UD‘s friend Tony Grafton sends her a letter the literary critic Gabriel Josipovici recently wrote to the Times Literary Supplement.

Josipovici is angry about various moves on the part of the British government to shut down humanities departments at universities and prop up career-oriented programs.

The question this raises is: Are universities really businesses? And if not, what are they? Are they to become forcing houses for the immediate economic development of the country and nothing else (ie, are Business and Media studies to replace Engineering, English, History and Philosophy)? If that is what the country wants, so be it. But we should be clear that it means the end of universities as they have been known in the West since the Middle Ages.

Readers with insanely long memories will remember that these were the founding questions I asked when I began this blog. On the very first page of University Diaries, I quoted James Redfield, from the University of Chicago [scroll down]:

The problem with universities is that universities are not operations which are constructed for making money. They are operations which are chartered to spend money. Of course, in order to acquire money to spend, they do have to acquire it. But their job is to pursue non-economic purposes. Or, to put it another way, their job is to pursue and, in fact, to develop and shape purposes within the society in some specific way. They are value-makers. They are not supposed to be pursuing the values of the society by responding to demand; they are supposed to shape demand, which is, in fact, what education is all about.

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An economics major at the University of Oklahoma writes an opinion piece which makes absolutely clear why the university – British and American – is becoming a sort of first-responder unit to socioeconomic emergencies (UD‘s comments in response to his argument are in blue):

The core curriculum is an inefficient model of education that keeps students in universities much longer than is necessary. It is absurd and childish to force adults who have chosen to major in economics to study cell structures, just as it is absurd to force biology majors to understand the Keynesian national income model.  [See how Redfield’s whole idea that universities are about creating values, shaping demand, is DOA here?  Redfield regards the university as intellectually transformative:  It takes young people who are not yet liberally educated in a serious and disciplined way, and it trains them in rigorous forms of thinking even as it introduces them to the best which has been thought and said.  But this model assumes an open-minded person, eager to uncover,  grapple with, and organize the profoundest historical, aesthetic, philosophical, theological, mathematical, and scientific material.  This student regards freshmen as adults infantilized by an institution which thinks they have something more to learn than a trade.]

The rationale behind the liberal arts model of education is that “the whole individual” should be educated. This of course is simply an impossible goal, for there are endless academic pursuits necessary to educate “the whole individual,” from ethics to ballet to ancient French.  [The liberal arts curriculum has an ancient and well-elaborated character and rationale which has nothing to do with pablum like ‘the whole individual.’  But one can forgive this student for thinking that the term ‘liberal education’ refers to mush, since many universities have so compromised this curriculum as to make it look way random.]

The core curriculum, aside from forcing us into several classes we simply do not care about, also makes classes less valuable for those who are genuinely interested in the topics discussed. One only needs to peek at the masses of freshmen texting and doodling during their introductory lecture halls to see that this is true.  [The coercion principle is of course a problem here too.  What a liberal arts student would consider a well-considered requirement, the trade school student considers arbitrary authoritarianism.]

… The reason this model still exists is an entire college degree is still worth the entire cost of tuition to students. We’ve all heard the numbers about lifetime earnings for those with degrees rather than only high school diplomas, and that’s why most of us are here.  [Most of the students at the University of Oklahoma, in other words, jolly along the university for most of their years there, only in order to get a higher salary when they finish.]

However, it would be much more cost-effective to shave off the useless requirements of our liberal arts degrees and only require students to take those classes which are relevant to our chosen major or majors.

For many students, such as my fellow economics majors, this would shave as many as two full years off the time necessary to complete our degrees. This creates two additional years to pursue internships, travel or gain real work experience while we’re still relatively young.  [Time-managementwise, who could argue with this?  But he could save even more time and money doing an online course in accounting, macro- and micro-economics.  He could even do it on the weekends, so that he could take that full-time job he’s panting for.]

For others, such as Petroleum Engineers, abolition would probably not save them an extra year in college, but would allow them to focus more heavily on their career-oriented studies.

One effect of the core curriculum many people ignore is it can actually prevent students from truly delving into a second or third subject. Because we are required to meet so many different requirements, students may find they do not have time to pursue a minor or a second major.  [Again, from the start, it’s about picking and choosing.]

Even if the core curriculum were abolished, there would still be students who choose to pursue minors and dabble in other subjects. Some would even choose a liberal arts education, pursuing many tracks.  [Dabble says it all, eh?]

To these students, additional classes are worth their tuition. Many of us, however, would choose to explore other topics in our free time (as most of us already do) and focus our time at the university toward our future careers.

