Diversity Plan Sparks
Controversy with Faculty

The University has received letters
criticizing the plan from
faculty members and the AAUP.



The controversy surrounding the University's Five Year Diversity Plan shows no signs of dissipating, as professors threaten to leave the University if the current draft is approved, while the American Association of University Professors wrote a letter criticizing the administration for allegedly bypassing the standard set of faculty committees while drafting the plan. [A little awkwardness with tenses in there, but basically a good first paragraph. “Dissipating” is good.]

The AAUP letter came at approximately the same time that 25 faculty members drafted their own “Open Letter to President Frohnmayer,” in which they called the Diversity Plan “Orwellian” and “frightening.” [Orwellian it certainly is, but there’s no need to be frightened by the diversitocracy. The diversitocracy lacks O’Brien’s genius. In the twenty-first century, brain wins over brawn.]

The AAUP letter, dated May 10 and addressed to former University of Oregon Senate President Andrew Marcus, states that the charter for the University places the governance in the hands of the faculty and that the AAUP principles emphasize faculty involvement for proposals relevant to professors.

Jean Stockard, a Planning, Public Policy Management professor, said she shared the AAUP's concerns and was upset that faculty had “virtually no involvement” in drafting the plan.

“Members of the committee listed at the front of the document were only shown the document after it was printed,” said Stockard, referring to the 80 names listed as active participants. Some professors have threatened to leave if the current draft becomes a reality. [Eighty! I thought it was seventy, already a shitload. And see what I mean about the diversitocracy‘s intelligence problem? They just put people’s names on the thing…]

“As for faculty thinking of leaving: I am,” said N. Chris Phillips, a math professor and co-signer of the open letter.

Mathematics Associate Professor Alexander Kleshchev said he has heard of other professors who might leave but says it is too early to tell.

“I did consider leaving, and if anything like this plan will be implemented I will continue to think very hard about this,” Kleshchev said.

Kleshchev, a Russian immigrant, says the plan conjures up memories of his former homeland.

“Look, I am personally not going to be interrogated about my thoughts, and I am not going to go to reeducation camps either,” said Kleshchev, alluding to the Five Year Diversity Plan's requirement that faculty participate in a summer diversity seminar. [You can hear the diversitarians firing up their version of Frohnmayer’s response to the anger and national attention that the draft originally drew -- “You’re over-reacting! You’re making a fuss about nothing! You don’t understand what you’re talking about!” “Okay. So tell me what I’m talking about. What’s cultural competence?” “ We don’t believe in defining it.”]

“I've had enough of that in my previous life in the Soviet Union, and I just will not have this again. I tried freedom now; I liked it, and I am not about to give it up,” Kleshchev said.

For the most part, criticism of the diversity plan has come from professors in the sciences. Twenty of the 25 co-signers of the open letter are in the sciences; 14 of those are math professors. [Hm. What’s this factoid mean, UD wonders… I mean, she’s an English professor, about as far from a math professor as you can get. Together, her math SAT and GRE scores would add up to… whatever. But as you know if you read UD, she’s the daughter of a scientist, an authentic, all-the-way-down empiricist, and that did rub off… But let her put on her humanities professor cap here and try to figure out why any self-respecting faculty member from any division would accept or even welcome this particularly gruesome diversity project … Maybe it has an analogue in Kleshchev’s former setting: “Please, comrades! Put me on stage! Let me show you the depth of my passion for the party!”…]

Phillips said the Five Year Diversity Plan is a “terrible idea” because it “calls for us to judge new faculty hires first and foremost by the color of their skin.”

More than that, Phillips believes the Diversity Plan would create a bureaucracy the University cannot afford. The Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity already costs approximately $1.5 million per year.

“This plan calls for millions per year in extra spending. What will happen to faculty salaries then?” said Phillips.

Of primary concern for the AAUP and some faculty members is the plan's use of the term “cultural competency,” which is not defined within the plan's text [That‘s what I meant up there. The Oregon Eighty don‘t define the central term of their proposal.]

John Shuford, the interim associate director for the Center on Diversity and Community (CoDaC) said that cultural competency was not defined for two reasons: It would not be appropriate for the drafters of the blueprint to impose a definition because that might have led to adverse responses by some. [Gevalt. No comment. Beyond gevalt.] Secondly, the working definition would have become the focal point of debate, preventing a deeper discussion of the ideas presented. As such, the diversity work group, led by former Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity Greg Vincent, decided not to include a definition. Shuford said that various definitions of cultural competency could be found because it is a popular concept [You can see how popular just by following this non-dissipating story.].

Byron Kunisawa, a lecturer and academic who specializes in analyzing the relationship between people and institutions, helped popularize the term cultural competency. He first used it in his seminal [Why not ovulal? Three weeks, summer diversity camp...] work “Designs of Omission,” in which he concluded that “bias and discrimination are endemic to the structure and methodology of every system and institution in America.” [Bias: It’s everywhere you want to be.]

