Scathing Online Schoolmarm reads the Mark Dreier letter.

Sentenced to twenty years in prison for theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, Dreier “used money obtained from the scheme to support a lavish lifestyle, including purchasing two beach-front homes in the Hamptons valued at about $12.5 million, a $10.4 million Manhattan apartment, a $18.3 million yacht, a 2007 Aston Martin DB9 Volante, [and] more than $30 million in art work … ‘He abused his clients for seven solid years in every way imaginable,’ said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Streeter at the hearing.”

But he could write. And he wrote a long letter to the judge before sentencing. Let’s take a look at some of it.

And let’s think about what he wants this letter to do. Clearly, he wants a lighter sentence as a result of sharing with the judge his humanity, his motives, his anguish and guilt.

He says at the beginning, “I am writing to give some context to what I did… to try to explain how a person with my background and advantages came to do the unconscionable. Perhaps in learning how I made these terrible decisions which have ruined my life, others may avoid such mistakes. [This is] a warning to others not to follow in my path.”

Dreier indeed had every advantage, growing up in a loving, affluent home and attending the excellent schools in this post’s title. So one is curious to know how a person to whom so much had been given was able to take so much away.

Although he got the wondrous jobs you’d assume, “I was achieving less satisfaction and recognition than I expected. Colleagues of mine and certainly clients of mine were doing much better financially and seemingly enjoying more status. By my mid-forties I felt crushed by a sense of underachievement.”

Well, he’s honest. And he does write well. He tells us quite clearly that although filthy rich and located at the pinnacle of success in New York City, it wasn’t enough. As long as one other person seemed to have more money or status (That ‘seemingly’ is interesting, isn’t it? It acknowledges the pesky, abstract nature of status. By definition, you can never really know, can you, whether other people are enjoying more?), he was crushed.

Again, you have to admire the honesty. But how sympathetic can you be to someone who honestly tells you that his greed is cosmic, infinite, transtellar, surpassing the imaginings of humankind and deity? Sympathy implies the ability to perceive and feel at least a little of the reality of someone else’s emotions, experiences… What he has done is so extreme, so grotesquely bad, that the idea of his mea culpa serving to stop others from the same behavior doesn’t really get off the ground.

“[I felt] overwhelmed by debt, by a disappointing career, by a failed marriage… And so, incomprehensibly, I started stealing.” But it’s not incomprehensible, even if it is impossible to sympathize with it. If we assume a totally amoral, grasping human being, eaten up inside at the thought of any person with more money or status, the crime is perfectly comprehensible. If your bottomless greed sends you into debt despite your earning an enormous salary; if you don’t care about destroying people; and if you care cosmically about being rich and showing off your goods, then you will certainly steal.

“I lost my perspective and my moral grounding; and really, in a sense, I just lost my mind.” We have no indication of any moral grounding ever in this man’s life – he provides none in the letter – so we cannot go with him here. Bernard Madoff’s parents were both crooks; he understood morality, but never cared for it, and probably didn’t know many people who did. It might be the same situation here. Everything points to an amoral, grasping person from the ground up.

And Dreier certainly never lost his mind. He carried out his crimes with brilliant forethought for seven years, and stopped only when the police hauled him in. There’s nothing crazy about stealing from people if you want their money and don’t care about the law, morality, or the destruction of other human beings. “I just wasn’t in control of myself.” But he was. He may have lost control of his scheme as it became more and more complex. But he himself was always – as was Bernard Madoff – under control. Still is. Writes one hell of a letter.

“In some sense, being caught was a relief.” Now we’re starting to have problems with honesty. Not only that, but as the letter winds down the self-dramatization everyone who knows him describes as part of his spectacular narcissism emerges in a damaging way. His final paragraphs are self-pitying, though meant to be poignant. “I have lost all my friends. I have lost my law license, my law firm, and all that I ever owned. I have seen my family suffer the unimaginable.”  Like ‘incomprehensibly’ earlier, this just doesn’t work. Smart guy like this – he certainly imagined this outcome. He  didn’t care. He doesn’t care about people. He cares about money and status.

This is from the letter’s final paragraph: “I don’t know what gives some men the strength of character to lead virtuous lives for all of their lives, and what causes others, such as myself, to lose their way.”

The rhetoric is bracing but unreal. No one leads an entirely virtuous life; it doesn’t really take that much effort to lead the sort of pretty much moral life most of us manage to lead. It takes effort – unless you’re a career criminal – to spend seven years consciously destroying hundreds of lives.  

SOS suspects that this man did not lose his way, because his way was always degeneracy and covetousness — to get biblical about it. SOS indeed suspects that he took some pleasure at the thought of his evil, of what he was getting away with, of how he was making fools of people.

This letter, well-written as it is, would have been better had Dreier admitted that he is by nature and upbringing a thief, that he rather enjoyed his long run, and that the best he can offer at this point is to say that he’ll maybe spend some time in his cell giving thought to that.

Straw man plus just the sort of bland vapid reassurance you’d expect from a certain sort of doctor. This is ultimately arrogant writing that thinks you’re stupid. Don’t be taken in by it.

It’s written by the chair of the University of Minnesota psychiatry department, a locus of conflict of interest.

Let’s take a look.

Much has been written over the past few years about the relationship between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry. So I would like to disclose the following right now: I have worked with multiple companies over the years on sponsored research and as a consultant, and I continue to do so. During this time I have published a number of papers regarding this work — including some pertinent negative results concerning the drugs these companies make. [Dull but okay writing. He needs to provide at least one link to a study he’s been involved in, funded by a pertinent drug company, that arrived at seriously negative results. This is the first instance of bland reassurance in an opinion piece rife with it.]

A recent Pioneer Press report noted I have received less money from industry in the last year. Why? Because nothing is more important to me than the reputation of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School, and I am concerned that the media portrayal of all physician-industry relationships as bad could affect public perception. [This is just weird. Wacky. Where’s the logic? We need hard numbers first of all — the sort of thing notoriously missing from conflict of interest forms psychiatry professors give their universities — if, of course, they give their universities the forms at all. Quite a number of them don’t seem to bother with the paperwork. Many of those who do fudge the numbers like hell. This writer needs to talk to us about that… But as to the logic: Why should his caring so much about his school’s rep mean he’s received less money? And I mean — we need to know if it’s five or five thousand or five hundred thousand less, don’t we? And here comes the straw man: Absolutely no one believes, argues, or writes that all of these relationships are bad. Set up a straw man and knock him down. How powerful.]

What the media stories do not mention are the advances that have been made because of these relationships, which are managed carefully by institutions such as the University of Minnesota, where the Institutional Review Board approves all studies for human subjects and the Sponsored Projects Administration negotiates all contracts with industry. [He thinks you’re stupid, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he know that you know that things aren’t managed carefully at all? That this is an ongoing national scandal? You know what he’s doing? He’s saying There there little woman. There there little man. It’s all fine. You don’t need to understand — you don’t have the capacity to understand — the details and complexities here. Trust me.]

Physician-researchers need to partner with industry to develop new treatments. It is the system we have in place. The National Institutes of Mental Health do not fund development of new compounds in psychiatry; their focus is on funding basic science and mechanisms of action after approval. [Sure. True. No one has a problem with this. Get to the point.]

