… in his dormitory room. He kills a fellow student and then is shot by police. He is apparently alive, under treatment at a local hospital.

… forgets to attend the October meeting of the Garrett Park Town Council. Yet she still covers the event for the town paper.

How does she do it?

Scroll down to Wordplay.

I could you send here; or I could send you here. 

But the title of this post, a little phrase taken from Lynn O’Shaughnessy’s MoneyWatch column, is really all you need.

Harvard’s many-splendor’d fuck-ups, revealed with its recent release of its annual financial report, are the talk of the town.

The same alumni who a few years ago saw something not quite right about employees of a non-profit receiving thirty million dollars a year now wonder about clawbacks from the compensation of the current group of inept managers. These alumni have written a letter to Harvard’s president. Here are some excerpts:

Since the university is legally required to release the compensation of its highest-paid employees, clawbacks from that compensation should be made public as well… The story of the endowment is one part of a larger problem of investment practices that have brought down much of the world economy. We would like to see Harvard take a lead in addressing these problems… The annual report gives no indication that the compensation system will be seriously re-examined, let alone changed. We continued to believe that no Harvard employee should earn more annually than the President of the University and that multi-million dollar bonuses are inappropriate in non-profit institutions.

From the long comment thread to a NYT blog post about the ineffectiveness of efforts to control binge drinking at party schools.

My youngest (of five) kids – all fine people – is graduating from college this year. After paying college tuitions for 20 years now (the kids were spread out in age) I have started to question the necessity of spending all that money for what is, in many respects, a four-year party.

They all went to good private schools, but was the huge expense and all the worry really worth it? What would have been so terrible if they’d gone to the local state college, lived at home and worked to pay tuition? Add the number of actual weeks in the college year and you’ll be shocked to see how many vacation weeks there are.

I wish colleges were the challenging bedrocks of scholarship and intellectual pursuit they were hundreds of years ago. As things stand now, why should anyone pay $55,000/year for a huge four-year party?

— Jane Landers

I wonder whether a better remedy for college binge drinking would be stricter academics. My friends and I drank reasonably in college because our college was hard. If we’d been hungover we couldn’t have kept up with the work and we would have flunked out.

–Charlotte K

… is going up even as we speak.

It’s a response to a recent Stanley Fish post at his New York Times blog.

As always, to read UD‘s IHE posts, click on one of the titles listed at the LATEST UD BLOGS AT IHE feature just to your right.  →

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Here it is.

If so, that school must be doing a Yeshiva. Doing a Yeshiva is slang for anxiously airbrushing a Merkin or a Madoff from the webpage listing your trustees or your executive committee or whatever when the Merkin or the Madoff gets in trouble with the law.

Big trouble.

Samberg of Pequot Capital is being investigated for trades in Microsoft shares in 2001, around the time he hired an employee from Microsoft. That employee didn’t stay long at the fund, but eventually got a $2 million payment from Pequot, which was disclosed in a recent divorce action. The payment rekindled the SEC’s interest in the on-again, off-again case.

When it got a big gift from him, Columbia Business School praised Samberg’s “commitment to cultivating ideas that will help business schools shape society.”

Insider trading. It’s an idea. An idea that shapes society.

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Update: They’ve got his name on a teaching excellence institute.

Brainy old hippies can be spies too. Nozette, recently retired from a long career as a high-security government scientist, was arrested today on charges of spying for Israel in exchange for lots of money.

When he worked for NASA, he told an interviewer for one of their newsletters that he enjoys “listening to The Grateful Dead Channel on Sirius satellite radio.” In this YouTube, he looks very casual-wear — not at all the sort who’d sell defense secrets for moolah.

But. You know. Live and learn.

Frank Rich, New York Times:

… Last month the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, contributed a stirring essay to The Times regretting that educational institutions did not make stronger efforts to assert the fundamental values of pure intellectual inquiry while “the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism.” She rued the rise of business as the most popular undergraduate major, an implicit reference to the go-go atmosphere during the reign of her predecessor, Lawrence Summers, now President Obama’s chief economic adviser.

What went unsaid, of course, is that some of Harvard’s most prominent alumni of the pre-Faust era — Summers, Blankfein, Robert Rubin et al. — were major players during the last two bubbles. As coincidence would have it, the same edition of The Times that published Faust’s essay also included an article about how Harvard was scrounging for bucks by licensing a line of overpriced preppy clothing under the brand Harvard Yard. This sop to excessive materialism will be a scant recompense for the $11 billion Harvard’s endowment managers lost in their own bad gamble on interest-rate swaps…

Yes, in the blink of an eye Harvard University has gone from a pigsty under Lawrence Summers to The Little House on the Prairie under Drew Faust — complete with homespun tales about the evils of materialism.

