'When I began my undergraduate career at Harvard a little over two years ago, I spent the early days, weeks, and months floating around in a haze. I felt out to sea in my classes, and socially, the scene surprised me. I had expected Harvard to be an oasis of intellectualism, and it wasn’t. [In a haze, out to sea, an oasis... We've got a mess of metaphors here. But the first-person approach is a good idea, and this Harvard undergraduate writing in the campus newspaper is about to say something very important, and say it pretty well.]

To some degree, this lack of intellectualism was a relief: It meant that I didn’t have to worry so much about whether people considered me an intellectual powerhouse, because they weren’t intellectual powerhouses either. It was a shame so few of them read [Note: This is a current Harvard undergraduate talking about the reading habits of others like her. Many do not read... Which can't really be true. But many probably read very little.] and so few of them cared about the happenings of the world [Weak phrase, happenings of the world. Vague. Global events, for instance, might be better.], but at least I felt less guilty when I spent more time freshman year surfing Facebook than thinking about art or culture or politics.

And though I would come to get used to this aspect [grow accustomed would be more elegant.] of the Harvard landscape (and discover microcosms of intellectualism on campus), the pervasive apathy still troubles me. The ability to engage with the world in a multifaceted way, to employ the approach of liberal arts, and to absorb and apply new knowledge over the course of a lifetime is an essential part of being an intelligent and worthwhile person. [This writing is weak, but describing the nature and value of intellectuality is very difficult.] If Harvard, an apex of higher learning, does not hold the pursuit of intellectualism as a central value, then can any other place be expected to?

The phenomenon may have to do with the college admissions game that has reached maniac-scale intensity [maniac-intensity would be better.]. According to a 2000 College Board report, between 1994 and 1999, the number of first-year students in American universities grew by 200,000. In part, this owes to [owes to is awkward] an expanding demographic, Generation Y. Combined with better recruiting by colleges and programs such as the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (HFAI), winning a spot at Harvard (or Yale or any other top college) has become a considerable feat. The cause of Harvard’s intellectual decline in this period of hyper-competitiveness is two-pronged: It has to do with the transformation of the college student makeup, as well as the growing college preparatory hysteria.

The first part of this lack is due in part to something that is quite good about Harvard: the place is no longer a rich, white boys’ club. Harvard, in the trend of colleges nationally, is increasingly diverse, particularly socioeconomically. [Four is's in two sentences. Let's see how we can avoid them.... An easy initial move: Get rid of that is. Just drop it and read the phrase without it: ...something quite good about Harvard. Much better. Okay. Let's go back and look at the first is. How about This lack stems from? So now we've got This lack stems from something quite good about Harvard. Let's keep our third is in: the place is no longer, etc. As for our final is, I propose radical surgery: Drop the sentence altogether. The sentence right after this one carries the substance of the point.] Thanks to programs such as HFAI, Harvard draws from a much wider cross-section of applicants than it once did.

But this unquestionable benefit has had negative side effects [Drop side.]. With an influx of students from for whom a major draw is post-college career success and earning potential, there will naturally be less emphasis on the “frivolous” pursuits of the liberal arts and more on activities and areas of study that are distinctly pre-professional. [See that that are toward the end of the sentence? Just as with that is before, drop it and read the phrase: activities and areas of study distinctly pre-professional. Get it? Wordy writing is in part about sticking in unnecessary little phrases like these.] Though of course there are exceptions, this culture increasingly pervades campus. This is why there has been a surge of campus business groups, and so-called “leadership” organizations. This is evident, too, in the rise in number of concentrators in areas such as economics, which serves for many as a pre-business track. [The last two sentences both begin with the sometimes confusing and often dull phrase This is. Go back and find the heart of these sentences - campus business groups, economics concentrators -- that's where you should find their first words.] A Crimson survey of the Class of 2007 found that more than 60 percent of those entering the workforce were pursuing jobs in finance. [Too ingy. Rewrite: pursued jobs in finance.]

On the flipside, the intellectual’s status as an endangered species is also caused by a sort of leisure class mania. [To be verb plus passive voice. Rewrite: Leisure class mania also contributes to the intellectual's endangered status.] In this atmosphere of intense competition, the college admissions game has been transformed into an industry. Students are sent off to preparatory programs, and their parents drop thousands of dollars on private SAT tutors and college consultants. Ivywise, a New York-based college consulting firm, charges anywhere from $1,000 for a one-time consultation to $30,000 for a two-year 100-hour program. The company promises pleasing results: 75 percent of its clients go on to attend Ivy League colleges. Ivywise provides a slew of standard services like scheduling students’ testing dates and summer programs and editing admissions essays. But some of the firm’s offerings are a bit unsettling: One Ivywise package promises to “identify the student’s passions and interests.” A teenager, we gather, couldn’t possibly figure out his interests on his own. At least, he couldn’t possibly pinpoint which “passions” would win him a spot at a top college. [Fine writing throughout, but drop quotation marks around last use of word passions.]

When it comes to the college admissions process, vigor is hardly a virtue. The modern child may be a whiz at excelling in [drop at excelling] his courses and extracurriculars, but this does not make him capable of intellectualism. His schedule is jam-packed with all the stuff his hovering helicopter parents and college consultants have picked out for him. He learns the ways of networking and time management, not the ways of devouring a poem or pondering life’s great questions.

Upon arrival at Harvard, many of these students are not so sure why they’re here. Some burn out completely — free from the watchful eyes of mother and father, they stop attending classes and flop as students. But most of them simply don’t get what they should be getting out of college — the rigorous pursuit of liberal arts — because they can’t escape the résumé padding of their earlier years. They continue to take courses they’re not really interested in and they participate in activities they find dull because these are the ways to land jobs at Goldman Sachs & Co.

Though the Harvard of 2007 is a progressive and admirable institution, something has been lost. We’ve mistaken grades, test scores, meaningless extracurriculars, and our college admission as a collective barometer for the successful young person. These are components of personal success, but they are irrelevant if, as individuals, we are deficient in intellectual depth. Only when we recognize (and change) this, will we be able to get something worthwhile out of college.'

