of his own which he felt was similar to ‘citizenry.’ " |
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SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME
FROM TODAY'S GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY STUDENT NEWSPAPER " They blew it last year. The most applications in GW history and instead of cutting down on the number they accepted, they took the largest class ever, and dropped GW's ranking to 52nd in the nation. Now, with the recently announced drop in Early Decision I applications, we're seeing the long-term results of decisions that put profits ahead of prestige. ... [George Washington] University officials should be spending less time giving themselves pay raises and more time considering the best interests of the students. For example, in 2004, President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg was one of 13 university presidents making more than $600,000 a year. Instead of allowing himself to be put into the ranks of the highest paid university officials in the nation, he should be more concerned with putting his students into one of the highest ranked Universities in the country. While Trachtenberg has gotten pay raises every year since 2001, GW has managed to drop lower in rank. Then again, maybe that's because there's a correlation between his pay and the number of student applications. "(Trachtenberg) added that his salary is determined based on the quality of GW's management, the number of freshman applications and the value of the University's endowment" (GW Hatchet, Nov. 22, 2004). So basically every time GW takes more students - and incidentally lowers its selectivity rating - Trachtenberg earns a pay raise. Well, that may no longer be an issue. This year Early Decision I applications dropped by almost 200, to around 950. If it turns out that GW's dropping rank is making potential students look to other places, will anything be done? If regular decision application numbers also drop, will President Trachtenberg take a pay cut? Is anything at all being done to attempt to bring GW back up after this year's slip to 52nd in the nation? " |
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ONE GOOD SUBLUXATION
DESERVES ANOTHER "Now, prompted by the debate raging over the future of a plan for a chiropractic school at Florida State University, [Florida Senate President Tom] Lee wants to keep lobbyists from serving on boards that govern the state's public universities, including the boards of trustees at each school and the statewide Board of Governors. 'We have 17.4 million Floridians,' said Lee, R-Brandon. 'We can't find 100 talented people who don't butter their bread with the Florida Legislature to serve on [these boards]? Give me a break.' In the case of the universities, Lee wants to avoid the appearance of lobbyists being pressured by legislators to support programs such as the chiropractic school, funded last year by the Legislature at the insistence of FSU alum and then-Senate President Jim King -- even though the university did not then and still does not want it." |
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NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
FINDS AN EMPIRICIST TO INTERVIEW He's Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory University. Here's some of what he said: “[The question of the] shortage of women in senior posts in science and engineering is … a scientific question… Do men and women differ in math ability? ….[F]emales tend to score higher in tests of language … boys tend to be much more likely than girls to score at the extremes, [both to have more] learning disabilities… [and be] exceptional at math. ... [T]here is some emerging evidence linking abilities to sex … [But] biology findings favor women as much as men…[Women are much stronger than men linguistically.] … [But gender stereotypes as children are raised are also in play.]…Did President Summers misspeak? … [I don't know, but I] hope this…won’t deter Summers from raising … disquieting questions…” Don't listen to Westen, though. He's prejudiced. He hasn't been through Emory's diversity workshop. Look at his department webpage: 'Dr. Westen received his B.A. at Harvard University, an M.A. in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex (England), and his Ph.D. in clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he subsequently taught for six years. For several years he was Chief Psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. Prior to moving to Emory in 2002, he was at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. His major areas of research are personality disorders, eating disorders, emotion regulation, implicit (unconscious) processes, psychotherapy effectiveness, and adolescent psychopathology. His holiday song, "Oy, to be a Goy on Christmas," still airs on the radio in New York during the holiday season.' Not only does Westen's Harvard pedigree render him incapable of dispassion. His rank bigotry against Christians makes him little more than an object of pity. *************************************** UH OH. IMMMEDIATE UPDATE AFTER CHECKING ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM: 'PINKER: Look, the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is “offensive” even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.' A COUNTER-TSUNAMI OF EMPIRICISTS HAS BEGUN!! |
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
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GETTING TO YES