When it comes to clinical research to improve and develop medicines and bring them to market, it is industry that funds that work. And the research to develop new drugs is very expensive, costing $800 million and even up to $1 billion to get a drug discovered and available for patients. [How much improved are the improved meds you’re talking about? Isn’t one of the big points here that professors with financial interests in new, more expensive, but by no means better pills, are pushing those, thereby contributing to the health costs crisis? When do you plan to say something about this?]

When I consider the field of psychiatry, the advances made because of new medicines — studied in research institutions and developed by pharmaceutical companies — have been enormous and life-changing. Before we had effective medications, one out of two hospital beds was taken by a mentally ill patient. We no longer warehouse psychotic patients and drug them with opiates to “manage” them. Now, we have better ways. Better medications. [Who says? Do you think I’m dumb? Do you think I’m not aware of studies showing that many, many psychiatric meds are no more effective than placebos?]

Because of the partnerships between physicians and industry and the medications that have resulted from these relationships, many psychiatric patients were able to leave institutions. Now, because of the advances in psychiatric medicine, patients in our department — who are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and friends — can be treated as outpatients. Many have jobs, support families and contribute to society. [Bland, bland, prose to match Dr. Pangloss’s happyface. At this point in reading, you should be telling this writer to eat shit.]

Are the psychiatric drugs we have now perfect? No. All drugs have side effects, and the drugs I prescribe my patients are no different. [Why don’t you talk not merely about side effects but effectiveness? Relative effectiveness of new, expensive and old, inexpensive? Why don’t you talk about all the people who shouldn’t be taking these strong-side-effect, expensive drugs in the first place? About the fact that the pills are being over-prescribed unconscionably by you and your colleagues? Where is all that?] The leading edge of our research now focuses on predicting which medications, which compounds, will be effective for our patients. The goal remains to help people live independently, or with the fewest restraints on their freedom. In our department, we develop programs that integrate efficacious medications with effective psychosocial treatments. [Gag me. You’re letting Mister Doctor use pompous big words — efficacious?? — and how’s that different from effective?? Oh. It ain’t — you’re letting him do that in order to make you think he’s a big ol’ authority and all that you shouldn’t question. Tell him one more time to eat shit.] There are always new discoveries to be made, and it is truly unfortunate that the public is hearing only one side of the story from the media.

Do physician-industry relationships need to be managed? Absolutely. Has the increased scrutiny in the past couple of years resulted in constructive changes? Yes. But the answer is not to break these ties completely. My patients of the future are counting on them. [Pompous, self-righteous, self-serving. Why did the paper publish it? Because of who the writer is. But the writer is lazy and cynical and he thinks you’re stupid.]

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SOS thanks a reader for emailing this article to her.

… always appreciates fine writing. Here’s some. Let’s see how John Kass of the Chicago Tribune does his thing.

If there were any doubts that Illinois is the diseased poster child of political corruption, those doubts are long gone. [Such a fresh, strong opening sentence, in the context of such an absurdly over the top story of statewide corruption, that SOS laughed out loud. Great start.]

Friday’s story in the Tribune exposes a widening pattern of corruption at the University of Illinois. This time, with the trading of law school admission for patronage-style jobs. [Sentence fragment! Yes, the second sentence isn’t a sentence. But that’s okay, right? The guy’s pissed, and his clipped approach fits his anger.]

So any doubts about where this state stands should be erased. What remains is the smell. [Maybe he’s heading into a bit too much figurative language — poster child, disease, smell. We might ask him to polish this by finding one metaphor — stench would certainly do it — and sticking with it.]

The state stinks, from Rich Daley’s City Hall to Springfield, and now all that’s left, for taxpayers, is the smell and the stain. [Smell, stain, stink — I guess we’re basically into liquid doodoo here. And that’s fine. If the shit fits, wear it.] Corruption and patronage, once thought to be [Drop to be.] the exclusive province of greasy politicians, now reach into the law school of the state’s premier public university. [Not sure about greasy, though greasy-palmed is I guess the referent. If you wanted to stay with flowing manure, you might say malodorous or something.]

Friday’s story details how University Chancellor Richard Herman forced the university’s law school to accept an unqualified student. That student had the backing of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The student’s relative dropped wads of campaign money on ex-Gov. Dead Meat. [Laughed again on dead meat. Though again, if you wanted to keep the primary metaphor you might say ex-Gov. Fertilizer.]

In exchange for corrupting his law school’s admissions policy, Herman wanted to get jobs for five of his law school graduates. University officials considered the law grads so far at bottom of their class that they needed political clout to get a decent salary at a good law firm. If that wasn’t possible, the U. of I. was willing to place them in government jobs.

“Yeah, I’m betting the Governorship will be open,” Heidi M. Hurd, then dean of the university’s College of Law, wrote in an e-mail to Herman on April 29, 2006, perhaps joking that Blagojevich’s time in public life was coming to an end.

What followed in her e-mail was worse.

“Other jobs in Government are fine, since kids who don’t pass the bar and can’t think are close enough for government work,” Hurd wrote. In another e-mail to other U. of I. officials, Hurd wrote:

“FYI: The deal is supposed to be that WE get to pick the students — and they are supposed to be bottom-of-the-class students who face a hell of a time passing the Bar and otherwise getting jobs!”

That’s law school the Chicago Way. If they can’t pass the bar on the first or second try, they’re qualified to become mayor.

The latest e-mails from Herman, Hurd and other U. of I. officials were released Thursday. The Tribune had asked for all such e-mails in April. But these somehow were forgotten, until U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald issued subpoenas. Then, magically, that which was lost was found. A miracle!

Did the U. of I. search by the light of Batman’s beacon, Diogenes’ lantern or some other powerful lamp of truth? [Once again, funny. Remember: Writing is all about control. If you’re angry, don’t spew. Find some other way to convey your rage. Humor is a fantastic way.]

Thomas Hardy, spokesman for the University and a former Tribune colleague whom I know and respect, dismisses my skepticism and deserves his say.

“We’ve made a good-faith effort to respond to the Tribune’s Freedom of Information requests, and others,” Hardy said. “Some documents were not produced that apparently should have been. We don’t know right now the reason for that, but the fact of the matter is that in collecting documents and doing interviews for the Quinn commission, we’ve come across these new e-mails and made them publicly available.”

Within days, perhaps sooner, you’ll hear a few thudding sounds, like lonely bowling balls tossed down a dark alley, and you’ll realize you’re listening to the political heads of Chancellor Herman and his crew rolling into history. [Well, we’ve switched figures bigtime, and I’m not sure how fresh and lovely the bowling ball thing is. I mean, not that shit’s fresh and lovely qua metaphor, but somehow people always like it. And yes — He could rewrite with an eye to maintaining his dominant metaphor by saying That sucking sound you hear is the head of Chancellor Herman being flushed down the toilet of history.]

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that lopping a few heads and burning the stumps will clean things up.

Not in the state where our boss Democrats in the state legislature — guys like state Senate President John Cullerton (D-DeLeo) — are still slapping themselves on the back for stopping the Illinois Reform Commission led by former assistant U.S. Atty. Patrick Collins.

Not in the state where Mayor Daley can pretend not to know that his nephew received $68 million in city pension money to invest, and then, without telling his taxpayers, puts them on the hook for likely cost overruns in his 2016 Olympic dream.

