The University of Limerick has denied allegations of nepotism over the appointment by the university’s president of his wife to a senior management position, without consideration of any other candidates.

University Diaries has already written about the outrageously mismanaged Chicago State University, with its thieving presidents and desperate faculty and students.

Really desperate faculty. They recently begged the governor to fire the school’s entire board of trustees, in order to stop the trustees from appointing another putrid president. The governor ignored them.

But whatever else might be wrong with the new guy, he did do some auditing.

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

He found out that a local politician has run off with one of CSU’s statues.

Officials from Chicago State University stopped just short of accusing State Representative Monique Davis of statue theft.

Davis, who recently made headlines because she allegedly owes $500,000 in back rent to the Chicago Board of Education, has in her possession a $25,000 statue of an African slave that belongs to Chicago State University.

And she’s refusing to give back the artwork, the Sun-Times’ Michael Sneed reports.

Chicago State University Police Chief Ronnie Watson tried to collect the 400-pound bronze entitled “Defiance,” but, perhaps poetically, Davis refused to relinquish the rendering of a slave girl in shackles with whip marks on her back.

… CSU originally purchased the statue to adorn its financial aid center. They used state funds that were set aside for the school.

But that doesn’t explain how Davis ended up with the bronze. She can’t explain it either, or, rather, she declined to explain it to Sneed.

… Newly installed president Wayne Watson, who is trying to revamp the school’s management procedures, uncovered the missing statue during a financial audit.

As far as UD can make out from reading a variety of accounts of this matter, Davis simply loves the statue. She loves it madly. She loves to look at it in her office. She has bonded with it and feels it belongs to her.

A writing program named after Joyce’s novel.

… isn’t working at the moment.

We’re trying to fix it.

A University of Manitoba professor is alleging a doctoral candidate twice failed his comprehensive examination, then appealed to be reinstated on the basis that he suffers from the disability of extreme examination anxiety.

The professor — who asked not to be named — said he has filed a complaint to the U of M senate alleging a senior administrator reinstated the student into the doctoral program and ruled that the student’s PhD be determined solely on the basis of his doctoral thesis…

UD‘s friend Tony Grafton sends her a letter the literary critic Gabriel Josipovici recently wrote to the Times Literary Supplement.

Josipovici is angry about various moves on the part of the British government to shut down humanities departments at universities and prop up career-oriented programs.

The question this raises is: Are universities really businesses? And if not, what are they? Are they to become forcing houses for the immediate economic development of the country and nothing else (ie, are Business and Media studies to replace Engineering, English, History and Philosophy)? If that is what the country wants, so be it. But we should be clear that it means the end of universities as they have been known in the West since the Middle Ages.

Readers with insanely long memories will remember that these were the founding questions I asked when I began this blog. On the very first page of University Diaries, I quoted James Redfield, from the University of Chicago [scroll down]:

The problem with universities is that universities are not operations which are constructed for making money. They are operations which are chartered to spend money. Of course, in order to acquire money to spend, they do have to acquire it. But their job is to pursue non-economic purposes. Or, to put it another way, their job is to pursue and, in fact, to develop and shape purposes within the society in some specific way. They are value-makers. They are not supposed to be pursuing the values of the society by responding to demand; they are supposed to shape demand, which is, in fact, what education is all about.

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

An economics major at the University of Oklahoma writes an opinion piece which makes absolutely clear why the university – British and American – is becoming a sort of first-responder unit to socioeconomic emergencies (UD‘s comments in response to his argument are in blue):

The core curriculum is an inefficient model of education that keeps students in universities much longer than is necessary. It is absurd and childish to force adults who have chosen to major in economics to study cell structures, just as it is absurd to force biology majors to understand the Keynesian national income model.  [See how Redfield’s whole idea that universities are about creating values, shaping demand, is DOA here?  Redfield regards the university as intellectually transformative:  It takes young people who are not yet liberally educated in a serious and disciplined way, and it trains them in rigorous forms of thinking even as it introduces them to the best which has been thought and said.  But this model assumes an open-minded person, eager to uncover,  grapple with, and organize the profoundest historical, aesthetic, philosophical, theological, mathematical, and scientific material.  This student regards freshmen as adults infantilized by an institution which thinks they have something more to learn than a trade.]

The rationale behind the liberal arts model of education is that “the whole individual” should be educated. This of course is simply an impossible goal, for there are endless academic pursuits necessary to educate “the whole individual,” from ethics to ballet to ancient French.  [The liberal arts curriculum has an ancient and well-elaborated character and rationale which has nothing to do with pablum like ‘the whole individual.’  But one can forgive this student for thinking that the term ‘liberal education’ refers to mush, since many universities have so compromised this curriculum as to make it look way random.]

