… The circumstances surrounding the death of Alain Monnier, professor of religion and anthropology in Geneva remain unclear for now, with police saying only that a knife was found in a nearby river and that he died of a stab wound to the heart.

Monnier was a professor for 21 years at the University of Geneva and he was last seen Thursday 4 June when he left his home in the Jura, near the Doubs river area, to go for a walk. His body was found Saturday. Police are not excluding all [should be ‘any’] possibilities, from suicide to accident to murder.

Most of the articles about this are in French, but this one, from Geneva Lunch, conveys the basic elements. Unless police find signs of a struggle, I’d say suicide. Hard to know how you accidentally end up with a knife in your heart.

This article describes a vivid, original personality of enormous warmth and inspiring intellect. He lived a rich life.

Here’s his home page at the university. He did religious ethnography.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm starts her day with this letter to the Chicago Tribune from one of Clout U’s trustees.

As always her comments appear in parenthesis, in blue.

This is in response to your series “Tribune watchdog: Clout goes to college.” [Terrific opening. Real human interest there. Can’t you just feel the warm pulsing humanity of the writer?]

To correct at least some misconceptions, I write to share factual observations. [The Trib didn’t write a novel. Why not correct all of its mistakes? Too busy, I guess. Too important.] I am the senior (longest-serving) trustee of the University of Illinois. All who know me recognize that I take this role very seriously. As a trustee, just as if we were legislators, we are “agents” of the citizens of Illinois (trustees are appointed by the governor and approved by the Senate). [Parentheses and quotation marks already mucking up the works. Drop the pompous all who know me crap. Putting agents in scare quotes makes being a trustee sound underhanded.]

Many times I have been asked: “Can you get my son /daughter into the University of Illinois?”

The answer is always the same: “No, but I would be happy to check on the status of the admission.”

I believe that offer to make an inquiry is one of the duties of the position, again similar to what a legislator would do for his or her constituent. Those inquiries are sent to the appropriate chancellor — not with advice or with any request, other than checking the status of the admission.

The answer, good or bad, is given back to the requesting individual. That advice can range from “yes”; “perhaps, depending on acceptances of offers already made”; “no”; to “would you like a counseling interview?”

And there the role of a trustee stops. [Well, obviously not, or there wouldn’t be a national story raging and a legislative investigation pending into preferential admissions practices among trustees and others at the university. The letter writer thinks you’re stupid.]

Quite frankly, I have never heard of a “Category I” list.

Allow me to also state that I have never spoken with or made a written request to an admissions officer. My offers to check admissions status have been extended to anyone who has asked — not just the politically connected, or the donor, or to someone with whom I have a business or professional relationship.

The Tribune chose to publish an e-mail communication from me totally out of context — referencing the situation as “epidemic.” As the economy slowed, more and more students were switching from private to public university admissions requests. The applicant pool swelled in both numbers and quality. More and more families were concerned, and sought information.

This was the epidemic, not some “list.”

As I recall, at the time I may have had information requests in for three students. That e-mail, coupled with the picture from central casting (a most nefarious character shot), was nothing less than irresponsible sensationalism. [Harrumph! (Brushes mustaches nervously.)]

I welcome responsible journalistic inquiry; I abhor the adornment of the inquiry with supermarket check-out line trappings.  [I am a lofty person. Mark ye my lofty words and mark them well!   Welcome. Abhor. Inquiry. Trapping. There are others where those come from, and I will happily write you another letter in which I use some of them. ]

… was, you recall, Sympathy for the Devil, Rolling Stones.

The wood thrush’s ee-oh-lay — which, now that the babies are here, I hear all day long — is the theme to Mission Impossible.

The ee-oh-lay notes start at fifteen seconds into the Mission Impossible You Tube. It’s those three strong notes that work through the piece, a leit-motif.

Here’s the wood thrush. Hear it?

It was only a matter of time before the Freakonomics guys at the New York Times got hold of creative writing.

For years, colleges have treated their students as consumers, building ever more elaborate facilities and hiring ever more dazzling star scholars to lure applicants. They did this regardless of how high these investments drove tuition, since easy credit meant families could stretch to cover the costs. But with the credit crisis come signs that the college bubble is bursting, as “consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college,” the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests. Further evidence: The New Yorker aims to deflate creative writing programs, “designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.”

A few universities – like the University of Toledo under its embarrassing president – are set to enjoy the benefits of peer instruction, as it’s known, not just in creative writing courses, but across the curriculum.

Toledo details here.

I think we all recognize, instinctively, the enormous budgetary advantages of making students teach each other.

Shooting reported at the Holocaust Museum here. Man with a rifle got in, shot a security guard, and then was shot by another guard. It all happened too recently – around twenty minutes ago- for any of this information to be guaranteed.

