Right after having seen a tepid performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf last month, UD turned to Taylor’s Martha and admired it all over again.

[The 2012] budget proposes no changes to traditional Pell grants, which are currently at their highest level ever. What it does is halt, after just two years, a program launched in the 2009-2010 school year that allowed students to apply for a whole second Pell grant for summer school or if they took extra credits.

That program turned out to cost 10 times more than expected, and there was no evidence it was helping anyone graduate from college faster. Instead, it appeared to be the case that for-profit colleges were gaming the system to encourage students to apply for the additional grants to take academically questionable courses.

The tax-profiteers play their games and ruin a good program.

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Update: Trash talk.

UD‘s stomping grounds are described in this way in today’s Washington Post, and it seems about right (though Mr UD claims “We are not a village.”). It’s an article about all the generators people are buying, given the constant power outages.

Because I’m feeling a little better (I’ve got bronchitis), and because today was warm and sunny, I went out to our back acre and began removing the many limbs that fell during what people are calling the thundersnow. I broke smaller branches off of big fallen trees and tossed them into the woods next to our property. Then I dragged the stripped trees into the same woods.

Background on Joseph Kubacki here.

Kubacki is a son of the late Reading Mayor John C. Kubacki, who was indicted on extortion charges by a federal grand jury in 1964, the last year of his first mayoral term.

John Kubacki was convicted along with reputed Reading mobster Abe Minker of extorting $10,000 from parking meter vendors who were told they should pay up or lose their city contracts.

The opening wedge.

Eventually all American university courses will be taught at coffee houses.

… in college.

The University of Oregon: It’s all about Phil’s spigot.

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I originally got the name of the school wrong.

Thanks, TAFKAU, for correcting me.

… has been shot, along with others, at a public event in Tucson.

Her Wikipedia page.

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She has died, according to NPR.

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More recent reports state that she is in critical condition.

… writes Richard Wilbur in the poem Year’s End; and let’s consider the point he’s making in his stately, nicely rhymed stanzas as we stare December 31 in the face.

At the very end of Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens describes us – well, describes “casual flocks of pigeons” symbolically us – flying in a downward direction at night:

And in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Down we go to death; but on the other hand our wings are “extended” — our arms open out to “More time, more time,” Wilbur writes.

And: As we sink down, we create beautiful, complex “undulations.” Formal grace, and mystery, express themselves in the patterns of our existences.

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Evening’s one thing; evening on December 31 packs mortality-intimation awfully tightly. Stevens’ poem after all is about morning, Sunday morning, the way Sunday morning can be dreadful if you’re suspended somewhere between secularity and belief, if you’d like to believe in some form of soulful immortality. Wilbur has us at night, and the night of December 31 at that; so questions of our mortal fragility and the shape – make it the undulating shapeliness – of our lives – are perhaps even more urgent.

Both poets in any case want to capture the peculiar tenterhooks we’re on – brightly appareled in our lives, we stretch our wings. Yet our true condition is, writes Wilbur, like that of leaves trapped in ice: “Graved on the dark in gestures of descent.” We’re “flutter[ing]” still, but down under the ice. We’re gesturing still, but always in postures of descent. Downward to darkness on extended wings.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

The patterns, if patterns there are, in our frayed lives, express themselves only after we’re dead. Or maybe something of a pattern occurs to us while we sit, in the isolation of the evening sky, prodded into contemplation by a sudden end of time.

A physician who rocked a UC Irvine fertility clinic 15 years ago when he and a partner switched the frozen embryos of dozens of unsuspecting women, has been taken into custody by Mexican authorities, officials said Monday.

Ricardo Asch, one of two fertility doctors who fled prosecution as the scandal unfolded, was arrested in Mexico City on Nov. 3, said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. He remains in custody as U.S. prosecutors seek to extradite him to Southern California to face federal mail fraud and tax evasion charges

LA Times

… provision of food content (grilled cheese sandwich), UD read a letter in the New York Times about the provision of course content:

To the Editor:

… [W]e should be extremely wary of the move toward online education…

People cheat. All the time. Sure, they cheat on campus, but it is extraordinarily easy to cheat online. The easiest way is to simply have someone else do the course for you. Another way is by searching for information while taking a test.

… If the company or university is going online to save money, you bet it will try to cut corners as much as it can. That means a noninteractive, bottom-of-the-line course, with students able to cheat easily.

We are truly on the race to the bottom…

Diana Lambert

Bottom-of-the-line, race to the bottom — As you know, UD has for years called online the poor white trash of education. I believe the letter writer is getting at the same idea.

Or think about it this way: When all the university’s doing is providing course content in the quickest, most efficient fashion, students feel quite comfortable providing, in return, exam content in the very same way. Students are responding in kind to the pointed disdain for students, and for education, that online represents. It’s a right back at ya situation.

With online, everybody gets an A for contempt.