The core curriculum, aside from forcing us into several classes we simply do not care about, also makes classes less valuable for those who are genuinely interested in the topics discussed. One only needs to peek at the masses of freshmen texting and doodling during their introductory lecture halls to see that this is true.  [The coercion principle is of course a problem here too.  What a liberal arts student would consider a well-considered requirement, the trade school student considers arbitrary authoritarianism.]

… The reason this model still exists is an entire college degree is still worth the entire cost of tuition to students. We’ve all heard the numbers about lifetime earnings for those with degrees rather than only high school diplomas, and that’s why most of us are here.  [Most of the students at the University of Oklahoma, in other words, jolly along the university for most of their years there, only in order to get a higher salary when they finish.]

However, it would be much more cost-effective to shave off the useless requirements of our liberal arts degrees and only require students to take those classes which are relevant to our chosen major or majors.

For many students, such as my fellow economics majors, this would shave as many as two full years off the time necessary to complete our degrees. This creates two additional years to pursue internships, travel or gain real work experience while we’re still relatively young.  [Time-managementwise, who could argue with this?  But he could save even more time and money doing an online course in accounting, macro- and micro-economics.  He could even do it on the weekends, so that he could take that full-time job he’s panting for.]

For others, such as Petroleum Engineers, abolition would probably not save them an extra year in college, but would allow them to focus more heavily on their career-oriented studies.

One effect of the core curriculum many people ignore is it can actually prevent students from truly delving into a second or third subject. Because we are required to meet so many different requirements, students may find they do not have time to pursue a minor or a second major.  [Again, from the start, it’s about picking and choosing.]

Even if the core curriculum were abolished, there would still be students who choose to pursue minors and dabble in other subjects. Some would even choose a liberal arts education, pursuing many tracks.  [Dabble says it all, eh?]

To these students, additional classes are worth their tuition. Many of us, however, would choose to explore other topics in our free time (as most of us already do) and focus our time at the university toward our future careers.

Abolishing the core curriculum forever would allow students to earn their degrees in less time. It also would allow them to customize their education to their own goals and desires rather than requiring them to satisfy some administrator’s definition of “well-rounded.”  [Just some damn administrator, after all.]

Do you suppose anyone at the University of Oklahoma will think it worth their while to respond to this student’s polemic with a defense of the university as a liberal arts institution, rather than a trade school?

With many professors using Blackboard and Powerpoint presentations during their lectures, it becomes difficult to take notes in a notebook, look at visual aids and listen to the professor lecture, some students said. “You constantly have to take notes while looking at other stuff. So it’s easier to take notes on a laptop,” said Katie Curren, a senior journalism student.

Blackboard, Powerpoint… maybe you’re also texting back and forth on your phone. Not a pretty picture…

I mean, nothing but a picture, really. You’re jumping from screen to screen to screen, capturing a blur of an image here, a rush of language there.

You gotta figure the first thing to go is the actual meaning of anything the professor’s saying. That’s why you’re passively transcribing all of her words on your laptop.

I heard about it on the metro. I was on my way to Foggy Bottom in the morning, and a group of cultured retired people – probably on their way to a Smithsonian museum – sat near me.

One of them said, “Did you see that poetry thing in the Post? The Bernie Sanders guy who’s an English professor? Who sends poetry to Senate staff members? It renews your faith…”

Everybody nodded; they’d all read it and they all approved.

So here’s the article. Sanders, a senator from Vermont, has a chief of staff who in real life is an English professor.

[Hank Gutman lobs] poems into the e-mail inboxes of every chief of staff in the Senate. Each note offers escape through verse. Meaty, challenging, thought-provoking lines, accompanied by pages and pages of Gutman’s analysis. Poetry that has nothing to do with cloture votes or amendments or motions to recommit. Poetry intended to get his BlackBerry-addicted, tunnel-visioned, life-as-a-treadmill colleagues to think about the “huge dimensions of life that get shortchanged” in the grinder that is Capitol Hill.

Gutman’s engaged in Action Poetry, whose Wikipedia page says this:

Action Poetry is the active use of poetry, often spreading in a community. It might include painting poetry on murals, or distributing poetry. It can also involve the encouragement of live poetry recitings and distribution of free poetry.

