UD‘s many quotations from poets and philosophers who lived on Key West begin to constitute a new field of study. Call it Key Western Civ.

Merrill, Bishop, Stevens, MacLeish, and now John Dewey (the paragraph below is from Art and Experience) — all of these islanders evoke the tireless quest for intensified life, and describe artistic creation and aesthetic experience as our supreme paths toward the clarity, exultation, presentness, and sense of inner unity that constitute intensified life.

“To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous, but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is now and here. In life that is truly life, everything overlaps and merges. But all too often we exist in apprehensions of what the future may bring, and are divided within ourselves. Even when not overanxious, we do not enjoy the present, because we subordinate it to that which is absent. Because of the frequency of this abandonment of the present to the past and future, the happy periods of an experience that is now complete because it absorbs into itself memories of the past and anticipations of the future, come to constitute an aesthetic ideal. Only when the past ceases to trouble, and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive. Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what is now.”

Dewey House, the original home of philosopher and educator John Dewey and its neighbor, the intimate La Mer Hotel are located in the heart of Key West’s historic district on the Atlantic Ocean.

Today, Emory; tomorrow, maybe you.

…Within a few months, officials plan to file civil and criminal charges against a number of surgeons who they say demanded profitable consulting agreements from device makers in exchange for using their products.

… The move against doctors is part of a diverse campaign to curb industry marketing tactics that enrich doctors but increase health care costs and sometimes endanger patients. Taken together, the new measures are likely to transform the relationship between medicine and industry.

… Also, as part of plea bargains, federal health officials are forcing a growing number of drug and device makers to post publicly all payments made to doctors who serve as consultants or speakers. Manufacturers have repeatedly used consulting payments in illegal schemes to persuade doctors to prescribe drugs or devices in inappropriate and unapproved ways, according to federal charges.

… [T]he United States attorney said officials hoped to send a strong message to doctors. “I have been shocked at what appears to be willful blindness by folks in the physician community to the criminal conduct that corrupts the patient-physician relationship,” he said.

New York Times

UD has never reckoned with that set of instructions before, and she probably never will again.  But as you enter the Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory, that’s what you’re asked to do.

These tubbies are bobbing about underfoot as you walk the butterfly path, and you don’t notice them because you’re taken up with the psychedelic flittering all ’round your head.  Everywhere immense and profuse lepidoptera, with the usual insane range of colors and patterns, buzz you.

No touching, of course, and sometimes you’re close to stepping on them.  You’re not even supposed to reach out to them, but it’s impossible not to.

The same music they play when UD‘s at a spa getting a facial pipes along as you pause at a pond and look at koi. 

The whole thing’s way zen, and UD kept going back in, flashing the little red butterfly stamp on her hand at the ticket taker and circling the path.

… electronic cigarettes, you must not expect her — she’s addressing university students among her readers here — you must not expect her to know anything, really, about your world.

If you name your band The Airborne Toxic Event, or Titus Andronicus, she’ll eventually get wind of it. But she really knows nothing about your world.

Still, every now and then her online activity produces something like this – a review of Alcoholics Unanimous and other works – and she does get a glimpse.

A seven minute excursion into the agit-funk of ’77 era Talking Heads (or, if you prefer, Julian Cope’s ‘Safe Surfer’) complete with the Pulitzer-prize worthy couplet: “I can’t remember anything I’ve done/I fought the floor and the floor won!” it’s a sobering account of the morning after the night before which seems destined to fill dancefloors from Paris to Pasadena.

This human type can be played for tragedy (Lear) or comedy (Homer Simpson). It’s either horrific or hilarious to watch him destroy himself and others through stupidity and arrogance.

Lloyd Jacobs, president of the University of Toledo, is one of these, very much in the comic mode with his Babbitty emails about the revolutionary for-profit approach he’s bringing to the school.

Along with Babbitt, the fictional prototype for Jacobs is Charles Bovary, Emma’s dullard husband, who, convinced he’s found a new way to fix a club foot, ends up crippling a patient for life.

Faculty and students have mobilized quite impressively against Lloyd, and have so far managed to keep him from realizing his dreams. Here’s their latest blocking action.

Still. The man is president. “I will do such things…”

[Senator] Grassley, in a letter to Pfizer, wrote that he was “greatly disturbed” to read an article in The New York Times on Tuesday describing a Pfizer representative taking cellphone photographs of [Harvard] medical students last October at a campus demonstration against industry influence. “I find this troubling as I have documented several instances where pharmaceutical companies have attempted to intimidate academic critics of drugs,” he wrote.

New York Times

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

The curious lensman from Pfizer
Has become my new Harvard advisor.
“Promote my next pill
And you’ll be in the swill.”
To which all I can say is “Aye aye, sir!”

… students constantly write sad pieces in the campus newspaper advising them, in the simplest terms, how to use it.

But, as this University of Kansas student knows, instruction in the technology don’t mean shit if you’re using it because you’re lazy, unimaginative, or incompetent.

… Some people seem to make slides only because they think they have to. Others rely on PowerPoint to cover up their weaknesses, such as when they become nervous and simply read out texts on slides.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather not have a PowerPoint unless it’s well-made. One of my favorite instructors, for example, never used PowerPoint in his class. He always made his point clear and I never felt bored in class. His animated expression and gestures showed his passion for his subject, which drew me to the class.

And as a University of Alabama student notes:

You pay thousands of dollars to attend our fine University, not to mention the hundreds of dollars you are forced to spend on books. You head to class with your coffee and your copy of The Crimson White and take a seat. Your professor puts up his or her PowerPoint and starts to read it word for word. Literally. And it is literally word for word from your book.

