'[Quotation mark abuse] bothers people mightily ... as this 24-year-old grad student and language-lover has discovered from the hundreds, occasionally thousands of visitors she gets daily. And nary a day goes by when she doesn't receive a bunch of e-mails with photographic evidence of quote abuse, misuse or overuse. [Two examples are the] restaurant billboard in Madison, Wis., which felt the need to put quotes around "Lunch" and "Dinners." [And] the bathroom sign that asked visitors to Leave the Light "On" during business hours. ("On" was also underlined. Twice.)

A communications student who specializes in rhetoric at the University of Georgia in Athens, [the blogger] started her blog in 2005 after her senior year in college in Michigan. (Her boyfriend, also a rhetoric student but in Maryland, is a frequent contributor. And proofreader.)

The blog wasn't noticed much at first. But about six months ago, things started picking up. "You know how it happens - one person links to you, then others do. Also, everyone has camera phones now," [she] said in a phone interview. Earlier this week, she was linked on Yahoo!, which quadrupled her traffic for a couple days to about 2,000 hits - though her record is still about 3,000 in a day.

... Rampant quote abuse is a pet peeve of many writing teachers, of course. One of them, Pat Hoy, feels the larger problem is not the punctuation missteps - that's bad enough - but the reliance on quotes themselves, by writers who should know better.

"I have a thing against overuse of quotations, period," says Hoy, director of the expository writing program at New York University. "Whether in academic or bureaucratic writing, it's giving up responsibility for what you're writing. It's a pushing aside of the responsibility to be the major thinker in the piece."'

'I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her, `I love you madly', because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, `As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.' At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated, both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.'

'Soliciting no reputation for respectability, X people are freely obscene and profane, but tend to deploy vile language with considerable rhetorical effectiveness, differing from proles by using fucking as a modifier only now and then and never dropping the g. They may be rather fonder than most people of designating someone - usually a public servant or idol of the middle class - an asshole. This will suggest that generally they eschew euphemism, as, for example, when they insist that their children use the words penis and vagina. But they don't always call spades spades. Sometimes they will euphemize, but unlike more genteel speakers, Xs like to use euphemisms ironically or parodically, favoring those especially which low newspapers use with a knowing, libel-skirting leer. Thus when an X lifts one eyebrow slightly while referring to someone as a confirmed bachelor, we are to gather that flaming homosexual is meant. Similarly... starlet is the ironic euphemism for whore, constant companion for lover, tired (or overtired) for publicly drunk, and fun-loving for promiscuous. Applied to young women, willowy means near death from anorexia. X people can also use the middle class's euphemisms for sardonic effect if sufficient irony is signaled at the same time. Thus it is possible to speak of some poor soul's kleptomania problem in such a way as to install viciously skeptical quotation marks around the words.'

'Have you had any funny moments while you were teaching?

Well, what we professors find funny, students usually don’t find funny. Occasionally students misspell words that are bizarre to us. One student wrote, “He got a plastic enema,” when the correct answer was aplastic anemia.'

'It’s all quite an accomplishment for the former corporate tax lawyer, who entered the academy just four years ago after practicing in New York and doing a brief six-month stint in Washington. Academics generally toil in obscurity for years, hoping for a big political hit. The now-famous paper was Fleischer’s first published policy recommendation.'

'Industry lobbyists mock his earnest demeanor and bright-red hair. Behind closed doors, some even call him “Bazooka Joe,” after the bubble gum cartoon character.'

'In early May, the Senate Finance Committee invited him to speak at a closed-door briefing for staffers from the Hill, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service.

...In September, Fleischer testified on a panel before the House Ways and Means Committee.

“There is widespread agreement among tax professors and economists that the status quo is an untenable position as a matter of tax policy,” he told the committee. “The partnership tax rules were designed with small business in mind, not billion-dollar investment funds.”'

'Behind closed doors, they call Fleischer a careerist hack. They criticize his use of the phrase “airplane rich” as a way to describe the investment managers, saying he’s simply targeting the wealthy.'

'...Something’s not adding up when rising tuition rates keep climbing year after year while many universities are flush with ballooning endowments.

At a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing in September, witness testimony revealed college and university endowments have grown enormous fortunes. The top 25 college and university endowments are $11 billion more than the combined assets of the top 25 largest private foundations. Investment returns often exceed 12 percent or more. However, college endowment spending averages a paltry four percent.

Some of those endowments are massive and have gotten so big, in large part, because they benefit from very generous tax breaks. Yale University’s endowment equates to $2.8 million per undergraduate. Tapping endowment returns to help keep college accessible to non-wealthy families seems more than reasonable.

As the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee hammers out details of an education tax package, an endowment pay-out requirement ought to be included in the discussion to reduce tuition and help students afford college...'

