Hillary Reinsberg, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, reminds us that you can be highly selected, and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, and still get a cheesy education.

Huffington Post:

The lights go dim, eyes begin to shut and the room gets quiet. Sorry kids, if you’re looking for a story about the bedroom, you’ll have to go elsewhere. Welcome to a college lecture hall in 2010.

Too many classes begin the same way: with an often cheesy PowerPoint presentation. The professor hooks up a projector to a computer and spends ninety minutes clicking through a series of slides. In order to best see the projection, the lights are usually dimmed or shut off entirely. Blinds are closed to trap out the sunlight, making the room feel like a claustrophobic cave.

And on a Monday afternoon in a beautiful old lecture hall, I feel like I’m being pitched a product in a cheesy office sitcom. Oh, and the dark room makes me sleepy. Get me out of here!

… [P]rofessors should think of the future of the students they should hope to inspire. A generation of students accustomed to lackluster and lazy slides on a projector will enter the workforce with the idea that this is a good way to do things…

The only way these professors are going to change (it’s not a matter of their learning that what they’re doing is cheesy; they already know that) is for all of us to keep complaining. Loudly.

In this post, UD noted that Seton Hall University employs, at an enormous salary, a borderline psychotic basketball coach.

This doesn’t distinguish Seton Hall, of course, from many other mad-dog-affirmative universities UD‘s covered on this blog. But Seton Hall understands itself to be a serious Catholic institution, featuring, for instance, faculty retreats devoted to quiet thought about values, and this did seem to UD a notable contradiction.

Under pressure of a big New York Times article last week about its filthy program, Seton Hall has fired this man.

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

Remarking on his unemployment, the New York Times now writes:

[Coach] Gonzalez is originally from Binghamton, N.Y., the site of the state university whose foray into Division I basketball has caused shame to all university officials who are capable of shame. If Binghamton is still on the make, it might want to consider Gonzo.

In April 2009, organisers invited three radical Islamist preachers to address the [City University London’s Islamic] society’s annual dinner, with the “brothers” and “sisters” segregated, and the latter forbidden to ask questions.

Put aside the radical preachers; can you imagine any American university sponsoring a student group that segregates women students and makes them shut up?

Madonna Constantine (here are all my Constantine posts; scroll down) has lost her wrongful dismissal suit against Columbia University.

Undaunted, she’ll press on with whatever else she can think of that’ll divert time and money from Columbia’s efforts to educate people. Specifically, she’ll see if she can’t make some money from one of these two remaining sources:

1.) A $200 million defamation suit.

2.) A federal discrimination case.

At seven AM pickup trucks arrive. They back up to the boat slips and their drivers unload ropes and pots and throw them into the back of the boats.

They’re going eeling. I think.

Last night we watched the sunset and then a canopy of stars over the dark bay. From here.

Sun’s up on this side now. Downstairs, our innkeepers prepare breakfast.

… for a few days on Tilghman Island.

Blogging continues throughout.

… a new novel by Diane Meier, is a mix of university novel and chick lit. Unlike much contemporary academic fiction, it doesn’t take up some grand theme (sexual harassment, political correctness, free speech, student unrest), but instead focuses throughout on the emotional awakening of a repressed professor, Joy Harkness.

In her book Faculty Towers, Elaine Showalter notes that “While earlier academic novels had been idyllic, satiric, ironic, or even embittered,” more recent instances of the genre, by writers like Philip Roth and Francine Prose, tend to be “cosmic, mythic, and vengeful.”

Meier’s novel is none of these things. It is more like Jane Eyre, a first-person account of a withdrawn and emotionally wounded woman’s emergence out of self-protective self-control. Like Jane, Harkness, an English professor, substitutes the world of literature for a personal reckoning:

We humans are, after all, lying in wait for the next great story. I know. Literature is my game. I hand the playing cards to the next generations: Emma Bovary and Jay Gatsby, Hester Prynne and Othello, Medea, Newland Archer and Daily Miller – their stories are what carry me back into the classroom each day; they are the reasons I get out of bed. The thing I might not really wish to look at is that their stories may have been so compelling, they allowed me to put off creating my own.

The reflections on literature Meier places throughout the narrative, though, aren’t particularly illuminating, since the writers Harkness admires most – in particular, Henry James – feature themes at odds with the comic and even utopian themes at the core of chick-lit. The attainability of radical self-transformation toward moral perfection and domestic bliss is the fundamental conviction of chick-lit, and this conviction animates The Season of Second Chances. Consider, on the other hand, the fate of the characters Harkness just listed: Bovary, Miller, Gatsby, Othello, Medea…

So there’s a curious knottedness at the center of this novel. It must convince us of Joy’s initial dark Jamesian convolutions; it must then make her breakthrough into the light plausible and sympathetic. But – in accordance with its genre – this is a relentlessly plot-driven novel. It has no time for the dense flows of interiority James gives us for people like Isabel Archer.

Novels like the Bridget Jones series also, like Season, offer self-consciously literary narrators, but in their purely comic way these narrators are aware of the vast gulf between the realities of their ridiculous lives and the grand romantic contrivances of their favorite heroines’ lives. Season of Second Chances lacks this comic lightness; it’s morally didactic in a pretty straightforward way.

I liked the novel, actually — it was easy to keep reading. But Season locates itself in an ultimately less than satisfying fictional netherworld — it’s neither a modernist Jamesian novel affording us the pleasure of insight into the ambiguities and entrapments of moral consciousness, nor a postmodern confection like the Bridget Jones novels, affording us the weightless pleasure of satirical self-recognition. I guess I’m saying that for me, an English professor happy to encounter English professors in the pages of novels, Joy’s being an English professor – being in a university setting at all – seemed incidental.

… is just the sort of headline to make UD‘s heart leap up.

How good it is to know that “Revenues from big-time athletics at Clemson University have soared by more than $20 million since 2005, yet the program last year operated at a slight loss even as income from ticket sales jumped 59 percent.”

How comely in thy sight, O Lord, that “These figures come at a time when an analysis by USA TODAY shows that the nation’s top sports colleges are propping up their athletic departments to the tune of more than $800 million, while many are cutting faculty salaries and raising student fees and tuition.”

And amen to this: “At Clemson, nine assistant football coaches will earn a total of more than $1.8 million this year, and the board of trustees last week approved raises for them, bumping the total to $2.3 million. In addition to that, head coach Dabo Swinney got a $900,000 raise. That brings the total payroll for Clemson’s 10 football coaches to $4 million – up from $2.6 million in 2009.”

… is a most Nabokovian name. But rather than coming to us from Ada, or Ardor, this name comes to us from the Yale School of Management, where it belongs to a professor of management. Vroom’s name is preceded by his title: BearingPoint Professor of Management & Professor of Psychology.

Now for a spot of awkwardness.

The court-appointed official in charge of winding down BearingPoint Inc. is suing Yale University to recover $6 million the consulting firm paid to endow a chair in management and name facilities at the university.

The donations were part of a $30 million, seven-year deal between BearingPoint and Yale’s School of Management.

The consulting firm made three payments of $2 million each to the school in the two years before the firm sought bankruptcy-court protection in February 2009.

… [The official] is also seeking the return of $2.1 million BearingPoint paid to Yale three months before its Chapter 11 filing in a deal that allowed the firm’s employees to attend leadership classes and education programs at the school.

… Mr. [Victor H.] Vroom holds a chair endowed by BearingPoint under its deal with the university, which was stuck by the firm’s then chief executive, Harry L. You, a Yale graduate…

It looks as though Vroom will have to stop holding that chair.

Ali Ghalambor is an endowed chair in the Petroleum Engineering department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

He is also a globe-trotting consultant who has figured out that if you charge your travel to your university as well as to the people for whom you’re consulting, you make double what you’d have made if… if you hadn’t done that.

Ghalambor has also figured out that for high-demand oilmen, a university is really just a business address, a launching pad, an office away from the office. “Ghalambor … often conducted outside consulting or contract work during his ULL working hours and responsibilities.”

You see the synergy here between the conflict of commitment and the double dipping. He didn’t tell the university that his travel was not scholarly but commercial. So the university gave him scholarly travel funds, and of course the commercial entity involved paid his consultancy and travel expenses.

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

No, it’s not earth-shattering. Ghalambor is just a guy playing the angles. What could be exploited in his work setting he exploited. What corruption was possible, he engaged in. He didn’t do anything dramatic or anything out of whack with the basic principles of corruption. He was simply corrupt in the ways available given his situation.

… [H]undreds of invoices, letters, itineraries, travel requests and expense reports… indicate… tens of thousands of dollars were paid to Ghalambor for trips ranging from Wyoming to Kazakhstan [and] that he may have double-billed the university and the institutions or businesses he visited.

ULL administrators had questioned some of Ghalambor’s travel and expenses, especially to Ghalambor’s native country Iran, at least as far back as December 2004, according to letters received by The Advocate through former and current ULL petroleum engineering department employees.

The internal audit reported that from 2006 to 2009 Ghalambor received $42,280 from ULL “while conducting activities that appear to be outside of his working hours or responsibilities.”

He also claimed $84,117 from ULL for travel expenses while accepting travel reimbursements for possibly the same expenses “from companies and organizations he provided services to as part of his outside activities,” the report states.

He also sometimes converted state-contracted airfare to first class that was reimbursed by other companies or organizations, according to the report.

Moving this money here and that money there to shift from a shabby state-contracted seat to first-class… Again, nothing outside the rule book… Plain old vanilla graft.

… Above the Law, is UD‘s kind of guy. They don’t agree on everything (Mystal thinks laptopped classrooms are great), but I like his style, and I certainly agree with him on this one: Professors at law schools with poor placement rates shouldn’t pontificate about for-profit universities with poor placement rates.

