Singaporean Li-ann Thio, appointed visiting professor at NYU law school for the fall, has canceled.

Her record of fervent and often vulgar statements against gay rights generated enormous controversy on campus, and she finally declared herself so offended by what people were saying about her that she decided to stay home.

Inside Higher Education has both a well-presented summary of the situation and a terrific comment thread.

In an extraordinarily forthcoming and thoughtful comment, the dean of NYU’s law school asks the crucial question:

Should an academic opposed to the recognition of certain important human rights be allowed to teach a human rights course?

UD thinks the answer must be, in some circumstances, yes.

Partly this is because reasonable people can argue about what a human right is, and, once we’ve decided that, what an important human right is, and what its implications are (does important mean basic? universal? important to the majority of people asked to vote or comment on a certain right? Gun rights advocates – a majority of Americans – will argue that guns provide a basic right to self-defense, etc.). Recall that Peter Singer’s notion of human rights is pretty eccentric, and offensive to many, and he’s teaching at Princeton.

I answer yes to the question because I can imagine a brilliant, non-vulgar mind (Singer might be an example) with non-standard views on human rights — views that, while offensive to a lot of people, might be defended in usefully provocative ways.

Thio defends her views with brio, but without intellectual respectability. She’s simply prejudiced, and it shows.

Kristin Luker, a law professor at Berkeley, is a prose stylist who understands that the best way to castrate a man is with a smile on your face.

Let’s see how she does it! (Note that I’ve revised this post to quote less of the original article.)

It’s an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times:

UC Berkeley law professors Robert Cooter and Aaron Edlin are such … economists! And they’re such men. (They are also brilliant and friends of mine, but that’s not the point here.)

[A bit scattered for an opening paragraph, but she’s got a couple of dissonant things going on here. One, she wants to do a shout-out to a couple of beloved colleagues. Two, she wants to castrate them.]

In their July 16 Op-Ed article, “UC system: layoffs, not pay cuts,” Cooter and Edlin suggest that the way to solve the University of California system’s budget crisis is to lay people off, not to cut salaries across the board. “With employees paid up to 20% below what peer institutions pay … the best people will leave,” they note plaintively.

[Ooh, but plaintively already begins to give up the game, don’t it? Ja, plaints from rich law professors at a first-rate, gorgeously-located university — the envy of the world, really … I think we’ve got some prenez vos mouchoirs problems coming up.]

[Cooter and Edlin] argue for “staff” layoffs, but when looked at closely, what they really mean is layoffs for anyone but professors. Tenured professors, as Cooter and Edlin admit, are almost impossible to fire unless the university takes the almost unprecedented step of eliminating entire departments. [Sure, we tenured law professors have absolutely secure jobs when everyone else we know is in peril. But on the other hand, instead of $250,000 salaries —  this table shows ’04-’05 salaries, so figure it’s higher — we’ve had to make do with $200,000.]

… So what “staff” does that leave? Well, it leaves almost everybody who’s not a professor — the clerical workers, the lecturers, the administrative people, the janitors, the research staff, the cooks and the groundskeepers.

… [T]he staff I am most familiar with already work overtime and routinely do things not in their official job descriptions. One employee I know informally runs her department’s computer operations, mentors graduate students, plots strategy and tactics to get what the department needs from the administration, and does fiscal planning and budgeting to keep things moving for her professorial colleagues, many of whom are blissfully unaware of how much she really does.

… Yes, let’s do follow Cooter’s and Edlin’s advice and think critically and carefully about how the university goes about its business. But let’s take it a step further and have an outside agency do the analysis, rather than the tired “self-study” we usually engage in. My hunch is that a “comparable worth” analysis of how hard and how effectively people work on the Berkeley campus — and in the UC system generally — will lead to some eye-opening results. [Ouch. Well, this is another issue. If you look at the comment thread for the article, you see the problem. Not only do these guys make immense academic salaries, they don’t work very hard. Let’s figure their course loads range from one to two courses a semester.]

If I’m right, and if the measure is how much an individual contributes to the institution’s core mission, many professors will find themselves just a little bit humbler, and many staff will find themselves with much healthier paychecks.

They certainly won’t find themselves humbler. They’ll find themselves at the University of Texas law school, making $300,000.

UD‘s colleagues: Saving people from their own wieners.

… relaxes at his vacation home.

Australian medical students launch Pharma Phacts:

Fed up with the barrage of drug company marketing designed to mould their future prescribing habits, a group of Australian medical students has decided to fight back.

