… is one of this guy’s specializations, but he seems to have flubbed it.
A faculty member at a public university in California, he sent out an email to hundreds of students on campus telling them to vote for
… Proposition 30 [a Jerry Brown tax initiative] and push others to vote for it, while warning of dire consequences if it fails. It also noted that students would receive a $498 tuition reimbursement if the initiative passes.
“The fate of Proposition 30 on the upcoming November ballot will directly affect our university (and our jobs),” said the email from Stromberg, a professor in CSUMB’s Division of Humanities and Communication.
Now there’s a lawsuit against the school, since what this guy did violates California law. You can’t “use … public resources for mass political mailings.”
… of a University of Texas Arlington psychology professor points in the direction of suicide. His car was found at a park about fifty miles from campus.
Typical pro-laptop bs. Centuries ago, still images of Picassos and volcanoes were flashed on one screen in front of students via projectors – a cheap, perfectly adequate way of providing visual material. Waters doesn’t note in his comment that laptops are about one long endless private self-service image-stream. His comment doesn’t note that instead of occasionally drawing students’ attention to one image at the front of the room, the PowerPoint prof quite often spends the entire class session hunched over images and blocks of words, ignoring the class, which is of course in return ignoring her.
But anyway. Faculty gatherings like this one at Elon College are all about the lovely PowerPoint/laptop classroom synergy coming out of the closet.
As always, it’s honest students instructing cynical professors:
“There is no reason to use them in a discussion class,” [an Elon student] said. “That’s where they become more of a distraction, because students that use them during discussions are most likely on Facebook or Pinterest.”
And as for the massive, no-discussion lectures laptops are so terrific for — this form of education is becoming obsolete, since it makes absolutely no sense to do a class of this sort in real time. Just gather all the clickers and laptops and PowerPoints and films and cellphones that you’re dragging into the classroom and, you know, take your toys and go home. Only an idiot – or someone drawing a salary – would continue with this scenario.
… the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
The interesting thing is, nowadays my career would have been impossible in the sense that I did classics, ancient Greek and Latin, all my school time and then had to switch to science. My poor parents had to pay an extra year of private tuition to get into science. In those days they were actually short of students in Oxford, and so I received a curious letter from the admissions tutor in Oxford that said they would accept me on two conditions. One was that I came into residence immediately, in a week’s time, and the second was that I did not study the subject in which I had been examined. This is unimaginable!
So, you were being ordered not to become a classicist!
Absolutely. They said I’m not suitable for that. I later met the person socially. He was the man, [Hugh] Trevor-Roper, who later became Lord Dacre, very involved in the last days of Hitler, and he told me privately that his mind was on greater things and he’d realized he hadn’t filled the places in the college, and so he looked down the list of unsuitable people.
An investigative reporter badgers a University of Houston professor about how much he charges the university and his research sponsors for work-related expenses.
He’s in the UH physics department but he works for big oil and sees no reason why he shouldn’t live like his real employers — or at least a little like them. For oil executives, renting Land Rovers and flying first class ain’t worth a bucket of spit (they use chauffeurs and private jets); but for physics professors it’s way cool.
University stories rarely offer international intrigue, but the Jorge Gilbert saga at Evergreen State College has potential.
Jorge, a charming Chilean, ran back to the mother country with tens of thousands of dollars he stole from students in the Evergreen study abroad program he used to administer. He even managed to sell his pricey Olympia condo before the hapless state could grab it.
Jorge’s not in hiding; he’s living an elegant life in a fancy apartment in Santiago and is attached to some university there. So Washington’s trying to hire a collection company to corner and fry his ass.
… Chilean collection agencies typically keep as payment about ¼ of the total debt collected- meaning any collection agency interested in tracking Gilbert … and wringing him of the money he owes Washington stands to make a cool $30,000.
I see Gilbert scaling the Gran Torre Costanera and shouting Nunca me llevan vivo.
UD has covered similar professor meltdowns, but usually they’re about alcohol or drug use. This one, a math professor at Michigan State who paced his classroom, slammed his head into the window, shouted obscenities at his students, shouted about there being no God, and then stripped naked – looks to have been a pretty classic psychotic break.
Students madly dialed 911; they claim police took too long (fifteen minutes) to arrive, but there seems to be some controversy about that. What’s not controversial is that these students were badly traumatized (some feared the professor might have a weapon).
It’s hellishly difficult to identify mad or dangerous or badly addicted people on campus. I’ve only had one student, in years of teaching, who was immediately identifiable as mentally ill by her class behavior and comments (I told someone in administration about it; the student later withdrew to get treatment). Privacy rights; a tolerance for oddness; denial; fear — lots of factors play into our tendency to avoid doing anything about unsettling behavior. And things are often mixed: Amy Bishop’s students report that she taught quite normally only hours before the faculty meeting during which she murdered three of her colleagues.
Given this difficulty, response time is key.
Paul Campos, a friend of this blog, gives great interview. He’s talking here about his new e-book, Don’t Go to Law School.
In order for things to change, “legal academia has to get its collective head out of the sand and stop being so piggish (I am mixing my metaphors).” He compares wildly overcompensated law school professors to French aristocrats: “[L]egal academia right now is France in 1780, and my lord doesn’t care to hear about the supposed troubles of the peasantry.” He quotes Upton Sinclair (“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”). He does all he can to make absolutely clear that people shouldn’t make $250,000 a year for graduating hundreds of unemployable people with $200,000 of debt.
But he also recognizes that law school professors themselves will do nothing about their culture of entitlement. They will have to be tossed and replaced by reasonable people if the schools are to survive.