Labels: SOS

'I have sat quietly by reading the headlines and editorials about Glenn Poshard, a dizzying roller coaster ride that made me wish I had skipped the chili dog. [A quiet, dizzying roller coaster ride. Confusing.] He devoted his life to serving people of Southern Illinois and is charismatic, enthusiastic and dedicated to his community. [You can be many good things and a plagiarist too.]

I watched him dancing on the sidewalk in Carbondale's Town Square last December, bobbing along to the music of the middle school marching band with his grandson, Tucker, on his shoulders. It was anybody's call as to which of them were having the better time at the annual Lights Parade. He is genuine and caring. [This kitschy description intends to bring a tear to the eye. But you can bob along to the beat, have a grandson with a cute name, and still plagiarize.]

You can hear it in the squeals of laughter of his grandson. [How much, really, can we conclude from this laughter? Hitler made toddlers laugh at Nuremburg, you know...] And if that's not enough, you can read it in his public record.

How is it that a self-appointed, nameless band of plagiarism vigilantes can tear apart a man's career, family and reputation? [John Wayne talk.] The accusations don't have to be true to be damaging. Just because he's accused doesn't make him guilty.

Tossing out a lifetime of stellar public service over a passage written years ago is incomprehensible. At minimum, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. Until the hooded, neo-Nazi, Klansmen of plagiarism snuff out their burning torches and find something better to do there will be no peace. Show us your faces so that we may level the playing field and scare up the skeletons in your dark closets. [Skeletal masked closeted torch-bearing fascists cavort on tilted fields.]

We can look Glenn Poshard in the eye. But we cannot see in yours.'

Labels: SOS

'With some trepidation, I venture a few thoughts on the controversy over residence-hall programs at the University of Delaware. Trepidation because the kind of position I take on these issues is increasingly wearisome to hold given the polarization in online discussions of academia. [UD is not at all sure she sees the polarization. I don't see anyone out there - online or off - defending programs like Delaware's. Quite a number of these programs, for students, and sometimes for faculty, poke their heads out, attract enough outrage to appear in the press, and then, in seconds, get killed. I don't read anyone, left, right, or center, mourning their passing. It's too easy for Tim to begin his remarks with a gesture of despair about academic polarization, as if there's no common ground. There's common ground, and it's clear right there in the comment thread on Tim's blog. He has plenty in common with commenters to his right, like withywindle.] but I wish I could write in a looser, more enjoyably idiosyncratic, more compelling way about these questions like Oso Raro, but I’ve made my rhetorical bed and I’m stuck with it.

Before I try to stick any kind of proportionality or nuance into the discussion, one thing should be clear: the program at Delaware as described in the press is just plain wrong, and that’s even if the press description is exaggerated or out of context in some respect. Even if the content of the program weren’t simple-minded and reductive (which it is), doing it as a mandatory institutional program in residence-halls is a big mistake. I’m not sure there’s anything that’s appropriate to that context beyond making sure people know how to evacuate in a fire and communicating basic institutional safety policies (such as no fire sources in rooms). The moment you mandate that all students receive safe-sex tutorials or drug and alcohol abuse prevention training, you’ve exposed the institution to in loco parentis, and where’s that going to stop? [Absolutely correct, and an important point. Imagine if GWU, UD's institution, mandated anti-anti-semitic sessions in response to scrawled swastikas around campus which now turn out -- most or all of them -- to have been a hoax invented by an attention-seeking freshman.] Moreover, if you’re going to ennumerate the “rights and responsibilities” of people living in university housing, you’ve got to include much more forcefully that you have the right to think whatever you want – including to question some of the precepts and approaches of diversity training. (The document does say you have the choice to “stand up for yourself and others and speak up for what you believe has value”, but in context, that seems to mean only that you are encouraged to defend an active commitment to diversity.)



But ok. How to move beyond simple sputtering outrage at the supposed dominance of political correctness [Again, I don't see the sputtering. I see the outrage, and I applaud it. Outrage can catalyze you to act against injustice. How many Delawaresque programs are still lobotomizing students because students aren't strong and clear enough about their speech and privacy rights to protest?], leftist academics or whatever boogeyman is the label of choice in this round of postings?

The first bit of proportionality I’d interject is to look at the source of some simple-minded kinds of political and institutional misbehavior. In this case, I’m guessing that activist students are at least part of where this program is coming from, probably working with a residential administrator or dean who has a hard time thinking beyond dogma.

I’m going to be a bit condescending here, but students are students, and they make mistakes because they’re still learning, whether they’re left-wing activists or intensely single-minded premeds. [Again, this is an important point. Many students are supercharged with responsiveness to perceived injustices, and yet they're still young. This combination can create serious programmatic errors.] That’s what they are in college to do. Residential colleges sell themselves precisely on the point that some learning takes place outside of the classroom through extracurricular activities, social life and so on. Students with strong political or philosophical views naturally turn to their own educational institution to explore how to make those views real or powerful or transformative. Americans who were in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s couldn’t do much to directly touch South Africa, so we tried to figure out how to mobilize our own institutions to touch South Africa, however indirectly. I have to admit, looking back, that many of us understood very little about how divestment might concretely function, or about the costs and risks we were asking our institutions to incur. But partly I got a better understanding of both of those things by being involved, an understanding I don’t think I could have gotten just by studying in a classroom. I learned about a lot of the shortcomings of activism by being active.

In other cases, some of these kinds of commitments come from individual faculty or administrators that I wouldn’t hesitate to call simple-minded hacks. (That, readers of this blog might recall, was my first and primary comment on Ward Churchill: whatever else the guy was or did, he was a third-rate hack.) [This is a crucial point, and one that I don't think Tim does enough with. Universities may have in them administrators who think all day about making already culturally competent people culturally competent, through activities that skirt or simply are indoctrination. UD sees these administrators as the enemies of the piece.]

The valid issue in that case is then, “Why allow such extensive access to institutional programs and policy to either inexperienced activists or hacks, then?” Yup, that’s an issue, and it’s well worth exploring a bit more.