If you buy that, you — like Summers with those interest-rate swaps — will buy anything.

Central Michigan University’s newspaper says many important things about PowerPoint use in the classroom. The article is very strong, but the student comment AFTER the article is even stronger.

Let’s take a look.

For Robert Bailey, using PowerPoint slides for his class lectures hinder a student’s learning capabilities.

Bailey, a professor of biology, teaches three entry-level biology courses and said he tries to keep PowerPoint use to a minimum.

“I used anywhere from 30 to 50 slides per class when I first started teaching and would give students print versions of the slides, but it didn’t take long for attendance to come down,” he said. “Before Thanksgiving break one year, only 10 students showed up for our final unit on human genetics. I knew I had to do something.”   [Point One, among many obvious points: Provide the same information online and students won’t come to class. UD is absolutely certain there are professors who welcome this outcome. Most do not.]

Bailey said students cannot seem to decide what is important from a PowerPoint presentation and think everything posted is golden.

“It’s convenient to use PowerPoint slides for large lecture classes, but students get caught up in trying to write everything down and spend their time writing instead of listening,” he said.   [Point Two, equally obvious: Too much information. The student who comments below will elaborate on the point.]

It can be useful, however.

“We just need to remember that less is more. Slides should contain the most useful information. I try not showing more than 10 slides per class. I believe active, not passive, learning is the most beneficial,” Bailey said. “By active learning, I mean group interaction, where we all can get a better understanding of what the issues are and solve them.”   [Point Three, yet more obvious. Turn people into confused sheeplike herds and they’re unlikely to learn anything.]

… [S]ophomore Brett McMahon said he does not like when PowerPoint slides are used in his classes.

“I like when teachers physically write on the board what they feel we need to know. PowerPoint presentations don’t make classes harder, just confusing. I never know what to write down and how much,” he said… [Point Four: Not only some discussion is crucial; clear signals about what the professor considers important to know are crucial. The things we go to the trouble of writing on the board with our very own fingers are the important things, not the twelve bullet points some book has provided for your slide. Physically writing on the board is also letting the students watch the professor’s brain operate right there in front of them. PowerPoint of course makes professors just as passive as it makes students.  Everyone reads off of a nice neat packaged page. Writing on the board is messy, human, dynamic — thought in motion. Active.]

[F]reshman Erika Schrand said knowing what to copy is easier when professors write directly on the board.

“Sometimes teachers put too much information on the slides and I can’t sort what is important from all the other excess information,” she said.

[Now to the comment.]

One Response to “Some CMU faculty moving away from PowerPoint presentations in classroom”

Antonio says:

Professors trying to use Powerpoint for their lectures has been my biggest pet-peeve while attending CMU. It’s a waste of paper, ink, and time, and only increases tuition to cover the cost of the paper and ink wasted when students print out full slides of black background presentations.

No offense to the professors, as I’ve had many great ones over the years, but I’ve never had a professor who provided notes correctly by use of a computer. (Ok, maybe one). Most of the time, the idea of outline organization has been non-existent.

I do realize professional seminars and events such as TED seminars often use Powerpoints, but the environments there are completely different than a classroom.

To the professors: Anyone can remember and regurgitate information given to us on pre-made Powerpoint presentations, but if it’s information we could have critically and actively filtered through while simply listening to you speak, why make a Powerpoint for it? Why not just give us the ideas and concepts you want us to understand without dividing our attention away from listening to instead focusing on a big projector with the SAME thing you just said, just in different wording?

This makes even less sense when you take into account how much professors usually dislike all the new technology, anyway. Why give us Powerpoint notes, base exams solely on those notes, and then mark us down for not coming to class? What do you honestly expect to come of that?

The only bigger interest killer I’ve seen is when professors spend 5-10 minutes trying to project a piece of paper that everyone already has. Why do we need to see it in two different places? We know how to follow along.

Contrary to popular belief, it is very possible to give a lecture without all these external visual aids. Every time a new semester begins, or there is some problem with the computer network, up to 5-10 minutes or more is wasted trying to figure out the technology, and if it doesn’t work, the professor acts like he/she doesn’t know what to do. For some reason, it seems academic administrations have forgotten the simple tool of speaking outward to a classroom without all this technology mumbo jumbo.

Conclusion: Step away from trying to fumble with the technology and tell us what you want us to know. If the technology is absolutely necessary for your lecture, figure it out beforehand instead of during class time.

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Teach us something.

Speak to us.

Outwardly.

BE.

THERE.

NOW.

In which case, a run-off or a power-sharing arrangement would ensue, and Afghanistan’s government would gain enormously in legitimacy.

