'School’s out, summer is here, and it’s time for the Ethics and Leadership Camp for Public Officials at Santa Clara University.

In an effort to prevent the next big government ethics scandal, mayors, city managers and other public officials from around the country will spend two days, June 27 and June 28, (from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m.) dissecting ethical dilemmas and trying to engineer a new, ethically enlightened public servant for the 21st century.

“With the kinds of problems we’ve been seeing on the national level, citizens and lawmakers are starting to say we’ve got to do something to defuse these land mines,” says [Judy] Nadler, senior fellow in government ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and former mayor of the city of Santa Clara.

Among the campers will be officials from San Diego, Los Angeles, Gilroy, Los Altos, Santa Clara and San Jose as well as elected and appointed officials from cities and counties around the country.

In addition to Nadler, “camp counselors” will include:

Kirk Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and former chair of Santa Clara County Political Ethics Commission.

Carla Miller, co-ethics officer for the city of Jacksonville, Fla., and board member of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL), and founder of CityEthics.org.

LeeAnn Pelham, executive director of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission.

Elsa Chen, assistant professor of political science at Santa Clara University and leader of the Public Sector Program.

Media opportunities:

June 27, 9 a.m.: Ice breaker where campers will don hard hats for interactive exercise

June 27, 12 noon: Chuck Reed, Mayor of San Jose will give presentation

June 28, 9:15 a.m.: Campers will be asked to put on protective masks and sanitize their hands during a presentation about ethics during a flu pandemic – who gets medicine, transportation, etc.

This year’s camp theme: “Bridging the Ethics Gap”'

To be verbs are all the various forms of that verb: am, is, are, was, were, has or have been, had been, will have been, being, and to be. They are used to link a subject with a noun or adjective complement, to precede the ing-form of an action verb to form continuous tenses, and to precede the past participle of a transitive verb to form the passive. All of the following examples are correct, but many of them are boring. Changing them to the actor-action sentence pattern normally makes the sentences more interesting and concise.

Laura is a photographer for the local newspaper.

Better: Laura works as a photographer for the local newspaper.

Better: Laura shoots photographs for the local newspaper.

George hasn't been well for a long time.

Better: George's illness has lasted for a long time.

That scandal is interesting to a lot of people.

Better: That scandal interests a lot of people.

This month I finished my first full year of teaching as a tenure-track professor. I’ve learned a lot this year [redundancy of "year...year" not a great idea], much of it an odd amalgam [odd amalgam's nice] of the practical and philosophical: I’ve reflected on the nature of education. I’ve pondered the ultimate existential importance [drop ultimate -- already the reader's getting a general sense of wordiness] of education for the development of the individual. I’ve also mastered the overhead projector in my classroom and learned how to make two-sided hand outs on the office photcopier. [This is supposed to be funny, the absurd disproportion between grandly existential values and the trivial business of two-sided handouts. It could be funny. But it's not, because the writer's prose isn't sharp and lean enough to let the humor out. Again, it's the wordiness problem.] But the one thing that I learned this year that I did not expect to learn was the value — and inevitability — of intimacy.

As an adjunct teaching for the first time I hungered for acceptance and praise. I wanted my students to tell me that I knew what I was doing because I couldn’t quite convince myself that I did. I quickly learned, however, that adjuncts have to have thick skin — negative student feedback is inevitable [The to be problem begins to creep in - feedback is inevitable is less interesting than, say, feedback happens...] when you are inexperienced and overworked. [I'm going to start bolding the problem.] And of course students are interested in receiving a high grade and learning a thing or two along the way, not being caught up in the complex interior psychology of their professor [Overuse of adjectives is a problem here too. Drop "complex," and certainly drop "interior," as UD is unaware of any psychology which is not interior.] As a result, the message I took away from my years of adjuncting was the importance of separating my private thoughts and feelings from my public role as an academic: professionalism, judiciousness, and a commitment to the craft of teaching were all skills that I worked to cultivate.

Of course, these are not values that I gave up once I became an assistant professor (a point I’d like to underline in case my chair is reading this!) But now, at the end of my first year, what has struck me most about being in a tenure-track position is interplay between professionalism and personal intimacy. And the nature of this interplay is, as far as I can tell, denial: a necessary and yet futile insistence that we can separate who we are as professors is different from who we are as people.

