UD‘s got the impression that many American university students now routinely check Rate My Professors before taking a course. Despite RMP‘s obvious limitations, students really have to.

Why? Because unwise tenure decisions at some universities have wedged into place professors like this one.

Recently disciplined by the Ohio State University Office of Human Resources, the professor (this is his self-published book) has generated many student complaints about his teaching.

Here is a recent newspaper article about him.

… who was fired from his position at the University of Poznan for pro-democracy activities, including underground publishing, but was welcomed back after 1989, has died. During his years of protest against the Polish regime, he went on hunger strikes and went to prison.

A Popperian, Nowak urged his students, as they write in an introduction to a volume in his honor, “to look for holes in his theories.”

Nowak was also a Marxist.

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

Mr UD just got back from food shopping.

“Nowak. Yes. He was the only Marxist in Solidarity.”

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

Mr UD reads this post and says:

Popperian? Maybe in this restricted pedagogical sense; but intellectually he was an anti-Popperian. Popper thought there could be no rational guidelines to scientific discovery. Nowak’s famous phrase, as I recall it, was “caricature in the service of explanation.” The scientist attempts, in Nowak’s view, to capture in a few lines the essence of a phenomenon. Popper would deny that one can say anything about what he considered spontaneous creative guesses about phenomena. For Popper, falsifiability is the only criterion distinguishing real from pseudo science.

A professor at Wellesley gets her bike back by writing to the idiot who stole it and then tried to sell it on Craigslist.

And they’re fine, fine. Sensible, fine. But as UD ponders her own gratifying media stuff over the last few years, she thinks she might have something to add to the GW list… Scathing Online Schoolmarm also has a few things to say…

Here are some of UD’s university’s suggestions for faculty on how to handle media appearances, with UD/SOS adding some thoughts in blue ink.

* Are you the right person? Only agree to talk about what you know about. If you can’t help (i.e. if you are not the right person), offer to find someone who can. [Pish posh. You’re the right person. Go for it. Is UD an expert on the Dan Brown oeuvre? Wing it.]

* Be prepared. If the call takes you by surprise, tell the reporter that you’re busy but will call back in 15 minutes or so. This will enable you to collect your thoughts, gather information, and make notes. [Maybe I’m in a faster lane than GW, but I wouldn’t recommend this. Er… gimme a few minutes to collect my thoughts… I’ll call you back… Meanwhile the producer’s on the line to someone who shoots answers back immediately…. See, this is the sort of thing a professor will do … Lemme check a reference or two and… Nein. Just do it. Go with it.]

* Stay positive. Be friendly and conversational, even if the reporter seems to be adversarial. However, don’t be lulled into flippancy or forced humor. [I guess this is okay, but it’s drifting toward bland. Be yourself. If you’re un p’tit peu non-standard, not entirely amiable, go with it.]

* Avoid jargon and complex language. Use plain, simple language as though you were talking to a friend or neighbor. Define technical terms and use examples, anecdotes. [Absolutely. Excellent advice. For talking or for writing.]

* Speak slowly and clearly. Reporters are writing down notes or typing them into a computer. They will be more likely to get it right if you take your time. [This may be true for talking to a reporter from the Washington Post on the telephone; but television appearances tend to be a little sharper, a little faster-paced in terms of speech, in UD‘s experience.]

* Stay on message. Repeat primary points to make sure message is clear and accurate. Don’t veer off topic. [I guess this is true. Though the other day in my DeLillo class I suddenly for no particular reason started talking about the new scary film, Paranormal Activity, and the place LIT UP.]

* Never go “off-the-record.” Expect everything to be quoted. That’s no reason to be nervous—just be aware. [SOS says: Lose the quotation marks.]

* Avoid “no comment.” It implies confirmation. If you can’t comment, provide an explanation, i.e., a personnel matter, pending legal issue, etc. [Lose the effing quotation marks.]

* Stay calm. If you “flub” an answer, start over and rephrase your response. [What did I tell you???]

