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.

A law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul has been charged with tax evasion between the years 2004 and 2007.

… Between 1991 and 2003, she filed only one tax return, in 1997, within the required time. Magee, who has been employed by Hamline for 17 years, told an investigator “she teaches classes on race and religion and is not familiar with tax law,” the complaint states…

One of many simple and eloquent comments in memory of a just-retired University of Wisconsin zoology professor who died in a bicycle accident. Article and comments evoke an exceptionally kind and committed scholar.

Really, a genuine and encouraging man.

“The Stanley I Dodson Rocky Mountain High” was what we called in his honor climbing a mountain and doing a headstand at the top. I’m comforted by the fact he’d find it fitting he died this way, doing what he liked in the place where he grew up and loved.

He was the real deal. Always one of those professors who had time for his students.

He didn’t make a big deal of himself. He preferred the essential things and he loved the outdoors and being with family and friends.

I remember one assignment where he had us calculate the proportion of passers-by wearing Earth Shoes (to teach us population sampling techniques).

Stanley was our neighbor. He loved his cat. He made his yard into a garden paradise with a stone wall and many native plants. He was always a kind soul.

He loved the out of doors and the simple pleasures of working around his house and yard, biking and living in harmony with nature.

I too studied Ecology with Dr. Dodson at the UW [Summer of 1985]. What an exciting class! A great professor. Assigned readings included Aldo Leopold’s magnificent “Sand County Almanac”. Additionally, each student chose a site collecting phenological data for periodic reports. I loved the guy!

A 50-year-old female professor at Ewha Womans University, who forced students to do chores at her home and extorted money from them, has lost a suit she filed against the school to nullify sanctions on her, a Seoul court said Thursday.

Among the chores were house cleaning, watering plants, trash disposal and changing the filters in her vacuum cleaner.

The students also had to take care of her around the clock when she was hospitalized and perform tax-related tasks, according to a ruling statement.

The professor, identified only as Park, well known in the field of textile arts, even extorted part of one student’s scholarship, worth 2.76 million won ($2,200), saying the student did not fulfill her duties, the court said.

In 2007, Park faced a one-month salary reduction after a student filed a complaint with the school authorities. Park denied the charges.

As the school refused to withdraw the punishment, the professor filed a suit with the Seoul Administrative Court. But the court also went against her wishes.

Presiding judge Lee Nae-joo said, “The punishment against her was appropriate.”

The feet of an impassioned, bizarre, and brilliant professor were worth sitting at. They (the professors, not the feet) challenged my perception of what reasoning was, what it meant to have an independent mind. (See Nabokov’s lectures on literature.) Would they get past search committees today?

The New Yorker

… for my other blog, over at Inside Higher Education.

Title: RICHARD POIRIER, VAGUELY

Link to the post: HERE.

One of the high points of UD‘s writing life was being published, about twenty years ago, in Richard Poirier’s journal, Raritan. She had long admired Poirier’s essays on literature — his independent spirit, his beautiful writing style — and was thrilled when he put her in Raritan.

Poirier has died, age 83, from a fall.

This charming tribute to him — “”He was a wonderful man. He was fantastic, rambunctious, beefy with energy.” — comes from the poet Frederick Seidel, Poirier’s longtime friend. (Have I posted on Seidel on this blog? I think I have. I’ll check.) (I have. But this reminds me that I’ve meant to write about his poetry. I’ll do that. Maybe today.)

I was surprised to read that his father was a fisherman. I’d have guessed diplomat, lawyer.

“Call it weed, Mother. Or call it pot.”

Okay, weed. Pot. I don’t smoke it.

Nor do I light cigarettes.

Or farts.

Since I never cook, I do not light my oven.

I used to light candles, but now I’m afraid.

When it’s cold out and I’m in the mood, I light a fire in my hearth.

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

Far as UD can tell, from her admittedly limited ‘thesdan perspective, she and Mr UD are about the only people of any age anywhere in the region who do not sometimes take a hit. UD hasn’t gone out and interviewed people, but that’s kind of how it looks.

So she figures this guy is probably telling the truth when he says his step-father — a law professor at Suffolk University — smokes pot with him. This guy deals the drug, and he has brought to his anxious upscale neighborhood some of the gun play disagreements among dealers can sometimes prompt. So he’s in court, and he has been talking about his family life. Of course, he could be lying. But his account has the homely feel of the truth.

Jonathon Cook, 20, said his stepfather, Suffolk University law professor Timothy Wilton, helped him build a place to grow marijuana in exchange for some of the profits and also smoked it in the house, according to a police report.

He said that his mother, Kathy Jo Cook — the former president of the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts — also knew about the drug activity and frequently complained that her husband’s smoking left the house smelling like marijuana, authorities said. … Authorities said they found a small smoking pipe in a dresser drawer in the parents’ bedroom, a scale and several baggies in the bedroom and another pipe in a closet in an office only they use… After his arrest, Cook told police his parents knew that he was selling drugs out of their home, and that his stepfather built a “grow closet” for marijuana plants. They agreed to split the proceeds of sales from the plants, Cook said.

Cook also said his stepfather bought marijuana from him, occasionally stole it from him and “constantly smoked marijuana,” according to the police report.

“He said that Mr. Wilton walks around the house smoking marijuana and his mother gets upset at him because the house smells like marijuana,” police wrote in the report…

If it’s true, it’s no one’s business. On the other hand, you shouldn’t tell lies.

Is Arnold Klein — Michael Jackson BFF, probably father of two of his kids, supplier of calming agents to Jackson, and soon to be arrested — is Arnold Klein a professor at UCLA?

He’s not listed on the medical faculty page, and yet as recently as last June the UCLA Newsroom cited a magazine article that quotes him, and the school identified him as a “UCLA clinical professor of dermatology.”

Indeed, he shows up on a directory page.

Most surprisingly, given how much in the headlines he’s been lately, Klein’s mentioned not at all on the dermatology department’s professors-in-the-news page, which contents itself with cellulite and athlete’s foot updates.

… who asked Why are Swedes So Stupid?

A retired Norwegian linguistics professor has described Swedes as “stupid” for not being able to understand Norwegian. Norwegians have no problem with Swedish, the professor points out.

Finn-Erik Vinje has caused an escalation in what is promising to become an all out language war, by publishing a post on his blog last week asking, “Why are Swedes so stupid?”.

… The basis of Vinje’s assertion is that Swedish viewers of Himmelbå, a Norwegian television series based on the British production “Two Thousand Acres of Sky”, have complained that the language is too difficult to understand and would prefer to see a series in Swedish, with Swedish actors, in a Swedish setting.

Vinje reacts to a review of the series in the Expressen newspaper in which Norwegian is described as an “incomprehensible and ugly language”.

“Line Verndal in the female lead can look as much like (the Swedish actress) Lena Endre as she likes. But she is still speaking that strange double Dutch,” Expressen’s Nils Schwarts writes.

Vinje [claims] it is… unnecessary for Swedish to be subtitled on Norwegian television although adds that perhaps it may be useful to do so for some of the Norwegian dialects…