… in Central Michigan Life newspaper:

PROFESSOR DAVID CURRENT’S DEATH
WILL NOT CHANGE CLASS SCHEDULES

Here’s a list – Ten Warning Signs of a Bad Professor – that does a pretty good job of covering the main characteristics of poor or indifferent instructors.

I can think of a few other things, like uses too much technology.

Speaking of which… UD‘s blogpal Veblen sends her this account of PowerPoint use in the American military.

The chair of Tulane University’s Department of Pharmacology died Saturday evening, after driving through floodwaters and into a canal on the Westbank.

On a night when heavy rainfall flooded streets across the city, investigators say the Tulane University professor and his wife detoured onto Marr Avenue from Gen. DeGaulle.

But with so much water covering the roadway, Agrawal drove into the Donner Canal.

The couple managed to get out of their car, but police say Agrawal disappeared while trying to help his wife get to higher ground…

… at 94.

Excerpts from the New York Times obituary:

… His technical work — especially his discipline-shattering Ph.D. thesis, immodestly titled “The Foundations of Economic Analysis” — taught professional economists how to ply their trade.

… His most influential student was John F. Kennedy, whose first 40-minute class with Mr. Samuelson, after the 1960 election, was conducted on a rock by the beach at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. Before class, there was lunch with politicians and Cambridge intellectuals aboard a yacht offshore. “I had expected a scrumptious meal,” Mr. Samuelson said. “We had franks and beans.”

… He left high school at age 16 to enter the University of Chicago. “I was born as an economist on Jan. 2, 1932,” he said. That was the day he heard his first college lecture, on Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British economist who studied the relation between poverty and population growth. Hooked, he began taking economics courses.

The University of Chicago developed the century’s leading conservative economic theorists, under the later guidance of Milton Friedman. But Mr. Samuelson regarded the teaching at Chicago as “schizophrenic.” This was at the height of the Depression, and courses about the business cycle naturally talked about unemployment, he said. But in economic-theory classes, joblessness was not mentioned.

“The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern,” he recalled, “yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, ‘We are starving, how about a potato?’ I speak from poignant memory.”

… In 1940, Harvard offered him an instructorship, which he accepted, but a month later M.I.T. invited him to become an assistant professor.

Harvard made no attempt to keep him, even though he had by then developed an international following. [Robert] Solow said of the Harvard economics department at the time: “You could be disqualified for a job if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?”…

… of peer review.

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

UD thanks Barney for sending it.

… on the faculty of the University of Chicago when Les UDs were students there, has died.

… “His big contribution was to bring philosophy from the abstractions of reason and logic — Plato’s world — to the reasonableness of making inquiries into human situations in which questions of morals, ethics and logic come to life,” said Roy Pea, the director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning at Stanford University.

… Mr. Toulmin’s provocative ideas often encountered resistance at first, especially in Britain, and his work on argument was no exception. He proposed, instead of formal logic’s three-part syllogism, a model of persuasive argument consisting of six components. Some, he maintained, apply universally but others do not. Arguments, in other words, do not unfold in a Platonic ether, but in particular contexts…

From his 1997 Jefferson Lecture:

Print taught readers to recognize the complexity and diversity of our human experience: instead of abstract theories of Sin and Grace, it gave them rich narratives about concrete human circumstances. Aquinas had been all very well, but figures like Don Quixote or Gargantua were irresistible. You did not have to approve of, or condemn such figures: rather, they were mirrors in which to reflect your own life. Like today’s film makers, 16th century writers in the Humanities from Erasmus and Thomas More to Montaigne and Shakespeare present readers with the kaleidoscope of life. We get from them a feeling for the individuality of characters: no one can mistake Hamlet for Sancho Panza, or Pantagruel for Othello. What count are the differences among people, not the generalities they share. As Eudora Welty said in appreciation of V.S. Pritchett, who died just recently at the age of 96: ‘The characters that fill [his stories] — erratic, unsure, unsafe, devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and passionate, all peculiar unto themselves — hold a claim on us that cannot be denied. They demand and get our rapt attention, for in the revelation of their lives, the secrets of our own lives come into view. How much the eccentric has to tell us of what is central!’