One final piece of advice: Don’t watch tv. Don’t own a tv. UD doesn’t watch or own a tv, and look how well she’s done with the medium. Possibly there’s a connection.

… blogger, dies at 81.

… a Harvard professor of biostatistics in the School of Public Health, has died in a car crash. His wife and mother were also killed:

[H]is SUV veered over the center line on a rural New Hampshire roadway and struck an oncoming car, killing its driver as well, police said. … “We don’t know where any of the vehicles were coming from and where they were going,” Guinard said, adding that “there was nothing to indicate” that alcohol was a factor in the crash.

… Lagakos had until recently served as head of Harvard’s biostatistics department, a rotating post, and had developed statistical methods used for numerous clinical trials on AIDS research in the United States…

… of UD’s friend, Lisa Nesselson, and a professor in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts (note way cool faculty webpage), has died. She was 57.

Friedberg wrote about the strange new world of screen media — the constant presence of screens, our constant scanning of screens — but she was also an historian who complained about the “presentness,” as she called it, of media studies. She was interested in shifts in the ways we envision the world, and her work went back as far as the sixteenth century.

In an email to me, Lisa, who lives in Paris, writes:

She was smart and funny.

She and [her professor, novelist and screenwriter husband] Howard liked to stay at the Hotel Louisiane because of its spartan style and famous guests.

The only drawback to their incredibly cool house [in the Hollywood Hills] was that it didn’t have enough walls for the giant vintage film posters they brought back from France.

There’s a tiny clothing boutique a few blocks away from here called Hug & Co. and …Anne liked to take a photo in front of it with her son each time she was here.

Friedberg’s very vivid web presence, in interviews and films and interactive sites, reminds UD that to her it does indeed still seem strange and new, this online history we leave of ourselves…

…sics.

… a great classical scholar, has died at 87.    From the Telegraph obit:

… Lloyd-Jones was the product of a type of rigorous philological training in Latin and Greek which was uniquely characteristic of the best English schools in the pre-war period. To this he added a thorough knowledge of the classical tradition and the history of scholarship; expertise as a papyrologist and textual critic; and a thorough grounding in ancient Greek religion and culture. Thus armed, for most of his academic career he engaged in an almost personal war to protect the soul of Classics from the modern age.

… As part of his wartime work, Lloyd-Jones had learned Japanese, and noticed how it was impossible, or at least difficult, to express certain Western concepts in that language. When he returned to Oxford, he set out in an essay for his tutor to refute St Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God by showing the difficulties of expressing it in Japanese…

But really I just wanted to show you this photo.

1978, Cyprus, with his wife, Mary Lefkowitz.

Could they be any more professoresque?

How bad is Manchester University?

Consider how long it took the university to deal with the now-notorious Professor Surprenant; and consider that even now the university has communicated nothing about the whole sordid affair to the students who had to suffer her appalling presence. No updates; no apology. Nothing.

… James Wyatt, who was the Life Sciences School Representative at the time, told [the campus newspaper], “the problem with her teaching style was that she was completely disorganised and a terrible communicator.

“The combination of her often illegible diagrams photocopied from a multitude of textbooks delivered in an order that she often seemed to be confused by, her random rambling, sidetracking, and often inaudible mumblings made for a shocking course of lectures.

“I was one of those who made audio recordings of lectures, these only served to remind me of the appalling lecture delivery the first time round.”

According to another student who took the module, in one lecture the entire room of students resorted to shouting at Surprenant as they couldn’t follow the flow of her teaching, with the room of outraged students described as “a riot.” [Unfuckingbelievable.  How can a university be so contemptuous of its students that even after this incident it would fail to remove Surprenant from the classroom?]

As Surprenant’s lectures became “increasingly chaotic and hard to understand,” student representatives within the Life Sciences Faculty raised the issue at a staff-student liaison committee in October. At this meeting it was arranged for Wyatt, along with Carly Mckenzie, the Life Sciences Faculty Officer for the Students’ Union, and other course representatives to meet with Surprenant herself to discuss the students’ concerns.

