… only slightly better than that of Greece, will reform itself a little bit.

The Italian Parliament on Thursday gave a definitive green light to a government decree designed to promote meritocracy in Italy’s higher education system and overhaul the hiring of university staff.

“Today the university system changes,” Italian Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini said after the Chamber of Deputies okayed the decree with 281 in favor, 196 against and 28 abstentions.

Among measures introduced in the decree, which forms part of a wider program of cost-cutting reforms for the sector yet to be finalized, 7 percent of government funds allocated to universities will be shared out on a performance basis from 2009, rewarding universities which demonstrate excellence in teaching and research.

In a bid to help out people at the start of their careers, 60 percent of funds must be spent on the employment of young researchers.

The decree also increases funding for research studentships by 135 million euros from this year.

The decree has been welcomed by some university bodies including the Conference of Italian University Chancellors and heads of research institutes.

There is a general consensus that the university system, which fails to gain a single entry in the top 100 universities in the world and which Gelmini has said “produces fewer graduates than Chile,” needs to be overhauled.

But critics have downplayed the usefulness of the decree in the light of government spending cuts of an estimated 1.5 billion euros in the sector planned from 2010.

Background here.

UD‘s about to see Legally Blonde – The Musical, at the Kennedy Center, with her kid.

UD‘s been calling for the dismantling of the pilfering, conflicted board of trustees at Yeshiva University since the Madoff thing broke. Nobody listens to her because she’s just a girl. Just a blogger. Everybody listened to Stephen Trachtenberg, who’s a guy, plus a paid Yeshiva consultant, and not only did Trachtenberg think everyone should leave the board alone, he dismissed all criticism of the Yeshiva boys as “Monday morning quarterbacking.”

So, you know. Fine. UD‘s used to this sort of thing. On to the next subject. You don’t change intimate homosocial subcultures just like that…

But maybe there’s hope.

Normally, activist hedge fund managers try to shake up boards of companies they’ve invested in. But one fund manager is seeking to oust the directors of his alma mater over the Bernard L. Madoff scandal.

Andrew Sole of Esopus Creek Advisers called for the removal of Yeshiva University’s board, after the school’s endowment lost millions of dollars because of its investments in Mr. Madoff’s firm, The New York Post reported, citing correspondence between the hedge fund manager and the school.

Yeshiva’s endowment, which has fallen to $1.2 billion from as high as $1.8 billion, suffered because the school had invested with J. Ezra Merkin, a fund manager who has emerged as one of the main feeders into Mr. Madoff’s investment firm. Both Mr. Merkin and Mr. Madoff were Yeshiva directors, but have since resigned their positions.

Mr. Sole is demanding the replacement of the rest of the board, according to a letter obtained by The Post. But when the school’s president responded to Mr. Sole by saying Yeshiva’s counsel was looking into the matter, the hedge funder responded that the university was resorting to an “ostrich defense.”

Actually, the original article about this in the NY Post quotes a far stronger response on Sole’s part. Yeshiva’s letter to him is, Sole wrote, “scripted” and “beyond offensive.”

And the letter’s not from Yeshiva’s president. He’s far too busy to respond to so trivial a concern. He gave the job to an assistant.

Leadeth me beside
the submerged school desk.

… One of the ads for the Kaplan, Inc. division (and subsidiary of The Washington Post Co.) is a 60-second commercial depicting a professor at a lectern before his students. The professor apologizes, saying “The system has failed you; I have failed you” because higher education, “is steeped in tradition and old ideas.” As he argues that it is time to use technology to “rewrite the rules of education,” the camera cuts to different people in different locations watching his speech from laptops and mobile digital players.

A second commercial shows a series of video shots of school desks arrayed in odd locations, like a beach, submerged in a river, in subway cars, and in supermarket aisles. A college-guy voiceover says “Where is it written that the old way is the right way? Where is it written that a traditional education is the only way to get an education, that classes only take place in a classroom?” …

UW RANKED 16th BEST
UNIVERSITY ON EARTH

The Daily, University of Washington

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations with God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com that was nearly identical to a 10-year-old article originally published by a little-known writer in a spiritual magazine. He now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually happened to him.

… Except for a different first paragraph in which Mr. Walsch wrote that he could “vividly remember” the incident, his Dec. 28 Beliefnet post followed, virtually verbatim,… previously published writing, even down to prosaic details like “the morning of the dress rehearsal, I filed in ten minutes early, found a spot on the cafeteria floor and sat down.”

… In a telephone interview, Mr. Walsch, 65, who said he regularly gives 10 or 20 speeches a year, said he had been retelling the anecdote in public as his own for years. “I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me,” he said.

… In a statement, Beliefnet said that Mr. Walsch had withdrawn from the Web site’s blogging roster. “As a faith-based web portal, Beliefnet will continue to hold ourselves and our writers to the highest standards of trust,” the statement read….

The Presidential Inaugural Committee has been mum, but sources tell the Post’s Lena Sun that Bruce Springsteen will perform at Barack Obama’s inauguration week welcome event Jan. 18 on the National Mall. The event will be on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and open to the public for free.

La Kid will be part of the chorus for the event.

… UD helped Jerzy Soltan write an essay of Le Corbusier reminiscences for this book (Soltan, Mr UD’s father, was a Corbu disciple).

