We’re not nearly as well-paid as most other professionals, but tenure-track faculty have embedded compensations which almost no one, professional or otherwise, has in this economy. Job security is almost the least of it: the ability to work without direct supervision from a boss might be even more valuable. And faculty within their institutions are accustomed to at least think they are in control of the institution, and perhaps they should be. It’s not wrong for faculty to think that their work is at the center of higher education, that without them, the whole thing would be pointless. But these basic structural facts alone also tend to isolate academics even from other workers in their own institutions, and have a spill-over into the wider communities that they live within. Add to that some of the peculiar flourishes of scholarly and intellectual cultural life, and you have a reason for a structural antagonism between academic professionals and the wider society. I don’t think there’s much to be done about it except to know it is there, to soften its edges, and to be humble about its manifestations.

There are a lot of forces in American life since 1950 that have pushed our culture away from valuing knowledge that is impractical or has no immediate application. Universities have colluded in defining the value of what they do in terms of careers and economic rewards, but that’s also been done to them by the relentless careerism of students and their parents. The ghastly cynicism of big-time college athletics has had a generally corrosive effect, often feeding a belief that college is primarily for parties, getting laid, and social networking.

Freshman wide receiver Ryan Broyles has been suspended from the Oklahoma football team after his arrest early Friday on suspicion of trying to steal gasoline from a Norman convenience store pump.

“Effective immediately, Ryan is suspended from the team for an indefinite period of time," OU coach Bob Stoops said in a statement released Friday afternoon. "I take very seriously the conduct of our players and I will not compromise my expectations for anyone associated with our program."

Stoops has reason to take the matter seriously. His program is coming off a year-long ordeal involving three players being paid by a booster for hours they did not do at a Norman car dealership. Two of the players, Rhett Bomar and J.D. Quinn, were dismissed right before camp opened for the 2006 season. [You know it's the local press here, since the writer both sobs along with the coach on the subject of his "ordeals," and chooses not to pick up on the irony of Stoops announcing that a notoriously corrupt program takes player conduct seriously.]

The NCAA and OU conducted a joint investigation. The NCAA infractions committee found OU guilty of failure to monitor last July. The committee extended OU's probation -- the university had been penalized for violations committed in its... basketball program the previous year -- through May 23, 2010.

Of the Broyles matter, whether it was isolated in nature or other players were involved, OU assistant athletic director Kenny Mossman said: "We'll look into it thoroughly."

According to Norman police Capt. Leonard Judy, a patrol officer observed the 19- year-old Broyles standing between an SUV and a pump at a closed Mr. Shortstop convenience store in east Norman at 12:10 a.m. Friday.

The officer, Judy said, discovered a key stuck in a lock on the front panel of the pump, and determined it belonged to Broyles. Broyles was also in possession of override codes which he used to activate the pump after gaining access with the key. [Codes and key! Enterprising lad. Wonder how he got that stuff.]

Judy said Broyles was arrested on attempted larceny charges and booked into the Cleveland County Detention Center. A Cleveland County Sheriff's Department spokesperson confirmed Broyles posted $200 bond and was released at 3:44 a.m. Friday.

Ron Henderson, owner of the Mr. Shortstop where Broyles was arrested, distanced himself from the university when contacted Friday.

"I've heard all these conspiracy theories that I'm a donor or supporter of the program. Nothing could be further from the truth," he said. "Other than I'm a general fan like everybody in Norman might be. I've never met Ryan Broyles, and don't know anything about him other than what I've read about his as a player.

"I've never had a key to those pumps and I've been here 36 years. I'm totally amazed to find out something like this could happen. My real concern is who might have those keys or codes and how long this has been happening. We've had problems balancing our inventory and some irregularities the last two or three months. We thought the problems were leakage in the lines or tanks. We never dreamed it might be something like this." [Theft plus leakage. Make a note of it: Mr. Shortstop.]

Henderson, who was Norman's mayor from 2001-04 and who owns three Mr. Shortstop stores in the city, said he contacted OU athletic director Joe Castiglione Friday morning.

"I wanted to make him aware of the situation," he said. "Other than that, it's pretty much in the hands of the police. My thing is to cooperate with the authorities through the investigation process, to find out how widespread this is and if others have keys."

I think [Drop I think] academia honors bans against professor-student relationships more in theory than in practice, because if professors and students couldn’t hook up, the professorate [sic] would go extinct.

Now, I think we can almost all agree that dating a student while he or she is in your class is inappropriate – but what about students not in your class, but with whom you might have to otherwise professionally interact? [Clotted up with various style problems. Overuse of to be verbs; too many weasel words, as in another use of I think; an awkward split infinitive in to otherwise professionally interact.] When I think [Another I think.]of all the seemingly [Drop seemingly.] happily married couples that I know who started out as faculty advisor and graduate student advisee, the line starts to blur.

Look at it this way: most academics’ social universes could be bound in a nutshell and within that nutshell, many of the individuals are already married. So, if you’re still single upon entering academia, you really feel the pinch. And, then you put professors with students who have common interests. For example, as shocking as it might sound, both political science professors and political science majors tend to be very interested in politics. The rules seek to discourage any attractions that develop. It’s like academia is a dating agency in the ironic punishments division of Hell. [In principle, this is amusing and charming. But his heavy-handed writing style, his tendency to gum things up with too many words and phrases, keeps the lightness from appearing.]

Labels: SOS

'Many members of the faculty worry the [plagiarism] issue will adversely affect enrollment. Shahram Rahimi, associate professor of computer science, said if everyone's work were scrutinized, many would be found guilty of plagiarism.

"(AFAC) [the faculty group seeking out instances of plagiarism] have been working on this days and nights and it's destroying the University," he said. "We were finally recovering our enrollment numbers."

...Some professors cite technological changes as a reason for some verbatim text being unquoted or not being cited. When Poshard submitted his dissertation, word processors were a commodity and typewriters made it difficult to revise large documents, said Robert Swenson, associate professor of architecture.'

"To go back and make a correction on page 27 means you type the entire page over again, beginning to end," he said. "I can't imagine any dissertation being perfect."

'Glenn Poshard is a three-degree graduate of Southern Illinois University. He earned a bachelor's degree in secondary education in 1970, a master's degree in educational administration in 1974 and a Ph.D. in administration of higher education in 1984.'

"The majority of programs range from inadequate to appalling," Levine says, "even at some of the country's leading universities." He mentions a couple of "strong" programs, but none that meet nine criteria relevant to program quality in higher education - clear purpose, curricular coherence, balance between theory and practice, faculty quality, admission standards, degree requirements, research quality, financial resources and continuing self-assessment.

