This human type can be played for tragedy (Lear) or comedy (Homer Simpson). It’s either horrific or hilarious to watch him destroy himself and others through stupidity and arrogance.

Lloyd Jacobs, president of the University of Toledo, is one of these, very much in the comic mode with his Babbitty emails about the revolutionary for-profit approach he’s bringing to the school.

Along with Babbitt, the fictional prototype for Jacobs is Charles Bovary, Emma’s dullard husband, who, convinced he’s found a new way to fix a club foot, ends up crippling a patient for life.

Faculty and students have mobilized quite impressively against Lloyd, and have so far managed to keep him from realizing his dreams. Here’s their latest blocking action.

Still. The man is president. “I will do such things…”

[Senator] Grassley, in a letter to Pfizer, wrote that he was “greatly disturbed” to read an article in The New York Times on Tuesday describing a Pfizer representative taking cellphone photographs of [Harvard] medical students last October at a campus demonstration against industry influence. “I find this troubling as I have documented several instances where pharmaceutical companies have attempted to intimidate academic critics of drugs,” he wrote.

New York Times

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

The curious lensman from Pfizer
Has become my new Harvard advisor.
“Promote my next pill
And you’ll be in the swill.”
To which all I can say is “Aye aye, sir!”

… students constantly write sad pieces in the campus newspaper advising them, in the simplest terms, how to use it.

But, as this University of Kansas student knows, instruction in the technology don’t mean shit if you’re using it because you’re lazy, unimaginative, or incompetent.

… Some people seem to make slides only because they think they have to. Others rely on PowerPoint to cover up their weaknesses, such as when they become nervous and simply read out texts on slides.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather not have a PowerPoint unless it’s well-made. One of my favorite instructors, for example, never used PowerPoint in his class. He always made his point clear and I never felt bored in class. His animated expression and gestures showed his passion for his subject, which drew me to the class.

And as a University of Alabama student notes:

You pay thousands of dollars to attend our fine University, not to mention the hundreds of dollars you are forced to spend on books. You head to class with your coffee and your copy of The Crimson White and take a seat. Your professor puts up his or her PowerPoint and starts to read it word for word. Literally. And it is literally word for word from your book.

At another university, a student says the same thing:

I took an art history class at Truman in which we spent endless hours flipping through PowerPoint slides of paintings while the professor read, one by one, the title of each work. We received mountains of information, but toward the end of the semester, one student sitting next to me actually pleaded under her breath, “Teach us something!”

Imagine what might happen if students all over the country began to organize. A Princeton student sees the possibilities:

The incomparable level of boredom Powerpoint inspires has …unite[d] a generation of young students trapped in lecture[s]…

PowerPoint. A deadly technology for dead people.

Eventually students will rise up against you.

Their signs will read TEACH US SOMETHING.

… puts out a newsletter about itself.  A citizen comments:

Residents within the Freehold Regional High School District recently received the mid-winter district newsletter. In it, I was amazed to find the district smelling like roses. The district has been an embarrassment since the news that the superintendent, two assistant superintendents and two other employees were found to have earned degrees from a diploma mill.

The board supported the administration (not even having the nerve to admonish them for their actions) and, despite claiming that things would change, continues to show contempt for the public that has spoken out on the misappropriation of funds on this and other items. The only changes we have seen were mandated by the state.

The newsletter contains an article on the accredited schools our seniors have been accepted to. Our students know where to go to further their education. What does that say about the administrators who should know better and set an example?

Another article concerns the need to hold back expenses with a quote from the superintendent that the district has a “moral obligation” to do so. This man received tuition reimbursements and additional stipends on his “diploma,” has cost the district more in legal fees and had no qualms about leasing a luxury SUV at $700 a month, with board approval.

This newsletter comes just at the start of school board electioneering and budget presentations. It paints a wonderful, albeit false, picture of the district and gives current board members positive, but wholly undeserved, free publicity. Anyone following the news should know better.

Yes, congratulations, kids, on having been admitted to accredited colleges! Before you go, drop by the office and tell us how you did it. But talk real slow.

Now that much of Florida is in foreclosure, UD has almost decided which house to buy here in Key West.

It’s either 420 Elizabeth Street, or 620 Elizabeth Street.

Neither house has a for sale, let alone bank owned sign in front of it. But all in good time.

420 has a slight edge at this point, though every time she walks by 620 UD wavers.

420’s smaller (UD likes small houses) and so fine. A white palmy house with a wide porch on which black urns display purple impatiens, the place conveys calm and sunniness, but also a sort of classical restraint. It looks across Elizabeth Street to a planting of riotous bushes and trees.

UD snuck down the alley, stuck her nose between some slats, and can confirm a pool.

620 is about the lavish overgrowth more typical of Key West houses. It’s got a much bigger front yard than 420, and the yard gushes green. Island winds whip up the bougainvillea and buttonwood and laurel, and high above them the palms rattle like mad.

It’s a jungle, and UD leans over the white picket fence and shakes her head at the unsubdued elations when the forest blooms of it.  Makes you feel like you’ve just snarfed some hot sauce.  Whoo hoo.

… but apparently the next issue of Consumer’s Digest will feature an attack on for-profit universities.

For-profit online universities represent a $6.2 billion industry with some 620,000 students as of fall 2008. Because of questionable oversight by the federal government, some of these “institutions,” such as Kaplan University and University of Phoenix, are able to skirt requirements of the Title IV student-assistance program that is part of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, and thus, mostly taxpayer money is filling the coffers of these companies. The transgressors often use high-pressure tactics to mislead individuals regarding the value of a degree and the costs involved in working toward that degree. Many potential students are deceived about the transferability of credits earned elsewhere. Allegedly, instructors are pressured to inflate students’ grades to keep them enrolled and the financial aid flowing in — and are rewarded for doing so. For students, all of this can result in subpar coursework, insufficient job training and a degree that is devalued by employers — a complete waste of a student’s time and money…

No surprises here, if you’ve been keeping up with your University Diaries reading.

Remember this song I wrote?

… from the Epicurean Dealmaker.

Consider his comments in connection with this blogger’s recent estimate of forty percent losses in Harvard’s endowment.

…Historiann.  Historiann’s proprietor comments on UD:

Wow … and I thought I was the crankiest young fogey around! 

But hey babe, check it out: UD ain’t young.

This sentence has become a real winner – you can buy it emblazoned on all sorts of merchandise – and UD agrees with the sentiment.

In fact she’d go so far as to say that part of her applauds when high-profile women behave very badly indeed.

People sentimentalize women; they think they’re all warm fearful law-abiding domestic creatures. True equality will never occur until people begin to regard women as – for instance – capable of the same rigid unmitigated viciousness of which some men are capable.

So in a strange way UD privately cheers when Ruth Madoff reveals herself every bit the Bonnie to Bernie’s Clyde:

Broken victims of her husband’s suspected Ponzi scheme are fighting for pennies on the dollar, but Ruth Madoff says $62 million she squirreled away is none of their business.

See, I sentimentalize women. When I started reading the Madoff saga I saw poor Ruth, martyred Jewish mother… Or I saw Michael Corleone’s waspy wife. She knew… She didn’t know… She loved him, that’s all she knew!… She was protecting the children! … Here’s how I pictured her:

But Ruth is a svelte postmodern concoction, in every way the equal of her husband.

She’ll fight for her bag of goodies.

The State University of New York melted down a 900-pound butter sculpture from the state fair last summer to help power its vehicles.

UD salutes the young idealists featured in the three posts below. They are students at Harvard, the University of Minnesota, and George Washington University.

The words in my title come from Walt Whitman.

The only med school in the country on probation, George Washington University refuses to release the accreditor’s report detailing its problems. In an editorial, GW students call for its release.

Most schools who’ve been on probation, or have had some trouble with the accrediting group, released their report.

Why is GW the exception? If the [agency] report [in 1999] called the conditions at Stanford “deplorable” – and it was not even put on probation – how much worse must it be in Foggy Bottom?

See the post just below this one, where the militancy that matters derives from Harvard medical school students.

Similarly, a med student at the University of Minnesota shows you, in this all-business, supremely clear opinion piece, how to eviscerate deans who can’t imagine adjusting to life without industry money.

While the militancy has to come from the students, we shouldn’t forget those other sources of moral clarity and pressure: High-profile professors unencumbered by greed, like Harvard’s Marcia Angell; and bulldogs in Congress like Charles Grassley.

In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

“I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.”

… Harvard [received an] F grade … from the American Medical Student Association, a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money.

[The last dean] was such an industry booster that he served on a pharmaceutical company board…

(One Harvard professor’s [now-required] disclosure in class listed 47 company affiliations.)…

new york times

Where does education fit into all this? It never has. U-Conn. — like many institutions of higher earning — brings in 18-year-old athletes to sell tickets and TV rights to basketball games. In return, the athletes get a scholarship to a university in which they scarcely attend classes.

Norman Chad, Washington Post, on the Calhoun thing.