Although he had no direct role in the drafting of the Five Year Diversity Plan, he said he was thrilled that another institution was taking steps to rectify racial biases.

“I'm glad the University is trying to do something measurable,” said Kunisawa. [Going to be hard to measure if you won’t define your central term.]

Kunisawa said cultural competency is a generic term that describes the importance of utilizing the elements of culture to assess and interact with diverse populations. [Huh?] He said it has been most helpful in the medical field.

“Bottom line, it forces one to acknowledge that culture is an important factor to consider whenever a multicultural situation presents itself,” Kunisawa said. [Culture’s in play in culture, and don’t you forget it.] Currently, President Frohnmayer said he is taking the AAUP's suggestion and creating an executive council of faculty members to review the Five Year Diversity Plan in order to define key terms, assuage faculty concerns and iron out the wrinkles.

POLICE ARREST
SEAT PLEASANT
COUNCIL PRESIDENT

The Associated Press

June 28, 2005, 5:07 PM EDT

OCEAN CITY -- Police arrested the president of the Seat Pleasant Town Council on charges of driving an uninsured car on a suspended license.

Officer Joseph Melena pulled Brian K. Shivers, 37, over about 1:30 a.m. Monday on 49th Street, according to police reports. A random registration check of the license plates had shown the gold Mercedes station wagon was uninsured and its plates were recorded as stolen.

Shivers told police he "needed to have a vehicle to come to Ocean City with because he was in town for a political convention," according to a police report filed documenting the arrest.

The four-day Maryland Municipal League conference kicked off Sunday in Ocean City and an administrator at Seat Pleasant's City Hall said the town's mayor and seven council members were attending the meeting. Shivers is one of 13 elected officials nominated this year for 10 seats as members-at-large on the league's governing board.

A call Tuesday to Shivers at City Hall requesting comment was not immediately returned.

Records on police computers showed Shivers' driver's license was suspended in February 2004, the police report said. Shivers told police he had been in contact with the Motor Vehicle Administration about the suspension and believed his license papers were in order, according to the police report.

Shivers was arrested and detained at the Public Safety Building on 65th Street. He was released on his own recognizance later Monday after a hearing before a district commissioner.

whatever it is, let it be without
affectation.

"The Carpet Coming."

[In honor of tonight's premiere of "War of the Worlds,"
which we were not invited to attend.]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The actor cannot hear the publicist;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere Scientology is loosed upon the world,
The squirting microphone is loosed, and everywhere
The memory of BRAD and ANGELINA is drowned;
The press lacks all conviction, while TOM CRUISE
Is full of passionate intensity,
Really, really passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely there is a movie they have to promote.
'The War of the Batmans' or something! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of 'Dianetics'
Troubles my sight: somewhere near the Eiffel Tower
A shape with KATIE HOLMES's body and the head of Mr. Cruise,
A gaze blank and jovial as the sun,
Is holding a press conference, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant Star reporters.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That two months of interminable news coverage
Were vexed to nightmare by a publicist's confirmation,
And what vapid interview, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards the Ziegfeld to be born?

I hate to ask your help with something so silly, but I have been nominated for membership in the Cosmos Club, which is a very distinguished club in Washington, DC, comprised of Nobel Prize winners, etc. Problem for me is that most prospective members have received awards and I have received none. I was wondering if you thought it possible that I could put that I have received an award from Toward Tradition with a sufficiently academic title, perhaps something like Scholar of Talmudic Studies? Indeed, it would be even better if it were possible that I received these in years past, if you know what I mean.

Throughout the class the students took notes on the computers, creating a ceaseless keyboard clatter and making it difficult for anyone to hear the teacher's voice. Worse, as they faced their screens they looked away from the professor and away from one another. The class had no sense of communal purpose, and some students scarcely gave the professor a glance.

The PowerPoint remote control didn't work quite right at first -- tinkering with it caused a delay -- and students periodically whispered to one another about technical problems when they should have been learning the day's topic. One rogue was covertly checking his e-mail messages; another was browsing supermodel Web sites.

What can we do? Professors, stop your engines. Take to class only your wits. Make yourself the center of attention. Let the students look at you, not at a screen, and let them discover the pleasure of learning as a communal activity. Let them watch and listen as you speak.

[The] enabling principle [of the humanities is] the principle of personal influence and personal example. [Professors should be] visible embodiments of the realized humanity of our aspirations, intelligence, skill, scholarship…[The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too.

Over the last 10 years average tuition and fees rose 51 percent at public four-year colleges and 36 percent at private institutions, outpacing the consumer price index. Undergraduate tuition and fees at elite private schools such as Harvard grew even faster. For example, Harvard undergraduate tuition and fees are $27,448 this year, up from $17,851 in 1995 and $9,500 in 1985. With room and board added, next year's bill at Harvard will be an attention-getting $42,000. That's as much as the average family income in the United States.