In many such cases, it’s not that political projects coming from a group of activist students or from a few activist administrators or faculty members are deeply shared in a consensual way by a large majority of institutional actors and thus become institutional projects by general acclaim. [Too true. Most academics are appalled at the vulgarity of thought and behavior associated with these sorts of activists. That's why I said above that Tim overestimates the degree of polarization among academics.] It’s more that the autonomy and decentralization of academic life which most of us cherish creates a complicated burden when it comes to blocking somebody else’s pet obsessions or commitments. [Yes. Another crucial point. UD would never want to restrict that autonomy. But it's the gradual centralization of authority over matters of social thought and behavior on campus into the hands of diversity appointments that often instigates the scandals.]

Suppose I see a group of students campaigning to get the institution to commit to some political objective that I think is unwise or simplistic in some respect. I don’t quite want to rise to block that on the grounds that anything and everything which is “political” is wrong because that can lead to some truly silly conclusions. I’m interested in the political commitments of the Free Culture movement – but quite beyond that movement’s specific views, it seems obvious to me that intellectual property policy, open-source publishing and so on are intimately relevant to the everyday business of scholars, librarians, and teachers. I’m not wild about some of the rhetoric and unexamined premises associated with demands for universities to have sustainability policies, but it would be silly to rule all of that out of bounds because it’s “political” – environmental sustainability might turn out to lead to some good economic outcomes for an institution, like reducing energy usage, but it’s also a legitimate claim on some level about what an institution can or should do in the world. [The problem with this example is that it doesn't share the intimately mind-penetrating character of diversity training. No one's going to call you a racist because you take a certain position on energy use.] Hell, devoting a big proportion of a college curriculum to studying “the Great Books” is political in some fashion. [Having stretched things too far in his first example, Tim now stretches them to tatters. The basic distinction between selfless intellectual activity with texts -- the foundational, definitive activity of universities -- and self-obsessed personal identity politics in the hands of doctrinaire trainers couldn't be clearer. There may be political as well as intellectual grounds for Great Books choices, but these choices, their justification, and their incorporation into a curriculum, are in an entirely different moral and institutional universe from the fucking with people's heads that is diversity training at its worst, as at Delaware.] You can’t oppose a political argument about institutional politics on the grounds that you yourself are too fastidious to ever be political, because it won’t take long before you’re hoist on the same petard.

So I’d have to take any case of activist demand as it comes. Now what? Well, if it’s students, I honestly don’t want to spend my life running around squashing any student political project I have a disagreement with. That’s not my job. In fact, it’s the opposite of my job: it’s being an anti-teacher, an authoritarian, misusing my power. If it’s a hack on the faculty or the administration? In self-interested terms, I honestly have to weigh whether it’s worth tangling with the person openly, about what kinds of hassles that person can visit upon me in retaliation.

In either case, there’s also a question of the consequence of being a crusader on every single issue where some other institutional actor has what I think is a bad idea. It’s one thing to block or criticize a proposal for institutionalization of a political project when it crosses my desk naturally: when faculty are asked by central administration for feedback, when it comes to the floor of a general meeting, when I’m sitting in a committee devoted to a particular kind of issue, when students or colleagues ask my opinion, when it’s an issue that’s known to be near and dear to my heart because of my specialized areas of knowledge. Or just when I have the time and the energy to compose a blog post, which has a very gentle impact on most issues. For example, some years back, some students here wanted an Ethnic Studies program. I thought (and still think) that was a bad idea for some very simple, non-political reasons (duplication of programs, greater demands on already over-extended faculty, no resources for new faculty lines, weakness of our institutional model for interdisciplinary programs) and some “political” reasons as well (I simply think Ethnic Studies is a bad way to organize the study of many very important and legitimate topics). This was a case where it made sense for me to be in the conversation because what I do was directly relevant to what the students wanted to do.

If you insist on being actively involved every single time someone else in your institution is doing something objectionable, you will almost certainly devolve into being a crank and an asshole. You can’t do that and not become tendentious and self-absorbed, that kind of omnipresent involvement is intrinsically narcissistic. At some point, it inevitably is going to affect how well you do the job that you’ve been hired to do, because there are only so many hours in the day. If you’re always at committee meetings, protest gatherings, scribbling furious emails, poking into dark corners with a cattle prod, then you’re not in the classroom or the library or the lab.

What some people settle for is splitting the difference: being furious at everything but not having the time to be involved with changing any outcomes through direct time-consuming involvement in deliberative process, through painstaking efforts to persuade others. [A lot of these important observations pertain to the scandal of bigtime university sports. Faculty understandably don't want to deal with it.] When you arrive at that point, you have no hope to change any outcome whether you’re coming to meetings or not, because you’ve got no persuasive tools left to you. You started by rolling your eyes derisively in a wholly justifiable way at the excesses of others (probably in concert with the majority of your colleagues) but now you’re the one everyone rolls their eyes at. You’re not connected to anything, not sympathetic to anybody else’s projects, not discriminate in what fights you pick or when you pick them. You’ve got nothing left to help you judge when the stakes are high and when they’re low: your institutional profile is “junkyard dog”, biting and howling at everything.

So sometimes dumb ideas and fringe political visions are going to become institutional projects because the sensible middle is mutually and simultaneously trying to avoid being drawn into this kind of indiscriminate misanthropy. Sometimes hacks and sweetly well-meaning but naive activists are actually pretty savvy about this aspect of institutional life, and know how to muscle something in under the radar, how to keep from triggering a major deliberative process where they’ll get blocked.

That’s one context to keep in mind. Another is that some ideas only become wrong when they’re simplistically truncated so that they can become institutional programs and policies, but that the precursor concepts, ideas and insights are something else entirely. And also that some institutional projects may eventually take a wrong turn on some smaller point, but are basically well-meaning, serious attempts to deal with genuine issues and problems. Diversity is a real question, in many ways, and it’s worth thinking about how to institutionally work towards it.