'...When players on the Duke lacrosse team were faced with charges of rape, many people demanded to know how it was possible that [Duke's president] did not understand that lacrosse players were seen as notoriously "thuggish" and "entitled." Why had he done nothing?... [Trachtenberg defends Duke's president against charges that he didn't act to bring his players under control before the lacrosse mess. Since the players were found innocent, Trachtenberg reasons, they must not have been an established behavioral problem about which the president could have known. Yet several of the players were exactly that, and Brodhead knew it, just as many other university presidents know -- how can they not? -- that some of their athletic teams have more than a few thuggish people on them.] [There's no way the] head of a university with 30,000 students, 5,000 faculty and staff members, and another few thousand adjuncts and visitors [can] control the behavior of all those people.... [Again, when there's notorious misbehavior on the part of certain campus groups -- some groups of athletes tend in this direction -- there's in fact every reason for a president to take note.]

... We [presidents may be] instructed [by our students] that charging tuition is a sign of vice... [GW students have never argued that charging tuition is vicious; they have argued, and their argument has now been taken up by Trachtenberg's replacement as president, that charging excessive tuition is wrong.]'

'Philosophy majors are notorious for being perpetually stoned, easy-going hippies. [I'd drop notorious for being.] They can be found in yoga class, at a NORML meeting or at a party trying to convince a bored sorority girl that the world is really nothing but the dream of a hamster named Fred. [End of sentence great: hamster named Fred is fun. But can be found is a bit clunky. How about Look for them in... And rather than trying to convince I'd simply write telling. I'd also drop is really nothing but and replace it with the world's the dream of a hamster named Fred. Notice the way my edits are about making things snappier, shorter, stronger, more direct.] However, there exists a lesser-known species of philosophy majors. [There exists is okay, because she's trying here for a certain pretentious intellectual formulation.] This minority consists of chain-smoking, coffee-consuming, Friedrich Nietzsche-worshipping emo kids. [Excellent.]

If you have ever been shaken out of your Sudoku-induced trance [I'd drop induced.] by the kid wearing black in the back of the class answering a professor’s question in an inappropriately deep fashion [Drop inappropriately.], you have probably encountered this lesser-known type of philosophy student. No question is too mundane. It could be an innocent rhetorical question such as, “How is everyone doing today?” Instead of joining the chorus of droning “Gooood,” from the class [The two of's are awkward; the joining and droning are too ingy. The sentence is wordy.], they volunteer the answer: “Considering the limitations of the human sense of perception, we can never know anything for sure. I do not even know for certain I exist. So how am I supposed to know how I’m doing? Why would you ask that? Whhhhy?” [Drop the final Whhhy. Too cute.]

For these lovers of knowledge, philosophy is a way of life. Spurning physical activity and rowdy social gatherings, emo philosophers can instead [Drop instead.] be found outside of coffee shops drinking coffee (black) and smoking cigarettes. [Unfiltered in parenthesis after cigarettes would be fun, and would give the sentence balance.] They will inevitably [Drop inevitably.] be reading an obscure philosophical text, or if with a partner, discussing the dark existential truths of life. [Simply dark existential truths would be better. Truths is a stronger word to end on.] Also, due to an affinity for rain and gloominess in general, they are often seen taking melancholy walks in the rain… without an umbrella. [Drop in general.]

They do occasionally detach themselves from their current book and engage in the pointless, shallow social activities that the rest of the world uses only [Drop only.] to distract [Awkward use of distract here. How about to elude etc.?] from the grim reality of life.
[Again, as in earlier sentence, simply write from grim reality.] When this happens, a large amount of alcohol can confer the emo philosopher with [ can confer upon the emo philosopher traits etc. would be better.] traits of their close relation, the stoner philosopher. Articulating nothing more intellectual than “Whoa!” repeatedly while staring up at the stars, or alternately giving long speeches about the futility of hope - both distinct possibilities. Drunkenness, however, is only an occasional respite from the weight of being serious all the time. [Note the unnecessary words gumming up this great material: repeatedly, alternately, long, occasional.]

The most recent on-screen emo philosopher is Dwayne from last year’s “Little Miss Sunshine.” He took an oath of silence in honor of his hero, none other than existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche. His over-the-top rebellious antics are common. [are common is a blah way to end the sentence.] When faced with the depressing conclusions dictated by their chosen philosophical gurus, some philosophy students have no choice but resorting to periods of long silences and listening to Elliott Smith. [Drop depressing; drop chosen. And rewrite latter part of the sentence something like this: resort to periods of silence or the music of Elliot Smith.]

If you have not been able to discern it already from my glowing portrayal [Drop glowing.], yours truly is a member of this philosophical following. My pride in my membership of this minority group [membership in.] stems from an incident that occurred [Drop that occurred.] last year at a party. When I answered a typical inquiry to my major [about my major] with “philosophy,” the response from the questioner [Drop from the questioner.] was: “Oh, did you just try to pick the easiest major possible?”

I was outraged, hot fire burned in my black heart. I knew that Socrates was flipping a shit somewhere in his Greek grave. [Flipping a shit's fun.] I proceeded to explain - while internally cursing
[Drop internally.] myself for participating in this idle distraction from life [Yet again: Drop from life.]- that actually, philosophy is one of the oldest and most interesting disciplines in the world.

Sadly, this one incident [Drop one.] is not the only time the seriousness of my major has been doubted. When faced with these naysayers, I need only relate the horror of the loathed branch of philosophy called “logic.” [Describe might be better than relate. And I'd drop the horror of.]

My teaching assistant actually told us on the first day that this class had a tendency to make students cry, give up hope and get a bad grade. Although filling me with dread, I suppose his warning was helpful. Now I can tell everyone who says philosophy majors aren’t serious students to eat shit and try to solve a biconditional derivation or read 100 pages on the word “the.” [This is good. Feisty.]

Despite their differences, emo kids and stoner philosophy students can unite in agreement [Unite in agreement is somewhat redundant and clunky. How about agree on one thing?] over one thing: Stop fucking confusing us with psychology majors!' [Excellent final line. An earned exclamation mark.]

Labels: SOS

'... The fire struck the house ... sometime before 7 a.m. and burned completely through the first and second floors, leaving only part of the home's frame standing. The waterfront home was built on stilts, forcing firefighters to climb a ladder onto the house's deck to reach the first living floor. The house was a total loss...

"We ran down the street to get away," said Nick Cain, a student at the University of North Carolina who was staying at a house about 100 feet away. "The ash and the smoke were coming down on us. We were just trying to get away."

Cain was one of the dozens of college students who filled at least four houses within a block of the burned home. Neighbor Jeff Newsome said the students were going back and forth between the houses all weekend long.

... Winds blowing flames over the water, and not toward any of the other residences on the tightly packed row of vacation homes, kept the fire from spreading. The intense heat kept [one neighbor] from attempting a rescue, although he said he had to fight to keep several of those who escaped from trying. When he approached the front door, he said, it was too hot to open.

"When I was going up to the entryway, you could hear the windows above me explode," [he] said. "When I knew the flames had taken over, I don't think I've ever felt as helpless in my life."

Authorities erected a blue tarp to block the view of the fire scene, but neighbor Bob Alexander said he saw investigators removing bodies from the gutted remnants of the home early Sunday afternoon. Family members of some victims who gathered in a chapel across the street from the town hall declined to speak with reporters.

"It's terrible to see somebody's children come out of that house this way," Alexander said.'

HLJ

'[Walter] McNeil said he could not remember any courses he took at St. John's or the names of any professors or how much tuition he paid. He also was not sure whether he wrote a master's thesis. "I think I did," he said.'

'McNeil is "putting himself on the same standard as other people with legitimate master's (degrees). It's not morally acceptable," said Allen Ezell, a former FBI agent who has written books on the issue and now investigates corporate fraud as a Wachovia vice president in Tampa. "He's a cop. He's a law enforcement officer. He's supposed to lead by example."'

'"It's basically a guy in some church," said Alan Contreras, who heads Oregon's Office of Degree Authorization, which closely tracks schools with questionable accreditation.'

I've been haunted about the issue concerning plagiarism in connection with President Poshard since I first heard about it. [Haunted is certainly seasonally appropriate...]

My first reflections went back to a recent issue about Dr. Walter Wendler being replaced because of plagiarism. [Wendler is one of three high-ranking SIU administrators who plagiarized.]

I've researched the dictionary and found the meaning of the word to be "To take (ideas, writings, etc.) from (another) and pass them off as one's own." I am persuaded by this definition.

Dr. Wendler didn't plagiarize anyone, because he was using his own plan for a project on the SIU campus. [He recycled a plan he'd prepared for a whole other university and, largely word for word, just stuck it onto SIU. This was stupid and lazy. He also more straightforwardly plagiarized in a speech he gave at SIU.] Dr. Wendler comes across to me as a fine gentleman and an asset to any organization. I've met him on campus a couple of times, and he is very well dressed, presents himself well and speaks to me although he doesn't know me. I'm honored. [See, this is the non-'thesdanian thing. In UD's world, defending a guy from plagiarism charges on the basis of the cut of his suit isn't considered a good move.]

He is a Christian man [Dresses well and isn't Jewish or anything.] and objects to some of the trends on campus, and I, for one, agree with him in what he attempted to do and his attitude about the whole affair. [What whole affair? This is mysterious. Haunting.]

I wonder if these issues [??] stimulated the anonymous letters that inspired the original accusations. I've been guilty of quoting the Bible at times without giving credit and have gotten away with it. President Poshard has been exonerated. Let's correct the issue with Dr. Wendler. [He'll be exonerating the third SIU plagiarist next.]

