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Wednesday, March 30, 2005
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ROBERT CREELEY 1926-2005 A WICKER BASKET Comes the time when it's later and onto your table the headwaiter puts the bill, and very soon after rings out the sound of lively laughter-- Picking up change, hands like a walrus, and a face like a barndoor's, and a head without any apparent size, nothing but two eyes-- So that's you, man, or me. I make it as I can, I pick up, I go faster than they know-- Out the door, the street like a night, any night, and no one in sight, but then, well, there she is, old friend Liz-- And she opens the door of her cadillac, I step in back, and we're gone. She turns me on-- There are very huge stars, man, in the sky, and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie, with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it, and I eat it-- Slowly. And while certainly they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket of these cats not making it, I make it in my wicker basket. |
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COUNTDOWN TO TARTAN DAY KILT RELOADED ‘THE Tartan Army have been exploiting it for years, but now the sheer potency of the kilt as worn by a true Scot has been seized upon by a new breed of American romance writers - with profitable results. Authors of novels with titles such as Master of the Highlands, Devil in a Kilt and Heaven and the Heather, have found that they can barely write the books fast enough to keep up with the demands of their smitten readers. Romance novels are big business in the United States, with one in 50 readers getting through more than 100 of the potboilers every year. The genre brought in $1.4 billion (£750 million) in 2003 alone. But perhaps following on from the success of Braveheart, this year’s publishing sensation is the racy plaid-ripper, where the men are smouldering Scots, the countryside is wild and rugged and the women are all a-quiver. Books with covers showing brooding, muscular, kilted heroes gazing out over the hills and glens are topping the best-seller lists. The authors, some of whom can barely contain their passion for a land they see as impossibly romantic, say their books are successful because Scottish men in kilts are so breathtakingly beguiling. Sue Ellen Welfonder, author of the bestselling Devil in a Kilt, said: "It’s the kilts. That or the men that fit in them. Scottish men are unbelievably sexy." …Devil in a Kilt tells the story of Duncan MacKenzie, an inarticulate cad who falls for Linnet MacDonnell, a feisty lass with second sight. One passage from the book runs: "Linnet’s cheeks grew warmer ... as did the rest of her body, but she fought to ignore the disquieting sensations. She didn’t want a MacKenzie to bestir her in such a manner. Imagining how her da would laugh if he knew she harboured dreams of a man desiring her chased away the last vestiges of her troublesome thoughts." Readers of Welfonder’s books agree that it is the Scottish men - and their "untamed" nature that make her romances unputdownable. On an online chatroom, one, known as "Keltictemptress34", writes: "Scottish men are so passionate and uncontrollable. Just the thought of trying to tame one makes me feel weak at the knees." ‘ |
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
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LOOK, IT’S OKAY WITH UD… …if people get all het up about monolithic liberalism on American college campuses. As an English professor (“The most left-leaning departments,” writes Howard Kurtz today in the Washington Post, about the latest study of the subject, “are those devoted to the humanities [81 percent],” and “the most left-leaning [among those] departments are English literature, philosophy…”), she has certainly had her fill of lefties 24/7. It’s even possible that with unrelenting publicity and pressure over the next decade or so, UD could in her lifetime encounter a teensy range of political opinion at American universities. But I’m not holding my breath. Here are the numbers that jump out at UD: 33 percent of the general public describe themselves as conservative, and 18 percent as liberal. Whereas. 72 percent of university and college teachers are liberal and 15 percent conservative. When UD reads stories like Kurtz’s, when she contemplates numbers like these, she gets this sudden image of the few remaining self-described liberals in the country huddled together like Ellis Islanders in the hull of a rusty boat, the boat being the American university… But this is altogether the wrong image. Many American universities (certainly UD’s) are glamorous yachts. The university is not merely one of the few asylums where liberals can be comfortably among their own; it is almost certainly the most stylish and attractive of escapes. (Hollywood isn’t a significant option, being too small and closed a world.) UD skews liberal for the purposes of the study about which Kurtz is writing. “The professors and instructors surveyed are, strongly or somewhat, in favor of abortion rights [yup]; believe homosexuality is acceptable [acceptable? I think we can do better than that], and want more environmental protections ‘even if it raises prices or costs jobs.’ [UD is an enviro-freak].” But on international politics UD looks much more conservative than her colleagues, and it’s too bad that it’s pointless for her to open a conversation about this anywhere on campus. Except with her students, of course. They’re far more conservative than any of us. |
Monday, March 28, 2005
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THE UNIVERSITY AS WELLNESS CLINIC UD discovers an intriguing convergence in a couple of recent online essays, one about private versus public universities, and the other about health, sickness, and ‘wellness’ in contemporary American and European culture. As with a Gregg Easterbrook piece UD cited awhile back [see UD, 9/11/04], John V. Lombardi notes the absence of any differences in outcome between graduating from a reasonably priced good public university and a very expensive good private one: Many studies have attempted to identify a major difference in the outcomes from attending expensive private institutions or attending high quality public universities in-state at half the price. Few of these find any significant difference in the outcomes, and in most cases the differences that do exist usually appear to reflect the differences in the wealth and opportunity provided by the students’ family circumstances before they enter college rather than any particular enhancement that comes from the luxury process of education. What really matters, writes Lombardi, is “the commitment and focus of the student.” After all, “most colleges and universities sell a commodity product, an education that at its core is fundamentally similar between institutions. The amenities may differ - luxury dorms, elaborate student centers, complex and fully equipped recreational facilities - but the chemistry and English classes are pretty much the same.” Easterbrook, in an interview about university education and successful people [see UD, 9/11/04], puts it this way: It's education generally — not any specific college — that [produced success] for them. The boomers misanalyze the situation and think, Oh, such-and-such person must have gone to Harvard to get where he is. But the relevant fact isn't that he went to Harvard, but that he got a good education somewhere. And a good education is now available at a hundred, maybe two hundred colleges in the United States. This being the case, observers have tried to figure out why tons of people still desperately want their children to go to very expensive private colleges. In some cases, undeniably, there are good intellectual reasons for such a choice. But in a significant number of cases, as Easterbrook suggests, it’s about snobbery. “In the world of Mercedes, Louis Vuitton, and vacation properties, high price means high status. At least some portion of affluent parents would be disappointed if college prices fell; they want the schools they patronize overpriced and thus exclusionary.” James B. Twitchell agrees, and goes further: [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. …[Furthermore], 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. This idea of the “total environment” university, where what’s at stake isn’t education so much as the creation of (as Lombardi’s list of goodies up there suggests) gyms, dorms, and student centers that generate a sense of privilege, exclusivity, and well-being, leads me to the other recent essay I’d like to look at. This one’s by Frank Furedi, who notices that, as Goethe predicted ("Speaking for myself, I, too, believe that humanity will win in the long run; I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else‘s humane nurse."), wealthy countries are becoming hospitals. The “problems we encounter in everyday life are reinterpreted as medical ones,” Furedi writes; “Problems that might traditionally have been defined as existential - that is, the problems of existence - have a medical label attached to them.” A writer for the New York Times, contributing to an end-of-year discussion about American culture in December of 2003, gives an example [see UD, 1/8/04]: These days you would think that there is no such thing as normal, thanks to the hand-in-glove working of the drug and insurance companies with the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the handbook of 374 ‘mental illnesses.’ If you are still grieving a loved one's death two months later, you fit the category of "major depressive disorder." Insurance companies want you quickly fixed, drug companies have a pill for every occasion, and friends and family are too overworked to provide the irreplaceable support for grief that is present in other countries. We are damaging the nature of friendship, teaching people that they need experts to treat them for everything. Furedi argues that we’ve now begun to fetishize the condition of being unwell. Being unwell has become our default position, which means that the attainment of “wellness” becomes “something you have to work on, something to aspire to and achieve. This reinforces the presupposition that not being well - or being ill - is the normal state. That is what our culture says to us now: you are not okay, you are not fine; you are potentially ill. The message seems to be that if you do not subscribe to this project of keeping well, you will revert to being ill.” (This idea of a perpetual project is particularly attractive to hyperactive Americans, since it provides a model within which our restless energies toward self-improvement may be - must be - tirelessly indulged.) Some of these ideas are not really new, but find a pedigree in Freud’s notion that we’re all neurotics; they also bear a family resemblance to the Laingian bromide that we live in a sick society. What’s new, says Furedi, is that “we are consciously valuing illness.” We must be ill, for if we are not ill we do not learn: “It’s almost like going to university, something positive, to be embraced, with hundreds of books telling us how to make the most of the experience of sickness.” Looked at from this perspective, it’s no wonder that our university professors are melancholics (see UD, 1/18/04); they bear the burden, year after year, of conveying insight into the truth of human life through the relentless focus upon and embodiment of being ill, being un-well. But more broadly, UD would like to suggest, in a culture where the “normalisation of illness remains culturally affirmed,” and in which “we are encouraged continually to worry about our health,” one value of the very expensive private university might lie in its simultaneous indulgence of its students’ unwellness and its constant search for a cure. Unlike big public universities (Michigan, Minnesota, Maryland, Wisconsin) where there are too many people about for much personal attention, expensive private colleges are good at creating a hothouse environment for neurotic wellness-strivers. They are good at maintaining the narrative that the parents of neurotic wellness-strivers may have been telling their children about themselves for years: the foundation of their unwellness is that they are brilliant, special, gifted. The years of therapy many over-parented students have enjoyed have conveyed to them above all their specialness, a specialness based upon superior sensitivity, intellect, and creativity. In his spectacular AIDS diary, Unbecoming, the American anthropology professor Eric Michaels remembers his gifted and talented boyhood: I had spent rather a lot of time in testing and therapy sessions by the time I was a college sophomore. These sessions introduced me to a bewildering universe of praise and blame, obligation and independence which seemed quite impossible to me. What was being reinforced was an extreme and alienating sense of my personal uniqueness, the vast gulfs that separated me from any other humankind. Thus, my encounter with culturalogical explanation was a revelation, a discovery embraced longingly. Michaels escaped a disabling sense of his unique unwellness through the discovery of anthropological method; but for many of the students in expensive private colleges, UD wants to suggest, the expense of the experience is justified by the college’s implicit agreement to continue the personal uniqueness story, to indulge the brilliant unwellness of each of its special charges. The institutional philosophy for which parents are willing to pay dearly, then, rests upon an acknowledgment of their children’s neurotic exceptionality, an acknowledgment of the fragility of their mental and physical health, and an in loco parentis devotion to the wellness project of each one of them. |
Sunday, March 27, 2005
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KILTS SCOTCHED Distracted by their nation’s own higher education controversy - Is Ward Churchill or is he not an Indian? - Americans have overlooked a similar national-identity story playing itself out at one of Europe‘s great universities. The story is particularly timely because 1. Tartan Day (April 6) is fast-approaching; and 2. the story involves Scottish people. Claiming that the national dress certain Cambridge students are wearing to its graduation ceremonies has become “flamboyant” and “extreme,” university authorities recently banned all non-standard (standard would be white shirts, dark trousers or skirt) clothing at the events. The announcement “sparked fury among patriotic Scottish students, and the university has been inundated with e-mails from angry alumni demanding that the dress law be removed.” One Scotsman.com columnist calls the Cambridge overseers “intellectual Sassenachs” [Note to self: Look up “Sassenachs”]. Another says they need to “forget 1746 and realise that we’re now living in 2005." [Note to self: What happened in 1746?] So intense has the Scottish challenge been that Cambridge officials have now begun to back down: “Yesterday, officials at the university admitted they were prepared to make exceptions for those who felt strongly about wearing their national dress.” |
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UD’s EASTER SUNDAY POST From Ways of Escape, by Graham Greene I look back on David Selznick now with affection. …When I was in New York he invited me to lunch to discuss a project. He said, ‘Graham, I’ve got a great idea for a film. It’s just made for you.’ I had been careful on this occasion not to take a third martini. ‘The life of St Mary Magdalene.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘no. It’s not really in my line.’ He didn’t try to argue. ‘I have another idea,’ he said. ‘It will appeal to you as a Catholic. You know how next year they have what’s called the Holy Year in Rome. Well, I want to make a picture called The Unholy Year. It will show all the commercial rackets that go on, the crooks…’ ‘An interesting notion,’ I said. ‘We’ll shoot it in the Vatican.’ ‘I doubt if they will give you permission for that.’ ‘Oh sure they will,’ he said. ‘You see, we’ll write in one Good Character.’ (I am reminded by this story of another memorable lunch in a suite at the Dorchester when Sam Zimbalist asked me if I would revise the last part of a script which had been prepared for a remake of Ben Hur. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘we find a kind of anti-climax after the Crucifixion.’) |
Saturday, March 26, 2005
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TV-B-GONE DELUXE Why, UD’s daughter wanted to know, wasn’t UD scared by the film The Ring? UD responded that she thinks it has to do with her tv disability. As you know (unless you’re visiting the new-look University Diaries for the first time), UD does not watch tv. Except for the last presidential election returns, when she was hoping Kerry would win, UD has not watched tv in many years. So many years, in fact, that UD is now fully television-disabled. She has lost her capacity for tv receptivity. She no longer has that virtually universal willingness to be pulled toward every lit square in the vicinity. For UD the subject of tv, the turning on of tvs, and the running of tvs, is boring and embarrassing. It’s been ages since she felt the tv-specific depression so many people feel when they robotically watch. Just as UD has noticed that there are some buildings so ugly she actually doesn’t see them, so television, she recognizes, has become the thing everyone else sees that she does not see. She’s like the brain-damaged people in Oliver Sacks’s books, except that she’s only tv-aphasic. She sees everything else. So when, in The Ring, the television screens out of which the disturbed little girl emerges suddenly turn on all by themselves with a creepy electronic whoosh that's supposed to make you jump out of your skin, UD yawns. The fear-effect of the film depends upon your finding scary the idea that this friend to us all, this most beloved and familiar of household appliances, has become an uncontrollable conveyor of horror. But since for UD the television set represents not a friend but a faintly embarrassing emanation, like a lazy fart, there’s no fright. Although few Americans, UD figures, have attained UD's total-tv-erasure, the web-server-crashing sales of TV-B-Gone (see UD, 10/22/04, 11/5/04, and 1/6/05 for background) suggest that she is far from alone in her attitudes. In a nice essay updating the TV-B-Gone phenomenon (in which a solo entrepreneur with a website, a guy named Mitch, invented a small black object which, when touched near any television, turns the television off), Andrew Ferguson notes that “Mitch's press has been so approving and so voluminous, with dozens of jokey stories in newspapers and magazines, that he has yet to spend a dime on publicity. The website of gadget-happy Wired magazine featured the TV-B-Gone the day Mitch started up. That morning he sold 1,200 units online until his web server crashed. The next day he sold 2,300 more before the server crashed again. Since November he's sold another 40,000, with demand showing no signs of slack.” UD bought four TV-B-Gones (Christmas presents). They took awhile to get to her. Mitch apologized about this on his website. He was unprepared to handle customer volume. Ferguson has tracked down Mitch and interviewed him: ' ”The TV is always on,” [Mitch] says, “whether there's anybody there or not. And really, the last thing you want to see while you're doing your laundry is things blowing up, reports of murders, crime and stuff. Or Dr. Phil [see UD, 10/6/04]." He shudders visibly. "I've never been in there when people are really watching it. They're distracted by it, but that's different. So when I pull out my TV-B-Gone and turn the TV off, they go back to their book, or they talk to each other, or they watch the laundry go round and round and round. Nobody ever gets annoyed." It was under similarly prosaic circumstances that the idea for TV-B-Gone came to him. He was having dinner with friends in a neighborhood restaurant. Up in a corner near the ceiling a television screen flickered. The sound was muted, but Mitch and his friends found themselves turning their attention to it anyway--an experience that every citizen of every country wired with electricity has had at one time or another. "You could just feel this screen suck the energy right out of the conversation," he says. "I thought, 'Gee, I wish I could turn that thing off." ' People eventually intuit, Ferguson comments, the coercive nature of many of the screens in public places: ' Wal-Mart announced last month that it was heavily investing in thousands of new 42-inch high-definition LCD televisions, to be placed strategically throughout all its stores. Every Wal-Mart is already a riot of television screens, of course, but as a company spokesman complained to the New York Times, the existing TV monitors were bolted "high above shoppers' heads and easily overlooked." Let them just try to overlook a 42-inch high LCD screen. Let them just try. ' And now, to make things even more interesting, a war’s hotting up: 'Inevitably, there has been a backlash. CNN, which owns all those Blitzer-blaring TVs in all those airports, is reportedly trying to concoct a way for its TV monitors to identify a remote signal from a TV-B-Gone and ignore it. ("That's okay," says Mitch with a shrug. "I'll just make a TV-B-Gone Deluxe.") ' You go, baby! |