There is very little in a professor’s life that does not stem from intensely personal commitments. With the job market the way it is these days you don’t become a professor unless you are in love with your area of expertise. In fact, given the length of graduate school and the rise of adjuncting as a near-inevitable phenomena in some fields, it takes so long to become a professor that you have to fall in love with it two or three times as you grow and change as a person in the course of your career. Of course it might not be love for you — it might be obsession, addiction, or any of the other emotions that keep people coming back for more when they should walk away. But regardless of which [This is wordy and awkward: Just write "Whatever feelings draw you in..."] particular feelings draw you in, this is a line of work that’s hard to get into without it getting pretty deeply entangled in who you are.

In many ways, however, these are unseemly entanglements that ought not be displayed by professionals. Pencils do not get purchased and job advertisements do not get written when faculty meetings involve table-pounding denunciations of the false readings of Blanchot perpetuated by others in your department. Students leave your classes feeling wounded and bitter when they become ego-fests in which your personal agenda dominates. For all of these reasons and more, we tell ourselves that professors — “even professors” — must act professionally.

Of all the lies that we tell ourselves, this one is probably the most necessary and also the most heinous. Like most strongly-enforced boundaries, we insist on separating intimacy and professionalism because in practice the line between them is so blurred as to be indistinct.

Take teaching, for instance. I was very lucky this semester to have some very good discussions in one of my classes. I remember one moment in particular when the class as a whole began focusing in on one particular issue. I could feel the entire room poised on the brink of commitment to the idea that what we were talking about was not just interesting, but important. It was one of those rare moments of intellectual and emotional commitment that educators live for. [Again, note the wordiness. Going through the paragraph, UD finds that the following words diminish the writing's power: very, very, in particular, as a whole, particular, entire, on the brink, rare. Drop them all.]

But why were we only on the brink? What was missing? As I attempted to draw students out I realized mid-sentence that the missing ingredient was me. I brought an important issue to the table, but in doing so I distanced myself from it because I was, at some level, afraid to let my students see just how seriously I took it. I was just about to tell a joke — the easy way out for all young hip assistant professors — to lighten the mood but instead I stopped, reset, and tried to lead by example by demonstrating how important I thought the topic in question was for me.

It is not easy for students to speak in class, especially when what they say lays who they are out on the line. In these moments students need to know it is OK to take risks, and the way they learn this is by seeing their teacher do it. As an adjunct I learned the downsides of this sort of openness, but this year I was struck by how inescapable and important it is to temper one’s professional remove with a generous helping of intimacy.

Advising graduate students is even more clearly a case of managing the tension between intimacy and professionalism. As someone whose Ph.D. is just over a year old, I have more in common with my graduate students than I do with some of the faculty members in my department. Indeed, some of my graduate students are older than I am. And yet, professors have power over graduate students: Structurally, they control letters of recommendation, grades, and of course approval of M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s. They have soft power as well — graduate students care about what professors think of them, and we have an infinite amount of opportunities [This should be number rather than amount.] to make ourselves feel more important by making our students feel less so.

Despite — or rather because of — the ambiguities of this boundary, professionalism is key. And yet graduate students are ill-served by professors who hide behind a shield of professionalism. Professors are role models, and much of graduate teaching involves modeling what Malinowski called the “imponderabilia of everyday life” for our students: methods of underlining books, the intuitive way we handle data, and of course the informal shop talk of our disciplines.

Even more important, professors demonstrate to students what a life lived as a professor is like. Having these sorts of role models is key not just to earning a Ph.D., but to one’s choice of career. It is not impossible to become a professor in today’s job market, but it is difficult. What, then, are we supposed to tell our students? Not to pursue the careers that we ourselves have chosen? The truth is that being a professor is good, but it is hard — and we need to let our students inside our lives so that they can see this, and make up their own minds about their careers informed of both the intimate and professional side of the professoriate. In my case, I believe the best way to do this is let my graduate students see me in all my anthrogeekery.

Of course [Notice how often of course shows up in this short essay.] the other thing about have graduate students is that they figure out stuff about you whether you want them to or not. In fact, they figure out stuff about you that you yourself didn’t know. Does my extroverted overenthusiasm in class hide a deeper, more easily wounded side that I hide from others? Is my overblown dislike of certain approaches bluster which papers over a private more embracing pluralism or am I in fact a brittle, doctrinare academic?

This is the other side of intimacy: its inevitability. As an adjunct I could get in, teach, and get out again — the relationships I had at the institutions where I adjuncted were relatively unentangling. But mentoring graduate students allows them to see who you are — indeed, it is in the very process of working with them that I find myself spinning out who I am and will be as a professor.

