… for the past few days.

1.) The botched-robbery murder inside a dormitory at Harvard University. This seems to have been a planned attack, organized perhaps by a senior at Harvard, the girlfriend of the shooter.

2.) Kansas State president John Wefald‘s (put it all together, it spells FLAWED) parting fiasco as he retires. That fine middle linebacker Sigmund Freud (The Sigmeister to his fans) would have plenty to say about a long-serving leader expressing his accumulated resentments, and his conviction that the school will fall apart without him, by arranging for it to fall apart. Oh! I didn’t know that the crony I appointed AD would do secret deals that would embarrass the school around the world and bankrupt us! Whooooops….

These are strange stories, a kind of Extreme College Sports. They represent a deepening of campus tendencies everyone knows are already there — widespread student drug use, filthy athletic programs.

Y know, every now and then
I think you might like to hear something from UD
Nice and easy

But there’s just one thing
You see UD never does nothing
Nice and easy

She always does it nice and rough
So we’re gonna take the beginning of this song
And do it easy

Then we’re gonna do the finish rough
This is the way we do Proud Mary

And we’re rolling, rolling, rolling on the river
Listen to the story

She left a law job in the city
Working for the man every night and day
And she never lost one minute of sleeping
Worrying bout the way things might have been

Big wheel keep on turning
Proud Mary keep on earning
And we’re rolling, rolling
Rolling on the river

Ate a lot of roe in Russia
Had a chauffeured car in Gay Paree
But she never saw the good side of her marriage
Till she got a job at the UNC

Big wheel keep on turning
Proud Mary keep on earning
And we’re rolling, rolling
Rolling on the river

… in a kingdom by the sea…

Or make that a city by the lake, and my friend Taraneh, who was taking some courses at the Illinois Institute of Technology, drove me over there. I was stunned.

This was the coldest, ugliest campus ever. The synergy between the flatness of Chicago’s plain, and the plainness of IIT’s flat architecture, was deadly. The place was a morgue, the buildings slabs.

To make matters entirely morbid, it was a dreary winter day. No one around, dark empty sky.

I fled, never to return. Modernism’s one thing, brutalism another.

Now the proposed demolition of this IIT beauty —

— to make way for a public transit stop — has Mies van der Rowe enthusiasts up in arms. Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she beautiful? Who else could’ve raised those brick shithouse walls like Mies?

An op-ed in the New York Times by the chair of religion at Columbia brings together familiar arguments about how American universities should change to avoid obsolescence.

Like Francis Fukuyama, Mark C. Taylor wants to abolish tenure because it has created “institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change.”

Although university tenure as an institution still seems to UD pretty secure, she reminds you of the recent upheaval at Mr UD’s University of Maryland over how stringent post-tenure review should be.

UD‘s most intrigued by Taylor’s comment about scholarly publication:

In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

It’s certainly true that tenure has wedged into place senior professors who may value nothing but older models of print publication. These professors review junior professors who look more and more like Taylor’s mixed modern model.

The Modern Language Association came out a number of years ago against the tyranny of the book manuscript and for the new formats Taylor mentions, but he’s correct that virtually nothing has changed.

—————————————

Update: It’s useful, in this connection, to look at the latest recipient of the Clark Medal in economics, second in importance to the Nobel. Professor of Economics at Berkeley, Emmanuel Saez has never published a book, and he has never occupied a narrow subject band. He publishes articles, mainly online. His work sometimes appears as book chapters.

In an earlier post on this subject, UD quoted Lindsay Waters: “To make a group of scholars turn on a dime, we need a publication not as thick as a brick, but as thin as a dime.” UD continued:

Economists, scientists, and political scientists have long known this, and their tenure standards focus upon essays as much as, if not more than, books. Waters describes an economist asking him “why the people in many of the disciplines in which I publish want to waste so much of the time of young people in the prime of their lives with such a lot of make-work. In economics, he said, they want to keep the kids working hard to generate new ideas that the rest of the profession can feed off of, because youth is the leading edge.” The economist, Waters concludes, is right: “Why should we encourage young humanists to do a lot of Mickey Mouse work, to go through the motions, when what they should be trying to write are moving essays… .?”

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

(Paul Krugman titles his blog entry on the prize SAEZ DOES MATTER.)

(“Mr. Saez, an easygoing Frenchman who loves surfing, has resisted overtures from the powerhouse economics departments at MIT and Harvard University.” The model here, of course, is Colin McGinn.)

… says get rid of tenure.

And maybe it’s not fair to judge his argument, since he’s written a piece in response to a Washington Post request that he contribute to a breezy, seasonal forum on “spring cleaning.” Still… Let’s take a look. UD comments here and there in blue.