However, following the discussion with Surprenant students remained unconvinced of any improvement. “She totally disregarded the concerns put to her [and] tried to imply that we were the voice of a worrying or complaining minority,” said Wyatt.

Students also expressed concern that the teaching they received has ultimately affected their final degree qualification, Wyatt stated: “I wholeheartedly believe that this unit severely impacted on the time and effort that I could dedicate to other course units.”…

She sounds, from the students’ descriptions, quite, quite drunk.

**********************
Update: Then there’s the
politics department.

A professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine was one of three Americans awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday.

Carol Greider won the prize with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

But Greider said the work didn’t start as way to find new treatments. Instead, she just wanted to find out how the cells worked.

The resulting Nobel prize is “a victory for curiosity-driven science,” Greider told The Associated Press.

… “It’s really very thrilling, it’s something you can’t expect,” Greider told the AP by telephone.

People might make predictions of who might win, but one never expects it, she said, adding that, “It’s like the Monty Python sketch: ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!'”

From the Burlington Free Press:

Charles Houston, the Burlington polymath who climbed K2, studied the effects of high altitude on the body and taught medicine at the University of Vermont, died Sunday. He was 96.

… He was a one-time director of the Peace Corps in India and of the Medical Peace Corps in Washington, D.C., before moving to Burlington in 1966 to join UVM’s medical school.

Sometimes called the “father of high-altitude medicine,” Houston was an expert on pulmonary edema, hypoxia and the effects of altitude and the resulting diminished oxygen.

His expertise stemmed from personal experience. In 1935, his first year of medical school at Columbia near his childhood home, Houston asked the dean if he could skip the last six week of classes to hike in the Himalayas.

The dean obliged, and when Houston again returned the following year, he reached the summit of Nanda Devi, a 25,645-foot mountain in India. At the time, it was the highest mountain ever climbed — a record that would stand until a 1950 ascent of Annapurna in Nepal.

His affair with climbing burned hot until the mid-1950s. Houston was part of two expeditions that attempted to summit K2, the world’s second highest mountain. The 1938 trip, whose climbers reached 26,000 feet, would produce a map to the top that was used 16 years later by the first team to summit the mountain.

… Houston’s daughter, Penny Barron, said his health had declined over the past decade. Macular degeneration left him virtually blind…

Ben Littenberg, a professor of medicine at UVM and Houston’s neighbor, wrote the article on Houston in Wikipedia. His wife, Anna Marie Littenberg, said that after Houston lost his sight, she read to him for an hour a day five days a week — “everything from Churchill’s history of the English speaking peoples to the “Raj Quartet,” she said.

… Houston also had medical students come to his house to read him journal articles so that he could stay current.

… “Several analyses have shown beyond question that the increasing cost of health care is due in large part to the desire of doctors to make higher incomes,” he wrote in a [newspaper opinion piece just two months ago]. As an antidote, he pointed to Grand Junction, Colo., where doctors contain costs by pooling their resources “without jeopardizing one of the good reasons for going into the health care profession: the fact that it is a healing activity which has been universal for centuries and can be restored.” …

Here’s an excerpt from a nice bit of writing by a student at Louisiana State University.

His first class of the day is history. The class is mind-numbingly boring. Hardly anyone bothers to attend on a regular basis, and today isn’t any different. By 8:40 a.m., the classroom in Lockett Hall is only a third full.

Today’s topic has something to do with the Great Depression. It’s a topic everyone should probably care about — especially in light of today’s economic climate. Unfortunately, the professor is an old curmudgeon with absolutely no technological understanding. He even takes pride in the fact he doesn’t know what the devil this “Moodle” thing is. There’s no PowerPoint. No overhead. Just little old Mr. Magoo, droning away.

Half the students are snoozing. The other half are surfing the Internet, either updating their Facebook statuses or watching the latest Youtube hit. And, of course, there’s the creepy guy in the back corner of the room, glaring at his laptop intently. His enormous headphones are sagged around his neck, and his right hand is conspicuously submerged within his tattered corduroy pants, tugging ever so gently.

