… er… awkward position on the issue of higher education.
… er… awkward position on the issue of higher education.
A hacker has broadcast a message to wired classrooms across Washington State University. Here is some of what he said:
[Why have you come to this university] merely to eat, drink, and breathe? [Unserious people have] infiltrated our once-astute university. [They] run wild in a state of perpetual inebriation [and have] no outward enthusiasm for the fantastic academic culture this university used to have.
The entire video is here. Scroll down.
Très pomo.
And definitely creepy.
[A just-announced Justice Department] indictment accuses [a] Glaxo official, Lauren C. Stevens of Durham, N.C., of lying to the Food and Drug Administration in 2003, by writing letters, as associate general counsel, denying that doctors speaking at company events had promoted Wellbutrin for uses not approved by the agency. Ms. Stevens “made false statements and withheld documents she recognized as incriminating,” including slides the F.D.A. had sought during its investigation, the indictment stated.
This could get ugly. The Justice Department has decided to go after people, not just companies.
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UPDATE: Along these same lines, the latest issue of Academe, edited by the wonderful Sheldon Krimsky, is all about conflict of interest and corporate influence in the university. Looks like a must-read.
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ANOTHER UPDATE: Much more detail about the Justice Department’s action from the indispensable Health Care Renewal.
Not all the details are in yet, but it looks as though a good and dedicated teacher there may have allowed students traveling with him on a field trip to drink on the chartered bus taking them back to Lubbock. One of the students got outrageously drunk, and, once back in her own car, plowed into another vehicle and killed one of its passengers.
[The student] was arrested October 22nd and charged with intoxicated manslaughter, intoxicated assault, and aggravated assault. According to the police report, [she] states that a professor allowed the students to drink on the field trip. She says in the report that she had five beers and a shot of alcohol.
[What happened during] Reggie Bush’s stay at USC … goes on to some degree or other at just about every school that’s running a football factory. Constructing a minor-league system for the NFL has turned out to be a profitable sideline, even if it sometimes means having to hold your nose.
Jim Litke on America’s Number One Smelliest Football Factory, Auburn.
Here we are. Flashlights on!
Point them at the front of the room.
There’s the prince of darkness, ruler of this domain. He strides from side to side, declaiming many things in front of six hundred followers.
Point your flashlight at the followers.
Note that instead of six hundred, there are two hundred in attendance. The entire course is taught out of a textbook; the prince merely copies, from the same textbook’s test bank, the test on which class grades are based.
He is after all a prince — not the sort to write his own tests.
Since there is no point in attending lectures, many students do not. This angers the prince.
What angers him even more is that a third of the students cheated on this semester’s midterm. Even though the New York Times recently featured his university’s expensive, pervasive, student surveillance cameras as a model for the nation, his business class still cheated.
Humiliated and enraged, he storms. The video of his storming is – like the test he takes out of the textbook – online for anyone to see.
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Here’s what seems to have happened.
[S]tudents [found] a version of the test and the grade key on line. Where is the security system for test banks, and how was it so easily obtained? Locally, they are saying that no security breaches happened and the answer key was simply found on line. Shame on the professor and the university. [Scroll down to comments at the link.]
Oy oy oy. Security systems again! First you gotta buy zillions of cameras and train them on the students while they take their exams so the classroom looks like a Vegas casino. THEN you gotta lock security into the exams your princes pick out of textbooks. It’s incredibly expensive, and you’re a public university in Florida, where expenditures for universities are in the cellar.
What to do?
The vast University of Central Florida is essentially an online university. It should drop its physical campus pretense.
Yes, a large percentage of online students cheat. But no one finds out.
And there’s no better field for play in this regard than big time university sports.
Here’s some wonderful writing from Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky, about Auburn’s rapidly-tarnishing Saint Cam Newton:
We expect a certain level of stupidity from our athletes. We accept that they’re going to have tons of personal tutoring help, up-to-and-including people writing their papers for them. Hell, it’s college; we expect kids of all kinds to cheat. But to get caught [as Newton did] indicates a stupidity that we just can’t accept. This, and nothing else, is sullying our notion of the student-athlete!
It’s a joke, of course. There’s an All-SEC Academic Team, and being on it doesn’t tend to improve a player’s draft stock. ESPN College GameDay doesn’t go to Knoxville or Baton Rouge or Tuscaloosa for finals week to cover the due date for term papers. We all know these kids are there to play football, and we’re there to watch them, and all we ask them is to make the slightest effort in preserving the illusion of academia mattering. We know they don’t care, but we’re all content to live in our giant happy Moon Bounce, oblivious to anything beyond the bizarre artificial creation that is college athletics. And we get mad when someone pops it.
I like Petschesky’s evocation of the surreality of big time college athletics, since that is what has struck me the most in my years of covering it. I like just as much his point about the fragility of this giant creation, the way it can suddenly be made to explode in our faces, and the way this reality-explosion angers us. Humankind cannot stand very much reality, says Eliot; and indeed fewer sights are more intense, and intensely strange, than university sports figures and fans forced to reckon with the reality of their false and sordid world.
Burst their bubble at your peril.
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[UD thanks Dave for the link.]