There’s the Harvard coffee guy (see below), and there’s the Johns Hopkins spy guy. The guy who boasted to the undercover FBI agent who caught him that he had “lots of medals” from Cuba. That’s because he’d been spying for them for thirty years.

One of his students reminisces about My Professor, the Spy. A writer for Politico wonders why, given the broad hints the spy dropped over the years, it took so long to catch him.

Lee Fleming,
a Harvard business school
professor, got angry when
some guy’s car partially
blocked his driveway. He
threw hot coffee on the guy.

Fleming was arrested.

He’s charged with
assault and battery.

The university is on pace to lose millions of dollars in revenue after enrollment projections fell drastically short last semester, a report shows.

The university’s fiscal year 2009 third quarter budget report revealed a spring semester enrollment figure of 19,099 — 399 students shy of the expected 19,498. The shortfall could account for nearly $3 million worth of lost revenue, Vice President for Financial and Administrative Affairs Corey Bradford said….

At least they’ve got a plagiarist president and a politically compromised board of trustees to deal with the problem.

Foggy. Weeks now of darkness and heavy rain and heavy thunder, and inside Garrett Park’s arboretum the world is a deeply dreaming green wall.

A wall, or a well — dark, deep, shaking with thunder and white at times with lightning.

Mourning doves coo inside invisible dogwoods. Thrushes sing misty.

So many foggy poems to choose among. This one, by David Mason, will do.

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

Fog Horns

Nothing was done then.
Nothing was ever
done. Then it was done.

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

These faint puffs of lines, these little brushstrokes, do the deed, make the mood. The haze so subdues the world that we can isolate, and hear, painfully, the wound of existence itself, bruises being born. When we’re out there, we’re vulnerable. We have to make our dim way through the world.

They’re too much for us, those hurts of sound that come blaring into the shut-in world in which we’ve made ourselves comfortable with a pot of tea.

We’re protected inside these small sunless days, inside the steamy fog of tea-time over and over again, where nothing ever happens. Nothing was ever done, says the poet. Comfortably numb.

But that’s its own hurt, because it will be done some day — Then it was done. — and we won’t have lived our lives.

… The Nuffield Review report is the biggest independent analysis of education for those aged 14 to 19 in fifty years, taking six years to complete. It was led by Professor Richard Pring and Dr Geoff Hayward, from Oxford, and professors from the Institute of Education and Cardiff University.

… The report says: “The increased central control of education brings with it the need for a management perspective, and language of performance management — for example, levers and drivers of change, and public service agreements as a basis of funding. The consumer or client replaces the learner. The curriculum is delivered. Stakeholders shape the aims. Aims are spelt out in terms of targets. Audits measure success defined in terms of hitting targets. Cuts in resources are euphemistically called ‘efficiency gains’. Education becomes that package of activities (or inputs) largely determined by government.”

It adds: “As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of questions, of trying to make sense of reality, of seeking understanding, of exploring through literature and the arts what it means to be human.”

Professor Pring told The Times that policy language was “leading to a narrowing of the curriculum and impoverishment of learning”. He added: “We are losing the tradition of teachers being curriculum directors and developers — instead they’re curriculum deliverers. It’s almost as though they have little robots in front of them and they have to fill their minds, rather than engage with them.” …

The Times of London

… says smart things about creative writing programs.

Louis Menand’s New Yorker review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a history of the rise of university writing programs and workshops, is subtitled, “Should creative writing be taught?” Despite itself, the review does not encourage a positive answer. Menand tells us that “by 1975, there were fifteen creative-writing M.F.A. programs in the country. Today, there are a hundred and fifty-three.” And what do we have to show for it? McGurl says that the “system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period” shows that the writing programs have helped, but we don’t see how this can be proven: while the rise of American aerospace engineering, say, can be connected to America’s supremacy in space, we don’t know how you connect the explosion of writing classes to advancements in literary quality. The sort of cultural product that distinguishes America around the world, such as rock songs, blockbuster movies, and potboiler novels, can hardly be attributed to Bread Loaf. There is something to be said for fine literature, but America produced enough of that to suit our needs before schools started mass-producing MFAs.

Other insights from the review are equally discouraging: for example, that “university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit — the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace.” This makes writing programs sound like a make-work schemes for aesthetically-inclined redundant laborers, and stirs suspicion that many of us currently struggling as scribes have been unfortunately discouraged from more useful lives as upholsterers or surveyors. We often think so, anyway.

Menand does supply fun anecdotes about the trade (“[John Gardner’s] preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples”), and he looks back fondly on workshops, saying “I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.” Maybe writing programs, then, are the information-age equivalent of shop class. If so, tuition should be adjusted to reflect this.

