UO MATTERS is a new blog written by anonymous faculty members at the University of Oregon, a school that’s gotten more than its share of negative attention on University Diaries.
The pun in the blog’s title points to matters of importance on campus (an overpaid president, too many administrators, a sports obsession, a budget crisis, anti-intellectualism, etc.) and the basic attitude of concern among the blog’s authors — their university matters, and its betrayal of fundamental academic principles is so severe that these people have gone public.
Reasonably public. The university can be vindictive, so they’ve chosen to remain anonymous.
If you take a look at UO MATTERS, you’ll see that at this point it’s still rather an insider’s document, most of it offering specifics about salaries, cutbacks, distribution of funds, and so forth. UD anticipates that this blog will evolve toward a more public voice, since its issues are the same issues all ill-run universities confront.
UD thanks one of its writers for alerting me to UO MATTERS.
One of your high-profile, highly-compensated professors is under investigation by The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee for having stolen large sums of money from NASA. His M.O. is the same as George Washington University’s Professor Bedewi: You create a private business run by your wife and kids and all, and you send your grant money there. You then use that money to buy — they all buy the same shit — massive SUVs, massive houses, etc.
It’s awkward because, although he’s on administrative leave, you’ve still got this guy’s university web page up, welcoming everyone to the Innovative Nuclear Space Power and Propulsion Institute, which he directs, and where he shows the sort of innovative entrepreneurial approach to directing an academic institute that lands you and your university in the middle of a big fat Senate hearing.
Seems to UD that the solution is something like the following: Take down the guy’s page and replace it with a generic Welcome to the Institute page, on which you note that the current director is on administrative leave.
… Condi Rice, who plans to go back to being a professor of political science at Stanford, got grilled by a student at a reception at a dorm there on Monday.
I’ve often wondered why students haven’t been more vocal in questioning the architects of the Iraq war and “legal” torture who landed plum spots at prestigious universities. Probably because it would have taken the draft, like the guillotine, to concentrate the mind. But finally, the young man at Stanford spoke up. Saying he had read that Ms. Rice authorized waterboarding, he asked her, “Is waterboarding torture?”
She replied: “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”
This was precisely Condi’s problem. She simply relayed. She never stood up against Cheney and Rummy for either what was morally right or what was smart in terms of our national security.
The student pressed again about whether waterboarding was torture.
“By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture,” Ms. Rice said, almost quoting Nixon’s logic: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
She also stressed that, “Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after Sept. 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans.”
Reyna Garcia, a Stanford sophomore who videotaped the exchange, said of Condi’s aria, “I wasn’t completely satisfied with her answers, to be honest,” adding that “President Obama went ahead and called it torture and she did everything she could not to do that.”…
From the Daily Northwestern:
Despite the millions of dollars companies spend on diversity training each year, these programs are ineffective, said Harvard sociology professor Frank Dobbin in a lecture Wednesday evening. Dobbin spoke to an audience of about 100 in the McCormick Tribune Center as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Center on the Science of Diversity.
In his lecture “You Can’t Make Me: Why Diversity Training Backfires,” Dobbin argued that diversity training simply does not make individuals and institutions more open to diversity.
“Companies with diversity training programs are not more diverse,” he said. “What’s frustrating is, it’s the most popular and most expensive type of program that firms spend time, money and energy on.”
Dobbin identified external sanctions as a key factor in the negative impact of diversity training. For example, if a company does not comply with diversity rules, it can be sued for violating civil rights, he said. This kind of pressure can cause psychological resistance.
“If you tell Billy that he will be punished for taking a certain toy from a pile,” Dobbin said, “Then that is the first toy he will reach for when he is left alone in the room.”
The problem is that firms make it mandatory for their employees to attend diversity training, Dobbin said.
… Sociology professor emeritus Arthur Stinchcombe [He’s a friend of Mr UD’s.] said he has known Dobbin for years and has researched many of the same subjects.
“Since he does very good work, I thought I would learn something, and I did,” he said. “(I learned that) if somebody orders you to have a given sentiment, then you probably won’t have it.”…
… and a credit to his breed.
In a provocative speech in the heart of coal country, a noted Appalachian scholar called for an end to surface mining for the good of the state’s economy.
University of Kentucky professor Ron Eller, a Pulitzer-nominated author and former head of the university’s Appalachian Center, said the state must recognize declining coal reserves, political opposition to coal-fired energy, and rising regulations on carbon dioxide emissions.
“We must begin, I think, by abolishing surface mining,” and especially mountaintop removal, Eller said to about 250 people in the keynote speech at the East Kentucky Leadership Conference in Hazard.
Reaction was not entirely warm…
Note the many thoughtful comments from local readers.
More detail here.
UD doesn’t know where on Professor McDonald’s list of priorities sitting on the board of a notorious spamming firm appears, but I guess it’s important to him, or he wouldn’t be on the board.
On the other hand, he doesn’t list the board membership on his otherwise fulsome bio at Stanford. Maybe he doesn’t want to be publicly identified with a business that uses aliases.