For example, with the Delaware residential life program, there’s nothing wrong per se with asking straights when they first realized their orientation or when they came out as straights. [There's everything wrong with it. It's nobody's institutional business what my private self-conception may be. Nor does straight/gay as a dichotomy, or "orientation" as descriptive of anything remotely true about my existential experience, make sense to me.] That is, nothing wrong if that’s a sly or mischievious [sp?] aside in a personal conversation about sexuality, or a subversive question directed at a public figure who is intensely anti-gay, or as a way in an intellectual discussion about the history of sexuality to illustrate what the ten-dollar word “heteronormativity” actually means. Turning the question into a set part of a pseudo-mandatory workshop (there’s some confusion at Delaware about how strongly students are encouraged to attend) takes everything valuable out of it. It turns something sly into dogma. [That shit's as sly as Sly Stallone, Tim. It ain't sly.]

Or take the assertion in one of the training documents for the Delaware workshops that all white Americans are racists because they are socialized to a racial identity associated with privilege. Put it that way and it’s crude. Put it in a workshop as an assertion of empirical fact as opposed to a tendentious argument with a pile of priors a hundred miles high sitting on it and you’ve just sailed off the edge of stupid. [No, you're still anchored at stupid.] In part precisely because accusations of racism are taken more seriously in early 21st Century American life than they were in 1960, you can’t casually scale from a general description of the consequences of a social identity to a highly personalized accusation unless you want those accused to treat the idea of racism as trivially generalized and meaningless.

But there are complex questions and debates to be explored about how historically-produced identities structure everyday psychological experience, social organization, and so on. There is an interesting scholarly literature on the history of whiteness. And so on. Part of the problem for me is that some of the people who react negatively to something like this program at Delaware act as if the deeper, more complex, more interesting scholarly debates and discussions are equally risible and discardable, but somehow we never really get around to that kind of conversation. [This is unfair as a description of most people interested in the matter. It's precisely because many scholars take seriously the intricacy and importance of these subjects that their outrage flashes out when activists beshit them.] We get stuck with the hacks and the polemicists. We talk endlessly, oh so endlessly, about Ward Churchill etcetera. We never get to the really deep literature on Native American history that might come to some vaguely similar moral conclusions as Churchill but in much more subtle and nuanced ways. [How does a serious scholar get vaguely near the moral conviction that white people deserved to die in the Towers?] We don’t get to talk about David Roediger or Noel Ignatieff on whiteness, or a huge complex well-researched literature on the history of racial identity in the United States as a whole.

When I say talk, I mean it. I don’t agree necessarily with Roediger and Ignatieff, particularly in terms of the way they read off the history of whiteness to a contemporary political praxis. I tend to come at a lot of the history of identity and the politics connected to that history the way that Anthony Appiah does in some of his recent work, as a skeptic. But Appiah’s work is a million miles away from quick dismissals of “political correctness” that are meant to encompass both superficial institutional projects and detailed monographs written in good faith and with serious craft. At some point, if we’re going to still have anything resembling scholarship left in the smoking ruins of culture war [This language takes us back to Tim's first paragraph. As cultural description, it is unconvincing.], some of the critics need to stir themselves and respond like scholars to tough, nuanced, challenging work rather than continuously dwell on how the hacks have been parasitically turning that work into slogans and screeds.'

Labels: SOS

'Among the many works of art hanging in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts’ atrium, Nantucket artist and SMFA alum Joan Albaugh’s oil paintings were part of a sea of canvases. [Awkward first sentence Her works were among many; her works were part of a sea... The feel of this is redundant. Circular.]

Touted as the largest public art sale in New England, with 4,000 original works and prints from 800 artists, the 26th annual School of the Museum of Fine Arts December sale kicked off last night with a celebration off Boston’s Fenway. The sale features work from students, faculty, alumni and other artists affiliated with the school. [Transition from first to second paragraph murky.]

Albaugh, a 1981 graduate of the SMFA, is known for painting houses without windows.

“I don’t like getting caught up in the details of a house,” Albaugh said last week. Winter light on the island also contributed to the conception of the windowless dwellings.

“The light’s so bright on a house it obliterates the windows,” she said.

At the SMFA, Albaugh studied with professors Barney Rubenstein and Henry Schwartz, in critique classes. She eventually moved to New York, and was living in Jersey City when she decided to move to the island in 1994, to start her son, now Nantucket High School Junior Jack Muhlkern, in preschool.

Albaugh travels often, she said, and each of her house portraits start [Should be starts.] as a real place. Later, she plays with the composition, taking off dormers and restructuring as she goes. She’s attracted to baron landscapes, she said. [Unless the writer means -- seems unlikely -- she's attracted to baronial spreads, I think he means barren.]

“It kind of goes with the idea of isolation,” she said.

This December sale is Albaugh’s second.


Last week, SMFA curator Joanna Soltan [Same last name as UD!], put final touches on the show, as others gave preview tours of the work to patrons. Soltan, who hung the show over the past month with the help of a team of 20 or so, is in her fifth year as curator.

“I knew the space very well so I know where I want to plan the layout,” Soltan said, in her present but not overbearing Polish accent [Polish accent? Mr. UD's Polish too!] [Present but not overbearing? Perhaps the writer meant to say pleasant but not overbearing...], regarding the positioning of the exhibition walls in the SMFA’s Anderson Hall. Under 30-foot ceilings, the space in between the walls is occupied with bins and bins of unframed work, mostly from SMFA students.

Soltan oversaw the drop-off period in early November, three days in which the students, alumni, school faculty and affiliated artists participating in the show could drop off up to 10 pieces.

Soltan then worked to hang at least one piece from each artist each artist [Typo.]. After the show starts, Soltan and company rotate the work, giving pieces several hours of wall time before taking them down.

“We never get bored,” Soltan said. “For us too, it’s like a new way to see something.” [Curious that like many of the other Soltans UD's related to, this one lives in Boston and works in the arts... Wait a minute! Joanna Soltan is Mr. UD's sister! That makes her UD's sister-in-law.]

Around the school, next to some of the work, were place [placed] these blue and gold medallion-like stickers. These denote the favorite works of this year’s art luminaries – Boston area reporters, personalities and curators – asked to share their opinions.


