A hired online class-taker describes his job.

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Here are a couple of entries from his article’s comment thread:

As our department has moved its … classes from live to online, objections about cheating (or even the basic identifiability of students) have been pointedly quashed. The reality is that courses are treated as cash cows and anything that interrupts the income stream is to be eliminated.

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Why doesn’t anyone blame the administrators who don’t back the professors when the professor says “I’m pretty sure the guy getting the A in my online class is the husband of the woman who’s actually signed up for the class. When I called her up to discuss her midterm, she PUT HER HUSBAND ON THE PHONE.”

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UD thanks Robert for the link.

… university football team in the country.

Here’s a case where litigation is richly deserved. A parent of an autistic child “became suspicious [about the competence of her child’s therapist] and checked the online registry for the Behavior Analyst Certification Board. She could not find certification records for [Stacy] Lore. It took months for school and police officials to act, she said. [Lore worked for the Norwalk schools.]”

You sue for damages; and you sue to scare other school districts, so they won’t be tempted to blow off the business of checking credentials. It took this parent seconds to confirm that Lore was a fraud.

Lore has been sentenced to three years in prison.

A Duke University medical student is distressed at the tacky thing his expensive, classy Duke education begins to resemble. Why are so many of his well-compensated professors so greedy that they go out and shill for drug companies?

It’s really not very becoming. The American Medical Student Association gave Duke a D last year on its report card on conflicted med schools. This year, Bart Simpson-like, Duke med has pulled itself up to a C.

From Dirty to Cheesy. It’s a start.

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COMMUNIST!

“It’s nonsense,” [one paid medical speaker said of calls for stricter oversight of conflicts]. “The notion that somehow this is going to influence us, because we’re getting dinner from a drug company, this is communist, nanny government at its most extreme.”

Next thing you know they’ll be regulating for-profit education!

… and on the morning after a dinner party with old friends, UD records this poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, with commentary.

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Envoy

Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!

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The poet sends his book of verse to the world with best wishes.

Let’s see:

Flowers in the garden.

A few white flowers remain on one of my potted geraniums on the deck. Some of the hydrangea out front still seem flowery, though strictly speaking they’re not. Do pyracantha berries count? No.

Meat in the hall.

Karyna, a gourmet cook, prepared a meaty Argentine stew for the evening. All I had to do was heat it on my stove.

A bin of wine.

“Get a good Rioja,” Karyna said, so Mr UD bought a Campellares Rioja.

A spice of wit.

The night was heavily spiced.

One of the guests recounted how, when she was a little girl, “old men were always coming up to me and saying dirty things. To this day I don’t know why I attracted so many. It happened all the time.”

This encouraged UD to recall how, decades ago, she and her mother were taken up Mt. Vesuvius by a guide, an old peasant. At one point the man directed UD‘s attention out to some distant hills, and as she gazed, he felt her up.

Another guest said that when he was young and beautiful, a drunk old guy on the subway tried to hump him.

Okay, none is this is what Stevenson meant by wit.

A house with lawns enclosing it.

Here I’m on extremely solid ground. Faithful readers know of UD‘s small Garrett Park house entirely surrounded by – at the moment – leaf-strewn lawns.

A living river by the door.

River of leaves? Leaves lie along the edges of the street by UD‘s door… And when it rains hard, a living river of water pours down the Rokeby Avenue hill… And if you’re willing to stretch things quite a bit, Rock Creek lies a quarter mile or so behind UD‘s house…

A nightingale in the sycamore.

An owl in the maple.

… among other things, a closed enterprise that protects its own. See the university act as a guild.

A student in [University of Central Florida] Professor Richard Quinn’s business class posted a new video on YouTube. The video is from the first week of class, when Professor Quinn told students he writes his own mid-term and final exams.

But it seems Professor Quinn never wrote the mid-term exam his students cheated on. It was written by the publisher of the textbook for his business class. One student found a copy on the internet, and passed it on to others. [Quinn’s statement to the class is excellent pedagogical technique, no? Keep the students off the scent by telling them that you write your own exam. Don’t check the book! I write my own! You’d be wasting your time checking the book! … Yet one of his enterprising charges looked anyway! Shouldn’t Quinn give that person extra credit for business acumen? Never trust what other people say! Trust your instincts!]