...If a university did want to offer a rigorous exemplary program, who would apply for it? Students intending to enroll in a graduate program in educational administration have an average score on the Graduate Record Examination 46 points below the national average on the verbal part, and 81 points below the average on the math part. And that may be optimistic, since only the relatively strong schools even ask applicants to take the GRE. In practice, many accept everybody who applies.

Sometimes they don't even need to apply. One dean told Levine, "Students would show up and we would let them stay."

Another administrator, from a respected university, said about the students who enroll in its off-campus programs, "We have admitted some people with GRE scores just above what you get for filling out the form."

Poshard Accusation Third in Two Years for SIU

Accusations that SIU President Glenn Poshard used unattributed verbatim text from previously published sources make him the third high-ranking SIU administrator to be linked with plagiarism or academic dishonesty in the past two years.

Former SIUC Chancellor Walter Wendler was twice accused of plagiarism in 2006, while Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Chancellor Vaughn Vandegrift came under fire for similar allegations in February of the same year.

Wendler, now a professor of architecture, declined to comment on the matter, and Vandegrift's office directed all inquiries to Mike Ruiz, the SIU communications director for the president's office. Ruiz did not return multiple phone calls Wednesday. [Awful quiet in here...]

Wendler was accused of plagiarizing the university's Southern at 150 plan, which seeks to make SIUC a top-75 research institution by 2019, from work he did at Texas A&M.

Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at SIU accused Wendler of lifting content directly from a plan called Vision 2020, a document Wendler helped write. Vision 2020 aimed to make Texas A&M a top-10 public university by 2020.

AFAC, as the group is commonly called, was formed after SIUE professor Chris Dussold was fired for plagiarizing his teaching statement in 2004. Since Dussold's firing, the group has sought out plagiarism amongst SIU administrators. [Turns out to be like shooting fish in a barrel.] Dussold has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit.

AFAC claimed both SIUC's plan and Texas A&M's plan listed similar goals and used verbatim text. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, both plans carried similar lists of concerns and used identical graphics.



Wendler insisted he had done no wrong because the portions he took from Texas A&M's Vision at 2020 were his own words.

"If I am the architect of the two of these planning processes, it would be odd if the two planning processes and the plans themselves looked very different," Wendler said in September 2006.

A month later, a three-person committee formed by Poshard concluded Wendler had committed academic dishonesty, not plagiarism. The committee was made up of Mike Lawrence of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute; Wenona Whitfield, associate dean of the SIU School of Law and William Muhloch, chairman of the zoology department.

"We have concluded that the central issue is not whether acceptable or unacceptable plagiarism occurred but whether it was appropriate to use lifted words without attribution in a document produced on a university campus, where students, faculty and administrators must be sensitive to even the appearance of presenting another's thoughts and ideas as one's own," the committee wrote.

In October, former SIUC linguistics professor Joan Friedenberg, who had spoken out on behalf of Dussold in the past, handed the committee a stack of documents containing alleged plagiarized documents within the SIU system.

At the time, Friedenberg said the stack of material came from teaching philosophies, departmental mission statements and a Morris Library Web site segment on effective teaching.

Friedenberg said in 2006 that AFAC brought the documents to her attention.

"Why are we singling out Walter Wendler? Why was the professor on the Edwardsville campus singled out? What about the rest?" she asked.



In November, Poshard demoted Wendler from his chancellor position and formed a panel to review plagiarism policies throughout the university system. Poshard said Wendler's academic dishonesty had nothing to do with the demotion. While the panel is finalizing its report, a clear definition for plagiarism has yet to be given.

Wendler was also accused of plagiarism in January 2006 for his 2005 State of the University address.

He apologized to author Roger von Oech after unknowingly using a passage from Oech's book. Then-SIUC spokeswoman Sue Davis, who said she helped Wendler write the speech, said shortly after the chancellor's apology she unintentionally omitted the attribution.



Less than a month later, SIUE Chancellor Vandegrift apologized for plagiarizing a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech, which he gave at a luncheon. Vandegrift's speech included unattributed excerpts out of documents from the White House, United Food and Commercial Workers Union and The King Center in Atlanta. [Are you able to keep track of all of this? A flow chart would help.]

Vandergrift's speech prompted Poshard to release a statement, in which he called plagiarism "intentionally taking credit for someone else's work." [He would know.] The SIUC Student Conduct Code states plagiarism is "representing the work of another as one's own work."

Vandegrift said he and his staff did not believe attributions were necessary because the speech was given in a non-academic setting. [How's that again? Concept of a Plagiarism-Free Zone emerging here...] The chancellor, though, said in a statement that he did approve the speech and claimed full responsibility for its content.

"I will say now that my integrity and the integrity of this university are very important to me," Vandegrift said in the statement. "If mistakes were made, we will take steps so that it doesn't happen in the future."

Poshard said August 1984 - when his dissertation was completed - was one of the busiest times of his life.

Just two weeks after his dissertation was completed, Poshard was appointed to the Illinois State Senate following the death of Sen. Gene Johns.

"This is not an excuse, and I would never offer it up as an excuse but at that point in my life, I had a family," he said. "I worked two jobs. I was running for the Illinois State Senate. I was trying to get my dissertation finished." [Quickest way is to plagiarize.]

Poshard said he would need more time before explaining why some pages have nearly identical text to works that are not cited.

...Poshard said his method of citing, which he said allowed for omitting quotes when information is cited in a footnote, could help explain several examples where he used long, verbatim passages without quotation marks. [Wait. Slow down.... omitting quotes when information is cited in a footnote... Hm...]

"No one on my committee said that when you reference and cite something correctly that you have to go up and put quotes around it," he said. [Poshard is the president of a university.]



Multiple academic experts said Poshard did not exercise enough caution while citing and attributing his 111-page dissertation.

Alan Perlman laid out a simple and widely accepted ground rule - if it's not original content, it needs to be cited.

Perlman holds a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Chicago and has assisted attorneys on plagiarism, copyright and authorship for more than 20 years. He said sloppy citing in lengthy papers is common. But absent citations and attributions go beyond what would be considered academically admissible, he said.

"(The author) went beyond error and took credit for what wasn't his," said Perlman, who viewed more than 20 pages of documents without knowing the author's name.

On page 54 of his dissertation, Poshard appears to have modeled his chapter summary, without citation or quotations, after a passage from author James Gallagher.

The last time Poshard cites Gallagher is on page 49, leaving Poshard at a loss to explain the nearly verbatim text on page 54.

