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Sunday, August 12, 2007
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Quadraphonics UD's been spending a lot of time in the car with Mr UD, listening to How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, an effing endless number of educational discs... UD learned a lot of this material long ago from Roger Scruton's book, The Aesthetics of Music, but, okay, she can always learn more... But there's so much of it! And Mr UD is a fanatic about listening to every single one of the lectures... It's UD's fault, really. For years she's held it over Mr UD that while he's well-educated and knows many things, he knows (and seems to care) virtually nothing about music. Mr UD's musical ignorance has come in handy as a kind of cudgel to hit him with when he laughs at UD's mathematical ignorance. At least I know what cadence is! But she seems finally to have provoked him into this fit of autodidacticism, in which he's removing her one intellectual weapon against him... Anyway, this is by way of introducing the following thought: Universities have their own music. Call it quadraphonia. A blogger like UD can never know the on-the-ground reality of more than a few campuses, but she writes relentlessly about them all. In part she can do this because, considered closely enough, each campus has a certain tune all its own, a certain distinctive sensibility, that can be intuited from the sorts of news stories that emanate from it, from the way faculty and administration and students tend to talk and write, from the way the campus looks, whatever. I suppose this is what the schools themselves would call branding -- at least when it's positive. When it's negative, when a school's leitmotif is pretty much totally dissonant (current top pick here would be Florida A&M), they call it a public relations problem. UD looks briefly now at two American universities, one of which seems to typify the baroque circularity of the school that never gets anywhere, while the other may prove to have the linearity of the classical symphony... Eastern Illinois University has an Athletic Director who seems to have a problem with women. He seems to harass some of them. But either because it doesn't want to spend the money buying out his contract, or because he's buddies with important administrators and boosters, or because the university sincerely believes that despite several complaints, he's innocent, the university has absolved him of all charges (it also has, rather confusingly, mandated counseling). The anguished comments at the end of the newspaper article suggest that this is a university whose ground bass lacks an upper part. SUNY Albany, on the other hand, represents a later stage of quadraphonic development. Here there's clear dynamic potential, largely because of honest critics on the faculty (score one for tenure). The Times Union reports: ...[A] long-term erosion in student quality. Not enough full-time professors. A campus culture that draws students who come to party rather than study. |