… flitting like butterflies about their little worlds…  Beautiful, delicate things, but when it comes to continuity of thought, rationality, consistency, backbone…

Well, who expects a butterfly to have a backbone?

Take UD‘s colleague, Jeffrey Rosen.  Five years ago, he attacked blogging because it encourages anonymous unfair comments about people (UD discussed his attack here.)

Since then Rosen’s joined the blogging bandwagon big time, and a recent entry of his cited anonymous sources attacking Sonia Sotomayor.  The unfairness of this post pissed off tons of people.

SO… Rosen has announced he’s done with blogging.  He hates it again.  It’s bad again.  Expect more articles from him about how evil it is and how it compromises our privacy…

But mark UD‘s words:  A few years from now, he’ll be blogging.

It’s kind of fun to watch.  Weaker sex and all.

… where people pay good money for this sort of thing:

Writers at all levels of experience are invited to explore new creative territory at a retreat on June 20-22 offered by local writer/poet Lorraine Gane.

“This retreat will take participants to a deep creative space where they can open to the writing that speaks to them at this time,” said Gane, who has taught writing here and in Ontario for nearly 20 years.

“We’ll start with practices to relax the body and still the mind, then move into longer writing sessions in which participants can delve into memories, images and ideas that they’ve been wishing to get down on paper but for some reason have held back from this,” she says.

“By connecting to a deeper space, these inner walls will dissolve and participants can move beyond boundaries into writing that is often original and alive with their natural voice.”

As such, participants will be encouraged to let go of form during this initial stage of writing and concentrate on fully expressing themselves, said Gane.

Feedback on first drafts will help shape the writing into the most appropriate form, whether fiction, poetry or personal essays.

“The supportive environment will allow writers to take risks and venture into those areas they may have been avoiding,” she said.

“This can open up new energy for this writing and also add vigour to ongoing projects,” she says.

Gane’s other intention for the retreat is to incorporate some natural elements, such as gardens and forests, which abound at the Salt Spring Centre where the retreat will be held. [This is a Yoga center, though the article doesn’t mention it.]

Lunch and a consultation are included in the retreat, which can be attended for the full three days ($260), or Saturday/Sunday/Monday only ($88 per day).

Each day stands on its own, and the hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday; and 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Sunday and Monday…

Let’s relax our bodies and still our minds and review.

You pay $88 for five hours during which you compete with a bunch of other people (none selected with any consideration of their writing skill) for the retreat leader’s personal consultation. In only five hours, the instructor promises to take you into a deep creative space and dissolve your inner walls and allow you to take risks — something you’ve been trying to do on your own for decades.

Sign me up!

A glimpse of an Arizona State University professor, from his obituary.

Born in Bogota, N.J., in 1923, [George] Paulsen served as a U.S. naval officer in the Pacific theater in World War II. Following the war, he pursued advanced degrees in history, receiving an undergraduate degree in 1949 from Hobart College and a doctorate in 1959 from Ohio State University, where he was a student of Foster Rhea Dulles.

At ASU, Paulsen was known among basketball players in the department for his unorthodox hook shot. He also regaled his colleagues with accounts of the early years of the ASU History Department when its graduate program was small and its library resources limited.

According to history colleague Stephen Batalden, Paulsen was an ardent Democrat and longtime member of the American Civil Liberties Union, who lived modestly, rarely driving his 1965 Plymouth Barracuda out of its place in the garage.

Two years ago Paulsen sustained serious head and neck injuries in a bicycle accident in Tempe, never fully regaining his health, though he continued to read widely until the last weeks of his life, according to Batalden, director of ASU’s Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

And from what UD can tell, it makes Scathing Online Schoolmarm look mild.

Description and trailer here.

This sentence from Louis Menand’s review of The Program Era — its author, Mark McGurl, sent a copy to UD, and she’s just finished reading the introduction — made her stop and think about the wired classroom, distance learning, PowerPoint, the whole bit.

Since few undergraduate students know what they aspire to be, almost all of their teachers are potential models.   And their teachers may not be professional models (Menand’s talking in particular about students who want to be writers); they may be ethical models, or models of scholarly practice, or whatever.

The larger point is that, as Menand’s comment suggests, teachers are intense figures in students’ lives.  Or they should be.  Students READ them, says Menand.  Closely.

Which UD, after twenty-five years of teaching, can confirm.  There are always several students who look at you with particular intensity.  That look is not merely about their intellectual alertness, their fascination with what you’re presenting by way of ideas; it’s also about a naked appraisal of you, the professor, as an entire human package.  What the hell are you?  What do you stand for?  How did you get where you are?  Why do you care so much about your subject?  Why should the student care?

Any professor who takes the time to look at students looking at her knows what I’m talking about.  Especially if you’re teaching literature, you’re exposed.  No getting around it.  Your subject is intense human experience intensely rendered.  Sometimes, reading a poem aloud, you surprise yourself with tears.  The students look.  They see your tears, or they see your struggle to suppress them.  Students see a lot of things.  Root around in Rate My Professors for awhile, and you’ll see remarkably lucid and perceptive takes on professors as human beings.  There’s a maturity and depth to these descriptions that you only get after a semester’s worth of staring fixedly at another human being, listening to her talk to you, reflecting on the subtle connections between her primal human experience and the advanced academic subject to which she has been drawn.

