It was only a matter of time before the Freakonomics guys at the New York Times got hold of creative writing.

For years, colleges have treated their students as consumers, building ever more elaborate facilities and hiring ever more dazzling star scholars to lure applicants. They did this regardless of how high these investments drove tuition, since easy credit meant families could stretch to cover the costs. But with the credit crisis come signs that the college bubble is bursting, as “consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college,” the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests. Further evidence: The New Yorker aims to deflate creative writing programs, “designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.”

A few universities – like the University of Toledo under its embarrassing president – are set to enjoy the benefits of peer instruction, as it’s known, not just in creative writing courses, but across the curriculum.

Toledo details here.

I think we all recognize, instinctively, the enormous budgetary advantages of making students teach each other.

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer met regularly with prostitutes in multiple cities for 18 months before being identified as a client of an escort service and resigning in disgrace, a lawyer for an employee who arranged the trysts said Monday.

Lawyer Marc Agnifilo said his client, escort service booker Temeka Lewis, revealed key information to prosecutors before the March 2008 resignation of Spitzer, who was called Client-9 in court documents charging four employees of the pricey prostitution ring.

He said Lewis, who was sentenced Monday and received no jail time after cooperating with prosecutors, arranged meetings between Spitzer and prostitutes, including one who discovered he was the governor of New York when she saw him on television.

… Lewis, a Brooklyn resident and University of Virginia graduate who majored in English, worked at the escort service from October 2006 until her arrest in March 2008. She set up a February 2008 meeting between a prostitute and Client-9.

She pleaded guilty in May 2008 to conspiracy charges after beginning her cooperation with prosecutors even before Spitzer resigned just days after her arrest. She apologized in court Monday, saying: “I deeply regret my decision to break the law.”

Wesleyan’s president’s tears.

Roth … cried when he recalled Justin-Jinich’s last paper, on the dignity of man.

From the testimony of Dusty Becker, co-captain of the University of Oregon Ultimate Frisbee team. Becker was appealing the university’s decision to shut down the team’s season after multiple instances of drunkenness, speeding, and playing naked.

“Speeding, drinking, nudity — they’re not bad things … They’re things a big portion of the community doesn’t think are wrong. … To run around naked is just kind of a hippie, ultimate thing… We didn’t think there was anything wrong at the time.”

The appeal failed.

**********************

Update: A reader, Larry, points out that Oregon might have made a serious mistake. He cites the following:

“A study by Dr. Michael Norden of the University of Washington shows that among all 86 private national universities, those ranking in the top half for Ultimate [Frisbee] have a graduation rate of over 85%, while those in the bottom half graduate just 60%. The difference in the totals of Rhodes scholars and Marshall scholars among their graduates during this decade is even more dramatic – 208 versus 15. (The odds of this happening by chance are truly infinitesimal). Moreover, the top ten schools based on Ultimate ranking have a slightly higher mean graduation rate and more winners of top scholarships than schools chosen by – not only SATs, but any standard metric including: grades, faculty resources, and financial resources.

… Why a game, requiring such all-around athleticism should so consistently be dominated by universities (and presumably students) with off-the-chart academic credentials, is truly a mystery. The top seven schools for ultimate have a mean graduation rate of 95% and nearly as many total Rhodes and Marshal scholars as all of the rest combined. The names speak for themselves: Stanford, Brown, Harvard, Tufts, Dartmouth, Yale, and Princeton.”

More at Dan Drezner.

… [The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s] incredibly brief self-titled EP released in 2009 (which totals a whopping 34 minutes) reveals a hipster-glasses-wearing, library-sex-having, pulsing beat all their own.

… So what is close to the heart for these three from New York City? One of their cutely pun-titled songs, “Tenure Itch,” explores the story of a clandestine hook-up with a professor. Berman sings, “He says your thoughts need form / but your form’s not that hard to find.” Another song romanticizes sex in the stacks, and yet another adolescent incest…

A music review from the Cornell Daily Sun.