Even the complex webs of self-cultivation woven during graduate advising seem as nought compared to the ultimate form of academic intimacy: faculty meetings. Hard decisions about important topics get made in faculty meetings, and it is exactly in these high-stakes situations that it is most necessary to act professionally to advance the interests of your department, rather than just yourself. And yet these are also the decisions that will have the most effect on us as people, and deal with the topics that we are least likely to compromise on. You cannot escape being who you are for other faculty in these sorts of situations.

And worse, like some sort of existentialist novel, departments perdure [The comparison is unclear.]. We have track records. Decisions made and relationships forged decades ago play out in every faculty meeting. This means that new faculty walk into rooms filled with history, and it makes us — or me, at least — keenly aware that the decisions we make today will impact us for many years in the future. Here intimacy is at its most inevitable.

I’m very lucky to have a department full of colleagues who have been [Drop who have been] welcoming and eager to help me get my footing on the tenure track, and overall my first year went really well — especially after I learned how to use the projector in my classroom. [Again, the attempt at humor fails.] As I take my first tentative steps down the road to tenure, I realize once again that however much we tell ourselves the academy is not ‘the real world’ [Grr. Quotation marks.] it is far more real than the cubicleland to which many of my high school friends have been consigned. Professionalism is important because it is the only way we [Word missing here.] to deal with the very scary fact that professors and students share a life together that is both very real, and intimate.

When she moved into her retirement condominium on a golf course, Eleanor Weiner admired the lush, pristine views of the fairways and greens, a landscape she never had to mow or maintain. Not long after, as she prepared dinner, a golf ball shattered the kitchen window, whistled past her head and crashed through the glass on her oven door. Ms. Weiner retrieved the ball from her oven and stalked outside to confront the golfer who had launched the missile.

“He told me that’s what I get for living on a golf course,” said Ms. Weiner, who has lived for a dozen years alongside Rancho Las Palmas Country Club near Palm Springs, Calif. “That was the first time I heard that, but it surely hasn’t been the last.”

The intersection of errant golf shots and private property is not a new phenomenon. But with new gear that enables average golfers to hit a ball 250 yards, and with golf communities sprouting nationwide — 70 percent of new courses include housing — it is becoming an increasingly prominent problem. Most homes built near this country’s 16,000 golf courses may not be in the cross hairs of slicing duffers, but thousands are.

Before buying a five-bedroom house in Maricopa, Ariz., Jenny Robertson scrutinized it, with her mother’s help, according to feng shui principles to assess its harmony with its surroundings. Mrs. Robertson, who is not a golfer, barely looked at the tee box 150 yards from her backyard.

“We did not consider the feng shui of bad golfers,” she said. “When I go outside, it’s like dodgeball out there. I wish I knew that you have to be careful where you live on a golf course.”

Some people have become virtual prisoners in their homes. Earla Smith lives at Lookout Mountain Golf Club in Phoenix. Look out, indeed.

“The second day I was in the house, I kept hearing a banging outside,” Ms. Smith, 85, said. “It was golf balls hitting the outside walls. Three or four windows were broken. I sat out on the patio and I was lucky I wasn’t killed. I had a 70-inch picture window broken on the front of the house, and that doesn’t even face the golf course.”

In Rehoboth, Mass., Joyce Amaral collected 1,800 golf balls from her property abutting Middlebrook Country Club, then lugged them into court when she sued the club. Ms. Amaral’s house was hit so regularly, her landscapers wore hard hats. Balls set off the burglar alarm and dented her car.

Ms. Weiner ... turned to Screenmobile, a company that specializes in heavy-duty screens for doors and windows. Screenmobile said it received more than 400 calls from homeowners last year.

Further integrating media management into the journalism education is now essential for a well-rounded education [said the new head of the school]. In a statement, [he] referred to much of the media’s inability to keep up with technology and consumer preferences. [There's a] growing need for media outlets to increase their marketing savvy... [The school also needs] to help students understand trends in how people consume media. [Another person involved in the change said that these changes will] certainly make marketing a larger part of the average journalism student’s experience. [He said that] marketing knowledge doesn’t necessarily “infect” journalistic content, but that if journalists want readers, they need to know how to produce good work, but also “how the audience wants to get it, and who they are.”

The use of technology is another area that will be beefed up....
[S]tudents must be equipped for a world in which consumers want multiple ways to experience a story, whether by watching a video clip or looking at graphics and photographs or listening to a podcast or reading the text of an article.

The faculty senate at Northwestern University has formally accused NU’s administration of abolishing democracy at the Medill School of Journalism. A resolution passed unanimously June 6 by the General Faculty Committee says it found NU’s “suspension of faculty governance at [Medill] to be unacceptable and in violation of the University’s Statutes.” The resolution predicts “curricular changes that are ill considered . . . the demoralization and enmity of the faculty . . . damage to the national reputation of the School . . . the loss of and the inability to hire faculty who believe that the faculty’s role in governance is important for students, faculty and the public.”