Labels: SOS

... cited in the report, $3,357 in charges at a New Brunswick restaurant -- including more than $1,000 in alcoholic beverages that included a $125 bottle of wine -- were billed to a state-funded [Rutgers University] account called Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture".

'[An] absorbing and suspenseful production ... "Redshirts" chronicles the crisis that erupts at a university when four football players are accused of plagiarizing an English paper.

...[It examines] the calculus of power and powerlessness on the Tennessee Southern campus. Dante [a player] and his teammates are at the mercy of [English professor] Dr. Bigelow and other authority figures from the university establishment.

But the athletes have a larger vulnerability, as their encounters with English literature suggest: They've missed out on valuable cultural grounding enjoyed by society's elite. "'Moor' and 'prayer?' That's a rhyme now?" Curtis complains in frustration while studying Emily Dickinson. "Man, they just keep makin' this [stuff] up!" Language is a kind of power, but it's one that largely eludes these students...'

'As high school seniors narrow their choices for college and parents gingerly peek at the price tags, they're asking themselves: How is it possible that colleges charge so much?

Colleges blame big tuition hikes on rising bills for fuel, health care benefits and salaries--and on the cost of keeping up with College X and its new rock-climbing wall and wired dorm. Businesses, though, face the same escalating costs and the same pressure to upgrade their products, but they don't raise their prices at anything like the same pace.

Since 1983 the cost of keeping colleges running has outpaced the Consumer Price Index by 48%, according to the Commonfund Institute, a nonprofit that compiles a higher-education price index. And the prices that colleges charge have climbed even faster. At George Washington University in Washington, D.C., the tuition for students who don't qualify for a discount is up 270% in real terms in the past 25 years....'

It is the purpose of this paper to discuss evidence supporting the existence of a gene (henceforth called the AH gene) that predisposes an individual to chronic behavior in an obnoxious, boorish, selfish, overbearing, and generally offensive manner. In our terminology, such an individual will be said to be acting like an AH. ... Following classical genetic theory, I postulate the existence of four alleles ...which I henceforth refer to as rectalleles ... Each pair of rectalleles constitutes a genotype; with four alleles there are 10 possible genotypes (disregarding allele order). An individual carrying the AH genotype will be referred to as a "complete AH"...

'I was appointed to raise the research profile of the school and, with the RAE submission now almost completed, I feel that we have achieved that objective. I am convinced that the school's RAE return will be an excellent one.

"I feel privileged to have led this school over the past few years. We now have excellent students, outstanding staff and a friendly and supportive working environment.'

'The full extent to which a leading business school head lifted material from papers published by his peers has emerged.

Tony Antoniou quit his post as dean of Durham Business School at the beginning of September for what were described as "personal reasons", amid unspecified allegations of plagiarism. He remains a professor of finance at the university.

An investigation by The Times Higher reveals that large quantities of material in Professor Antoniou's 1986 DPhil thesis, and a later journal article, are copied from a number of other sources.


The Times Higher has established that substantial parts of the professor's York University DPhil thesis, Futures Markets: Theory and Tests, take material from at least three other sources.

The introduction to Professor Antoniou's thesis begins identically to that of a paper by American academic Gary Koppenhaver "Risk Aversion and Futures Market Behaviour".

Both papers start with the same quote, attributed to an anonymous futures market analyst, and both are identical until the sixth line of the first paragraph.

Large sections of two chapters in the DPhil are also taken from Mr Koppenhaver's paper.



The DPhil also uses material from two other theses: Stephen Taylor's Time Series Properties and Models of Commodity Prices, Lancaster University, 1978, and Dosung Chung's Individual Optimisation and Market Equilibrium in Futures, Washington University, 1982.



Substantial duplication of other work is also apparent in a paper Professor Antoniou wrote in 1988 for the Journal of Business and Society.

Professor Antoniou's paper, "Futures Market Efficiency and the Time Content of the Information Set", borrows heavily from a paper, "Futures Market Efficiency and the Time Content of the Information Sets" written in 1983 by US student David Goldfarb and two Israeli academics, David Bigman and Edna Schechtman, for The Journal of Futures Markets.


... Professor Taylor said: "I am personally satisfied that Professor Antoniou's 1986 DPhil thesis contains several sentences and paragraphs that are identical to material in my 1978 PhD thesis."

"As Antoniou does not include any of my research output in his list of references, it is easy to see why people may believe that plagiarism has occurred."'

'...Germany's Federal Court has overturned the arrest of a sociologist accused of being a member of an extreme left group.... Holm, a sociologist at Berlin's Humbolt University, was released on bail at the end of August after three weeks in prison.... In its warrant, the prosecutor's office had said Holm had twice met with a suspected member of mg and that the researcher used "keywords and phrases" in his academic texts that had appeared in documents written by mg, such as the term "gentrification," according to news reports.