From the Washington College newspaper:

… [F]ish are not the only animals living on our campus. Junior Robbie Dinneen keeps two sugar gliders (a small marsupial) in his Talbot room named Jager and Maui. One is male and the other is female. Interestingly enough, these two have yet to mate. Dinneen said it’s really easy to take care of them. The most important thing is to give them a lot of attention because they can get depressed pretty quickly. He has never had any problems with Public Safety, and the majority of people really like the sugar gliders.

Another junior, who would like to remain anonymous, has a soft side for keeping rats. Last year he had two rats in his dorm on campus and this year he houses a whopping seven rats in his apartment off-campus. The seven rats are all girls named Peaches, Pumpkin, Bridget, Xing Xing, Mimi, Luffy and Panya.

Concerning difficulties with caring for them, all he said was, “It’s a bit tough to find supplies for them, especially now that the Pet Store is closed. Still, I try to load up on bedding and stuff whenever I go home.”

Luckily, he never had any problem with Public Safety. He did want us to know, “Rats aren’t as scary as movies and television make them out to be. When they’re healthy and happy, they’re actually more like little dogs than rodents. They make great pets!”

One senior girl agrees, who wishes to remain anonymous, but has joint custody with another girl on campus of two boy rats named Mator and Achilles. She said she opted to get boy rats because they are more social and friendlier.

“I think that having pets is a great thing,” she said. The problem is, she said, they can smell and it’s sometimes difficult to pay for food and bedding. But despite that, she said, “I think the no pets policy on campus is kind of ridiculous.”

Last year, I kept two pet rats in my on-campus room. I also agree that rats make fantastic pets. My roommate and I shared them, though she mostly took care of them. We never had any issues with Public Safety because we made sure not many people knew about them. Our RA knew we had them and assured us that as long as we kept them out of trouble she wouldn’t make us get rid of them.

My first year here at Washington College, I lived in Queen Anne dorm and roomed with a sophomore. I waited three days for her to arrive, and when she finally got here, the first thing she introduced me to was her pet hedgehog. Unfortunately, after a while word spread and Public Safety made her take the hedgehog home…

… to life as we know it on many American college campuses, but at UC Santa Cruz the smoking of dope has become such a big deal that the school’s making official efforts to suppress it.

Or at least to suppress 4/20 – the annual campus pot festival, where thousands of people – many not connected to UCSC – make a bright golden haze on a meadow.

If you ask UD, this sort of ritual is less offensive than football fans getting shit-faced and trashing main street. But the whole alcohol thing – the fact that many universities are surrounded by hundreds of cheap bars, for instance – gets a rise out of no one, while people believe toking erodes the foundations of the republic.

Having said that, UD has no problem with UC Santa Cruz sending a letter to the parents of freshmen asking them to discourage their kids from taking part in 4/20. The event is a victim of its own success, drawing such crowds that the national media’s paying attention.

It’s like the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. The event has gotten so big and so silly that it draws routine MSM ridicule.

Eventually a similar letter will go out to literature department chairs asking them to discourage new faculty from attending.

Four New York University freshmen reportedly have dismantled a secret marijuana den called “Narnia” that was entered through a hole in the back of a wardrobe.

By the time it was dismantled last week, hundreds of students allegedly had visited the den, crawling through a large hole carved in the back of a university-issued wardrobe placed to hide a doorway to an alcove, the New York Post reported Sunday.

The 10-by-8-foot alcove on the seventh floor of the Hayden Hall dormitory was decorated with Christmas lights, a set of bongos, a stuffed raven and a poster of Narnia’s Prince Caspian, the Post reported.

Narnia is the kingdom in the C.S. Lewis novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” in which three children enter an enchanted land through an old wardrobe…

… and St. Olaf College won the annual Rube Goldberg Machine contest.

The annual competition aims to bring to life Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg’s drawings of complicated machines and gadgets that accomplish simple tasks. Using as many whimsical, counterintuitive steps as possible, the machines must complete a task determined each year by contest organizers.

This year’s task was to replace an incandescent light bulb with a more energy-efficient light-emitting design, and the Oles designed a machine that broke a light bulb and replaced it with 150 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that spell out “St. Olaf.” They began working on the machine in September as part of a course taught by Assistant Professor of Physics Jason Engbrecht, and devoted thousands of hours — and almost every weekend this semester — to preparing it for competition.

