… 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.

Mr UD and his sister own acres of snaily fields near Rezekne, Latvia.

It’s the site of the house where their father grew up, and, post-Communism, they were able to recover it for the family.

UD‘s never been there, but Mr UD has gone a couple of times, and has described to her its many snails.

I bring this up because there’s a story out of Yale involving similar efforts to recover stolen property. This is from the Yale Daily News:

Yale filed suit Monday against Pierre Konowaloff, who claims to be the rightful owner of Vincent van Gogh’s renowned 1888 painting “The Night Café,” which is housed in the Yale University Art Gallery.

According to the suit, filed in the United States District Court in Connecticut, Konowaloff claims to be the heir of Ivan Morozov, a Russian aristocrat who owned the painting in 1918. Last July, Konowaloff’s attorney sent a letter to Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, threatening legal action, according to the suit. Yale will fight to keep the painting, Reynolds told the News on Tuesday night.

“It’s been in our collection for 50 years,” he said. “There is no wrong to be addressed.”

In December 1918, Vladimir Lenin… nationalized most private property, including Morozov’s art collection. His seized collection included “The Night Café.”

To raise money, the Soviets sold the painting to a German art museum in 1933, which then sold it to the Knoedler Gallery in New York City.

Stephen Clark 1903, who began to collect art after serving in the army during World War I, purchased “The Night Café” from the Knoedler Gallery in 1933 or 1934, according to the suit.

When Clark died in 1960, he bequeathed the painting to the University. Yale added the painting to its permanent collection in 1961 and hung it for public view in the gallery, garnering widespread media coverage about the donation.

Konowaloff contends that the Soviet nationalization of property was illegal and, therefore, the painting should be returned to him, Morozov’s rightful heir…

Yes, a mite more valuable than an abandoned snail farm in Latvia…

… reminds us about the openness of university classrooms.

The University of Oklahoma issued a warning to professors on Thursday after several men walked into a classroom and refused to leave.

In the alert issued to Arts and Sciences chairs and directors, Dean Paul Bell Jr. warned staffers about the incident last Wednesday.

It said two groups of men went into two large adjacent lecture halls in Dale Hall. The letter said that the men walked in uniform and most of them sat down at the same time, while two stood by the back doors. The letter said the men refused to leave when asked by the instructor, but eventually did walk out without incident.

In uniform meaning wearing uniforms, or simply together? The same way?

Could be a frat prank, but it’s very similar to the way terrorist dry runs look. There have been enough mass shootings at American universities for this to be extremely scary behavior.

If it were only one classroom, I’d wonder about some local gang protecting a member in the class. This is more sinister.