The most straightforward short term solution is to return to the faculty student ratios and faculty compensation structures of three decades ago. This can be done through not replacing people who leave and buying out others. The alternative for universities is to simply close schools altogether…
Among the schools Campos considers to be in existential trouble: American University, down the street from UD‘s GW.
… especially on the part of the faculty. But sometimes faculty pipe up.
Jay Smith, who teaches history at this month’s scandal-plagued darling, Chapel Hill, has piped up.
The Chancellor (who has so mismanaged all the sports scandals that he’s resigning) did his I’m Shocked We’re All Shocked shtick for the faculty, and I guess most of them bought it. Except for Smith.
[O]ne professor, Jay Smith, challenged Thorp on the university’s contention that athletics did not drive the scandal. While he praised the university for the reforms, Smith said the university has not been as forthcoming as it should have been.
He cited the last no-show class [Julius] Nyang’oro taught, AFAM 280, which Nyang’oro created two days before the start of a summer 2011 semester and quickly filled with football players. News & Observer records requests revealed the athletes-only class, which prompted an ongoing criminal investigation.
“The existence of that course alone provides very powerful evidence that the Nyang’oro scandal was all about athletics,” said Smith, a history professor.
He also asked why the university declined to check a test transcript from 2001 that The N&O found on a UNC website that turned out to be that of Julius Peppers, a football and basketball player who is now an All-Pro defensive end for the Chicago Bears. The university had insisted the transcript was fake but did not check records to make sure.
“Instead of confirming the reality of the record and then moving to protect that student’s privacy, the university ignored The N&O’s questions and left that transcript on a publicly accessible website, where it was available for later plundering by N.C. State fans,” Smith said.
You don’t want to overuse technology. You don’t want students staring at tv shows on their laptops, or texting their friends. If there’s noise in the hall, you should shut the door. If you have to breastfeed your baby, you should do it somewhere else.
American University, down the street from UD’s GW, has responded correctly to a professor there who took her breastfeeding baby (who was sick that day) to class.
“The faculty manual requires professional conduct in the classroom at all times, including a focus on high standards for teaching and respect for students,” said the administration’s statement, which a spokeswoman said was based on a range of policies already in place at the university. “For the sake of the child and the public health of the campus community, when faced with the challenge of caring for a sick child in the case where backup childcare is not available, a faculty member should take earned leave and arrange for someone else to cover the class, not bring a sick child into the classroom.”
The Weiss Gallery of Ancient Art will showcase the Museum’s Roman marble portraits and sarcophagi, wall paintings from the vicinity of Pompeii, and floor mosaics from the Roman province of Syria. Here the Museum’s collection of Etruscan and Italic ceramics and bronzes will also be shown, among these a bronze relief fragment depicting warriors on horseback dating to the 6th century BCE, a recent gift of Drs. Arnold-Peter and Yvonne Weiss…
The third gallery, devoted to Materials and Technology, puts on view more Greek and Roman coins from the Museum’s collection than ever before. Among these are a spectacular tetradrachm with a head of the god Dionysos from Naxos in Sicily and a decadrachm with a stunning image of the nymph Arethusa from Syracuse, as well as gold staters from Pergamon dating to the time of Alexander the Great, recent donations from Drs. Peter and Yvonne Weiss.
The Rhode Island School of Design might want to take another look at that spectacular tetradrachm. Might also want to see if there’s anything it can do toward renaming the Weiss Gallery.
As you know if you’re a regular UD reader, this blog takes a keen interest in the details of sandblasting disgraced donors’ names from buildings (Seton Hall specializes in this), and we’ll keep an eye on RISD’s design decisions here, because Weiss of Weiss Gallery has now been found guilty of coin theft. His punishment:
… Weiss must complete 70 hours of community service, give up all 23 coins that were seized from him at the time of arrest and attempt to publish an article on the problem of trading coins with uncertain origins.
One quick piece of advice for Weiss from UD: Contact your colleague, Martin Keller, for names of some organizations that can help with the writing of the article.
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UD thanks Maurice.
A Newcastle University professor, in a somewhat obscure though highly literate act of protest, has – it is alleged – taken a screwdriver and etched onto 24 fancy cars in his affluent neighborhood words like arbitrary and really wrong.
Stephen Graham (this is where you could have found him before Newcastle unpersoned him) definitely has a strong anti-capitalist orientation (he’s interviewed a few minutes into this YouTube), but dressing all in black and crouching down and scratching his rage into BMWs seems a bit much. A neighbor caught him doing it. He’s been arrested.
Stanford’s Henry H. Jones. A life outrageously well-lived.
Yes, it’s “notoriously disgraceful,” as his dean put it, that a professor at the Merchant Marine Academy made a tasteless joke about the Aurora shooter to his students – especially since he’d been sent an email informing him that one of the students in that class was the son of a man who’d been killed in the incident. The school plans to fire the guy, though this seems to me to be going a bit far.
Also disgraceful, by the way, is what the guy was doing as he made the comment. See how the article starts? See what the professors you and I pay for do in their classrooms?
After turning down the lights in his classroom at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, Prof. Gregory F. Sullivan began showing a documentary and prepared to step out for a moment.
But first, according to an internal personnel document, he paused to make a parting joke: “If someone with orange hair appears in the corner of the room,” he is said to have remarked to his students, “run for the exit.”
That’s right, kiddies. They’re showing movies. We’re paying for them to turn off the lights, turn on a machine, and leave.
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Outside the classroom, Sullivan writes about Japan.
It is especially in the state interventionist measures that Oka finally came to endorse in order to forestall orthogenetically-driven degeneration that the technocratic proclivities of his statist orientation become most apparent.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls this writing style Translation from the German.