The real question is whether students are getting their money's worth. In most other consumer markets, cost is a function of quality, real or perceived. This is a fact of life when purchasing a luxury car or high-caliber professional services. There is a ''value paradox" in higher education, however, since families rarely consider cost in the context of the quality delivered. That's partly because most colleges don't know how to measure their quality. But if education is truly an investment in a young person, shouldn't we be able to understand the return on that investment?

….Who's doing the teaching? What are students really learning? Perhaps a student is willing to pay a high price for education when professors, not graduate student teaching assistants, are guaranteed to teach the course and grade the papers. Maybe a parent is willing to pay market rates for a course whose small class size lets professors establish personal working relationships with students. Right now, many professors prefer their research ''opportunities" over their teaching ''load." Yet isn't it obvious the quality of education erodes when professors are absent, classes are unmanageably large, or most students get honor grades?

Ex-UF Official Pleads Guilty in Fraud Case

A former University of Florida associate dean in charge of setting up educational programs for medical doctors has pleaded guilty to defrauding the university of $120,500.

...Van Susteren faces a maximum of 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of probation.

The reasons for Van Susteren's actions remain unknown. He earned $95,092 last year as an associate dean in the College of Medicine's Continuing Education. Curtis declined comment on a motive for his client's actions.

Mrs Premise It's a funny thing freedom. I mean how can any of us be really free when we still have personal possessions.

Mrs Conclusion You can't. You can't. I mean, how can I go off and join Frelimo when I've got nine more installments to pay on the fridge.

Mrs Premise No, you can't. You can't. Well this is the whole crux of Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Roads to Freedom'.

Mrs Conclusion No, it bloody isn't. The nub of that is, his characters stand for all of us in their desire to avoid action. Mind you, the man at the off-licence says it's an everyday story of French country folk.

Mrs Premise What does he know?

Mrs Conclusion Nothing.

Mrs Premise Sixty new pence for a bottle of Maltese Claret. Well I personally think Jean-Paul's masterwork is an allegory of man's search for commitment.

Mrs Conclusion No it isn't.

Mrs Premise Yes it is.

Mrs Conclusion Isn't.

Mrs Premise 'Tis.

Mrs Conclusion No it isn't.

Mrs Premise All right. We can soon settle this. We'll ask him.

Mrs Conclusion Do you know him?

Mrs Premise Yes, we met on holiday last year.

Mrs Conclusion In Ibeezer?

Mrs Premise Yes. He was staying there with his wife and Mr and Mr Genet. Oh, I did get on well with Madam S. We were like that.

Mrs Conclusion What was Jean-Paul like?

Mrs Premise Well, you know, a bit moody. Yes, he didn't join in the fun much. Just sat there thinking. Still, Mr Rotter caught him a few times with the whoopee cushion. (she demonstrates) Le Capitalisme et La Bourgeoisie ils sont la même chose... Oooh we did laugh.

Mrs Conclusion Well, we'll give him a tinkle then.

Mrs Premise Yes, all right. She said they were in the book. (shouts) Where's the Paris telephone directory?

Mrs Inference It's on the drier.

Mrs Premise No, no, that's Budapest. Oh here we are Sartre ... Sartre.

Mrs Varley It's 621036.

Mrs Premise Oh, thank you, Mrs Varley. (dials) Hallo. Paris 621036 please and make it snappy, buster... (as they wait they sing 'The Girl from Ipanema') Hallo? Hello Mrs Sartre. It's Beulagh Premise here. Oh, pardon, c'est Beulagh Premise ici, oui, oui, dans Ibeezer. Oui, we met... nous nous recontrons au Hotel Miramar. Oui, à la barbeque, c'est vrai. Madame S. - est-ce que Jean est chez vous? Oh merde. When will he be free? Oh pardon. Quand sera-t-il libre? Oooooh. Ha ha ha ha (to Mrs Conclusion) She says he's spent the last sixty years trying to work that one out. (to Madame Sartre) Très amusant, Madam S. Oui absolument... à bientôt. (puts the phone down) Well he's out distributing pamphlets to the masses but he'll be in at six.

[…. Stock shot of Eiffel Tower. French accordion music. Mix through to French street thronged by old Frenchmen with berets and loaves. Mrs Conclusion and Mrs Premise appear and walk up to the front door of an apartment block. On the front door is a list of the inhabitants of the block. They read it out loud.]

Mrs Premise Oh, here we are, Number 25 .... (reads) Flat 1, Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Flat 2, Yves Montand, Flat 3, Jacques Cousteau, Flat 4, Jean Genet and Friend, Flat 5, Maurice Laroux...

Mrs Conclusion Who's he?

Mrs Premise Never heard of him. Flat 6, Marcel Marceau, 'Walking Against the Wind' Ltd. Flat 7, Indira Gandhi?

Mrs Conclusion She gets about a bit, doesn't she?

Mrs Premise Yes, Flat 8, Jean-Paul and Betty-Muriel Sartre. [She rings the bell. A voice comes from the intercom.]

Voice Oui.

Mrs Premise C'est nous, Betty-Muriel, excusez que nous sommes en retard.

Voice Entrez. [Buzzer sounds.]

Mrs Premise Oui, merci.

[Interior the Sartres' flat. It is littered with books and papers. We hear Jean-Paul coughing. Mrs Sartre goes to the door. She is a ratbag with a fag in her mouth and a duster over her head. A French song is heard on the radio. She switches it off.]

Mrs Sartre Oh, rubbish. (opens the door) Bonjour.

Mrs Conclusion (entering) Parlez vous Anglais?

Mrs Sartre Oh yes. Good day. (Mrs Premise comes in) Hello, love!

Mrs Premise Hello! Oh this is Mrs Conclusion from No. 46.

Mrs Sartre Nice to meet you, dear.

Mrs Conclusion Hello.

Mrs Premise How's the old man, then?

Mrs Sartre Oh, don't ask. He's in one of his bleeding moods. 'The bourgeoisie this and the bourgeoisie that' - he's like a little child sometimes. I was only telling the Rainiers the other day - course he's always rude to them, only classy friends we've got - I was saying solidarity with the masses I said... pie in the sky! Oooh! You're not a Marxist are you Mrs Conclusion?

Mrs Conclusion No, I'm a Revisionist.

Mrs Sartre Oh good. I mean, look at this place! I'm at my wits end. Revolutionary leaflets everywhere. One of these days I'll revolutionary leaflets him. If it wasn't for the goat you couldn't get in here for propaganda. [Shot of a goat eating leaflets in corner of room.]

Mrs Premise Oh very well. Can we pop in and have a word with him?

Mrs Sartre Yes come along.

Mrs Premise Thank you.

Mrs Sartre But be careful. He's had a few. Mind you he's as good as gold in the morning, I've got to hand it to him, but come lunchtime it's a bottle of vin ordinaire - six glasses and he's ready to agitate.

Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion knock on the door of Jean-Paul's room.

Mrs Premise Coo-ee! Jean-Paul? Jean-Paul! It's only us. Oh pardon ... c'est même nous...

[They enter. We do not see Jean-Paul although we hear his voice.]

Jean-Paul Oui.

Mrs Premise Jean-Paul. Your famous trilogy 'Rues à Liberté, is it an allegory of man's search for commitment?

Jean-Paul Oui.

Mrs Premise I told you so.

Mrs Conclusion Oh coitus.

SHAVED SOAP AND OTHER
MOTIVATIONAL ABSURDITY

He strides onto the stage armed with nothing but a portion of a McDonald's straw taped to his cheek (a maniac's idea of a microphone?) and within minutes has the audience eating out of his hand, howling with laughter at pretty much anything he says. And he says, brilliantly, pretty much anything, all in the guise of being a life coach named Chris John Jackson, inventor of the motivational technique Jackson's Way.

Thirty-one-year-old Will Adamsdale isn't so much a comedian (he won Britain's top comedy award, the Perrier Prize, last summer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival) as a veritable wizard, a virtuoso of the transcendently absurd. Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he spins a wacky world of increasingly bizarre nonsense out of thin air, creating an exquisitely idiosyncratic worldview that is as funny as it is wonderfully weird.

Mr. Adamsdale is a master of resonant quirkiness, and his 75-minute riff is remarkable for both its sheer inventiveness and its perfect pitch. Not to mention the level of riotous interaction, starting with getting someone in the front row to throw a dish towel - one of his major props - onto the stage. ("Now everybody can see that Toby would have to try real hard not to get the towel on the stage, right, because he's basically standing on the stage. Here we go, Toby, let's do this thing. One, two, three, go! Oh, beautiful. Good work, Toby. Achieved! Want to hear everybody say that - 'Achieved!'")

A fresh-faced, natty presence in a black linen suit, Mr. Adamsdale quickly gets the audience on his wavelength of inspired zaniness and keeps building from there. The core of this endearing spoof of an Anthony Robbins-style motivational speaker is the philosophy of Jackson's Way, a sort of 12-step-to-the-12th-power program of pure pointlessness, with its own strange internal logic.

Mr. Adamsdale works the room, expounding on his technique, a lunatic litany that involves deliberately pointless feats - or Jacksons. (There are also mini-Jacksons and compound Jacksons.) "What I'm getting at, what I'm asking you to do, is to open up your minds to a world of experience that you have never even considered," he urges, with all the unctuousness of a televangelist. "I'm talking about doing something, like going to the bathroom, getting a bar of soap and just shaving off a tiny piece, so nobody would actually see it, pick up that pinch of soap shaving, take it into another room, and leave it there."