... The decision on Thursday by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools is the latest blow for Florida A&M, which has been reeling from financial turmoil, turnover, and infighting.

Belle S. Wheelan, president of the association's Commission on Colleges, said Florida A&M was placed on probation for problems with 10 standards, including those dealing with financial stability, compliance with financial-audit requirements, and the integrity of administrative and academic officers.

Other violations dealt with control of sponsored research and outside funds, and compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law that prohibits sex discrimination at institutions that receive federal funds.

Florida A&M officials could not immediately be reached to comment on the accreditor's action.

'Paul Ciesielski, [University of Florida] associate professor of geology, developed a book with Faulkner Press that he uses in a large lecture class on dinosaurs that draws about 3,000 students each year.

Ciesielski's class started with an enrollment of just about 40 students a semester, but it grew substantially over time.

He now says he churns out 9,000 student credit hours a year for UF, and the university receives state appropriations based on the number of credit hours students take.

"I'm not saying I didn't know it was to my benefit (that enrollment grew), but it was to everyone's benefit," Ciesielski said.'

'Seigfred Fagerberg, a professor in UF's College of Health and Human Performance, has formed his own company to market his materials.

Students who enroll in Fagerberg's health and medical terminology class are instructed to buy an online textbook for $99.95 and, if they want to pursue extra credit, an additional workbook for $29.95 is available, according to his syllabus. Both books are published by Caduceus International Publishing Inc., which Fagerberg owns.

Fagerberg said he's disappointed to be in the "hot seat" amid an increasing investigation into professors' profits, adding that his product represents the very kind of innovation UF ought to be promoting. Fagerberg says his textbook has been adopted at three universities in Florida and he plans to market it nationally.

"(UF) should be encouraging faculty to develop these things to be competitive with other universities that are doing the same thing," he said.'

Ah Yes, Now I Remember

Blogging on the road from Orlando, Florida (yes, the Hurley Family Vacation 2007 was to Disney World, more on that later), I connected to the internet, and saw on my bloglines this lovely post at University Diaries. I spent Bloomsday 2007 in perhaps the most anti-Joycean way possible, but reading this made me long for my bookcase in New York, and my well-worn copy of the book that captured my imagination at the age of 17, and gave the first (albeit short-lived) direction to my hopes for an academic career:

... The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

Yes, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (quotation courtesy of University Diaries, as I'm too lazy to look it up myself). Maybe it's a bit cliche, but at 17, Joyce spoke to me in a way nothing else ever had, not even medieval literature. It's nice to remember, at a point in my career where I've chosen the critical over the creative, a moment when that choice hadn't been made yet, when I first thrilled at the possibility of language, molded and shaped into art. Not to suggest I've lost that intoxication with the power of words. I only write about poetry now -- but re-reading these lines from Joyce make me realize why so many of the colleagues who I am most grateful to have as interlocutors are poets and creative writers, professionally or not. It's a constant reminder that poetry isn't something only in the past -- it's something being continually reborn...

The worst kind of controversy that could affect our universities is the suggestion our degrees are for sale, that foreign students can simply fork over enough money and get a piece of paper attesting to proficiency.

The danger to Canada's reputation abroad is what makes the charges against the Universite du Quebec a Montreal's executive MBA program in China so serious. As The Gazette's Peggy Curran found, 11 students enrolled in UQAM's executive MBA program in China are said to have been admitted despite speaking virtually no English. This represents more than an impediment, since half the classes are given in English.

[S]ince there are no standards defining the professional doctorate [that is, a doctorate that tends to be about brushing up job skills for people already employed full-time], they say, there is a tendency to use the term "doctorate" very loosely. While a Ph.D. takes on average about 12 years to complete from the start of college, the new degrees, sometimes mocked as a "Ph.D. lite," typically take six or seven years. (The occupational-therapy degree is often completed in five and a half years, though new standards will require six years as of January.) Generally the new degrees do not require a major research project.

"For the last 15 or 20 years," says John D. Wiley, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, "we've been under pressure to take what is basically a master's degree and call it a doctorate."

In recent years Wisconsin introduced professional doctorate programs in pharmacy and audiology. Mr. Wiley says many faculty members initially opposed the programs, which some considered a cheapening of doctoral education. But in the end the university went ahead because it did not want to lose enrollments to institutions that were already offering them. Unhappy as they may be, Mr. Wiley says, "no one institution can afford to boycott the process."

