Syracuse University is the latest institution pushing the bogus tenure criterion of “publicly engaged scholarship.” Faculty there should resist with all the self-respect they can muster.

Known also as “scholarship in action,” this bureaucratic move shifts us philosophically from I think; therefore, I am to I act; therefore, I think. Since it cannot clarify the line between thinking and doing, this politically motivated criterion makes the university safe for people who believe that community organizing represents intellectual productivity. Physically moving around talking to people (reciting your poetry, knocking on doors to get out the vote, teaching) has nothing to do with sustained mental reflection and its results: books, essays.

A Syracuse professor of political science notes that because this confusion lies inherent in what is essentially a social rather than intellectual gesture, the university’s official language proposed for the criterion is gobbeldy-gook:

[N]o one is quite sure what [Scholarship in Action] means. A University Senate committee spent two years trying to discern its meaning and came away uncertain. The current language to be added to the tenure criteria reads: “Scholarship in Action is not a traditional model of community service, but a robust framework behind public scholarship, which can take a variety of forms but engages a deliberative intellectual foundation.” I wish I knew what that meant.

Indeed the Senate committee should be ashamed of itself for producing the sort of meaningless verbiage any professor would slash through if she read it from a student.

The pathetic language gives the game away. The activity in question does not exist as a category, but rather an emotion, a hearty group grope into the heart of intellectual seriousness.

Every day in every way, as the dissenting professor points out, Syracuse University has been getting better and better. Don’t let it go all dumb on you.

… describes the University of Maryland faculty’s recent rejection of a rather too-harsh post-tenure review proposal.

Mr UD, a department representative to the UM faculty senate, was very much involved in the thing.

Mr UD and his sister own acres of snaily fields near Rezekne, Latvia.

It’s the site of the house where their father grew up, and, post-Communism, they were able to recover it for the family.

UD‘s never been there, but Mr UD has gone a couple of times, and has described to her its many snails.

I bring this up because there’s a story out of Yale involving similar efforts to recover stolen property. This is from the Yale Daily News:

Yale filed suit Monday against Pierre Konowaloff, who claims to be the rightful owner of Vincent van Gogh’s renowned 1888 painting “The Night Café,” which is housed in the Yale University Art Gallery.

According to the suit, filed in the United States District Court in Connecticut, Konowaloff claims to be the heir of Ivan Morozov, a Russian aristocrat who owned the painting in 1918. Last July, Konowaloff’s attorney sent a letter to Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, threatening legal action, according to the suit. Yale will fight to keep the painting, Reynolds told the News on Tuesday night.

“It’s been in our collection for 50 years,” he said. “There is no wrong to be addressed.”

In December 1918, Vladimir Lenin… nationalized most private property, including Morozov’s art collection. His seized collection included “The Night Café.”

To raise money, the Soviets sold the painting to a German art museum in 1933, which then sold it to the Knoedler Gallery in New York City.

Stephen Clark 1903, who began to collect art after serving in the army during World War I, purchased “The Night Café” from the Knoedler Gallery in 1933 or 1934, according to the suit.

When Clark died in 1960, he bequeathed the painting to the University. Yale added the painting to its permanent collection in 1961 and hung it for public view in the gallery, garnering widespread media coverage about the donation.

Konowaloff contends that the Soviet nationalization of property was illegal and, therefore, the painting should be returned to him, Morozov’s rightful heir…

Yes, a mite more valuable than an abandoned snail farm in Latvia…

Len Homer lives across the hall, a warm and friendly man. I Googled him.

Here’s a 2008 piece about Len in Baltimore’s Style Magazine:

Birthday wake

Friday, June 20

The streets of Federal Hill were the backdrop for a “funeral” procession to celebrate (or grieve) the 70th birthday of neighborhood resident Len Homer. Ensconsed [That should be ensconced.] in a leopard-print lined coffin, Homer was paraded from his home through the streets to a big bash of a party at Junior’s Wine Bar. There, a New Orleans-style band kicked the party into high gear as guests nibbled Big Easy-style dishes from chef Mike Russell. On hand were lots of Len’s friends from the neighborhood like Patrick Sutton, Sheryl Segal, Dick Leech and Steve Ward; Camilla Carr handled MC duties in announcing the winners of the “best epitaph” contest. We stayed throughout the evening, since our seats at a table out on the sidewalk were the perfect vantage point for the festivities.