… At 9:49, after making the marathon walk from Lockett to Patrick F. Taylor, Saul walks into his accounting class. The professor is a young guy — probably a grad assistant. He’s the complete opposite of Saul’s last professor. A total tech geek. He even attempts to make a joke about Saul showing up late and walking right in front of the PowerPoint projector. A few brownnosers awkwardly chuckle.

For the next 30 minutes, Saul’s accounting professor steamrolls through more than 59 extravagant PowerPoint slides without giving any sort of coherent explanation. Saul can tell the guy feels a bit embarrassed about his lack of teaching ability. He even tries to cover it up by making a few jokes at his own expense.

But these self-deprecating jokes start getting a little depressing after a while. The insecurity is palpable. He might as well just ask, “Do you guys like me?”

Finally, Saul makes his way into his last class of the day — biology. His professor is a middle-aged woman with a load of personality. But her PowerPoint prowess leaves a lot to be desired. And so do her explanatory skills. It’s obvious to Saul this professor was forced by her department to utilize PowerPoint, even though it’s way out of her comfort zone.

As the last few seconds drain off the clock, Saul begins to reflect on what he’s learned today. The answer is a bit depressing — nothing. Absolutely nothing.

A student writes in the Brown University newspaper:

Perhaps the greatest problem [involving Brown’s two-week class “shopping” period] exists for Monday and Tuesday seminars. These classes have just two meetings for the entirety of shopping period, one of which is devoted to [an] abbreviated introduction. Thus, the only truly substantive class exists during the third week of classes… My friend and I shopped a seminar at the beginning of the second week, where the professor simply passed out syllabi, lectured for five minutes and let the class out after a mere half-hour (cutting professor’s own total class time by two full hours). When we were walking back to our respective dorms, I asked if he was going to take the class. “I have no idea what this professor is all about,” he said, “and I don’t really have the time to find out.” Needless to say, he isn’t showing up to class this week.

It sounds terrific.

Title: Leaves of Grass.

Plot, via Roger Ebert:

… It is certainly the most intelligent, philosophical and poetic film I can imagine that involves five murders in the marijuana-dealing community of Oklahoma and includes John Prine singing “Illegal Smile.”

… Sometimes you cannot believe your luck as a movie unfolds. There is a mind behind it, joyful invention, obvious ambition. As is often the case, I had studiously avoiding reading anything at all about “Leaves of Grass” before going to see the movie, although I rather doubted it would be about Walt Whitman.

… The film opens with [Edward] Norton as a philosopher named Bill Kincaid giving a lecture on Socrates to a packed classroom of star-struck students at Brown. It’s a measure of Nelson’s writing and Norton’s acting that this lecture isn’t a sound bite but is allowed to continue until the professor develops his point, and it’s an interesting one. Only as I think back do I realize what an audacious way that is to open a movie about the drug culture of rural Oklahoma.

Spoilers in this paragraph. Kinkaid is on the fast track. He’s published books, is a crossover intellectual superstar, is offered a chance to open his own department at Harvard. Then he gets a telephone call telling him his twin brother Brady is dead. He has long since severed his old family ties, but flies home for the funeral to Little Dixie, Oklahoma, and is met at the airport by his twin’s best friend. As it turns out, Brady is not dead, and the story was a lie designed to lure him back home for two purposes. One is to force him to see his mother, a 1960s pothead played by Susan Sarandon. The other is to act as his double to establish an alibi while Brady goes up to Tulsa for a meeting with the region’s dominant marijuana dealer Tug Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfuss).

… [T]he film makes the twins equally brilliant; Brady has designed and built a hydroponic farm that is producing its seventh generation of top-quality weed. He is also something of a philosopher himself. In writing his dialogue, [the director] doesn’t condescend. He is a Tulsa native who dismisses the widespread notion that a man’s “hick” accent (the movie’s word) provides a measure of his intelligence. Brady sounds like a semi-literate redneck, but he’s very smart.

… Janet (Keri Russell) [is] a local English teacher and poet, who quotes Whitman to Billy and entrances him in a way he has never before allowed…

The Sarandon character is right out of Michel Houellebecq.