Friday, March 25, 2005
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UPDATE: "HIMSELF AND NORA" [for background skepticism, see UD, 2/13/05] From Sandiego.com: ' Now Playing... "HIMSELF AND NORA" 03/25/2005 Old Globe Theatre Review by Welton Jones There's nothing tougher in the theatre than trying to make the writing process interesting. No matter how fabulous the result, the mechanics are booorrrrring. So a new musical about James Joyce, an author of famed complexity and passion, probably more revered than read, has a double burden to bear: Making drama out of a boring activity that produced, many would say, a boring result. The makers of "Himself and Nora," now in its world premiere version at the Old Globe Theatre, began by making the title characters improbably handsome and goofy in love. Joyce, a dour, lanky gent with a pinched look, was certainly no Matt Bogart, the clean-cut and lively actor who plays him at the Globe. And, while pictures of the young Nora Barnacle show her to be a fine broth of a girl, she hasn't the poise and polish of Kate Shindle at the Globe. ...The Joyces caper about on Tobin Ost's intricate set as if revolving masonry were an everyday affair and their three supplemental colleagues David Edwards, Frank Mastrone and Kathy Santen join them in endless variations to suggest stage pictures containing far more than just five faces. As for deeper meanings of roiling passions, there are none. If making a writer at work interesting is hard, than finding some fun in a tortured, egoistical genius is truly labor-intensive. Why Nora puts up with this Bozo is sometimes hard to understand, especially since he denies her even the comfort of marriage. And when he starts getting famous, he's insufferable. Ezra Pound brings him a rich heiress. Sylvia Beach begs to publish "Ulysses." They're seen as worshipful fools while he just becomes a bigger boor. Of course, everything should come clear in the songs, drawn, one might expect, from the rich musical tradition of Ireland as filtered, perhaps, through the influence of Italy and France where the Joyces spent most of their exiled lives. Sorry. But for a minor-key lick here and a twirl there, the source of these songs is Broadway, USA: The choppy rhythms and jagged sentimentalism of Stephen Sondheim in "Kiss;" the production-number pizzazz of "Let's Have a Drink" and "River Liffy;" "What Better Thing," a soulful love duet later reprised as a justification; and two or three finales. (Jana Zielonka leads the five musicians through orchestrations barely sketched by the composer.) After a couple of early duds, true, the songs are pleasant and useful enough. Two are more than that: "All Expenses Paid," a ragtime fantasia by the hard-working quintet during which all problems are solved, and "Lucky," a tough, wry torch song in the Brecht-Weill manner, sold with true bite by Miss Shindle. But the chance to paint Ireland's most influential author with the musical palette of his homeland must await some other show. Perhaps the same show that finally finds something of interest in the act of writing. ' |
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GROVERS Look. Can we talk? It’s one thing to have, at a high-profile university, a tenured plagiarist, a professor who has misrepresented himself as a minority in order to gain advantages. The University of Colorado will be within its rights to dismiss Ward Churchill on these grounds. It’s another thing to have, at an obscure campus, a tenured absurdity who does not plagiarize and who has never misrepresented himself. The critics of the academy who have turned their attention from Professor Ward Churchill to the Muppety-sounding Professor Grover Furr - a veteran English faculty member at Montclair State - are barking up the wrong jackass. Yes, Furr is an illiterate Stalinist. He uses the same boilerplate as the communist letter-writer George Orwell immortalized fifty years ago in “Politics and the English Language.” Here he is on the fascist CIA client, Solidarnosc: 'Why does the CIA support Solidarity? Because…the U.S. ruling class, in fact everyone but the public, from whom the truth as been withheld, knows that Solidarity is as reactionary as they come. It is a fascist organization, not unlike Hitler’s, resembling nothing so much as the Moscow and Warsaw ‘communists’ whom it opposes so bitterly. … In Poland as elsewhere racism is used to divert the workers’ movement towards scapegoats, away from its real enemies, and into pro-capitalist directions. [Albert Shanker] and Walesa are birds of a feather, loyal supporters of big business, enemies of workers everywhere, clones of one another… A real workers’ revolt…would be directed first against these wolves in sheep’s clothing, traitors who prey on the crying needs of workers and others for a better life.' Birds of a feather are cloned and become wolves in sheep’s clothing and none of us knows about it because we’re dupes of the ruling classes… If we’d read Grover Furr in the early ‘eighties we’d have avoided the catastrophe of Solidarnosc and the larger collapse of communism it helped to bring about… So there’s a fossil to be found at Montclair State. He’s teaching his students how to write like Brezhnev and think like Khrushchev. But look. A number of colleges and universities up and down this great land of ours have Grovers stashed away in labs and linen closets -- weird little men (women, it seems to UD, are underrepresented in this cohort) writing about space aliens (see UD, 7/16/04) and Sun Persons and Solidarnosc… Students are of course advised to stay away from these people, and most do. But these people have been tenured. They have been allowed to toil for the length and breadth of their days alerting us to the aliens and fascists and Ice People among us. A big country with a diversified higher education system will generate, and should tolerate, a few Grovers. |
Thursday, March 24, 2005
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CHURCHILL UPDATE via Blogger News Network: " Bottom line: Ward Churchill will not be fired for his 9/11 comments, but will be investigated for issues concerning his research. He will not be investigated on issues concerning his teaching. He will be investigated for issues concerning his Indian ethnicity, because he portrayed that ethnicity as being integral to his scholarly research. The conclusion of the report: ' Professor Churchill has outraged the Colorado and national communities as a result of profoundly offensive, abusive, and misguided statements relating to the victims of the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. As repugnant as his statements are to many in the University community, however, they are protected by the First Amendment. Allegations have been made that Professor Churchill has engaged in research misconduct; specifically, that he has engaged in plagiarism, misuse of others' work, falsification and fabrication of authority. These allegations have sufficient merit to warrant referral to the University of Colorado at Boulder Standing Committee on Research Misconduct for further inquiry in accordance with prescribed procedures. The research misconduct procedures afford Professor Churchill an opportunity to review and to respond to the allegations before any determination is made. If the Committee determines that Professor Churchill engaged in research misconduct, the Committee is to make recommendations regarding dismissal or other disciplinary action. Also referred to the Committee is the question of whether Churchill committed research misconduct by misrepresenting himself to be American Indian to gain credibility, authority, and an audience by using an Indian voice for his scholarly writings and speeches. Other issues brought to the attention of the reviewers, such as teaching misconduct, were not found to warrant action. '" |
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
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NYU UD’s fourteen year old daughter thinks she’d like to go to New York University. She is not alone: ' New York University beat Harvard University as the top “dream college” for a second straight year, leading a survey of U.S. students who increasingly are applying to urban schools, The Princeton Review Inc. said. …The number of applications to New York University more than tripled to 34,000 this year from about 10,000 in 1990 as students sought access to corporate internships and entertainment to supplement their education. Homicides dropped to 570 last year compared with 1,827 in 1993, according to New York City police department data, reducing concerns about urban crime and terrorism. “Over the last five to eight years, urban schools have had an incredible renaissance with college students,” said Robert Franek, Princeton Review's publisher and vice president of admissions services. … “Young people want to be in cities because they can do things in a city they can't do in the wilderness,” said New York University spokesman John Beckman. “They can get a taste of what their career might be like, they can do interesting jobs as they go to school.” …Current students at New York University include the actor twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, whose careers started in the television series “Full House.” ' It has nothing to do with actor twins for UD’s little one. A few years ago, on their way back from two months in Indonesia, UD and her daughter spent ten days in New York City. The little one fell hard for the place. |