From the Columbus Ohio Dispatch.

A seemingly routine request by Miami University to purchase $167,000 worth of office chairs turned into a spirited exchange yesterday that ended with a rare rejection by the state Controlling Board, a legislative spending oversight panel.

In a bipartisan 6-1 vote, lawmakers slammed the door after realizing that Miami officials decided to purchase the most expensive office chairs available — the Aeron stretched-fabric brand. Of the 333 chairs purchased, 245 of them designated for staff and faculty offices cost $522 apiece. Chairs for conference rooms ranged from $397 to $446 each.

As members including Sen. Ray Miller, D-Columbus, grilled university architect Robert Keller about the purchase, lawmakers said they were not satisfied with the responses.

“They didn’t give a solid explanation as to why” they purchased the most expensive chairs, said Sen. Mark Wagoner, R-Toledo. “In a difficult financial environment, we have to be fiscally responsible.”

APG Office Furnishings of Cincinnati is providing the chairs and gave the university three options for chair styles. Two other options offered staff and faculty office chairs for $458 and $365.

Rep. Jay Hottinger, R-Newark, voted to reject the request but first reminded his colleagues that they were sitting in $2,000 high-back leather chairs.

A Chicago Tribune columnist notes the very slow approach of spring to that city.

Having been in Key West for weeks now, I can confirm that spring – make that summer – has been here for awhile. And that for many reasons, only one of which is the weather, UD‘s finding it difficult to leave.

So she’s extended her stay. She’ll be moving to a new place soon, where she’ll spend April. Then she’ll go back to ‘thesda.

She’s been here on United Street long enough to have received mail. That anonymous agency she’s mentioned in other posts — the one interested in what she has to say about writing — has sent her some packages in the last few days, and it feels odd to realize that this apartment is also a business address.

Odd too to realize that this small island has become quite familiar to UD — her long walks have taken her to almost all of its streets, even its tiny lanes more like alleys: Poorhouse Lane, Catholic Lane. Catholic Lane, where a man hidden behind many palms called Les UDs over, escorted us through his white gate, and showed us his quiet compound: garden, house, pool, another garden, and then another building he and his wife were fixing up for a guesthouse. Their singular spot, their own green world with the sound of falling water.

It’s icing on the cake that we saw a rainbow a couple of days ago arching over the ocean.

… are a mess. Corrupt, cynical, and indifferent to the law. Here’s an update from Ha’aretz:

A scathing report issued last week by State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss details how Israel’s universities got into an ongoing budgetary crisis that threatens their academic quality and their very existence. The report lists widespread wage irregularities, generous pension plans, inflated bonuses and the improper use of a university academic fund as a personal savings plan for senior faculty rather than its stated purpose: scientific knowledge.

It appears that the universities are using state funds as they see fit. They handed out hundreds of millions of shekels in wage benefits without receiving authorization from the Finance Ministry’s wages director. Since 1999, the universities have refused to allow the wages director to monitor their activities. This enabled Tel Aviv University to pay raises of 55 percent as compensation for reorganization, even though the treasury had authorized an increase of just 21 percent. Bar-Ilan University paid administrative workers the same salary as professors with the longest tenures.

As for pension plans, the comptroller found that the deficits accrued by the universities reached NIS 17.9 billion – not NIS 1.6 billion, as the universities say. This occurred because the universities had overly generous pension policies, in some instances providing pensions that accrued at twice the accepted rate or pensions that reached 92 percent of wages.

The Council of University Presidents does not seem to like being criticized. The report describes how the comptroller’s office repeatedly asked the university heads to provide information – only to have them dodge and evade the requests, and even attempt to undermine the comptroller’s work.

“The responsibility for the large wage irregularities falls first and foremost on the shoulders of their administrations, which have been giving their workers preferential wage and retirement benefits over the course of years, without authorization, while foiling every attempt to supervise the universities,” Lindenstrauss wrote..

And here’s a delicious detail from the Jerusalem Post:

“[R]esearch funding went to business class plane tickets for senior professors.”

The Columbia News Service thinks so.

From an article by Danielle Friedman about the advantages and disadvantages of Gmail’s chat function:

For Margaret Soltan, an English professor at George Washington University, Gchat is wonderful for connecting with students outside of class.