Abolishing the core curriculum forever would allow students to earn their degrees in less time. It also would allow them to customize their education to their own goals and desires rather than requiring them to satisfy some administrator’s definition of “well-rounded.”  [Just some damn administrator, after all.]

Do you suppose anyone at the University of Oklahoma will think it worth their while to respond to this student’s polemic with a defense of the university as a liberal arts institution, rather than a trade school?

… [A] masterly new book argues [that the University of Chicago is] the United States’ greatest university.

… The University of Chicago is, in [the author’s] contention, “our closest approximation to the idea of a great university. … It is a meritocracy of ideas, a place where ideas flourish in an open way.”…

Once professors retire and become emeritus, they retain certain campus privileges. These might include parking, library, maybe an office if there’s enough space, catalog listing …. stuff like that. This Faculty Retirement page from the University of Oregon is pretty typical.

Although the UO page doesn’t mention it, it turns out that retired professors there can also rent university space to hold meetings.

One UO emeritus, who seems to be a Nazi, regularly invites his friends to campus in order to exchange fascist salutes and get up to date on what other white supremacists around the country are doing.

So far the university has issued badly worded statements about what a disgrace this is. But you gotta wonder: What kind of policy forces a school to host brown shirts? I think it’s nice that the University of Oregon respects its retirees, but this seems excessive.

An official announcement from Penn State:

The Office of Physical Plant (OPP) at Penn State will resume its crow relocation program this evening (Wednesday, Jan. 6). Large groups of crows have been gathering in the vicinity of Ford, Moore, Cedar and Chambers buildings, and near West Halls, Rec Hall, the HUB-Robeson Center and Pond Laboratory. Occupants of these buildings may experience the loudest noises as OPP’s sonic harassment efforts begin.

OPP’s anti-crow team will begin its efforts on the north side of Old Main at 7:30 p.m.; the campus community can expect to hear loud noises in the early evening as University employees launch anti-crow pyrotechnic noisemakers intended to convince the crows move to less problematic locations. Pyrotechnic operations may continue for several weeks until this objective is met.

OPP’s goal is to drive crows to a stand of trees east of the Visitor’s Center on the University Park campus. Small groups of highly trained OPP employees will be conducting the relocation operation and will be wearing distinctive green safety vests. Once the crows have vacated a location, crow effigies will be hung to dissuade the crows from returning. Light towers will be erected in the targeted relocation woods east of the Visitor’s Center to make the area more appealing to the crows.

No crows will be harmed in this operation. The public can expect some disturbance from the noisemaking activities and possible crow infestation if the crows attempt to re-roost in populated areas.

In addition to OPP’s efforts, the College of Agricultural Sciences is employing propane cannons at the dairy barns and at the the Organic Materials Processing and Education Center (OMPEC). These cannons produce loud blasts to scare crows away. The cannons may be used for most of the day, seven days a week, throughout the rest of the winter.

Last year about 3,000 migrating crows landed at Penn State’s University Park campus, creating unsanitary and unpleasant conditions. OPP’s goal is to discourage this mass roosting…

He’s more than reached that tipping point where accumulated institutional embarrassments demonstrate the failure of his presidency.

There’s the graduation rate.

There’s Rick Pitino (scroll down).

There’s the last dean of the school of education. (Background here.)

This list (I’m sure I’m missing stuff) describes a university president totally asleep at the wheel. Why hasn’t he been fired?

… Iris Murdoch remembered

the Oxford of our first year – utterly Bohemian & fantastic – when everyone was master of their fate and captain of their soul in a way that I have not met since. Those people just didn’t care a damn – and they lived vividly, individually, wildly, beautifully.

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There – right there –
is University Diaries’
New Year’s toast to you:

May you live vividly,
individually, wildly,
beautifully.

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… from AP’s education reporter.

We seem, in this article, to be inching closer to understanding why a university president was recently, and quite rudely, terminated.

My take on the thing here.

Athens University rector Christos Kittas, who was injured by hooded assailants who stormed onto the university’s main administration building (Propylea) last Sunday, submitted his resignation to the university’s faculty senate on Thursday.

Kittas was hospitalised for treatment after the attack, while also suffering a mild heart attack…

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Several dozen people ran through a parking lot between Giannini Hall and Tolman Hall, wearing hoods…

Not Athens. Berkeley, last night.

It’s not only Greek university students who think bludgeoning professors and administrators makes political sense. We’ve got a few like that here.

As many as 70 protesters, many carrying torches and smashing windows, attempted to storm UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s on-campus residence late Friday in a violent act condemned by university officials and student activists alike.