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He asked if I thought he had been too hard on the son-of-a-whore poet. I am not one easily to let by-gones be by-gones… But Mitch wrestled his gruffness And said some kind words. Mitch wrestled with yet more than gruffness and lost. He died. With each sip of brandy and ginger ale his words will speak kindness to us. This excerpt from a eulogy for a friend was written by JJ Jameson, recently named by a local arts group Chicago’s poet of the month. Jameson is the pen name of double murderer Norman A. Porter, Jr., who, after he escaped from prison in Massachusetts, assumed the identity of a marxisant midwestern bard. The disguise gave him, as he told the arresting officer today, “a good 20 years.” |
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Way To Go From today's New York Times obituaries: ' Stanley Sadie, a musicologist, writer and editor whose prodigious output included editing the last two editions of the titanic and authoritative New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, died on Monday at his home in Cossington, England. He was 74. ...Mr. Sadie had spent three weeks at a hospital in London, but was intent on returning home in time for the first concert in a music series that he and his wife run in a church near their home. The concert, on Sunday evening, was an all-Beethoven program performed by the Chillingirian String Quartet. Mr. Sadie was able to stay for the first half, but felt unwell and went home to bed. At the conclusion of the performance, the quartet went to Mr. Sadie's house, set up quietly in his bedroom, and performed the slow movement of Beethoven's Quartet Number 16 in F (Op. 135) as he drifted in and out of sleep. ' |
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
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You don't want ... ... another description of university students taking a midterm exam, do you? Recall that UD has already written a poem (see UD , 5/4/04) and a little prose piece (see UD, 10/14/04) for you while doing what she's doing now: sitting in front of a group of undergraduates and watching them take a midterm. But UD has nothing better to do for the next fifty minutes. So let's see if she can find something new to say about this classic scenario. UD will of course never be able to top Vladimir Nabokov's description of the university examination room: ...I loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved composing and delivering my lectures on Russian writers and European great books. But around 60, and especially in winter, one begins to find hard the physical process of teaching, the getting up at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle with the snow in the driveway, the march through long corridors to the classroom, the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map of James Joyce's Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping car of the St. Petersburg-Moscow express in the early 1870s -- without an understanding of which neither Ulysses nor Anna Karenin, respectively, makes sense. For some reason my most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith. Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30. About 150 students -- unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of pages. Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me, seeing in me with hope and hate the source of forbidden knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: "Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that ...? Or do you want us to answer only the first part of the question?" The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily scribbling on. A rustle arising simultaneously, the majority turning a page in their bluebooks, good teamwork. The shaking of a cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time's up. But perhaps UD's midterm posts can be seen as modest contributions to the subject... UD will get the less attractive elements of the setting out of the way first: 1. Great hacking phlegmy groans. 2. Cell phones. Moving on, there's the reliable blackness of it all: black tees, black sweats, black blouses, black turtlenecks. If glasses, black glasses. If watches, black bands. If hats, black hats. One woman's wearing a charcoal tee with GODDESS written on it. Another has a spectacular tan (spring break, Cancun). One male student has brought not a pocket dictionary but a thesaurus, which impresses me. Yet another student has brought, instead of a dictionary, a book of words you're allowed to use in Scrabble. "This is useless," he says to me on his way out. |
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This is a head-spinning one. Notice in particular the complex procedure described in highlighted paragraphs. ' State senator withdraws from university amid claims that ex-aide did schoolwork A former staffer claims that he wrote college term papers for Sen. Richard F. Colburn. By David Nitkin Baltimore Sun Staff March 22, 2005 State Sen. Richard F. Colburn, a Dorchester County Republican who sits on a committee that oversees education issues, has withdrawn from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore amid allegations from a former legislative aide who claims to have written and submitted academic papers on Colburn's behalf. The aide, Gregory Dukes, said he wrote five papers for Colburn last year for two sociology courses Colburn was taking toward a bachelor's degree. Dukes, 36, said he felt obligated to complete the papers to keep his job. He said he resigned from his legislative position in December after being ordered to perform those duties and a variety of personal tasks for Colburn, including waiting at his home for repair workers and coordinating the sale of baseball tickets. "If he receives any success because of what I did, I would feel bad about that," Dukes said of his former employer. Colburn, 55, flatly rejects the allegations, which he said stemmed from a personnel dispute. He said he wrote the papers longhand and gave them to Dukes to type, as he does not know how to type or use computers. He abandoned his coursework, he said, because of the demands of his legislative activities. "It's his word versus my word," he said. "We're talking about a disgruntled employee." Colburn said he paid Dukes for the typing and assumed the aide was doing the work on his own time, not state time. Dukes said he charged Colburn $20 an hour for the academic work, receiving $300 for one of the two courses but nothing for the other. He said the payment was to create the papers, not transcribe them. Dukes said he asked for the fee in the hope that Colburn would be dissuaded from having someone else do his work. The allegations first came to light in January when Dukes wrote to Anna Vaughn-Cooke, vice president for academic affairs at UMES, outlining what he said was his participation in Colburn's coursework and apologizing for his role. He said he wanted the letter to be considered a formal complaint. Ronnie Holden, vice president for administrative affairs at UMES, confirmed yesterday that Colburn is no longer enrolled and said the withdrawal came after Dukes submitted the complaint. But Holden and other university officials would not comment on any inquiry that might have been started, noting student confidentiality laws. Dukes provided copies of draft papers, notes, e-mails and faxes to the university and later to The Sun to support his allegations. Among them is a handwritten note from Colburn to his aide describing how a UMES sociology professor rejected as too advanced a term paper topic for a class on American minority groups that Dukes says he - not Colburn - suggested. "Gregory - I talked to Dr. Alston [Assistant Professor David Alston] about a term paper comparing the plight of Native American (Indians) on reservations in America vs. that of Jews in concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Dr. Alston states that he felt such a paper would be too complex. ... He stated to just read this chapter and try to read and quote from other authors," the note said. It is signed, "Thanks, Rick." Colburn said his handwritten directions to Dukes were not orders, but simply notes from the class and discussions that he was passing on. The senator gave a similar explanation for all the notes that Dukes kept. Elected to the House of Delegates in 1983, Colburn is chairman of the Eastern Shore Senate delegation and is not regarded as a particularly powerful figure in Annapolis. He is a member of the Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee, which, in part, considers bills on higher education policy. Colburn received an associate's degree from Chesapeake College, a community college, in 1982, according to the registrar's office there. He is town manager in Federalsburg, a 2,600-resident Dorchester County community. He said he has long desired a bachelor's degree for personal enrichment. "I don't know whether I'll live long enough" to receive one, he said last week. "I had a bout of prostate cancer." Dukes, an emergency room nurse by training, began as a campaign volunteer for Colburn in 2003 and went on the legislature's payroll in February 2004. As Colburn's chief of staff, he handled constituent complaints, wrote letters and researched legislation. Dukes said Colburn also asked him to do personal tasks such as help arrange the resale of the senator's Orioles season tickets and help move furniture in his home. Dukes said he worked on two UMES academic courses for Colburn. One was a sociology internship based on Colburn's experience as a Republican congressional candidate from Maryland's 1st District in 2004, supervised by Professor Stanley DeViney. Colburn was defeated in the primary by incumbent Wayne T. Gilchrest. The second was the course on minority groups taught by Alston. During the internship, Colburn was to receive credit for keeping a log of his campaign activities and writing a paper after reading two classic political science texts and comparing his