… and there’s Nothing.  There’s writing that’s absolutely nothing.   Here’s an example. 

True nullity of expression demands that the writer pay heed to style as much as content.  Nothing style should be without human markings, the work of a word-generator.  It should aim to be dead on the page at the moment it hits the page, like nail polish that dries the instant you roll it out. 

Classic Nothing takes a significant social problem, a current issue of substance, and then, in an attitude of hearty, can-do concern, taps it lightly here and there with rhetorical questions and reassuring answers.   It’s like the fairy godmother in Cinderella transforming actual things like pumpkins into pretend things like coaches.  What is this problem?  Can we solve it?  Time will tell!  Let’s work together!  Let’s admit we have a problem! 

 Put style and content together in this way and what do you get?  Bippity boppity boo.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has long talked on this blog about Guy Style, an argumentative approach she likes very much.  Some readers may find it boring and unemotional, but, au contraire, SOS finds its cool, terse, deep-feelings-withheld effect stirringly masculine, like Clint Eastwood.

Here’s a good example of Guy Style.

Now that the intoxicating frenzy of the Michigan State basketball season has subsided, perhaps a sober reminder of the intent in establishing the university is in order. [Classic Guy Style opening:  There’s the world of sloppy drunks and there’s the world of coldly observing Guys.  Who would you rather read?]

The main objectives were set forth in Section 11 of Article 13 of the state constitution: “The promotion of intellectual, scientific and agricultural improvement, and stressed “instruction in agriculture and natural sciences.”  [He’s missing a quotation mark in there, so we’re not clear where the excerpt from the constitution ends.  Not the end of the world, though.  Clever move to go back to scripture.]

No mention was made of funding any sport program, much less spending money to scout the world for basketball players.

Is Tom Izzo’s position as coach of the men’s basketball team as important as that of MSU President Lou Anna Simon, MSU’s provost, 12 of MSU’s top professors, or that of President Obama’s?

If one were to equate importance with salaries received, Izzo’s position would top all the others – combined.  [I don’t claim Guy Style sizzles on the level of word choice; rather, I claim that GS goes to the heart of things quickly, and gets them said efficiently.  This argument already has power, and the guy’s only a few lines in.]

One might ask how such an aberration from MSU’s core functions came about.  [Certainly by this point you see Clint’s sneer… You see the sneer that hides just behind the elaborate courtesy and restraint…]

Taxpayers were obliged to pay, in one form or another, $45 million for the construction of the Jack Breslin Center in 1989, with men’s basketball games intended as the main attraction. Major funding was obtained through the sale of bonds, toward which a liability of $22,722,000 remained on June 30, 2008.  [The highly emotionally controlled language skirts bureaucratic dullness.  But it’s kept from that fate by carefully selected details and a hint of Clint.]

Any attempt to compute the net monetary profit engendered by the team would be an exercise in futility.  [Sure, engendered is too formal.  Exercise in futility is a cliché.  Again, I’m not claiming verbal originality for Guy Style.  I’m merely claiming that, despite its weaknesses, it succeeds.  We’re paying attention; we’re getting the point.]

A Freedom of Information Act inquiry of the bonds’ interest rate and payment schedule drew the response of “No records exist on the data you seek because the debt you describe is contained within the university’s overall general fund commingled debt.”  [Drop of.  And don’t I always tell you to avoid the passive voice — a form of writing all over this piece?  I do.  Yet Guy Style may be the one place where the approach can be deployed – sparingly – to some effect.  The emotional content of that passivity does have to do with futility; it’s as if this guy’s style implicitly conveys the almost Beckettian absurdity of the university athletic system.]

No IRS-respecting private business would ever think of commingling funds from unrelated sources requiring separate accountability.  [Excellent point, strongly expressed.  For elaboration, read anything written by Andrew Zimbalist.]

Should the university take another look at its $796,000 bill to give 3,089 students choice season tickets at discounted prices to pay homage to gladiators on the court while dressed in “Izzone” T-shirts?

And why does MSU pay 13 talented basketball players the equivalent of $1,372,000 in tuition, room, board and books over a four-year period, and not pay anything to the thousands of astute students who are academically talented and may be our future Einsteins and Marie Curies? [The Einstein/Curie thing’s pretty hokey, but the rest of the sentence has power.]

Should taxpayer-funded universities with coaches on multimillion-dollar contracts be placed under salary caps, such as President Obama has ordered for executives of corporations that request bailouts with taxpayer money?