External link:

“Action Poetry as an Empowering Art: A Manifesto for Didaction in Arts Education” by Francois Victor Tochon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, International Journal of Education & the Arts, Volume 1 Number 2, May 15, 2000

UD loves empowering didactions. She herself is a one-woman empowering didaction machine. Nonetheless, there are ethical questions worth posing about the act of lobbing (the Post‘s word) unasked-for poetry plus reams of your own analysis of that poetry (Here’s a sample of Gutman’s prose.) into the email of people who work in the same building you do.

The Post article about Gutman is full of insults about people with jobs on the Hill. BlackBerry addicts, tunnel-visioned… It goes on and on like that. These people are soulless… mere fragments… robots rather than humans…

Gutman is there to make them whole:

Despite the myriad interactions of government process, Washington often undermines deep human connection; poetry is his attempt to make the fractional city whole.

You can sort of see the Post writer thrashing about here, can’t you, since this sentence makes no effing sense whatsoever.

But my larger point is that when Garrison Keillor comes on the radio to recite the same inescapable lyric Gutman recites in the Post article —

“It is difficult/to get the news from poems,” Gutman says. “Yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”

— we can turn off the radio. We can recall August Kleinzahler’s definitive take on these lines:

A pretty sentiment, to be sure, but simply untrue, as anyone who has been to the supermarket or ballpark recently will concede. Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else.

We can turn off the radio, but it’s harder to absorb the repeated impact of poetry lobbed into our email by a colleague. It’s demoralizing to feel that you’ve got to read the shit or he’ll ask you about it and you won’t know what he’s talking about and you need his guy’s vote on some piece of legislation, etc. So you automatically forward the you’re-a-tool-who-needs-me-to-explain-poetry-to-you emails to your assistant, some intern from George Washington University, and she forwards it to her English professor, and…

You get the idea.

… Les UDs will be able to spend three weeks in their little house in the New York mountains. UD‘s excited about this, because the setting is peaceful and beautiful during the day, and breathtaking at night, with the massive summer canopy overhead.

There are long country walks, operas at Glimmerglass, visits to Woodstock, and UD‘s traditional birthday dinner at the Bear Cafe…

It’s all very exciting. But if you live there year-round, I suspect life can get dull.

Perhaps this explains the propensity of professors in that region to have marijuana businesses. Not only does getting high alleviate boredom (I’ve heard), but running the enterprise is probably fun and interesting.

Just a couple of days ago a SUNY Cobleskill professor was arrested; and today, it’s a guy who teaches marketing at SUNY Albany.

Have you been following that study featured in the New York Times which argues that professors are almost all from the political left because of job “typecasting”?

The academic profession “has acquired such a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism that over the last 35 years few politically or religiously conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors,” [the study’s authors] write in the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” That is especially true of their own field, sociology, which has become associated with “the study of race, class and gender inequality — a set of concerns especially important to liberals.”

For sure these SUNY guys are doing their bit to tighten our typecasting. Think of it this way: If you can’t imagine starting a marijuana growing business at home, you’re probably not cut out to be a professor.

… the T.S. Eliot Prize.

The poem made me think of another poem, by James Merrill, probably because they’re both about art and air. Let’s take a look.

First, Philip Gross, this year’s winner.

Opera Bouffe

The count of cappuccino,
the marquise of meringue,
all the little cantuccini…
and what was the song they sang?

Oh, the best of us is nothing
but a sweetening of the air,
a tryst between the teeth and tongue:
we meet and no one’s there

though the café’s always crowded
as society arrives
and light glints to and fro between
the eyes and rings and knives.

We’ll slip away together,
perfect ghosts of appetite,
the balancing of ash on fire
and whim—the mating flight

of amaretti papers,
my petite montgolfiere,
our lit cage rising weightless
up the lift shaft of the air.

So the count of cappuccino,
the marquise of not much more,
consumed each other’s hunger.
Then the crash. And then the war.

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

Next, Merrill.

Farewell Performance

for DK

Art. It cures affliction. As lights go down and
Maestro lifts his wand, the unfailing sea change
starts within us. Limber alembics once more
make of the common

Lot a pure, brief gold. At the end our bravos
call them back, sweat-soldered and leotarded,
back, again back – anything not to face the
fact that it’s over.