… UCF spokesperson Grant Heston told WFTV “it’s not uncommon for higher education professors to use these pre-made exams produced by the publisher.” [Ah, Heston.  Guildmaster speaks.  Not uncommon, so that means, uh, perfectly fine so shut your face.  It’s a guild thing; you wouldn’t understand.]

… Eyewitness News asked if [Quinn] would be punished for using a test that’s so easily accessible online.

“It’s irrelevant. The focus shouldn’t be on the professor, but on the students who used the test inappropriately,” said Heston.  [Get the effing focus off my man!  This is how professors behave and did I already say shut your face?]

Background here.

And a new editorial in the local paper.

… its $250 million remodeling of its on-campus football stadium, a project Business Week calls “the most expensive renovation of a sports facility in NCAA history.” (UW could instead use an already-existing stadium a few miles from campus.)

Without the new stadium, UW officials explain, “the tailgating experience would be compromised.”

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A recent article about tailgating, in the Duke University newspaper.

An opinion piece about tailgating in the Louisiana State University paper.

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A fourteen-year-old found, after the event, half-dead in a portable toilet.

Your campus running like a sewer.

You wouldn’t want to compromise the tailgating experience.

The important thing is not so much the technological details, but the synergy between professor and student.

Professor: Grading is outsourced.

Student: What’s being graded is outsourced.

Almost all of it’s going to India. An emerging tertiary education sector in India is made up of people learning lucrative new things by way of playing the parts of American and Australian students and professors.

Expect stories to come out pretty soon featuring American professors who have outsourced their entire online teaching classes to Indian graduate students and professors.

… became a hit, has died.

[T]he work…achieve[d] …explosive success — a surprise, given its unceasingly mournful character — [when] a recording by the soprano Dawn Upshaw, with David Zinman conducting the London Sinfonietta, was released on the Nonesuch label in 1992. The recording became a radio hit in Britain, where it broke into the Top 10 on the Music Week pop chart, and sold more than a million copies worldwide. For a while, Nonesuch said, it was selling 10,000 copies a day in the United States.

Here’s the first part of the symphony.

… quotes Wendy Brown saying what I’ve long been trying to say about online university education. As I sometimes do, I’ll interrupt her thoughts with some parenthetical responses:

As is well known, no matter how “high touch” it is, on-line education inherently isolates and insulates students, deprives instruction of personality, mood and spontaneity, sustained contact, and leaves undeveloped students’ oral skills and literacy. [Of all the defenses of online I’ve read, the most pathetic – and one of the most frequent – is that it’s great for students who are so shy, so introverted, that they will never open their mouths in class… Yes, with online we can make sure that no mean professor ever gets a chance to bring that introvert out of herself and incorporate her into a verbal as well as intellectual world! Bravo, online! …  Do you know how many students UD has had over her years of university teaching who said nothing in the first few weeks of her classes, and then, gradually, began to contribute, began to come up to her after class with ideas, etc? Do you know that these awakenings constitute perhaps UD‘s proudest teaching moments? But by all means nip this problem in the bud by leaving those students at home and putting them in front of screens! What a favor online is doing them!] Countless studies reveal that on-line courses necessarily dumb down and slow down curriculums. They reduce as well the critical, reflective and reflexive moments of learning, moments of developing thoughtfulness, navigating strangeness and newness, and of being transformed by what one learns. [This is the heart of my rejection of one of my readers’ claims that online allows professors to “share their insights” with students.  No it doesn’t, and Brown here explains why.] On-line education necessarily emphasizes … “content retention,” rather than what liberal arts education has long promised: the cultivation of thoughtful, worldly, discerning, perspicacious, and articulate civic-minded human beings. Thus to substitute on-line for on-campus education, especially in those first two years of college when students are initiated into university level inquiry, is to spurn the enduring Socratic notion of learning as a “turning of the soul.” It is also to privilege those courses that conform best to large-scale cyber teaching, those with the most information-based content. It would thus further orient students and the future of the university toward education conceived simply as job training and credentialing.