Pharma Phacts, a national campaign that is officially launched today, aims to educate students on the effects and unconscious influence of pharmaceutical marketing. And it will come with an optional online pledge, in which students can vow to never accept a drug company freebie.

… After a “soft launch” including a Facebook group in March, Pharma Phacts gained about 450 members at 19 universities around the country.

… “[M]ore than doctors, we are ill-equipped to differentiate marketing from education [said one student]. With the free books, free stethoscopes — by the time you are prescribing you are totally involved in the machine. I think the Vioxx case has been an eye-opener about pharmaceutical tactics: a lot more medical students are coming off the fence. We want to be the generation that says no.”

Michael Edison Hayden’s The Books  [will]  play Aug. 14-27 as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

… According to production notes, “An offbeat love story of a professional dominatrix, Mistress Chimera, and her agoraphobic client, Mark, The Books chronicles the unique development of their relationship. After Mark loans Helen a copy of James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners,’ their personal relationship deepens, complicating their sadomasochistic rituals…”

… have been dropped.

Pusher who went to med school
might finally have to close shop.

But don’t be too sure.

It’s been obvious for
almost five years that
this addict, who
lives and practices very
near UD, has been
a major drug distributor,
drawing fellow addicts
from far and wide
(one of whom,
intriguingly, tells
police he’s
“an Attorney General
[Quasi Judicial Officers]
in the District of Columbia.”
A junkie’s lie? 
Or is there something
there?).

Until a few days ago,
this man had privileges
at UD‘s local hospital.

… Anthony Grafton described this blog as a “long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it,” UD, madly flattered as she’s been, has brooded a bit over focused.

In fact, long before Tony mentioned focus, UD had given thought to this feature of her blog, a blog titled, after all, University Diaries. How bound to the campus must it be?

As University Diaries has gained a good readership, UD finds herself sometimes talking about things that have little to do with universities — odd stories she finds funny and thinks her readers might also enjoy; and, more significantly, details of her life qua humanoid.

Of course you could say that any data you receive about UD — and her husband, also a professor! and her daughter, a university student! — is, stretching things a bit, university-related. But how much of a critique of the university as we know it is a photograph of UD‘s kid singing backup for Bruce Springsteen?

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

UD‘s commitment to focus sometimes means she obviously, desperately, attempts to draw a university connection to a story that really has none (Bernie Madoff went to Hofstra!); but more often she’s simply interested in writing about a story or a scene from her life that involves I guess you’d say culture, broadly conceived.

Since a serious liberal arts education understands itself to be producing cultured people — people familiar with world history, philosophy, political theory, art, science; people able to argue almost anything intelligently; even people who regard themselves as artisans of culture (musical performers, creative writers) — it has, over the years, seemed to UD that details of her life and the life of some of the people she knows that may reflect the rewards, as she sees them, of having been liberally educated, wouldn’t be out of place.

I mean, there are connections between doing something well and knowing things… Which seems an obvious thing to say, but in an anti-intellectual culture it can annoy people when you suggest, for instance, that ignorant histrionic poetry is a bore, educated controlled poetry often very exciting, etc. As T.S. Eliot wrote:

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are what we know.

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

Anyway. Here are two absolutely non-university stories that for whatever reason UD feels like sharing.

Well, maybe in a rather twisted way there is a university connection.

Seamus Heaney recalls a recent Letterkenny hospital stay while recuperating from a stroke:

“[Bill] Clinton was here for the Ryder Cup. He’d been up with the Taoiseach [Bertie Ahern] and had heard about my ‘episode’. The next thing, he put a call to the hospital, and said he was on his way. He strode into the ward like a kind of god. My fellow sufferers, four or five men much more stricken than I was, were amazed. But he shook their hands and introduced himself. It was marvellous, really. He went round all the wards and gave the whole hospital a terrific boost. We had about 25 minutes with him, and talked about Ulysses Grant’s memoirs, which he was reading.”

Like a kind of god!

I dunno. This, plus a moment from Hillary’s trip to India, in which after a long day of travel and diplomacy she charmed hundreds of university students with tales of her love of Indian food, got me thinking.

These stories remind me that I’ve always been staggered by the genial hyper-energetic hyper-sociability of the Clintons. I’m grateful there are people like these in the world, shooting from the Ryder Cup to Ahern to the entire ward of a hospital in one afternoon; flying to India with a still-sore elbow and charming hundreds with tales of your love of their cuisine… But while I’m no Richard Rorty (Watch this clip from an interview with him and tell me professors, even big famous ones, aren’t pathetic.), I’m (Did you watch it? Did you find yourself torn between laughing out loud and crying?) pretty (Doesn’t it read like a satire of a psychoanalytic session?) introspective (Directed by Woody Allen?). (Am I cruel, that I laugh more than cry when I watch this?) (Doesn’t the funny language on the screen deepen the satirical feel?).