Not in the state where — just before the patronage abuse trial of Daley’s top aides a few years ago — mayoral mouthpiece David Axelrod, now the media wizard for President Barack Obama, defended political patronage by arguing it is the grease that helps government run smoothly. [Yeah, ye olde start every paragraph with the same words — Not in the state… Fine. Works well here.]

Think about your taxes. And all the fine students denied admission to the U. of I., though they have the grades.

Think of the clout that’s been reported by this newspaper. Consider the thousands of excellent, hardworking students at the U. of I. who’ve been dishonored by the corruption of adults who are [Drop who are.] supposed to protect them.

If you’ve read carefully here and elsewhere, you know about corrupt politicians, corrupt cops, corrupt businesses. But the last line of defense for the corrupt are kinky judges.

How do you get such judges? You begin in law school, with university officials establishing corrupt practices, leveraging unqualified lawyers into jobs.

Lawyers become judges, don’t they? [Terrific conclusion, in which he clarifies the food chain by which judges become just as corrupt as everyone else in Illinois government.]

… about a local instance of the national scandal involving university presidents and corporate boards.

He says it pretty well, too. But of course Scathing Online Schoolmarm awards a demerit here and there…

One of the major reasons for paying a university president in South Dakota a $320,000 salary is because it takes a lot of money to hire a great talent with the right skills, credentials and experience to serve as president. [Avoid the wordiness, the use of “is,” and the repetition of president by rewriting in a more direct and simple way: We pay the president of South Dakota State University a lot of money — $320,000 a year — because we want a talented person with the right credentials.]

If the state paid a salary of [drop a salary of] less than $50,000, you’d expect that [drop that] a person of great stature and ability with full-time responsibilities would [drop would and write to] need to seek other income sources [Double dash after sources — He’s about to introduce a strong point. Give it some drama.] such as an additional salary of $195,000 plus a one-time stock-option payoff of almost $200,000 to sit on the board of directors of a multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation. But that’s not the case. [But that’s not the case is confusing. What does the writer mean? Rewrite.]

Monsanto’s gain is South Dakota State University’s loss. This $400,000 payoff creates a perceived conflict of interest not only for the university president but also for the quality of the research results coming from SDSU.

How are the results of research investments at SDSU to be taken seriously when one of Monsanto’s competitors can point to the university president’s $400,000 purse from the corporation and declare the research is skewed? If the perception is tainted, why would benefactors invest in the research services of SDSU or any other South Dakota university if it appears our university presidents can be bought and it becomes tolerated? [Drop and it becomes tolerated. Bought‘s your strong word.] What message does this send to students and parents faced with ever increasing tuition and fee increases? What message does this send to our SDSU research teams?

Personally, I like SDSU President David Chicoine and consider him a good friend. [Drop personally.] I strongly supported and campaigned for him to come to SDSU [Drop strongly.]. When he was hired, I felt SDSU had made a major leap forward in its growth as a prestigious institution. [had grown in prestige. Always try to tighten.]

The job is full time, requiring the full devotion of talents and energies of the president. [The job requires the president’s full time and energy.]  If a $320,000 salary isn’t enough to keep Chicoine on the job at SDSU, it should be negotiated so that we can retain a great talent whose full-time energies are devoted to SDSU. [This is the kicker. If SOS had been writing this, she’d have made this the first sentence. I like its threat to throw the guy out. That’s exactly what a politician should say.]

If Chicoine has spare time [Drop spare.] to promote the interests of [Drop the interests of.] a multinational corporation, he should refuse the pay other than to cover his expenses for travel, food and lodging. Service to academia should not appear as an opportunity to cut a fat hog at the expense of the university’s future. [SOS LOVES cut a fat hog! As a ‘thesdan, she doesn’t encounter phrases like cut a fat hog on a daily basis… In fact she’s never heard cut a fat hog… It’s the very opposite of a cliché– bright, new, and prompting pellucid images of bestial greed.  Bravo.]

As a leading national land-grant research university known for its excellent nonbiased research, we [Demerit goes here.  Are WE a land-grant university?] must do all we can to keep SDSU’s credibility intact. What message does this send to other university presidents? What message are we sending to corporate America?

We should not turn this debate into nitpicking about conflicts of interest. If Chicoine received a salary of $1,000 a year to sit on Monsanto’s board, there probably would be no discussion. That clearly is not the case here.

The state Board of Regents needs to resolve this matter immediately. If the board does not act, this issue will be presented to the South Dakota Legislature for a more permanent solution that will address it fairly and reasonably.  [Drop the address it fairly hoohah and end with the threat to can his ass.]

Scathing Online Schoolmarm starts her day with this letter to the Chicago Tribune from one of Clout U’s trustees.

As always her comments appear in parenthesis, in blue.

This is in response to your series “Tribune watchdog: Clout goes to college.” [Terrific opening. Real human interest there. Can’t you just feel the warm pulsing humanity of the writer?]

To correct at least some misconceptions, I write to share factual observations. [The Trib didn’t write a novel. Why not correct all of its mistakes? Too busy, I guess. Too important.] I am the senior (longest-serving) trustee of the University of Illinois. All who know me recognize that I take this role very seriously. As a trustee, just as if we were legislators, we are “agents” of the citizens of Illinois (trustees are appointed by the governor and approved by the Senate). [Parentheses and quotation marks already mucking up the works. Drop the pompous all who know me crap. Putting agents in scare quotes makes being a trustee sound underhanded.]

Many times I have been asked: “Can you get my son /daughter into the University of Illinois?”

The answer is always the same: “No, but I would be happy to check on the status of the admission.”

I believe that offer to make an inquiry is one of the duties of the position, again similar to what a legislator would do for his or her constituent. Those inquiries are sent to the appropriate chancellor — not with advice or with any request, other than checking the status of the admission.

The answer, good or bad, is given back to the requesting individual. That advice can range from “yes”; “perhaps, depending on acceptances of offers already made”; “no”; to “would you like a counseling interview?”

And there the role of a trustee stops. [Well, obviously not, or there wouldn’t be a national story raging and a legislative investigation pending into preferential admissions practices among trustees and others at the university. The letter writer thinks you’re stupid.]

Quite frankly, I have never heard of a “Category I” list.

Allow me to also state that I have never spoken with or made a written request to an admissions officer. My offers to check admissions status have been extended to anyone who has asked — not just the politically connected, or the donor, or to someone with whom I have a business or professional relationship.

The Tribune chose to publish an e-mail communication from me totally out of context — referencing the situation as “epidemic.” As the economy slowed, more and more students were switching from private to public university admissions requests. The applicant pool swelled in both numbers and quality. More and more families were concerned, and sought information.

This was the epidemic, not some “list.”

As I recall, at the time I may have had information requests in for three students. That e-mail, coupled with the picture from central casting (a most nefarious character shot), was nothing less than irresponsible sensationalism. [Harrumph! (Brushes mustaches nervously.)]

I welcome responsible journalistic inquiry; I abhor the adornment of the inquiry with supermarket check-out line trappings.  [I am a lofty person. Mark ye my lofty words and mark them well!   Welcome. Abhor. Inquiry. Trapping. There are others where those come from, and I will happily write you another letter in which I use some of them. ]

… and there’s Nothing.  There’s writing that’s absolutely nothing.   Here’s an example. 

True nullity of expression demands that the writer pay heed to style as much as content.  Nothing style should be without human markings, the work of a word-generator.  It should aim to be dead on the page at the moment it hits the page, like nail polish that dries the instant you roll it out. 