Some may offer that Izzo might seek a position elsewhere if his salary is reduced.  [Again, an awkward, bass-ackward sort of sentence, but, as with Clint, there’s something in the combination here of strong emotion strongly withheld — a tension that comes out as oddly formal speech — that’s riveting.]

There are those who thought MSU’s women’s basketball program would collapse after the departure of Coach Joanne P. McCallie.

Its success under Suzy Merchant has proven otherwise, and delighted many when it sent “Coach P” back to North Carolina on a blue note after beating the devil out of her highly touted team in March.  [When a Guy Style writer does allow himself a little emotion — beating the devil out of — it has a strong impact, given the background of emotional restraint.]

This is not meant to belittle Izzo’s coaching ability, but to question whether a well-meaning administration has been led astray from its fiduciary responsibility to help as many prospective students get a college education as possible – and not discriminate in favor of a small number of special interest students.  [End of argument.  Note that Guy Style writers get right to it, say it, and then stop.  They’re not about sculpting shapely polemics, so they’re not going to give you a texte de jouissance. You want heavy breathing, read the post just below this one — The Problem With Rants.]

Taking off from the University of Illinois admissions clout scandal, a writer for the Huffington Post shows you why SOS is always telling you to control your emotions if you want to argue something. Let’s take a peek.

… [In a recent] issue of the [Chicago] Tribune, the venerable sportswriter Bob Verdi refers to the NCAA and college sports as “our intercollegiate sewer system.” [Nice use of a strong quotation. So far so good.]

Yes, the Clout University scandal is shady, shabby, ridiculous, pathetic, disgusting, despicable, etc. But what irritates and baffles me is the public’s indifference to our wasteful, unconscionable, unfair, unreasonable practice of giving, not dozens, but tens of thousands of tickets of admission into our universities to young people many of whom would have no chance of being accepted into a higher-ranking university, or any university at all, strictly on their intellectual merits. [The first ridiculously long list is fine; the writer seeks to summarize what everyone’s saying, and he’s doing it in an exasperated, amusing way. But the rest of the paragraph’s also over-written, and here it’s not strategic; instead, it’s angry and uncontrolled.]

Of course I’m talking about the so-called “student-athletes.” [Two sins in one sentence: The juvenile so-called, and the quotation marks. Just as he’s packing too many words into his sentences, so he’s overloading his point about the inauthenticity of students selected for their athletic skill. Once you’ve said so-called, you don’t need the quotation marks; or, if you go with quotation marks, you don’t need the so-called. Though if you ask SOS you don’t really need either of them. Just use the term student-athlete and be assured that your reader will understand, from the prose around the phrase, that you disbelieve in the concept.] Our Illinois politicians, dastardly sneaks as they undoubtedly are, were not the first, nor the most culpable, offenders against intellect. We all decided long ago that many qualities were more important than mind in deciding who goes to college.

For example, community service. And extra-curricular activities. And exotic hobbies. And “a wide range of interests.” And being closely related to a previous graduate of the college. And, most important by far, performance in organized high school sports. [Why the quotation marks around wide range of interests?]

The truth is that none of these activities and qualities should enter into a decision about who gets into college. That’s right, none. [The writer makes it easy to reject his argument by taking so extreme a position.]

To deny the validity of what I’ve just said and to tacitly endorse a “system” [Note that he can’t stop with the quotation marks, which continue to add a juvenile element to his anger.] which awards seats in an institution of teaching and scholarship to the stupid, the indifferent, the anti-intellectual, and the duffers is to take a low revenge on Intellect, cultivate mediocrity, and degrade and prostitute the Alma Mater we say we cherish. [Way over-written. There’s a weird nineteenth century elaborateness to his style, complete with capitalization and grandiloquence.]

As indefensible as the custom of letting politicians decide who goes to school and who gets scholarship money may be, it does far less harm to higher education than our worship of sports and athletes.

“Beer and circus.” That’s what Murray Sperber, Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Indiana University, called the sports-spectacle atmosphere of college athletics two decades ago. That’s what we’ve turned our colleges and universities into. [The argument never gets going, does it? Reason: He settles for bombast and bitchery rather than substance.]

College presidents and faculties aren’t running higher education. (How many letters to the editor decrying the politicians’ influence on admissions have you read from faculty members at the University of Illinois?)

Young, male, beer-sodden dolts and screeching ESPN announcers give the predominant tone to our universities….

SOS should love this piece, shouldn’t she? But it doesn’t do her side any good. The writer merely exhibits his self-righteousness.

… is a big-budget film about Allen Ginsberg, centering on the writing and then the scandal of his famous poem.

Here’s an excerpt from Howl that includes references to universities, the subject of this my blog. The “who” in the first line refers to friends of the poet and their various disturbing fates.

… who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia…