The one hundred percent guaranteed A course in Dance Appreciation that football player Nadir Barnwell failed despite the coach’s direct intervention with the professor is all the rage at Rutgers.
The Dance Appreciation class Barnwell failed is a popular one on campus, with four sections this semester and a dozen more offered online through the university’s Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Sixteen sections! A dozen online!
The key factor in a grade is attendance, according to the online postings about the class.
What does attendance mean if you’re taking it online? If Barnwell took it online, how did he fail the course? Did the tutor whose job it is to take his classes for him fail to click on CLICK HERE? That’s a pretty poor excuse for a tutor.
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Had Barnwell stayed in the course long enough to pick up on the everything is dance thing, he’d have had a clear path to an A: His tutor could have submitted a paper titled The Home Invasion Hornpipe.
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A commenter describes the real point of the course:
Basically the class helps support the dance program. Instead of buying books, you buy tickets to the Mason Gross dance concerts and have to go watch, plus write a one-page reaction paper. I think it was like 50 bucks overall.
Assuming this is correct, UD proposes renaming the course Dance Program Appreciation.
As for the players, as one explains, “We’re really a tight team. You’re going to defend your brothers. I’m going to do anything for those guys I’m out there playing with.” Which sounds wonderful until you see it play out in a bar when one of them gets in a fight and the others rush in to play defense. Or when some on-campus criminal mastermind organizes them into an armed home invasion team. They’re a violent lot, the Rutgers football guys, and very group-oriented. There’s no I in RUTGERS FOOTBALL.
Coach Flood will do anything for the guys. He even sets up little teas with faculty members to swap ideas on how best to educate them.
[One] get-together lasted about 50 minutes … and resulted in [a] part-time prof agreeing to assign [one player] extra work that could improve his grade because she felt “implicitly intimidated” and “uncomfortable,” given Flood’s status.
Flood gets along just as well with full-time faculty.
[A faculty rep] believes Flood’s decision to lean on a part-time professor who earns around $4,800 per class and enjoys little job protection wasn’t an accident. “A tenured professor like me would have told him go to hell.”
Yes, go to hell highest paid public employee in New Jersey! (And don’t forget those bonuses for, uh, successful get-togethers with professors!) Go to hell most powerful man on campus who with one word can rouse hordes of fans to ruin my life! Tenured Rutgers Faculty to Flood: Go To Hell!
Ah but they’re weary now, weary… (Headline: RUTGERS COMMUNITY WEARY…)
They need to bring back Ray Rice, pride of Rutgers, to slap a little sense into them…
When he asked me asked me to review The Graduate School Mess on my blog, its publicist didn’t ask for my address in order to mail me the book. He gave me a password so that I could read the manuscript online.
Book. Manuscript. Long essay. What is The Graduate School Mess if perhaps its primary existence is as a series of scrolled paragraphs on a screen? Does The Graduate School Mess have to conform to regulation scholarly book length (around 300 pages)? Why does it have to do that, if it can make its argument (as I think it can) more briefly and more sharply? The need to feel a square object of a certain weight in my hands is gone, as is the need to pack it with sufficient pages to make up the weight. Is there an intrinsic need, for the sake of its argument, to have the thing weigh in at 300 pages plus?
Indeed, would I not have had an easier time graphically with the book had the publisher removed all the familiar long stretches of emptiness scholarly books offer? (Chapter separations, text within chapter separations, six semi-blank pages at the beginning, thirty pages of footnotes at which I’m barely going to glance, an empty page at the end.) Why do I need them, since I’m reading rolling text on a screen?
This is a particularly acute set of questions given The Grad School Mess‘s strong commitment to changing the ethos of higher study in the humanities in virtually all of its manifestations, including what an 2006 MLA report attacked as “the tyranny of the book.” Leonard Cassuto notes throughout his intelligent and humane set of proposals for changes in grad school that status and conformity account for the “very conservative prestige economy” that has turned grad departments in the humanities into (to list some of his descriptions) ostrich pens and cults and boxes (we professors “live inside the box that we want to teach out of”). He laments the fact that the MLA report – and other suggestions from plenty of other places that peer-reviewed lengthy documents published by academic presses cease to be virtually the only meaningful currency in academia – has been entirely ignored. He concludes with a powerful entreaty that humanities professors in research institutions make their work far more accessible to the larger world.