You are gone. You’d caught like a cold their airy
lust for essence. Now, in the furnace parched to
ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel
sifted through fingers,

Coarse yet grayly glimmering sublimate of
palace days, Strauss, Sidney, the lover’s plaintive
Can’t we just be friends? which your breakfast phone call
Clothed in amusement,

This is what we paddled a neighbor’s dinghy
out to scatter – Peter who grasped the buoy,
I who held the box underwater, freeing
all it contained. Past

Sunny, fluent soundings that gruel of selfhood
taking manlike shape for one last jeté on
ghostly – wait, ah! – point into darkness vanished.
High up, a gull’s wings

Clapped. The house lights (always supposing, caro,
Earth remains your house) at their brightest set the
scene for good: true colors, the sun-warm hand to
cover my wet one …

Back they come. How you would have loved it. We in
turn have risen. Pity and terror done with,
programs furled, lips parted, we jostle forward
eager to hail them,

More, to join the troupe – will a friend enroll us
one fine day? Strange, though. For up close their magic
self-destructs. Pale, dripping, with downcast eyes they’ve
seen where it led you.

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

Both poets are getting at something having to do with the separation between art and life; both poets notice our immense pull toward fantasy, beauty, intensity, toward the distillation of real experience into imaginative perfection. Both caution us about the danger of that pull.

In the Gross poem, the frothy delicious escapism of light opera, light-as-air opera, sweetens the actual air, sweetens our lives. It’s adorable, yummy, we eat it up, this spectacle of counts and marquises warbling in bustling, brightly lit cafes.

But it’s all pretend, of course: we meet and no one’s there. The performers are ghosts of appetite, apparitions carrying in flight a reflection of their audience’s hunger for art to be life.

When the play’s over, when the performers float away in their absurd confectionery balloon, reality resumes in all its dark heft. Perhaps there’s the suggestion here that our addiction to fantasy weakens our capacity to survive reality.

The simple exact end rhyme, the Mother Goosey feel of the thing, lends a clever contradiction to the Gross poem. Its surface is as light as light opera, a happy sing-songy lilt; yet its content’s increasingly bleak – ghosts, ash, and then the final crash and burn. The contradiction captures our denialist draw toward art as escape. We don’t want to see what’s beneath these happy lines.

Merrill’s is an elegy; it’s written in memory of a friend of his. The poem has three acts, as it were: an opening act describing a dance company performance the poet attends not long after his friend’s death; a middle act recalling the poet and other people taking a boat out to scatter his friend’s ashes into the water of a sound (the word ‘sound’ allows the poet lovely pun-latitude); and a final return to the performance as the dancers take their bows.

As in the Gross poem, art both “cures affliction” and causes it — “You’d caught like a cold their airy / lust for essence.” Art changes us; its transformative alembics spin our lives into gold, and we desperately don’t want its magic to end, don’t want dismissal into the painful chaos of real life.

So the poet’s friend tried to import art to his life, to lead the life of an aesthete — “palace days, Strauss, Sidney…”

We too want to “join the troupe,” though truly living that airy essence exacts a toll – it “self-destructs.”

will a friend enroll us / one fine day?

Will our sublimate too be rolled out onto the water some sunny afternoon?

Seton Hill professor Mike Arnzen puts his texting policy in the course syllabus: If students place his class in the background by texting, he marks them as absent.

“Because they’re not attending,” explained Arnzen, 42, chair of the school’s division of humanities.

… just keeping track.

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

Update:

UD thanks James, a reader, for pointing out that MN Daily has taken down this article, which tracks “a slew of off-field incidents” involving Minnesota’s way-bad football team.

UD guesses that the reporter is rewriting the piece — with so many incidents, errors will happen.

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

Another update:

Try this link.

UD thanks Bill.

One guy with a gun killed forty-four deer in one night on Vassar’s campus earlier this month. He was a sharpshooter hired by the school to reduce its rampaging herds.

In Big Buck Zone, hunters debate the merits of snipers.

… Bertrand Goldgar. Here are details of his memorial service.

A SUNY Cobleskill professor was arrested Wednesday for allegedly growing marijuana at his home.

Police executed a search warrant at 59-year-old Peter H. Van Deusen’s Sharon Springs home on State Route 10. There, they found an indoor growing operation and seized extensive growing equipment and a small amount of marijuana.

Van Deusen was not home at the time of the search, but turned himself in to troopers in Cobleskill Wednesday. He was issued an appearance ticket for the Town of Sharon Court Thursday.

He was charged with unlawful growing of marijuana, an unclassified misdemeanor.

Police say Van Deusen was a professor in the Agriculture and Engineering Division at SUNY Cobleskill.

Was? He’s a professor at SUNY at the beginning of the article, and has gone emeritus by the end? Wow.

And isn’t this like the four hundredth story UD‘s covered about a professor growing marijuana? Once pot’s legalized, expect a mass exodus from the universities…