Classic Nothing takes a significant social problem, a current issue of substance, and then, in an attitude of hearty, can-do concern, taps it lightly here and there with rhetorical questions and reassuring answers.   It’s like the fairy godmother in Cinderella transforming actual things like pumpkins into pretend things like coaches.  What is this problem?  Can we solve it?  Time will tell!  Let’s work together!  Let’s admit we have a problem! 

 Put style and content together in this way and what do you get?  Bippity boppity boo.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has long talked on this blog about Guy Style, an argumentative approach she likes very much.  Some readers may find it boring and unemotional, but, au contraire, SOS finds its cool, terse, deep-feelings-withheld effect stirringly masculine, like Clint Eastwood.

Here’s a good example of Guy Style.

Now that the intoxicating frenzy of the Michigan State basketball season has subsided, perhaps a sober reminder of the intent in establishing the university is in order. [Classic Guy Style opening:  There’s the world of sloppy drunks and there’s the world of coldly observing Guys.  Who would you rather read?]

The main objectives were set forth in Section 11 of Article 13 of the state constitution: “The promotion of intellectual, scientific and agricultural improvement, and stressed “instruction in agriculture and natural sciences.”  [He’s missing a quotation mark in there, so we’re not clear where the excerpt from the constitution ends.  Not the end of the world, though.  Clever move to go back to scripture.]

No mention was made of funding any sport program, much less spending money to scout the world for basketball players.

Is Tom Izzo’s position as coach of the men’s basketball team as important as that of MSU President Lou Anna Simon, MSU’s provost, 12 of MSU’s top professors, or that of President Obama’s?

If one were to equate importance with salaries received, Izzo’s position would top all the others – combined.  [I don’t claim Guy Style sizzles on the level of word choice; rather, I claim that GS goes to the heart of things quickly, and gets them said efficiently.  This argument already has power, and the guy’s only a few lines in.]

One might ask how such an aberration from MSU’s core functions came about.  [Certainly by this point you see Clint’s sneer… You see the sneer that hides just behind the elaborate courtesy and restraint…]

Taxpayers were obliged to pay, in one form or another, $45 million for the construction of the Jack Breslin Center in 1989, with men’s basketball games intended as the main attraction. Major funding was obtained through the sale of bonds, toward which a liability of $22,722,000 remained on June 30, 2008.  [The highly emotionally controlled language skirts bureaucratic dullness.  But it’s kept from that fate by carefully selected details and a hint of Clint.]

Any attempt to compute the net monetary profit engendered by the team would be an exercise in futility.  [Sure, engendered is too formal.  Exercise in futility is a cliché.  Again, I’m not claiming verbal originality for Guy Style.  I’m merely claiming that, despite its weaknesses, it succeeds.  We’re paying attention; we’re getting the point.]

A Freedom of Information Act inquiry of the bonds’ interest rate and payment schedule drew the response of “No records exist on the data you seek because the debt you describe is contained within the university’s overall general fund commingled debt.”  [Drop of.  And don’t I always tell you to avoid the passive voice — a form of writing all over this piece?  I do.  Yet Guy Style may be the one place where the approach can be deployed – sparingly – to some effect.  The emotional content of that passivity does have to do with futility; it’s as if this guy’s style implicitly conveys the almost Beckettian absurdity of the university athletic system.]

No IRS-respecting private business would ever think of commingling funds from unrelated sources requiring separate accountability.  [Excellent point, strongly expressed.  For elaboration, read anything written by Andrew Zimbalist.]

Should the university take another look at its $796,000 bill to give 3,089 students choice season tickets at discounted prices to pay homage to gladiators on the court while dressed in “Izzone” T-shirts?

And why does MSU pay 13 talented basketball players the equivalent of $1,372,000 in tuition, room, board and books over a four-year period, and not pay anything to the thousands of astute students who are academically talented and may be our future Einsteins and Marie Curies? [The Einstein/Curie thing’s pretty hokey, but the rest of the sentence has power.]

Should taxpayer-funded universities with coaches on multimillion-dollar contracts be placed under salary caps, such as President Obama has ordered for executives of corporations that request bailouts with taxpayer money?

Some may offer that Izzo might seek a position elsewhere if his salary is reduced.  [Again, an awkward, bass-ackward sort of sentence, but, as with Clint, there’s something in the combination here of strong emotion strongly withheld — a tension that comes out as oddly formal speech — that’s riveting.]

There are those who thought MSU’s women’s basketball program would collapse after the departure of Coach Joanne P. McCallie.

Its success under Suzy Merchant has proven otherwise, and delighted many when it sent “Coach P” back to North Carolina on a blue note after beating the devil out of her highly touted team in March.  [When a Guy Style writer does allow himself a little emotion — beating the devil out of — it has a strong impact, given the background of emotional restraint.]

This is not meant to belittle Izzo’s coaching ability, but to question whether a well-meaning administration has been led astray from its fiduciary responsibility to help as many prospective students get a college education as possible – and not discriminate in favor of a small number of special interest students.  [End of argument.  Note that Guy Style writers get right to it, say it, and then stop.  They’re not about sculpting shapely polemics, so they’re not going to give you a texte de jouissance. You want heavy breathing, read the post just below this one — The Problem With Rants.]

Taking off from the University of Illinois admissions clout scandal, a writer for the Huffington Post shows you why SOS is always telling you to control your emotions if you want to argue something. Let’s take a peek.

… [In a recent] issue of the [Chicago] Tribune, the venerable sportswriter Bob Verdi refers to the NCAA and college sports as “our intercollegiate sewer system.” [Nice use of a strong quotation. So far so good.]

Yes, the Clout University scandal is shady, shabby, ridiculous, pathetic, disgusting, despicable, etc. But what irritates and baffles me is the public’s indifference to our wasteful, unconscionable, unfair, unreasonable practice of giving, not dozens, but tens of thousands of tickets of admission into our universities to young people many of whom would have no chance of being accepted into a higher-ranking university, or any university at all, strictly on their intellectual merits. [The first ridiculously long list is fine; the writer seeks to summarize what everyone’s saying, and he’s doing it in an exasperated, amusing way. But the rest of the paragraph’s also over-written, and here it’s not strategic; instead, it’s angry and uncontrolled.]

Of course I’m talking about the so-called “student-athletes.” [Two sins in one sentence: The juvenile so-called, and the quotation marks. Just as he’s packing too many words into his sentences, so he’s overloading his point about the inauthenticity of students selected for their athletic skill. Once you’ve said so-called, you don’t need the quotation marks; or, if you go with quotation marks, you don’t need the so-called. Though if you ask SOS you don’t really need either of them. Just use the term student-athlete and be assured that your reader will understand, from the prose around the phrase, that you disbelieve in the concept.] Our Illinois politicians, dastardly sneaks as they undoubtedly are, were not the first, nor the most culpable, offenders against intellect. We all decided long ago that many qualities were more important than mind in deciding who goes to college.

For example, community service. And extra-curricular activities. And exotic hobbies. And “a wide range of interests.” And being closely related to a previous graduate of the college. And, most important by far, performance in organized high school sports. [Why the quotation marks around wide range of interests?]

The truth is that none of these activities and qualities should enter into a decision about who gets into college. That’s right, none. [The writer makes it easy to reject his argument by taking so extreme a position.]