It also said that "as an employee of a research institute, [Holm] had access to libraries where he could inconspicuously do the research required for the founding of a militant group."... The Federal court, however, said this evidence did not meet the requirements of showing it was a "strong possibility" that Holm himself was a mg member. ... In August, more than 100 academics from Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and other countries called on German Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms to release the sociologist.

..."We strictly oppose the use of violence as endorsed and practiced by the 'militant group,'" one of the letters reads. "At the same time, however, we strongly object to the notion of intellectual complicity adopted by the federal prosecutor's office in its investigation. …Such arguments allow any piece of academic writing to be potentially incriminating," the letter said.'

'Thirteen years after New Jersey dismantled higher education oversight, the entire system has shown itself to be vulnerable to waste of taxpayer and tuition dollars and abuse of positions by officials, a state commission reported Thursday.

The New Jersey Commission of Investigation said it found instances of officials taking gifts from contractors, accounting systems that were virtually indecipherable, patronage appointments to boards, out-of-control borrowing and little oversight of hiring practices and discretionary spending.

In the case of the alleged gift-taking, at the scandal-plagued University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, the commission's findings were serious enough to be specifically forwarded to state prosecutors for further review, according to the report.

... For example, Rutgers University, the state's largest higher education institution, had an accounting system that was so poorly integrated, with record-keeping so decentralized, that commission investigators had to hire a private forensic accounting firm to gain an understanding of it, according to the report.

A study of a random sample of Rutgers University expense reports submitted by faculty members found that nearly two-thirds - 37 of 58 - had compliance problems. A university professor, for example, received about $5,500 to take six people, plus family members, to a workshop in Lake Placid, N.Y., but submitted no documentation to support the expenditure...

... State Sen. Raymond Lesniak, D-Union, said the commission's report backs up his proposed legislation to increase state oversight of higher education.'

'A journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is accusing aides of John Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, of demanding that he remove from YouTube a student report critical of Mr. Edwards’s Democratic presidential campaign — and of threatening to block the university’s access to Mr. Edwards and the campaign headquarters near campus.

Mr. Edwards’s campaign officials said they did not level any such threat during what were clearly heated discussions with the professor and the student over her approach and over the central question in her report: Why has a campaign focused on poverty based its headquarters in an affluent part of Chapel Hill?

The student, Carla Babb, posted the report on YouTube as an entry to a video contest sponsored by MTV, giving the report the potential for national viewing. Ms. Babb had initially approached the Edwards campaign to interview a student working as an intern at its headquarters, but the piece changed focus after the initial request, taking a closer look at the location of Mr. Edwards’s campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, in light of its poverty message, which had been a subject of a column in the university newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel.

The video includes an interview with the columnist, James Edward Dillard, saying, “To pick that place as your campaign center, when you’re going to be the man who advocates on behalf of the poor, I just think, why not turn the media’s attention to somewhere where there are huge, huge problems.”

Ms. Babb’s professor, C. A. Tuggle, said in an interview that after the report first appeared on YouTube on Tuesday night he received calls of complaint from a deputy in Mr. Edwards’s national press office, and, then, his communications director.

Mr. Tuggle said the aides told him they felt “blind-sided by the way the reporter presented the piece in the pitch,” adding unapologetically, “The focus of stories change[s] all of the time.”

“We told them we were not interested in taking it down or holding it from broadcast on our show on Monday,” Mr. Tuggle said, adding that the campaign responded by telling him that, “campus media would have real trouble getting any sort of access to the Edwards campaign, and so might other parts of the university.”'

'Jessica Seinfeld did not write the new cookbook Deceptively Delicious. A team of experts large enough to form a soccer team—a writer, chef, nutritionist, art director, photographer, agent, editor, project manager, and then some — did. [But despite claims by some, it's not plagiarized.] Plagiarism [is]... about dishonesty. It's about pretending someone else's ideas and work are your own, even if those ideas are paraphrased. [Seinfeld's book and the other book in question] are based on the same unremarkable, unoriginal idea. [This makes both books empty. But they're different enough in their particulars that one hasn't plagiarized from the other.]... Plagiarism is a serious accusation. It can get students expelled; it can ruin writers' careers. And if it's occurred, it should. But the news media should take plagiarism seriously enough to not use the word unless it truly applies. Many things can be said of Seinfeld's book and its runaway success. A sad commentary on the state of parenting? I think so. A triumph of celebrity over substance? You bet. Further evidence of the decline of the West? Definitely. But an act of plagiarism? No way.'

'...copied his 1986 doctoral thesis (University of York) from three other sources: a paper by Professor Koppenhaver, "Risk Aversion and Futures Market Behaviour", a thesis by Professor Stephen Taylor (Lancaster, 1978) and a thesis by Dosung Chung (Washington University, 1982). Furthermore an article he wrote in 1988 for the "Journal of Business and Society" is largely based on another article from the "The Journal of Futures Markets" of 1983.'

"The probability that two authors use the same sources six years apart to write exactly the same thing including quotes is nil...

The role of a senior administrator, especially in the highly competitive environment of business education, is to maintain and improve the institution's reputation. Reputations are built on the trust between scholars, students and business partners – the trust that is required for an environment of scholarship. While plagiarism is always abhorrent to scholars, plagiarism by a senior administrator not only destroys the reputation of the individual but also the very environment for scholarship. Pity the students, both past and present, for the price they pay for such a selfish act."

'The controversy surrounding the president of Southern Illinois University has begun to bother me. [Recall SOS's many, many cautions against beginning a letter of this sort with how upset, hot, bothered, wild again, beguiled again, a simpering, whimpering child again, you are. Feelings expressed in this way do nothing for an argument except make it feel minutely, dully, personal.] While I have met Dr. Poshard on several occasions professionally, I have no vested interest in the affair. However, as it is playing out I have several observations and questions. [Dead ringer for Mr. Collins, Pride and Prejudice.]

My first deals with the continuous calls for "open and honest" revelation on the part of Dr. Poshard. If that is the case, why is that not also required of the person(s) who brought to light the issue in the first place? [The author of this letter will prove quite the fan of the quotation mark. Read on.]

Next, I struggle with a concept of law known as the statute of limitations. [Writer thinks you're stupid. "...a concept of the law known as..." ] I believe that in law there are very few actions that do not have to follow that rule. One of those exceptions is for murder.

If an academic panel found the text of Dr. Poshard's work acceptable over 20 years ago, why is it an issue now? Please tell me we are not making this "issue" as grave a matter as that of taking a life? [Quotation marks around issue mean to say I don't think it's an issue! It's a non-issue! I speet on your "issue"...] I am also troubled by the faculty vote at SIUE and rational of the person who proposed it. [He means rationale. I think. Bit murky in here.] Quoting a former U.S. President: "What is 'is'?" [Meta-quotation marks. Not murky. Send a search party.]

In philosophy there is a construct known as "cause and effect." [Same thing as with statute of limitations above. Since we've never heard of cause and effect, the writer introduces it to us here. With quotation marks around it.] I wonder what the "real" cause is? [Though a Reverend, author appears to be a radical skeptic. "Does" "reality" "exist"?] Is it academic integrity or perhaps the not so off hand remark to separate the two campuses? Or could it be something else? In short, I find this small rodent-like bump being made into the latest glacial peak. [Off the rails here..] It seems that we are more and more becoming a people caught up in the minutiae while real problems within society remain.

Yes, academic integrity is important, but to the detriment of "real" societal issues; I think not! Perhaps some of those in the academic "ivory towers" and the editorial offices who have been calling for the removal of Dr. Poshard would like to join me in my office where I deal with people who are trying to purchase gasoline for their cars, put food on their tables, pay their rent or keep their utilities connected; "real" issues for "real" people.

Is it not time to return some "common" sense to the issues that seem to drive our media and our lives?

Rev. Gary Gummersheimer

Murphysboro, IL'

Labels: SOS

"The inmost spirit of poetry ...is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world. "

"The only calibration that counts [Hughes wrote this toward the end of his life; it's addressed to his son] is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.

And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."

"Do you remember ... you described a dream – ...A frog was jumping up the path behind you. You entered the building and closed the glass door, shutting out the frog. The frog then jumped against the glass of the door. Do you remember it?

...One series of dreams I had, from my teens on. Occasionally still have. Were versions of your frog. Instead of a frog, mine, in these dreams, is an aeroplane. Sometimes I'm in it. More often, it goes over – in trouble. On fire, or driving out of control. It crashes – usually just out of sight.

...That plane is the frog hitting the glass. Something from the other side of my conscious mind – something mighty important, ie the news from my whole body and its understandings, is trying to get through to me.

...What I was needing to do, all those years, was deal with what had happened to your mother and me. That was the big unmanageable event in my life, that had somehow to be managed – internally – by me.

...The best I could do, through all those following years, to deal with that giant psychological log-jam of your mother and me, was write, as if to her, quite privately, simple little attempts to communicate with her about our time together.

They were what accumulated, over the years, to this Birthday Letters. ... So all I wrote, through all those years, contained nothing of what I really needed to say. And nothing in my way of life contained the real me – I was living on the wrong side of the glass door. ...

It was when I realised that my only chance of getting past 1963 was to blow up that log-jam, and assemble whatever I had written about your mother and me, and simply make it public – like a confession – that I decided to publish those Birthday Letters as I've called them.

