Graeme Wood describes teaching at a totally burqa’d university in Yemen:
… When I entered the classroom and saw fifteen students who looked identical in every way, I burst out laughing, and never totally regained composure. The utter neutrality of their aspect was disarming to say the least. After a few minutes, I started asking them questions in English about their lives and why they wanted to learn English. “I am a pharmacist!” chirped one of the bolder students, so I turned to look through her eyeslit and ask whether she thought Yemeni honey had medicinal properties. Instantly fourteen black-gloved hands shot out to point at one of the other women in the room: I was talking to the wrong student, six desks away. This drill happened about twenty more times in the next hour, and even though my sonar triangulation improved a little, even by the end I could narrow down blurted answers at best to a clump of five or so students. I ended up accidentally excusing women with no cars to check on their parking, and letting women with empty bladders go to the lavatory. In every case the errors lasted only seconds, but the experience was still totally bewildering.
Only Samuel Beckett, or perhaps Monty Python, could do justice to this scene.
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Beckett’s friend James Joyce captured the inner truth of these students, each one of them “a batlike soul, waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.”
… columns and letters that go out under her name. At her termination hearing, she explains:
… [Terry] Kinavey …addressed the plagiarism charges against her. She said the text for the letters that she published under her name came from examples that she received in several binders full of information that she received at the New Superintendents Academy held by the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.
She said the administrators who conducted sessions at the academy said that any of the information in the binders could be used and that she chose letters or parts of letters that she felt reflected the district’s mission and philosophy
“Some of these things they said they didn’t even know where they got them, they got them from booklets. There’s been a lot of programs where you can buy canned letters,” Mrs. Kinavey said…
… died in the plane crash in Libya.
An Irish author, Bree O’Mara, who was on her way to London hoping to finalise a publishing contract for her second novel, has been named among the 103 who died in the Libyan air crash.
… A publishing deal for her second novel, Nigel Watson Superhero, set in London where she lived in the 1990s, would have been her most significant career break. It should have been signed last month, but she missed the London Book Fair because of the flight ban after the volcanic ash cloud hit, and had to postpone her trip.
… She had worked for many years as a flight attendant in the Middle East, but moved to London in the 1990s to work in film production. She then spent a period living with the Masai tribes in Tanzania, and was discussing a documentary on the Masai with her South African publishers…
“None of this went reported. We were able to confirm there were no restraining orders, no reports. But just sort of the campus buzz — just the buzz, the campus grapevine — if you’re coaching a team and a player is assaulting a sleeping teammate, wouldn’t you prod around? There were just too many episodes that were almost foreshadowing this.”
A CBS reporter pulls together the latest reports of George Huguely’s violence – toward Yeardley Love and toward others – leading up to her murder.
Having covered, on this blog, quite a lot of on-campus and off-campus violence, I’d like to speculate a little here, about this case.
Let’s start with the coach. It’s contemptible that, knowing Huguely was dangerously violent, the coach said nothing to anyone about it. But it is unsurprising. Why?
1.) Coaches go to incredible trouble, and get paid large sums of money, to recruit and retain aggressive young men. These men are rewarded for their aggression on the field, and rarely punished for that same aggression off the field. Sports heroes like Huguely have been rewarded all their lives for being rude and crude. Their coaches are part of the reward system.
2.) From the coach’s point of view, Huguely is part of a crowd. There are several pretty wild drunks on the team, and it’s going to be hard to single any of them out as not merely wild but pathological.
3.) Coaches tend to have intensely paternal relationships with their boys. They think like fathers, and fathers don’t report their sons, or call the police on them.
4.) The coach is unlikely to come from same the privileged background as his players. If he did, he’d be a lawyer, not a coach. He will perhaps, when considering action against a player, be intimidated by the money and power the player’s parents have.
5.) He will also be intimidated by thoughts of fans and alumni who expect victories and who adore Huguely as a big part of the team’s victory delivery system. A coach’s job is always very shaky — recall that Duke unloaded its lacrosse coach long before the innocence of his players was finally established.