To deny the validity of what I’ve just said and to tacitly endorse a “system” [Note that he can’t stop with the quotation marks, which continue to add a juvenile element to his anger.] which awards seats in an institution of teaching and scholarship to the stupid, the indifferent, the anti-intellectual, and the duffers is to take a low revenge on Intellect, cultivate mediocrity, and degrade and prostitute the Alma Mater we say we cherish. [Way over-written. There’s a weird nineteenth century elaborateness to his style, complete with capitalization and grandiloquence.]

As indefensible as the custom of letting politicians decide who goes to school and who gets scholarship money may be, it does far less harm to higher education than our worship of sports and athletes.

“Beer and circus.” That’s what Murray Sperber, Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Indiana University, called the sports-spectacle atmosphere of college athletics two decades ago. That’s what we’ve turned our colleges and universities into. [The argument never gets going, does it? Reason: He settles for bombast and bitchery rather than substance.]

College presidents and faculties aren’t running higher education. (How many letters to the editor decrying the politicians’ influence on admissions have you read from faculty members at the University of Illinois?)

Young, male, beer-sodden dolts and screeching ESPN announcers give the predominant tone to our universities….

SOS should love this piece, shouldn’t she? But it doesn’t do her side any good. The writer merely exhibits his self-righteousness.

SOS has said it before on this blog: If, as a writer, you’re bringing bad news, you might want to use humor. Here’s an earlier example of what I have in mind – a University of Wisconsin Madison graduate student telling readers of the school’s newspaper that the campus lake is full of shit.

SOS‘s sister, the Morrissey fanatic (just back from a bunch of Morrissey concerts in England), sends her this charming example of the form, from the Baltimore Sun.

When Gregory Glass and his colleagues set out to trap rats in Baltimore neighborhoods for a recent study, they were welcomed by two-legged residents who were more than happy for the scurrying rodents to be taken away to a lab. They had just one concern. [Note two good qualities of intro paragraphs, newspaper-journalism-style: A rich, complex sentence, and a conclusion to the paragraph that makes you want more. What concern?]

“You’re not bringing them back here when you’re done, are you?” they asked.

No, after their DNA was extracted, all 277 rats collected in 11 alleys were killed, [Note how the writer smuggles in research project details without making them dry.] which is a good thing, given that what Glass learned was that death is among the few things that will get a Baltimore rat to leave the place it calls home. [Adorable. Note the intentional writerly awkwardness that makes this funny: what Glass learned was that death is represents pretty pedestrian prose on its own, but in this context it feels as though the writer’s amusingly easing us into this icky subject. She’ll get, we know, more explicit with each paragraph.]

In fact, the Baltimore rat is so wedded to its home turf, typically an alley a few hundred feet long, that at the molecular level, an East Baltimore rat is distinct from a West Baltimore rat. [The writer has intrinsic interest going for her too. Who knew this?]

“Give me a rat,” Glass brags, “and I can tell you which side of town it’s from.” [It’s another bit of luck that the study’s author is funny and warm.]

And it goes even beyond east is east, west is west, never the twain shall meet – the study, published recently in the journal Molecular Ecology, found that most rats apparently spend the bulk of their lives in the space of about a tenth of a mile. [Again, note how she seeds the piece with specific details. The details don’t get crammed, rat-like, into one paragraph.]

“Most rats are like people in Baltimore,” said Glass, who after 25 years in the city has had occasion to observe both. “They marry someone next door or down the block at most, and are happy to live in the neighborhood they grew up in.”

It’s that quality – our rats, ourselves – that makes the paper such great reading, both as science and local culture. It is the well-observed local quirk, the Baltimore homing instinct, rendered in charts, graphs, Euclidean distances and, of course, adjacent-allele heterozygotes. [Our rats, ourselves is very nice. Parts of the article are a bit hokey as the author pushes for humor, but basically what she does succeeds wonderfully.]   [I love the way she writes of course before the well-known adjacent-allele heterozygotes.]

The upshot: Nearly all the rats – more than 95 percent of them – exhibited what the researchers call “site fidelity;” they were bred and born in the alley in which they were trapped. (It made me feel a little sorry for one very lost rat that ended up in one of the traps, a veritable stranger in town whose DNA revealed it was unlikely to be from any of the alleys studied.)

“Most rat movements were limited within individual city blocks,” the paper concludes.

Here I’d always thought I was just a very grounded person; now, after reading the paper, I realized I am almost as site-faithful as the local rodent population. My first apartment here [Drop this here. Or the one at the beginning of the sentence.] was a couple blocks from the hospital where my elder sister was born. (My family moved to Harford County shortly afterward, which is where I was born, but then we moved away.)

My second apartment in Baltimore was two blocks away from the first one. Then in a fit of uncharacteristic wanderlust, I bought a house that was two whole miles away. I lived there until moving three blocks to my current house. [Drop uncharacteristic.]

Hopefully, that’s where the rat in me ends. [Drop hopefully.] Glass, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, tells me a rat burrow basically has a pair, an alpha male and an alpha female, that goes about breeding the next generation. Given what the paper calls “high fecundity and generation overlap in Baltimore rats,” the alley ends up as a community that is [Drop that is.] something like that song about a family filled with so many intermarriages that, as the narrator sings, “I’m My Own Grandpa.” [Drop as the narrator sings.]

More grossly interesting, or interestingly gross, [Charming. And notice she’s going to some trouble not merely to organize this through the use of transitional phrases, but to make those phrases witty.] facts about rat life: There’s only room for one alpha pair per burrow, so eventually some rats leave home and create their own communities. They’ll fight, “blood and skin,” Glass says, over territories. But they generally stay close to their ancestral home – there can be four or five burrows in a single alley, he said. The study found that rats within an 11-block area were part of one extended family. [Drop eventually and generally.]

The Jones Falls serves as a natural barrier dividing east- and west-side rats. The differences between them are at the DNA level, but after years of studying them, Glass has noted that there are [Drop that there are.] rats with black coats “and a beautiful white star on the chest” in one east-side neighborhood, around Jefferson Street above Orleans Street. “You go a couple blocks away, and they look normal again,” he said, “mostly yucky-brown.”

No doubt most urban rats behave like our own, but it is the Baltimore rodent that oddly enough is one of the most studied populations. [Note that she has a to be verb problem. Rewrite: but Baltimore’s rodent’s the most studied.] Glass and others in the field frequently cite 1940s research on Baltimore rats that probably were the ancestors of our current vermin. [no doubt ancestors of our current vermin. See how, in rewriting, I’m looking for ways to eliminate forms of to be?]

Rat scientists likely were drawn to Baltimore for the same reason Willie Sutton was drawn to robbing banks – it’s where the rats are. As a result, our rats have developed a certain je ne sais quoi among rat researchers. [I love her choice of je ne sais quoi. Like her choice later of Boswell, it’s the Oscar Wilde technique of yoking the lowest of subjects to the highest. Try it.]

“People from New York are always asking me to send pieces of Baltimore rats to them,” Glass said. “I think, ‘You’re in New York, you have your own rats.’ ”

Glass has a wry sense of humor, but it is unclear whether that is the cause or the effect of his choice of research subject. If you’re interested in studying biodiversity within animal populations, he said, “one way to do it would be to go to the Serengeti and look at lions.” He’s pretty much to the opposite side of the spectrum, and as a result, Baltimore rats got their very own Boswell.