I thought, let the feminists do what they like, let people think what they like about me, let critics demolish and tear to bits these simple, unguarded, quite private for the most part, unsophisticated bits of writing, let the heavens fall, let your mother's Academic armies of support demolish me... – I can't care any more, I can't lock myself in behind this glass door one more week.

So I did it, and now I'm getting the surprise of my life. What I've been hiding all my life, from myself and everybody else, is not terrible at all. Though you didn't want to read it.

And the effect on me, Nicky, the sense of gigantic, upheaval transformation in my mind, is quite bewildering. It's as though I have completely new different brains. I can think thoughts I never could think. I have a freedom of imagination I've not felt since 1962. Just to have got rid of all that.

Well, let's hope it wasn't all just a bit too late.

...You were given the means – if you use them, everything about you will be changed, by what follows the frog through the door. Slowly. Like a leakage. Bit by bit."

'Meet the top boss in Fort Bend County: County Judge Bob Hebert, who says he has a doctorate in management.

Hebert: “You want to know about my throw down degree.”

11 News: “The Ph.D.”

Hebert: “Oh, that’s my throw down degree.”

It’s from California Coast University, which is ... on the Texas illegal list.

But the judge claims, “I didn't get the degree to impress you or an employer or a voter. I got it to impress me.”

And he said, “I don't use that degree professionally. I don't sign any documents pertaining to the county as Bob Hebert, Ph.D.”

But 11 News showed him his own Web site.

“It says Ph.D. county judge,” Hebert said.

And the county’s official Web site had it too.

11 News: “You're claiming to be a Ph.D. as the county judge.”

Hebert: “That is an error.”

'11 News: “Do you claim you're a Ph.D. sir?”

Lin: “Oh yeah, yeah. I got a Ph.D. from Kennedy Western.”

He did say his Ph.D. was from Kennedy Western – something also mentioned on the Texas Southern’s own Web site.

11 News: “The State of Texas says it’s illegal for you to claim you are a doctor inside the state of Texas. Why would you continue to do that?”

Lin: “No I didn't claim that one myself. That's from the department.”

11 News: “Are you going to continue to claim you're a doctor?”

Lin: “Oh yes, yes. I have my Ph.D. degree. Yes.”'

'Thousands of Americans will travel to colleges and universities this fall for "parents' weekend." [Drop the effing quotation marks! ... Who told me that there's a whole blog now devoted to unnecessary quotation marks?] They'll wander leaf-strewn lawns and quadrangles with their sons and daughters, asking earnest questions about courses, sports and friends.

Later, when they retire to the local Hilton, Sheraton or Holiday Inn, they might notice something funny: It looks a lot like their children's dormitory. [This actually is funny, and a good comic writer could do great things with it... The idea that the parents' hotel room might indeed be less glamorous than their kid's dorm is a winner. But this writer will not be able to capitalize on the comic potential.]

Dorms are changing - to resemble hotels. Student centers have gotten makeovers, too. They look like museums or corporate office buildings. [These sentences, which gesture in the direction of description, but don't really describe, would be better if they featured actual physical details.]

At elite private universities and even at some public ones, students have nicer facilities and services than their parents could have imagined. That raises big questions about what we're teaching this generation and why.

Consider George Washington University in Washington [This is the Snapshots from Home bit in this post.], where incoming students receive engraved chocolates under their pillows during freshmen orientation. [Nothing's too good for UD's charges.] Or Ball State University in Ohio, which just opened a $36 million residence hall featuring mobile furniture, a digital music lab, and a dining hall that takes online take-out orders. [Isn't all furniture -- except for my new baby grand -- mobile?]

Plasma TVs? Got 'em. Refrigerators and microwaves? Check. Fitness center? Of course. Weekly housecleaning service? For an extra fee, it's yours. [The question and answer plus slangy language thing here is sort of lame.]

That's hardly the kind of luxury that Princeton president Woodrow Wilson envisioned a century ago, when he commissioned residential buildings. Wilson worried that too many students had moved off campus into "eating clubs," which separated them according to interests, tastes and wealth. Better that they live together in monasterylike brick or stone dormitories, sealed off from the world.

"A university was conceived as a place where the community life and spirit were supreme," wrote one Princeton architect in 1909, three years before Wilson entered the White House. "It was a walled city against materialism and all of its works." [Not sure of the wisdom of choosing America's most status-conscious, Social Registered university for your example of higher university values.]

After World War I, Harvard erected seven new dormitories along two sides of its famous yard. Featuring elaborate outside details but humble interiors, the dorms created a literal and symbolic divide between students and the surrounding city.

At new women's colleges, meanwhile, educators feared that off-campus boarding houses would lead innocent young women astray. So they took special care to construct solid but simple dormitories that would place all students under college supervision - and on equal economic footing. [He's muddying things here. Why bring in this now-unattractive paternalism? Does the writer want to go back to that, as well as to anti-materialism?]