… Writing early in World War II, near the end of his Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, [Wallace Stevens] refers [to] the contrast I have emphasized here, between reasonableness and rationality. For him, too, Reasonableness is more important than Rationality; and its importance is itself more than an intellectual one. It is the expression – as he puts it – of a “more than rational distortion – the fiction that results from feeling.” I recall one of my Chicago colleagues lecturing on the theme, “Is it rational to act reasonably?” Unless reasonable actions could be proved to fit his abstract moral theory with geometrical precision, respect for human frailty was for him intellectually suspect. Yet, rather than ask, “Is it rational to be reasonable?”, we might equally well ask, “Is it reasonable to argue in rational terms alone? In what situations can we reasonably rely on formal theories?”

… To sum up: like the uniqueness of names, the individuality or particularity of cases and characters divides the world of practice, in its actuality, from the world of theory, with its abstractions. Behind the contrast of the reasonable and the rational, behind the rival attractions of Nation State and Global Future, underlying the survival in a time of general toleration of the things Jefferson called bigotry and priestcraft, lie abstractions that may still tempt us back into the dogmatism, chauvinism and sectarianism our needs have outgrown… Nor is this conflict likely to be resolved permanently. It is another of those conflicts that demand eternal vigilance. So listen again to Wallace Stevens, writing in 1942… :

We shall return at twilight from the lecture,
Pleased that the irrational is rational . . . .
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.

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

More on Toulmin. An interviewer summarizes:

[L]ike Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty, and many others, Toulmin sees “no legitimate role for theory” and advises that we “be prepared to kiss rationalism goodbye and walk off in the opposite direction with joy in our hearts.” These views are entirely understandable given the fact that Toulmin’s mentor at Cambridge and his principal intellectual influence was Wittgenstein, from whom he inherited “a kind of classical skepticism.” As a committed pragmatist, then, Toulmin’s life’s work has concerned “the recovery of the tradition of practical philosophy that was submerged after the intellectual triumph of theory in the seventeenth century.”

… Toulmin would rather be known as a “neo-premodernist” than as a postmodernist; he believes “the thing to do after rejecting Cartesianism is not to go on through the wreckage of the temple but to go back into the town where this heretical temple was built and rediscover the life that was lived by people for many centuries before the rationalist dream seized hold of people’s minds.”

From his remarks during the interview:

[Jürgen] Habermas comes here to Northwestern most years, and we have a jolly two or three days when he’s here. He gives a couple of lectures, usually on Kant’s ethics as being the ultimate font of universalization and impartiality and the rest. He and I have a kind of joking relationship: he gets up and denounces the neo-Aristotelians, by whom he means some people in Germany who call themselves neo-Aristotelians; then I get up like St. Sebastian, take the arrows full in my chest, and say, “I’m happy to be a neo-Aristotelian.” So we chew that one a bit. Sometimes I ask my colleague Tom McCarthy, “What’s really biting Jürgen; why does he have so much investment in his pragmatics being universal?” Tom explains how different it was growing up in Germany after the Second World War from growing up in England just before and during the Second World War. We really do come out of situations in which what reasonably mattered to us was very different.

… There was a very intelligent conservative politician called Edward Boyle who died ridiculously young. I remember having an amusing conversation with him in which he was explaining how there were certain nineteenth-century novelists–the one he chose to talk about was Thomas Hardy–who could only have written after the invention of the railway and before the invention of the automobile. Chekhov is similar: everybody in Chekhov is always dreaming of going to Moscow in the same way that everybody in Hardy is dreaming of going to London. This comes out in Anna as well. One of the central things in Anna is that Anna finds herself in a series of situations that become progressively intolerable to her; she can’t cope. Because the moral demands made on her are for one reason or another too intense, too unbearable, what happens again and again is that she goes down to the railway station and gets on a train to go somewhere. Where the train is going is the last matter of importance. Right at the end, of course, she is doing it again, only this time a train journey is not enough. This is why, in some ways, the invention of the private car made it much harder to distinguish between the people with whom we are actively engaged in a moral way from day to day, and other people.

… student newspaper.

As finals become a frightening reality for students, professors need to be reminded that finals week is for finals.  [Yes, it’s gotten this bad.  Students admonishing professors to do their job.] It has become customary for professors to schedule finals or place deadlines on lengthy term papers during dead week or the week before, often times violating Rule 79 of the WSU Academic Regulations. The rule states, “No examinations or quizzes (other than laboratory examinations, make-up examinations and make-up quizzes) may be given during the last week of instruction.” Professors are using the lax dead week schedules to turn finals into a two-week marathon of test-taking. Of the five members of The Daily Evergreen Editorial Board, we have 12 finals or papers due during “dead week” and only six finals or papers due finals week between us. We highly doubt that we are the only students facing an incongruous lineup of exams and deadlines.

