Busy day at University Diaries — tons of traffic, and the comments keep coming in. So I’m sitting here riding the currents, writing and linking and reading non-stop.

Just as well. I can’t go in the pool today because I seem to have a mild case of Jacuzzi Rash.

… sort of theory should be aware of this.

… Zinkhan didn’t set the schedule for a planned trip to Amsterdam or even buy the airline ticket for the flight out of Atlanta.

Harmen Verbruggen, dean of Vrije Universiteit (Free University) in Amsterdam — where Zinkhan has taught part-time for two years — invited Zinkhan to help the university start up a marketing master’s program, Verbruggen told the newspaper Tuesday. The dean’s secretary made travel arrangements with Delta Air Lines three or four days before the triple homicide, he said.

Zinkhan’s travel plans had been widely reported as an indication he had planned to flee to Europe after the shootings.

At this point, I’m seeing him push his car into a body of water and then head for the remotest part of the Appalachian Trail he knows and shoot himself.

… reveal the place to be just … a little different.

It’s being sued in federal court, but wants the suit thrown out since Clemson’s got sovereign immunity as an arm of the state.

Let’s listen in as the lawyers have themselves a little parley.

Clemson attorney Tom Bright cited a dozen ways Clemson is an arm of the state, including Clemson money being held by the state and Clemson’s budget being approved by the state Legislature.

“The state controls all manner of activities for Clemson,” Bright said.

Collins countered that Clemson officials for years have claimed it is a municipality with its own magistrate’s court and fire department.

Collins likened Clemson to Humpty Dumpty saying, “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean, no more or less.”

He said Clemson wants to tell people it is a municipality but then say in court it isn’t.

Moreover, said Collins, seven of Clemson’s trustees are appointed for life, and the state constitution prohibits life appointments to state positions.

“If Clemson University is an arm of the state, all the life trustees are disqualified,” Collins said.

Under Clemson’s unusual charter, seven of its 13 trustees are appointed for life and choose their successors.

Clemson’s Bright said even though some trustees are called life trustees, “it doesn’t make them trustees for life.”…

Removing a Clemson Life Trustee can be done, but it’s tricky.

A Life Trustee may only be removed by action of the other Life Trustees. In the event four Life Trustees believe that another Life Trustee has failed to properly perform the duties required of all Trustees, the four shall present their concerns to the Life Trustee with the longest continuing service (“Senior Life Trustee”), exclusive of the Life Trustee whose actions are in question. In the event two or more Life Trustees have equal years of service, the Senior Life Trustee shall be deemed the Life Trustee whose last name appears first in alphabetical order. The Senior Life Trustee shall convene a meeting of the Life Trustees to hear the allegations and to render a decision. The Life Trustee whose failure has been alleged shall have the right to be notified seven days in advance of the meeting and shall have the right to present evidence in his or her own defense. The Senior Life Trustee shall establish procedural guidelines for the meeting, but in no event shall any attorney be permitted to attend the meeting for the purpose of representing any party involved. Once all evidence has been presented, the Life Trustee in question will leave the meeting and the remaining Life Trustees will deliberate and vote by secret ballot. In the event five Life Trustees vote to remove the Life Trustee, then his or her service on the Clemson University Board of Trustees shall be terminated. An action to remove a Life Trustee shall be effective immediately, unless otherwise specified at the time the action is taken.

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Update: Some more information:

Unlike situations at many other state public universities, Clemson’s inner workings have rarely undergone scrutiny. The state’s watchdog agency, the Legislative Audit Council, has investigated finances at other top state education institutions but never looked into Clemson’s financial practices, according to its Web site.

Unlike leaders at other colleges and universities, a majority – seven – of Clemson’s trustees are called life members and are self-appointed. They are not subject to direct oversight by the governor or legislature. The legislature chooses only six trustees.

At the state’s 12 other four-year colleges and universities, the trustees are picked mostly by the legislature. Clemson’s life trustees were a requirement set out in the will of Thomas Green Clemson, who died in 1888, leaving most of his estate to found the school.

Not that politician-appointed boards are a pretty thing! Look at Southern Illinois University, for god’s sake. But this here arrangement’s mighty weird for an arm of the state.

… but another solid contribution to UD‘s library of student laments about worthless wired classrooms.