The study details how researchers picked Baltimore alleys – mostly older neighborhoods known from previous studies to harbor rats in ample supply. Or, as the paper describes them in the kind of language that would make a real estate agent faint: “Areas characterized by row houses with small backyards comprised of concrete parking pads and small garden areas often occupied by rat burrow systems.” The lucky areas had what the researchers estimated was, on the average, a density of about 50 rats per alley.

Glass’s interest in rats comes from a public health rather than a cultural standpoint. While the rest of us view rats as horrid creatures that basically spread revulsion, he studies them for how they spread viruses and bacteria. Although most rats don’t stray much, enough do – they’re known as the “super spreaders” – that they remain potential carriers of various diseases.

Still, I have to ask Glass: Why does the rat, unlike the chicken, generally not cross the road?

Blame it on the two-legged creatures and their generosity, putting trash in plastic bags.

“Rats will move a long distance to get food,” Glass said. “But if they can get food, get a drink where they live, they won’t.”

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My favorite part of this very nice piece of writing appears after the article:

RELATED TOPICS: Population, Biotechnology Industry, Ecosystems, Genes and Chromosomes, Conservation, Human Body, Real Estate Agents

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… this is one shitty letter to the editor.

I mean, yes.  Do damage control.  Do damage control until the cows come home.  SOS has no trouble with damage control.

But don’t do damage control so badly you end up doing more damage.

Here’s the problem:  The University of Toledo currently has the most corrupt sports program in the country, with all the national news coverage that implies.

A faculty member seeks to control damage.  Let us see how she does it.

Let us first notice the very end of her letter, when she provides some identification for herself:

Alice Skeens

Associate professor
University of Toledo

Fine, a concerned Associate professor…

And now let’s look at an editorial note below her name, provided by the newspaper that published her letter:

Editor’s note: The writer is UT faculty athletic representative to the NCAA.

Oh whoops yeah forgot to mention I’m faculty athletic representative to the NCAA!  (It’s possible the writer provided this information to the paper, which chose to present things this way.  If so, a mistake.)

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

March 29, 2007, was a difficult day for the University of Toledo. That was the day federal investigators filed a criminal complaint against a former football player alleging that he had been a part of a point-shaving scheme.

This dark cloud follows UT athletics to this day, yet the investigation has always focused on the past.  [Dark cloud ushers us into a world of clichés.  It’s hard to get a whole world of clichés into a letter to the editor, but this writer has done it.]  [The investigation focuses on the past because the crime, like all past crimes now under investigation, occurred in the past.  If you catch my drift.  There are two reasons its darkness insists on pursuing UT:  One, it involved organized crime and betting on university games, which is REALLY REALLY dirty stuff, even by the dirty standards of bigtime university sports.  Two, the president of UT refuses to deal with it in an honest and forthright way.   Like this writer, he’s trying to, er, sweep this event under the scrapheap of history.]
Indictments filed last week appear to be the beginning of the end, focusing on a 13-month period from Nov. 19, 2005, to Dec. 19, 2006.  [The past, the beginning of the end… Like UT’s president, to whom this writer toadies, the idea is to convince you that something profoundly, lastingly, corrupt is ancient history.]

I have spent a majority of [Pompous, wordy.  Say most.] my 47-year career working with UT’s student athletes and I couldn’t agree more with [President Lloyd] Jacobs’ assessment that this period is truly behind us.  [Toady.] [And a very nice example of what SOS has said many times on this blog about the desperate use of intensifiers to make what you want to be true the truth.  It’s truly truly behind us, I tell you…]

In a June, 2007, editorial, The Blade described intercollegiate athletics as “a monster – like the mythical multiheaded serpent Hydra – that is nearly impossible to subdue.” It then went on to applaud President Jacobs for being “determined to try.” Accolades were earned by “implementing aggressive new procedures to tighten up athletics administration.”  [Passive voice — were earned by.]

Shakespeare aptly observed, “What’s past is prologue,” as history sets the stage for future actions.  [Well done, Bill! Shakespeare certainly gets an A in this professor’s class… To quote Shakespeare at all in this tawdry context is laughable, and to use the tight-ass aptly observed is … oh well.  I suppose the writer attempts to lend some tragic gravitas to this unfortunate, long-forgotten incident.  She accomplishes exactly the opposite.]  Responding to the events two years ago, the university implemented its new procedures, including “a comprehensive educational program for all student-athletes in areas such as gambling …” as reported in the Blade on June 14, 2007.

One can argue that the success of these programs is evidenced by the continued retrospective nature of the probe.  [Deadly writing:  One can argue.  Is evidenced by.  As SOS noted above, the retrospective nature of the probe — again, note the pomposity — has to do with the retrospective nature of the events.  To be more precise, they already happened.]

On May 10, The Blade called upon the administration to successfully address the situation, noting, “To countenance cheating creates a culture of corruption that not only hurts [the athletes] as players, teammates, and representatives of the university but also damages UT’s reputation and that of its sports programs.”

I could not agree more.  [Repeats this phrase; she said it a few paragraphs above.  A stiff inhuman writing style coupled with robotic repetitions of phrases – it just ain’t gonna get you there, honey.  Now, what you should have done is start like this:  I’m the faculty athletics representative, and I’ve always… And then whatever.  Say whatever the hell you want to say.  Tell a story.  Tell it from the heart.  But make it honest and human.  Don’t make it a press release from the president’s office.] That is why swift actions were taken two years ago and the university can say it has truly turned the page.   [The intensifier truly again.  Writing by machine.]  Our best years are yet to come.  [Ends with a flourish — her biggest cliché  yet.]

SOS thanks a reader for sending her this.

Especially a negative restaurant review. How many really negative restaurant reviews have you read?

Here’s one. Let’s see how he does it.   We’re in Toronto, by the way.

“Walk of shame” usually refers to showing up at work in last night’s clothing. It means you got lucky. It also alludes to bed head, missing buttons and incriminating clothing stains.

Basically, looking and feeling like crap.

It also describes the strip of Bloor [Street] between Bathurst and Spadina.

The Annex is no stranger to bad restaurants. The neighbourhood nearly owns a patent on the concept.

Cheap sushi joints line the street, each as barely adequate as the last. The ‘hood’s most popular sushi restaurant was closed down in March for three days by health inspectors. This month, an investigative report by the Star found it was selling tilapia as snapper. [Nice, very precise details.  Sort of amusing.]

Pubs and coffee shops sit in the shadow of the Brunswick House, where a fist fight can be had for the price of a pint. All of it is fuelled by a steady supply of undergrads from University of Toronto’s student ghetto.

T cafe, a new tea and tapas spot, is unlikely to improve the neighbourhood’s reputation.  [SOS likes the way the writer sketches the restaurant’s low-life setting before reviewing the restaurant itself.  Gives the reader a sense of the larger reality in which the place sits.]

The site – the corner of Bloor and Borden – was the home of Dooney’s for more than 20 years. In the mid-’90s, the cafe scored a victory over coffee giant Starbucks. Locals and regulars rallied their support when the property’s owner leased it to the coffee giant. After a lot of bad press, Starbucks leased the property back to Dooney’s and quietly opened up shop down the block.  [Again, a little history is good — though SOS had some trouble understanding the sequence of events as written.]

Perhaps the food at T cafe would be better if it were a Starbucks. I would rather eat one of its prepackaged ham sandwiches than another meal here.