... The SMFA December Sale is open from 12-8 p.m. Thursday, and from 12-6 p.m. Friday through Monday in the first floor of the school, located at 230 The Fenway in Boston, next to the MFA.'

Labels: SOS

'I see why a contribution to, say, the Salvation Army should be eligible for a charitable deduction. It helps the poor. But why, exactly, should a contribution to the already extraordinarily wealthy Guggenheim Museum or to Harvard University (which already has an endowment of more than $30 billion)?

Awhile ago, New York's Lincoln Center had a gala supported by the charitable contributions of hedge-fund industry leaders, some of whom take home $1 billion a year. I may be missing something, but this doesn't strike me as charity. ...

It turns out that only an estimated 10% of all charitable deductions are directed at the poor. So here's a modest proposal. At a time when the number of needy continues to rise, when government doesn't have the money to do what's necessary for them and when America's very rich are richer than ever, we should revise the tax code: Focus the charitable deduction on real charities.

If the donation goes to an institution or agency set up to help the poor, the donor gets a full deduction. If the donation goes somewhere else -- to an art palace, a university, a symphony or any other nonprofit -- the donor gets to deduct only half of the contribution.'

'The business of philanthropy and the purposes of fund raising — a $200 billion annual marketplace of givers and receivers — are complex. [Beware of people who begin arguing by announcing the immense complexity of their issue... an immensity only insiders can understand. This comes across as hocus-pocus stuff -- I'm not going to argue against my opponents on the merits; I'm going to insist that they -- and you, the reader -- can't hope to understand the mystical intricacies of my field. This approach is a dud on many levels, but mainly it's a dud because it's condescending.] That's why it's easy for casual observers to mistake generosity for self-interest. [Reich says nothing about the motives of the givers. He talks only about definitions of true charity, and about fair distribution.]

Robert B. Reich made that mistake in his recent Outlook column ("Harvard effect/ When charity really isn't ... ," Oct. 21) where he argued that we have entered what might be characterized as an era of Philanthropic Darwinism, a time when big donors give to bigger and bigger arts and education institutions, all designed — in his mind — to promote a wealthy lifestyle and a hefty tax deduction. So, he would cut in half donors' charitable tax deduction for gifts to the arts and universities because they do not meet his definition of worthy, i.e., helping the poor. [It's not only Reich's definition. Giving to universities and concert halls is not direct charitable aid to the poor.]

I know there are arts organizations and patrons who can make an argument for the positive impact they have on society. [positive impact they have on society is dead language. And the deadness, in the context of this argument, is no mere stylistic matter. If this is the best the writer can do by way of describing the charitable value of the arts, the reader's suspicion that Reich's right only grows.] So, I want to concentrate on the darts he threw at the university world, as he has me seething at his fund-raising fumble. [Okay. If you've been reading SOS for any length of time, you know exactly what she's going to throw darts at here. Yes. Seething. I'm seething! I'm at the boiling point! Hold me back! ... Talking about how damn mad you are is an argument-killer. All you're really doing is showing off what you take to be your moral superiority -- I mean, I'm so ethical, my heart bleeds so for the poor, that I can't control my rage when know-nothings like Reich run their mouths... This sort of thing makes the reader distrust and dislike you. You can't control your emotions. You flatter yourself that you're better than other people. Plus -- see dud approach #1 -- you think you know more than other people.]

Education is the best way, bar none, for people to move up the economic and social ladder. In the 1950s, the GI Bill made education possible for the middle class. Today, it is private citizens, corporations and foundations whose generosity supports tens of thousands of first-generation college students and gives them and their families tools and hope for the future. [Cliche-ridden language throughout, and forgets to mention that it's still overwhelmingly the government that helps out universities.]

Let's look at the University of Houston and what increased philanthropy means to Houston's university.

We are definitely not the ivy-covered palace Reich imagines all universities to be. [At no point does Reich say all universities are Harvard.] This university attracts a large percentage of students who are the first in their families to attend college, so we need scholarships by the barrelful.

No young person should have to drop out of college for lack of funds. More than two-thirds of UH students receive some form of financial aid, but primarily in the form of loans that create a huge financial burden that may take years to repay. Private scholarships make the real difference in getting these students through graduation to become part of the educated workforce needed by Houston industry. That doesn't sound elite to me.

UH must pursue philanthropic gifts for endowed chairs and professorships to recruit and retain the intellectual firepower that will attract bright new students, federal grant support and help create economic prosperity for the nation's fourth-largest city.

And we must build this campus anew because UH is full of young scientists, budding artists and students crowded together elbow to elbow. Our research facilities house faculty aching for the tools and space they must have to apply for and fulfill the requirements of federal grants.

The Moores School of Music is bursting at the seams with too many students and not enough rehearsal space. The Bauer College of Business is exploding with students seeking that old fashioned thing called a job. [that old fashioned thing... Hard to get a grip on his tone in this piece. Indignant, yes. But is he being sarcastic here? Not clear.] We simply need more classroom buildings and more labs.

Today UH has the largest space deficit of all universities in the state, and that's just to serve our current students. So we seek philanthropic support for the buildings this campus must have to stand tall for a new generation of Houstonians. We're not building a palace, Mr. Reich; we're building an ark of economic opportunity. [Again, a strange sort of argument that misreads what Reich says and then attacks him frontally like this. The whole Mr. Reich thing is just weird.] And if philanthropy can help us achieve flagship university status in Texas, then it will be money well spent.

This year, the UH System received $54.3 million from generous contributors, a 37 percent increase over the previous year.

That's just the start. We want our philanthropic intent to be clear. The University of Houston is not seeking to raise more and more money just to build a big reserve. We want to make our case to our alumni, friends and donors that we seek to raise the philanthropic resources that will build a truly great University — one that Houston can be proud to call its flagship public university.