experiences to them. Dukes said Colburn had him read the books - Robert Dahl's Who Governs? and William Domhoff's Who Really Rules? - and write a paper. He said Colburn told him to give the paper to retired Chesapeake College professor Conway Gregory, a friend of Colburn's who the aide said was serving as an informal academic adviser for the senator. Gregory rewrote the paper, said Dukes. The aide said Colburn, without looking at it, told him to submit the revised version. "He said, 'OK, send it to the school.' He wouldn't touch it," Dukes said. "I lost all interest in his school endeavors at that point." Colburn and Gregory, the retired professor, appear to have long-standing connections. Gregory's resume shows that he worked for years as a grants writer in Federalsburg and was a legislative aide to the senator. A "plan of action" for Colburn's bachelor's degree kept by the aide shows that of 11 UMES classes the senator proposed taking in 2003 and 2004, Gregory was to be the instructor for seven. But Gregory has no relationship with UMES. There is no indication that the university approved the plan. In an interview, Gregory said that plans that he serve as Colburn's primary instructor were "just a suggestion." Gregory said he recalled making suggestions on Colburn's sociology paper but denied that he rewrote it. "That's all I did was edit it," he said. "I do not recall writing a paper." But Colburn could not explain why there were two versions of the sociology paper. Asked to name the city that was the subject of the two books - New Haven, Conn. - the senator could not. He also could not name the professor overseeing the course, Stanley DeViney. DeViney would not comment for this article, saying federal laws prohibited him from speaking about a student's work. Alston, the second professor, could not be reached for comment. Colburn said Dukes was disgruntled because the aide wanted to work out of Annapolis instead of Cambridge, but that Colburn refused. He said that after Dukes resigned, the aide improperly copied and removed files from the state-issued computer. The senator contacted the state attorney general's office to get them back; after that, Dukes got an attorney. Assistant Attorney General Robert Zarnoch, who advises the General Assembly, acknowledged that he got involved in the matter. "Our job at some point was to make sure the files got back," Zarnoch said. Dukes provided copies earlier this year. Even if Dukes' allegations are true and he wrote papers for Colburn on state time, that probably does not constitute a legal violation, Zarnoch said, because lawmakers have wide latitude in the tasks they give their employees. ' |
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' Two-Alarm Fire Breaks Out At GWU One Person Receives Serious Injuries POSTED: 6:15 am EST March 22, 2005 WASHINGTON -- A fire at George Washington University located in northwest Washington has forced the evacuation of a high-rise dormitory. D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services spokesman Alan Etter said the fire is at Thurston Hall in the 1900 block of G Street. Etter said the fire broke out shortly before 5 a.m. and was confined to a dorm room on the ninth floor of the high-rise dormitory. Etter said one person was found inside unconscious suffering from serious burns and smoke inhalation. The injured person was removed and taken to George Washington University Hospital. Etter said the male, believed to be about 20 years old, was in respiratory arrest. He will be stabilized and eventually transferred to the burn unit of the Washington Hospital Center, Etter said. Etter said a firefighter also suffered an injury while helping to remove the person from the room. It has not been determined yet whether the injured person is a student. So far there has been no damage estimate and the cause of the fire remains under investigation. ' |
Monday, March 21, 2005
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WOMEN WHO READ THE ECONOMIST AND THE MEN WHO LOVE THEM Actually, UD will say nothing about the men who love them. She just likes the title. Steve Sailer (iSteve.com) comments, apropos the few-women-are-pundits controversy: I've spent enormous amounts of time standing around magazine racks in my life, and I can assure you that women almost never look at the prestige section where they group together "The Economist," "The New Republic," and "The National Interest," and other journals that don't have anything to do with your personal life. Attractive single women look at fashion and beauty magazines. Attractive married women look at expensive home decorating magazines. The ugly truth is that UD, anatomically female, reads The Economist all the time. She subscribes. Why oh why oh why oh, why does UD ever read The Economist? Because it covers all these teeny countries (Montenegro. Population, 600,000.) in fascinating detail. Because it has lengthy special reports on things like universities. Because its orientation is international. Because it’s well-written. Does UD have reservations about The Economist? She does. Graphically it’s a bore. Photo captions are sometimes sophomoric. It still runs ads for a Thai airline that portrays its female flight attendants as sex slaves. To be sure, UD also reads the shelter mags Sailer mentions. Metropolitan Home means a lot to her, as does the extremely well-put-together Garden Design. UD’s furtive love for Paris Match is now, thanks to her tell-all blog, well-known. And while UD reads the shelter magazines from front to back like a normal person, faithful readers of this blog already know that UD reads The Economist from back to front, starting with the week’s featured obituary, and then moving on to the arts and culture pages. When she finally backs up into the Finance section, she doesn’t even look. She just keeps going in reverse until she gets to the foreign news. Finance stories tend to be about hefty men named Helmut who may or may not be going to jail for malfeasance. Oh, and UD’s a regular reader of the New Republic, too. Has been for years. So… a pretty good writer, with a pretty good grasp of politics… and yet UD doesn’t punditize, at least about non-university stuff. Why? I’m not sure. UD is enough of a professional writer that if you paid her to do it she’d probably do it adequately. I don’t think I’m afraid to speak out. Dahlia Lithwick, in an interview on NPR, remarks that it can be “hard for women to brave an opinion. When they do they get slapped down for it.” In UD’s experience, it’s not so much that you get slapped down. It’s that you get The Look. Men have a way of looking at women who speak and write sharply … like …it’s like… Huh? … It’s not exactly hostile… it’s just like, uh, what are you doing? What are you? What's going on? Simplement, these men are confused. It's best to ignore them and keep going until they begin to understand what is happening to them. No, UD fears that the problem, at least for her, is too great a sense of Life’s Ambiguity. Pundits have to generate confident settled positions about everything. UD dithers about the ineffability of it all. |
Sunday, March 20, 2005
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SPRING CLEANING A professor at the University of Colorado, smarting under the Churchill whip, comes to a conclusion UD came to a long while back (see UD, 2/8/04): “[T]here is no place for the personal political positions of faculty in the classroom. It tends to make for poor teaching.” Philip Rieff, regarded by most leftists as a reactionary whackjob, has long argued this, and it makes UD lighthearted, on this first day of spring, that the professor from CU, who describes himself as “one of those refugee leftists, stashed away in academia, and regarded by many conservatives as all that's wrong with universities today,” finds common ground with Rieff. (Rieff’s ideas about the “triumph of the therapeutic” - and Christopher Lasch’s elaboration of them - have strongly influenced UD.) He does so because he has actually stopped and thought about the distinctive thing that a university is: I'm an academic not because it's a good place for me to practice my leftist politics or indoctrinate my students to my cause. Rather, I'm here because I was a lousy leftist. I could never commit to a cause that I inevitably saw as riddled with internal contradictions. As a young activist, I was far more interested in the complexities and contradictions inherent in political positions than in the "rightness" or the "wrongness" of those positions themselves. I was drawn to academia not because it was a haven for my political beliefs, but because it encouraged me to subject the world to rigorous scrutiny, enabling me to challenge anyone's political position when such a challenge was warranted. Here we have an eloquent version of Arnold’s idea of the particular critical capacity you’re supposed to gain from exposure to university education: an ability to "see the object as in itself it really is." True critical thought, as Michael Bryson points out in a discussion of Matthew Arnold, “strips away political agendas. …Criticism's primary quality is … disinterestedness. [Criticism must] keep ‘aloof from what is called the practical view of things’ by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a ‘free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches.’ It [resolutely avoids] political polemics of the sort which dominate criticism in the late 20th century: ‘Criticism must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims.’ The law of criticism's being is "the idea of a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." There’s an important temporal claim embedded in the CU professor’s description of what university faculties do: To expect [university faculty] to both question the taken-for-granted world of our students (this being what we are trained to do) and then provide them with a forum for reorganizing their views around ready-made ideological positions is to cheapen and ultimately contradict what we are here to do. (This, by the way, is why pre-shrunk programs like women’s and ethnic studies are undergoing scrutiny. They tend to cheat students of a real education.) Note the implicit narrative of critical thought here: Before any position taking, one needs to acquire a ground of knowledge, as well as an understanding of legitimate modes of intellectual argumentation. Even more importantly, you must somehow acquire the attitude of patient disinterestness that allows for mental flexibility, for the possibility of changes in your ways of thinking. “The very basis for beliefs themselves [is] challenged at the most basic level” at a serious university, says the CU professor [UD would have rewritten that sentence to find a way to avoid the repetition of “basis“ and “basic”…] The university’s function is not to rush the student toward conclusions but “rather to develop critical inquiries of the knowledge upon which political positions are based in the first place.” Free critical thought at a serious university, in other words, is prior to, and at best a possible foundation for, practical position-taking. This is why Tim Oakes (he does have a name), old leftie that he is, concludes his opinion piece by describing universities as “inherently conservative institutions in which the inertia of critical scrutiny serves as a drag against the bold and radical changes desired by political movements.” |
