… 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!

So the latest thing is that students on certain exercise machines at the university gym are generating energy:

The gym at Oregon State University offer elliptical machines for college students to work out on, and the motion they create helps to generate heat energy in the same process.

Oregon State University (OSU) is located in Corvallis, Oregon and has been offering this capturing of energy to any college student wanting to add to the power gathering.

… The hardware used to capture this energy is installed on 22 of the elliptical machines and can save the college about 3,500 kilowatt hours per year. That’s enough power to help support a small energy efficient house.

The hardware is set up so that more machines can be fixed to the power grid in the future and adds to the harvesting of other people’s energy workout. OSU is now known as the college that is turning other people’s workouts into usable energy…

Take it a step further. In hard economic times, offer
students Green Galley Scholarships, in which the
university covers their tuition in exchange for, say,
twenty hours a week on the elliptical.

From Louisiana State University’s newspaper.

University professor William Rowe was like any other student in his 375-person class when, a few years ago, he invited a guest speaker to one of his freshman-level geography classes. He found an open seat in back of the classroom and sat down to listen to the 30-minute presentation.

While taking in the lecture, Rowe saw most of his students paying attention. Some were even taking notes on their laptop computers. But one student’s activity on a laptop immediately caught his eye.

“One guy was perusing pornography, which was causing a bit of a disturbance around him,” Rowe said.

… Tracy Rizzuto, assistant psychology professor, recently instituted a “laptops in first row” rule. She’s been teaching at the University for four years.

“I don’t have an attendance policy — I don’t require people to come. But if they’re one of those people who are surfing the Internet or doing distracting things while taking notes, I want to be able to keep an eye on that behavior,” she said. “It’s easier to monitor what people are doing on their laptops if they’re sitting in the front row.”…

I know what you’re wondering: What if the student perusing pornography who you’ve put in the front row ejaculates on you while you’re teaching?

Here’s what UD recommends. In her day, guys used to go to seedy porno cinemas where they’d be given empty, bottomless popcorn containers along with their ticket. When a professor sees a student masturbating, she should issue him one of these, along with suggestions on how to direct his flow.

——————————

UPDATE: Some context. Feinberg’s famous A Ride on the Bus.

… and a diplomat on his first mission, has been killed in Ethiopia.

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

A commenter points me to an excellent article about Adkins in the GW newspaper.

At least two people were arrested as Chico police broke up a crowd of several hundred that had gathered around a bonfire on a residential street.

One woman was treated for minor burns after the drunken disturbance early Friday near California State University, Chico.

Authorities say 200 to 300 people gathered around the fire at Sixth Street before midnight Thursday, adding a couch and other items to the blaze.

Police blocked off several streets, but the crowd refused to leave, throwing rocks and bottles into the street. The area was quiet by 1:30 a.m. Friday.

It’s unclear what prompted the gathering. Some witnesses said nearby house parties may have spilled into the street, while others say it was to mark the first week of the new semester.

… maketh UD way nostalgic for her own times in Ireland.

Carolyn’s studying over there.

I don’t remember what I was doing, but it wasn’t studying.

Carolyn’s keeping a charming record. With photos.