And that Mr. Reich, is the true purpose of philanthropy and the impact it will have on the future for all of us — colleges and universities, art museums and ballet companies. We are all 100 percent tax deductible and a bargain indeed for Houston and the nation. [Essentially, this piece comes across to UD as cynical. The writer isn't really engaging Reich. He's using the occasion of Reich having written about giving to universities in order to remind the newspaper's readers that they should give to his university.]'

Labels: SOS

'Just weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into World War II, Utah State made its own kind of history.

The Aggies lost their final game of the 1941 season and finished 0-8.

It was Utah State's first winless season of more than four games and it was the last time the Aggies ended a season without a victory. Sixty-six years later, the Aggies find themselves in a down-to-the-wire struggle to avoid making the wrong kind of history.

Heading into Saturday's game at heavily favored Fresno State, Utah State is 0-8. With four games remaining - three on the road and one at home against nationally ranked Boise State - the Aggies' prospects for victory are grim. [As grim as Pearl Harbor.]



"Life is hard. This is hard, and why we're being tested like this, I wish I had the answer for you," said coach Brent Guy said [Typo there. Extra "said."], trying to remain optimistic. "But we've had a lot of opportunities to win games this season. We've been close. Now, we've got to complete one and we have to do it fast."

This season, Utah State has led four times in the fourth quarter, only to lose in the closing minutes to UNLV (23-16), Wyoming (32-18), San Jose State (23-20) and Nevada (31-28).

Still, the Aggies have lost 14 straight games, going back to 2006. They have lost 25 of their past 27 games, including 12 straight on the road and 10 straight within the Western Athletic Conference.

It's been a grinding stretch that has tested every player and coach who has been part of each defeat - close or otherwise.

"I'm generally an upbeat kind of guy - not much brings me down," said senior fullback-tight end Jimmy Bohm. "[So] keeping guys mentally excited about the game, that's what [the] seniors and leaders of the team are trying to do."

Said Guy: "I'm really, really proud of this group of seniors. These are the guys I inherited - that were here when I got here, guys that could have gone somewhere else. One left, but the rest stayed. I think that's a credit to them and why this team is still really fun to coach."



Fun?

"You can tell by the way they practice that they are still trying very hard," Guy said. "They chirp around and they laugh with each other, Not that that's the way you want to actually practice [N of Not shouldn't be capitalized.]. But they don't come out with 0-8 hanging over their head. They come out with, 'OK, how can we win the next game? What do we have to do?' That's encouraging to me."

This season to forget continues a long stretch of futility for Utah State, which hasn't won as many as four games since 2002 and hasn't enjoyed a .500 season since 1997. [The team's graduation rate is 54%.]



"To break a losing tradition is tough," said Keith Henschen, a University of Utah sports psychologist. "You almost have to start over because people actually start believing they are going to lose. Not consciously, but subconsciously." [Henschen elsewhere argues that "many teams go through four identifiable stages of performance development – forming, storming, norming and performing."]



Utah State started over by hiring Guy in 2004. He was the Aggies' fifth head coach since 1992.

"A problem at Utah State is that it has been a stepping stone for coaches," Henschen said. "There has been very little continuity and, as a result, very little accountability regarding what is expected." [Bet grabbing and tossing all those coaches has cost the university quite a lot of money. In university football, long stretches of futility tend to be expensive.]

Besides the coaching turnover, Henschen blames the losing environment on the Aggies' tradition of playing two or three "money" games every season - games they have little chance of winning but results in a huge payday for the athletic program.

"By overscheduling, they keep beating their kids down - physically and mentally," he said. "I feel sorry for them. Why do they keep doing that? . . . It just feeds into a situation where everybody involved starts thinking, 'We can't win.' It definitely becomes a psychological situation." [Keith, you have a PED degree, which SOS takes to be a Physical Education Doctorate. Surely you understand the money game.]



Guy seems to understand, saying the hardest thing about the ongoing losing streak is "the emotional toll - the toll you try to keep off the kids. It's a tremendous burden for them because they continually get asked about it and continually have to answer for it."

Of course, it happens at other schools. [Of course. We're not the only ones, you know...]

Three years ago, New Mexico State went 0-12 under coach Hal Mumme.

"The toughest thing is getting the players to believe in what you're doing," he said."It's almost a player-by-player thing and it's very difficult to do."

This season, Idaho is 1-8 under first-year coach Robb Akey.

"When the losses start mounting up, it gets a little heavy," he said. "That's a battle we fight every week. What I'm trying to do is point out the positive things and show them, when we do it together, it works."

At this point, Guy believes his players might be too aware of the losing streak and are not focused on enjoying the game.'

Labels: SOS

'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

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

'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

'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. [We're living in the best of all possible worlds. It's not as if many of the schools mentioned in this article are, like Texas Tech, ancient hulking sports factories with almost no interest in academics, schools who'll be made so anxious about this new data about what their rivals are spending that they'll add a few more catastrophic athletic expenditures to the ones they've already made. No -- things are great, and they'll be made greater by the dashboard indicators.]

“We do a lot of benchmarking at the institutional level,” said Michigan State University’s Kathy Lindahl, the school’s vice president for financial administration. “The dashboard project for athletics has tremendous potential in that it gives you instant validation as to whether you are ahead of the curve, behind it or in the ballpark. The data bring athletics to a level of sophistication that universities are accustomed to in other areas of the campus.” [Machine-generated prose, with an eerie manufactured enthusiasm thrown in... Oh, and here's another example of this sort of prose...]

... “Presidents are deeply engaged in benchmarking in every other aspect of our work — why not in athletics?” University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher said. “We are creating a system for accountability for the value added of a college degree, a system about what students are learning from their general studies program and a system about the degree to which students are satisfied with their college experience. We are using national instrumentation to probe those areas, so the idea of a common data set for gauging the return on our investment in athletics is just as important.” [Gauging what's going on -- financially, legally, morally, academically -- in most of bigtime university athletics isn't about dashboards. It's about sledgehammers. Texas Tech doesn't need sophisticated instrumentation to know it's got its head up its ass.]


...“The kind of change we’re talking about will be more incremental than revolutionary,” said University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Chancellor James Moeser, who as a Task Force member helped draft the white paper on the dashboard project. “But we are giving leaders the tools to make more informed decisions. It’s up to every president and chancellor to use them in their own situations.” [This overlooks the fact that presidents and chancellors, at many of these schools, have little to no power over athletics.]

...“There will be a lot more conversation between the athletics department and our vice chancellor for financial administration than there has been in the past, for example,” Moeser said. “And there will be more regular presentations by athletics to the budget committee.” [Uh-huh.]

... Task Force members acknowledge the possibility that the additional data may in fact fuel the perceived arms race in athletics [Note the word "perceived." It's not perceived. It's actual.] rather than douse the flame, but most of them downplay the concern [Bath salt prose. No cause for alarm! Keep doing what you've been doing!], saying that more accurate data beats little or unreliable information.

... Others, though, think the dashboards will prompt institutions in the upper echelon to hit cruise control and some in the lower half to step on the gas.

“Large governing bodies are guilty of that kind of behavior, and you can’t help it,” said Katie Hill, a senior associate athletics director at Clemson University. “You presume that everyone’s decision-making is based on the global good. It’s not. Does our government scale back spending because the national budget is out of hand? No. Does our national debt keep us from borrowing from China? No. We’ve heard the expression that all politics are local — well, all athletics decisions are local, too. It’s about what our universities, our athletics departments, and our fans and supporters expect from us.” [Writer sticks the truth of the situation at the end of the piece -- things like dashboard indicators hasten the trend in which schools like the University of Texas maintain obscenely over-funded sports programs, and smaller schools destroy themselves trying to keep up. The writer gives us another paragraph insisting this worry is groundless, and then he concludes the piece.]

Labels: SOS

We are writing in response to the "Our Word" editorial (including the cartoons) in Friday's DE, and Monday's "The P Word" editorial (including the cartoon), both which have occasioned a good deal of negative response on campus and in the wider community. We hope that you will explain what's puzzling about those editorials, as an initial contribution toward developing a reasoned and positive educational experience from what now is a sadly contentious episode in our university's life. [Beyond the vapid positive educational experience cliche, note that these two initial sentences are, well, puzzling. Does the word "puzzling," for instance, mean puzzling to the writers, or puzzling in the editorials? And already the tone feels condescending, irritated, defensive.]

What needs explaining is this: In Friday's paper, under the headline of [Drop of.]"Exactly what the doctor ordered," you say: "The committee has failed us. The Board of Trustees has failed us. Our university is a joke. And the Daily Egyptian is at a loss for words."

The initial question we ask is: What committee has failed you, and how? The first editorial appeared on the day that the review committee, charged last month by Chancellor Fernando Treviño, delivered its report to the chancellor, who in turn delivered it to the Board of Trustees. Yet the cartoons that follow those four sentences show a caricature labeled "blue ribbon committee" - an entity formed by SIU President Glenn Poshard, more than a year ago, which delivered its report last month. Both editorials confuse these very different committees.

These are different committees, chosen in radically different ways, and with completely different charges. We cannot speak for the "blue ribbon committee," and we certainly do not speak for the Board (any more than the Board speaks for us). Nor can we speak for President Poshard - or he, for us. However, we can speak as members of the review committee to what we have determined.

We ask that you, and all concerned persons [all concerned persons is police-speak] in our community, listen to the press conference and hear, for yourselves, that the chair of the Board of Trustees, in response to a specific question, said that "the Board does not feel that he committed plagiarism."

The chair of the review committee, however, responded to the same question by saying that the review committee concluded that "inadvertent or unintentional plagiarism" was the result of student Poshard's citation practices. (The Southern Illinoisan provides the audio: See their Web site under "Archives," Oct. 11.)

The report submitted by the review committee on the day that you published the first editorial does not consider plagiarism to be a joke. [Since it has treated it like one, it certainly does consider it a joke.] And the report submitted by the review committee on the day that you published that editorial does determine that plagiarism, understood within a particular definition of the many that exist [There aren't many definitions of plagiarism. These writers are obfuscating in an effort to get Poshard off the hook.], is present in the dissertation that student Poshard's committee approved. One item in the review committee's charge was to determine the "severity" of instances of incorrect citation. [It's clear that Poshard's dissertation represents severe plagiarism. Long verbatim passages from other places appear in it.]

Just as there is a spectrum of severity in a messy room, a case of poison ivy, a broken bone, or a misleading newspaper article, there is a spectrum of severity in plagiarism. Correlatively [Ooh, aren't we fancy. Correlatively. Throughout this piece, these two, who can't write, are talking down to students who can.], the law recognizes shades of severity in both civil and criminal cases - from negligence to intentional wrong doing; from manslaughter to first degree murder. People commonly accept that there are differences in the character of acts that make for differences in what decision is warranted. We determined that the category of "inadvertent plagiarism" was the most warranted in this case. [But why? In his remarks about the case immediately after the paper's discovery of it, Poshard himself seems to acknowledge that he was aware of what he was doing.]

Lastly, although we regret that the Board feels otherwise, that difference should suggest, at the very least, that we have acted independently in investigating the allegations and reaching our conclusions and recommendations. [What? Because you attached a bogus designation to your exoneration of him while the Board didn't bother to do this? That only makes the Board more honest than you.] Our report, listed as "Faculty Review Committee Report," along with the Board's statement and other statements and reports, is available for all to read at http://news.siu.edu.

The DE editorial board, as well as various commentators and letter writers, feel that because the review committee was composed of SIU faculty, it could not have remained objective because we were evaluating our boss. We believe that you should reconsider this presumption.

First, President Poshard is not our boss. We do not report to him directly or indirectly. We are all tenured faculty. [So? He determines your budgets, and is certainly, in a variety of other ways, in a position to make your lives unpleasant.]

Second, had the chancellor or we decided to convene an outside panel to review the allegations, this panel could not have been blind to the subject of the review (as is usually required in external, peer review). [I don't understand this sentence.]