Menand’s comment tells us what we all know — The most valuable, the most profound education, emerges out of the complex, evolved human encounter of the classroom.  Because for all that you’re looking at me, I’m looking at you, kid.  My speculative heart’s going out to you.  Especially when you’re writing your in-class final and I can stop talking and start looking, you’d better believe I’m scanning for all I’m worth.  It goes both ways.  What are you?  Where do you come from?  Do your parents love you?  When you responded to that short story with such vehemence, some of it directed at me — Do you know that I loved that?  That I’ll never forget that?  Do you know that above all I want you to be passionate?

Well.  I could go on.  I only wanted to say that if you want to gut this experience entirely, if you want to carve out the heart of it, you hide the pages of your teacher-book behind PowerPoints; you hide the pages of your student-book — a book I find very moving — behind your computer screen.

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

In his review of McGurl’s book, Menand describes the nature of minimalist and maximalist fiction writing:

The form of a Carver short story—ostentatiously brief, emotionally hyper-defended—expresses something. McGurl thinks that the style represents the “aestheticization of shame, a mode of self-retraction.” Literary minimalism like Carver’s—McGurl calls it “lower-middle-class modernism”—is a means of reducing the risk of embarrassing oneself, and is one way that students from working-class backgrounds, like Carver (he was from Oregon, where his father was a sawmill worker), deal with the highbrow world of the academy.  … McGurl thinks that maximalism, too, is “a way of shielding oneself with words.”

This plain affectless style carries over easily into the classroom, where we’re all ever so defended and hard.  (Of course, when they’re not being strong and affectless, Carver’s characters are drinking themselves to death.)  And the preference for non-expressivity — a preference all the wired additions to the classroom play to beautifully — is not class-based.  The same self-shielding (for different reasons maybe) happens among upper-class students.  Read Walter Kirn’s descriptions of Princeton University classrooms.

So now the book the student used to try so hard to read slams itself shut.  The book the teacher tried so hard to read withdraws behind a screen.

… the Garrett Park Town Office.  She’s using one of their computers in a beautiful room overlooking the railroad tracks and some enormous trees and the parking lot for Black Market restaurant.  

On her way home from her swim, UD stopped to pick up her mail at the post office (no home delivery in Garrett Park, by popular demand — as you already know if you’re a regular UD reader) and then went up to the third floor of Penn Place to ask Ted Pratt, the town manager, if there’s a Garrett Park hotspot.  He said no, and then escorted UD to this office and said Use one of our computers, Margaret.

So…  Various thoughts in UD‘s mind right now about the glory of living in a town where people know and like you…  UD‘s family moved to Garrett Park when she was eight, and she stayed here until college and graduate school.  Back in DC, married to Mr UD, she lived on Capitol Hill for thirteen years, and then moved back to Garrett Park when Ania, her daughter, was small.  

It’s strange being a ‘thesdan with a long memory, a Garrett Parker who knows almost everyone in town, plus their kids and parents.  I’m not complaining.

Anyway, off to Google News with me.  See how the Princeton thing’s going.

UD’s friend Alan Allport emails her that he’s locked into a classroom at the moment.  There’s a report of a gunman on the Princeton campus.

I’ll keep you updated.

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

Update: Alan now writes to say it’s over.  But it’s not clear whether that’s because nothing happened, or because the gunman has been captured.

The AP hasn’t yet reported that it’s over.

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

Update:  From Alan:  “The word down at the Wawa is that it was a kid – possibly a student – with a toy or replica gun. Not clear whether he had any kind of harmful intent or whether someone simply saw him and freaked out.”

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

Update:  Kids.  Toy gun.

… just … I dunno… conflict of EVERYTHING! — inspiration will always be Harvard’s last president, Larry Summers, who earned, I dunno, something in the mid hundreds of thousands for being Harvard’s president, but who got FIVE MILLION DOLLARS AT THE SAME TIME for whatever the fuck he did for some hedge fund ONE DAY A WEEK.

Even UD‘s recent acquisition of Hummer is unlikely to yield such results. (She’s already fielding emails from Hummer Club presidents about this that and the other. Who knew there were Hummer Clubs?)

But anyway, what with Senator Grassley making a fuss about it, lots of universities are trying to cough up new and improved COI language. (Language only, of course. The relationship of university administrators to faculty COI is much like the relationship of the NCAA to university sports programs.)

And then there are places like the University of Oregon, which doesn’t seem to have any COI policies at all. A significant segment of UO’s faculty is undergoing attachment issues as UO threatens to take away cherished freedoms…

This article takes a pretty intelligent look at COI at UO. The comments after the article are also worth a read.

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer met regularly with prostitutes in multiple cities for 18 months before being identified as a client of an escort service and resigning in disgrace, a lawyer for an employee who arranged the trysts said Monday.

Lawyer Marc Agnifilo said his client, escort service booker Temeka Lewis, revealed key information to prosecutors before the March 2008 resignation of Spitzer, who was called Client-9 in court documents charging four employees of the pricey prostitution ring.