... [T]he new degree programs are usually run by institutions' professional schools and are outside the "coordinating oversight of graduate school." Worse, [one] report says, many of the new programs are popping up at institutions "that offer few if any other doctoral programs," leading to concerns about their quality.

There are even fears, the report concluded, "that the new degrees will erode the integrity and primacy of the research doctorate in U.S. higher education."

...One issue that particularly troubles educators is the degree programs for people already working in a profession who want to upgrade their qualifications to a doctorate. Known as postprofessional, or transitional, programs, they operate under virtually no supervision because the professional associations generally accredit only entry-level programs.

... [I]f educators do not cooperate [in fixing the problem], ... weaker and less scrupulous institutions will see opportunities to make money from low-quality programs.

"In the worst case," [one observer] says, "you'll have a competitive rush to the bottom."

'A star runner at Brigham Young University was arrested after getting out of his car and striking a pedestrian with a mop, police said.

Kyle Perry's vehicle apparently got too close to the man, who was pushing a bucket with mops across a street ....

"Angry words were exchanged," Provo police Capt. Cliff Argyle said.

"Mr. Perry exited his vehicle and grabbed a mop out of the pedestrian's mop bucket and started to strike the pedestrian," Argyle said. "The pedestrian grabbed another mop and used it to defend himself. Eventually the pedestrian was shoved over a planter box and fell onto his back."

The man, who had a bump on his head, blocked Perry's car until police arrived and arrested the track star for aggravated assault, Argyle said. ...'

...The chore of teaching doctors how to practice medicine has been handed to the pharmaceutical industry. As a result, dangerous side effects are rarely on the curriculum. ... Most states require that doctors obtain a minimum number of credit hours of continuing medical education each year to maintain their medical licenses. Not so long ago, most of these courses were produced and paid for by universities and medical associations. ... [But] drug-industry financing of continuing medical education has nearly quadrupled since 1998, from $302 million to $1.12 billion. Half of all continuing medical education courses in the United States are now paid for by drug companies, up from a third a decade ago. Because pharmaceutical companies now set much of the agenda for what doctors learn about drugs, crucial information about potential drug dangers is played down, to the detriment of patient care.... Education that doubles as advertising for drug companies occurs in all branches of medicine.

Drug companies should never have been allowed to become the primary educator for America’s doctors. The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, a nonprofit organization composed of the major medical associations, establishes the rules that govern continuing medical education. According to the guidelines, companies are forbidden from directly paying doctors who teach continuing medical education courses.

But the standards have a loophole that allows drug companies to circumvent the regulations. They hire for-profit “medical education communication companies” to organize the courses. These companies receive millions of dollars from drug companies to create course work and to pay doctors to deliver the content. Sometimes, they pay doctors to give lectures to other doctors. Other times, prominent doctors are paid to be listed as the authors of journal articles that are written by ghost writers, a practice that was extensively documented in court records from a lawsuit against Pfizer.... Either way, the content is rarely developed by the identified experts. Instead, it is developed by the undisclosed communication company, which is paid by the sponsoring pharmaceutical company.

Essentially, this is a new twist on that well-known instrument of corruption, money laundering. Drug companies don’t directly pay doctors to teach courses. Instead, they pay someone else to cut the checks. Similarly, the drug companies don’t explicitly tell doctors to say good things about their products. Instead, they hire a company to write good things about their products and to pay doctors to deliver the messages.

If you present for a living – whether you're a CEO selling your ideas to the board, a department manager trying to get funding from corporate for a capital project or a salesperson trying to win new business – your job is tougher than ever. You face relentless competition. People are bombarded with messages from the media, the Internet and other sources. It's getting harder and harder to break through the clutter, yet that's what you must do in order to persuade your audience. And ironically, in a time when you most need to hit your prospects with a powerful pitch, you're likely to fall back on an ineffective crutch: PowerPoint.

"Sellers have become projectionists, throwing words onto a screen while listeners read ahead and sellers plod behind, mouthing what's already been displayed," says Paul LeRoux, the co-author (along with Peg Corwin) of Visual Selling: Capture the Eye and the Customer Will Follow (Wiley, April 2007, ISBN-10: 0-4717936-1-2, ISBN-13: 978-0-4717936-1-8, $24.95). "PowerPoint's electronic barrage of words, bullet points and sentences threatens to turn the art of persuasion into a lost art."

That's right. LeRoux is on a mission to break presenters from the seductive PowerPoint routine. When you al