While the Better Business Bureau has registered only two complaints for QuinStreet under advertising and sales practices (and several more in other categories), other complaints have been filed under QuinStreet’s aliases — such as VendorSeek.
It’s not spam anyway. QuinStreet/VendorSeek is performing the public service of keeping us informed — every day, every minute — about new products.
From the obituary of Princeton engineering professor Norman Sollenberger:
… Sollenberger was a fine teacher who deeply cared for his students, according to colleagues. He once devoted many hours to ensuring a young civil engineering student from Hong Kong, a rarity in the 1950s, would graduate. That engineer, Gordon Y.S. Wu, went on to help found a major Hong Kong-based construction firm. When he returned to Princeton years later to announce a record-breaking $100 million gift to the University, the first person Wu asked to visit was Sollenberger.
… from UD‘s old friend, Steve Elkin.
“I was his thesis student and his research assistant.
Beer, as Harvey Mansfield once put it, was ‘manly.’ He was virile looking, with a red Guards mustache, a lionesque face and a strongly built body. He also had a boxer’s nose.
I first met him at a reception for new graduate students. He was dressed in an English cut pin-striped suit and leaning on a cane.
I asked whether he had hurt himself.
Yes, he said, taking a sip of sherry; he’d been sky-diving.
What else. He was a gentleman — courteous and forthright. Intellectually, he had the gift of being able to combine acute historical analysis, theoretical propositions in comparative politics, and political theory. Indeed, he was the master of combining these things, and in doing so defined the study of British politics for half a century.
He also wrote a first-class book on the American political order, showing the roots of American thought and practice in early modern and medieval arguments.”
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This Harvard Gazette article, which shows you what Beer looked like at ninety, quotes him saying something wonderful:
Beer summarized his intellectual odyssey in a few brief, thought-provoking words: “In my case, it’s been a journey from the land of reason to the land of imagination. I believe that thought advances through metaphor rather than through precept. I really believe that metaphors – those corny expressions, almost a kind of street poetry – tell you more about the future than the think tanks do.”
Samuel Beer, legendary Harvard professor, has died at age 97. He taught, for decades, Social Science 2, and since Mr UD not only took it with him lo these many years ago, but saw Beer recently, I’ll let him do the talking.
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“I saw him at the Harvard Memorial Church, at the memorial for John Kenneth Galbraith, and I talked to him after the event at the Galbraith house.
I said ‘I enjoyed your course,’ and he smiled and made a funny remark I don’t remember… His wife said he gets that a lot. They were in the Tokyo airport not long ago and someone stopped him to say he enjoyed his course.
Soc Sci 2 was a very famous course – there’s an edited volume based on it. Don’t know the title; came out a long time ago. [Is it this?] About the same time I was an undergraduate.
It was a core course , a social science requirement, and it was a great course. Quite a number of interesting intellectual types went through it as teaching assistants. It was a year-long course devoted to revolutions.
He started with the Gregorian revolution, so that was an unusual thing… The great changes starting in the 11th century and developing through the 12th and 13th – church reforms , struggles between the papacy and the emperor.
One could argue that modern revolutions have their roots there… Then he did the English revolution… Then the great revolutions of the 18th century… The Russian revolution… I think the last one was the Nazis…
Sam Beer was important to me intellectually … I’m glad that I had a chance to tell him at the Galbraith event that I enjoyed his course. It was really kind of a crucial course in my intellectual development. I could have gone a more conventional route; I was a government major, but I didn’t want to take a course in American government. It struck me as incredibly boring.
I took his course, which was kind of history-heavy social science… Looking for patterns and so on. I very much liked that and I switched into social studies.
[UD: It says in the Crimson story about him that he sometimes wore his military uniform to class. Do you remember his doing that?]
No. When I was a student at Harvard, that wouldn’t have been a good idea.”
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… at our house on Capitol Hill many years ago. I recall a calm, unpretentious man with whom it was instantly easy to chat. I think I recall correctly his disappointment with our pathetic liquor cabinet.
Mr UD , who studied with him at the University of Chicago, admired his independence, his strong sense of individuality. He did his own work, utterly unreliant on any form of received wisdom.
Brian Barry, who has died at 73, had a political philosophy “best … described as egalitarian liberalism – the view that, along with protecting traditional liberal freedoms, the ‘just’ state must promote economic redistribution from rich to poor and provide equality of access to public services.”
Barry was famously pugnacious in argument and uninhibited in his criticisms of those with whom he did not see eye to eye. Colleagues who bought his books would quickly pass over prefatory tributes to Gertie the cat and go to the index to discover the identities of his latest victims. Terms such as “astonishingly crass”, “obscurantist”, “cavalier” or “complete rubbish” were characteristic put-downs.
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UPDATE: Excerpts from an exclusive interview this evening with Mr UD, who worked closely with Brian Barry at the University of Chicago.