"We have a chance to see what the human spirit can do when unhampered either by deprivation or by excess," the dean of Smith College wrote in 1919, praising a new set of dormitories.

The big boom in dorm construction occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, sparked by massive state and federal spending. In 1958, the University of California's nine campuses could house only 2,900 students; by 1970, they had residential space for nearly 20,000. Despite some new architectural styles, most of these dormitories were built in concrete or cinder block - functional, not fancy.

Fast-forward to the latest $22 million dormitory at Tufts University, offering suites with two large singles off a sunlit living room. Each has a dining room with a glass table and a kitchen with a dishwasher. "This is like going from Amerisuites to the Ritz-Carlton," a Tufts senior told the Boston Globe last month.

The dorm is a hotel, but it just got way nicer. That's bad news for anyone who cares about the future of the university. [Note the abruptness with which the writer now returns to the argument he introduced at the beginning of the essay. This is of course about the space constraint he's under. But it comes across as too sudden -- unprepared, unsupported.]

By providing really nice things for our kids, we're teaching them to expect such goodies as their due. And we're forgetting the older collegiate ideal, which prized the life of the mind over the lure of materialism.

Only a segment of students can afford the new luxuries, of course, which makes matters worse. More colleges now price dorms at different rates, depending on how many bells and whistles are included. So rich kids get the fancier residence halls and poorer students the older ones, which yields the economic divide Wilson and his generation wanted to avoid. [Again, it's not as if Princeton ever housed an economic divide.]

How did we get here? As government aid has declined, colleges chase the students with the most dollars, and the best way to do that is to offer really cool amenities. University presidents may not like catering to the whims of already-privileged 18-year-olds, but competing schools are doing it, so what choice is there?

During the Cold War, that kind of thinking was called "mutually assured destruction." At universities today, the era could be called "mutually assured consumption." And we're all impoverished by it. [Ask yourself: Is this a strong piece? I think the answer's no. And why is it not strong? Because it's sketchy. It's not able to gather its complicated and multifaceted subject matter into a concise little polemic. And the main reason for that failure, IMHO, lies in the writer's lack of an individual sensibility. The one crucial ingredient missing in this piece is an interesting consciousness. The writer might have, for instance, started in the first-person rather than the third, drawing on his own years of university life to give his argument a sense of emotional immediacy to go with its intellectual substance. Instead, his voice is that of a vague, disembodied, complainer.]'

Labels: SOS

The first signal Division I’s dashboard indicators project [Cute name, and UD's just able to make out that it has something to do with cars.] has revealed is that the “check engine” light is on. Athletics spending is progressing at a rate three times that of overall university spending — a pace presidents and chancellors know is not sustainable in the long run. [The piece is about to announce a new service for member universities -- the NCAA will provide schools with comparative sports spending numbers from the other schools. Note that the piece does begin with a seeming acknowledgment of problems in bigtime university spending on athletics. But, typical of bath salt writing, it will do this only in order to calm readers' fears as the piece progresses.]

While the blinking beacon may be alarming to some, others are reassured [The calming process begins.] that the NCAA’s collaboration with the National Association of College and University Business Officers to produce a uniform data-reporting system and provide dashboard indicators that allow for peer comparison will serve as a financial GPS for big-time intercollegiate athletics. [Note the hokey playing out of the dashboard metaphor.]

The dashboards, which are expected to be finalized in spring 2008, are to fiscal responsibility as the APR is to academic reform. [This sentence exemplifies the to be verb problem in writing, about which SOS has written in greater detail here. In one sentence, the writer has given us four instances of is: are, to be, are, is. It makes for a dull and wordy sentence. Rewrite it something like this: The dashboards, due in spring 2008, are a kind of APR of fiscal responsibility. Your reader knows what APR means.] They are benchmarks developed on a by-campus basis that provide presidents, athletics directors and university CFOs the most comprehensive, accurate and comparable data to date that inform decisions about athletics spending.

That means Kent State can compare itself to its Mid-American Conference peers in its reliance upon university-allocated funds as a percentage of the total athletics budget. Texas Tech can see where it ranks among Big 12 schools in football revenues. Duke can run a comparison with other private institutions on athletics giving. Oregon can determine its percentile in revenues via ticket sales. Illinois can stack up against other traditional basketball powers in facility investment. A Football Championship Subdivision institution can see the investment it takes to reclassify to the Football Bowl Subdivision. [This is a good paragraph, with varied prose and rich examples. It mentions one of UD's favorites, Texas Tech, where four of every ten annual debt service dollars repays loans for athletics facilities. Texas Tech's program just emptied its reserve fund because of a multi-million dollar deficit.]

In other words, the dashboards can be all things to all schools. Simply put, it is the best customized financial data Division I has ever had, and the system is being applauded by those who will use it. [