… as the Cowardly Lion sings…

If I were king, enlightened deans would see that most instances of PowerPoint use in the classroom are lazy and irresponsible and even inhuman. They would understand that PowerPoint breeds a robotic remoteness and simple-mindedness in professors that in turn breeds boredom in students. These deans would firmly discourage their teaching staff from using PowerPoint.

Dream on, you fool!

… And yet…

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

He’s not the only one raising questions about PowerPoint, which on many campuses is the state of the art in classroom teaching. A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. The survey consisted of 211 students at a university in England and was conducted by researchers at the University of Central Lancashire.

Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but also to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities, even interactive exercises in computer labs. “The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions,” said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

But…

The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors…

Yes well. You know how irritable you become when you’ve been sleeping and people try to wake you up.

“[S]tudents … are used to being spoon-fed material that is going to be quote unquote on the test,” says [one observer]. “Students have been socialized to view the educational process as essentially passive.”

Duh! The professor’s been socialized to be passive too, sitting there like a pointless nothing watching a movie or staring at slides along with the kiddies. What a rip-off. You’re paying a lot in tuition for your professor to warm her ass on the seat next to you. To read bullet points aloud to you like a kindergarten teacher.

UD certainly sees the benefit of PowerPoint to professor and student. Nobody has to do anything, and the only negative is that everyone’s bored out of their gourd.

But, as this enlightened dean notes, college professors are supposed to do something. So are college students.

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

UD thanks Bill for the link.

… under extremely strange circumstances.

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

He was arrested in his house. The police said he was disorderly when they interviewed him about a (nearby?) break-in.

This is a rambling old luxurious house, just around the block from our house on Shady Hill Square, and inches from the house our friend Peter owns (his father, John Kenneth Galbraith, bought it).

I’m trying to open the police report and read it now. Hold on.

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

Well, okay, here’s the police report.

And here’s how things look — in a VERY preliminary way — to old UD.

There had been a previous break-in at the Gates house, and the front door wasn’t working right. A woman walking by saw two black men with backpacks pushing up against the door as if to break it in. She called the cops.

But it seems likely that they pushed the door in that way because that was the only way to open it since the break-in. Or I guess attempted break-in.

Okay. So a policeman responds to her call and begins to talk to Gates, who is most decidedly unpleasant to him. Did the policeman provoke the unpleasantness? Maybe, maybe not. Is Gates so angry being racially profiled in various ways that he took his rage out on the policeman? Maybe, maybe not.

In any case, it seems clear that Gates lost it and shouted and made a big scene.

It is not at all clear that the policeman should have arrested him. So Gates is screaming and out of control. So what. He’s still in his house. He’s not going anywhere. The thing to do at this point, it seems to UD, is leave. It seems to UD that this was not so much a racial as a class encounter between a high-handed Harvard professor (“You don’t know who you’re messing with,” said Gates, obnoxiously.) and a cop insulted by Harvard obnoxiousness.

But if you work the Harvard beat, you need to be able to take it. You need to be able to walk away when high-handed people who think they’re better than you are mouth off. I’m guessing the policeman lost his cool.

But this is WAY preliminary…

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

Update, New York Times. Still a bit murky.

… an English professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, died in the crash of his ultra-light plane.

… Angela’s Ashes, has died of cancer.

He used the GI bill to enroll at New York University, talking his way into college even though he had never gone to high school. One of his professors asked a class to write about an object from childhood, and Mr. McCourt wrote about the bed he shared with his three brothers and countless fleas. He received an A-plus for his paper and began to think of being a writer.

… a University of Washington football player ran down a purse snatcher in downtown Seattle. He was one of a number of people chasing the thief, who was arrested:

… [Skyler] Fancher decided to sprint after him — in his flip-flops.

The chase lasted about 10 minutes, according to Fancher. It included two other men, one of whom suffered knee and nose injuries while trying to catch the purse snatcher. During the pursuit, Fancher, who has had two surgeries on his right leg since he injured it during spring practice, also climbed a wall….

As psychiatrists gather to enlarge the profession’s enormous diagnostic manual (bitterness, shyness, apathy, being online too much, having been traumatized in some way or other — all of these, and many more, are about to be billable), let’s consider once again the work of Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher who died a few days ago.