He said Lewis, who was sentenced Monday and received no jail time after cooperating with prosecutors, arranged meetings between Spitzer and prostitutes, including one who discovered he was the governor of New York when she saw him on television.

… Lewis, a Brooklyn resident and University of Virginia graduate who majored in English, worked at the escort service from October 2006 until her arrest in March 2008. She set up a February 2008 meeting between a prostitute and Client-9.

She pleaded guilty in May 2008 to conspiracy charges after beginning her cooperation with prosecutors even before Spitzer resigned just days after her arrest. She apologized in court Monday, saying: “I deeply regret my decision to break the law.”

… economic forecasting, has died.

… Granger realised that not all long-term associations between non-stationary time series are nonsense. Suppose, as the American academic Kevin D Hoover explained, that the randomly-walking drunk has a faithful (and sober) friend who follows him down the street from a safe distance to make sure he does not injure himself.

“Because he is following the drunk, the friend, viewed in isolation, also appears to follow a random walk, yet his path is not aimless; it is largely predictable, conditional on knowing where the drunk is,” Hoover noted. Granger and Engle coined the term “co-integration” to describe the genuine relationship between two non-stationary time series. Time series are “co-integrated” when the difference between them is itself stationary – the friend never gets too far away from the drunk, but, on average, stays a constant distance behind.

Granger’s discovery had an enormous impact, leading, as one of his students put it, to “chaos for a few years”. In order to forecast non-stationary variables, new techniques had to be developed to replace the ones Granger had debunked. …

Granger once wrote: “A teacher told my mother that ‘I would never become successful’, which illustrates the difficulty of long-run forecasting on inadequate data.”

… who was a veteran kayaker, dies in an accident.

An Eastern Washington University professor is believed to be the man killed in a kayaking accident on the St. Joe River on Friday.

W. Anthony “Tony” Oertling was an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

The 55-year-old had been at EWU since 1992 and was in his first year as chair of the department, “where he was performing in his usual effective and enthusiastic manner,” according to an e-mail Judd Case, dean of the College of Science, Health and Engineering, sent to colleagues Monday morning…

The Sheriff’s Office described the victim as a veteran kayaker who had 20 years of experience…

… has apparently been found, so far off course that analysts speculate it might have been trying to return to Brazil.

… settles in for more years of state-sponsored locked-in syndrome with occasional violent twitches, the British system begins to show a little movement.

Britain’s elite universities should be allowed to privatise to form a US-style Ivy league, a senior vice-chancellor said today.

Sir Roy Anderson, rector of Imperial College, said institutions including his own, as well as Cambridge and Oxford universities, should be freed from state control to allow them to charge students more than the current £3,140 capped fees and recruit greater numbers of international students to boost their income.

… “The trouble is all, universities are too dependent on the government. You don’t want to be subject to the mores of government funding or changing educational structures.”…

France, Italy, and Greece remain the hopeless paralytics of European higher education, leaving the path clear for Germany and England and everybody else.

But all I have to do is read the papers.

A headline from Tomahawk Nation:

University of Florida Cornerback Janoris Jenkins
becomes the 24th Gator arrested under Urban Meyer

Yummy details at the link.

Even UD wouldn’t go this far in describing big time university sports. I mean, there’s … Why can’t I think of anything? Maybe Murray Sperber’s right!

A Memphis paper interviews him about the recent unpleasantness there involving a basketball player at the University of Memphis who seems not to have taken his SAT. I mean, he didn’t forget to take it. Someone else took it for him.

He was a one-and-done student. This is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of thing where an athlete, because of irrational rules, spends a year at a university before entering professional life. The university’s thrilled, of course — unlike the professional world, it doesn’t have to pay the player four hundred million dollars a year. It has to pay the player nothing. And the player gives it its most amazingest winningest season ever!!! Until the NCAA takes all the wins away because someone else took the student’s SAT so he could be admitted to the university.

“The NCAA really insists on this ‘student-athlete’ thing,” said Sperber, the author of “Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education.” “And I assume the NCAA put pressure on (NBA commissioner) David Stern to institute the one-year policy. The NCAA ought to rethink the whole thing, but there’s so much pressure within the NCAA and from big-time coaches to keep it in place. A one-and-done player did get Calipari to a Final Four. But you have to wonder: Did it really help the University of Memphis at the end of the day?”

The negative impact of the past week on the school’s reputation cannot be measured, Sperber said. In recent days, the phrases “University of Memphis” and “major violations” got constant play throughout the media. Sperber said he feels certain there are Memphis fans who insist the ordeal is a small price to pay for a trip to the national title game, but the effect can be corrosive and lasting.

“I’m sure the Chronicle of Higher Education will report on this, and people in academic circles will say, ‘Oh, there’s Memphis again,'” Sperber said. “It just seems like a travesty forcing these players to go to college. And poor Memphis, it’s like a roller coaster. They got to the very top of the thing with the Final Four, and now that coaster is heading down and they may not even get to keep the banners. I guess the whole thing could have been avoided.”