At another university, a student says the same thing:

I took an art history class at Truman in which we spent endless hours flipping through PowerPoint slides of paintings while the professor read, one by one, the title of each work. We received mountains of information, but toward the end of the semester, one student sitting next to me actually pleaded under her breath, “Teach us something!”

Imagine what might happen if students all over the country began to organize. A Princeton student sees the possibilities:

The incomparable level of boredom Powerpoint inspires has …unite[d] a generation of young students trapped in lecture[s]…

PowerPoint. A deadly technology for dead people.

Eventually students will rise up against you.

Their signs will read TEACH US SOMETHING.

… puts out a newsletter about itself.  A citizen comments:

Residents within the Freehold Regional High School District recently received the mid-winter district newsletter. In it, I was amazed to find the district smelling like roses. The district has been an embarrassment since the news that the superintendent, two assistant superintendents and two other employees were found to have earned degrees from a diploma mill.

The board supported the administration (not even having the nerve to admonish them for their actions) and, despite claiming that things would change, continues to show contempt for the public that has spoken out on the misappropriation of funds on this and other items. The only changes we have seen were mandated by the state.

The newsletter contains an article on the accredited schools our seniors have been accepted to. Our students know where to go to further their education. What does that say about the administrators who should know better and set an example?

Another article concerns the need to hold back expenses with a quote from the superintendent that the district has a “moral obligation” to do so. This man received tuition reimbursements and additional stipends on his “diploma,” has cost the district more in legal fees and had no qualms about leasing a luxury SUV at $700 a month, with board approval.

This newsletter comes just at the start of school board electioneering and budget presentations. It paints a wonderful, albeit false, picture of the district and gives current board members positive, but wholly undeserved, free publicity. Anyone following the news should know better.

Yes, congratulations, kids, on having been admitted to accredited colleges! Before you go, drop by the office and tell us how you did it. But talk real slow.

Now that much of Florida is in foreclosure, UD has almost decided which house to buy here in Key West.

It’s either 420 Elizabeth Street, or 620 Elizabeth Street.

Neither house has a for sale, let alone bank owned sign in front of it. But all in good time.

420 has a slight edge at this point, though every time she walks by 620 UD wavers.

420’s smaller (UD likes small houses) and so fine. A white palmy house with a wide porch on which black urns display purple impatiens, the place conveys calm and sunniness, but also a sort of classical restraint. It looks across Elizabeth Street to a planting of riotous bushes and trees.

UD snuck down the alley, stuck her nose between some slats, and can confirm a pool.

620 is about the lavish overgrowth more typical of Key West houses. It’s got a much bigger front yard than 420, and the yard gushes green. Island winds whip up the bougainvillea and buttonwood and laurel, and high above them the palms rattle like mad.

It’s a jungle, and UD leans over the white picket fence and shakes her head at the unsubdued elations when the forest blooms of it.  Makes you feel like you’ve just snarfed some hot sauce.  Whoo hoo.

… but apparently the next issue of Consumer’s Digest will feature an attack on for-profit universities.

For-profit online universities represent a $6.2 billion industry with some 620,000 students as of fall 2008. Because of questionable oversight by the federal government, some of these “institutions,” such as Kaplan University and University of Phoenix, are able to skirt requirements of the Title IV student-assistance program that is part of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, and thus, mostly taxpayer money is filling the coffers of these companies. The transgressors often use high-pressure tactics to mislead individuals regarding the value of a degree and the costs involved in working toward that degree. Many potential students are deceived about the transferability of credits earned elsewhere. Allegedly, instructors are pressured to inflate students’ grades to keep them enrolled and the financial aid flowing in — and are rewarded for doing so. For students, all of this can result in subpar coursework, insufficient job training and a degree that is devalued by employers — a complete waste of a student’s time and money…

No surprises here, if you’ve been keeping up with your University Diaries reading.

Remember this song I wrote?

… from the Epicurean Dealmaker.

Consider his comments in connection with this blogger’s recent estimate of forty percent losses in Harvard’s endowment.

…Historiann.  Historiann’s proprietor comments on UD:

Wow … and I thought I was the crankiest young fogey around! 

But hey babe, check it out: UD ain’t young.

This sentence has become a real winner – you can buy it emblazoned on all sorts of merchandise – and UD agrees with the sentiment.

In fact she’d go so far as to say that part of her applauds when high-profile women behave very badly indeed.

People sentimentalize women; they think they’re all warm fearful law-abiding domestic creatures. True equality will never occur until people begin to regard women as – for instance – capable of the same rigid unmitigated viciousness of which some men are capable.

So in a strange way UD privately cheers when Ruth Madoff reveals herself every bit the Bonnie to Bernie’s Clyde:

Broken victims of her husband’s suspected Ponzi scheme are fighting for pennies on the dollar, but Ruth Madoff says $62 million she squirreled away is none of their business.

See, I sentimentalize women. When I started reading the Madoff saga I saw poor Ruth, martyred Jewish mother… Or I saw Michael Corleone’s waspy wife. She knew… She didn’t know… She loved him, that’s all she knew!… She was protecting the children! … Here’s how I pictured her:

But Ruth is a svelte postmodern concoction, in every way the equal of her husband.

She’ll fight for her bag of goodies.

The State University of New York melted down a 900-pound butter sculpture from the state fair last summer to help power its vehicles.