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What about Yeardley Love herself? She was obviously being bombarded by threatening emails and by escalating physical violence from Huguely. She must have known about his jealousy-fueled attack on a male friend of hers on the team. Why did she do nothing, beyond locking her bedroom door?
1.) She might have done something. She might have talked about it. She might even have lodged a complaint — something short of a restraining order, let’s say, but maybe something. We don’t know yet.
2.) She might have thought along the same lines as the chair of Amy Bishop’s department: Yes, this is a scary person, but the school year is almost over. If I can just get to the end of the semester, she’ll have to go away, because she didn’t get tenure. Love might have thought We’re a few weeks away from graduation. If I can just wait that out, he’ll go his way and I’ll go mine.
3.) The crowd thing again. She saw him as one of the guys, part of a very close-knit team. Maybe he was crazier than most of the other guys, but they embraced him, loved him, didn’t throw him off the team. He could be seriously shitfaced, but so could they. He could also probably be charmingly apologetic about his obnoxiousness the next morning.
4.) Finally there’s pity and fear.
She wanted to help him. She understood he was a terrible drunkard about to enter an unforgiving world of work, and she wanted to help him. She pitied him, not just because he was an alcoholic, but because he loved and needed her so much. He roused her compassion.
Just as much, though, he roused her fear. He was a powerful man, and a very mean drunk. His love was sick and obsessive, and now that she’d rejected him, it was all wounded ego and vicious rage. Perhaps like his coach she deluded herself that Huguely was under it all still a little boy given to tantrums, rather than a man capable of murder.
UD‘s blogpal Barney sends her this moving article about the aftermath of Amy Bishop’s killing spree at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
… “There are times when you feel very, very empty,” says [Joseph] Ng, who has carried out research in structural biology in the department for 12 years.
… “The adrenaline is gone,” he says. But the sadness has moved in. “You go into the building and you are really missing these people.”
[Professor Debra] Moriarty feels much the same. “I told somebody a week ago that I felt worse than I have the whole time,” she says. She also sees similar signs in her students. “I have had a number of good students who are not doing well at all now. They come in to me and say, ‘I just can’t get my mind on it’. I send them all to counsellors.”
… Now that the initial shock has worn off, a new species of desolation has set in. The once-collegial third floor of the Shelby Center, where [a graduate student] used to enjoy hanging out, has become a lonely place that she leaves as soon as she can. “Every time you are in the building you are thinking about it,” she says. “On Fridays, when the clock strikes three or four, you are thinking about it.”…
The university news focus is now on the University of Virginia, and Yeardley Love’s killing. Perhaps the aftermath of that crime will be similar there. Weeks after the memorial events and the adrenalin, perhaps the emptiness, loneliness, and desolation of which the UAH faculty and students speak will begin to seep in — a sad, weak, distracted feeling that makes it hard to do your work.
This is a breaking story, and I can’t even get a confirmed name for the guy, much less which university is lucky enough to have him on its botany faculty, but what we have so far is that an Egyptian-American professor sailed through security at JFK with “six metal boxes containing two 9mm pistols, 250 bullets, two swords, and 11 daggers,” only to be stopped by security at Cairo.
His name is Mohamed Ibrahim Khalf, or Mohammed Ibrahim Marei, or something.
I’m sure I’ll be updating this.
[C]ongratulations on the new contract extension — it’s quite the accomplishment.
Not many Connecticut residents can boast about getting a 25 percent increase in salary as a reward for a less-than-stellar year — especially your fellow state employees, many of whom are taking furlough days and foregoing pay increases because of the state’s fiscal crisis.
[M]issing seven games over a 23-day period, finishing the season with an 18-16 mark and a second-round NIT loss, and an NCAA investigation into alleged recruiting violations, and yet still pocketing a $400,000 pay increase, is something. That is, at least, how we understand the new five-year, $13 million extension is defined — retroactive to this past season with a salary increase from $1.6 million to $2 million.
And then another raise, $2.3 million, for the coming year…
An Andrew Sullivan reader writes:
I live in the extremely multi-ethnic Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. The high-rise across the street from me has a large fundamentalist Muslim community living in it, and there are several dozen fully-veiled women who live in the building. I run into them at the bus stop, the grocery store, McDonald’s – pretty much all over my ‘hood.
And although I’m an uber-liberal urbanite who embraces my multi-culti neighborhood, I have to confess: there is nothing creepier than having a burqa-wearing woman coming at you in the cereal aisle. I’ve lived here for years and see them all the time, but I can’t help but find them spooky. They’re wraith-like and eerie. I know I’m not supposed to admit that, but it’s true.
I understand that it is (theoretically) their choice to wear the veil, but the same is not true of their daughters. I have seen few sadder things in my life than the day I ran into one of my neighbors at the store, and saw that her adorably goofy and energetic little daughter had suddenly been converted into a somber, ghostly, black-clad shadow of herself. That was the first time I felt like a burqa ban might not be such a bad idea….
But surely the daughter chooses to wear it.
From an interview with Zadie Smith a few years ago:
… [T]here were many things about academic life that I found unbearably oppressive and absurd. There’s so much of one’s real lived experiences that you have to leave at the gates. There’s something about English departments in particular—a kind of desperate need to be serious, to be professional, to police this very ambiguous and necessarily amorphous act, reading—that I find hard to deal with.
English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be. I always feel a disappointment coming out of English departments, as if all these brilliant people are gathered and poised to study something and all they have to study is . . . these things? Novels? But they’re so . . . smooshy. It’s as if, at some fundamental level, they consider the novel beneath them. They want something more macho, harder, with a more rigorous structure. It depresses me, how embarrassed some people seem to be about novels, how much they want them to be something else.
The flip side of that experience is finding a professor here, a professor there, who is absolutely willing to engage with everything a novel is and face up to its strengths and failures as a human product and allow students to express their most intimate intellectual and emotional experiences of reading. When that happens, there’s no better place to be in a university than in an English department. But when someone is spending a semester explaining to you why Adam Bede is an example of the nineteenth-century pastoral fallacy, that’s a little demoralizing. To me, a university is one of the most precious of human institutions; that’s why when they fall short of their own ideals, you feel so cheated.
How did I get onto this page, this particular Zadie Smith interview?
Via Roger Deakin, via Iris Murdoch, via scribbling in my journal while I was coming home on the train from the university this afternoon, even via the burqa…
Well, I’ll try to straighten it all out. But it’s got something to do with this quotation from Murdoch. Smith cites it in her interview:
The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one. . . . This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals.
Real lived experiences… intimate intellectual and emotional experiences… Smith is after these, and she rightly identifies the university as a bastion of actuality, a much-evolved, much-elaborated truth-seeker. The university embodies, ideally, Murdoch’s discipline of seeing what there is outside one, tearing the tissue of self-centered fantasy in order to attain what Murdoch elsewhere calls the “merciful objectivity” at the core of morality.
Deakin? In the few days since I discovered this British environmentalist and nature writer (he died five years ago), I’ve experienced the same excitement I felt first reading James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Albert Camus’ Lyrical Essays, and George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London,” and Jan Morris’ essay “La Paz,” and quite a few other great works of descriptive prose. Like these writers, Deakin has the gift of writing outside of himself, the gift of merciful objectivity, which he trains on the natural world.
This is from his book Waterlog:
Natural water has always held the magical power to cure. Somehow or other, it transmits its own self-regenerating powers to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression, and come out a whistling idiot. There is a feeling of absolute freedom and wildness that comes with the sheer liberation of nakedness as well as weightlessness in natural water, and it leads to a deep bond with the bathing-place.
Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are signposted, labelled, and officially ‘interpreted’. There is something about all this that is turning the reality of things into virtual reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities. They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild in these islands, by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official version of things. A swimming journey would give me access to that part of our world which, like darkness, mist, woods or high mountains, still retains most mystery. It would afford me a different perspective on the rest of landlocked humanity.
One writer, remembering Deakin, singled out his “enormous exuberance and anarchic life.” He said of Deakin that “The poems of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge were as immediate to him as today’s newspapers.”
Deakin was Zadie Smith’s ideal English department. He had what Murdoch calls the discipline of art as well as the amorphous smooshy exuberance of real experience. Because he wasn’t landlocked in his own dreams, or in the virtual dreams of technolife, he was able to see the world of nature and people with great clarity, and this clarity compelled his morality, his environmental work which continues after his death to change the world:
“The writer needs a strong passion to change things, not just to reflect or report them as they are.”
Steven Harper, in AM Law Daily, wonders why an ethics-minded business school dean thinks so highly of lawyers.
Last Tuesday, Nitin Nohria was named the new dean of Harvard Business School.
In leading the school, Professor Nohria will focus “on business ethics, a cause he has long championed, particularly during the financial crisis,” as The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Nohria also has been, as the Journal describes him, “vocal critic of management education and the leaders it produces.”
… As the great recession deepened, Nohria and a colleague, Rakesh Khurana, argued in the October 2008 Harvard Business Review that management should become a profession: “Managers have lost legitimacy over the past decade in the face of a widespread institutional breakdown of trust and self-policing in business. To regain society’s trust, we believe that business leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role that goes beyond their responsibility to the shareholder to include a civic and personal commitment to their duty as institutional custodians. In other words, it is time that management finally became a profession.”
It might surprise many attorneys that Nohria singled out lawyers as offering a better model. He did so largely because the legal profession abides by a code of ethics. Is he searching for nobility in the business world? If so, maybe Nohria has a fictional character in mind–Atticus Finch. Unfortunately, it’s too late for the most lucrative and influential segment of the legal profession to guide business schools to better places.
For 20 years now, large law firms have been moving in the direction Nohria seeks to reverse in the business world. Following the example of their corporate clients, law firm leaders have adopted an MBA-centric mentality. In recent years, a large percentage of law firm managers have earned MBAs. And increasingly, they have come to rely on business-school metrics — billable hours, leverage ratios, and profits-per-partner–to dictate decisions that shape the culture of their legal businesses.
… If Dean Nohria is looking for a new model of something that is truly a profession, rather than a collection of bottom-line businesses where MBA-type metrics set the tone, he’ll have to look elsewhere.
A professor at the University of Iowa medical school, recently placed on paid leave for undisclosed reasons, stabbed himself while out jogging and then told police he’d been attacked by a gang.
UI spokesman Tom Moore confirmed that the UI Department of Public Safety is investigating Hunninghake — although it isn’t yet clear what for — and that UI placed Hunninghake on paid leave on April 23. Moore also confirmed that five search warrants had been served in the Hunninghake investigation.
UD is currently scratching her head over this one. Hunninghake was a big shot with a big salary, so theft seems unlikely. Though why else would there be all of those search warrants? Academic fraud’s another possibility. They want to look at his records and computers to see whether he fakes data along with physical assaults.
As for the faked assault itself: This seems a bit more straightforward to me. A distraction. An effort to gain sympathy.
For those who need reminding, this is how it typically goes.
The city’s top policeman [Diploma mill stories are almost always about police forces, fire departments, and the armed services. More often than you’d think, they’re also about schools – public schools. Any organization that forks over cash to people who show it a piece of paper that looks more or less like a college degree is asking for diploma milling. Unless these organizations learn how to screen bogus degrees, they should stop with the whole college degree incentive pay deal.] will face a Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission panel next month, stemming from a bogus college-degree scandal.
Fruitland Park [Florida] Police Chief Mark Isom had received about $775 in incentive pay for what was supposed to be his attendance at an accredited college, which turned out to be a degree mill.