"Unless I just failed to cite it," Poshard said. "What else can I say?"

That's plagiarism, says Dan Wueste.

My initial experience of illness was as a series of disconnected shocks, and my first instinct was to try to bring it under control by turning it into a narrative. ... The patient has to start by treating his illness not as a disaster, an occasion for depression or panic, but as a narrative, a story. Stories are antibodies against illness and pain. ...Gregor Samsa dies like an insect. To die is to be no longer human, to be dehumanized - and I think that language, speech, stories, or narratives are the most effective ways to keep our humanity alive. ... [A] sick person can make a story, a narrative, out of his illness as a way of trying to detoxify it. ... Making narratives like this rescues me from the unknown, from what Ernest Becker called 'the panic inherent in creation,' or 'the suction of infinity.'

Writers like Miller and Gunter Grass, “who set themselves up as moralists and public scolds, are more vulnerable to criticism based on their own behavior,” wrote Morris Dickstein, who teaches English at the City University of New York Graduate Center, in an e-mail message this week. “But the truth is that very few great artists were admirable people. At heart they’re killers who’ll do anything to get the work done.”

'A University pharmacy professor is a defendant in a federal court case, in which he is accused of collecting and disseminating pharmacy test questions to students, according to court documents obtained by The Red & Black.

The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy filed the case Aug. 3 against the Board of Regents and Flynn Warren Jr., citing copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of contract, according to the documents.


...Alan Ray Spies, an assistant pharmacy professor at Samford, said in an affidavit that he learned Warren was giving NAPLEX questions to students. Spies said he first found out this information in May 2007.

"Specifically, I learned that Mr. Warren's course materials include, among others, a series of questions, some 2,700 in number, that appear to be very similar, if not verbatim, to questions asked on the NAPLEX," Spies said in the affidavit.

Spies said he talked with some of his students about Warren's course in the affidavit.

"It soon became apparent to me that individuals who had just taken the exam were sending Mr. Warren questions which he in turn was forwarding to students who had not yet taken the NAPLEX."

...a lawyer for NABP, bought Warren's course materials on July 31. In her affidavit, she stated, "a true and correct copy of my payment receipt from the 'UGA Pharmacy Cont ED, Pharmacy Building' for the course materials" was given to her for $100.'

'Many College of Pharmacy students and alumni boast Flynn Warren is the best professor at the University. And over the past five years, 514 pharmacy students - 99 percent - passed national and state pharmacy exams - usually after his review class.

Soon some returned the favor, according to students interviewed Wednesday.

"(After the tests, we would) e-mail him anything we could remember," said Chandler Greene, an alumnus from Dunwoody. "I wanted to do it because he helped me out so much."'

'"...[A]t least 150 questions are verbatim, nearly verbatim or substantially similar," a court document reads.

...Saturday, NABP officials suspended the NAPLEX examination nationwide.

... [Flynn was] a man they knew had a history of wreaking havoc.

... In 1995, NABP accused Warren of compiling and selling NAPLEX test questions to students. Warren signed a contract promising to "cease and desist." However, NABP has failed to monitor Warren's actions for the past 12 years.

... NABP officials need look no further than their own spreadsheet of NAPLEX test scores for every pharmacy school in the nation. The document, available here, showed our University consistently excelled with 100 percent pass rates and near-perfect scores.'

'...Dr. Flynn's class is awesome. He encourages his students to write down questions they remember & send them to him, and he himself takes the NAPLEX in different States to compile his notes...


...The problem is that questions on the NAPLEX are not to be disclosed. You sign an affidavit on the computer before the exam. It's okay to go over the type of questions that are on the exam during a review. Reiss & Hall do this with the Kaplan review, which I took back in May. What Dr. Flynn passed on to his class, in addition to the general study information, was questions that students sent to him that they saw on the NAPLEX and his response to those questions. This is illegal. Students will always talk with classmates about what questions they saw on an exam. I believe that the NABP realizes that this will happen and is okay with it. But, when you have someone charging for a review class and that information is disclosed then the line has been crossed.'

'The recent decision to let junior guard Jamar Smith redshirt for the 2007-08 basketball season is an insult to true Illini fans and emblematic of a culture in which standards are treated merely as a limbo stick.

Back in February the underage Smith, while heavily intoxicated with tequila, was driving a car carrying fellow Illini player Brian Carlwell. That car crashed into a tree, leaving Carlwell in a perilous medical state. Smith then left the scene of the accident and returned to the apartment complex where they had been without calling police or an ambulance. Only later did witnesses alert authorities.

Smith pleaded guilty in an agreement with prosecutors in the spring to aggravated DUI and served a two-week jail sentence in the summer. Now a felon, he is on probation for two years and required to complete community service and pay a fine.

This incident follows previous criminal behavior by former Illini Rich McBride who not only was implicated with Luther Head and Aaron Spears in a burglary and never charged, but was also arrested in September 2006 for DUI. That followed the April 2006 arrest of now senior center Shaun Pruitt for assaulting an employee of The Clybourne.

The administration and the athletic department's failure to hold high profile students like these accountable for their egregious and illegal behavior is intolerable. To continue to allow figures like Smith the honor of wearing the Illini uniform is a slap in the face to every student and fan who comes to Assembly Hall to support the team.

And of course, it's a fair bet that if one of those student fans was involved in the kind of reckless behavior that some of our most prominent athletes have engaged in, they wouldn't enjoy such lenience from coaches, much less administrators.

While a double standard seems to exist in student discipline, it appears that there is a double standard among athletes as well.

There is little to reconcile between how two football players were kicked off the team last semester by Coach Ron Zook for being charged with residential burglary and how Smith, after being convicted of a felony, will not only remain with the basketball team but also enjoy a de facto paid campus vacation with funds that could be given to more deserving athletes or students.

While our athletic programs continue to endure criminal behavior and academic mediocrity as evidenced by today's news that a new freshman recruit has been declared ineligible, the entire University suffers.

Until administrators and coaches decide to get proactive, we are left to wonder if someone literally has to die before this environment of tolerance ends.'

From CNNMoney.com:



'Maryland is now the wealthiest state in the union, as measured by median household income, according to the latest stats from the Census Bureau.

The typical Maryland household earned $65,144 in 2006, propelling it past New Jersey, which came in second with earnings of $65,470, but had led the nation in 2005. Connecticut finished in third place both years, recording a median income of $63,422 in 2006.