Third, had that committee come to the same conclusion that we did, we're sure that the DE editorial board would have found many ways to discredit them, such as accusing us or the chancellor of cherry-picking panel members. To avoid any appearance of cherry-picking, the chancellor named this committee on the basis of our already being in elected positions of leadership in the Faculty Association, Faculty Senate and Graduate Council. [This is a sweet one. Choose institutional insiders to make sure the committee isn't made up of insiders.]

Fourth, we knew from the beginning that our findings would be highly scrutinized by both President Poshard's distracters [The student editors missed this one. Or did they -- as UD hopes -- non-inadvertently retain it, in order to display the semi-literacy of professors who feel comfortable condescending to students about their writing?], and his supporters. Moreover, we have our academic colleagues around the world looking over our shoulders. These concerns kept us in check, and kept us honest in our attempts to reach a fair conclusion.

Finally, as teachers and researchers, we suggest that reading our report and listening to the press conference might alleviate your sense of being at a loss for words. In the light of reading and listening to the relevant evidence, we, as members of the review committee, ask that you reconsider the belief that you have been failed, in light of reading and listening to the relevant sources of information and considering the following: [Dizzyingly circular sentence full of light.]

Had the review committee not followed due process, as set out in established university policies (specifically, in the Student Conduct Code) for investigating allegations of academic misconduct, we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not applied thought, deliberation, and analysis, and instead relied solely on plagiarism software technology to reach our conclusion, we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not gone further in our analysis than is indicated in recent media reports - which, in some cases, are misleading or inaccurate - we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not fully investigated the context and circumstances in which the alleged plagiarized text was prepared, we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not concluded that the attribution style and other errors resulted in inadvertent plagiarism, we would have failed you. [Dayenu.]

Would you want any current, former or future SIU student accused of academic dishonesty to not be treated with due process, as we have treated this former student?

Labels: SOS

'Past generations of Arizona's football and men's basketball teams wrote the headlines, but when essay assignments arrived, your high-profile athletes took a hit in the loss column. [The reporter for the University of Arizona newspaper is a freshman who writes pretty well. Naturally, though, SOS has some suggestions...] [...For instance, generations would be better than past generations. Past is implicit when you refer to generations. And while SOS is about to notice and more or less admire the flamboyant language throughout the piece, she will also issue a caution about overuse...]


Both teams held the worst graduation rates in the Pacific 10 Conference from 1997-2000, according to the NCAA's Graduation Success Rate report released Oct. 3. For the third year in a row, Arizona football occupied the Pac-10 cellar with a 41 percent graduation rate of players earning a degree within six years of enrollment.

This year, the men's basketball team joined the basement party with a backboard-shattering 25 percent graduation rate - less than half of the national average of 61 percent. [Basement party's nice, and backboard-shattering's great, but when you put them together you get a mixed metaphor.]

The McKale male ballers may have grabbed plenty of rebounds in March, but when it came down to snagging a diploma on the hardwood, three of four players shot the air ball in May. [Peppy, peppy. But a little over the top with all the sports metaphors.] Wonder if 25 percent from the free-throw line would be an acceptable performance on the court? [Very good. But I'd tighten it a bit: Would 25 percent from the free throw line look good to you? Something like that.]

Then again, look who's laughing now, sitting pretty with multi-million dollar bankrolls. [Look who's laughing now is a walloping cliche... But SOS has pointed out before on this blog that sports writing is cliche writing, so there may be no way out of this...]

"For the elite-level kid, basketball is everything," said Josh Pastner, a UA men's basketball assistant coach. "Why do you think Mike Bibby came here? He came here to get ready for his chosen profession."

Pastner believes the NCAA data is skewed, since the numbers penalize student-athletes who leave school to turn professional. [Um, in what way is this skewed? It's exactly what the numbers mean to reveal.] The percentage also fails to credit former players like Mile Simon, who left Arizona in 1998 but returned to finish his degree outside of the designated six-year period.

Can you blame current NBA superstars Bibby, Gilbert Arenas and Jason Terry for walking away from Tucson to cash contracts combining for hundreds of millions?

"Make Gilbert Arenas stay four years - I want to hear how they're going to do that," said Jim Rosborough, UA special assistant to the athletic director.

In his 18 years as an assistant coach for Olson's Arizona men's basketball program, Rosborough ensured his players attended class. But since the new mindset in athletics drastically evolved into dollar signs, academic priorities evidently fell down the ladder. [Rewrite this sentence, getting rid of drastically and evidently, and choosing between dollar signs and ladders for your images.]

Through the eyes of an elite athlete, turning professional is a continuous fixture [Continuous is redundant. And I'm not sure fixture is the best image. How about saying fixation?] from youth basketball up through high school. Rosborough said those attitudes develop from parents' pressures to become great.

And as Pastner said, "In the NBA, they don't require you to have a degree."

The debate boils down to one simple argument: stay for an education or leave for financial freedom. [That's two simple arguments.] Eat at Which Wich, or own a Which Wich franchise? [Nice example.] In senior cornerback Antoine Cason's case, his education remains priceless.

Despite opportunities to enter last year's NFL draft and prognosticators pegging him as a first-round pick, Cason believes his tough decision to stay was a "gut check," showing dedication to finish out something he started. [Writer did well to highlight "gut check." It's a good phrase.]

"You can't duplicate your college experience," Cason said. "Graduation is one of my goals, and that's what I want to do."

Rocky LaRose [Great name!], a UA associate athletic director, believes being last place in the Pac-10 is irrelevant, due to the diversity of public and private schools in the conference. [Huh?] She compares athletic graduation rates to the entire UA rate, which she said has exceeded the school percentage in the past. [Confused sentence. Problem starts with the word which. Rewrite for clarity.] The recent decrease, however, dips athletes below the university percentage.

LaRose, who forecasted such a downfall, seeks an optimistic future after the football program went through four head coaches in five years between 2000-2004, leading to multiple player transfers. [Futures can't be optimistic. Only people can be optimistic. Find a better word.]

The academic unit now reports to the university side, rather than the athletics department.

More changes include a revamping of the C.A.T.S. program that Pastner describes as "the best in America" and the MVP of McKale Center. From life skills to academic help, C.A.T.S. provides athletes with the proper resou