Why aren’t professors and administrators reading the same material, and doing something about it? UD, for instance, would love to read a professor’s description of what it’s like to teach hundreds of people totally ignoring you.

In lecture a few weeks ago, I observed a guy sitting in the row in front of me watching three-fourths of the movie [I’d drop ‘three-fourths of the movie’] “Twilight.” Two seats down from him, two people were going through Google images of Beyoncé. I turned to note this to my neighbor, who nodded while scrolling through her BlackBerry.  [Nice touch – Even the neighbor’s wired.]

These people weren’t anomalies. Though the lecture, delivered by a professor ranked 4.3 in the CUE Guide, was a fairly interesting one, a good portion of the class looked up from their various screens only when a phrase was prefaced with the warning, “This might be on the midterm.”  [Nice conclusion to sentence, but drop the many modifiers: fairly, good, various.]   It looked like in this class, at least in this lecture, intellectualism was dead. [Just make the sentence ‘Intellectualism was dead.’  See how, as is often the case, SOS is largely making your writing snappier by editing out verbiage?]  But I don’t blame the people—I blame the technology.

The introduction of laptops and wireless Internet into the classroom environment has allowed us to prioritize our time in a highly pragmatic way.  [Fuck prioritize.  Ugly bogus word.  Corporate jargon.  Save it for your career as a motivational speaker.  And drop ‘highly.‘]

No longer are the choices in class between doodling in a notebook and paying attention; now we have an entire workstation at our fingertips. We can e-mail, organize, and update away while a professor is explaining easy or boring material that presumably doesn’t warrant full attention. [This responds to cynical laptop-defending professors who insist that using a laptop during class is just another form of doodling.  No it ain’t.]

The problem is that while many initiate these side tasks with the intention of only drifting away from class for a short period of time, we often don’t have that self-control. [Drop often and only.] More and more of our attention is taken up by reading blogs or clicking through Wikipedia, until we’ve de-prioritized listening to everything but the most essential concepts. [De-prioritized!  I’m pukingized.]

This approach may allow for the best economization of time  [Oy.  What are we, a business major?  This is basically a nice, conversational essay, but the writer needs to deal with her ize problem.]—it’s probably possible to fill in gaps in the syllabus during reading period, and those emails need to be sent for tomorrow. However, taking on this cost-benefit view of class time both diminishes enjoyment of the course and contributes to a cycle of indifference under which class quality suffers.

When a successful class is defined by acquiring the minimum amount of necessary information in the minimum amount of time, then something is off. Lectures should be interesting, not just useful for the midterm, and when we budget our class time we give up on this basic intellectual ideal. The nuances that get cut with an economic approach to class time are what make the Harvard academic experience more than four years of test prep. When we drop them, we drop learning for its own sake, that clichéed goal that we laud but clearly do not internalize as we fail the simple laptop-lecture attention test.  [Again, this writing could use some sex appeal, but it’s okay.]

Furthermore, class quality on the whole suffers from individual indifference. After all, if we don’t pay attention to anything but vital concepts, why should professors attempt to engage us anymore?   [Crucial point.  Well said.]  Why should they add details or throw in a joke when we’re not looking to be interested? [The whole throw in a joke thing is important too.  Since the laptops, er, dehumanize the classroom, the professor will understandably decide that there’s no point in bothering to have a personality for the purpose of teaching.  If students want her to be another screen, fine.]  Surely, the prospect of lecturing to 200 metallic screens is a discomfiting one, and even more so when they know that an awkward non-response to a question in lecture means that 200 people are logged onto gchat. [I love the phrase ‘lecturing to 200 metallic screens’.  The word metallic is wonderful.]

The best antidote to the rise of viral activity during class time would be to pull the plug on wireless internet in classes in which it is not academically necessary. [Instead of that lame final phrase, just write ‘pull the plug on most wireless internet in class’.] This would inevitably upset many students. However, such a reaction [Students would be upset, but this would only...]  would only prove the degree to which zoning out in class thanks to technology is ingrained in the way we spend our class time  [Drop ‘in the way we spend our class time’.]. Such paternalism may not be the answer, but certainly something has to change. After all, the lecture hall is beginning to resemble Lamont Cafe, without the lattes.  [Drop ‘After all’.]

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Bonus extra: The old days at Harvard. James Agee describes one of his English professors:

It’s perfectly impossible for me to define anything about him or about what he taught but it was a matter of getting frequent and infinite vistas of perfection in beauty, strength, symmetry, greatness—and the reasons for them, in poetry and in living….That sounds extravagant—well, his power over people was extravagant, and almost unlimited. Everyone who knew him was left in a clear, tingling daze, at the beginning of the summer.

…is a plan to end industry influence over medical refresher courses. Presently, drug and device makers provide about half of the funding for such courses so that doctors can often take them for free. Even as they have acknowledged the need for other limits, many medical societies and schools have defended subsidies for education as necessary.

“As science progresses, it’s going to get harder and harder to get doctors to keep pace,” said Dr. Jack Lewin, chief executive of the American College of Cardiology. “I think industry has some responsibility toward education.”

By contrast, the American Psychiatric Association recently announced that it would phase out industry funding for medical refresher courses at its conventions.

The institute acknowledged that many doctors depend on industry funding for refresher medical courses but said that “the current system of funding is unacceptable and should not continue.” The report recommended that a different funding system be created within two years.

That would be the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, which has added its voice to the condemnation of widespread conflict of interest in America’s medical schools and in the practice of medicine generally. Its just-issued report on industry corruption of research and care is, says the New York Times, “scolding… damning… a stinging indictment.”

But as to the creation of that new funding system for continuing education courses about which Jack Lewin’s so worried… Let’s see… How do people usually fund their education?

Well, if they’re poor, you know, they get scholarships and take out loans and pay some out of pocket… They take part-time jobs while they’re in school…

Which is all well and good. But how in the world are they supposed to pay when their average salary is $300,000? This is what’s worrying Jack Lewin… It’s getting harder and harder for doctors to keep pace with new information, and how in hell are they going to afford these courses????

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Update: I’ve made this point many times on University Diaries. If you kids keep misbehaving…

Much of the IOM report echoes recommendations from the Association of American Medical Colleges, which also supports Grassley’s proposed database. But not all schools have followed that group’s advice. “We give a pretty clear warning,” says panel chair Bernard Lo, a bioethicist at the University of California, San Francisco. “If the [institutions] don’t get their act together, they’re really inviting the legislators to step in.

… is haunting the Democratic party.

I’ve just sent off a post to my blog at Inside Higher Education about Malcolm Lowry and James Agee, both of whom have centenaries this year. The post should be up pretty soon.

UD will be giving a paper at this year’s Malcolm Lowry Conference at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. It’ll be as much about Richard Rorty as about Malcolm Lowry.

From the testimony of Dusty Becker, co-captain of the University of Oregon Ultimate Frisbee team. Becker was appealing the university’s decision to shut down the team’s season after multiple instances of drunkenness, speeding, and playing naked.

“Speeding, drinking, nudity — they’re not bad things … They’re things a big portion of the community doesn’t think are wrong. … To run around naked is just kind of a hippie, ultimate thing… We didn’t think there was anything wrong at the time.”

The appeal failed.

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Update: A reader, Larry, points out that Oregon might have made a serious mistake. He cites the following:

“A study by Dr. Michael Norden of the University of Washington shows that among all 86 private national universities, those ranking in the top half for Ultimate [Frisbee] have a graduation rate of over 85%, while those in the bottom half graduate just 60%. The difference in the totals of Rhodes scholars and Marshall scholars among their graduates during this decade is even more dramatic – 208 versus 15. (The odds of this happening by chance are truly infinitesimal). Moreover, the top ten schools based on Ultimate ranking have a slightly higher mean graduation rate and more winners of top scholarships than schools chosen by – not only SATs, but any standard metric including: grades, faculty resources, and financial resources.

… Why a game, requiring such all-around athleticism should so consistently be dominated by universities (and presumably students) with off-the-chart academic credentials, is truly a mystery. The top seven schools for ultimate have a mean graduation rate of 95% and nearly as many total Rhodes and Marshal scholars as all of the rest combined. The names speak for themselves: Stanford, Brown, Harvard, Tufts, Dartmouth, Yale, and Princeton.”

More at Dan Drezner.

1.) Zinkhan has been fired from his professorship at the University of Georgia.

2.) UD suggested in an earlier post that George Zinkhan has killed himself. Police now seem to be preparing us for that possibility:

… The longer it takes for authorities to find triple murder suspect George Zinkhan, the more likely it is that the UGA professor did something to hurt himself, police said Monday morning.

“That’s a strong possibility,” said Capt. Clarence Holeman of the Athens-Clarke County Police Department.

… [P]olice have been tracking Zinkhan’s cellphone, credit cards, ATM card and passport, but none of them has been used since he disappeared on Saturday.

No one has reported any sightings of Zinkhan or his vehicle, despite a nationwide alert for both…

3.) If he killed himself, how did he do it?

Like Jerry Wolff, a biology professor at St. Cloud State who killed himself by wandering deep into a national park and letting the elements take over, Zinkhan was a big outdoorsman who wrote poetry about hiking the Appalachian trail. Given his poetry and his love of nature, I’d guess that Zinkhan did something similar. Walked into the wild. Shot himself.

Unless Zinkhan has an accomplice in Amsterdam (where he has a house) with whom he acted incredibly quickly, chances are he’s dead.

… features University Diaries.

… Roger Williams…

All of these universities are models of insider dealing, their boards of trustees bursting with local merchants making money off of their position.

Of course, no one does it like Jersey.

I’m a huge admirer of the SIUC newspaper, The Daily Egyptian. It’s not only well-written, it’s gutsy and ethical and knows exactly what SIUC has become.

… Board of Trustees Chairman Roger Tedrick has indirectly benefited from millions of dollars worth of construction contracts SIU has awarded — contracts that he voted to approve. Tedrick helped nearly 40 companies on university contracts find insurance to cover the work they would be doing. Tedrick voted “yes” on 20 of them — each of which weighed in at more than $250,000 — then found insurance for the successful bidder.

Between 2002 and 2006, Tedrick donated $26,000 to the Blagojevich campaign. Tedrick was appointed to the BOT in February of 2004.

… The Southern Illinoisan reported Sunday that SIU President Glenn Poshard’s son Dennis Poshard and Dennis’s company have received contracts from the university and from organizations affiliated with the university for $138,000.

Dennis Poshard’s company received a contract from his friend and neighbor, College of Business Dean Dennis Cradit, to make a promotional video for the college.

… President Poshard serves southern Illinois as a politician who understands the downstate area, but he shouldn’t be running the university like a patronage political machine.

… Now that SIU has Chicago’s attention, the Daily Egyptian appeals to Gov. Pat Quinn to stir up the university’s governing board. SIU is still rife with Blagojevich politics. There’s no telling how deep corruption could run at this university….

That last point’s the most important one. We know who the hacks are and how they think. The corruption almost certainly runs deeper than we know.

There’s a bright side to this. The Egyptian is well-positioned to win some serious journalism prizes. Unlike student journalists at clean schools, they’ve got a lot of dirt to write about.

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.

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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… .?”

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(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.)

… translating physics is charming, smart, wonderful.

He was one of the three people killed near the University of Georgia yesterday.

UD thanks David for the link.

… who wrote poetry, one hesitates. But here’s a page of Zinkhan’s stuff.

Read it while you can. I imagine the American Marketing Association might want to to take it down.

Here’s a perfectly competent poem of his, capturing the bureaucratic surreal:

“after hours”

Late at night after he thought
that everyone had gone home
the senior accounting partner loosened
his tie and
walked around the offices
splay foot
bare

“You’ll catch your death of cold”
pronounced the newly hired secretary
when she caught him one evening
unaware

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Bare. Unaware. Good rhyme, well-placed. And unaware has a nice duality to it — caught him unaware; i.e., he didn’t know she was still in the building. But she too is unaware — unaware of the deeper weirdness in this place, in this man — she’s a new secretary, after all.

Zinkhan, in this poem and others, is highly attuned to the Kafka-nature of The Office (a nature played for laughs in the television shows by that name), the weird disjunction between a buttoned-up rational senior accountant and the same man a bare-footed creature at night roaming the halls. Werewolf story. The naked animal beneath the suit. Catch your death in these cold climes.

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Update: As I anticipated, the poetry has now been removed from the website.