Mr. Adamsdale walks the audience through other Jacksons - like taking a piece of trash, a discarded paper cup, say, brought all the way from Australia and switching it with one from America. Or trying to make the word "boy" rhyme with "pickle." Jacksons must be performed with P.T.I. (Push Through with Intensity, as he charismatically puts it, to the point of throwing up).

But only Chris John Jackson himself can really convince you of the transformative nature of Jackson's Way. Which he does, with dazzling P.T.I.

The show runs through June 26 at 59E59 Theater, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan; (212) 279-4200.

It must be said that Ms. Brewer made a portly Elizabeth. Still, she sang with such conviction that you believed in her dramatically. She even bravely took a few dance turns…

Javanomics 101: Today's Coffee Is Tomorrow's Debt
The Latte Generation Hears a Wake-Up Call

Washington Post

SEATTLE -- At a Starbucks across the street from Seattle University School of Law, Kirsten Daniels crams for the bar exam. She's armed with color-coded pens, a don't-mess-with-me crease in her brow and what she calls "my comfort latte."

She just graduated summa cum laude , after three years of legal training that left her $115,000 in debt. Part of that debt, which she will take a decade to repay with interest, was run up at Starbucks, where she buys her lattes.

The habit costs her nearly $3 a day, and it's one that her law school says she and legions like her cannot afford.

It borders on apostasy in this caffeine-driven town (home to more coffee shops per capita than any major U.S. city, as well as Starbucks corporate headquarters), but the law school is aggressively challenging the drinking habits of students such as Daniels.

"A latte a day on borrowed money? It's crazy," said Erika Lim, director of career services at the law school.

To quantify the craziness, Lim distributes coffee-consumption charts. One shows that a five-day-a-week $3 latte habit on borrowed money can cost $4,154, when repaid over 10 years. She also directs students to a Web site she helped create. The "Stop Buying Expensive Coffee and Save Calculator" shows that if you made your own coffee and for 30 years refrained from buying a $3 latte, you could save $55,341 (with interest).

Inside the Starbucks across from the law school, Daniels seemed surprised -- but unmoved -- to hear all this. "I guess I never had done the math," she said. "On the other hand, I would be a very crabby person without my comfort latte."

Therein lies the rub for those who would curb latte consumption with pocketbook reasoning. As Lim concedes, "no one pays any attention."

Financial planners, best-selling investment gurus and a number of advice columnists have been warning consumers for years that seemingly insignificant daily spending on such luxuries as gourmet coffee can, over time, sabotage savings and hobble a person's financial future.

But these warnings, too, have been ignored, at least as measured by the runaway growth and profitability of Starbucks, the world's leading purveyor of specialty coffee. Its stock is up more than 1,200 percent in the past 10 years. When it went public in 1992, the company had 125 stores. It now has more than 9,000 locations around the world and long-term plans for 20,000 more.

Starbucks declined to comment for this article, referring questions to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a trade group. Its spokesman, Mike Ferguson, said that coffee shops provide an excellent opportunity for students to do their homework.

"You can occupy a table for two hours for about $3, which is unique in a retail setting," he said. "At a traditional restaurant, they will kick you out."

The second-largest gourmet coffee retailer in the Seattle area, Tully's, did respond. Its chief financial officer, Kristopher Galvin, said he had never before heard any complaint about the long-term financial impact of spending $3 a day on coffee, either for consumers or for students buying the drinks with borrowed money.

"I would guess, based on my years in college, that having lots of good coffee would help you get through college and help you pay back those student loans," Galvin said.

Nonprofit groups that specialize in lending money to college students disagree. They object not to lattes or cappuccinos but to the several thousand dollars of student debt that can be incurred to buy them. In decades past, lenders chided college students for excessive spending of borrowed money on pizza and cigarettes, but the staggering ubiquity of Starbucks appears to have narrowed the nagging to foamy espresso drinks.

According to recent federal figures, 42 percent of undergraduates borrow money for school. In professional schools such as law and business, 78 percent rely on borrowed money.

"The question that needs to be posed is 'Do they really need to have a Starbucks every day?' " said Jeffrey Hanson, director of borrower education service at Access Group, a Delaware-based organization that is the nation's third-largest provider of graduate school loans. "Since they are living, in part, on borrowed money, they need to be aware of the opportunity cost of that $3 latte. Once they spend it, it is not available for a loaf of bread."

In visits to college campuses around the country, Hanson hands out fliers that detail the "real cost" of lattes purchased with borrowed money. He also gives away cautionary stickers that can be attached to credit or debit cards. They show a steaming espresso drink, a dollar sign and a question mark.

At the University of Washington in Seattle, the largest higher-education institution in the Pacific Northwest, money-management courses also single out lattes, warning that they can be a "major budget buster." About half of the university's 36,000 students receive loans.

But these warnings have a way of getting lost amid the sweet aromas emanating from university-owned espresso shops inside nearly every major building on campus. The university began a major espresso expansion in 1997, after a survey found that coffee was far and away the favorite on-campus "food."