An economics professor writing in the New York Times notes the following scandalous fact.
The American Economic Association [has no] official ethics code. Sadly, some of its members seem to be in dire need of one.
See for yourself. “Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s new documentary on the financial crisis, includes revealing interviews with several academic economists whose public statements appear to have been rather closely aligned with their private bank accounts.
No doubt the AEA will object that it’s a purely scholarly organization, thinking thoughts about markets all the day. Tra la.
Saul Bellow gave it all away in his books.
If you’ve read Herzog and Ravelstein, you don’t really need his just-released letters. I mean, enjoy them by all means, as UD just did; but you don’t need them.
Most reviewers of them admit as much. While respectful and appreciative, they clearly find the Letters rather disappointing.
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Bellow himself, in a 1987 note to Cynthia Ozick, helps explain their anemia. Ozick is one of many correspondents who complain that he doesn’t answer when they write to him.
I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary… [I’m] a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key… By now I have only the cranky idiom of my books – the letters-in-general of an occult personality, a desperately odd somebody who has, as a last resort, invented a technique of self-representation.
Yet the business of withdrawing into yourself as you get older started young for Bellow. In an earlier letter, he writes:
[O]ne of my friends tells me, truly, that I am the solitary of solitaries, a combination of a glacier and a volcano, that I have perfected the power to be alone.
That solitude was partly a revulsion against modernity, post-modernity:
I make no claim to be special. I haven’t been at all special. I made all the plainest, most obvious mistakes. But all the large “cultural” trends… are so obviously wrong that I don’t have to act to isolate myself. I am passive, registering what’s wrong in what this civilization of ours thinks when it speaks of Nature, God, the soul, and it cuts me off from all organized views. It doesn’t cut me off at all from the deeper being of people – in fact that’s where my reaction against these organized views begins.
Cut off from all organized views, Bellow fashions what he calls his cranky idiom, his odd, occult technique of self-representation. But he neglects to add that this seemingly eccentric writing in fact speaks to millions of readers and is therefore not occult at all. It is original; it is true; it gets at the occult depths of human experience. For most of his life, Bellow, an intensely committed fiction writer, was engrossed in transforming his life into art, in giving beautiful clarity to what would otherwise be a blizzard of events. And letters. Blizzard life, life untransformed, had rather weak claims on him.
In a letter to John Cheever, Bellow captures the motive and force of great fiction writers:
You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There’s nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul.
Transformed, the soul of a great writer becomes an incredibly sensitive receptor/transmitter of things human.
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Bellow seems to have rolled through life restlessly generating personal turmoil in order to write about it. His best novels happened in the aftermaths of atrocious divorces.
I don’t mean that he consciously spun himself around in the direction of calamity; I mean that his combination of experience-hunger and innocence, visceral passion and aesthetic curiosity, made him as much of a chump as Ted Hughes. Or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like them, he hurled himself forward, insistent on passion and insistent on the truth; like them, he took a lot of falls.
Janis Bellow says, in an interview in Tablet:
He was direct. There was nothing he wouldn’t say and not just in a letter to another writer but in company or among colleagues, or to students. He had a clean, pure, open way of being in the world. And maybe some of that will emerge for people reading this book — his fearlessness may impress young people who are longing to be that way themselves.
As he says in a 1981 letter to Philip Roth, “I discovered some time ago that there was nothing to stop me from saying exactly what I thought.”
The fearless instinct for saying exactly what you think; the courageous insistence on following your heart; yes. But frequently what he thinks turns out to be wrong; what he feels is mistaken. The most compelling series of letters in the collection records, for instance, Bellow’s outrageous adoration of one of his lovers, Maggie Staats. You can read these letters and feel entirely convinced that she was the one. Yet Bellow’s fanatic passion alters… Maybe she’s a little unstable? Demanding? There are hints in his glaciating (though Bellow was, as his friend up there observed, as much a volcano as a glacier; he ran hot and cold) letters to her; but what matters is that Bellow was a headstrong, heartstrong man who threw himself into things and then, with rather a lot of damage, fashioned an exit strategy.
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In the perfection of the life or the work sweepstakes, in other words, Bellow was always way ahead of the field on the work. The Letters record what was left over for life.
The work, the literary work, flashes out in these letters; and that’s what makes them worth reading. There’s his inimitable mordancy:
Well, [Bernard Malamud] did make something of the crumbs and gritty bits of impoverished Jewish lives. Then he suffered from not being able to do more. Maybe he couldn’t have, but he looked forward to a fine old age in which the impossible became possible. Death took care of that wonderful aspiration. We can all count on it for that.
And of course there’s the way he found words, combinations of words, no one else could find:
[The] young dons [at Oxford] practiced their snob-judo on me at High Table…
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I … go out of doors [in the Vermont winter] and rinse my brains in God’s icy air…
Trinity College, which was founded by Henry VIII in 1546, stores … wine to be drunk by dons, their guests and some privileged students.
Following a freedom of information request it emerged that the total value of wine stored in its cellars is £1.67 million.
… UD‘s George Washington University begins to ask whether 4 Loko makes you 2 Fucko’d.