… A criminal investigation dove into the college education of Isom earlier this year after the city of Fruitland Park learned [that the school listed was] a non-accredited and bogus institution, Youngsfield University, which is registered as a corporation in Delaware.
Isom had contended he took the courses from 2003 to 2009. A state statue allowed the city to pay Isom an extra $36 each pay period as an incentive for his having accredited college degrees.
But Isom reportedly paid a one-time electronic payment of $1,110 to the school on March 17, 2009 for online bachelor’s and master’s degrees in criminology, diplomas that were then mailed to him, according to the FDLE. [People often ask UD — well, Mr UD once asked UD — why people continue to pay so much money to these places when they could probably, with sufficient technological skill, produce these pieces of paper for themselves, for free. It’s a good question. The idiots on the other end of this, after all, never notice the thing is bogus; or they do notice, but they don’t care. It almost always takes outsiders to blow the whistle in these cases, as in Isom’s bitter complaint that some “disgruntled citizen” fingered him… So why buy the thing? Why part with a thousand bucks? Because most of the diploma mills, for that money, hire some person to sit at a phone and answer it in the unlikely event anyone actually calls to verify credentials. “Good afternoon, Youngsfield University, registrar’s office!… Hm, just a moment… Yes, Mr. Isom was a student here… Would you like me to mail you his transcripts?”]
An FDLE investigation report that was turned over to the State Attorney Office for review stated the college was as a bogus institution and degree mill. And investigators said Isom couldn’t provide the name of a “single” textbook, reference book, instructor or course after allegedly completing 63 separate and distinct bachelors and masters level courses from the school in the six years. [As with the just-tenured professor of justice studies at Northeastern Illinois University who one-clicked his PhD, diploma mill grads won’t show you their thesis or their transcripts, and they can’t remember what they read or who they worked with.]
The report added that Isom had refused to meet with investigators…
The real question is: Given how similar all diploma mill stories are, and how obvious the institutional structure sustaining the mills, why are diploma mills still a billion dollar or so industry?
And the answer is: No one gives a shit.
University of Alabama students chose Lawrence Kohl, a history professor, to give this year’s Last Lecture.
… Kohl said scientific thinking dominates every other way of thinking. Many modern-day scientists know people will like what they discover or create because people now rely on technology, he said.
“Our age has become disillusioned and dissatisfied with what humans can do,” Kohl said.
According to Kohl, the 21st century is a time of competition — countries compete, humans compete and even schools compete…
Humans use drugs to increase athletic performance beyond their natural ability, Kohl said.
… Kohl discussed how educators now have a misguided worship of technology, where they prefer the new over the old and compare the real to the virtual. Also, instructors should trust students to be able to learn without all [the] new technology in the classroom.
… The scientific mind is reshaping education to make it more reductive, Kohl said. One example is the goals and objectives instructors have to put on the class syllabus. According to Kohl, it is wasteful, corrupting and destructive of proper teaching. Some instructors may even create goals which are easily achieved.
… He mentioned that the clickers many UA students use are a great example of the reductive scientific mindset. Every technique will not necessarily work for every class or for every set of students.
Kohl said he disagrees with educators who claim that young people are better at multitasking than older generations.
… He said most people think new is always better than old, and this can be destructive because people may accept educational techniques without looking at their usefulness, necessity and implications.
… Humanities and fine arts, especially, cannot replace an instructor with technology because technology can cause the course to lose its value to students, he said.
Kohl gave an example of students who may be looking forward to taking a class taught by Rick Bragg, only to discover he is teaching the course through pre-recorded videos. Kohl said students would likely be disappointed, and a lecture can be a life-changing experience.
“Much of my career has been shaped by those who have long passed away,” Kohl said. “We need to create an educational environment of, by and for human beings.”
Kohl pointed out instructors should live up to the University’s slogan, “Touching lives.”
“Let them be human lives, and let them be touched by human minds,” Kohl said…