Top 10 wealthiest states

Here's where the median household income is highest

State Income

Maryland $65,144
New Jersey $64,470
Connecticut $63,422
Hawaii $61,160
Massachusetts $59,963
New Hampshire $59,683
Alaska $59,393
California $56,645
Virginia $56,277
Minnesota $54,023

Source:U.S. Census Bureau



The 10 poorest states

The states with the lowest median household income

State Income

Montana $40,627
Tennessee $40,315
Kentucky $39,372
Louisiana $39,337
Alabama $38,783
Oklahoma $38,770
Arkansas $36,599
West Virginia $35,059
Mississippi $34,473


Source:U.S. Census Bureau


Maryland's income was nearly double that of Mississippi, which, with a median of $34,473, was the nation's poorest state. West Virginia, where the median household earned $35,059, was second poorest and Arkansas, at $36,599, was third.

The median income for the United States as a whole came to $48,451.'

'South Korea is being shaken by a series of scandals involving an art historian, a movie director, a renowned architect, the head of a performing arts center, a popular comic book writer, a celebrity chef, leading actors and actresses, a former TV news anchor, even a revered Buddhist monk. What binds them is that all falsified their academic records.

In an intensely competitive country that has long put a premium on impressive degrees, one prominent person after another is being exposed as having exaggerated, or even fabricated, academic accomplishments. The revelations of résumé fraud have created problems for South Korean corporations, which rely heavily on diplomas to assess job applicants.

...One of the biggest shocks involved a well-known Buddhist monk named Jigwang, whose temple in an affluent district of Seoul had grown from seven members in 1984 to more than 250,000. Part of the respect he enjoyed arose from the widespread belief that he had attended Seoul National University, the country's top academic institution.

"People swarmed in because they heard that a monk who had gone to a distinguished university was teaching the scriptures in English," Jigwang said at a news conference Aug. 18. "I think that the Seoul National University title more or less helped in propagation."'

'Florida has five of the nation's 15 largest universities but only one of the nation's top 50 in quality. When students and their parents walk on campuses, they see new buildings and new law schools, medical schools and football teams.

But inside, core classes like history pack in 250 students, part-time instructors do much of the work that professors used to do, and students grind out extra semesters without graduating because the classes they need are full or advisement staffs are too thin to guide them through their majors.

Already lumped in with the nation's bottom third, Florida's university system must contend with cutting up to 10 percent of its budgets -- a statewide hit on academics of as much as $232 million. With more lean budget years on the way, academic leaders worry that a further plunge in quality would undermine Florida's ability to compete with other state economies.

...[T]he university system ranks in the bottom third. That's unacceptable for an influential ''mega-trend'' state, with an economy larger than those of many sovereign nations, [the system's chancellor] said.

The most influential measure, U.S. News & World Report rankings, has flaws, including biases that favor older schools.... But the magazine's conclusions about Florida schools are reinforced by other rankings that consider research accomplishments, graduation rates, available space and the number of full-time faculty members. Except for the University of Florida and FSU, Florida's other mega-schools linger in the bottom third and fourth tiers of U.S. News' rankings.

''That's the one [ranking system] you can find in almost every airport, for God's sake. It's striking you in the face,'' [the chancellor] said.

...At FIU, psychology is among the most popular departments -- with 2,400 students choosing it as a major and 16,000 enrolling in classes. But with only 19 permanent full-time professors, the school relies on part-time instructors to teach 70 percent of the classes, said Suzanna Rose, who chairs the department.

A recent outside review concluded that the department should have 45 full-time faculty members.

''You want to have a critical mass in your area, and if it looks like the university isn't headed that way, your career is going to be affected and you might as well go somewhere else,'' Rose said.

...Florida ranks 34th in spending per student at its universities when agricultural extension campuses, libraries, student services and other projects outside the classroom are included. But the state ranks 41st in money spent on actually teaching students.


...Former Gov. Bob Graham, who remains an active player in higher-education politics, said Florida has not made universities a priority.

''Universities, more than any other institutions, set a tone for the state and tend to influence its development, particularly its economic development,'' Graham said. ``I don't think there's been a full appreciation of that by the political and business leadership of Florida, and we've suffered as a consequence.'''

Revenge of the Godzillatron

'...[N]ext month, the U.S. House Ways and Means committee will discuss college athletic programs and whether their millions should remain tax exempt. At the center of all the controversy is [Alabama Coach Nick] Saban’s paycheck.

As Alabama football prepares to launch into a new era, the Crimson Tide's $4 million man is at the center of a financial-- and some might say ethical -- controversy.

“When you hear about a coach making $4 million a year at a public university -- that gets attention,” said UA Mass Communications professor Dr. Johnny Sparks.

But many experts are warning that Saban is catching the heat for an issue that's been growing for years: the increasing amount of money pumped into collegiate sports through TV contracts and high dollar advertisers. [No, he's catching the heat for his greed. There's no connection between these trends and his insistence on making $4 million a year.]

"It's been a continuing trend for more than a decade. Only now has it broken through public consciousness because of Nick Saban and his salary,” said UA PR and Advertising professor Dr. Lance Kinney.

..."I've been anxious to end the hoopla for a long time. I think the focus should be on the team and not on me,” said Saban.' [Look away, Dixie Land! Nothing to see here! Just because my salary uses up nine percent of the football budget, that's no reason for you to keep staring at it...]

'Q: Can you make any bold predictions about this year's football season?

A: I predict that we will win a game, which, if we do, will make us definitely better than last year. Last year we went 0-12 so if we go 1-11, we're definitely better than last year. I also predict that we are going to be in a lot of games where people expect us to be out of.

Q: Do you think with new leadership the football team will be able to turn around last year's 0-12 season?

A: I think we have an extraordinary head coach. Both he and athletic director [Pete Garcia] have put together a formidable coaching staff. The head training was the head trainer for the Orlando Magic. Prior to that, he trained Olympians and other professional teams. He is an extraordinary man, I personally train with him.'

'Recent stories ... [about] Dave Serrano, a former candidate for baseball coach at the University of Oregon, raise several issues. Are diploma-mill degrees legal for use? Do coaches need degrees at all? Do athletic directors?

Oregon law separates degrees into three categories. Standard degrees such as those issued by the UO, Lane Community College, Eugene Bible College and other accredited schools can be used with no restrictions, although employers may require certain kinds of specialized accreditation or preparation. Degrees that go through the state's approval process also are legally valid for most uses.

Unaccredited degrees from U.S. colleges and foreign degrees from colleges not comparable to accredited U.S. colleges can be used in Oregon with a disclaimer of accreditation, provided that the college actually exists as a legally operating degree-granter in its home jurisdiction.

