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.)
Dispositions assessment for new candidates approved (includes consultation with UMN general council) [sic]
This excerpt from a University of Minnesota school of education task force draft says it all.
The professor who wrote it doesn’t know how to spell counsel. The same professor looks forward to subjecting applicants to the school to an assessment of their cultural competence – cultural competence here being what the task force tells applicants it is.
Applicants who don’t want their social views investigated and approved by admissions officers might save themselves money and anxiety as to the correctness of their views by not applying.
Applicants who read the criteria by which they will be considered culturally competent, and who alter themselves to conform to the school’s standards of cultural competence should feel encouraged to apply. This group should understand, however, that even if admissions officers find their degree of competence acceptable at this time, applicants will continue to be scrutinized closely on the matter throughout their years at the school.
The reason the task force thinks it might want to check in with the general council is that someone in the group has an inkling that political litmus tests might be considered unconstitutional.
But constitutional questions are the least of it. Who but an idiot would apply to this school?
After former marketing professor George Zinkhan shot and killed three people on April 25, the marketing department had to scramble to cover his classes.
Red and Black, University of Georgia newspaper.
From a comment on a UNM Daily Lobo story about a sadomasochistic sex worker in the creative writing department:
I propose a no-holds-barred celebrity duel between Mike “Suckerpunch” Locksley and Lisa “Mistress Jade” Chavez to be held in Smith Plaza next Friday at high noon – 15 rounds or until one of our UNM celebrities can fight no longer – tickets will be sold to the public and all proceeds will go to settle lawsuits against UNM resulting from the earlier escapades of “Suckerpunch” and “Mistress Jade” – Come one, come all – see the show of a lifetime – and shake hands with the man who brought you the whole thing, Ringmaster David Schmidly!!!
The State University of New York system, as we know, is dealing at the same time with a big sports scandal and a big money scandal. Details here.
There’s a similar sort of two-front war raging at the University of Florida, where they’ve got both a big sex scandal and a big money scandal.
Money scandal first. UD covered the story back in May when accusations that the Director of the university’s Propulsion Institute created a fake research unit to steal from the government first arose. She was shocked back then to discover that Samim Anghaie’s university website still functioned; imagine her amazement to discover, post-indictment, that he’s still up there, representing the University of Florida.
As to the sex scandal: The only thing UD finds scandalous in this story is the sort of course the professor teaches. Scathing Online Schoolmarm thought she’d seen it all.
Joong Ang Daily:
… Local online auctioneer Ggi Auction said yesterday that Asia University, located in Gyeongsan, North Gyeongsang, was put up for sale on its site last Wednesday.
It marks the first time a college has been listed in an auction in Korea.
The appraised price of the school – which includes a 120,000-square-meter (1.3 million square feet) plot of land and 12,577 square meters of buildings and other facilities – was 11.064 billion won ($9.36 million).
But perhaps that was a bit too high for the online auction crowd: No one offered up a bid for the college at Wednesday’s auction, Ggi Auction said. The company plans to put the college up for sale again, this time during a live auction on Nov. 20 at Daegu District Court. Bidding will start at 7.745 billion won – 30 percent less than it was listed on Wednesday.
The college, founded in 2003, was battered by a series of corruption scandals involving the executives of its foundation, which eventually led to its closure. In 2005, its president and vice president were arrested together for receiving a combined 3.9 billion won in bribes in return for the promise of professorship. In another case, an executive was caught obtaining a loan from a bank under the name of a part-time lecturer. The amount of cumulative liabilities at the school is over 5.1 billion won, Ggi Auction said…
From the long comment thread to a NYT blog post about the ineffectiveness of efforts to control binge drinking at party schools.
My youngest (of five) kids – all fine people – is graduating from college this year. After paying college tuitions for 20 years now (the kids were spread out in age) I have started to question the necessity of spending all that money for what is, in many respects, a four-year party.
They all went to good private schools, but was the huge expense and all the worry really worth it? What would have been so terrible if they’d gone to the local state college, lived at home and worked to pay tuition? Add the number of actual weeks in the college year and you’ll be shocked to see how many vacation weeks there are.
I wish colleges were the challenging bedrocks of scholarship and intellectual pursuit they were hundreds of years ago. As things stand now, why should anyone pay $55,000/year for a huge four-year party?
— Jane Landers
I wonder whether a better remedy for college binge drinking would be stricter academics. My friends and I drank reasonably in college because our college was hard. If we’d been hungover we couldn’t have kept up with the work and we would have flunked out.
–Charlotte K
If so, that school must be doing a Yeshiva. Doing a Yeshiva is slang for anxiously airbrushing a Merkin or a Madoff from the webpage listing your trustees or your executive committee or whatever when the Merkin or the Madoff gets in trouble with the law.
Big trouble.
Samberg of Pequot Capital is being investigated for trades in Microsoft shares in 2001, around the time he hired an employee from Microsoft. That employee didn’t stay long at the fund, but eventually got a $2 million payment from Pequot, which was disclosed in a recent divorce action. The payment rekindled the SEC’s interest in the on-again, off-again case.
When it got a big gift from him, Columbia Business School praised Samberg’s “commitment to cultivating ideas that will help business schools shape society.”
Insider trading. It’s an idea. An idea that shapes society.
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Update: They’ve got his name on a teaching excellence institute.
Nortin Hadler, a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, adds another item to our list of university-sponsored bullshit.