Saturday, March 19, 2005
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UD SALUTES… …the editors at The Roundup, the student newspaper at New Mexico State University, who complain in a recent editorial that …the university has made plans to include alcohol education in the curriculum of English 111 courses in light of the alcohol-related student deaths that occurred this year. While we are pleased the university is addressing the issue, it seems administrators have not properly researched the impact of these changes. First, adding alcohol education to the curriculum of English courses will create duplications of course material. University 150 classes already discuss such topics. Why should incoming freshmen have to attend multiple classes to learn the same material? Additionally, how is a section about alcohol education any more appropriate in an English class than it is in a math class? Requiring English professors to change their lesson plans and cover something entirely off-subject implies that their discipline lacks importance and therefore may suffer interruption. ... If the school really wants all freshmen to receive alcohol education, it should research effective measures to take and possibly make University 150 courses mandatory for all incoming freshmen. This is also a perfect opportunity for the university to work with the Associated Students of New Mexico State University to devise new programs that would increase student awareness and safety related to alcohol. Other institutions, such as Rice University, have "drunk-sitter" programs in which student volunteers go through training to learn the proper way to care for a drunk person. Those volunteers then make themselves available for students to call for assistance. ASNMSU could develop such a program and possibly pay those students willing to dedicate their time to helping drunk people. UD salutes the New Mexico students because they understand that professors are not social workers. If UD wanted to go into the field of alcohol education and become conversant with phrases like drunk-sitter programs, she would have done so. Instead she read and studied and now writes about and teaches novels like Under the Volcano … whose main character, to be sure, is drinking himself to death in Oaxaca…but the novel is not a morality tale about the evils of drink. On the contrary, it can be read as suggesting that drink -- along with other forms of chemical indulgence -- may stimulate a valuable sort of thinking about existence. So it is not merely, as the students rightly say, that forcing English professors to moralize about the evils of drink in classes devoted to rhetoric or poetry or the novel conveys a belief that “their discipline lacks importance” (you can hear the conversation among the deans: “Where do we shoe-horn this in?” “Oh, I dunno … English department?”); it also conveys a belief that they don’t have a discipline. To UD, the creeping moral didacticism of the university classroom is every bit as insidious as the political indoctrination people go back and forth about lately. As English professors, for instance, are more and more instructed to incorporate social work into their subject matter, UD foresees the emergence a new genre of novel, expressly written to the English 111’s of the future. UD doesn’t mean to trivialize the problem. She’s written a lot on this blog about American university students who have died with astounding amounts and varieties of alcohol in their bodies. She has singled out notoriously alcohol-soaked campuses and towns. And she is aware, as Inside Higher Ed points out, that the situation is getting worse: ' Death by Drinking Alcohol consumption accounted for 1,715 deaths among traditional-age college students in 2001, according to a study released Thursday by the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. That represents an increase of about 6 percent (after being adjusted for the rise in the number of college-age people) from the 1,575 alcohol-related deaths three years earlier, in 1998, according to the study, which was published in the latest edition of the Annual Review of Public Health. The study also found a sharp rise in the proportion of students aged 18 to 24 who acknowledged driving drunk, to 31.4 percent in 2001 from 26.5 percent in 1998. That represents an increase in the number of students who drove drunk over that three-year period to 2.8 million, from 2.3 million. The researchers drew their data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and the Harvard College Alcohol Survey, as well as national coroner studies and census and college enrollment data for 18 to 24 year olds. The deaths exclude homicides and suicides. “This paper underscores what we had learned from another recent study — that excessive alcohol use by college-aged individuals in the U.S. is a significant source of harm,” said Ting-Kai Li, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. But the English or philosophy or chemistry classroom is about the disinterested consideration of the complexity of the world; professors should not be in the business of sermonizing (UD recognizes and regrets the fact that many professors are already sermonizers). The study of literature in particular should be about allowing challenging and often morally ambiguous writing to have its say. |
Friday, March 18, 2005
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SPRING BREAK IN SOUTH PARK ' Cartman: Ma'am, I need to clear out your giggling stoners and your drum-circle hippies RIGHT NOW, or soon they're gonna attract something much worse! Elderly Woman: Ooooo. What's that? Cartman: The college know-it-all hippies. [The neighborhood, day. A red car pulls up to the curb. On the back window is a decal which says "University of Colorado at Boulder." Three men and three women step out of the car] Driver: [wearing green jacket] Wow, my friend Brittany was right. This is a really laid-back place. Woman 1: [wearing tan jacket] Yeah, this will be a great place to spend spring break. [Stan, Kyle, and Kenny approach them] Kyle: Hey, let's ask them. [the boys are wearing shoulder totes with magazines peeking out from them.] Stan: All right. [the two parties meet] 'Scuse me. [holds out a clipboard] Hello, we are selling magazine subscriptions for our community youth program. Would you like to help young people like us by purchasing a subscription of your choice? Driver: Oh wow, you guys shouldn't be doing that. Don't you know what you're doing to the world? Kyle: Wha- whataya mean? Man 1: [wearing a guitar over his back] You're playing into the corporate game! See, the corporations are trying to turn you into little Eichmanns so that they can make money. [the other man is busily eating chips] Stan: Who are the corporations? Woman 2: [a blonde with a psychedelic fish on her shirt] The corporations run the entire world. And now they fooled you into working for them. Stan: Are you serious?? We never heard that. Driver: We just spent our first semester at college. Our professors opened our eyes. The government is using its corporate ties to make you sell magazines so they can get rich. Kyle: Ugh! Those dirty liars! Kenny: (Sonofabitch!) [throws down his shoulder tote] Man 2: [has finished his chips] This is a really nice town you have here. That's why the corporations are trying to use you to take it down. Stan: Well... Well what do we do? Driver: Just hang with us for a bit. We'll fill you in on everything you haven't been told. ' |
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Snapshots from Home DEER, ME Well, it’s just as the website I consulted said: Deer like to bed down for the night on the tops of slightly wooded hills, so they have a view of predators. UD and her dog were headed toward the top of her backyard early this morning when, as one, a small herd of deer who’d been stretched out there staggered to their feet and stared down at the two of them. UD didn’t go up. She and the dog (who hadn’t seen the deer yet) turned around and walked to the front yard. And the deer shrugged and lay down again. Which is to say that in some important respects UD is willing to share her life with large numbers of deer. But things have gotten so bad in Montgomery County, Maryland, that the county now sponsors multiple deer hunts. On private land. In principle, UD could invite a group of hunters over one Sunday and let them blast away. |