Kudos to UD‘s buddy Peter – he’ll be on the Lehrer News Hour tonight – for having pressed the issue.

Nortin Hadler, a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, adds another item to our list of university-sponsored bullshit.

…[W]e are … bombarded by announcements and pronouncements from medical centers… Many tout the opening of a new building, or the offering of a new procedure, or claim world class expertise that outshines all others. These announcements and pronouncements are the work product of a formal department in the institution that often bears the moniker “Public Affairs” or even the “Public Affairs and Marketing Office” as is the case for my own [University of North Carolina] Hospitals. The departmental budget is often liberal and always part of the “overhead” of health care in our country. We all pay for these activities as part of our health care premiums.

Staffing these departments are people highly skilled in communicating to the public with backgrounds in marketing, public relations or, increasingly, health journalism. Working in institutional “health communications” is all too often the soft landing for unemployed health journalists. Hence, the pronouncements and announcements are often put forth in the glossiest of multimedia formats as well as the more standard press announcements.

A recent analysis of the press releases by academic medical centers casts all this activity in an unflattering light (Annals of Internal Medicine 2009;150:613-8). This analysis was a demanding exercise undertaken by investigators funded by the National Cancer Institute. Academic medical centers issue an average of nearly 50 press releases annually. Nearly half pertain to research in animals, which are almost always cast as relevant to human health.

Of the releases about primary human research, very few were describing studies that would pass muster as high quality; far more described findings that were preliminary at best. Most neglected to emphasize cautions regarding interpreting such studies. Clearly, academic medical centers are wont to promote research that has uncertain relevance to human health.

… At the very least, media must state whether the reportage is based on primary sources that take personal responsibility for the validity of the pronouncement. Better yet, independent sources should be queried as to the validity, reproducibility and relevance of the claims…

If the pronouncement is simply lifted from a marketing Web site, that should be disclosed….

Via the indispensable website (indispensable for DeLillo fans like UD), Don DeLillo’s America, the first advertising for the next DeLillo novel, due out February 2010. Here’s Simon and Schuster’s page about it, and Scribner’s catalogue entry (scroll down).

The book’s plot has many elements familiar to DeLillo veterans:

In the middle of a desert “somewhere south of nowhere,” to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualize their efforts – to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create “Bulk and swagger,” he called it.

At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character – “Just a man against a wall.”

The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster’s daughter Jessie visits – an “otherworldly” woman from New York – who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men’s talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and connection, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.

Bucky Wunderlick of Great Jones Street, Bill Gray from Mao II, and now Richard Elster — all are brilliant artistically, or brilliant intellectually, and all run aground, retreat to the desert (as do, for that matter, various characters in Underworld) or to the countryside or to shabby apartments in New York City — anywhere they can leave the fallen world and contemplate their implication in it.

It looks as though Nicolas Sarkozy’s son, 23 and doing his second year of university over again, will NOT be running the billion-euro enterprise that is La Défense.

A Johns Hopkins undergraduate was killed a few days ago by a hit and run driver.

… Miriam Frankl, a junior molecular and cell biology major from the Chicago area, was surrounded by dozens of friends at Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where she was taken after the accident at 3:15 p.m. Friday.

Frankl had serious head wounds, as well as other injuries, Moses said. She remained on life support, dying at 2:30 a.m.

The university released a statement Saturday saying Frankl’s parents “told us they were deeply moved and comforted by the presence of so many of Miriam’s friends at the hospital with them.”

… The death of Frankl, who was a member of Alpha Phi sorority, coincided with Hopkins’ Greek Weekend. Organizers postponed events and asked that participants at other events wear red in honor of Frankl and to support her sorority sisters.

Anna Johnston, a senior at Hopkins and one of her friends, said five or six of her good friends gathered at the hospital shortly after the accident, but as the evening wore on 70 Hopkins students came to be with her and her family.

“She had a lot of strength and personality and had a lot of confidence,” said Johnston. Her favorite color was purple, and friends around the Hopkins campus began wearing small purple ribbons Saturday in her memory.

A petite woman with freckles and short brown hair, Frankl had recently become interested in science and had begun working at a Hopkins laboratory that studied the brain. While Johnston said Frankl spent a lot of time in the library, she also was devoted to working with the sorority and was supposed to plan the recruitment of new members in December.

Johnston said her friend was very poised, loved scarves and getting other women interested in the sorority. She was learning to cook and Johnston believes she might have been on her way to a Greek Weekend cook-off when she was struck…

He was one of two students stabbed after a fight broke out at a university-sponsored dance.

The other student survived.

The student killed was a football player for the school.