"We will do about 50,000 pounds of coffee a year," said Vinnie Gore, associate director of housing and food services at the university, adding that "coffee is still extremely popular, and coffee sales have been growing every year."

Jon D. Markman, an investment manager and writer in Seattle, has done a lot of thinking about why gourmet coffee sellers such as Starbucks are so successful, especially among young people. Markman himself spends $3.22 every workday at Starbucks on a double-tall, extra-hot latte with a single pump of sugar-free vanilla.

"Finger-wagging won't stop people from buying lattes," said Markman, who argues that Starbucks has pulled off "a cultural hat trick that is unparalleled in restaurant history."

He says it has created the white-collar equivalent of the tavern next to the car plant, a place where office workers, 20-somethings and teenagers can all gather in comfortable surroundings for "an addictive product that doesn't kill you."


"Financial planners and career counselors will never have any effect on this behavior, unless they can break the psychological mold of the latte-drinking cohort by mounting a campaign similar in size and impact to the campaign against cigarettes," he said. "I don't see that happening."

At Seattle University School of Law, Lim concedes the futility of persuading students to stop spending borrowed money on high-priced coffee. Still, she refuses to give up. The consequences of latte-larded law school debts are worrisome for the legal profession, she said, insidiously tilting career paths toward jobs that pay more but satisfy less.

"The amount of money you owe directly affects the professional choices you have," she said.

Debt-panicked law school graduates, she said, tend to run away from low-paying jobs such as public defender (about $45,000 a year) and into the more remunerative arms of corporate law.

Lim, by the way, is not a latte drinker, unless someone else pays.

Seton Hall University students attend classes in Kozlowski Hall and pass through the L. Dennis Kozlowski Rotunda on their way into the campus library.

Whether those campus facilities keep their names may depend on a jury deliberating today in New York.

Kozlowski, the former chief executive officer of Tyco, is on trial in state Supreme Court in Manhattan on charges that he and fellow executive Mark Swartz looted their company of $600 million.

The jurors, who will get back to work on conspiracy and larceny charges they have been deciding since June 2, indicated last week they were close to a verdict on some of the 31 charges.

Seton Hall officials have watched the case closely. If Kozlowski is found guilty, they face a familiar dilemma: What does a school do when a campus building bears the name of a convicted felon?

Kozlowski, a Seton Hall graduate, was once one of the South Orange university's most generous donors. The former Tyco chief gave the school millions and sat on its board of regents for more than a decade.

Officials at the Roman Catholic university would not say yesterday whether they will strip Kozlowski's name from the library rotunda and the six-floor academic hall if he is found guilty.

Seton Hall's naming policy allows the university's board of regents to decide if and when a name should be removed from a building.

"We can't speculate on what they would do," said Thomas White, a Seton Hall spokesman. "The current naming policy ... does not oblige the board to act in any way."
The regents are not scheduled to meet again until September for a board retreat, White said.

During Kozlowski's first trial, which ended in a mistrial last year, some Seton Hall students said they were embarrassed that the business school and other departments were housed in a building honoring a man whose name conjures up images of corporate scandal.

Kozlowski, a Newark native, made headlines during his first trial when he was accused of spending company money on lavish parties and other purchases. Those included a $2 million birthday party and a $6,000 shower curtain billed to the Bermuda-based company with operational headquarters in West Windsor.

The Setonian, Seton Hall's student-run newspaper, advocated removing Kozlowski's name.

"On a campus where many of the buildings are named after saints, is that the kind of image the university wants to cultivate?" the student newspaper said in an editorial shortly after Kozlowski's indictment.

Building names are a touchy subject on the campus that Business Week magazine dubbed "Seton Hall of Shame" in 2002 for having not one but three major buildings bearing the names of disgraced corporate executives.

The trio included Kozlowski Hall, Walsh Library (named after former Tyco board member Frank Walsh, who pleaded guilty in 2002 to concealing a $20 million bonus) and Brennan Recreation Center (named after convicted First Jersey Securities founder Robert Brennan, who is serving time for bankruptcy fraud and money laundering).

All three buildings were named well before the donors -- who all served on the university's board of regents -- were accused of any crimes.

In 2002, Seton Hall's board voted to pull Brennan's name off the recreation center, saying it was "in the best interests of the university." The university did not announce any plans to return the $11 million that Brennan reportedly pledged to the school.

At the same closed-door meeting, the Seton Hall board also adopted new guidelines on naming buildings. The board did not disclose the details.

When Walsh pleaded guilty in the Tyco scandal a few weeks later, Seton Hall officials said the board would weigh whether to remove his name from the library.

But Walsh, who avoided jail time, appears to still be in Seton Hall's good graces. His name remains on the library and he was invited to help organize a fund-raising campaign for the university last year.

Whether Kozlowski gets the same treatment at his alma mater remains to be seen.
Seton Hall is not the only higher education institution that has had to reconsider naming a building or accepting a gift.

In recent years, the University of Missouri, the University of Michigan, Mississippi College, Brown and Harvard have been among the schools facing questions on whether to remove a name from a building or return a donation from a scandal-plagued corporate executive.

In nearly all the cases, the school decided to keep the money and the name.

The University of Missouri still has a chair in economics named after donor and alumnus Kenneth Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, who is awaiting trial. The professorship in his name is expected to remain vacant until a jury decides his fate and university officials weigh their options.

At the University of Michigan, the architectural school, medical library and part of the campus hospital are named after A. Alfred Taubman, the former chairman of Sotheby's auction house who later served a jail term for price fixing.

The university decided to honor its original agreement with Taubman and keep his name on all three buildings, despite calls from faculty and students upset about associating their school with a felon.

"We are committed to retaining his name," University of Michigan spokeswoman Julie Peterson said, without apology.

'Wednesday, June 22: Those who can't do, teach. That still seems to be the premise as the eight-episode season 2 of the made-in-Montreal Naked Josh debuts. David Julian Hirsh plays Josh Gould, an Oxford grad and professor of sexual anthropology whose own sex life is, for all purposes, a failure. As the professor continues to learn from his experiences plunging into Montreal's night life, he is joined in the new season by Audrey (Claudia Ferri), a rival professor who just may provide both personal and professional challenges.'

CAMPUS LAB IS CALLED
METH-MAKING SITE

A San Diego State graduate student on probation for drug violations used a university lab to make methamphetamine, Ecstasy and an anesthetic 80 times more potent than morphine, authorities said yesterday.

Matthew Finley, 26, was arrested at his home in Ocean Beach yesterday and the campus lab where he worked was shut down as investigators removed illicit drugs, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman said.

"He felt he could get away with it. To his disappointment today, he did not," DEA spokesman Misha Piastro said. "His disregard for the safety of the rest of the student body is alarming and not something we take lightly."

After his arrest, Finley told investigators that he manufactured methamphetamine and a chemical used to make methamphetamine, as well as Ecstasy and fentanyl, the powerful anesthetic, according a court document.

…While drug arrests on the large campus are not unusual, Foster said he could not recall another drug incident in the last five years involving the chemical labs.

Finley, who was pursuing a master's degree in chemistry, was convicted of drug charges in Santa Barbara in 2002 and placed on probation, according to a complaint a DEA agent filed with a federal judge yesterday.

At that time, he told investigators he used a lab at the University of California Santa Barbara to convert a liquid form of the drug Ecstasy into a powder, the agent said.

He was caught growing marijuana the following year and again placed on probation. A judge sentenced him to two years in prison but suspended the sentence, according to the complaint.

San Diego State University police approached the DEA late last year after being tipped that someone was manufacturing methamphetamine in the chemistry lab where Finley worked.

A surveillance camera in the lab captured Finley late last month working with a dark liquid that later tested positive for Ecstasy, authorities said.

…Foster said there are strict controls on its laboratories, which do some of the more than $100 million worth of research the university performs a year.

"Students have to go through environmental health and safety training," he said. "There are safety officers within departments like chemistry that track the incoming orders for chemicals and disbursements of chemicals."

Finley is expected to appear in court today.

O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh Molly Bloom complains in the middle of her unparagraphed, unsentenced, and unpunctuated soliloquy at the end of Ulysses. Professors like me - people who routinely conduct graduate seminars dedicated solely to Joyce's novel - are trained to point out to their students that this moment in the text is an instance of literary self-reflexivity; for "Jamesy" is none other than the novel's author, James Augustine Joyce (during his lifetime, Irish detractors called him James Disgustin' Joyce), and Molly is calling out to her maker from her fictional bed, begging him to make her stream of consciousness stop.

One hundred and one real years after that fictive June 16, 1904, there is no stopping the Joycean flow. Today hundreds of thousands of ordinary people from Szombathely to Sydney will gather to recite beloved lines from Chamber Music, Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.

They will dress up as their favorite Joyce characters; they will display their Joyce death mask sculptures, their James Joyce stroll gardens, their Joyce films. Scads of them a few hours ago sat at tables stretching the length of Dublin's O'Connell Street and ate Joyce-inspired breakfasts. They will sing songs immortalized by having been dropped into a Joyce story; they will sing their own Joyce-inspired music. They will drink the new Provins Valais specially labelled red and white "Cuvee James Joyce." They will stand by the side of the Liffey, the Mississippi, the Seine, and the Nile reading aloud about Paddy Dignam's funeral and Leopold Bloom's soap.





Ever since Roddy Doyle's putdown of the James Joyce industry ("They'll be offering James Joyce Happy Meals next,"), it has become fashionable to deride Bloomsday, the worldwide festival in honor of James Joyce's greatest work, Ulysses, and its hero, Leopold Bloom. And the thing has certainly gotten out of hand. It used to be the provenance of literary nerds like me, who'd get up at six in the morning on a hot rainy Washington day and join eight other jerks in some out of the way setting that someone thought looked Irish and do a marathon reading of the novel. Now it's a glitzy affair for gliterati everywhere.

They'll be dancing, for instance, in the streets of Ljubljana. Slovenia News reports that "A discreet plaque commemorating Irish writer James Joyce has recently been unveiled at platform no. 1 of Ljubljana's central railway station. In 1904, Joyce and his wife Nora mistakenly disembarked there, believing they had reached their destination - the city of Trieste." Mistakenly, mind you. But Ljubljana will take it.

"Így Szombathely Joyce híres regényalakjának, Leopold Bloomnak századik évfordulóját méltó módon ülheti meg," explained szombathely online last year. The Hungarian town of that name is now famous because Leopold Bloom's father - an extremely minor character in the novel, and long dead when its events take place - comes from there. "As they have for years, Joyce's fans will congregate in Szombathely, a well-tended, pretty little town of some 80,000 inhabitants in southwest Hungary, in mid-June to celebrate Bloomsday, named for the fictional Leopold Bloom, the genial protagonist of Ulysses" notes a Hungarian newsletter.

The organizer of the Hungarian Bloomsday is convinced he has tracked down the real Hungarian "Blum" who served as the inspiration for Joyce: "We have identified the Blum house in Szombathely, and that is where the statue of James Joyce will be erected, as if emerging from the wall of the house."

Cities, ordinary readers, cutting-edge artists: all identify themselves with Jamesy's pooh, perhaps because this affiliation conveys both a certain seriousness and a keen aesthetic responsiveness. The hot Irish band, The Pogues, expressed this widely shared instinct to hitch a ride with him by featuring on a recent album cover a famous photograph of Joyce, and surrounding the photo with a montage of the band members dressed and posed identically. The equally hot band, Black 47 [as J.V.C. points out, for which I am grateful], sings: "To see where James had bit the dust/ I hopped a train to Zurich. / The customs man held down his hand:/ What was my business? / I wanna get laid on James Joyce's grave/ and I wanna do it instantly./ James Joyce I got no choice. / James Joyce I was only trying to find my voice."

Kate Bush's album, The Sensual World, is profoundly Joycean; in one song, Bush is Molly Bloom, "Stepping out of the page into the sensual world /Stepping out, off the page, into the sensual world…"





Molly Bloom got up out of Jamesy's pooh and entered the sensual world through the sheer literary power of James Augustine Joyce, who sang the bliss of existence. And why not, once a year, celebrate that bliss, and the way Joyce sang it, in the streets?

Ulysses, one writer points out, "is the only book in the world...to which a holiday is dedicated." It has, notes another, "become [the world's] international literary holiday." "For those who are passionate about their literature," writes an Australian observer, "June 16 is ice-cream, sex and Christmas rolled into one. [Celebrants] share a kind of trancendent, proselytising glow." "It is June 16," writes an American reporter, "not April 23 (Shakespeare's birthday) or February 23 (Keats' death) that has become the world's de facto literary holiday." "Do any [other literary luminaries] have dedicated days?" asks an Australian who doesn't think Joyce should have one either. "Memorial half-hours? Do we pause for a minute to praise the name of Lampedusa or Nabokov? And where, Paris included, has there been a talk-back session on Proust?"

The day has gotten big enough that politicians, some of whom spin Joyce and some of whom actually read and love him, have noticed, as Gideon Long, a Reuters reporter recently pointed out:



"Joyce exemplifies the European aspect of Irish identity," Irish President Mary McAleese informed a gathering of students in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo earlier this year.

"International in his vision and impact, but always intellectually rooted in his native city of Dublin, Joyce could be said to represent the spirit of modern Ireland -- confidently Irish, comfortably European, fearlessly global in outlook."

Speaking to a gathering at Tel Aviv University, Foreign Minister Brian Cowen posited Leopold Bloom, the Jewish hero of Ulysses, as evidence of "the long history of affinity between the Irish and Jewish people".

Hailing Bloom as "a modern-day epic hero", Cowen assured the Israelis that the humble advertising salesman who wanders around Joyce's Dublin would be "very much to the fore in June of this year when we celebrate the centenary of Bloomsday".

Foreigners have also jumped on the Joycean bandwagon.

When Dominique de Villepin visited Dublin as French foreign minister this year, he reminded the Irish that Ulysses -- vilified in Ireland for years -- was first published in Paris, where Joyce spent much of his adult life.

"Joyce's journey embodies a new form of writing that criss-crosses the labyrinthine surface of the city to explore the nooks and crannies in the depths of the human soul," said De Villepin, a poet in his own right.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, addressing a meeting of Irish businessmen in Dublin last month, observed, like millions of despairing literature students before him, that "Ulysses is a pretty hard book to read".