From the Bowdoin College obituary for professor of mathematics Steve Fisk, who died at the age of 63:

Fisk’s love for mathematics… continued to the very end of his life.

“He was a person who loved mathematics more than anybody I know,” said [a colleague]. “And I know a lot of mathematicians.”

When [this colleague] visited Fisk at the Gosnell Memorial Hospice House in Scarborough, Maine on Friday afternoon, Fisk asked [him] for a particular math book called “Roots to Research.”

“I came back and I tried to get a copy—I didn’t have one myself, and couldn’t find any copy anywhere. Amazon could send it, but it wouldn’t arrive until Monday, and I sensed that was too late.” …

Instead, [he] called Visiting Lecturer in Mathematics Leon Harkleroad, who drove two hours from Brunswick to deliver the book early Saturday morning.

“Steve did read from it that day,” [he said]. “His wife told me later that he actually had left it bookmarked on the fourth or fifth page, where the authors describe the concept of length of game.”

Fisk’s obituary, written by his family, considers the concept of length of game symbolically.

“While Steve’s length of game may have been shorter than most of us would wish, the numbers he chose along the way gave him—and all of us—great joy,” it reads.

… at Portland State.

It’s early in the story, but apparently an economics professor there, in class a few days ago, suddenly launched a long and elaborate verbal attack on one of his students.

… John Hall, who has taught at PSU for 24 years, began the class with a lecture relevant to the course material but about halfway through the two-hour long class, he began to describe his experiences with law enforcement in places including Eastern Europe, according to a student who wished to remain anonymous.

Hall claimed to have been surveilled at times throughout his life and then told the class that an FBI informant and agent provocateur was in their midst. Hall said this person served as a sniper in the Israeli army and called him a killer with access to a personal arsenal.

He then pointed at Bucharest and identified him as the informant in question, according to the unnamed student.

Bucharest, a student at PSU since the fall of 2006 … sat silently throughout the ordeal, according to students in the class.

… Hall accused Bucharest of trying to organize students to participate in violent acts against the university, according to the unnamed student.

Hall also said he believed that Bucharest is at times armed while on campus. He then put a letter on the document projector that he wrote to the FBI’s Portland Field Office. In the letter, Hall claims to know Bucharest’s identity as an agent. He then handed Bucharest a copy of the letter and told him to give it to his superiors.

After a time of silence, Bucharest got up and said that some of Hall’s claims about his military background were true, but that other claims the professor made were not. Bucharest left the classroom after being told by Hall to leave and not to come back to PSU, according to students…

Let’s pause there for a moment.

One of many strange aspects of the story is that this account, published in the PSU newspaper, is no longer available. I got it from a blogger who reproduced it on his site. Why did the paper take it down? Is the student on whom the reporter relied for the account in fact not reliable? Bucharest apparently has a lawyer – does the paper fear legal action? Has it been asked by the university’s administration to take the piece down?

Anyway. Here’s something we can say with some confidence, assuming we’re getting something reasonably close to what went on. Whatever the background of this student, the professor’s behavior is paranoid and outrageous.

Hall, who has been removed from the classroom — indeed, from the campus — while PSU investigates, has issued a comment to the newspaper (again, I’m assuming the comment indeed came from him, etc.) which does nothing to weaken suspicion that he’s paranoid:

“I decided to take a stand. I observed the situation becoming extremely dangerous, not only for me but for about eight of my very finest students…. I felt that what I had to do should not have been my responsibility. …I understand the students’ privacy is to be respected, as defined by the codes governing PSU… I felt the level of danger had grown to such an acute level that I felt it fully in order to engage in an ‘emergency exemption’ of student privacy.”

This is nuts. The student might be malsain, might talk violence, might even carry a concealed weapon, but you respond to all of that, if it scares you, by going to the administration. Worst case scenario, you go to the police. You don’t stage a tribunal in front of the class.

… and has had to cancel this semester’s classes. 79 years old, Bloom has attempted to teach for the last few semesters, but illness and injury had him canceling most of them as well.