…[W]e are … bombarded by announcements and pronouncements from medical centers… Many tout the opening of a new building, or the offering of a new procedure, or claim world class expertise that outshines all others. These announcements and pronouncements are the work product of a formal department in the institution that often bears the moniker “Public Affairs” or even the “Public Affairs and Marketing Office” as is the case for my own [University of North Carolina] Hospitals. The departmental budget is often liberal and always part of the “overhead” of health care in our country. We all pay for these activities as part of our health care premiums.
Staffing these departments are people highly skilled in communicating to the public with backgrounds in marketing, public relations or, increasingly, health journalism. Working in institutional “health communications” is all too often the soft landing for unemployed health journalists. Hence, the pronouncements and announcements are often put forth in the glossiest of multimedia formats as well as the more standard press announcements.
A recent analysis of the press releases by academic medical centers casts all this activity in an unflattering light (Annals of Internal Medicine 2009;150:613-8). This analysis was a demanding exercise undertaken by investigators funded by the National Cancer Institute. Academic medical centers issue an average of nearly 50 press releases annually. Nearly half pertain to research in animals, which are almost always cast as relevant to human health.
Of the releases about primary human research, very few were describing studies that would pass muster as high quality; far more described findings that were preliminary at best. Most neglected to emphasize cautions regarding interpreting such studies. Clearly, academic medical centers are wont to promote research that has uncertain relevance to human health.
… At the very least, media must state whether the reportage is based on primary sources that take personal responsibility for the validity of the pronouncement. Better yet, independent sources should be queried as to the validity, reproducibility and relevance of the claims…
If the pronouncement is simply lifted from a marketing Web site, that should be disclosed….
He acted heroically during the mass shooting last year at Northern Illinois University, but NIU’s police chief has always been a bit unhinged, and students, with whom he has been abusive, want him out:
… [A]n editor of the campus newspaper [has] accused [Donald] Grady of threatening and shouting at him during an interview that became a three-hour tirade.
“It’s time to put an end to this mess. It’s time for a change,” the Northern Star student paper wrote in a blistering editorial calling for Grady’s removal. It accused him of employing intimidation to get his way.
School officials put the 56-year-old Grady on paid leave for 30 days starting last week while a panel reviews the allegations …
DeKalb County Sheriff Roger Scott is among the officials who have publicly backed the paper’s call for Grady’s ouster or resignation.
“NIU has isolated itself under his leadership,” Scott said.
… Controversy has dogged Grady, who also is from Beloit, Wis., during his career. After becoming Wisconsin’s first black police chief in the mostly white town of Bloomer in 1989, he created a stir by issuing nearly 300 tickets, including to himself, for violations of a snow-shoveling ordinance.
When he became Santa Fe, N.M., chief in 1994, he ordered officers to stop accepting free cups of coffee on the job and banned bolo ties.
Police responded with a 103-to-5 no-confidence vote in their boss. After digging in his heels for two years, Grady resigned, saying his reforms had encountered too much resistance.
And at NIU, well before the shooting, staff of the student newspaper had already complained that he often withheld standard crime reports, requiring the paper to file Freedom of Information Act requests…
The Los Angeles Times reports:
A UCLA professor who taught the student accused of slashing a female classmate’s throat last week said Saturday that he told a university administrator 10 months ago that he had concerns about the student’s mental health, but strict federal privacy laws prevent UCLA officials from disclosing how they handled the issue.
Stephen Frank, an associate professor in the university’s history department, met the suspect, undergraduate student Damon Thompson, when he enrolled in the instructor’s Western civilization class late last year, Frank said in an interview.
Frank said he grew concerned about Thompson in mid-December 2008, after the student sent several e-mails complaining that classmates sitting around him had been disruptive and made offensive comments to him while he was taking a written exam.
In one of the e-mails that Frank provided to The Times, Thompson, 20, also accused Frank of taunting him.
“I believe I heard you, Professor Frank, say that I was ‘troubled’ and ‘crazy’ among other things,” Thompson wrote in the e-mail. “My outrage at this situation coupled with the pressure of the very weighted examination dulled my concentration and detracted from my performance.”
There were other such complaints from the student about a range of campus people. He seems, from the article’s descriptions, to be a severe paranoid.
An official told Frank that they could only suggest to Thompson that he seek treatment, but they could not require him to seek psychological services.
“My concern was in the context of other violent incidents on campuses around the country,” Frank said…
It can’t be true that merely suggesting help was UCLA’s only option. Surely it can suspend students who seem threateningly unstable.
[A spokeswoman] noted that campus police have said they have no record of any formal complaints being made about Thompson prior to his arrest.
What are we calling a formal complaint? A faculty member had sent the university plenty of evidence that the student was seriously unbalanced.
Another thing. UD‘s followed enough of these stories to know that getting anything useful out of the student’s family is unlikely. For whatever reason (denial?), in a number of cases, when family members comment to the press, they express amazement that an obviously troubled brother or son or cousin had anything wrong with him. If even Susan Klebold can claim she hadn’t a clue…
Which leads UD to suggest that universities looking to avoid trouble should pay serious attention to what professors and teaching assistants tell them.
…White Noise.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has defended a professor’s $219 purchase of the complete set of the 1960s series “Get Smart” as appropriate.
The Legislative Audit Bureau discovered the purchase of the 25-DVD set by a business professor during a review of credit card spending.
Auditors also wanted explanations for the professor’s purchase of seasons of “The Love Boat” and “Family Ties.” The professor, whose name was redacted from records, spent more so all three could be shipped overnight.
In an internal e-mail, the professor said clips from the shows would be used “to illustrate aspects of business and management” in his class.
UW-Madison called the purchases a “best judgment” and said the DVDs would be used for years, so purchasing instead of renting them made sense.