The last category is what are usually called degree- or diploma-mill degrees, those simply purchased, sometimes requiring "life experience," often not. Using such a degree in Oregon and many other states is illegal; in Oregon, it is a Class B misdemeanor as well as a civil violation. It is the floor below which no degree used in Oregon for any purpose, public or private, is allowed to fall. The Legislature established this nationally recognized standard in 1997.

Any employer who allows an employee to use a diploma-mill degree had best have a good attorney and deep pockets for the potential liability claims when that employee screws up.



Unfortunately, it is that third category into which Serrano's degree falls. Therefore, had the UO hired him, he would have had to erase the degree from his rèsumè when he took the job.

But should coaches be required to hold degrees at all? Of course not, because athletic "departments" are not really parts of universities, at least not at top-level schools. The UO athletic department is an ancillary business that is allowed by our cultural norms to use the university's name and trademarks to operate a large-scale entertainment business. The more private money it gets (thereby freeing other actual and potential funds for academic uses) the better. [Warms the cockles of UD's heart!]

That is why someone such as Pat Kilkenny is a good choice to lead such an enterprise. He's an experienced businessman with the ability to attract and manage money. The fact that Kilkenny has no degree is a who-cares. The problem he faces is that he is unaccustomed to operating within the slow, talkative process of academe, in which his actions will be publicly trashed by low-income people he has no choice but to work with. He is accustomed to doing things in private with people in his own economic stratum. [Love it!]

But I'd take one degreeless Kilkenny - even with an absurd, poorly considered cheerleading team - over 10 Serranos with degrees from a mailbox in Delaware. The problem with Serrano and those like him who acquire and use bogus degrees is not that they are bad coaches; it is that they are proven to have poor judgment.

An employer, including the UO, always can require that a degree meet whatever requirements the employer deems appropriate. Many employers require that degrees be from accredited schools; some require certain kinds of accreditation. Employers interested in finding out more about how to distinguish real from fake degrees should use the Employer's Guide to College Degrees at www.osac.state.or.us/ oda/doc/Employers_Guide_to_Degrees.pdf.

A degree is not a toy or a decoration. It is a public credential that people rely on in many aspects of their lives. Degrees don't tell us all we need to know about a person, but we need to respect their value, not trash it.'

'The Southern football team has had at least 10 players become academically ineligible since the spring, but football hasn’t been the school’s only program touched by grade, retention and clearance issues.

In the previous school year, men’s basketball lost veteran forward Ralph Hishaw. Women’s basketball lost up-and-coming shooting guard Deidra Jackson. And baseball lost several veterans and couldn’t get Joshua Kirk, who earned his master’s degree in December, eligible until after the conference season concluded.

In May, the NCAA issued its Academic Progress Report and sent official warning letters to schools, including Southern.

SU was the nation’s only school whose three main men’s programs — football, basketball and baseball — were noted for all having academic concerns.

“With that APR, eventually we’re going to get penalized if we don’t turn this thing around,” SU Athletic Director Greg LaFleur said.

Plus, campus-wide, the problem of academic progress is getting more focus.

Southern reported its retention rate of freshman as 73.2 percent, but its six-year graduation rate was 27.7 percent. The school has been hurt financially by declining enrollment.

“I’m challenging the entire university. … We’re going to do something with our retention rates,” SU Interim Chancellor Margaret Ambrose told the school’s student-athletes Thursday at an orientation meeting in the F.G. Clark Activity Center.

Ambrose spoke to the student-athletes about the APR warning letter from the NCAA.

“We have a challenge with at least three of our major sports,” Ambrose said. “I got an important letter that told me you guys are not where you’re supposed to be in terms of graduation rates. … We want not to fail you. Hold us to that. Study; go to class; if you need help, ask for it.”

LaFleur said the school will establish an academic center for student-athletes (in addition to other tools available on campus) in the Clark Center. He said the center, which will be open until 9 p.m., should be up and running in a month.

“We’re consciously doing some things to elevate the academic support we’re giving to the entire athletic department,” Ambrose said.

The problem could require research.

“We need to analyze and try to approach it from a data collection and analytic point of view,” Ambrose said. “We just have to bring to bear everything we can to figure this thing out.”

The latest rash of ineligible football players, along with at least five more players who are no longer with the program, underscores the problem.

“I feel comfortable Ambrose and (SU System President Ralph) Slaughter understand we have an issue,” SU football coach Pete Richardson said.

“They’ve made a commitment to get us some help. Now, it’s not going to happen overnight, because the problem we have didn’t start overnight. It’s going to be a period of time of putting things in place.”'

'The Edinburgh Festival may be one of the world’s great arts fixtures, but its Fringe festival has always operated like a national freak show, opening nonjudgmental arms to anything that could be said to pass as entertainment. Proust on Rollerblades, Ibsen in drag, your favorite Wagner moments whistled by a chorus in gorilla suits: old-timers will have seen and usually passed by it all. And being passed by is the shared experience of Fringe events. They tend to play obscurely, in church halls and basement rooms to audiences of 16, barely noticed, instantly forgotten.

That said, the Fringe does have its star acts that either get seized on by TV talent scouts or at least acquire cult status and return year after year. One of the most spectacular of the cult items, not quite ready for prime time but expectant, will be playing Edinburgh’s sizable Canongate Church next Sunday. All seats are sold, and lines for returns will undoubtedly stretch around the block.

This hottest of hot tickets is an Edinburgh band called the Really Terrible Orchestra. And were you to ask what it does, the answer would be that with true Scottish candor it lives up to its name, or rather down to it: an orchestra that plays terribly.

“We are indeed quite bad,” the principal bassoonist admitted. The standard varies from player to player, he added, noting that he himself had passed Grade IV, the British examination level normally taken by schoolchildren around age 12.

“But I have trouble with C sharps — a design fault of the instrument, I think — which means I don’t play them,” he said. “And some of our members are really very challenged. We have one dire cellist who has the names of the strings written on his bridge. Otherwise he can’t remember what they are.”

The fascinating thing about the Really Terrible Orchestra, though, is that its appalling players are in fact eminent in other walks of life. They are politicians, bankers, judges, surgeons, senior academics. And the principal bassoonist who doesn’t play C sharps happens to be the polymath law professor and best-selling writer Alexander McCall Smith, the author of (among many other things) the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books, which are now being filmed for international release.

A genial, donnish figure who lives in the most genteel of Edinburgh suburbs and now ranks among the most popular literary figures in Britain, Mr. McCall Smith was one of the founders of the orchestra eight years ago. He likes to say that it was set up with no other reason than to give hopeless amateurs a chance.