English was Soltan’s fourth language. His son’s girlfriend was just the person to turn Soltan’s rather raggedy prose (full of exclamation marks !!! and ellipses  ……. ) into something chic.

I loved doing it. The story of Soltan’s discovery of Corbu, and the way Soltan, fresh from six years in a prisoner of war camp, simply appeared at the door of Corbu’s Paris atelier — it’s quite a thing.

The latest big biography of Corbu – Le Corbusier: A Life, by Nicholas Fox Weber – quotes a great deal from that essay, UD‘s pleased to say.

Mind/body problem brewing in France…

The skull of famous French philosopher René Descartes could be on the move from its current resting place, the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, to the north western town of La Flèche.

Descartes, one of the founding fathers of modern philosophy developed theories which helped to provide a framework for natural sciences. He is most famous for his Discourse on the Method [sic], his Principles of Philosophy and the expression cogito ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am”.

The remains of his body were separated shortly after his death in Sweden in 1650, and his skull is housed in the Musée de l’Homme in central Paris.

But with the backing of French Prime Minister François Fillon, the Prytanée military school has submitted an official request to move Descartes’ cranium to an adjoining church for display.

The school, run by Jesuits, was attended by Descartes from 1607 to 1615, and is looking to honour its alumni. They believe its current home alongside prehistoric man and a moulding of the head of footballer Lilian Thuram, is not suitable.

There is also an ongoing dispute about the authenticity of the remains, with four skulls that could theoretically be Descartes’.

The one requested by the school turned up in Stockholm in 1821, where he was originally buried, before his body was moved to Paris, where it now lies in the Saint Germain des Près church.

Some experts say the authenticity must be checked, while others believe it is more important to reunite his head with his body.

From Inside Higher Ed:

State Rep. Ray Sansom of Florida announced on the first day of a special legislative session Monday that he would reluctantly give up his $110,000 a year, part-time job with Northwest Florida State College, the Associated Press reported. Sansom, the majority leader in Florida’s House of Representatives, became the latest lawmaker there to generate conflict of interest accusations with jobs at colleges to which they’ve also helped direct funds. Sansom was hired by the college in November as vice president for development and planning, a newly created position that was not publicly advertised, after he helped steer $25.5 million toward Northwest Florida State College during a year when budgets were being cut across the state.

It’s Florida.

It won’t change much of anything.

…will sing at the opening

ceremony of the Obama

inauguration events.  She’ll

be part of a chorus at the

steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Obama will be in the audience.

Sunday January 18,

around 2:00 PM.

… the Madoff thing’s getting positively Shakespearean.

Bard College, a liberal-arts school in New York State’s Hudson Valley, lost about $3 million in investments related to Bernard Madoff.

The losses involved $11 million of Bard’s $270 million endowment that the college invested in the Ariel Fund, managed by J. Ezra Merkin, Bard President Leon Botstein said today in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. Merkin was introduced to the school by the late Leon Levy, a Bard trustee who founded OppenheimerFunds Inc., and serves as a governor of Bard’s Levy Economics Institute, Botstein said. [Bit confusing there. If Levy’s late, how can he serve?]

Bard believed about a fourth of its Ariel investment was in cash, Botstein said. Instead, it was invested with Madoff without the school’s knowledge, he said.

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” Botstein said. “We never knowingly invested with Madoff. We invested with Ezra Merkin.”…

… is discussed in this book.

I haven’t ordered it yet; I only
know from Google Books that
UD‘s part of
his discussion of blogs. I’m
looking forward to reading
what the author has to say.

… to get us going for the New Year.

“If one follow Blake’s mind through the several stages of his poetic development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild pet for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and Dante and Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare—and also in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant. Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry. Nothing that can be called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion, have this quality; only those things which, by some extraordinary labour of simplification, exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul.

… Blake …  knew what interested him, and he therefore presents only the essential, only, in fact, what can be presented, and need not be explained. And because he was not distracted, or frightened, or occupied in anything but exact statement, he understood. He was naked, and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal. To him there was no more reason why Swedenborg should be absurd than Locke. He accepted Swedenborg, and eventually rejected him, for reasons of his own. He approached everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions. There was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him terrifying…”

T.S. Eliot,  The Sacred Wood

A herd of elephants today strayed into the Berhampur University campus [in India], some 180km from the state capital, injuring one person and causing panic among students, employees and their families.

The herd comprising 10 elephants kept people on the campus terrified till the evening, said Berhampur divisional forest officer A.K. Jena, while speaking to The Telegraph from the spot.

Jena said the elephant herd that was seen around Sundar hills near Chhatrapur some 20km from Berhampur last evening was sighted in the jungle behind the university high school in the campus at around 4am today.

…

Preparations for the celebration of the 43rd Foundation Day of the university scheduled for tomorrow have been hampered due to the presence of the animals, sources said.

District forest officer Jena conceded that a large crowd gathered to see the elephants was creating logistical problem for the forest officers.

“We will start the drive in the evening and take efforts to chase them away towards the Berbera forests,” he added.

This herd was a part of huge herd comprising more than 20 elephants that had strayed from Chandka sanctuary located on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar in 2007 and have been moving across Ganjam since then.