On each visit, it’s difficult to pass the intoxicating perfume of cumin wafting from Ghazale, a wonderful Middle Eastern place across the road.

There are a few pleasing bites at T Cafe. [It’s always a good idea to start an attack with whatever positive you can think of to say.  Makes you look less nasty, more fair.]  Onions, fried with a green-tea speckled batter, are not without their charm ($4.25). Rosti are freshly fried, topped with bits of goat cheese and green-tea smoked salmon ($6).

But that’s just an attempt to say something nice.  [Refreshing directness.] Most of the food has the sprightliness of leftover wedding hors d’oeuvres.

There are cold goops of roasted zucchini and peppers ($4.25) and overcooked lamb chops ($9.25) with mate tea honey mustard. Frico (thin, baked crisps of cheese) are served as “Asiago chips” ($6). Except they are nothing like a chip. They are thick and gummy like a tougher, cheese version of a fruit roll-up.  [Goops.  Gummy.  Excellent icky words.]

The “creamy salsa verde” with won ton chips ($5.25) is yogurt with chopped peppers. Sliders with pancetta ($7.50) are straight out of a caterer’s page #1 selection. That’s the page you flip back to after you see the page #3 prices and say, “People like mini-hamburgers. I guess sliders are good enough for our guests.”

This place even manages to FUBAR something as simple as a bowl of cold soba ($4.99).  [Hold on.  Gotta look up FUBAR.  Fuck Up…?  Ah.  Fuck Up Beyond All Repair. Who knew.]  I can’t imagine how it is even possible to get soba to the consistency of licorice. I’d rather not know.  [Instead of the windy I can’t imagine how it is even possible… maybe something more direct instead:  How do you get soba to the consistency of licorice?]

Nearly all the food has tea in it. Yet nothing tastes of tea. Except for the tea, which is quite nice ($4.50).

But if I were coming here just for tea, it would infuriate me that all the teapots drip.

It’s shocking because good restaurateurs put a lot of care into these things. [Shocking overstates things and risks making the writer sound like a snot.]  A friend who owns a coffee shop has gone through three milk jugs and three sugar bowls in search of the perfect paraphernalia.

When I visit, most guests are drinking tea – couples on laptops; a boy with a stack of textbooks; a woman reading a magazine article titled “Decluttering Your Sewing Room.” A teapot and its drips clutter every table.

The only menus are placed at ceiling level over the counter, in tiny type. A server brings our food, but not cutlery or napkins. “It’s over there,” she says, motioning with her head.  [Excellent bit here.  It’s the details that do the trick.]

Despite the window sign promising a “unique tapas menu,” this is no restaurant.

No one inquires about our half-eaten food. We have leftovers wrapped up to feed someone on the street. But the container leaks red oil on my pants and the stain does not come out (thanks a lot, Shout Triple-Action).

A restaurant is a business – a big investment. It’s hard to fathom the bank employee that would approve a loan for a restaurant, in any neighbourhood, serving tea-infused tapas dishes.

The Annex doesn’t needs [typo] this, period. There is already a tea shop across the street, All Things Tea. There is no shortage of options for chicken wings. A merging of the two (chai chicken wings with peach green tea plum sauce $8) is far less than the sum of its parts.

Despite being in possession of Dooney’s’ liquor licence, there is no alcohol. Maybe this is for people who love wings but hate beer.

I might feel guilty picking on T cafe, but there are plenty of people around town working their bums off to make the best food they can. There is no excuse for this.

Popcorn at the Bloor theatre is a better meal.

… who lived in the house behind mine (and across from Nils Lofgren’s) in Garrett Park. Don’t recall how old I was — maybe thirteen? Dino’s father (here’s his obituary) owned a hair salon, House of Alexis, which Dino now manages.

I’d picked a book at random from a shelf in the Alexis living room, and it turned out to be softcore porn — not that I had that category in my head at the time. Harold Robbins kind of thing. The scene I opened to had a woman expressing her enjoyment of some mildly sadistic nipple play. “Aiee!!” she said. “Aiee!!”

This was a formative moment for little Scathing Online Schoolmarm, because it was her first encounter with the double exclamation mark. From that day forward, she gave a good deal of thought to when and how one should employ the exclamation.

Stuart Jeffries has a charming and thoughtful piece on the subject in the latest Guardian.

In general, SOS sides with those who counsel sparing use of this heavy breather; she believes that in almost all cases your prose, not funny little marks at the end of various sentences, should convey your sentiments, including exclamatory feelings like excitement, delight, surprise, rage, and love. Writing is a discipline; it’s about control. Excess exclamation marks suggest lack of control, as Jeffries notes in quoting some authors about them:

Elmore Leonard wrote of exclamation marks: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” Which means, on average, an exclamation mark every book and a half. In the ninth book of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Eric, one of the characters, insists that “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.” … Fowler’s Modern English Usage [says]: “Except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.”

Jeffries goes on to note that in the age of email the exclamation mark is much-used. People say email’s a particularly cold and unemotional medium, and that the exclamation allows them to add warmth. Great to see you! Instead of Great to see you. Looking forward to seeing you! Rather than Looking forward to seeing you. We’re anxious for people to know we care, and the exclamation mark does the trick.

SOS notices that she only uses the exclamation mark in two ways in her emails. When a student she hasn’t heard from in a while writes to her — with simple greetings, or asking for advice, or asking for a recommendation — she in fact often opens her reply with an exclamation mark at the end of her first sentence: It’s wonderful to hear from you! She knows that students worry they’re bothering professors, or that professors don’t remember them, or whatever, so she wants to underline her happiness at having heard from them.

She also uses the mark ironically. Or sarcastically. Jeffries takes note of this use as well:

There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness. In this post-literal time, exclamation marks become signs of sarcasm as witty correspondents rebel against their overuse. Hence: “I loved your last email! OMG did I LOVE it!!!!!!” The point is they didn’t. They were being IRONIC.

An undergraduate woman at the University of Minnesota writes a column in the campus newspaper.

… [W]e were supposed to be working on a group project, but instead, we decided to get drunk. Inevitably, drunk classmate girl talk leads to the question of whether we find our professor hot. Prudence’s response was something along the lines of, “Well, I find MY professor to be hot.” When we asked her exactly what she meant with that kind of emphasis on ownership, she proceeded to unveil every girl’s college fantasy:

“I’ve known him, my professor boyfriend, since I started working in his department about two years ago. I never took a class under him, but he always flirted with me…I blew him off mostly, but a couple of months ago he asked me out to dinner. We have had many, many discussions about whether or not it’s okay to pursue this, but so far it’s working out well enough. We just have to be discreet about it.” Before I could even get the question out of my mouth, Prudence added, “And yes, I call him ‘professor’ in bed.”

My classmates and I were awestruck by her academic prowess, but it did cross our minds that he could just be a hairy old man. A couple of Facebook clicks later, however, and Prudence proved us wrong. He is, in fact, a gorgeous specimen – perhaps heightened by the fact that he is not opposed to scandalous romance. (As a side note: the fact that we now have the ability to friend our professors on Facebook to learn more about their personal lives, sift through their photos, etc. makes this dating scene even more hot to handle.)

“It is highly likely that us professors are attracted to our students,” Prudence’s professor said when asked for comment….

There it is. US professors????