… Team members built a record player from scratch that, as it spins, allows lasers to fire through pre-drilled holes. The lasers are picked up by light sensors, which trigger several other steps and eventually enable a gate to open and release a ball.

The team also constructed a Gauss rifle, a mechanism that uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a metal ball at a very high speed, and a simple harmonic oscillator, a system that employs simple harmonic motion and magnetic induction to trigger the start of a car moving along a track. They even turned an ice auger into an Archimedes’ screw that caught pool balls and took them from the machine’s lower level to an elevated track…

… what they seem, sings Buttercup in Pinafore.

And ain’t it the truth. He’s a resident assistant in a Hofstra University dorm; she seems a nice Jewish girl. But he assists students in buying drugs, and she’s a gangster’s moll.

You’re missing a lot if you don’t occasionally troll Rate My Professors.

The Columbia News Service thinks so.

From an article by Danielle Friedman about the advantages and disadvantages of Gmail’s chat function:

For Margaret Soltan, an English professor at George Washington University, Gchat is wonderful for connecting with students outside of class.

Over the years, the tech-savvy teacher has accumulated dozens of students on her Gchat list, and she chats with them frequently. While not all realize that she can “see” them until she pings them for the first time — which, to be sure, can catch some off guard — she occasionally uses the tool to coordinate conferences or discuss letters of recommendation when time is tight. It’s convenient, she says.

Soltan also likes perusing students’ status messages. “They give me a little window” into them, she says. “They are like little mini-diaries of student life.”

Sometimes Soltan takes her observations a step further: When she spots a misspelling, she isn’t shy about pointing it out. “I’ll Gchat them and say, ‘Revise your message!’” she says, laughing. She tells them she’s joking a few seconds later — but they’re usually apologetic and a little embarrassed.

“I suppose you’re vulnerable to this kind of thing,” Soltan says. “Your crazy English professor bursts in and tells you to fix your spelling error!”

UD’s not feeling too sanguine about Peter Singer’s efforts to get American university students “adequately informed about world poverty, its consequences, and the ways in which it can be reduced.” Even our best universities don’t seem to be conveying very much along these lines. Take this Yalie.

A Yale University student from Ohio has filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million from US Airways for a video game console he says was taken from his luggage.

Twenty-one-year-old Jesse Maiman alleges that during a flight from New Haven, Conn., to Cincinnati in December, his Xbox 360 with a specialized hard drive disappeared from his luggage.

Maiman says he got what he called “an unconscionable run-around” from the airline. He’s asking $1,700 for the loss of the gaming system and for the maximum damages allowable, or $1 million.

Maiman filed the suit Monday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court.

A US Airways spokeswoman said the airline was unaware of the suit but noted that the government limits liability for lost luggage to $3,300 per bag.

Unconscionable!

Which is why this little essay in the Washington Post, whose author prides himself on his radicalism and chides current college students for their quietism, fails.

He, a product of the sixties, still “care[s] about literature,” while today’s “narcotized” students read “inferior literature.”

The problem lies in the writer’s conflation of radical writing and superior literature. While some of the writers he admires – Ginsberg, Lessing – are indeed both artistically impressive and politically radical, others — Plath, Nin — are not political. Yet others – Mary Daly, Robert Pirsig, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, Germaine Greer – write broadsides and not literature; and while some of these people (Greer, for instance) are powerful prose stylists, others (Daly) are almost unreadably bad.

The category confusion in the essay, its facile generalities — “The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.” — and its willingness to overlook the importance of writers like David Foster Wallace and Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo to this generation of college readers, makes the piece more emotive than polemical, the expression of a certain contentment with one’s own cherished forms of radicality. Note that the writer doesn’t even have time for the wildly popular Chuck Palahniuk, whose work is without much literary merit, but has the exact same transgressive thing going (he’s best known for Fight Club) as many of the not-well-written works the author of the Post piece cites.

… to criticize the Bobby Knight of Connecticut.   Throw a chair at her!