“There were a number of us with children in school orchestras who fantasized about being in an orchestra ourselves,” he said. “And as there was no likelihood of ever being accepted into an existing ensemble, we decided to create our own. There’s a concept of asylum in the R.T.O. It’s therapy.”

It’s also something that could easily have turned into a standard amateur ensemble like a thousand others. But where standard amateurs may be incidentally bad, the Really Terrible Orchestra is fundamentally bad. Its random ability to play the right notes at the right time, or at all, is part of what the orchestra chairman, the lousy clarinetist Peter Stevenson, calls “our entertainment package.”

“We knew there was no market for a good amateur orchestra, because a poor professional one would always be better,” Mr. Stevenson said. “But there is a market for the R.T.O. And that our concerts sell out in advance, to audiences who just love to hear us scrape through easy arrangements of Bach or the last 40 bars of the ‘1812’ Overture — the rest is far too difficult — is proof. There’s always thunderous applause, especially if we’ve got lost in something and ground to a halt. Always a standing ovation. And it’s not just because we have our friends and family in the audience. People genuinely thrill to it.”



All of which raises the question: Why? Why do people love bad art? Why is there a cult museum near Boston proudly dedicated “to bringing the worst of art to the widest of audiences”? And why does history afford a special place for the creatively incompetent, from poets like William McGonagall (the immortal versifier of “The Tay Bridge Disaster”) to singers like Florence Foster Jenkins (whose inability to sing packed Carnegie Hall) and, more recently, the “American Idol” reject William Hung (whose inability to do anything of artistic note has turned him into a celebrity)? Why, in fact, is so much latter-day TV obsessed with celebrating cultural failure?

One answer is that it’s a variant on classic banana-skin comedy; or, as Mr. McCall Smith prefers, “simple schadenfreude, a pleasure in the misfortune of others that’s all the sweeter with the R.T.O. because so many of us are otherwise well established in our lives.”

“Our clarinetist chairman is a typical example,” he added, “tremendously successful in investment banking, reached the very top. But now he’s at the very bottom of the orchestral ladder and, alas, will probably stay round about that level.”

But there’s another reason, surely, for the cult of bad art, and it has to do with liberation: the anarchic pleasure of disorder, the repudiation of established rules of judgment. Bad art is an invitation to escape the formal boundaries of adulthood and be a child, delighting in the rude and raw.

In this respect the Really Terrible Orchestra has interesting precedents. Back in the 1960s a maverick figure of the British musical avant-garde, Cornelius Cardew, created what he called the Scratch Orchestra; like the Terrible, it was an ensemble of players who couldn’t play, or at least couldn’t play the particular instruments they had selected for Scratch Orchestra Concerts, a proviso that allowed the involvement of bona fide musicians like Michael Nyman and Brian Eno.

For some, especially the newspapers, the Scratch Orchestra was just a grand joke; and much was made of its intuitive response to the “music” specially composed for it by Mr. Cardew, which was written representationally, not with notes and staffs but with pictures and poems.

For Mr. Cardew and company, however, it was no joke. There was a philosophical basis to it all, founded in the work of John Cage, who had declared that there was “no room for the policeman in art.” The Scratch Orchestra had profoundly humanist objectives concerning music as process rather than product, and with them came a sociopolitical agenda: initially a broad and fairly friendly swipe at cultural elitism but fossilizing into a hard-line Marxist-Leninist debate that hijacked the whole venture and brought it to a messy end.

But before it died, the Scratch Orchestra spawned a 1970s offspring in the Portsmouth Sinfonia, which involved some of the same personnel, including Mr. Nyman and Mr. Eno. Again there was an underlying philosophy; and it was eulogized in serious terms, not least by Mr. Nyman, who played the cello in shambolic performances of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and compared the results to Charles Ives. “The combination of everybody’s individual errors,” Mr. Nyman wrote, “built a musical structure that was incomparable.”

Mr. Eno, who played clarinet in the Sinfonia and produced its early recordings, similarly declared that what you heard in its performances was “a number of approximations of how the piece should be played,” and that they collectively amounted to beautiful music.

But for most of its audience — which was considerable, thanks to discs like “Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics” and concerts in places the size of the Albert Hall — the joys of the Sinfonia were less elevated. Enthusiasts cherished the sagging intonation, the dubious conductors (one of whom managed unintentionally to conduct the “Blue Danube” waltz in 4/4) and such priceless occasions as when the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s B-flat minor Piano Concerto failed to turn up, and the orchestra played it without her, transposed down to A minor because, as a spokesman explained, “sharps and flats tend to unnerve us.”

Perhaps the height of the Sinfonia’s acclaim came when it was threatened with an injunction by the publishers of Richard Strauss on the ground that its performances of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” were rearranged without permission. The case never reached court, to the chagrin of the Sinfonia’s manager, who replied that the music had not been rearranged: “It’s just that we don’t play it very well.”

That is exactly the kind of response one could imagine coming from Alexander McCall Smith, were any publisher foolish enough to take a similar line with the Really Terrible Orchestra. There is an undeniable, and entirely mischievous, vagueness about its objectives, and it falls in line with the unclear intentions behind so much of the bad art of history. To what extent were the perpetrators in on their own joke? And to what extent was their badness deliberate?

William McGonagall is generally thought to have had genuine belief in his own worth as a poet; Florence Foster Jenkins, likewise as a singer. They weren’t trying to be awful. How much, you might fairly ask, is the Really Terrible Orchestra trying to stink?

“Not at all,” Peter Stevenson insisted, sounding slightly hurt when I asked to attend an orchestra rehearsal if it had such things.

“It’s unkind of you to think we don’t rehearse,” he said, “because we do. And some of us even take lessons, as I am at the moment, from a serious teacher. I can’t pretend that no one ever plays deliberately badly. It’s usually the trumpets, and they make me angry when they do. But for the rest of us, we are actually doing our best. And that’s the tension in which we operate. On the one hand, we’d like to get better. On the other, we know we won’t.”

Locked in this quandary the Really Terrible Orchestra has otherwise progressed from strength to strength. It made what Mr. McCall Smith called its “first world tour” to Pittenweem in Fife. “We went down terribly well in the village hall,” he added, “playing to an audience of fishermen who got a free glass of wine — well, several glasses actually — for coming. Gave us a marvelous reception.”

The second world tour is due to hit London in November. “I fear they’ve heard of us down there,” Mr. McCall Smith said, slightly concerned that they might also have heard a pernicious rumor that, thanks to persistent practice, the orchestra was less bad than it used to be.