“What did he look like? Big teddy bear…
I had just finished studying John Rawls with John Rawls, at Harvard. His big book on justice had recently come out, and the course there was basically Rawls responding to his critics. It wasn’t until I took a two-semester seminar in justice with Brian at Chicago – a course that featured Brian’s critique of Rawls – that I began to understand Rawls. In other words, I didn’t get Rawls as well, studying with Rawls, as I got Rawls studying Rawls with Barry. If that makes sense…
I went to his office to introduce myself before the semester started. I was already an admirer of his work. Finding him was a little difficult, because there was a geography professor on campus also named Brian Barry, and it was Barry’s first semester, and it wasn’t entirely clear where his office was… I found him, and he was really welcoming; we had a long chat, and he ended by saying “Well, I guess I’ll be seeing a lot of you!” I remember his office was very dark; he kept all the lights off…
The seminar was great. After it was over he organized an informal weekly gathering at his apartment so we could continue talking about justice. Various faculty gave papers; Brian served beer.
You know that book we have, The Incomplete Book of Failures? He introduced me to that book. He used to read out of it during class. He especially liked to read from the famous phrasebook, English As She Is Spoke.
I once bumped into him coming out of Regenstein Library. His arms were full of books — twenty of them, say. I said something like I see you’re finally reading a book or two. And he said I just finished writing a book on utilitarianism and now I have to read up on the subject to put in some footnotes.”
… the University of California Riverside professor who wrote a generous blurb for Jenny’s and my book, has died.
… Mr. Elliott grew up in a three-room apartment in a gritty Baltimore neighborhood. His father drove a truck. His mother operated a loom that produced corporate emblems.
After earning his bachelor’s degree, his family’s first college degree, from Loyola College in Baltimore, he got his master’s degree from Bowling Green State and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
After 17 years teaching at Princeton, he came to UCR for the opportunity to shape a growing campus, he said in a previous interview.
… Liam Corley, who earned his Ph.D. at UCR in 2004 under Elliott’s guidance, also remembered him fondly. Corley, an assistant professor of English at Cal Poly Pomona, is deployed to Afghanistan with the Navy.
“Emory was a selfless man,” Corley wrote in an e-mail to UCR officials after they informed him of Elliott’s death. “He was always in high demand as a mentor, teacher, speaker and scholar, but he had the generous gift of always paying attention to the person before him.”
Ward Churchill, that is. And yes, you’ve noted correctly that UD isn’t covering Ward’s trial. She’s had enough of Ward. I think you can watch the whole trial on Fox News or something.
But Ward’s vile words about 9/11 look almost mild compared to those of his British counterpart, who has now been suspended from his university post because of the violence of his threats against capitalists.
Chris Knight, of the University of East London, told BBC Radio 4 things “could get nasty” after ex-bank boss Sir Fred Goodwin’s Edinburgh home was attacked.
The university confirmed in a statement the professor of anthropology had been suspended from duties on Thursday.
An investigation was being launched into his comments, it said.
… The professor was interviewed for BBC Radio 4’s PM programme after the home and car of former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred were attacked by vandals early on Wednesday morning.
Mr Knight, who was organising [G20] protests next week, said: “We are going to be hanging a lot of people like Fred the Shred [Sir Fred Goodwin] from lampposts on April Fool’s Day and I can only say let’s hope they are just effigies.
“To be honest, if he winds us up any more I’m afraid there will be real bankers hanging from lampposts and let’s hope that that doesn’t actually have to happen.
“They [bankers] should realise the amount of fury and hatred there is for them and act quickly, because quite honestly if it isn’t humour it is going to be anger.
“I am trying to keep it humorous and let the anger come up in a creative and hopefully productive and peaceful way.
“If the other people don’t join in the fun – I’m talking about the bankers and those rather pompous ministers – and come over and surrender their power obviously it’s going to get us even more wound up and things could get nasty. Let’s hope it doesn’t.”
…writes a student on her RMP page, and I guess it’s true.
A creative writing professor at Drake University seems to have beaten up her boyfriend, and is under arrest for “domestic assault, first-degree burglary, criminal mischief and obstruction of emergency communication.”
[Anzalone] began yelling and threw a Yankee Candle at Peterson, which struck him at the base of his head. Peterson eventually went to Mercy Hospital where he was treated for minor injuries.
Anzalone allegedly followed Peterson through his house and tore a picture off of his wall and threw it down the bedroom hallway, according to the police report.
She then took his cell phone as he was trying to dial 911. Before she left, Anzalone hurled a glass vase at a double-pane window, shattering both panes, the police report said.
Peterson called police from a neighbor’s house. When police arrived, they went to Anzalone’s home and called Peterson’s phone. A phone rang on the bookshelf that showed the officer’s phone number in the caller ID, police reported.
When officers asked why Peterson’s phone was in her possession, Anzalone said that Peterson must have left the phone there the last time he visited.
… describes the University of Maryland faculty’s recent rejection of a rather too-harsh post-tenure review proposal.
Mr UD, a department representative to the UM faculty senate, was very much involved in the thing.