Mystal first describes Seattle School of Law:

[It’s] ranked 77th by U.S. News, but the school charges $35K – plus for tuition. The cost per year exceeds $50,000 when you include books, board and other living expenses. But the school only sports a 67.9% “employed upon graduation” statistic.

Then, writing about this New York Times piece about for-profits, which basically rewrites the Business Week piece UD blogged about here, Mystal mocks a professor at Seattle interviewed for the NYT article who says this:

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

Mystal remarks:

How can you fix your mouth to criticize “trade schools” for setting up their students for financial ruin when you teach at Seattle School of Law? … I wonder why Professor Pardo exempts Seattle from the list of schools who graduate more and more students who “can’t find meaningful employment.” …

“… We went to the Café Maure de la
Mosquée de Paris and got lots of
peppermint tea and smoked a little
bit of hookah and we felt very authentic.
It was really fun. We just sat and talked
for two hours. We saw the Arc de Triomphe
last night which was awesome and tonight
we’re going to the Eiffel Tower and getting
dinner by Musée d’Orsay. We got a really
yummy dinner last night at a restaurant
called something Odéon and then we
just wandered around St Germain…”

New York Times:

This season, 19 percent of the [NCAA basketball] tournament teams have graduation rates below 40 percent, according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida. Across all 36 sports monitored by the N.C.A.A., men’s basketball has the lowest graduation rates, with fewer than two-thirds of players earning degrees. The Central Florida study released Monday highlighted a vast disparity between white basketball players, with an 84 percent graduation rate, and African-American ones, with a 56 percent rate.

… Thom Cooley.

After the massive snow, a sudden and massive spring in Garrett Park.

As I walked my acre just now, picking up small limbs from yesterday’s windstorm and large limbs from last month’s snowstorm, I saw the son of friends of ours. They live at the bottom of Rokeby Avenue.

He was bent over in the forest adjacent to our place, examining white flowers. He’s La Kid’s age, studying to be a chef.

“Find any unusual plants?” he asked me. He held open in his hand a guidebook to edible plants. “I’m foraging.”

“Funny you should ask. These … crocuses? … look new to me. I’ve got plenty of smaller ones, lighter purple. These are different.”

“Those are Russian crocuses. They’re
darker. Kind of shimmery gray on the
outside when they open up.”

“How did they get here? Suddenly?
So many of them?”

“The wind maybe.”

“Squirrels.”

“Definitely squirrels.”

“But listen. I find all sorts of strange things in the back.” I motioned to the purple field behind me. “Feel free to forage my territory.”

A car horn beeped.

“That’s my mom. Thanks! I’d like that.”

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

Another Snapshot from Home, if I may. This one also involves a plant.

A few months ago, Mr UD drove a neighbor – an older man, who no longer drives – around Silver Spring for a few hours as he did some errands. The man, John Wilpers, brought a flowering plant to our house as a gesture of thanks.

(I was very close friends with Terry, one of John’s children, when I was growing up in Garrett Park. She works in Baltimore now. We’re still friends.)

But that’s not the snapshot from home. Here’s the snapshot from home. I’ll give it this headline:

GARRETT PARKER WINS
BRONZE STAR
FOR SAVING TOJO’S LIFE

Washington Post:

More than six decades after the end of World War II, a retired U.S. Army colonel this week received the Bronze Star Medal for his part in the arrest in 1945 of Japan’s principal wartime prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo.

The medal, one of the highest honors conferred by the military for combat actions, was awarded to John J. Wilpers, now 90 and living in Garrett Park.

… In January 1947, Wilpers’s commanding officer at the time of the arrest recommended Wilpers for the Bronze Star Medal for his actions Sept. 10-11, 1945. The paperwork describes how Wilpers located Tojo’s Tokyo residence and broke in after hearing a gunshot.

Once inside, Wilpers found that Tojo — who knew his arrest was imminent — had shot himself in the chest. Wilpers reportedly secured Tojo’s weapons and found a Japanese physician who, “faced with Captain Wilpers’ .38 caliber revolver,” administered first aid until U.S. medical officers could arrive.

… What happened to the original recommendation is unknown; it apparently did not make it through the chain of command, or might have gotten lost, said Lt. Col. Mike Moose, a public affairs officer with the Army’s Human Resources Command.

… Wilpers’s family did not learn about his involvement in the arrest of Tojo, who was eventually tried and executed for war crimes, until his son Michael stumbled upon his name while studying at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Wilpers did not pursue the forgotten award until 2002, when he contacted the Awards Branch of the military. In a typewritten letter he wrote: “Dear sir, In the process of putting my military records in order (old geezers tend to do this when they suspect that they may be nearing the long slow slide to Forest Lawn), I came across the attached 1947 recommendation . . . for an award . . . If the recommendation was not approved, just a phone message would do. If it was approved, I would prefer the simplest notification possible… “