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EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT MENOPAUSE IS WRONG ‘ PROFESSOR CHARGED WITH FAKING GRANT INFO By LISA RATHKE, Associated Press Writer BURLINGTON, Vt. - A former medical school professor was accused Thursday of fabricating research data on closely watched topics such as menopause, aging and hormone supplements to win millions of dollars in grant money from the federal government. Prosecutors said Eric T. Poehlman, 49, a former tenured professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, would fabricate his research to make his proposals look more intriguing, in the hope that the government would be more likely to dole out grants to him. "Dr. Poehlman fraudulently diverted millions of dollars from Public Health Service to support his research projects," U.S. Attorney David V. Kirby said Thursday. "This in turn siphoned millions of dollars from the pool of resources available for valid scientific research proposals. As this prosecution provides, such conduct will not be tolerated." Poehlman has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of making false statements in an application for a $542,000 grant he received, federal prosecutors said. He faces up to five years in prison. He is also barred by the federal government from receiving Public Health Research funds and must retract or correct 10 articles. Poehlman is accused of requesting $11.6 million in federal funding using false data. Although he did not receive many of the grants, the National Institutes of Health (news - web sites) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (news - web sites) used $2.9 million in research funding based on the faulty applications, prosecutors said. His lawyer, Robert B. Hemley, said Thursday that he was unwilling to comment on the case until at least after the sentencing. In a paper on published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1995, Poehlman said he had tested 35 healthy women and retested the same women six years later in the "The Longitudinal Menopause Study: 1994-2000" when he actually falsified and fabricated test results for 32 of the women. In applications for federal grants, Poehlman lied about the number of subjects he had tested in "The Longitudinal Study of Aging: 1996-2000" and changed the data about their physical characteristics and test results to create trends that did not occur in the research. Poehlman also made up the results from a 1999-2000 Hormone Replacement Therapy study to seek federal funding. UVM started to investigate Poehlman in December of 2000 when one of his research assistants accused him of scientific misconduct. During the two-year investigation, Poehlman deleted electronic evidence of his falsifications, presented false testimony and documents and influenced other witnesses to provide false documents, the U.S. attorney's office said. Poehlman resigned from the medical school in 2001 and moved to Montreal, Canada to work as a researcher. He has since left his job in Canada. Poehlman has also agreed to pay $180,000 to settle a civil complaint. ’ ****************** POEHLMAN UPDATE: Today’s Boston Globe calls this “the worst case of scientific fakery to come to light in two decades.” Here’s a crucial part of the problem: The lab assistant who blew the whistle ‘says that at least four University of Vermont researchers told him privately that they had concerns as well about some of Poehlman's work. However, no one else had spoken up to university authorities. "I was in a unique position to act. …I did not rely on Dr. Poehlman for funding, a post doc [research position], or a salary." …The University of Vermont took DeNino's accusations seriously, he said, but he quickly realized the difficulty of being a whistle-blower against someone as powerful as Poehlman. Other colleagues in Poehlman's lab doubted DeNino's claims, while Poehlman's attorney threatened to sue him if he spoke against Poehlman outside of the investigation.’ |
Thursday, March 17, 2005
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University Diaries... ...has a hacker. She's done what she can to protect the site. If strange messages show up here, my apologies. |
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NO PERFECT MURDER? TO PARAPHRASE MISS PRISM… ….this seems to me an imperfect murder of an extremely obvious kind… ‘ LAWRENCE, Kan. - Kansas State University professor Thomas E. Murray was found guilty Thursday of first-degree murder in the death of his former wife. Douglas County jurors deliberated for two days before announcing they had a verdict about 9:20 a.m. Thursday. Murray, 48, of Manhattan, was convicted of killing his former wife, Carmin D. Ross, 40, on Nov. 13, 2003, at her two-story farmhouse north of Lawrence. She was bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Murray showed no obvious emotion when the verdict was announced. Some of Ross' family members including her grandmother, Malta Ross, began crying. Ross' fiance, Larry Lima, reached over and grabbed the shoulder of Ross' father, Danny Ross. Douglas County District Judge Robert Fairchild said Murray will be sentenced in 45 days after a presentence investigation. He faces a sentence of life in prison with a possibility of parole in 25 years. After the verdict was announced, Kansas State fired Murray. "In light of Professor Thomas Murray's conviction, Kansas State University has taken him off its payroll, effective immediately," said a statement from Richard Seaton, an attorney for the university. "His employment with the university is terminated." Prosecutors said Murray killed Ross partly because he was afraid he might lose custody of their 4-year-old daughter. Ross had been planning to move to California, where Lima lived. Murray and Ross shared custody of their daughter after their divorce and were mediating custody issues at the time of her death. Defense attorneys argued that Murray was a gentle man saddened by the end of his 18-year marriage. They also said no evidence linked Murray to the crime and suggested Ross was killed by at least two unidentified people. After the verdict was announced, Lima's eyes filled with tears as he said the verdict "still is not enough to bring her back." "This part is done and now comes the real work - caring for the daughter in an environment of love," he said. Defense attorney Bob Eye said it was too early to determine if the conviction will be appealed. Another defense attorney, Pedro Irigonegaray, said Murray was disappointed and sad about the verdict. "He's doing well and will continue to do what he can to establish his innocence," Irigonegaray said. Assistant District Attorney Angela Wilson acknowledged that the case was based primarily on circumstantial evidence but said "it all added up and pointed to him." "Once again we proved there is no perfect murder," she said. Two jurors said the group had voted Wednesday, with most voting for guilty. They decided to go home and vote again Thursday morning. "We were pretty well decided yesterday and we wanted to sleep on it," said Ted Kihm, 44, of Lawrence. Kihm and juror Robert Wagner, 42, of Lawrence, said no single piece of evidence convinced the jury of Murray's guilt. But Kihm said a 9 1/2-hour video of Murray being questioned by investigators was "extremely important testimony." "We couldn't get any of the defense points to stick," Kihm said. "They were contradicted by the facts." While Kihm and Wagner were talking to the media, Ross' father, Danny Ross, and other family members approached, shook their hands, hugged them and thanked them. "We are so thankful the jury took their time," Ross said. "I think they did a wonderful job. As a family we're relieved but it won't bring our daughter back. It gives us our granddaughter, which we will raise." The child has been living with Ross' family since Murray was arrested last year.’ |
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!!!UPDATE TO THE HERMES RAT!!! The Edit Posts function on Blogger is for shit this morning and I can't wait I'm too excited I FOUND THE RAT. Maybe not the Hermes rat -- it's hard to tell from the picture if this one's made out of Hermes scraps. But I found at least A Tom Sachs Hermes rat with a syringe in its mouth! Enjoy. |
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AT HOME WITH "ONE OF DOWNTOWN'S NEW POWER COUPLES" New York Times, House and Home: "A mushroom sculpture by Takashi Murakami springs up from the carpet of the media room. On the wall at the end of the table where the family eats supper each night is a self-portrait of Cindy Sherman as a clown, a picture that has particular resonance for Ms. Levy, whose first job was working as a clown at children's parties. Nearby a lifesize orange rat by the renegade sculptor Tom Sachs, fashioned out of torn-up Hermes gift bags and with a matching syringe clenched in its teeth, adorns a side table. ...Sam's father is Fermin Vilanova, a Spanish advertising executive who lives in Barcelona. 'He's an extraordinary father with a very warm heart,' Ms. Levy said. 'He comes to see him every month, and they speak twice a week. ...There was no way I was going to have a child without a present father.'" |
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ST. PATRICK IN ULYSSES [From Chapter 17, "Ithaca"]: Were their views on some points divergent? Stephen dissented openly from Bloom’s views on the importance of dietary and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen’s views on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature. Bloom assented covertly to Stephen’s rectification of the anachronism involved in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus, son of Odyssus, sent by pope Celestine I in the year 432 in the reign of Leary to the year 260 or thereabouts in the reign of Cormac MacArt (+ 266 A.D.), suffocated by imperfect deglutition of ailment at Sletty and interred at Rossnaree. |
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