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UD thanks Bill for the link.

… but another solid contribution to UD‘s library of student laments about worthless wired classrooms.

Why aren’t professors and administrators reading the same material, and doing something about it? UD, for instance, would love to read a professor’s description of what it’s like to teach hundreds of people totally ignoring you.

In lecture a few weeks ago, I observed a guy sitting in the row in front of me watching three-fourths of the movie [I’d drop ‘three-fourths of the movie’] “Twilight.” Two seats down from him, two people were going through Google images of Beyoncé. I turned to note this to my neighbor, who nodded while scrolling through her BlackBerry.  [Nice touch – Even the neighbor’s wired.]

These people weren’t anomalies. Though the lecture, delivered by a professor ranked 4.3 in the CUE Guide, was a fairly interesting one, a good portion of the class looked up from their various screens only when a phrase was prefaced with the warning, “This might be on the midterm.”  [Nice conclusion to sentence, but drop the many modifiers: fairly, good, various.]   It looked like in this class, at least in this lecture, intellectualism was dead. [Just make the sentence ‘Intellectualism was dead.’  See how, as is often the case, SOS is largely making your writing snappier by editing out verbiage?]  But I don’t blame the people—I blame the technology.

The introduction of laptops and wireless Internet into the classroom environment has allowed us to prioritize our time in a highly pragmatic way.  [Fuck prioritize.  Ugly bogus word.  Corporate jargon.  Save it for your career as a motivational speaker.  And drop ‘highly.‘]

No longer are the choices in class between doodling in a notebook and paying attention; now we have an entire workstation at our fingertips. We can e-mail, organize, and update away while a professor is explaining easy or boring material that presumably doesn’t warrant full attention. [This responds to cynical laptop-defending professors who insist that using a laptop during class is just another form of doodling.  No it ain’t.]

The problem is that while many initiate these side tasks with the intention of only drifting away from class for a short period of time, we often don’t have that self-control. [Drop often and only.] More and more of our attention is taken up by reading blogs or clicking through Wikipedia, until we’ve de-prioritized listening to everything but the most essential concepts. [De-prioritized!  I’m pukingized.]

This approach may allow for the best economization of time  [Oy.  What are we, a business major?  This is basically a nice, conversational essay, but the writer needs to deal with her ize problem.]—it’s probably possible to fill in gaps in the syllabus during reading period, and those emails need to be sent for tomorrow. However, taking on this cost-benefit view of class time both diminishes enjoyment of the course and contributes to a cycle of indifference under which class quality suffers.

When a successful class is defined by acquiring the minimum amount of necessary information in the minimum amount of time, then something is off. Lectures should be interesting, not just useful for the midterm, and when we budget our class time we give up on this basic intellectual ideal. The nuances that get cut with an economic approach to class time are what make the Harvard academic experience more than four years of test prep. When we drop them, we drop learning for its own sake, that clichéed goal that we laud but clearly do not internalize as we fail the simple laptop-lecture attention test.  [Again, this writing could use some sex appeal, but it’s okay.]

Furthermore, class quality on the whole suffers from individual indifference. After all, if we don’t pay attention to anything but vital concepts, why should professors attempt to engage us anymore?   [Crucial point.  Well said.]  Why should they add details or throw in a joke when we’re not looking to be interested? [The whole throw in a joke thing is important too.  Since the laptops, er, dehumanize the classroom, the professor will understandably decide that there’s no point in bothering to have a personality for the purpose of teaching.  If students want her to be another screen, fine.]  Surely, the prospect of lecturing to 200 metallic screens is a discomfiting one, and even more so when they know that an awkward non-response to a question in lecture means that 200 people are logged onto gchat. [I love the phrase ‘lecturing to 200 metallic screens’.  The word metallic is wonderful.]

The best antidote to the rise of viral activity during class time would be to pull the plug on wireless internet in classes in which it is not academically necessary. [Instead of that lame final phrase, just write ‘pull the plug on most wireless internet in class’.] This would inevitably upset many students. However, such a reaction [Students would be upset, but this would only...]  would only prove the degree to which zoning out in class thanks to technology is ingrained in the way we spend our class time  [Drop ‘in the way we spend our class time’.]. Such paternalism may not be the answer, but certainly something has to change. After all, the lecture hall is beginning to resemble Lamont Cafe, without the lattes.  [Drop ‘After all’.]

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Bonus extra: The old days at Harvard. James Agee describes one of his English professors:

It’s perfectly impossible for me to define anything about him or about what he taught but it was a matter of getting frequent and infinite vistas of perfection in beauty, strength, symmetry, greatness—and the reasons for them, in poetry and in living….That sounds extravagant—well, his power over people was extravagant, and almost unlimited. Everyone who knew him was left in a clear, tingling daze, at the beginning of the summer.

… quotes this sentence from an English professor’s book about the history of creative writing programs:

Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

McGrath comments:

[Writing like this] may explain why creative writing is so popular. If stuff like this is what you get to read in regular English class, then no wonder students would rather write texts of their own.

What was that sentence again?

Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

Let me pull on my ontological prosthesis and see what I can make of this.

[Deep breath.]

[Expulsion of breath.]

[Overwhelming sense of futility.]

[Reminder that you have clicked on University Diaries because you’re in desperate need of something beyond the ’emptiness’ of pure formality.]

Okay. The sentence appears to want to help us understand what an artistic movement, technomodernism, is. We cannot help but note, however, that the sentence does not help us. It hurts us. It hurts our understanding, and it hurts our sense of beauty. Unlike Susan Boyle who is not pretty but can sing, this sentence is not pretty and cannot sing.

Problems start almost immediately. What can it mean to say that an artistic movement identifies with something? People identify with things; things do not identify with things.

And yes. My prosthesis edges
toward the author’s upcoming
quotation marks like a ouija
pointer loaded for bear.

Emptiness, pure, and formality all mean pretty much the same thing in this sentence, but only emptiness gets the mysterious quotation marks. Why? Our sense of confusion deepens. Is pure formality — the simple functional working of this or that machine, let’s assume he means — not empty? Why not?

Have you ever seen the word systemacity before? I ain’t. I’ve seen systematicity, though I’m not proud of it. I’m not proud I hang out on street corners where people use words like systematicity, but systematicity is in fact a word. You can look it up.

You will not find systemacity in the dictionary.

Not that you won’t find it used! Google it and discover that it’s a very specialized word, used mainly by mathematicians and linguists. Why would a writer, in an effort to help people understand something, use a word like systemacity?

… drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

The repetition of “itself” only deepens our sense that instead of getting out of a confusing and circular world, we are entering it more and more surely. And what can it mean to draw a machine to itself? The word draw is clearly the problem here. What sort of an act is this? Artists draw, and the subject is art, so our mind goes perhaps to the visual arts and reads draw literally. But this can’t be what the author intends. Who or what is doing the drawing, and what sort of drawing is this? Dunno.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the idea behind ontological prosthesis is that the technomodernist attempts to lend life (ontology — being) to lifeless empty machines by infusing a kind of aesthetic vibrancy, a presentness, into the technological object. This infusion is an artificial construction, as all art is, and therefore it’s …prosthetic.

Have I made myself clear?

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Update, correction: A reader who has looked at the book writes in this post’s comment thread:

[T]he Times seems to have misquoted the sentence from the book, which uses the word “systematicity,” not “systemacity.”