Administrators have to take violations of Rule 79 more seriously. [Admonishing administrators too.  The students are correct to do so.] With the cost of tuition increasing nearly every year, students deserve every dollar of that education. The 16-week semester schedule does not provide enough time to cover course material in enough detail, especially when professors take an early holiday vacation by turning dead week into finals week. [It’s really not a good idea for professors to make students cynical.] By removing a week of instruction from the semester, professors also cut down on the amount of time they can tell stories about their children and pimp their latest book.  [Piling it on a bit here, but why not?  Students see the rip-off and are pissed.]

A weak economy, poor performance and a disregard for regulations are all adequate grounds for removing a professor. Given the cutbacks in numerous departments and custodial services, students would assume that professors are working harder than ever to make their courses as intellectually stimulating as possible. However, evidence points to the contrary.

Though this is no laughing matter, maybe underperforming professors should be replaced with custodians. We are not convinced that would negatively impact our education – that is how high we hold WSU’s current line-up of “educators.”  [Drop the quotation marks.  The word educator is vile enough without them.] Who knows, WSU might have a janitor who is a savant like the one played by Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting.” Dead week is designed to provide students adequate time to prepare for finals. Digesting 15 weeks of lectures is a daunting task for students who actually care about their education. Of course, some students will use dead week to party, but the irresponsible behavior of a few students does not justify the actions of professors who schedule early finals.

Students should be aware of their rights and report abuses of Rule 79 to the Office of the University Ombudsman in Wilson Hall Room 2.

Tenured academics are insulated from reality, and allowing them to keep their jobs while remaining ineffective is a disservice to everyone who is paying to be here.  [It’s certainly true that tenured professors are insulated from all sorts of realities, including the need to take angry editorials like this one seriously.  Pity.]

Encounters with accused killer Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani led several local Muslims to take steps to avoid him when they saw him on campus or elsewhere in the community.

Al-Zahrani, the man accused of fatally stabbing Binghamton University Professor Richard Antoun on campus Friday, had accused fellow Middle Eastern students of following him, [had] answer[ed] a greeting of peace with an obscene insult, and [had] disparaged a local mosque, according to three students interviewed Saturday night.

“Tell these students not to follow me,” Awni Qasaimeh, a Jordanian studying for his doctorate in industrial and systems engineering, said Al-Zahrani told him last week. “Do not make me trouble.”…

From Fox News:

People who lived and studied with the graduate student accused of fatally stabbing a Binghamton University anthropology professor say the younger man was confrontational and threatening.

Souleyman Sukho says that Abdulsalam al-Zahrani came at him with a knife during the three weeks they shared an apartment with another student, Luis Pena.

Pena says he recalls the 46-year-old sitting on the sofa and suddenly blurting out, “I just feel like destroying the world.”…

A graduate student has stabbed Richard Antoun, an anthropology professor, “four times with a 6-inch kitchen blade inside a campus office.”

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

UPDATE:

From WHRW News:

Unconfirmed reports are coming in stating that the suspect was a foreign exchange graduate student, possibly from Egypt with difficultly obtaining grad funding, whose dissertation was to be judged by the professor.

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

Another Update: Background on this sort of crime here in a 2007 New York Times article.

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

Richard Antoun, distinguished anthropologist, has died.

Professors and students told pressconnects.com reporter George Basler that the mood in the building was one of shock and fear. “It’s scary as hell,” said Peter Knuepfer, an associate professor of geological sciences who works in Science I. “It’s another one of those things like the downtown shooting (at the American Civic Association, where 13 people were fatally shot in April). You think it happens somewhere else, but it happens here too.”

********************************
An article, in a SUNY magazine, about Antoun.

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

A statement from SUNY Binghamton’s president.