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BLOGOSCOPY A Regular University Diaries Feature MOI, MARGUERITE BLOGGIERE II ' A 1968 profile by the journalist Lee Edison described [Hans] Bethe as "a tall, spare man with a deceptively distracted look." He wrote: "His graying hair seems permanently electrified; his shoes are scuffed, and his tie seems to have been studiously arranged to miss his collar button. He listens attentively, nodding his head as if in agreement, but - as devastated colleagues and adversaries have discovered - this habit is far from a sign of agreement. His 'yes, yes, yes' is rather a signal that his mental apparatus is receiving. What he does with the input is another matter." ' Yet again UD gets to talk about what it’s like for her to be a woman! A woman who blogs! Who blogs in a woman’s voice! UD has no effing idea what a woman’s voice is. All she knows is that she loves the attention. Are you okay, UD? How do you feel about men banging about the blogosphere drowning your woman’s voice? And the op/ed page of the Los Angeles Times - how do you feel about the fact that so few women’s voices are heard there? Yes, it’s time for UD to testify. Ain’t I a woman?! No. Not in any way recognizably akin to the woman Deborah Tannen describes in her LA Times essay on the subject, coyly titled "The Feminine Technique" -- an echo of Betty Friedan’s book‘s title, "The Feminine Mystique." Tannen says there’s a woman’s technique of writing. The feminine technique. It is different from men’s. It is better than their “attack-dog” writing. Because of the “agonistic rituals” with which they’ve been raised, men think that [A]rguing ideas [is] a way to explore them … . Because they're used to this agonistic way of exploring ideas — playing devil's advocate — many men find that their adrenaline gets going when someone challenges them, and it sharpens their minds: They think more clearly and get better ideas. But those who are not used to this mode of exploring ideas, including many women, react differently: They back off, feeling attacked, and they don't do their best thinking under those circumstances. …[Women are] put off by the competitive, cutthroat culture of science. The assumption that fighting is the only way to explore ideas is deeply rooted in Western civilization. It can be found in the militaristic roots of the Christian church and in our educational system, tracing back to all-male medieval universities where students learned by oral disputation. … [Males see] fighting as a format for doing things that have nothing to do with actual combat: They show affection by mock-punching, getting a friend's head in an armlock or playfully trading insults. So much here to leap upon and attack. It is not only men who think that “arguing ideas is a way to explore them.” It is all sentient human beings. If, confronted with dialectical thought, women “back off, feeling attacked,” they shouldn’t, and Tannen shouldn’t pretend that running away from intellectual rough-housing is a species of moral superiority. If you read in its entirety Tannen’s contribution to the Susan-Estrich-generated controversy about the representation of women among bloggers and opinion columnists, you'll note how she conflates strenuous oppositional give-and-take (as in Blake's "I will not cease from mental fight") and pointless cerebral brutalizing… Along these lines -- UD has noticed throughout her life that some people are profoundly conflict-averse. Such people routinely conflate things in Tannen’s way -- if you raise your voice with them, if you challenge a point they’re making, if you fail to maintain at all times a sharing and caring demeanor, they assume you’re beating up on them and they get angry or weepy or weird. This is called taking things personally, and it is a surefire way to deal yourself out of the world of thought. At its core it represents a wretched egotism. As for the actual physical fighting Tannen mentions - “mock-punching, getting a friend’s head in an armlock or playfully trading insults” - this is and always has been the very foundation of UD’s affectional life. Take it away and she has nothing. |
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TEACHING TODAY A University Diaries Series ‘ AT 86, A PROFESSOR WHO IS STILL GOING STRONG The Globe and Mail As the University of Toronto moves to end mandatory retirement at 65 for its professors and librarians, Brenda Milner says it's about time. "If you are attached to university life and the whole academic tradition, it's a little hurtful to be forced out of it just because of age," says the 86-year-old, full-time professor at Montreal's McGill University. "I know that people suffer a lot when they have to [retire] when they are still doing good work." Prof. Milner speaks from experience. A renowned professor of neuro-psychology at McGill's faculty of medicine and at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Prof. Milner says she was able to stay at work past 65 through a special concession granted by the university. And about a year later, Quebec abolished its mandatory retirement law, which let her continue to stay on. "It would have been terrible" if she had had to retire, Prof. Milner says. Even now, she works a typical day that stretches from about 9 a.m. and ends at 6 p.m., although her hours are flexible. Her work consists of a combination of lectures, research and writing. And she says she'll keep going as long as her work is "scientifically credible" and can continue to get her grants to do her research. In fact, she believes, such credibility is key to anyone's decision to continue working. "If my work had suddenly deteriorated or if I had failed to get my grants and it was suddenly obvious that I was going to the dogs, then I would have to retire," she says. "There was a quality-control understanding." Prof. Milner says age is no factor in how she's treated by her peers. She also says her students enjoy the fact that she can provide personal perspective on her discipline from her own long life. "I lecture about memory and the brain," she says. "People want to know about what it was like when you were making some discoveries 50 years ago. You are getting it from the horse's mouth." That's not to say age doesn't take its toll. She has slowed down and had cataract surgery. And she acknowledges that memory doesn't get better as one ages and "an older brain is not good at learning new tricks." But what is encouraging is that "things that we have learned well and that we are very familiar with seem to hold up well to normal aging," she says. Prof. Milner, one of the world's eminent neuro-psychologists, doesn't believe there is any recipe for a lengthy career. She credits her own ability to work well into her 80s to her "genes." Her mother lived to be 95 and taught music in a university setting until age 88. "I have a role model," she says. "But I have my fingers and toes crossed.. . . I am 86, and anything could happen to me." But she's doing everything she can to prevent it.’ [Yes, yes, well and good. But here’s where she really gets going.] ‘ She walks 10 minutes to work every day. "I don't drive a car. I walk and do all my grocery shopping up and down Montreal hills." "I eat healthily," she adds. "I'm an enthusiastic eater of meat, and I like a glass of red wine with most of my evening meals." To keep her mind active, she is an avid reader but avoids watching TV. In fact, she doesn't even have a television. "It's too passive," she says. Prof. Milner says people should only continue working only if you like what you're doing. "I think people in the academic world are fortunate because they are doing something they love usually," she says. Even so, she acknowledges that working past age 65 is not for everyone, and suggests that some academics might want to pursue a second career instead. "They might want to get out of the rat race of grant applications because it is fiercely competitive and may get to you." Why has she worked so long? Simply because she loves it. "I never wanted children," says the British-born academic. "I knew I wanted a career." Prof. Milner says she began to "slow down" only about 10 years ago and moved to a five-day work week from six days, giving up Sundays. "Now, I find that I am quite glad to have a weekend," she says.’ |
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
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WHY DID UD EVER WORRY THERE WOULDN'T BE ENOUGH NEWS OUT OF UNIVERSITIES TO KEEP A DAILY BLOG GOING? ' Harvard Faculty Approves No-Confidence Motion Against Summers March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard University's largest faculty group approved a no-confidence motion against President Lawrence H. Summers following his comments that women may lack the aptitude to excel in science and engineering. The vote by the 690-member Faculty of Arts and Sciences was 218 in favor and 185 against, with 18 abstensions, said J. Lorand Matory, a professor of anthropology and African American studies who wrote the proposal. "There is no noble alternative to his resignation," Matory said in an interview following the faculty meeting today. "He should resign as president of Harvard University." The faculty also supported a second motion by Government and Sociology Professor Theda Skocpol that expressed regret for Summers' management missteps and praised his pledge to try to improve relations with the staff. ' |
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L’IRONIE… …here is that this professor’s claim of discrimination because of her Frenchness cannot be true, since by her own description her behavior is totally American: [irritable parenthetic remarks UD’s] EX-INSTRUCTOR SUES UNIVERSITY, SAYS SCHOOL THOUGHT HER TOO FRENCH Associated Press  CINCINNATI - A former fashion instructor has filed a discrimination lawsuit against the University of Cincinnati, charging that the school did not renew her contract because of her French nationality. Nathalie Doucet, who filed the lawsuit last week in U.S. District Court, said she was treated differently than her non-French colleagues. [“from” would be better than “than”] The university denies Doucet's allegations of discrimination, said Mitchell McCrate of the Office of General Counsel at UC. Doucet, who was born in France and is a permanent resident alien in the United States, served a three-year contract as an assistant professor of fashion design at UC from 2001 to 2004. [you can be a professor of anything these days, grumble, grumble] The lawsuit claims that Doucet was labeled anti-American by a student's parent [UD has been labeled anti-American by loads of people - where does she sign up?] and told by an administrator that she was "too French." [if Doucet were truly French, she would take this as a compliment] Doucet also was humiliated by an administrator who rejected her approach to a research project by saying that it was "not the way Americans do it," the lawsuit alleges [see how American this chick is? she’s totally glommed onto the whole hypersensitivity thing] The fashion instructor claims that the discrimination began early in her term and grew worse, especially as |