“It’s not true,” he insisted, “and I don’t see how it could be. We’re only too happy for people to practice. I do myself, but it will never make a difference. No one good is ever going to join us. And if they did, they’d be hugely outnumbered. Children would raise the standard, but we don’t let them in for that reason. It would be too embarrassing. And though people say we have ambitions, what is ambition? When a piece speeds up, it’s ambitious enough for me.”'

'Margaret Soltan, an English professor at George Washington University whose blog, "University Diaries," can be found at www.insidehighered.com, suggested Harvard start giving grants with all that money. She specifically mentioned Florida Southern College, the Lakeland school that has the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings, some of which have fallen into disrepair.

So we wondered: What would our local schools do with even a chunk of Harvard's loose change?

Their responses reflect a sense of what officials value at Bethune-Cookman University, Daytona Beach Community College, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Stetson University.

Bethune-Cookman University has four priorities, the first being residential housing, said Catherine Kershaw, assistant vice president and director of public relations. An upcoming capital campaign -- on the heels of a 40 percent boost in the school's endowment in the past four years -- will include housing and a new dining hall. The others: a new library and technology center; a new science building with updated labs; and a student union. (Bethune-Cookman University has $43 million in endowments as of May.)

Frank Lombardo, vice president of academic affairs at DBCC, wants to have professors spend more time working one-on-one with students in the Academic Support Center. "If we reduced the teaching load of the faculty by two courses per academic year, the impact on the budget would be about $3.5 million per year . . . That would result in higher retention and more student success." (Daytona Beach Community College has $26 million in endowments as of August.)

Embry-Riddle would start spending Harvard's money by providing $50 million per year in student opportunity scholarships, said Dan Montplaisir, vice president for institutional advancement. The school would also like to get its hands on several $2 million "very light jets," or VLJs, for teaching tools. Montplaisir would continue by building world-class aviation research parks both in Daytona Beach and at the Prescott, Ariz., campus, at $200 million apiece. He would also spend $130 million in new buildings, including classrooms, residence and dining halls and the Worldwide Campus headquarters. Not to be outdone, President John Johnson added four more dream projects: creation of 10 endowed faculty chairs (at $40 million); increasing faculty and staff salaries by 10 percent ($12 million); building a local aviation magnet high school ($25 million); and constructing $12 million worth of science and engineering labs. (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University has $60 million in endowments as of June 30.)

Stetson University spokeswoman Cindi Brownfield said the school would settle for $25 million to complete construction of the Sage Hall Science Center addition and renovation. It could also use a "dream endowment" to improve scholarship support and compensation for faculty and staff. (Stetson University has $138.6 million in endowments as of May 31.)'

'I came to college expecting lectures, late night cram sessions and running late for mid terms. I wanted to cheer for the sports teams and in some way become an important part of the campus.

The most important thing I wanted out of my college experience was an actual college classroom experience.

Maybe the movies I saw during my adolescence about college life warped my opinion about what college was really like. It made parties, basketball games and boring lectures seem like daily activities.

During my college career I have graduated with an associate's degree, stayed up all night the day before a test and almost joined a fraternity. Now that I have reached my senior year, I want to make sure that I experience every aspect that college life has to offer.



This semester, 75 percent of my classes are online and 100 percent of that is not by choice. There are classes which are only offered online and if I want my degree, I have to take these classes. [Note: The online option is no longer an option.]

I did not come to UMSL to stay at home and take classes. I came to this university to be part of a university.

If I wanted to complete my studies online I would have enrolled at University of Phoenix. Internet courses are great for people who are unable to get to campus, but I think they should be an option, not the only choice.



On the first day of classes, like many students, I sat in front of my computer and was ready to see what my first assignments were, and to my surprise, My Gateway was down.

Any students who tried to log last week probably ran into the same problem I did. So here's a question: what do you do for an internet class when the website does not work? [Whoops.]

We still have to buy books for internet courses and form groups, but the one thing that we do not have is the classroom experience. That is why I am in college, for the experience.



Even though I am not in favor of online courses, they seem to be a growing part of the educational process.

Professors can save a lot of time, and not to mention trees, just by putting their syllabus online instead of handing out paper copies in each class.

I am sure that Captain Planet and the Planeteers would be proud of us.

I am not alone in embracing the idea that college classes should be held in classrooms and not on a website....'

'Laurence Lee is the sort of alumnus that the University of Chicago craves, with two degrees from the school and plenty of money that he is looking to give away. But when Chicago solicits Mr. Lee for donations, he says he thinks to himself, "What do they need me for? What difference can I make when they already have billions?"

Instead of contributing much to Chicago, where he earned bachelor's and law degrees, Mr. Lee, who is retired, gave $6.6 million to a school he never attended: Lake Forest College, a small liberal-arts school located in the Chicago suburb where he lives. Its endowment is about $75 million, just over 1% of University of Chicago's $6.1 billion. Mr. Lee says he hasn't totaled the amount he has given to Chicago over the years but describes it as "a modest annual gift for the hell of it."


... Mr. Lee is among a rising cohort of philanthropists who are eschewing their richly endowed alma maters in favor of schools with meager resources. Turned off by massive endowments at the nation's top schools, they seek to make a greater impact at less-wealthy institutions. They are probably also aware of a fringe benefit: getting your name on a building is a cheaper proposition at schools not accustomed to seven-figure donations.

... Colleges with modest endowments are stepping up their pitch to nonalumni who graduated from more moneyed schools. Steven D. Schutt, president of Lake Forest, says he tells potential donors, "Your return on investment is going to be greater here than at places like Harvard or Yale. A million dollars gets lost in an endowment of three or five or $10 billion." Mr. Schutt was formerly a vice president at the University of Pennsylvania, which has a $6.4 billion endowment.



Last week, Harvard University announced that its endowment, by far the largest in higher education, had grown to $34.9 billion last fiscal year. The Cambridge, Mass., university, which is continuing to solicit donations, says it needs the resources to ensure future growth and to support operating expenses at its 14 schools.

But Harvard is aware that some potential donors may question the university's claim it still needs financial gifts. [Clearly, these money-wise millionaires are asking tough questions. Does a university with 34.9 billion dollars need more? Hm.... Hm...] Materials distributed to Harvard's fund-raising volunteers include a response to the question, "Does Harvard really need more money with such a large endowment?" The suggested answer begins, "Yes." It goes on to note that much of the university's endowment carries spending restrictions, and that some parts of the university, including information technology, have "little or no existing endowment" and require alumni donations to meet annual expenses. [Oh, okay, well here's my $2,000 annual giving! Don't spend it all in one place!]