… Stanley Fish of a couple of books about politics and the university. Fish notes a welcome moderating of views on both the left and the right, but also says this:

… To his credit, [Cary] Nelson [in his book] expresses uneasiness at his part in creating an academic word where “’the professional is the political.’ ” If he now believes, as he says, that we should “set aside our political differences in tenure decisions,” he should also believe that we should leave our political differences and commitments outside the classroom door. The reason he gives for declining to do so is that a classroom free of political passion would be overly reasonable and contribute to the acceptance of the status quo: “The relentlessly reasonable classroom may reinforce confidence in the reasonableness of the nation state in which it resides.” Get it? If you confine yourself to the subject and preside over reasoned discussions of the assigned materials, you will be turning your students into toadies for the neoliberal state. I guess you would also be courting that danger if you arrived at class on time, and devised objective tests and assigned grades accordingly. In the face of an argument like this one, there is literally nothing to say…

Here Fish gets at the problem of disposition and cultural competency mandates in American schools of education. (See this earlier post, and the many comments it attracted, for details.) Cary does not believe in the existence of reasonable, dispassionate, objective discourse in the classroom setting. He’s the guy on your block with the bumper sticker that says If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. It’s an obvious fact to him that pretty much whatever the political situation is, it’s fucked up and outrage-generating.

To tamp down your passionate indignation for the sake of a classroom ostensibly devoted to the poetry of John Milton would therefore be a dereliction. What we call “art,” after all, is — read correctly — most importantly a vehicle of social protest.

Whatever their subject, in other words, professors need to leave it at times and model in the classroom a passionately partisan response to ambient political events. Professors are not merely teaching Milton, with all of his aesthetic as well as social and theological complexity. They are teaching their students not to become neoliberals.

Fish is right — there’s nothing to say about this argument. Its cynicism takes your breath away.

A University of Florida professor seems to have some violence issues.

[Richard Conley] was arrested Thursday on a domestic battery charge, after which he was put on leave and UF’s political science department briefly closed.

[He] was arrested on a misdemeanor charge in connection with allegations that he grabbed his wife by the wrist during an argument. The political science office closed early Friday as a result of the incident, according to an e-mail department chairman Stephen Craig sent to the department later that day.

“Because this individual has threatened violence in the past, it was decided that the best thing would be for the political science office to close early – which it did, shortly after 2 p.m,” Craig wrote.

… In May 2006, Conley’s ex-wife received a restraining order against him. That came after an incident in which, according to the restraining order, Conley allegedly referred to the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office as the “Gestapo” and threatened to arm himself with shotguns and enough ammo to “blow these f—–s to hell.”

Conley said Tuesday he has never owned any guns and that the allegations were false. He said his ex-wife used the issue for leverage in a pending divorce.

“This was not something that I said. These are allegations. The matter was dropped,” he said.

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean Paul D’Anieri said Conley has been placed on leave while the most recent situation is assessed, but that Conley is free to come to campus. D’Anieri said he could not comment on a personnel matter, but that there was no “clear and present danger” in the decision to close the office.

“We’re in an environment that we almost have to overreact to these things,” he said.

… Conley’s attorney, Thomas Edwards, said it was a “huge disconnect” to close the office and attributed the decision in part to academic disagreements between Conley and Craig.

… According to an arrest report, Conley was involved in a domestic argument Thursday over financial issues and other matters in which he threw a wine rack in anger. [Wine rack. He might be violent, but he’s still a professor.]

… Edwards said he believes the case ultimately could be dismissed, attributing the situation to changes at UF and the economy.

“I think there are a lot of people who are under stress because of the economy and things that are going on,” Edwards said. [Tenured professors?]

In the 2006 incident, Conley’s ex-wife alleged that he threatened to purchase an “arsenal of weapons” and “go to the death defending the right to keep and bear arms on his property,” according to the restraining order. He told a deputy he had no weapons when he was served with the order, which was lifted later that month…

A scan of his personal website suggests Conley is a bit hot under the collar about the federal government… Big Brother Barack leads the Two-Minute Hate…

… the visiting professor convicted of massive credit card and student loan fraud. He’s going to prison for a few years.

Watch a professor at the University of North Florida smash a 2X4 over a guy’s head when the guy asks for payment for recent construction work.

From Seton Hall University’s announcement of this year’s faculty retreat series:

The Heart of the University Retreat Series gives faculty and administrators of all faiths the opportunity for quiet reflection guided by four members of the University’s priest community. The series is co-sponsored by the Office of Mission and Ministry, and the Center for Vocation and Servant Leadership.

The second retreat, given by Rev. Paul Holmes on the theme We Teach Who We Are: Authenticity in the Classroom, will be held on Wednesday, December 2, 2009, from 9 to 11 a.m., in the Regents Suite, Presidents Hall.

“Deep in the heart of every university are the hearts of its teachers, and as we explore the university’s identity, we naturally need to explore ourselves. Ultimately, whatever our discipline, we teach who we are – `professing’ our worldview, our ethics, our values, as well as our hopes and dreams.”

Agree or disagree.