In her longer remarks, Brown mentions many other appalling aspects of online: Its sky-high drop-out rates, with the attendant debt … And why are the drop-out rates so much higher than on physical campuses, where they’re already pretty damn high? Because its such a blah, isolating, atemporal, nothing experience… like reading Waiting for Godot, very slowly, every day, over and over again… And of course because intellectually its also nothing; there’s none of what Brown calls turning; you’re a passive recipient of data, a memorization-machine, no human beings anywhere in sight, no professor to get you excited about ideas because she’s so excited about them. Who can get it up for that mindmush on a regular basis? No wonder so many onliners cheat! Anything rather than drag yourself through this soulless routine.

As one of my readers, a math professor, writes in a recent comment:

Learning mathematics can be done easily online. Provided a student is motivated. That’s the rub with online education in mathematics. It’s hard to be motivated. There is something about coming to class – even a boring lecture class – that keeps more students on track. In online classes they tend to fall by the wayside.

(You know one thing UD thinks is funny? UD has always found the way-popular motivational speaker phenomenon in the United States embarrassing and absurd. You can’t run a convention without hiring some clown to whomp everybody up first? Yet in its tacky clownish way the motivation industry tells us some baseline truths about organizing people and focusing their energies.)

(Oh and here’s a business tip from old UD: Start a company that hires actors, motivational speakers, students, to precede online classes with motivational speeches! Like that lady who talks to Winston Smith through the telescreen:

‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.’

Maybe a little nicer than that.)

Online is a boon in one way. Since it so dramatically represents the opposite of a liberal arts education, it helps us clarify the nature of authentic higher learning, helps understand exactly what we’re defending, and why we defend it so fiercely.

Back when UD was a hippie, Theodore Roszak’s book, Where the Wasteland Ends, was an enormously influential attack on technocracy.

Technocracy won, of course, and, in the case of universities, we now see, in both the for-profit and non-profit realms, a move toward the onlining of most higher education.

At the moment we’re in a transition phase, with rapidly increasing numbers of face to face classes featuring laptop use by students and PowerPoint use by professors. More and more professors also make lecture content available online.

A moment’s thought about this in-class arrangement tells us it cannot last, that it’s only a matter of time before everyone realizes you can accomplish online exactly what’s being accomplished in laptop/PowerPoint/downloadable content classes.

If you’re right now in a class of this sort, it will in a few years disappear from the physical realm and become part of the metaphysical.

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The problem with online is that practically everyone cheats. Short of constant video surveillance of you in your home, it is impossible to determine that you are taking the course, and not someone else. It’s equally impossible to determine that the professor assigned to the online course is teaching it.

It is easy to envision a time when low-salaried drudges will play the parts of professor and student in this transaction – the professor-simulacrum will get a cut of the actual professor’s salary, while the student-simulacrum will receive a stipend from the actual student. One can also anticipate formal enterprises growing up around these needs. There is already a business professor at George Washington University who charges professors for outsourcing their reading of papers and exams, and their grading, to people in India.

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Let’s estimate that, with several years of popular and easily available online courses behind us, we now have ten thousand Americans walking around who received A‘s in statistics courses in respectable American universities but who did not themselves take the courses. That means ten thousand Americans who do not know the difference between a statistic and a spastic colon.

Off they go to the workforce.

What we’ve done, see, is we’ve mainstreamed the old diploma mill problem. The old embarrassing disreputable diploma mill problem — it’s a problem schools as burnished as UC Berkeley will soon be up against. No one taught the diploma mill course; no one took the course. Money was exchanged, a degree was awarded. Now you’ve got this person working for you who doesn’t know shit – you begin to realize – about anything.

Same thing with lots of online courses.

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Is this where the simulacrum ends? With the online high school statistics instructor who doesn’t know what statistics is, teaching statistics to students whose parents pay someone to take the statistics course for them?

No. It could go on like that forever. There’s no end to simulation.

… provision of food content (grilled cheese sandwich), UD read a letter in the New York Times about the provision of course content:

To the Editor:

… [W]e should be extremely wary of the move toward online education…

People cheat. All the time. Sure, they cheat on campus, but it is extraordinarily easy to cheat online. The easiest way is to simply have someone else do the course for you. Another way is by searching for information while taking a test.

… If the company or university is going online to save money, you bet it will try to cut corners as much as it can. That means a noninteractive, bottom-of-the-line course, with students able to cheat easily.