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Online’s bold new idea: We’ll save money by not educating our students.

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Hey, and here’s another problem on the horizon: Presidents of online universities make like forty million dollars a year. Eventually, presidents of massive public universities which have become almost entirely online will start demanding commensurate compensation.

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UD thanks Dennis.

From the front page of today’s New York Times.

… Is it possible to learn as much when your professor is a mass of pixels whom you never meet? How much of a student’s education and growth — academic and personal — depends on face-to-face contact with instructors and fellow students?

… Kaitlyn Hartsock, a senior psychology major at [the University of] Florida, [said], “My mom was really upset about it. She felt like she’s paying for me to go to college and not sit at home and watch through a computer.”

… [Ms. Hartsock, a] hard-working student who maintains an A average, she was frustrated by the online format. Other members of her discussion group were not pulling their weight, she said. The one test so far, online, required answering five questions in 10 minutes — a lightning round meant to prevent cheating by Googling answers.

In a conventional class, “I’m someone who sits toward the front and shares my thoughts with the teacher,” she said. In the 10 or so online courses she has taken in her four years, “it’s all the same,” she said. “No comments. No feedback. And the grades are always late.”

From a review, by Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard, of The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

… “Wonder why Obama went to Harvard?” [the author] slyly asks. “Here is a clue: It is the leading academic institution in America. And here’s another: His father went there.” Forget that neither of these facts is a clue, technically. Surely the first assertion is enough to adequately answer the question without recourse to the second, which is simply gratuitous as well as conjectural. But [the author] always sees absence of evidence as evidence of something or other.

Let’s linger at Harvard a moment longer. “At Harvard … his real mentor was Roberto Mangabeira Unger.” Unger is a brilliant crackpot who championed critical legal studies, a left-wing academic fad of the 1980s. I’ve never heard before that Unger served as the president’s mentor. How does [the author] know it? “Obama took two of Unger’s courses,” he writes. Well, then. “Obama’s attraction to Unger’s work is obvious.” Obvious, but undemonstrated. “So what does Obama say about Unger in his speeches and writings? Nothing.” Aha! “Unger has simply disappeared from Obama’s official record, and not because his influence was minor; in fact, quite the opposite.” QED.

Several questions garnered loud applause, including that of senior political science major Avrell Stokes, who said that it is his understanding that athletics received the cut it did ($137,000), because a deeper cut would have meant athletics being lowered a division.

“What I would like to know is who made the decision to cut education rather than to go down a division in athletics and why?” asked Stokes, as his fellow students clapped.

University of Southern Mississippi students confront hapless administrators at an open meeting. They got the same bullshit answer to this question that administrators always give: Big-time sports make universities ever so much better!

Oh, and about the plane the university leases:

Saunders explained that the reason for the plane is to maximize administrative time.

Administrators for USM are simply jetting about all over the country all the time! They have to! And a limo to a distant private airport, flying for a hundred miles, putting down in another nowheresville airport, getting limo’ed from there to somewhere… You’d be amazed how much time this saves.

This blog was born just as asynchronous (to use the pretentious word its advocates like) courses became the rage in American universities. University Diaries has chronicled the immense and ongoing public relations effort to make these cheesy offerings seem legit. Click on the category Poor White Trash for details.

Or just start with this detail, something that won’t surprise anyone who has thought even a little about the technology that has come to define America’s for-profit universities, and which even schools like Berkeley are considering.

…The researchers did everything from making students sign an e-mail course contract to placing personal phone calls to make sure they were on top of their class material, according to the study, which will be published in the International Journal of Management in Education in October. Students exposed to the strategies dropped out as frequently as those who were not, the authors said.

“We called them at home, sent them emails, quizzed them on the syllabus and made other efforts to try to engage them,” said Elke Leeds, an associate professor of information systems at Coles and one of six study authors, in a press release issued by the school…

And gee, nothing worked. Wonder why.

Wanna wait for the next round of studies on that one? Or wanna read the next paragraph?

Babe, you can’t even verify the identity of the person taking an online course. You can’t verify the identity of the professor giving the course. We’re in the twilight zone. Where are we? Who are we? Who took the midterm? Who gave the midterm?

Drift, drift, drift… I’m melting… Life is but a dream…

Okay so call the student! Put in a call! Place an actual personal phone call! Hellohello? Actual person? Here is another actual person. Come back! Why are you fading? Why are you dropping out….?….. Helloooo?… O tell me all about why you faded. I want to know all about why you faded…

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Do not stand at your phone and forever weep.
I am not there; I make no peep.
I am a thousand courses that blow.
I am the students who nothing know.

I’m the dumbass emoticon on your screen.
An eager mind unheard and unseen.
The nightmare end of a bookkeeper’s dream.
The evil spawn of a cost-cutting scheme.

We are the students who might have shone.

Think of everything we’ve missed!
We are not there. We don’t exist.

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Ooh la la!