The Lawrence Summers business has now become an intellectual tsunami and an institutional firestorm, by turns drowning and scalding Harvard’s beleaguered leader. In a desperate bid to save himself, Summers conferred last Tuesday with a group of high-powered women academics. “I want to listen, mainly,” he said at the time. “And, frankly, I want to see if there’s a way I can get myself out of this mess.” After a three-hour conference, both parties emerged with a plan by which the divisions could be healed and Summers could maintain his stewardship of the university. Summers and a spokeswoman for the group took turns at the microphone in a hastily called joint press conference, during which they described in detail a purification ceremony that will take place on Saturday in the room where Summers’s comments were uttered. “What I’m going to do,” Summers said, “is sprinkle salt over the doorway and windowsills of the room. I’ll then light a white candle. Before the ceremony, I will have prepared a fireproof bowl with garlic, peppermint, clove, thistle, sweet grass, and sage in it. I’ll light it so it smolders, and I’ll then recite the following spell repeatedly: In the name of the Eternal Lady and Lord I bid thee part. I consecrate and clear this space. Let nothing but joy linger here. Once everything’s finished burning, I’ll go outside with the ash and sprinkle it over the earth, our Mother.” |
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
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HOT OFF THE EMAIL --
ANOTHER PYNCHON UPDATE -- UD GETS RESULTS! From a GWU library representative: "I realized this in early November and ordered all of the Pynchon books we didn't have. It sometimes takes a while for them to arrive and be processed. This is definitely the kind of feedback I need, though, in trying to fill in gaps in the collection. I'm going to go ahead and rush order another copy of Crying in the meantime." |
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FRAILTY, THY NAME IS WOMAN
[for background, see UD below, 1/17/05] 'Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who once led an investigation of sex discrimination there that led to changes in hiring and promotion, walked out midway through [Harvard President Lawrence] Summers' remarks. "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Hopkins said.' |
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UPDATE ON THE CRYING OF LOT 49 AND THE GWU LIBRARY
One of UD's readers who is a George Washington University student pointed out in a comment a few weeks ago that GW's library doesn't own a copy of Thomas Pynchon's great postmodern novel, The Crying of Lot 49. UD just wanted to mention that she's relayed the problem to the English department's library representative, who has sent a formal request for the novel to the subject specialist at the library. |
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MORE REFUTATION OF THE
NEA'S INSISTENCE THAT SERIOUS READING MAKES YOU A BETTER PERSON [see UD, 7/12/04] From a commemoration of Marjorie Williams [see UD, 1/17/05]: "In 1990 she captured the vanity and the grasping that would ultimately undo Bush the First's budget director Richard Darman in [a] 10,000-word profile for the Washington Post Magazine. Apparently stunned into stupefaction by the Williams gaze, Darman takes Marjorie to his home overlooking the Potomac where it's his idea to lead her on a narrated tour (the wife and kids aren't there) at jog-speed. First the priceless view of the river, then quickly through the living room and up the stairs as he repels questions about the family photos and into his bedroom, outfitted with a pair of four-poster twin beds. Marjorie notes aloud that he's reading T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," and he amends sharply, 'Re-reading.'" |
Monday, January 17, 2005
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HARVARD PREZ SEXIST PIG!
Lord knows UD enjoys giving Harvard a hard time, but she's having trouble joining the hordes of women storming out of his lectures and calling him "pompous" for having said at a recent meeting of economists that there seem to be innate differences between men and women. Some people might "prefer to believe" that differences in math and science performance, for instance, are entirely social in nature, but "these are things that need to be studied." Or at least Summers said something like that. No one seems to have recorded his comments, which Summers, now under fire, says were in any case not his own views, but the views of some researchers, which he was summarizing for the audience. Plus, say conference organizers, he was "asked to be provocative." Anyway, UD is offended. UD is way offended. UD is offended by the elitist snobbery that made this meeting of top economists "invitation-only." In words that UD trusts she was able to deploy non-pompously, one of the offendeds explained that only "this country's most accomplished scholars" could come. Humph. |
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MARJORIE WILLIAMS,
1958 - 2005 "In Washington … I've always felt right at home. There, I have the pleasure of falling toward the raffish end of the fashion spectrum. (Trust me, it isn't hard.) It's an easy city -- small, leafy, navigable; a place where you can have a green backyard just a 10 or 15 minute drive from downtown. Of course it's a hive of conformity and caution, but that's part of what I like about it--about covering it, anyway. The mixture of that brittle, conservative set of social conventions and all the messy human stuff that goes on inside and among the people who try to climb to the top of the heap makes for such rich material. A lot of my stories (chiefly, my work is writing long, intensive profiles of people in government and politics) are really about what Washington admires, and why, and what it says about the political culture. … I love working this seam between the accepted narrative, usually hammered out between the Washington press corps and its sources, and the grubby hum |