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Tuesday, May 31, 2005
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DISPOSITIONLOVE “Brooklyn College's School of Education has begun to base evaluations of aspiring teachers in part on their commitment to social justice, raising fears that the college is screening students for their political views. The School of Education at the CUNY campus initiated last fall a new method of judging teacher candidates based on their "dispositions," a vogue in teacher training across the country that focuses on evaluating teachers' values, apart from their classroom performance. Critics of the assessment policy warned that aspiring teachers are being judged on how closely their political views are aligned with their instructor's. Ultimately, they said, teacher candidates could be ousted from the School of Education if they are found to have the wrong dispositions. "All of these buzz words don't seem to mean anything until you look and see how they're being implemented," a prominent history professor at Brooklyn College, Robert David Johnson, said. "Dispositions is an empty vessel that could be filled with any agenda you want," he said. Critics such as Mr. Johnson say the dangers of the assessment policy became immediately apparent in the fall semester when several students filed complaints against an instructor who they said discriminated against them because of their political beliefs and "denounced white people as the oppressors." … Driving the new policies at the college and similar ones at other education schools is a mandate set forth by the largest accrediting agency of teacher education programs in America, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. That 51-year-old agency, composed of 33 professional associations, says it accredits 600 colleges of education - about half the country's total. Thirty-nine states have adopted or adapted the council's standards as their own, according to the agency. In 2000 the council introduced new standards for accrediting education schools. Those standards incorporated the concept of dispositions, which the agency maintains ought to be measured, to sort out teachers who are likeliest to be successful. In a glossary, the council says dispositions "are guided by beliefs and attitudes related to values such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social justice." To drive home the notion that education schools ought to evaluate teacher candidates on such parameters as attitude toward social justice, the council issued a revision of its accrediting policies in 2002 in a Board of Examiners Update. It encouraged schools to tailor their assessments of dispositions to the schools' guiding principles, which are known in the field as "conceptual frameworks." The council's policies say that if an education school "has described its vision for teacher preparation as 'Teachers as agents of change' and has indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate's commitment to social justice." … [One Brooklyn College course], which instructs students on how to develop lesson plans that teach literacy, is built around themes of "social justice," according to the syllabus, which was obtained by The New York Sun. One such theme is the idea that standard English is the language of oppressors while Ebonics, a term educators use to denote a dialect used by African-Americans, is the language of the oppressed. A preface to the listed course requirements includes a quotation from a South African scholar, Njabulo Ndebele: "The need to maintain control over English by its native speakers has given birth to a policy of manipulative open-mindedness in which it is held that English belongs to all who use it provided that it is used correctly. This is the art of giving away the bride while insisting that she still belongs to you." Among the complaints cited by students in letters they delivered in December to the dean of the School of Education, Deborah Shanley, is Ms. Parmar's alleged disapporval of students who defended the ability to speak grammatically correct English. Speaking of Ms. Parmar, one student, Evan Goldwyn, wrote: "She repeatedly referred to English as a language of oppressors and in particular denounced white people as the oppressors. When offended students raised their hands to challenge Professor Parmar's assertion, they were ignored. Those students that disagreed with her were altogether denied the opportunity to speak." Students also complained that Ms. Parmar dedicated a class period to the screening of an anti-Bush documentary by Michael Moore, "Fahrenheit 9/11," a week before last November's presidential election, and required students to attend the class even if they had already seen the film. Students said Ms. Parmar described "Fahrenheit 9/11" as an important film to see before they voted in the election. "Most troubling of all," Mr. Goldwyn wrote, "she has insinuated that people who disagree with her views on issues such as Ebonics or Fahrenheit 911 should not become teachers." … Four students, Ms. Harned said, dropped out of Ms. Parmar's course during the semester. One of the students was a former mechanic from Bay Ridge, Scott Madden, who said he wanted to become a teacher because "I like explaining things." Mr. Madden, 35, said that after he disputed a grade he received from her, Ms. Parmar encouraged him to withdraw from the course. He said he changed his plans to take the course in the summer after finding out that Ms. Parmar was again teaching both sections of the required course. "Basically, she's a socialist, she's racist against white people," Mr. Madden said. "If you want to pass that class you better keep your mouth shut." In an interview with the Sun, Ms. Harned said she dropped out of the School of Education and switched her major to political science because of her experience in Ms. Parmar's course. "I'm blacklisted," she said. "How am I supposed to move forward in a department I'm not comfortable in?" That is the point of the new format, critics of the dispositions standard said. "In its most pernicious form, then, dispositions theory is a tool for education schools to ensure that the next generation of public school students is educated solely by those teachers who have accepted the kind of extremist beliefs articulated by Professor Parmar," Mr. Johnson wrote.” *************************************** UD managed to get a face-to-face interview with one of the disposition mandate’s most enthusiastic proponents, a brilliant, high-ranking administrator at a well-known school of education who feels he cannot reveal his name “until each and every dispositional misfit has been silenced.” Here is a transcript of the interview, beginning with his response to UD’s skepticism about whether schools of education in this country can truly be purged of all students with non-standard dispositions. Ms UD, I would not rule out the chance to preserve in our schools of education a nucleus of true social justice specimens. It would be quite easy... heh heh... . UD: How long do you think this would take? Well let's see now ah … hmm.. I would think that uh... possibly uh... one hundred years. UD: You mean, you’re actually willing to wait a hundred years? It would not be difficult mein Fuhrer! Heh... I'm sorry. Ms UD…. UD: Well I... I would hate to have to decide.. who gets in and who…gets purged. Well, that would not be necessary Ms UD. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, and intelligence, as well as disposition. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top school of education leaders be included among this cohort to foster and impart the required principles of caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social justice….[Slams down left fist. Right arm rises in stiff Nazi salute.] Arrrrr! [Restrains right arm with left.] Naturally, such people would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way toward total dispositional uniformity within say, twenty years. UD: But wouldn’t people miss the freedom and the variety of viewpoints about life that we have long cherished as Americans? No Ms UD ... [Right arm rolls his wheelchair backwards.] Excuse me. [Struggles with wayward right arm, ultimately subduing it with a beating from his left.] There would be no shocking memories of intellectual freedom and self-respect, and the prevailing emotion will be a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead! Ahhhh! [Right arm reflexes into Nazi salute. He pulls it back into his lap and beats it again. Gloved hand attempts to strangle him.] UD: Doctor, you mentioned the ration of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned? Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature. |
Monday, May 30, 2005
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STUNNED AND NAUSEOUS Given all the attention paid lately to whether universities are insensitive to women’s issues, you’d think Harvard and other institutions would be a little more respectful and encouraging when a young, canny, successful, Hispanic woman entrepreneur comes along. But the university suits are all beating up on Michele Hernandez , a spunky 38-year-old who’s making a fortune charging rich Americans tens of thousands of dollars in return for getting their children into elite colleges. Hernandez makes one of the admissions counselors “nauseous.” Harvard’s dean of admissions finds himself “stunned.” The woman represents nothing more than the “gross exploitation of fear,” says a third. Her business, says another, is “a vile, vulgar, cynical rip-off.” "Capitalism can have a very lurid and dark side,” yet another says, “and this fits in that category." An article in Bloomberg News reports on Hernandez’s upcoming “three-day boot camp in New York City that costs $10,000... The event will be open to five to 15 high school students at a cost of $9,999 before June 15 and $10,750 after. That is more than the $9,278 the University of Massachusetts Amherst charges for annual in-state tuition and fees. Students will get a report on their odds of being accepted by as many as 100 colleges, practice writing college essays and receive interview training.” TERROR "‘There is obviously a fear, maybe even a terror, among wealthy folks that someone is taking their place, their piece of the pie,’ [Bruce] Poch said in a phone interview... Parents may be worried because top U.S. colleges are trying to recruit more lower-income students, said Poch, vice president and dean of admissions at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. Since last year, Harvard and Yale University have eliminated or reduced costs to parents who earn less than $60,000 a year.” LESSONS IN THE FREE MARKET UD commends Hernandez for brilliantly exploiting the hypocrisies and absurdities that college admissions and publicity offices have done so much to promote. She‘s also pleased to note Hernandez’s response to her critics: "'I don't see why people get mad,' Hernandez said. 'Do people get mad when you hire an accountant? It is the same thing…. It is the educators who get mad when they hear that other people are making money in education… People say, 'I can't believe you charge this much.' But I say, 'Sorry. In a free-market economy, if people pay me, too bad.' " |
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QUOTATION OF THE DAY: “If half the effort this student put into firebombing the English department went into studying for class, it would never have happened.” Full story appears below: “Police said an arson that scorched Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus more than two months ago was still unsolved Sunday, even though English professors have a pretty good idea who tossed bricks and gasoline through their office windows. Although FAU police said no arrests had been made since the March 10 arson that closed the Humanities Building, professors said campus gossip implicated a certain freshman so upset over a bad performance in his mandatory English composition class that he flew into a rage when department heads upheld a grade assigned by their teaching assistant. “We have a pretty good idea who would have done it,” professor Thomas Martin said. “Unfortunately, I think the investigation is going to sit on the shelf and go away, unless you get CSI out here to find some micro-fiber or something.” Martin described the arsonist as a “strange, violent nut job of a student” who would eventually land in jail. “It was a cowardly act and probably part of a pattern of bad behavior,” Martin said. “If half the effort this student put into firebombing the English department went into studying for class, it would never have happened.” According to fire marshal investigators, it was around midnight when the arsonist threw bricks through three English department windows located in a corner of the ground floor of the Humanities Building. The arsonist then poured gasoline into the offices, lit one of the rooms on fire and was apparently scared off by the sprinkler system before finishing the job. No one was working in the building at the time, although arson remains a first-degree felony regardless of the reported injuries. Although fire marshal investigators said in April that the prime suspect failed his preliminary lie detector test, they would not say this weekend why university police had not pressed charges. “We’re out of the investigation now and FAU is handling the rest of the case,” said Lt. Rich Schuler of the fire marshal’s office. “They know what they need to do.” Lt. Chuck Aurin of the FAU police said he could not discuss any suspects in the case because the investigation was still open. The three rooms drenched in gasoline were the main office of the Department of English, the office of department chairman Andrew Furman, and the office of writing programs director Dan Murtaugh. The arsonist set off the fire in Murtaugh’s office. Murtaugh, who teaches freshman composition, was vacationing in Bermuda at the time. “We gave police the names of the students we thought could have been responsible, but that obviously wasn’t enough to make an arrest,” Murtaugh said this weekend. “I suspect it’s a matter of hard evidence at this point.” Furman said FAU had relocated the English professors to the third floor of the Social Sciences Building indefinitely. A decision on whether they will return to the old offices is expected before the university’s fall semester. “We hope to stay here for several reasons,” said Furman, whose office window was also smashed a week before the arson. “Personally, I feel a bit safer being off the ground floor.” Although Furman said he was disappointed by comical speculation in the student newspaper about what happened to the Department of English, he said professors had not responded to the rumor mill. “This fire was traumatizing for the department,” Furman said. “We’re still too busy dealing with it ourselves to be able to tell the students how to deal with it.” Martin said Furman and Murtaugh did nothing to provoke the attack on their offices, which he called an anomaly. “Dan and Andy are the nicest guys you’d ever meet,” Martin said. “They’re student-oriented, self-effacing and they don’t have any enemies.” University spokesman Andrew LePlant said this weekend that he had no idea whether an arrest would be made in the arson. “It’s just a wait and see,” he said. Renovations to the Humanities Building, which required new walls and flooring due to water and smoke damaged, have totaled more than $30,000 and were nearly complete as of this weekend. No date has yet been set for reopening the building.” |
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FORTY YEARS ON Faithful readers know that UD is a die-hard fan of the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music, and that it was a high point of her academic year when she took two of her Novels of Don DeLillo students to a Sing-a-Long at Lisner Auditorium at GW a few months ago. It is now the fortieth anniversary of the film, and a writer for the New York Times wrestles in today’s paper with the enigma of its massive success (“in inflation-adjusted dollars, it remains the third-biggest-grossing film of all time at the domestic box office.”). “Christopher Plummer, Captain von Trapp himself, is said to have called it ‘The Sound of Mucus.’" Pauline Kael was the first person to light on this felicity - she used it in her notorious review of the film. Mad Magazine made the phrase famous by titling its satire of the film “The Sound of Mucus.” UD has fond memories of long car trips with her family when she was a kid, during which lusty group renditions of The Sound of Mucus were enjoyed by all. “[F]rom the very beginning, the public lapped it up. Ms. Kael lost her job as movie critic for McCall's after her infamous panning, and the film has since survived innumerable television reruns (Ronald Reagan once skipped reading an economic-summit briefing book to watch it), cast reunions and high-camp ‘Rocky Horror‘-style sing-alongs that began in London in 1999, with audience members dressed as brown-paper packages and tea with jam and bread.” UD would like to differentiate as cleanly as she can between the high-camp singalong and the other stuff the writer tosses promiscuously into this paragraph -- the low pathos of Reagan lapping up the movie instead of running the economy; the lower pathos of aging von Trapp children. ‘"Whom could [The Sound of Music] offend?" [Kael] asked in her famous McCall's drubbing. "Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated.”’ The genius of the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music is that it both acknowledges and ridicules that manipulation. There’s no denying the film’s powerful emotional manipulations (“Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, who estimates that anniversary-related activities surrounding ‘The Sound of Music’ have occupied more than 90 percent of his time in the last two months, [says]: ‘In retrospect, it's a very good story, with very good tunes. The score doesn't really sound like a score written by 60-year-old men. There's a kind of youthfulness and honesty to the songs, about how to learn music, but also how to break down barriers. It doesn't sound like someone's trying to phony something up.’”), but, equally, there’s also no denying its outstanding absurdity. The Sing-a-Long keeps the manipulation and the absurdity going very nicely. |
Sunday, May 29, 2005
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MEMORIAL DAY POST… …in memory of Marc Bloch, intellectual, war hero. From The Historian’s Craft: "What is it, exactly, that constitutes the legitimacy of an intellectual endeavor? No one today, I believe, would dare to say, with the orthodox positivists, that the value of a line of research is to be measured by its ability to promote action. Experience has surely taught us that it is impossible to decide in advance whether even the most abstract speculations may not eventually prove extraordinarily helpful in practice. It would inflict a strange mutilation upon humanity to deny it a right to appease its intellectual appetites apart from all consideration of its material welfare. Even were history obliged to be eternally indifferent to homo faber or to homo politicus, it would be sufficiently justified by its necessity for the full flowering of homo sapiens." From D.W. Brogan: "I remember vividly the day on which the news of Marc Bloch's death reached us in Cambridge, and how eagerly we pounced on the rumour — false, alas! — that he had escaped. When we learned beyond doubt that he was dead, we felt that a blow had been dealt to the whole world of learning." From Bloch's Testament, March 18, 1941: "During my entire life, I have, to the best of my ability, striven towards a total sincerity of expression and spirit. I hold the indulgence of lies - regardless of the pretexts it may adorn itself with - as the worst plague of the soul. …I would readily have my tombstone read no other motto than these simple words: Dilexit veritatem." |
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Scots ‘n Twats UD has a thing for Scots. You don’t hear much about Scots, but when you do, it is often funny. Gorgeous George Galloway is more than a mere diversion for UD - she loves his voice, she loves his language, she loves his shameless shameless ways. His appearance in the Senate made her wonder whether the only man in her memory to match his oratory in that sort of setting - James Traficant - might have Scottish blood. UD has already commended the Scots (type "Scottish" in that Search thing), and now she wants to do it again. You can speak of your Irish gift o’ the gab all you like, but for colorful language these days, it’s the Scots. Here’s the latest, as reported by another blogger: “In a truly amazing display of anti-Americanism and bias, presenters of BBC Radio Scotland's "Off the Ball" football coverage are heard denigrating the US Senators who recently questioned George Galloway and at one point referred to them as ‘American twats.’” The blogger is offended: “Until it is removed you can listen to this disgusting display of anti-Americanism by the BBC here.” He goes on to say that “The BBC owe all of Scotland and America an apology.” But UD doesn’t want an apology, any more than she wants Mel Brooks to apologize to her because in Blazing Saddles Harvey Korman gets angry at Madeline Kahn and says “Shut up, you Teutonic twat.” She thinks it’s funny. |
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TENURE: CURSE OF THE RULING CLASS "I just want to know," Morris Zapp asks an Italian university professor in David Lodge‘s Small World, "how you manage to reconcile living like a millionaire with being a Marxist." Fulvia, who was smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, waved it dismissively in the air. "A very American question, if I may say so, Morris. Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege, we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not by the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the 'istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role that we know 'ow to perform with a certain dignity. Whereas to be poor with dignity, poor as our Italian peasants are poor, is something not easily learned, something bred in the bone, through generations." Most Americans avert their eyes from the ugly business of ostentatious privilege within academia, as they avert them from the larger ugliness of American ostentation. We don’t like it when Peter Singer tells us we’re selfish shits who should give most of our money to Oxfam. We want to drive luxurious gas guzzlers and have second homes, and we’re not at all keen on arguments about who suffers and how they suffer because of our desires. Academics may talk of higher things, but few are any different from ordinary Americans in this species of bad faith, and the tenure system - a spectacular and unique privilege in this land of privilege - arguably makes them worse than ordinary Americans. Many American university students, for instance, have had the experience of taking a class with a Fulvia. Their anthro professor is a firebrand feminist, a woman of the left who expresses her disdain for greedy privilege-mongering Republicans with their manicured golf courses and gated communities. She dresses down - printed gunny sacks or lived-in jeans - and wears no makeup. Gradually, however, her student discovers that she drives a Range Rover, lives in a big house, has her children at Andover, and is married to an attorney who helps rich people hide their assets. Gradually the student comes to resent the aura of complacency this woman carries with her, a complacency born of lifetime guaranteed comfortable employment. Indeed it eventually occurs to this student that one might prefer the unhypocritical wealth and prestige acquisition of that ugly Republican to the shameless dishonesty of this professor. “The information society,” writes David Brooks, “is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate the views of the left.” When Ward Churchills and Timothy Shortells happen at universities -- there must be a word for this, along the lines of “bimbo eruption” -- dimbo eruption? dumbo eruption? -- it rivets national attention to the increasingly-difficult-to-justify tenure system. People realize all over again that it doesn‘t matter how dim or how dumb he is -- if a professor has tenure, tant pis. Take a story like this, in an Oregon newspaper: “ INSTRUCTORS ENJOY STRONG JOB SECURITY Rules protect professors, even those with criminal records Statesman Journal May 23, 2005 Tenured professors are guaranteed a steady job as long as they keep a few things in mind: Show up for class. Do your work. Don't violate any laws or policies. Even when those requirements are not met, however, administrators must prove that a professor is neglectful or breaking laws or violating policies -- or in rare cases, is deemed incompetent -- in order to strip him or her of tenure. Actually firing that professor, especially a union-represented, tenured professor, can turn into an arduous and time-consuming task. "It is extremely rare for a tenured faculty member to be terminated," said Ben Rawlins, the general counsel for the Oregon University System. Instead, a professor usually receives a lesser punishment, and universities keep secret their investigations of misconduct, citing exemptions to Oregon's public-records laws. Parents and prospective students have no way of finding out whether a professor in the state university system has a history of sexually harassing students. Parents and students also cannot find out whether a professor has been accused of, found guilty of or disciplined for sexual harassment. At the seven universities in the state system, faculty disciplinary records are considered confidential. The tenure system, which for years has been seen as the best way to preserve academic freedom, prevents school administrators from dismissing professors unless they commit a particularly egregious offense. Union representation often compounds the difficulty of firing a tenured professor. Those conditions provide a climate that keeps professors, including those with criminal records and reputations for sexually harassing students, on campus. That can put students at risk. Officials at Western Oregon University did not try to strip professor Gary Welander of his tenure, even after the Statesman Journal reported that the 59-year-old had been convicted of sexually abusing a child when he was a Portland-area elementary teacher. As a professor of teacher education, Welander mentors and instructs future teachers and is permitted to visit public elementary schools where his students teach. WOU administrators disciplined Welander earlier this year after a former WOU student filed a $12.6 million lawsuit claiming that he sexually harassed her. He currently is serving an unpaid, one-term suspension. Confidential records Privacy laws restrict university administrators from talking about sexual-harassment complaints against professors. Students who file claims, however, are free to talk about their complaint unless they sign a confidentiality agreement. Former Portland State University graduate students Fang Zheng and Qiong Li agreed to keep quiet about their sexual-harassment allegations against a professor as part of a financial settlement offered by the state. University administrators will not disclose whether any punishment was taken against the professor, Yih Chyun Jenq. Jenq also agreed not to discuss the claims against him. He still teaches at PSU. In Welander's case, WOU officials refused to publicly release findings of their inquiry into his conduct. Requests for other related documents were deemed "personal/personnel" and exempt of Oregon's public-records law, said Judy Vanderburg, the affirmative-action officer and director of human resources at WOU. … The punishment will cost Welander nearly half of his $65,232 salary, he said. He plans to return to his teaching position at the Monmouth campus in the fall. … Earning tenure and having union representation further strengthen a professor's job security. By then, if university administrators learn of a professor's criminal record, they likely will be unable to dismiss the professor unless another serious offense is committed. … Former WOU English professor Dean Bethea's case perhaps best represents the rarity of a tenured professor who is fired. Bethea was convicted in 2002 for assaulting a student during an off-campus party. The university's faculty union represented Bethea for months as he fought to save his job. In the end, the university's decision to fire him was upheld by an arbitrator in August 2003, slightly more than a year after the incident occurred.” “Why,” asks Victor Davis Hanson, “does this strange practice linger on?” If it’s there to guarantee free and unfettered thought, he writes, why is thought in our universities monolithic? “Why then does uniformity of belief characterize the current tenured faculty? Contemporary universities are among the most homogeneous of all American institutions, at least in attitudes toward controversial issues of race, gender, class and culture. Faculty senate votes aren't just at odds with American popular opinion; they often resemble more the 90 percent majorities that we see in illiberal Third-World stacked plebiscites.” Tenure, further, has contributed to the maintenance of the university as a strikingly unjust hierarchy: “Our universities are also two-tiered institutions of winners and losers. Despite the populist rhetoric of professors, exploitation occurs daily under their noses. Perennial part-time lecturers, many with the requisite Ph.D.s, often teach the same classes as their tenured counterparts. Yet they receive about 25 percent of the compensation per course and without benefits. Universities cannot remove expensive tenured "mistakes" or public embarrassments, but they can turn to cheaper and more fluid part-time teaching.” As for job security, “the warning that, in our litigious society, professors would lack fair job protection is implausible. Renewable five-year agreements — outlining in detail teaching and scholarly expectations - would still protect free speech, without creating lifelong sinecures for those who fail their contractual obligations.” No, what tenure has wrought is “a mandarin class that says it is radically egalitarian, but in fact insists on an unusual privilege that most other Americans do not enjoy. In recompense, the university has not delivered a better-educated student, or a more intellectually diverse and independent-thinking faculty. Instead it has accomplished precisely the opposite.” Max Boot agrees: “Churchill and his professorial colleagues are beneficiaries of the most ironclad protection for mountebanks, incompetents and sluggards ever devised. It's called tenure. To fire a tenured professor requires a legal battle that can make the Clinton impeachment seem like a small-claims dispute by comparison. Even if there is clear evidence of wrongdoing, professors are entitled to endless procedural safeguards against being fired. The University of Colorado wanted to offer Churchill a generous financial settlement to leave voluntarily, but that idea has been torpedoed by regents angry at the idea of buying off this buffoon. An epic struggle looms in which Churchill and his numerous faculty defenders will nail their colors to the mast of ‘academic freedom.’” He also agrees with Hanson on the intellectual freedom argument: “The rigid ideological intolerance of American universities makes a mockery of tenure's primary justification: It is supposed to allow scholars to pursue their work without outside pressure. Professors like Churchill are all too happy to take advantage of this freedom to mock off-campus pieties. But few dare to disagree with the received wisdom of the faculty club, where the political spectrum runs all the way from left to far-left. The primary practical effect of tenure is to make universities almost ungovernable. Those ostensibly in charge — presidents and trustees — come and go; the faculty remains, serene and untouchable. This helps to explain some of the dysfunctions that mar big-time universities, such as the overemphasis on publishing unintelligible articles and the under-emphasis on teaching undergraduates. Armies of junior faculty and graduate-student drudges have been enlisted to assume the bulk of the teaching load because most of the tenured grandees think that instructing budding stockbrokers and middle managers is beneath them. And there is almost nothing that administrators can do about it because mere laziness is no grounds for removing someone with a lifetime employment guarantee. The solution is obvious: Abolish tenure. Subject professors to the discipline of the marketplace like almost everyone else. But of course this is an idea too radical to be seriously entertained on campus. Comparing the United States with Nazi Germany, as Ward Churchill routinely does, doesn't raise an eyebrow among the intelligentsia, but suggesting that there may be something fundamentally wrong with a system that rewards a Ward Churchill is considered too outre to discuss.” Amy Ridenour concurs: "Rarely do I criticize another for being old-fashioned, but I find the very notion of tenure distastefully medieval. Literally. In the Middle Ages there were few institutions offering scholars the opportunity to ponder -- not just few alternatives to universities, but very few universities, period. If that were the case today, perhaps tenure for the purpose of protecting academic freedom would make some sense. But it isn't, and it doesn't. A simple question: If professors at universities need tenure to feel free to think, how is it that think-tanks do so well without it?" That’s one side of it, and UD has more than a little sympathy with these arguments. But then there’s this, from Winfield Myers: “Recently, a friend who teaches at a major state university told me that he and some of his colleagues -- all tenured full professors, all known to be conservatives -- would have been gone ‘long ago’ were it not for the protection that tenure affords. It's the only thing keeping him in his job, he said, and despite the abuses it can bring, nothing else could protect like-minded scholars from being tossed out by the left-wing majority. I think he's correct in this, and that conservatives who want to see tenure abolished should think through the implications of opening up academe to an even more thorough scrubbing of conservatives or libertarians than we've already seen. Granted, tenure is abused -- massively -- by both the entrenched left and the drunk, the lazy, and the incompetent. I've known dead wood who fit some, or even all, of those descriptions, and their presence on campus is a disgrace. But until some way is devised to protect professors whose politics are deemed beyond the pale by sanctimonious left-wingers, tenure works to preserve their careers. Perhaps some means can be worked out that would allow universities to fire those who should never have been granted tenure to begin with, or who have abused the system since winning their lifetime positions. Surely, some means of holding professors accountable can be devised that would allow a sense of responsibility and obligation into campus life while protecting the minority of true radicals -- those who uphold high standards and who lean to the right. Reform is long overdue in higher education; let's just be careful not to leave embattled conservatives vulnerable.” Thomas Reeves says the same thing: “What about the protection of intellectual freedom? In fact, there is more to academic life than just the knee-jerk leftist reaction that is often celebrated in the media. Genuine thought goes on everywhere in academia and can be viewed in learned journals and books and heard in untold numbers of seminars and lecture halls. (The University of California System spends $30 million a year on scholarly journals.) Many of the best professors spend their lives seeking the truths of the universe, nature, and human conduct; indeed, that’s why they entered the academic profession. When the responsible scholarship of serious and qualified scholars clashes with conventional thought, it should be protected, for in that way alone do we advance. Heresy has long played an important role in history. Ask the historians of science. Today, on campus, conservatives are heretics, often challenging the established principles of orthodox leftist ideology with scholarship and bold thinking. It is a dangerous business, for the people who talk the most about diversity and tolerance are rarely in the mood to welcome dissent. As an abundance of literature shows, and experience verifies, conservatives are often persecuted on campus. They must sometimes mask their beliefs in order to be hired. But tenure, once achieved, protects them. Eliminate that protection and watch conservative heads roll, both at the hands of administrators and fellow faculty members. Instead of arguing for the elimination of tenure, conservatives should be defending it strenuously, for without its protection the heresy of thinking outside leftist orthodoxy would be eliminated. Tenure may need adjustments; conservatives should demand more objectivity and fairness in the process. But let us not abandon what has long served us well. Today, the tenure system enables free minds to step beyond the iron curtain of political correctness without fear of serious reprisal. Tenure is not one of the major problems in contemporary academia. Indeed, it is a blessing for those, all across the ideological scale, who are interested in thoughtful scholarship. Intellectual freedom is among the most valuable features of Western civilization, and we threaten it at our peril.” UD tends toward the defense of tenure for intellectual freedom reasons; but she thinks that tenure as it now plays out at a number of high-profile campuses is a symbolic disaster for a professoriate which already looks to many Americans hypocritical and over-indulged. |
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HARRUMPH II [For HARRUMPH I, scroll down.] " Really and Truly Fed Up To the Editor: Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but I slammed down my coffee cup in exasperation while reading Nell Freudenberger's otherwise smart review of Stewart O'Nan's new novel, "The Good Wife" (May 8). Or maybe it wasn't me; maybe it was that Freudenberger's passing remark about how O'Nan "does a lot of the things they teach you not to do in M.F.A. programs" (for which, it should go without saying, she greatly admires him) was the proverbial itty-bitty piece of perfectly harmless straw, and this camel's back had finally had it. Just to set the record straight, for all the readers of the Book Review who have not attended an M.F.A. program in creative writing — who are not, in fact, writers themselves but passionate readers (but who have heard this sort of nonsense so often they found themselves nodding thoughtfully: Yes! That's right! A good writer would never do what he's told to do by — shudder — an M.F.A. program!); just to let the young writers who read the Book Review (and who might themselves be thinking about attending an M.F.A. program someday) know: no M.F.A. program worth its salt would ever "teach" a writer not to use the second person, not to write in present tense, not to tell a story sequentially. I don't know where Freudenberger got her M.F.A. (and I'm betting she has one; most writers do these days, for better or for worse — if for no other reason than that these programs provide a community of writers and other artists, and many of them give their students two or three years of full financial support while letting them write nearly full time and giving them the opportunity to take classes, free, in any subject that happens to interest them anywhere in the university, thus going the old move-to- Paris routine one, or two, better), but I can say with absolute certainty that neither I nor any of my colleagues at Ohio State University, all of whom are themselves not only fine writers but thoughtful, dedicated teachers, has ever told a student "not to do" anything. And to tell you the truth, although it was 20 years ago that I was an M.F.A. student myself at Iowa, I don't remember ever being told not to do, or not to try, anything there, either. I'd call up all my friends who teach at other programs right now and ask them if they have ever told a student writer such a thing — or if they were ever told such a thing when they were students — but I'm too busy today reading my students' M.F.A. theses (which in most cases will become their first books), not one of which has anything in common with any other, except that they were all printed out in 12-point type on white paper. MICHELLE HERMAN Columbus, Ohio " |
Saturday, May 28, 2005
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David Brooks, in tomorrow's New York Times " Karl's New Manifesto I was in the library reading room when suddenly a strange specter of a man appeared above me. He was a ragged fellow with a bushy beard, dressed in the clothes of another century. He clutched news clippings on class in America, and atop the pile was a manifesto in his own hand. He was gone in an instant, but Karl's manifesto on modern America remained. This is what it said: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses. The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system. The median family income of a Harvard student is $150,000. According to the Educational Testing Service, only 3 percent of freshmen at the top 146 colleges come from the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these colleges and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a small, co-optable portion of them can get in. The educated class reaps the benefits of the modern economy - seizing for itself most of the income gains of the past decades - and then ruthlessly exploits its position to ensure the continued dominance of its class. The educated class has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and reduced it to a mere factory for the production of little meritocrats. Members of the educated elites are more and more likely to marry each other, which the experts call assortative mating, but which is really a ceaseless effort to refortify class solidarity and magnify social isolation. Children are turned into workaholic knowledge workers - trained, tutored, tested and prepped to strengthen class dominance. The educated elites are the first elites in all of history to work longer hours per year than the exploited masses, so voracious is their greed for second homes. They congregate in exclusive communities walled in by the invisible fence of real estate prices, then congratulate themselves for sending their children to public schools. They parade their enlightened racial attitudes by supporting immigration policies that guarantee inexpensive lawn care. They send their children off to Penn, Wisconsin and Berkeley, bastions of privilege for the children of the professional class, where they are given the social and other skills to extend class hegemony. The information society is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate the views of the left. Periodically members of this oppressor class hold mock elections. The Yale-educated scion of the Bush family may face the Yale-educated scion of the Winthrop family. They divide into Republicans and Democrats and argue over everything except the source of their power: the intellectual stratification of society achieved through the means of education. More than the Roman emperors, more than the industrial robber barons, the malefactors of the educated class seek not only to dominate the working class, but to decimate it. For 30 years they have presided over failing schools without fundamentally transforming them. They have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower down. In 1960 there were not big structural differences between rich and poor families. In 1960, three-quarters of poor families were headed by married couples. Now only a third are. While the rates of single parenting have barely changed for the educated elite, family structures have disintegrated for the oppressed masses. Poor children are less likely to live with both biological parents, hence, less likely to graduate from high school, get a job and be in a position to challenge the hegemony of the privileged class. Family inequality produces income inequality from generation to generation. Undereducated workers of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated class tremble! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win! I don't agree with everything in Karl's manifesto, because I don't believe in incessant class struggle, but you have to admit, he makes some good points." |
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OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BLOGS [A Regular University Diaries Feature In Which UD Recognizes Pithily Stated Truths That Appear On Blogs.] From a reader’s comment at the website The Valve : "[If I criticize the work of a queer theorist], all of the sudden I’m manifesting symptoms of latent homophobia ….. This isn’t the time or the place to attack the raging stupidities of academic psychoanalysis and the theories built upon it, but if ever such a time and place arises...my feelings about theories built on the false foundation of psychoanalytic thought will be evidence of my muddle-headed politics. It bothers me to no end that I can’t engage in a serious academic debate about the merits of someone’s theories without my criticisms becoming symptoms of whatever I’m criticizing. If it’s post-colonialist thought, I’ve imperialistic tendencies; if it’s queer theory, I’m a latent homophobe...when, in fact, I’m only someone who thinks that theories with psychoanalytic premises are fundamentally, fatally flawed." |
Thursday, May 26, 2005
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You want to be careful about throwing around words like Orwellian and totalitarian... ...but in this case, Professor Michael Kellman of the University of Oregon has it right when he calls the just-released draft of proposed diversity mandates for his school "sort of an Orwellian, totalitarian plan." Under the plan, all faculty up for promotion, for instance, would have to be "evaluated on their 'cultural competency' - the ability to successfully work with people from all cultural backgrounds." It's fun to think about what this might mean in practice. UD envisions Peer Theater Workshops in which individual faculty members up for tenure would be placed onstage - the audience would be made up of cultural competency evaluators - and confronted with a variety of scenarios involving their being challenged by someone very different from themselves. Like, for instance, say we're talking about UD. UD is a woman. A white, Jewish, urban, middle-aged woman. What would happen if all of a sudden she was confronted by an Asian, non-Jewish, younger male? How would she react? How would she interact with him? What strategies of cultural competency would she draw upon? To what extent could she overcome her cultural determination in terms of race, class, gender, and age? Just thinking about it makes me nervous! But also kind of excited! It'd be incredibly validating to demonstrate to a roomful of cultural competency evaluators (and to myself!) that I truly can interact successfully with people who aren't exactly like me.... ************* Update: Julia Silverman must be enjoying this. She's the AP writer whose article about mandatory cultural competency tests for faculty at the University of Oregon has, within hours of its appearance, been picked up by 44 major news outlets. The number will grow. A fine thing it is, too, and not merely for Silverman's career. "You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are," says George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In a kind of reversal of "swine" and "truffles," you gotta have a press, bloggers, and a self-respecting faculty to show you where the Orwellians are. In this particular case, the Orwellians have been sniffed out very quickly. UD is impressed. ************ Update II: Shit! Things really are happening quickly. UD has already been up in front of her Cultural Diversity Tribunal. Despite strong efforts to convince them otherwise (here she is in action), UD has been deemed "too cosmopolitan" to interact competently with people from non-urban backgrounds. Here she is (UD's sitting right front, taking notes during a cultural competency training session) at the farm she's been assigned to for the summer, where she will "interact with the common people in an effort to enhance her cultural competence before the fall semester." |
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SHORTELL SPELLING WATCH Professor Timothy Shortell's spelling is improving. He has so far corrected "turpitude" on his university webpage. This leaves the word "mandatory" on his instructions to the students in his most recent course: "Wednesday is a review session. Attendance is not manditory. There will be no participation points or quiz. You should attend only if you are prepared to participate in the review. Bring your text, online materials and notes." MandAtory, not mandItory. Once we've cleared up spelling problems, we'll move on to writing style. Stay posted! |
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
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CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER… …grows the short tale of Professor Timothy Shortell. His tale will be short because the president of Brooklyn College, where Shortell has been voted chair of the sociology department, has gotten wind of the fact that the man’s a bigot, and the university has started an investigation. To the extent that tenured faculty can be neutralized, Shortell will shortly be neutralized. We must sport with him while we may. This latest sniffing out of an extremist at a respectable American university (see also - via the Search button up there - Jacques Pluss, Nicholas De Genova, Ward Churchill, Grover Furr) adds one more name to the Stalin column (Hitler has only one entry so far, Jacques Pluss.) Shortell is not a very good writing model for his students. His prose reads like an English translation of Enver Hoxha (“The foot soldiers are spewing lies… Just as any fascist state, the megalomania of the [American] ruling elite is paid for in working class blood.”). He cannot spell. We have already seen (scroll down) his struggles with the word “turpitude.” On his syllabi he warns students that certain assignments are “manditory.” But what people are talking about is Shortell’s redhot hatred of religion. Anyone with the merest smidgeon of religiosity is a “moral retard.” Yet this aspect of Shortell is also curious. He earned his Ph.D. at Boston College, a fervently Jesuit institution which describes itself thus: “The Jesuit Community at Boston College is committed to maintaining and strengthening the Jesuit, Catholic mission of the University, especially its commitment to integrating intellectual, personal, ethical, and religious formation; and to uniting high academic achievement with service to others. Jesuits are active in all aspects of University life.” What the hell was this hellion doing at Boston College? Was he cynical enough to have accepted fellowships from the retards? Would a man with even a pinch of principle take an offer of admission, much less scholarship money, from this deeply tainted source? The only way UD can make sense of this execrator of religion having dallied with Jesuits for four years and gotten a Ph.D. off them is to presume that Shortell began his studies at Boston College as Father Timothy Shortell, S.J., and that something -- I won’t even begin to suggest what -- must have happened while he was there… |
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
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FROM THE BELLY OF THE BEAST... …comes some tentative questioning of the management-guru wisdom that now dominates so much of the academy. A dean of education from an Australian University (I found her essay via Pedablogue) dares to wonder whether motivational speakers, Powerpoint powwows, and professional development workshops might not be ideally suited to professors. Erica McWilliam asks if “the sort of knowledge that is coming to count as worthwhile for all professionals, including academics,” is in fact as appropriate for medieval historians as it is for certified public accountants. The corporate model of university education would regard a professor’s “entire self,” McWilliam writes, as something that “must be completely made over as an enterprising individual.” The “enterprising individual” model rests on a psychological foundation. “The discipline of psychology is [an] important knowledge component of the professional development curriculum. This is an effect of the hegemonic status of psychology in defining and explaining everything about human beings and their behavior -- organizations, personal, relational, cognitive, and developmental. … [T]he sort of knowledge which counts as developmental is generalisable economic, technological, and management knowledge, underpinned as it often is by psychological models of human behaviour and organizational life.” Before UD would listen, much less grant a grain of assent, to the flagrante stupido that is psychology, she would disembowel herself. Which can be arranged. “Those academics yet to be ‘converted’ to Powerpoint use for lecture presentation are unlikely to hail from Information Technology [i.e., they‘ll be English professors like UD]. However this conversion experience is only a matter of time, given the speed with which Voluntary Early Retirements are being requested and approved in Australian universities. Exit Anthony Giddens, enter Bill Gates. …The new broom of enterprise is designed to sweep away the cobwebs of ivory-towerism, including any special pleading that higher education should have special (non-market) status in the cultural order of things. …Enterprising activity is very much at the heart of recent calls for the transformation of Australian universities along corporate lines. … We need to accept firstly that universities ‘are not intrinsically different from other organizations.’” This corporate model, with its close analogues in the United States, means the end of classroom teaching (the model assumes “that academics are deficient as teachers”) and its replacement by “flexible delivery” technology -- “online teaching, the use of Powerpoint, email and CD-Roms, multi-media and computer-assisted learning, and so on.” “The difficulty here,” McWilliam continues, “is not that any one of those techniques is not worth knowing. It is rather that ‘flexible delivery’ threatens to collapse the complexity of pedagogical process into a ‘technology will deliver’ quick fix…” McWilliam describes what the triumph of corporatism is doing to intellectual life. It is bringing to the university “mind-numbing simplicity,” “irony deficiency,” and ultimately the death of “radical doubt itself.” Or as Terry Eagleton puts it in a review of a book by Frank Furedi: "With the decline of the critical intellectual, the thinker gives way to the expert, politics yields to technocracy, and culture and education lapse into forms of social therapy. The promotion of ideas plays second fiddle to the provision of services. Art and culture become substitute forms of cohesion, participation and self-esteem in a deeply divided society. Culture is deployed to make us feel good about ourselves, rather than to tackle the causes of those divisions, implying that social exclusion is simply a psychological affair. That to feel bad about ourselves is the first step towards transforming our situation is thus neatly sidestepped." The happy shiny corporate world, in other words, really is different from the intellectual world. UD will now offer a personal example along these lines. UD’s husband, you recall, just won a local election. He will soon attend the annual Maryland Municipal League convention in Ocean City, Maryland (UD‘s going too! She‘ll be blogging from there!), where he will attend no doubt useful seminars on governance. The convention kicks off, though, with a motivational speaker who will gather all the attendees in a big room and share with them the following “compelling message.” They should “enjoy the true joy of life: the trip!” “Steve Gilliland has become one of the most sought-after speakers and trainers in America. His colorful background includes Major League Baseball, broadcasting, and eleven years of corporate management on three different levels. As founder and CEO of Performance Plus Professional Development, Inc., Steve owes his personal and professional success to using past challenges as opportunities. He is a speaker that doesn’t just challenge people to change; he motivates them to do it. In a style typically filled with wisdom, wit, and passion, Steve will provide attendees with a wealth of practical insights on what it takes to enjoy the true joy of life: the trip! Loaded with hope, direction, encouragement, and specific procedures, this powerful keynote address will show that true success is not a thing you acquire or achieve; rather, it is a journey you take your whole life long.” To UD, this is as nakedly obvious as it can possibly be an example of flagrante stupido. If she had to sit in a room with it she would disembowel herself. She worked hard at school and listened carefully to people like Paul Ricoeur so that she would never ever have to hear these things. If people entered UD’s office at her university and announced it was time to join everybody down the hall where hope, direction, encouragement, and specific procedures were being offloaded, she would react very badly. Maybe UD’s the only professor in America like this. Maybe she’ll be swept away in the tide of corporate history. That's fine. Death before surrender. |
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RICOEUR RECURRENT In a comment, a reader asked UD what Paul Ricoeur was like. She answered. The reader suggested that she post her answer to her main page. Here it is: He was modest, disheveled, trim, kind. Rather lost behind those archaic-looking academic European spectacles. Shy. Radiating INTENSE well-meaningness. Lost behind an intensely thick French accent which, coupled with high-level linguistic theory, had me pretty much lost. (It didn't help that his handwriting when he went to the blackboard was illegible to me.) Unfailingly intellectually serious. No thigh-slapping, I can tell you that. The funniest thing he said was a convoluted story he told about being in Greece and seeing all these trucks that had METAPHOR written on them (this was a seminar on metaphor). How could this be? Then he figured it out! They were moving vans -- metaphor is Greek for among other things, to carry! He laughed with wild abandon at this. (If I'm remembering this wrong, and if this is completely factually inaccurate, I apologize.) A complete, unself-conscious intellectual, in other words. A model of philosophical and moral rigor. ------------------------------------------- Seven minutes later... Oh goodie. "Upon disembarking into the bustle of Piraeus," my friend who lacks a good clutch wrote after a trip to Greece, "we puzzled our way through sights and sounds of a new language and alphabet. Among the first words I sounded out from the Greek alphabet was METAPHOR, painted on various trucks and vans hurtling about the seaport. I chose to believe that these were moving trucks, transforming lives as they transported chattel. Carrying change! Bearing transformation! It was a moment of memorable resonance; I had discovered a literal metaphor." |
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THAT EXPLAINS IT. I was standing in my soggy ‘thesda garden yesterday, early evening, when I heard far too many military jets overhead. The sky was cloudy, so I couldn’t make any of them out when I looked up, but, intrigued by the noise, I kept scanning the sky. I’m not especially aware of jet noise around me, but this was unusual. Lots of swiftly streaking military aircraft. Awake much too early, I just checked the online news (while simultaneously listening to a fascinating BBC interview with Yoko Ono), and there’s this: ‘ WASHINGTON -- Federal air defense officials say a Cessna plane violated airspace around Washington Monday evening. Two F-16s were deployed to the area to intercept the plane, which was diverted to Montgomery County, Md., where the pilot was being interviewed by local authorities. The pilot complied with the fighter jets. The plane was headed from Knoxville, Tenn., to Gaithersburg, Md. This was the first time fighter jets were scrambled since the new Visual Warning System was deployed. The system was not used Monday due to the weather.’ |
Monday, May 23, 2005
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Professors who can't spell ‘turpitude' should be careful throwing around words like 'retard.' Timothy Shortell, incoming chair, Brooklyn College Sociology Department, on religion: “T]hose who are religious are incapable of moral action, just as children are. To be moral requires that one accept full responsibility for one's self. Morality is based on scientific rationality. In order to act in the world as an adult, one must be able to recognize that the world is structured and the situatedness of all individual action. The choices that present themselves in the course of day-to-day living are influenced by social forces (which is why we need theory). Morality is a basis for making choices, in the context of a particular political economy. Faith, like superstition, prevents moral action. Those who fail to understand how the world works—who, in place of an understanding of the interaction between self and milieu, see only the saved and the damned, demons and angels, miracles and curses—will be incapable of informed choice. They will be unable to take responsibility for their actions because they lack intellectual and emotional maturity. On a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying — like bad taste. This immaturity represents a significant social problem, however, because religious adherents fail to recognize their limitations. So, in the name of their faith, these moral retards are running around pointing fingers and doing real harm to others.” From Timothy Shortell’s website: “The cover-up of war crimes continues and no one is paying any attention. Check out Frank Rich's excellent coverage of the non-coverage. Corruption and moral terpitude will be overflowing in DC for the inauguration of our war-criminal-in-chief. The magnitude of the scandal is ignored. No wonder Americans are hated by so many people around the world.” |
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FIRST SIMS 2 UNIVERSITY, AND NOW TRUMP U! UD has already registered and taken the Trump Success test. Here are her test results. While she has a respectable amount of optimism and self-confidence, UD falls down badly on wealth motivation. ************************************************ Postscript: Good thing they didn’t ask for favorite poem! MONEY Philip Larkin Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me: ‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully? I am all you never had of goods and sex. You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’ So I look at others, what they do with theirs: They certainly don’t keep it upstairs. By now they’ve a second house and car and wife: Clearly money has something to do with life - In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire: You can’t put off being young until you retire, And however you bank your screw, the money you save Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave. I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down From long french windows at a provincial town, The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad In the evening sun. It is intensely sad. *********************************************************** Another postscript: Surprisingly cool response to Trump University from Lucianne.com’s people… |
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LEFT BEHIND Some interesting language from an article by Keith Thompson in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle about his decision to “leave the left” -- “A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word ‘evil’ had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert. When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find ‘evil’ too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport. My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like ‘gulag’ to the dinner table. [The American left is] a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic. In the name of ‘diversity,’ the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on ‘individual style.’ The University of Connecticut has banned ‘inappropriately directed laughter.’ Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment ‘may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment.’ (Yes, we're talking 'subconscious harassment’ here. We're watching your thoughts ...)." And, for UD’s French readers, Paul Ricoeur’s encounter with the French left in the ’seventies, recalled by Le Monde in his obituary: " …Ricoeur, qui a déjà été choqué par Mai 68, vit assez mal les événements qui marquent les premiers mois de 1970 sur le campus de Nanterre, alors livré aux agissements de toutes sortes de factions violentes. Victime d'attaques injustes et même d'agressions physiques, déçu par l'incompréhension du gouvernement aussi bien que par l'impossibilité de moderniser les structures de l'enseignement supérieur français, il finit par démissionner de son poste de doyen (1970). Il s'exile alors pour trois ans à l'Université catholique de Louvain, avant de regagner Nanterre où il enseigne à nouveau jusqu'à sa retraite (1981). " Eager to escape being beaten up on in France, Paul Ricoeur also decided to accept an invitation to teach each winter semester at the University of Chicago. As a result, UD - though in over her head in the class - had a once in a lifetime intellectual experience as a participant in Ricoeur’s seminar on metaphor. |
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IN OTHER GRADUATION CEREMONY NEWS… …it was tough going there for awhile, but Rudolph Giuliani managed to climb the speaker’s platform at Middlebury College yesterday and give a commencement speech to the graduating seniors. Quotation-mark mad Albert “Ben” Gore***, a graduating senior, came at Giuliani hard last March in a campus newspaper opinion piece denouncing the “white elites of the Northeast,” the “people that call the shots here, the Trustees,” the “white billionaire New Yorkers” who forced upon students their choice of “an authoritarian, a racist and shill for a president that many, if not most, students here find morally reprehensible.” He called for Giuliani to be disinvited. The Middlebury College student newspaper editors accompanied Gore’s comment that “Before Sept. 11 Rudolph Giuliani was a controversial politician, and to many outside the elite class, he was coming to be considered a fascist” with a photograph showing Giuliani as Hitler. Although this choice of photo was editorially appropriate given the views expressed in the piece, the newspaper editor came to regret having chosen it, and resigned. Then the committee which had decided upon Giuliani noted that Giuliani’s name was submitted not by a billionaire junta but “by members of this year’s graduating class. …It was students who submitted his name to the committee.” And a Middlebury student named Andrew Carnabuci, a Democrat, pointed out that “Giuliani’s homeless policy,” singled out by Gore as a cornerstone of his tyranny, “”implemented the suggestions of a 1990 report by Democrat Andrew Cuomo, who at that point was working for a homeless advocacy group.” But so what? Gore points out that much of the drop in crime for which Giuliani is credited was really about “the overall drop in the use of crack cocaine during the 1990’s.” Ah, but why did that happen? Wasn’t it in part because of certain high-profile drug arrests in the late ‘eighties, like that of cocaine dealer John Zaccaro, Jr., son of Geraldine Ferraro and Middlebury College student? As reported by the popular comedy show Weekend Update with Dennis Miller: ‘ Geraldine Ferraro's son, John Zacarro, Jr., was busted for cocaine possession yesterday at Vermont's Middlebury College. [scattered applause - Dennis looks up in surprise and ad libs:] I think the Board of Regents is here. ... School psychiatrists said young John had a deep-seated need to compete with his father, John Zacarro, Sr. who ... last year pleaded guilty to real estate fraud. ... [scattered applause] Geraldine Ferraro, reached for a comment, said, "I can't explain any of this but, you know, I'm sure glad I kept my own last name." …’ (And speaking of white elites, why isn’t Gore protesting the injustice whereby, in the words of another inmate, “John Zaccaro, Jr., the son of 1984 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, received four months in jail for selling $25 worth of cocaine to an undercover agent in 1986. For a conviction for selling the same dollar amount of drugs, I got 72 times Zaccaro's sentence--24 years.”? The struggle against injustice begins at home.) When it came to it, the “uproar” and “firestorm” the local and national media had hoped for failed to ignite. When Giuliani finished his speech, people rose and applauded. A dozen students put red cloths around their mouths to indicate that fascists had muzzled them. A woman handed out leaflets explaining how Giuliani directed that the planes fly into the towers. *** Gore puts his own name in quotation marks and scatters quotation marks about with abandon in his writing. At times they are meant to be sarcastic, as in his reference to Giuliani’s “achievements,” and to a newspaper article by someone whose views he doesn’t like as an “article.” At other times they seem to mark an epistemological confusion, as when he says that Bush “has done more violence to the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ than any other person in recent memory.” If those concepts have actuality for Gore, why does he put them in quotation marks? UD presumes he has learned to do it from his humanities professors. But if, as the quotation marks mean to suggest, these words refer to empty concepts, then why does the president’s or anyone else’s violence against them matter? |
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HARRUMPH ' Calvin College, a small evangelical school in the strategic Republican stronghold of Grand Rapids, Mich., seemed a perfect stop on Saturday for the president's message. Or so thought Karl Rove, the White House political chief, who two months ago effectively bumped Calvin's scheduled commencement speaker when he asked that Mr. Bush be invited instead. …[T]he bumped commencement speaker, Nicholas Wolterstorff, a Democrat, a former Calvin academic and a recently retired philosophy of religion professor at Yale […] said in an interview last week, "Here's a Yale professor being bumped by a Yale graduate with a very average college record." He said he planned to stay home and garden in Grand Rapids instead of attending the president's speech. ' |
Sunday, May 22, 2005
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INCONTINENCE UD - to paraphrase Oscar Wilde's Algernon on the subject of his relatives - loves hearing English departments abused. She is in fact very happy in her own particular English department at her own university, but she loves hearing English departments in general abused, for the field of literary studies is ridiculous at the moment, and has indeed been ridiculous for some time. Today’s New York Times book section contains an attractive example of English department abuse, by Christopher Hitchens, who, sniffing the most recent turgid bladder from the theory people (a book of almost one thousand pages whose $80.00 price will be borne by penniless graduate students forced to read it by their professors), singles out an entry in it titled “On the Abolition of the English Department” and writes ‘Like the other contributors to this shabby volume, [the author of this essay] ought to be more careful of what he endorses. The prospect of such an abolition, at least in the United States, becomes more appetizing by the minute.’ UD thinks it’s important for people who care about these things to be part of the reconstruction of serious literary studies, before what’s left of English departments has been so thoroughly pissed upon as to be worthless. For details, read this blog at your leisure. |
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PAUL RICOEUR… in whose course on metaphor at the University of Chicago UD was in way over her head, has died, at the age of 92. |
Saturday, May 21, 2005
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SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME Washington was windy and wet all day on Friday. UD was, as ever, inappropriately dressed. Her sandals squeaked. But she had proper regalia for the degree-granting ceremony she attended. (Not that her regalia was her own. She has never gotten around to ordering her University of Chicago duds. Last year she wore a University of Maryland gown that her husband scared up; this year, a colleague who graduated from the University of Toronto lent her a nice red and white number.) She hooded one of her Ph.D. students and watched onstage with the rest of the faculty as many other students were hooded, including a Korean man who was one of four from the same family graduating that day: ‘ FATHER, THREE CHILDREN, EARN UNIVERSITY DEGREES ON SAME DAY BY MICHAEL BARNETT Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Simon Lee, who believes strongly in education and family, merged those values grandly Friday when he and his three eldest children all graduated from George Washington University. Lee, the founder and chief executive officer of the $170 million Internet technology provider STG Inc., and his two oldest children, Julie and Philip, received master of science degrees from GWU's engineering school. His middle daughter, Michelle, earned a bachelor's degree in business administration. The celebrations mark the first time in the Washington school's 181-year history that four immediate family members earned degrees in the same year, university officials said. It's unclear how many other families nationwide may have pulled off the same feat. Simon Lee, 56, of Falls Church, Va., said the family's achievement fulfilled a goal that most Korean parents had. "Korean parents try to plant their dreams through their children because they were not able to succeed at them," said Lee, the son of South Korean farmers who died before he was 15. He earned an undergraduate degree in South Korea and took graduate classes at GWU in 1980 but had to drop out to support his young family. "I want my children to finish their curriculum at least up to a master's degree." He began his Fairfax, Va.-based company in 1986 with one employee. It's now a major IT provider to the federal government. Two years ago, he returned to school and asked Julie - who had been taking business classes at GWU - and Philip Lee to join him in pursuing engineering master's degrees. "I don't need any more education to get promoted, and I don't need any education to get paid better," said Simon Lee, whose first job when he came to the United States in 1979 was keeping the books at a seafood restaurant in northern Virginia. "Why did I come back to school? Learning never ends." Lee said he also wanted to spend time with a younger generation, jokingly drawing comparisons between himself and Rodney Dangerfield's character in the 1986 movie "Back to School," a comedy about a middle-aged man who joins his son at college. Speaking in an engineering school dean's suite that was named for his wife, Anna, and him after they made a contribution to the university, Lee said the family's combined GWU bills approached $500,000. Michelle Lee started her undergraduate career at Boston's Northeastern University, but transferred after her sophomore year partly because she wanted to be with her family. "It's just kind of funny how it worked out with the rest of my family," the 22-year-old said. ' The most gratifying end of year event for UD was receiving three thank you postcards from students in her Irish Literature class. She was proudest of the one that praised her “snide remarks.” And speaking of Irish -- We’re less than a month away from Bloomsday! Which, UD recently discovered, was the brainstorm of stormy Flann O’Brien, whose novel At Swim-Two-Birds UD placed on the Irish syllabus even though she doesn’t like it. (His humor’s too desperate for her taste.) As faithful readers know, Bloomsday is a big deal for UD, very much worth getting excited about. Here are some preliminary Bloomsday instructions: 1.) Do not confuse the annual worldwide celebration of James Joyce on June 16 with the race in Spokane Washington that also calls itself Bloomsday. 2.) Ignore those who like John Banville call for the end of “commercialized,” “kitschy” Bloomsday. To quote O’Brien, “fuck the begrudgers.” |
Thursday, May 19, 2005
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So far, 48 newspapers around the country have picked up on this seemingly very local story… CITY PLAN WOULD CURB GARAGE DOOR OPENING The Associated Press Wednesday, May 18, 2005; 7:32 AM GERMANTOWN, Tenn. -- Some residents of this upscale Memphis suburb say ordinances have gone too far. The final straw may have been rules proposed about when garage doors can be opened. Among other directives, the city codes would tell homeowners to open their garage doors only when entering or exiting or for "short periods of time" for cleaning and maintenance. "I'm in favor of reasonable codes, but I think some of these things go to extremes," said resident Robert Scallions. Because of such criticism, officials in this town known for a sharp eye for community decorum have agreed to give the proposals another look before a final vote. Jean Wallace said she fears town regulators could come down on her because the street address on her house is spelled out in words. The rules would call for numbers only, from 4 to 6 inches tall. "That seems very strange, especially when the house is 30 years old," Wallace said. "The builders put them up, and they used to always be like that." The all-too-aptly named Germantown has a lot more ordinances where these came from. You can’t park your car in your driveway, for instance. Has to be kept behind those doors…. Will selectmen with stopwatches station themselves outside random driveways, timing owners as they whisk their cars in and slam the doors? No. Being outside and walking around is unlikely to be permitted under the Germantown ordinances. |
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MORE ON STUDENT EVALUATIONS A professor at SMU comments on the website Inside Higher Ed about the damage candid academic bloggers like the Phantom Prof can do to American university professors: “When students read these blogs and the connections between that subject matter and their professors becomes clear, I would imagine a professor could charge that the blogger has caused damage to their reputation (we do live and die by student evaluations, after all).” |
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Gevalt. 'May 17, 2005 575 Teachers of the Year The headline proves the case. This article sums up what is wrong with public education, why teachers will continue to be the lowest-scoring students on SAT tests, and why science and math majors and other high-quality teaching prospects will continue to avoid/flee the teaching profession: At Lucia Mar, 575 Teachers of the Year TEACHERS' UNION DECIDES NOT TO PICK A SINGLE WINNER THIS YEAR TO PROTEST SCHWARZENEGGER'S MERIT PAY PROPOSAL The Teacher of the Year for the Lucia Mar Unified School District cannot be named within the space of this story. "It's everyone," said Branden Leach, president of the Lucia Mar Unified Teachers Association. All 575 instructors in San Luis Obispo County's largest school district are winners, he said. "We all help children in our own special way." via Joanne Jacobs |
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BLOGOSCOPY “A Lawyer Outs Himself to Sue for Privacy” the Times of London story is captioned. The headline made UD scratch her head. A guy she never heard of before - a fellow ‘thesdan! - has given UD and the world his name and his most humiliating sexual proclivities in a bid to sue a blogger for invasion of his privacy. This is about that silly bitch, Washingtonienne, a twentyish Hill staffer who kept a blog for a week or two which tabulated the ways and means of six of her sex partners, including this guy, the guy who’s suing. A reporter asks a legal expert about the guy‘s chances: “Charles Abernathy, a law professor at Georgetown University, Washington, and an expert on privacy issues, said: ‘The traditional American position here could not be clearer. If you know something first-person because you have done it with them, you have a tort-free right to tell it.’ The case was ‘an extreme long shot.’” There’s a sad disparity in the outcome of this quickie between the guy (his name is everywhere, but UD doesn’t see why she shouldn’t, perversely, continue to protect his privacy) and Washingtonienne. She is currently rich and famous, while he is suing her for the paltry sum of $75,000 and, having given her recently released book yet more publicity, he will certainly lose the case. You can read everything Washingtonienne said about the guy in his own legal papers, reproduced at Smoking Gun. Marjorie Williams wrote this about Washington: 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 human nature stuff that is nearly always as plain as the nose on your face. The messy human stuff, grubby human nature, always seems to astonish and scandalize us when it emerges, even though, as Williams notes, it’s as plain as the n |