I’m a tenured professor. But I’d get rid of tenure. [At first glance, a pithy, hard-hitting opening. Yet if Fukuyama’s opposed to tenure, he’s always free to turn it down, as a number of professors in this country have done. They negotiate various forms of non-tenured contracts with their institutions. It can be done — perhaps not at all schools, but at many. So from the outset, Fukuyama looks cowardly or hypocritical. If tenure should be abolished, be an example.]

Tenure was created to protect academic freedom after a series of 19th-century cases when university donors or legislators tried to remove professors whose views they disliked. One famous instance in the late 1800s involved progressive movement leader Richard Ely, whose critics accused him of socialism and tried to remove him as an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin.

The rationale for tenure is still valid. But the system has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country. Yes, conservative: Economists joke that their discipline advances one funeral at a time, but many fields must wait for wholesale generational turnover before new approaches take hold. [As with his first point, his second has an internal unsteadiness to it. Fukuyama both concedes the link between tenure and intellectual freedom, and attacks tenure as the cause of intellectual sclerosis. Presumably, with the abolition of tenure a host of intellectual freedom problems will arise. Why should we get rid of one flawed system in order to introduce another?]

The system also hamstrings younger untenured professors, making them fearful of taking intellectual risks and causing them to write in jargon aimed only at those in their narrow subdiscipline: Thus in economics, people have “utility functions” instead of needs and wants. [Wow. Try being an English professor. Utility functions sounds like a breath of fresh air… But put that aside. Fukuyama is about to defend think tanks as a model of non-tenuring intellectual institutions, but almost all think tanks are ideologically driven in a very obvious way, so I don’t see how they would respond to this problem. And as for the problem itself: The numbers don’t lie. Most universities tenure most of the people who come up for it. At some universities, the figure is almost one hundred percent. Junior faculty should check the figures, calm down, and write what they want to write….  And really – on the matter of jargon –  let us recall Ecclesiastes:  Of the making of much jargon there is no end. I doubt people write this way because they’re afraid they won’t get tenure.  I think they write this way because most conform, and this is the way many other people are writing.  Professors who use jargon don’t suddenly become fresh and pellucid after they get tenure.  As Fukuyama points out, tenure has always been about protecting the intellectual freedom of the few people who don’t conform.

If you want to know where jargon starts, read the post just below this one, which excerpts Walter Kirn.]

These problems are made worse by a federal employment law that bars universities from instituting mandatory retirement. Deans and provosts can’t remove elderly professors who take up slots that could fund two or three younger colleagues. Two developments are about to exacerbate this problem: a decline in university enrollments as the baby echo generation passes through college, reducing overall demand for professors; and the financial crisis, which has decimated professors’ retirement savings, giving them incentive to hold on to their sinecures even longer. [Actually, there are many things that universities can do to deal with this admittedly significant problem. Buy-outs, offers of gradually reduced teaching and hence gradually reduced salary …]

Things don’t have to be this way. Academic freedom can thrive in think tanks and research institutes. [Let me say again what I say above. Think of almost any think tank – Brookings, Heritage, CATO. They’re wonderful places for strengthening the visibility of liberal or conservative or libertarian thought, but they lack the non-ideological atmosphere of universities. And yes, UD‘s aware that some university departments are themselves very ideological. But that’s not a permanent, definitive characteristic of them, and things can and do change.] U.S.-style tenure doesn’t exist in Britain or Australia. [I’d hesitate to point to Britain’s faltering university system as a model.] Japan grants tenure but forces professors to retire at a relatively early age (60 at Tokyo University). [Is Fukuyama endorsing state-mandated retirement? Seems out of step with his other political positions.]

The freedom guaranteed by tenure is precious. But it’s time to abolish this institution before it becomes too costly, both financially and intellectually.

… We spoke of “playfulness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that the Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert. In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors — the ones who drank with us at the Nassau Street bars and played the Clash on the tape decks of their Toyotas as their hands crept up our pants and skirts — we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.

… I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up… [Many professors] seemed to favor [opportunists] over the hard workers, whose patient, sedimentary study habits and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic postmodernism…

Walter Kirn recalls his undergraduate years at Princeton.

… FITS’ to print.

Again UD‘s grateful to FITS News for news of the unanimous passage of the Clemson University faculty resolution expressing “strong disapproval” of administrative self-serving in the matter of salaries.

UD will continue following, on FITS News, the story of Clemson University’s slow release from the clutches of its leaders.

… to express its anger at the university’s leadership.  The draft resolution on disproportionate administrative salaries is here.

Via FITS News.

Background here.

Half the people asked at Southern Illinois University’s Edwardsville campus think it would be a good idea if it split way from the flagship Carbondale campus, according to a year-long study by the SIUE Faculty Senate.

A task force formed to examine the issue of campus separation, a proposal that has previously been the subject of state legislation by Metro East lawmakers, surveyed 1,838 faculty, students and staff at SIUE, including an interview with Edwardsville Chancellor Vaughn Vandegrift.