A stubborn old coot who has written angrily about the betrayal of literary values by people who think beauty reactionary, Bloom would have been a great blogger. And no, he doesn’t revile the internet.

If, in fact, you have an impulse to become and maintain yourself as a deep reader, then the internet is very good for you. It gives you an endless resource. But if, in fact, you don’t have standards and you don’t know how to read, then the internet is a disaster for you because it’s a great gray ocean of text in which you simply drown.

I’ve been reading a lot of Camus today (the fiftieth anniversary of his death happened a few days ago), and what Camus says about discovering literature is very Bloomian. Here’s Camus, reading Jean Grenier’s Les Iles as a very young man:

A garden of incomparable wealth was opening up to me; I had just discovered art. Something, someone was stirring dimly within me, longing to speak. Reading one book, hearing one conversation, can provoke this rebirth in a young person. One sentence stands out from the open book, one word still vibrates in the room, and suddenly, around the right word, the exact note, contradictions resolve themselves and disorder ceases. Already, at the same moment, in response to this perfect language, a timid, clumsier song rises from the darkness of our being.

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Bloom said this in an interview about ten years ago:

I have told the president of Yale, Rick Levin, who is a very splendid man, that I intend to be carried out of my very last Yale class in a large body bag, still talking, many years down the road. I–I will not retire. I don’t think they will wish me to retire. I don’t think they can or will make me retire. Obviously, if my health goes completely at some point and I cannot get myself into the classroom, if my mind goes and I can no longer think and articulate clearly, if I’m not capable of teaching well, then I will stop teaching. But otherwise–otherwise, I would hope to teach until I die. It’s–it’s what I do. It’s what I’ve done for 46 years. And I think I would go mad and feel worse than useless without it.

… hard-charging leftist historian, as famous for his running battles with Boston University president John Silber as for his People’s History of the United States, has died.

… Les UDs will be able to spend three weeks in their little house in the New York mountains. UD‘s excited about this, because the setting is peaceful and beautiful during the day, and breathtaking at night, with the massive summer canopy overhead.

There are long country walks, operas at Glimmerglass, visits to Woodstock, and UD‘s traditional birthday dinner at the Bear Cafe…

It’s all very exciting. But if you live there year-round, I suspect life can get dull.

Perhaps this explains the propensity of professors in that region to have marijuana businesses. Not only does getting high alleviate boredom (I’ve heard), but running the enterprise is probably fun and interesting.

Just a couple of days ago a SUNY Cobleskill professor was arrested; and today, it’s a guy who teaches marketing at SUNY Albany.

Have you been following that study featured in the New York Times which argues that professors are almost all from the political left because of job “typecasting”?

The academic profession “has acquired such a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism that over the last 35 years few politically or religiously conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors,” [the study’s authors] write in the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” That is especially true of their own field, sociology, which has become associated with “the study of race, class and gender inequality — a set of concerns especially important to liberals.”

For sure these SUNY guys are doing their bit to tighten our typecasting. Think of it this way: If you can’t imagine starting a marijuana growing business at home, you’re probably not cut out to be a professor.

… Bertrand Goldgar. Here are details of his memorial service.

A SUNY Cobleskill professor was arrested Wednesday for allegedly growing marijuana at his home.

Police executed a search warrant at 59-year-old Peter H. Van Deusen’s Sharon Springs home on State Route 10. There, they found an indoor growing operation and seized extensive growing equipment and a small amount of marijuana.

Van Deusen was not home at the time of the search, but turned himself in to troopers in Cobleskill Wednesday. He was issued an appearance ticket for the Town of Sharon Court Thursday.

He was charged with unlawful growing of marijuana, an unclassified misdemeanor.

Police say Van Deusen was a professor in the Agriculture and Engineering Division at SUNY Cobleskill.

Was? He’s a professor at SUNY at the beginning of the article, and has gone emeritus by the end? Wow.

And isn’t this like the four hundredth story UD‘s covered about a professor growing marijuana? Once pot’s legalized, expect a mass exodus from the universities…

… 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.

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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.”…