Read Mark Scroggins’ amusing post about the president of the University of Florida and his Clemson-like approach to the US News and World Report rankings.   The proprietor of the fine blog Culture Industry is a faculty member at Florida Atlantic University.

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

Update: BERNIE MACHEN THINKS YOUR SCHOOL SUCKS

Gloomy glamour shot. She took it herself. Leaning into her Mac.

An Illinois state rep is

… pushing the so-called “fumigation“ [Drop so-called or drop the quotation marks.] bill that would review all appointments and hirings by the Blagojevich and Ryan administrations, promoting the development of a “model trustee” profile and training program in Illinois, [and] asking university alumni groups to get more involved in the appointment of trustees…

[H]e wants Gov. Pat Quinn to review the appointments of all the trustees appointed by Ryan or Blagojevich.

“I think there are probably some that should be dumped,” he said. “What I heard from President (B. Joseph) White last month is that individual trustees, depending on the issue, insert themselves into the decision-making capacities of the university, outside of their work as a board. I think that’s inappropriate, and I think it would be inappropriate to leave all those appointments in place without going through them with a fine-tooth comb.”

… [The representative] hasn’t given up on his goal of reinstating the statewide election of UI trustees, which was eliminated during the term of former Gov. Jim Edgar.

“I would still like to see the trustees elected,” he said. “This is a $4 billion state asset, and I think the taxpayers should have a direct role in its governance.”…

The Polish capital joins in the worldwide tribute to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The place to go is the Warsaw University Library which, together with the Irish Embassy, is organizing the event. The programme includes a lecture on Joyce’s civic imagination, a recital of traditional Irish songs used in the writer’s books (by Fran O’Rourke of University College, Dublin) and a multi-media show by Emilia Gowin-Pacuła Leopold Bloom’s Phantasmagories.

The show combines photographs from the Bloomsday celebration in Dublin in 2004 with a selection of quotations from Ulysses, in English and Polish.

The first Polish translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, by Maciej Slomczynski, was published in 1969.

… I’ve spent the last six years of my life at Florida State University, first pursuing my master’s and now my doctorate in English literature. The English Department enrolls more than 20,000 students each year, teaching every university student — regardless of major — how to write and think critically. We’re the biggest department in the College of Arts & Sciences, with 1,600 majors, so if you want a marker for how healthy FSU is, the English Department is a good place to start.

Over the past three years, the Legislature has slashed some $80 million from Florida State’s budget, cuts that translate to — among other things — one of the worst faculty-to-student ratios in the nation. Only 48 faculty work to support those 1,600 majors, to say nothing of enrollees from other departments. FSU is expected to cut $56 million this year.

… Already, graduate students teach nearly 75 percent of classes at FSU. This previously silent labor force recently unionized in an attempt to protect our rights during these difficult times.

Why? At an average salary of around $11,000 per year (one of the nation’s lowest), without health care, graduate students teach packed classrooms and lecture halls full of undergraduate majors and nonmajors. What would Mom and Dad think if they knew that their son or daughter had never taken a class from an actual faculty member until they were seniors? But that’s the reality…

Bernard L. Fulton started his teaching career in a two-room schoolhouse in his native Boone County, W.Va.

… Fulton … was still talking schools recently when he ate lunch with [the] Greenhill [School’s]headmaster. He built his reputation in Dallas, where, starting with a vision and a three-room building, he founded the Greenhill School in 1950.

Mr. Fulton, 99, died Sunday … at his Dallas home.

… Greenhill headmaster Scott Griggs said Mr. Fulton’s life mission was to create great educational opportunities for children.

“I had lunch with him two weeks ago, and he spent an hour and a half talking about schools, education, public schools and our challenges we have today,” Mr. Griggs said. “At the age of 99, he was still thinking about what we could do to improve upon education.”

Mr. Fulton was 8 when his father died of blood poisoning, a complication of a compound fracture he received in a railroad accident at his Boone County lumber company. The boy helped his mother raise his three younger siblings.

Mr. Fulton, a high school running back, declined football scholarships to Notre Dame and Princeton to attend Morris Harvey College, now the University of Charleston, in Charleston, W.Va., which was closer to his family…

Hope he lets us sit up front!

After a reported 21 arrests over the past four years, the University of Florida’s football team has been invited to get a new perspective on the cops through volunteer ride-alongs. The school’s University Athletic Association and the Gainesville (Fla.) Police Department have teamed up to show Gators football players what the other side of law enforcement is like, UF’s Independent Florida Alligator reports.

Players are invited to ride alongside officers on the night shift (5 p.m. to 4 a.m.), Gainesville Police Department spokesman Mike Schiubola told the newspaper …

… government troops attack universities.

There are reports that a number of Iranian professors have resigned in protest against government brutality against students.

The University of Florida medical school received an F … on a scorecard designed to measure ethical policies on professors’ relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, the Pew Prescription Project announced Tuesday.

… The Gainesville school flunked because it refused to provide information, according to the 2009 American Medical Student Association PharmFree Scorecard. UF spokeswoman Melanie Fridl Ross said Tuesday, “We aren’t sure what happened with respect to the AMSA survey, but . . . shortly after being named interim dean of the College of Medicine last June, Dr. Michael L. Good appointed a task force to review and update the existing policies . . . on industry conflicts of interest and industry-academic relations . . . “

They can’t even find the survey.

This was UD‘s toast, at Ireland’s Four Fields, to James Joyce on Bloomsday. She raised her pomegranate martini; Courtney and Mary Anne raised their Guinnesses.

The bar was pretty quiet; UD wanted a quiet Bloomsday this year. Her tattered and taped up copy of the book sat on the table by the shepherd pie and the apple pie. While waiting for her friends (both were once students of hers at GW), UD read the opening pages of the book, puzzling as ever over why the words

the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak

have such surpassing beauty. They’re like these lines from a James Merrill poem:

I hear the ferrous, feather-light diluvian / Lava clink at a knife-tap from our guide.

What is it? The delicate combination of hard Ks and gentle Ls?

My students – my friends – were
brimming with life. We laughed.
At the Cleveland Park metro we

embraced and said goodnight.

Find out here.

One, James, told me today about a new novel by Don DeLillo, Point Omega, due to be released next year.  The great DeLillo website, DeLillo’s America, has a short plot summary:

A young filmmaker visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man’s daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn.

The other, Mary Anne, will meet up with UD at an Irish bar tomorrow night, where they’ll drink to James Joyce for Bloomsday.

Colum McCann has a pleasant little Bloomsday piece in the New York Times.

… The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.

… The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in another time. I was 10 years old again, but this time I knew my grandfather, and it was a moment of gain: he was so much more than a forgotten drunk.

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be…

Photo from Tehran University blogger.

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

Shirin Behzadi, 45, university professor, on Enghelab Square yesterday morning: “It’s very surprising that the whole world is silent now. I don’t understand why the international community just ignores what’s happening right now in Tehran. Why don’t they react and help hopeless Iranians? I’m quite confused why even the United States has not paid enough attention to the obvious vote fraud in Iran. I’m now thinking maybe the world’s big powers like Ahmadinejad. We are losing our semi-democracy in Iran. We had a very poor democracy and now we are losing everything we had. Why doesn’t the UN help Iranians? Everybody in the world is just concerned about the nuclear issue in Iran. Why is the world silent now when Iran is in turmoil and enduring a semi-coup?”

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

Andrew Sullivan is following events with great care and thoroughness.

… Tenured Radical and Carlat Psychiatry,  two spectacular blogs.   Well-written, socially committed, human, humane.  All that a blog should be.

Now that you’re here, feel free to look around at other UD posts.