English professor Joel Hardman, chairman of the task force, said faculty on campus generally supported separating from Carbondale but the overall number showed thoughts were evenly split.

Vandegrift has been openly opposed to separation, as have SIU President Glenn Poshard and other top administrators of the university system.

The SIUE Faculty Senate has been critical of Poshard since allegation of plagiarism arose in 2007 about his doctoral dissertation. When the board cleared Poshard of the charges, the faculty senate called for his resignation.

The survey report also suggested other actions that could be taken instead of separation, such as changing wording on the SIU system Web site to better reflect each university’s individuality and moving the university’s system office from Carbondale to Springfield to enhance lobbying efforts and quell a perception of favoritism of SIUC.

Glenn Poshard is one of the few authentic political hacks running an American university system.

UD sympathizes with SIUE’s faculty. How would you like to live every day of your life embarrassed?

Maybe a name change is part of the solution. Southern Illinois Edwardsville In No Way Associated With Glenn Poshard.

… is the University of Medicine and Dentistry, New Jersey. Ever since UD opened up shop, UMDNJ has been a little slice of Sicily right here in America.

When it comes to criminal proceedings, UMDNJ has a kind of rolling admissions policy — there’s always something happening. The latest is the indictment of the guy who used to run the physical plant. This guy told a local contractor that he wanted a Cadillac Deville, a deck, a sun room, and a cell phone, and that if the contractor would give these things to him, he would give the contractor millions of dollars in campus construction work.

But this is small potatoes for UMDNJ. Historically, it’s more into big potatoes, like Medicare fraud.

“Emanating Connections” by renowned artist Chakaia Booker was unveiled Thursday in front of New Theater.

Booker explained artwork is never completely alive and finished until everyone has experienced looking at it for themselves.

Her sculpture has finally found a resting spot in the art corridor by New Theater. It has been two years since she was first approached to bring her artwork to Indiana State.

“I visited in the summer so it (the area) was more lush, more organic-ness,” Booker said.

Booker recycles old tires and turns it into art, whether it is a sculpture or wall relief.

“Michelin Tires donated the old tires,” Booker said. “I usually use radial tires, but not for this piece,” Booker said.

A person might see Booker walking along the streets of New York, where she lives, or out at her studio in Pennsylvania looking for useful materials.

“If I see something, I pick it up,” Booker said. “It may be at a gas station for less quantity or along the street.”

The idea for the recycled sculpture has to do with connectiveness, forms and shapes. The sculpture brings to life a reverse motion on a wheel, Booker explained.

Paul Reed, director of ISU Recycling Center, said recycling was about used and abandoned materials and expanding its lifestyle.

Reed also stated the artwork makes us all stop and ponder our own feelings.

Terre Haute Mayor Duke Bennett also attended the dedication.

“What’s interesting about this community is its diversity,” Bennett said during his address to the large audience. “People feel like there is something unique.”…

… a (really well-written) scandal-sheet. Or it might be exactly the sort of clearinghouse for developing stories, and public commentary on them, that strong journalistic blogs are meant to be.

Its target, Clemson University, is already experiencing terrible publicity because of its Animal Farm-based management structure. FITS suggests that there’s more wrong with Clemson than that.

We’ll see.

… about which UD‘s already posted, has now been released as a movie. Here’s the New York Times review.

… the worst university in America. Now a new book tells you why. In detail.

Syracuse University is the latest institution pushing the bogus tenure criterion of “publicly engaged scholarship.” Faculty there should resist with all the self-respect they can muster.

Known also as “scholarship in action,” this bureaucratic move shifts us philosophically from I think; therefore, I am to I act; therefore, I think. Since it cannot clarify the line between thinking and doing, this politically motivated criterion makes the university safe for people who believe that community organizing represents intellectual productivity. Physically moving around talking to people (reciting your poetry, knocking on doors to get out the vote, teaching) has nothing to do with sustained mental reflection and its results: books, essays.

A Syracuse professor of political science notes that because this confusion lies inherent in what is essentially a social rather than intellectual gesture, the university’s official language proposed for the criterion is gobbeldy-gook:

[N]o one is quite sure what [Scholarship in Action] means. A University Senate committee spent two years trying to discern its meaning and came away uncertain. The current language to be added to the tenure criteria reads: “Scholarship in Action is not a traditional model of community service, but a robust framework behind public scholarship, which can take a variety of forms but engages a deliberative intellectual foundation.” I wish I knew what that meant.

Indeed the Senate committee should be ashamed of itself for producing the sort of meaningless verbiage any professor would slash through if she read it from a student.

The pathetic language gives the game away. The activity in question does not exist as a category, but rather an emotion, a hearty group grope into the heart of intellectual seriousness.

Every day in every way, as the dissenting professor points out, Syracuse University has been getting better and better. Don’t let it go all dumb on you.