In a 1967 essay, “The Psychoanalytic Theory of Culture,” Kolakowski attacks what I’ll call psych-medicine (this term will cover the complex meld of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychotherapy).

Psych-medicine teaches, writes Kolakowski, that “the individual is organically incapable of self-understanding and can achieve it only with the aid of an analyst.” It “aims first and foremost at securing spiritual comfort, conditions of peace and forbearance, at protection from traumatic experiences, and, in particular, at removing … stresses.” The result, for the education of children, he continues, is disastrous: “An education thus planned leads them to expect that others will endlessly satisfy all their whims, thus exposing them to a considerably greater amount of frustration, trauma, and suffering in later life. [Psych-medicine] is effective, if one wants to deprive people of their sense of the responsibility for thinking about their own lives; it always recommends the path of least resistance, and it teaches one to be afraid of risk, chance, and competition. [Society] is [thus] exposed to the growing pressure of people who preserve the characteristics of capricious pre-school children – cowardly, selfish, and irresponsible.”

Kolakowski concludes: “A doctrine which teaches that we cannot truly be subjects is… discouraging – it teaches acquiescence in treating oneself and others as objects. And such acquiescence is what is helping to put civilization to sleep.”

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

Why is the man of the American hour, maybe the man of the American century — to get at this point another way — Michael Jackson, a person who spent years scoring hospital-strength opioids so he didn’t have to exist?

Talk about putting civilization to sleep…

Half in love with easeful death?

The American dream is no longer to be Fuck-You Rich.

The dream is I’m-Dead-and-You’re-Not Rich.

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

The ever-ramifying Diagnostic Manual is the bound meta-narrative of all the reasons we opiated ourselves.

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

“I am only afraid,” wrote Goethe, “that the world will [eventually turn] into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else’s humane nurse.”

Not too sure, though, about the humane. This blog — and many other blogs — has followed the shocking inhumanity of psychiatrists who routinely give powerful drugs to three-year-olds.

“[G]iving major tranquilizers to children,” writes David Healy, “is little different from giving children cancer chemotherapy when they have a cold.”

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

Anyway, can’t say Kolakowski didn’t warn us. Yet so sickening and out of our control is the situation that our only revenge is art, as Terrence Rafferty noted recently in the New York Times.

Decades ago, he points out, in talking about the portrayal of psych-medicine people in film (he could have added novels, like the postmodern classic Crying of Lot 49, whose character Dr Hilarius is a violently demented psychiatrist), psych-med people

were accorded a certain respect, as most doctors were: they were expected to perform miracles, and their patients were duly grateful. Not any more. Hollywood’s familiarity with psychiatrists — and our filmmakers are no strangers to the couch — has bred something more like contempt, to the point where a mumbling, depressive wreck like the hero of [the new film] “Shrink” seems more the norm than the exception.

Now the psychiatrists themselves — the mumbling depressive wreck is a wildly successful Los Angeles psychiatrist — number among the dead. Having helped put civilization to sleep, they’re self-sedating.

[The film’s psychiatrist is] pretty much permanently stoned on pot (sometimes enhanced with substantial quantities of alcohol). The blank stare he trains on his patients is not a therapeutic technique, a pose of studied indifference — it’s actual indifference. [His patients consider him] an eccentric genius, using his own emotional dishevelment and brazen boredom as a radical, innovative approach to the treatment of their neuroses.

Rafferty wonders about the many contemptuous representations of the contemporary psychiatrist.

… It’s tempting to speculate, at times, on filmmakers’ motives for treating psychiatrists so rudely, to suspect that there might be just the hint of a desire for revenge on the perpetrators of their own failed, ruinously expensive adventures in self-knowledge.

And again:

… You have to wonder, really, why psychiatrists come in for so much abuse in the movies these days. Is it merely a kind of natural resentment of people who presume to understand us?

This is Kolakowski’s point, isn’t it? Psych-medicine convinces us that “the individual is organically incapable of self-understanding and can achieve it only with the aid of an analyst.” Having created this dependency, having assured us that we cannot live an autonomous examined life, the profession both shows itself actually incapable of understanding us, and at the same time capable of drugging us out of the distress our epistemological misery prompts. Those drugs are where the money is. Andrew Scull quotes Healy:

With an ever-expanding array of problems being medicalized and added to psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, “diseases have all but become commodities and are as subject to fashions as other commodities, with the main determinant of the fashion cycle being the patent life of a drug”.

The shrink at the center of “Shrink” is really a kind of model for us, for his patients. Fuck the adventure of insight. It’ll make you sad and anxious, like Woody Allen. Just calm yourself.