Over the years, the tech-savvy teacher has accumulated dozens of students on her Gchat list, and she chats with them frequently. While not all realize that she can “see” them until she pings them for the first time — which, to be sure, can catch some off guard — she occasionally uses the tool to coordinate conferences or discuss letters of recommendation when time is tight. It’s convenient, she says.

Soltan also likes perusing students’ status messages. “They give me a little window” into them, she says. “They are like little mini-diaries of student life.”

Sometimes Soltan takes her observations a step further: When she spots a misspelling, she isn’t shy about pointing it out. “I’ll Gchat them and say, ‘Revise your message!’” she says, laughing. She tells them she’s joking a few seconds later — but they’re usually apologetic and a little embarrassed.

“I suppose you’re vulnerable to this kind of thing,” Soltan says. “Your crazy English professor bursts in and tells you to fix your spelling error!”

… that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand 16th March, 2009, at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for some time.”

Sylvia Plath’s son has killed himself.

From the Fairbanks News Miner:

Friends in Alaska are mourning the death of Nicholas Hughes, who studied at Oxford and became a prominent fish biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The news of his passing has prompted headlines around the world because his parents were poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

… [T]he 47-year-old Fairbanks resident …became an authority on grayling, salmon and trout. He developed computer models to show the relationship between fish behavior and stream characteristics. He was an incredible cyclist, as well as an ardent gardener and fisherman.

*******************
Update: From the same News Miner writer:

A few times, I called him to let him know I would like to write about his life and his family connections, whenever a news story about his parents appeared, but he did not think it was a good idea, so it never happened. He deserved his privacy. By and large, people in Fairbanks respected that, which is a good comment on our part of the world.

In Alaska, he had the freedom and the opportunity to live on his own terms and be recognized for his own accomplishments. Here he was not a literary figure forever defined by the lives of his parents.

But he was their son and his death will generate headlines around the world.

The statement from his sister, quoted in the Times Online, said: “His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan.”

… of God.

Everyone’s picking up on Joseph Biederman’s statement in a recent deposition that the rank after full professor is God.

Everyone’s dumping on him because he’s so arrogant as to have said that.

But while there’s every reason to abhor Biederman for his perversion of science, I’m not sure this lame attempt at humor merits the attention it’s gotten. Like a lot of people who end up in courtrooms and Grassley Letters, Biederman’s a twisted character for sure. The fact that he can be sophomoric under pressure, though, seems to UD neither here nor there.

Unfortunately for him, it’s an easy sound bite to sink your teeth into.

Today, for UD, it’s been Edelweiss. Because she’s been reading about the death of Natasha Richardson.

She likes what Charles Isherwood says in today’s New York Times:

“Life is an easily breakable possession even for those who abide in the waiting room of immortality, which is to say celebrity. … The freakish nature of Ms. Richardson’s death has already inspired ghoulish tabloid commentary on the curses that seem to descend upon famous families in showbiz or politics. It’s absurd, of course. Not to get all Beckett on you, but life itself is a cursed thing, fated to end before all promise is fulfilled.”

So that was in my mind. That Beckett thought, plus Edelweiss. Also this poem by Roethke.

Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

Skittery pigeon. Pickerel. See how his avid language reanimates her, how the power of his love brings back her vibrancy. The poet’s modest self-appraisal – neither father nor lover – paradoxically makes his love seem more intense to us, since its groundlessness is a kind of purity.

Alison Bass tells you why.

The second commenter on the post adds an important point.

No one cares.

Harvard gets a Grassley letter.

… about an old friend of Les UDs.

… In addition to increasing its own civilian component, the administration seeks better coordination among the many other governments and international and nongovernmental agencies operating in Afghanistan, often with different rules and objectives. The strategy proposals include a strengthening of the United Nations as a clearinghouse and overall coordinator of nonmilitary efforts, including the appointment of veteran U.S. diplomat Peter W. Galbraith as deputy to Norwegian Kai Eide, the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan.

… Galbraith served in senior U.S. and U.N. positions in the Balkans, East Timor and other conflict areas. Sharply critical of Bush administration policy in Iraq, he resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 and served as an adviser to Iraq’s Kurdish regional government.

Faithful readers know that Mr UD worked with Peter in East Timor and in Kurdistan.