Frost at midnight is silent and full of sky, and the sky is full of galactic clouds. You stand on a rickety bridge over a brook and look at satellites and stars.
Around you are flat dark fields grazed in the morning by deer who come in from the hills that circle the fields. You’re standing in a bowl of dry grains circled by the hills.
Early this morning I put on my black alpaca coat and my black winter hat and black gloves and walked the circuit of the farm, starting with the deer on the fields near Route 92. Cows lowed from a neighboring farm. I moved on to the goats, who clattered out of the barn when they heard me; and then to the llamas.
Now I walked the labyrinth on the far side of the house, along the brook. I walked its stony turns slowly… Frost performed its secret ministry. I took up abstruser musings. Strange and extreme silentness.
Why?
Because PowerPoint pisses people off.
I mean, PowerPoint rules, of course; so you shouldn’t be surprised, for instance, to be commanded to use PowerPoint when you’re invited to give a conference presentation.
Matt Blaze, a security systems expert at U Penn, was surprised, and pissed off. He explains on his blog why he hates PowerPoint:
“Presentation software” like PowerPoint (and KeyNote and others of that ilk) has blurred the line between mere visual aids and the presentations themselves. I’ve grown to loathe PowerPoint, not because of particular details that don’t suit me (though it would be nice if it handled equations more cleanly), but because it gets things precisely backwards. When I give a talk, I want to be in control. But the software has other ideas.
PowerPoint isn’t content to sit in the background and project the occasional chart, graph or bullet list. It wants to organize the talk, to manage the presentation. There’s always going to be a slide up, whether you need it there or not. Want to skip over some material? OK, but only by letting the audience watch as you fast-forward awkwardly through the pre-set order. Change the order around to answer a question? Tough — should have thought of that before you started. You are not the one in charge here, and don’t you forget it.
Here are the PowerPoint slides Blaze prepared for an upcoming conference whose organizers made PowerPoint presentations mandatory for all participants.
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UD thanks Ian.
There’s the Ryerson guys; and now
Laurence Thomas, a popular [Syracuse University] philosophy professor whose courses have waiting lists, walked out on his class of nearly 400 students last week when he caught a couple of students fiddling with their phones instead of paying attention to him.
It wasn’t the first time Thomas has cut a class short because a student broke his no-texting rule. To Thomas, texting saps the class of its intellectual energy.
… no one else comes close to the University of New Mexico.
Its president is a nepotistic nullity.
Its football coach likes to lose games and beat up people.
Everyone’s tried to get rid of the president every which way, but the governor and legislature can’t get enough of the guy.
UNM will also keep the coach on, rumor has it, because “UNM’s Board of Regents, the state of New Mexico and the athletic department’s private fundraising Lobo Club is unwilling to provide the $1.46 million to buy Locksley out of a contract that runs through 2014.”
They’re already paying through the teeth on contract buyouts for three other coaches.
Plus:
This year’s average attendance will likely be the lowest since 1992. The school’s ticket revenue projection is down over a million dollars over the last two years yet it will cost the University about $1.4 million to buyout the remainder of his contract.
All UD can say is Choose your state well. You’re free, in the United States, to move unaccosted from state to state, putting down roots, attending school, and working, where you prefer. Occasionally, you’re trapped; I understand that. But in most cases you do not have to go to a public university in Nevada, New Mexico, Alaska, or Hawaii — all states where there is simply no good option if you’re serious, or even semi-serious, about an education.
Don’t wait for UNM to change. Go away.
… let’s see if they can find trustees who haven’t had to pay the federal government twenty-two million dollars in a Medicare fraud settlement.
Her term on FAU’s board has now expired, but for the last five years Lalita Janke, an expert in the submission of false diagnoses, has tended to the health of that university.
Here’s Trustee Janke, in an interview about FAU’s incoming president, warning the new leader that she’ll “have to prove herself.”
In UD‘s opinion, that is.
Here you’ve got one of the many naughty people at America’s most criminalized university – the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey – having his university pension taken away (he recently retired from UMDNJ) while he’s being tried for bribery.
In arguing that he shouldn’t have his pension taken away, the guy showed the judge “documentation from a psychologist that he has undergone treatment for schizoaffective disorder, major depression, a generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Four diagnoses? Four?? No wonder the judge denied the guy’s pension request! If the guy’s psychologist had merely gone to the trouble to flip through the DSM he’d have come up with at least twenty.
Well, we know all of this, and the only contribution the Canadian professor I’m quoting makes is a literary one: He puts a nice Edgar Allan Poe twist on the sheer creepiness of teaching to a laptop.
Creepier still is the way, sufficiently massed and sufficiently angry (think five hundred laptoppers herded together for PowerPoints and clicker tests), these students begin to stage a Revenge of the Zombies. The professor, for instance, is commenting on an article about an engineering class at Ryerson University:
Paper airplanes thrown at professors, music and movies played aloud on laptops and chattering cell phone users are causing engineering instructors to pack up and leave.
In an announcement posted on BlackBoard Oct. 19, first-year engineering instructors Robert Gossage and Andrew McWilliams announced two measures to deal with the “constant disruptions” in General Chemistry lectures.
The first was a three-strike policy. After three warnings the professor would walk out and it would be up to students to learn the rest of the lecture material on their own. The second was to make test and exam questions harder, since “the class appeared to know the material well enough so as not to listen during lecture.”
“Chemistry has been the worst,” said Adam Rupani, a first-year engineering student. “I was sitting in the first row and couldn’t hear the professor.”
Oh, but there’s some good news!
Rupani said lectures have been better since the removal of clicker tests that were at the end of each lecture. Students got bonus marks just for taking the test, but without it, some of the rowdier students decided to skip class.
“People won’t come if there’s nothing going on,” said Rupani.
Truly the introduction of enormous classes, PowerPoint, laptops, and clickers has been a boon.
To journalism. And to YouTube.
Twice.
The consensus around here is that Ella, old, imperial, receiving human tribute as she lies in her barn, likes UD. “Two kisses! She gave you two.”
The llama kiss is not really a kiss. The llama brings her big head, her black eyes, hard against your face, and breathes.
Briefly you bathe in the breath of the llama.
It’s different with the goats. They bat their weird eyes at you and let you pet their faces and stroke their horns.
I sang them a song.
Because all goats are brothers
Wherever goats may be
One goatherd shall unite us
Forever proud and free…
The cats sprawl under pickups and ignore your mewl imitation until you start to walk away, at which point they drag their asses over and let you stroke their ears.
The farm has everything pour les types uds – a good library, a piano, silence, views… We even seem to be in what the farm calls the scholar’s room — appliqued images of books along the walls, paintings with books in them…
The four-poster bed’s so high you have to take a running leap to get on it.
Quite right. Universities can do what they like in terms of refunds and new courses, but they can’t avoid the damage that failure to check the academic credentials of their instructors does to their reputation. When students – like Hubbs up there – have to uncover the bogus backgrounds of their professors, universities have a lot of explaining to do.
The Monterey Institute of International Studies is a graduate school of Middlebury College. For years it’s enthusiastically employed a man whose grandiose claims about himself made students so suspicious that a group of them hit the internet and checked the guy out. He’s a fraud.
It’s scandalous that students, not fellow faculty or the administration, had to do the dirty work here. It’s embarrassing that it happened at a school that’s about security studies. Unable to detect an obvious fraud on their own campus!
… West Virginia for Thanksgiving. Blogging continues through her mountain trek.
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If you ask UD what she’s thankful for, she’ll tell you right out pretty much everything.
But let’s go with the most recent thing for which she’s grateful. Let’s cast a cold eye over the last twenty-four hours…
OK. She’s grateful for the Joyce Boys.
Her James Joyce seminar, this semester, is all-male. Twelve bristly intense sensitive amused males gather twice a week very late in the afternoon (by the end of our session, K Street’s gone dark) on the ground level of an office building GW uses for classes.
We meet in a windowless room. It’s never bright enough in there. I’m always playing with the lights, trying to make it brighter, even though by now, the end of the semester, I’m aware I’m not going to succeed.
The room is heavily trafficked by the PowerPoint brigade, so UD‘s first business before she begins teaching involves rolling up screens, pushing speakers to the side, wheeling computer stands out of the way… Black machines with randomly blinking red lights on their faces and tangles of cords streaming out of their asses surround UD as she speaks.
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Do you realize how odd an all-male literature course is?
In this corner, a dozen Blazes Boylans, bursting with youthful virility.
In that corner, the Unsinkable Molly Bloom. Plus twenty years.
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I’m thankful because my teaching life offers me odd scenarios like this one, in which I lecture to smiling young men not only about the humanity of Bloom, and how it wakens the soul of Dedalus, but also about how in the Ithaca chapter they have a pissing contest.
Ulysses is full of pissing and farting and shitting and playing with yourself, and Scathing Online Schoolmarm gets to describe it all to the guys, who guffaw.
UD/SOS, the one female in a room of males, gets to be the gross one.
Kitsch, thy name is Orlando.
Now, with the FBI investigating the university’s research institute (it’s “the contracting arm of the university, farming out millions of dollars in research work to professors and others on behalf of all manner of clients, including NASA, Boeing and the U.S. Army”), presumably for theft, things at A&M have gotten so chaotic that the situation is simply impossible to follow. It obviously involves conflict of interest, incompetence, and cover-up, but who really knows? The university doesn’t seem to have an actual president at the moment… or, rather, the pro tem guy in the job seems all messed up in the conflict of interest and as a result lacks authority… Whatever. If anyone cared about, say, the students at that school, they’d shut it down and send them all somewhere else.
Worldwide, happiness equates very strongly with equality — mostly status equality, but the countries that have a very short ladder between the richest and the poorest people are a lot happier than those where a few people make a lot of money and a few people don’t make much money. In Denmark, a CEO only makes about three times as much as an average worker, whereas here in the U.S., you can have a CEO making many thousands of times as much as an average worker.
The author of a new book about the happiest places in the world helps us put the resurgent insider trading scandal in the United States in context.
The reason UD goes after universities like Brown and Harvard and Chicago, whose boards of trustees include increasing numbers of the morally shady hyper-rich (boards of trustees have always included small-time crooked cronies — we’re not talking about that), is that of all cultural locations, universities are supposed to be serious places, engaged in serious thought about how to live. Trustees run universities; they set all sorts of crucial policies; they sign off on all sorts of crucial decisions. Symbolically, these people embody and articulate the foundational values of their academic institutions. They’re trustees, after all, people to whom students and faculty entrust the ethical and intellectual, as well as financial, welfare of the institution.
Remember the law professor at the University of Chicago who got into all sorts of trouble and enraged thousands of people because, with a household income of around $450,000, he complained about his deep unhappiness in the current economy, under a President who might increase taxes on some of that money?
If that guy had been located anywhere outside of a university, no one would have batted an eyelash at his sense of entitlement, his refusal to take even a hint of a civic attitude toward his wealth and good fortune. In every place in this country except universities (okay; maybe churches), people positively applaud amoral acquisitiveness. Greed is good, yadda yadda…
So it’s always something of a shock to realize that a university like Harvard until recently paid each of its top investment people 35 million dollars a year, and that it hoarded unto itself a 35 billion dollar endowment.
I mean! No one’s asking for universities to be shabby thready head in the clouds sorts of places; but really…
Blinded by the billion dollar blizzards swirling around hedge fund managers, universities have been piling their boards higher and deeper with these people. Of course the universities know they’re taking a risk by elevating possibly insider-trading hedgies to positions of immense trust. Will the hedgies have time to give the school a one hundred million dollar gift before they have to go to prison? How much damage to the reputation of the school will its high-profile association with financial criminals generate?
Well, we’re about to find out.
Meanwhile, universities might take a deep breath, shake themselves off, and ask whether putting their presidents on the boards of places like Goldman Sachs, investing in firms like Steve Rattner’s, and handing the fortunes of the institution over to money-obsessed cheats is, in the long run, a wise policy.
Yesterday it was Steve Rattner… Today, another member of your university’s corporation is in the news.
All eyes are on Brown trustee Steven A. Cohen.
Plus:
The [FBI] investigation is said to look into a broad range of firms, from hedge funds to Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sachs is where, for ten years, Brown University President and corporation member Ruth Simmons sat on the board of trustees.
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Update: Says here Brown has invested in Rattner’s firm.