Eight people, including two UC Berkeley students, were arrested on suspicion of rioting, threatening an educational official, attempted burglary, attempted arson, felony vandalism and assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, the university said.

Some protesters threw incendiary objects at the house in an attack that left the chancellor and his wife fearing for their lives.

The group was apparently protesting student fee hikes and budget cuts. The demonstrators chanted “No justice, no peace,” as the chancellor slept. His wife woke him up about 11 p.m. …

Details and many comments at the Berkeley campus paper.

… is becoming a phrase to strike fear — or at least intense irritation — in the hearts of universities all over the United States. Whatever you think of his take on health care and other issues, Senator Charles Grassley is a fierce warden of public money, and he repeatedly goes after universities he suspects of wasting or in other ways misusing it. He writes them Grassley Letters asking them to account for what they’ve been doing with taxpayer money.

It’s usually when UD‘s talking about multiply-billioned Harvard, or football factories like the University of Alabama (which just cancelled a bunch of classes so everyone can go to a championship game), that she reminds readers of the remarkable tax breaks our campuses enjoy. They enjoy that non-profit status because they’re committed to the high ideals of educating citizens and generating important research. When it turns out that they’re just as committed to hoarding cash as they are to education, or when they ignore the whole education thing in favor of football, we should care. It’s our money they’re playing with.

America’s public universities of course don’t exhibit the structural corruption of, say, Greek and Italian universities. For the most part our schools are extremely cleanly run, it seems to UD; but Grassley and his staff have certainly uncovered questionable financial practices, and the ongoing story of the University of California San Francisco medical school is a good example. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

The UC system has agreed to hire PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a financial review at UCSF, after a U.S. senator raised concerns about allegations of money mismanagement and university officials making misleading statements to state leaders.

The allegations came from Dr. David Kessler, who was fired from his job as dean of the UCSF School of Medicine in 2007. Kessler had repeatedly questioned what he said were “financial irregularities” in the dean’s office budget.

In a letter to UC President Mark Yudof on Monday, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote that he’s pleased that UC has agreed to an outside audit at UCSF, but noted several “troubling matters” at the university. He said UCSF administrators appear to have provided “misleading” statements to the California Senate.

… [Kessler’s] allegation relates to the dean’s discretionary funding budget, which he has said was millions of dollars less than what he’d been promised when he was hired in 2003. He conducted his own financial analysis in December 2004 and said he found an $18 million annual discrepancy…

These are large sums of money, and if it’s true that they’re missing, it would be good to know where they went.

WAFB.com:

Southern University’s former system president lost his wrongful termination lawsuit against the board of supervisors Thursday.

… [Ralph] Slaughter filed the lawsuit after the Board of Supervisors voted not to renew his contract earlier this year.

District Judge Tim Kelly did not mince words when he issued his ruling, saying after his dismissal, Slaughter emptied his office and stadium suite of just about everything that was not nailed down.

Judge Kelly also said Slaughter created chaos when he took those things, therefore Southern’s failure to pay his unused vacation and sick leave was justified. Kelly also ruled that Slaughter is not entitled to penalties or attorney fees.

… [The judge] called testimony from … Slaughter the “least credible” he has ever heard.

A jock-sniffing, nepotistic president; sociopaths on the sports teams; Mistress Jade, who punishes naughty grad students with whips, on the creative writing staff… It’s all gotten too much for UNM, which has just hired an expensive ‘reputation management’ consultant to make the corrupt twisted people who make UNM what it is look uncorrupt and untwisted.

UD awaits the ministrations of the public relations firm upon her. She looks forward to her sense of UNM as a crony-ridden craphouse being transformed by clever pr into a sense of UNM as something that smells really good.

… from UD‘s house in upstate New York is SUNY Cobleskill.  

Quite a distance down the hill.  The house sits way up in tiny Summit. We drive to Cobleskill, the closest town, for groceries.

A news story about SUNY Cobleskill is just beginning to break, and if its details check out, yikes.

… In a blistering complaint, a professor claims the SUNY College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill removed him from as dean because he objected to the school’s policy of recruiting unqualified students, many of them black, solely to get its hands on their tuition, “for the express and admitted purpose of making budget, knowing that these students are not reasonably likely to graduate.” He claims black students were fraudulently induced into enrolling so their tuition could “subsidize agricultural programs, which run at an annual deficit,” and which “serve white students almost exclusively.”

In his federal complaint, Thomas Hickey says he was a tenured professor and Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He claims the campus president and vice president for academic affairs lowered academic standards and admitted students they knew were unlikely to graduate, and even falsified some students’ records to make them eligible.

… Hickey claims he discovered that a student who earned a B+ in English Composition was functionally illiterate.

He claims [Anne Myers, Academic Affairs VP] changed the school’s Academic Review standards by lowering the threshold GPA to 1.0: “On Dec. 2, 2008, Defendant Myers sent an email to the faculty stating that ‘in light of the budget, we will use a 1.0 [Grade Point Average] cut off for first semester freshmen for Academic Review.'” And he claims that “as one point, she suspended Academic Review entirely.”

Thomas Cronin, a physics professor, responded to Myers’ email with one of his own, according to the complaint. It said: “The list of academically and morally corrupt practices that ensue from our inability to adhere to our own standards is rather long. One of our worst offenses is that we admit, and re-admit students absolutely unqualified and absolutely incapable of achieving a college degree. Many go into debt or cause their families to go into debt into [sic] order to attempt a college degree. This is an absolutely corrupt practice and it may be criminal. If we have done this to even one student, then we are guilty of a very low form of corruption.” …

Here

are

three

articles from three universities about the class on Wednesday before Thanksgiving controversy.

(Very pleasant, thank you, and I hope yours was too. Highlight: Playing Rock Band, UD‘s sister on drums, La Kid on guitar, and UD warbling into the mike. We did all these songs I sort of know… sort of know the chorus, maybe… Ramblin’ Man, Kids of America, American Woman… Started mentally ramblin’ during Ramblin’ Man… I was thinking Allman Brothers didn’t Cher marry one of them Sonny always seemed dumb named one of his kids Chesare because you couldn’t expect people to figure it out if they named him Cesare…)

So here’s my take on Should we cancel Wednesday classes before the holiday.

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What’s happening, most broadly, at the American university right now is what UD calls Invisibility Drift. Classes used to meet three days a week; now most meet two. There used to be very few holidays and cancellations; now there are gobs. Official cancellations and particular professors cancelling for this and that reason. Some class sessions you just watch a film, which you can do anywhere, at any time, and there’s nothing class about it… I mean, no one’s up there teaching you something; there’s no discussion going on. The classroom, the professor, other students, the university — all incidental. I’ve read more than one Rate My Professor complaint about professors in courses like these turning out the lights, starting the film, and leaving. See you next Tuesday! Enjoy the show.

Add to this high levels of class skipping among students (I did plenty when I was an undergrad), high levels of watching tv shows on your laptop or texting while you’re in class, high levels of guest lecturers instead of the ostensible professor teaching the class, high levels of blowing the course off and looking at downloaded stuff in your dorm…

You get the idea. The university as a physical location where professors and students interact in real, flesh and blood time and place vanishes. Does your professor look at you and talk to you and think in front of you? Do you look at the professor and listen to her and take notes? Do students look at each other and talk to each other? Bring books and look at the places in the books where the professor directs their attention?

No. Ain’t much attention going on in the vanishing classroom. People are absent — physically or mentally.

So look at it this way. Administrators are aware that at $50,000 a year or so they need to, well, pay attention to the fact that their enterprise as more or less originally conceived and priced is vanishing. At least at British universities, where you seldom see a professor or take a class, they don’t charge much of anything. Here in a quintessentially postmodern transaction you pay immense sums of money for white noise. (Let’s not even talk about the Human Kinetics and Leisure Studies major you’ve chosen.)

Am I saying it’s all evaporated? No. I’m talking about a trend. I’m talking about administrators’ awareness of a trend.

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So slot this into yet another canceled day — the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. And keep in mind that when you cancel the Wednesday you also basically cancel the Tuesday and eventually the Monday — There’s some psychological principle going on here, I guess… a kind of infinite regression principle in which once you cancel Day Z, Days X and Y are imperiled…

You can see, I hope, why universities are reluctant to do this particular deal. I mean, think about it from the perspective of the many schools like Auburn and Georgia where classes are further dumped left and right because of football games … It begins to look as though we might as well forget classes for the entire months of November and December.

Many universities are therefore doing nothing for the time being about the Wednesday. They leave it up to the professor, who tends to cancel classes. Over time, so many professors will cancel as to make it impossible for the few professors who hold Wednesday class to do so. Everyone will be gone. Professors will lecture to a whistling nothingness.

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Me? I hold class. Quite a few students showed up in both classes, and we had relaxed, excellent discussions (of Kafka’s A Hunger Artist and DeLillo’s Underworld).

(I mean, I thought they were great.)