... Some [schools], including Cleveland State University in Ohio and the University of the Cumberlands in Williamsburg, Ky., have begun giving potential donors copies of a July opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that made the case for more parity in donations.

"When your alma mater is already fabulously wealthy, it is advisable, indeed wise, to shun your sentimental attachment to the institution and adopt other institutions that can yield better returns," wrote Steve O. Michael, a professor of higher-education administration at Ohio's Kent State University. In an interview, he said that data show schools with smaller endowments are more efficient in their use of resources.



... Mr. Lee, who made his fortune as the top attorney for Abbott Laboratories, based in Abbott Park, Ill., says his emotional ties to the University of Chicago waned as it amassed "its fancy endowment," which has tripled in the past decade. The school is at the tail end of a $2 billion capital campaign. A spokesman for Chicago wouldn't respond to Mr. Lee's comments.' [What can they say? I guess they can try Harvard's tack -- We really need the money, man...]

'Blogs: All the Noise that Fits

The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute
for the patient fact-finding of reporters.

By Michael Skube
August 19, 2007


The late Christopher Lasch [Great so far. UD, who knew Lasch a little when she taught at the University of Rochester, and who, long before she met him, admired his work, always welcomes his name.] once wrote that public affairs generally and journalism in particular suffered not from too little information but from entirely too much. What was needed, he argued, was robust debate. Lasch, a historian by training but a cultural critic by inclination, was writing in 1990, when the Internet was not yet a part of everyday life and bloggers did not exist.


Bloggers now are everywhere among us, and no one asks if we don't need more full-throated advocacy on the Internet. [No one and then don't are awkward together here.] The blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.

And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. "No man but a blockhead," the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said [Stubbornly sensible is hokey.], "ever wrote but for money." Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. [What we now know of how this piece was written makes the cynicism of this view of writing all the greater, pointing it directly at Skube, who in exchange for money let editors seriously fuck with his prose.] And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers -- Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post -- are insistent partisans in political debate. Some reject the label "journalist," associating it with what they contemptuously call MSM (mainstream media); just as many, if not more, consider themselves a new kind of "citizen journalist" dedicated to broader democratization.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, whose popular blog Daily Kos has been a force among antiwar activists, cautioned bloggers last week "to avoid the right-wing acronym MSM." It implied, after all, that bloggers were on the fringe. To the contrary, he wrote, "we are representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we're selling."

Moulitsas foresees bloggers becoming the watchdogs that watch the watchdog: "We need to keep the media honest, but as an institution, it's important that they exist and do their job well." The tone is telling: breezy, confident, self-congratulatory. Subtly, it implies bloggers have all the liberties of a traditional journalist but few of the obligations. [So subtly that UD fails to see anything like this in the Moulitsas statement.]

There is at least some reason for activists like Moulitsas to see themselves as the new wave. Last year, the California 6th District Court of Appeal gave bloggers the legal victory they wanted when it ruled that they were protected under the state's reporter shield law. Other, more symbolic victories have come their way too. In 2004, bloggers were awarded press credentials to the Democratic National Convention. And earlier this month in Chicago, at a convention sponsored by Daily Kos, a procession of Democratic presidential hopefuls offered full salutes, knowing that bloggers are busy little bees in organizing political support and fundraising. [Busy little bees = They're so gay.]

And yet none of this makes them journalists, even in the sense Lasch seemed to be advocating.

"What democracy requires," Lasch wrote in "The Lost Art of Argument," "is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can only be generated by debate. We do not know what we need until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy."

There was something appealing about this argument -- one that no blogger would reject -- when Lasch advanced it almost two decades ago. But now we have the opportunity to witness it in practice, thanks to the blogosphere, and the results are less than satisfying. One gets the uneasy sense [less than satisfying... one gets the uneasy sense... These vaguely British locutions, coupled with the Samuel Johnson mention, tell you that Skube wants his style to be what he considers non-bloggy -- profound, weighty with gravitas, for the ages. But he's writing for the LA Times.] that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect [Er, suspend?] judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks.

But they are, more often than not, trademarks of the kind of journalism that makes a difference. And if there is anything bloggers want more than an audience, it's knowing they are making a difference in politics. They are, to give them their due, changing what is euphemistically called the national "conversation." But what is the nature of that change? Does it deepen our understanding? Does it broaden our perspective? [Old Grandad prose again. And again, the problem is that people who want to deepen and broaden understanding don't write op/eds for the LA Times.]

It's hard to answer yes to such questions, if only because they presuppose a curiosity and inquiry for which raw opinion is ill-suited. Sometimes argument -- a word that elevates blogosphere comment to a level it seldom attains on its own -- gains from old-fashioned gumshoe reporting. Compelling examples abound. On the same day I read of the Daily Kos convention in Chicago, I finished "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation," winner this year of the Pulitzer Prize for history. No one looms larger in the book by Gene Roberts Jr. and Hank Klibanoff than Claude Sitton, whose reporting in the New York Times in the 1960s would become legendary. [Cliches abounding.]

Full disclosure: I once worked for Sitton at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., after he had left the Times, and I knew that he and others, including Karl Fleming, had put themselves in harm's way simply to report a story. I naively asked Sitton once if he had encountered veiled threats. "Veiled?" he asked. "They were more than veiled."

He recounted the time in Philadelphia, Miss., when "a few rednecks -- drunk, shotguns in the back of their truck -- showed up at the Holiday Inn where Fleming and I were staying." The locals invited the big-city reporters -- Sitton from the Times, Fleming from Newsweek -- to come out and see the farm. "I told 'em, 'Look, you shoot us and there'll be a dozen more just like us in the morning. You going to shoot them too?' " [John Wayne bullshit.]

When I knew him, Sitton seldom mentioned those dangers of 20 years earlier. What mattered was the story, and the people swept up in it. But it was his vivid, detailed reporting that, as Roberts and Klibanoff write, caught the attention of the Kennedy White House and brought the federal government to intervene in a still-segregated South.

In our time, the Washington Post's reporting, in late 2005, of the CIA's secret overseas prisons and its painstaking reports this year on problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center -- both of which won Pulitzer Prizes -- were not exercises in armchair commentary. The disgrace at Walter Reed, true enough, was first mentioned in a blog, but the full scope of that story could not have been undertaken by a blogger or, for that matter, an Op-Ed columnist, whose interest is in expressing an opinion quickly and pungently. Such a story demanded time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance. It's not something one does as a hobby. [Gotta get paid, baby.]

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.'

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