We are truly on the race to the bottom…

Diana Lambert

Bottom-of-the-line, race to the bottom — As you know, UD has for years called online the poor white trash of education. I believe the letter writer is getting at the same idea.

Or think about it this way: When all the university’s doing is providing course content in the quickest, most efficient fashion, students feel quite comfortable providing, in return, exam content in the very same way. Students are responding in kind to the pointed disdain for students, and for education, that online represents. It’s a right back at ya situation.

With online, everybody gets an A for contempt.

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Online’s bold new idea: We’ll save money by not educating our students.

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Hey, and here’s another problem on the horizon: Presidents of online universities make like forty million dollars a year. Eventually, presidents of massive public universities which have become almost entirely online will start demanding commensurate compensation.

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UD thanks Dennis.

Make that hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Put aside the morality of people selling their children.

These sorts of stories are doing wonders for the university as an institution.

And they help Americans understand where their education taxes are going.

Its most illustrious alumni have written a letter calling for President Hazel O’Leary’s resignation. Even more importantly:

The authors… blasted the university for allowing its attorneys to argue in court “the emotionally bankrupt and morally egregious declaration that art created by Caucasians is of no relevance to the education of Fisk’s African American students, only art created by African Americans.”

Background here.

… and as UD now always says, I beg to dinner. I beg to dinner with the following Cam Newton commentary by Jake Simpson. My begging to dinner appears in brackets, and in blue.

Like any multibillion-dollar enterprise (or political machine), college athletics doesn’t just rely on its core constituency. It needs the support of its undecided voters — casual sports fans who follow their alma mater religiously and tune in to games when they’re bored on Saturday afternoons. Diehard college football fans are almost necessarily jaded (hello, BCS) and will probably accept Newton’s crimes (if proven true) the same way they accepted the news that Bush had accepted $290,000 in gifts from sports marketers while at the University of Southern California. But if an athlete is accused of flouting the rules of college football by multiple sources, doesn’t address the allegations, wins the Heisman and the national championship while the NCAA investigation plods along, and then escapes to the NFL a couple months ahead of news that yes, he did demand “pay-to-play” deals from prospective colleges, well… let’s just say a lot of casual fans may care whether the game has even a veneer of integrity.  [No they won’t.  I mean, they’ll care a little, but they won’t change their behavior.  Know why?  Because mayhem and rule-breaking are part of the charisma of sports, college and professional.  Men who worship sports are, among other things, worshipping the shits they themselves can no longer be.  These men used to be bad.  Now they’re in the grip of domesticity and corporate employment.  Aggression and loutishness aren’t in the picture for them anymore.  But they remain guys, and they miss those things.  They are not anxiously eyeing the game for veneers of integrity; they’re leaning back in their easy chair and reassuring themselves that even a very advanced culture reserves its highest rewards for the most basic male behavior…. Read Civilization and Its Discontents, for goodness sake.]  [And what does this mean?  It means Simpson’s not only wrong.  He’s exactly wrong.  What he argues is the opposite of the true deal.]

And like any corrupt political machine, the NCAA needs to avoid the wrath of big government. Congress may have infinitely better ways to spend its time, but if California Congressman Darrell Issa really follows through on his pledge to have seven House investigations a week, 40 weeks a year, don’t you think a look at the inherent corruption in college athletics could be among the 280? The NCAA is already facing a potential legal challenge from Utah’s attorney general over the BCS, and it cannot afford to get in any more Congressional hot water.  [Even wronger.  Congress is almost all men.  The new Congress has more yahoos than ever.   Representatives represent the guys I just told you about.   Congress has never gotten anywhere near sanctioning the NCAA on anything, including the notorious absurdity of its tax exemptions…. Same principle here as in my first point:  The idea is to maintain a cultural preserve within which bad guys get away with things.  Until people realize that the moron who stood up during that speech the President gave to Congress and shrieked YOU LIE is a hero to millions of people, they will never understand university football and basketball.]

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UPDATE: These views may be a tad controversial. Let me add a couple of things to clarify.

1. The philosophy of gender underlying these remarks is perhaps best exemplified by the work of Dina Martina, here. Note the expression first of female, and then male (starting at 2:11), behavior.

2. I do not call for an end to football and basketball and other aggressive sports. Not at all. I just don’t think they belong, in their present incarnation, in self-respecting universities.