These ideas are presented in a book that in every respect adheres to the conformist prestige model.
Presenting it in this way makes it likely that its call for change will be shelved, if you will, among the many Harvard and other university press books calling for similar change in the last few years. Shelved too among things like a recent American Academy of Arts and Sciences report about which Stanley Fish wrote. The authors of this report on the crisis in the humanities argue, precisely like Cassuto, that we must get out of the ostrich pen, the cult, and the box, and “connect with the larger community.”
Fish argued – correctly – that the report would be “dutifully noted by pious commentators and then live a quiet life on the shelf for which it was destined.” How can The Grad School Mess avoid this fate?
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An ultra-secretive $35 billion corporation (the Harvard Corporation puts English professors’ efforts to avoid the public realm to shame) published this book, which exhorts us toward more egalitarian openness.
Only the exigencies of the market, and the emergence of new technologies, put this conservatively packaged book somewhat forward in time; only the commercial reality that many people won’t buy books but will download text keeps this book from being, among other things, an exercise in irony.
Equally difficult, given the realities of the culture (or cult) the book aptly describes, will be the effort to keep the book from being an exercise in futility. If in fact the situation is a “mess,” “reprehensible,” “mendacious,” “deplorable,” and “disturbing by any reasonable measure,” we will need to find ways to reach not the cultists (who are pretty much beyond reach, given their well-established ability to resist even the severest of market reversals), but, in line with the book’s democratic aims, ordinary readers. They are the ones who need to be alerted to the exploitative distortions (Cassuto lists, among other things, “old-fashioned and incoherent course offerings, bloated time to degree, high attrition, a distorted academic job market and a failure to prepare students for alternative employment, and outdated dissertation requirements”) going on in this realm of higher education.
The book is indeed written in a clear and accessible voice. But the prose can also be dull in a lecturing way (“no freedom worth having comes without responsibility”). Its scholarly self-presentation will I think fail to attract, as will this earnestness. The author tends to call livelier voices and ideas “hyperbolic” (Rebecca Schuman, who, like Camille Paglia** before her, entertainingly describes the cultists up close and personal) or “radical” (Louis Menand), and worries perhaps more than he should that biting depictions of the appalling situation in grad level humanities will encourage anti-intellectual right-wingers to kill higher study altogether. (Fish himself offered a very useful evocation of the culture of the cult here. All of these writers seem to me ultimately perhaps more useful than Andrew Delbanco and Leonard Cassuto and those like them, because they enable the ordinary reader to know her enemy and therefore arm herself.)
As to Cassuto’s recommendations: These tend to revolve around a reform of graduate study in the humanities in the direction of what I’d call a super-BA, a very high-level liberal arts college curriculum. We’re talking about the goal of a greatly heightened cultural literacy with a rather soft-focus specialization that will stand you in good stead in a postmodern job market looking for really smart, flexible, and research-savvy minds rather than people with very deep knowledge of a highly specialized subject. For those interested in pursuing a teaching career, this curriculum would feature how to teach courses, as well as higher thought about the educational process. It might allow you after a year or two to concentrate on parts of curriculum that are, if you wish, more vocational in nature; it would also allow you to remain less vocationally oriented. The point is “to train teachers and liberally educated, public intellectuals” along with those who still represent what Cassuto very nicely calls “the sacralization of research.”
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Perhaps the French flunkies should leave academe and form their own organizations, like the Shriners, where they can moon over their idols and exchange photos like bubble gum cards. There are precedents for this in the cults of Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky.
… dumpster fire.
Dumpster Fire
Football’s a burning thing
And it makes a fiery ring.
Bound by wild desire
We fell into a dumpster fire.
We fell into a burning dumpster fire,
We went down, down, down as the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns,
The dumpster fire, the dumpster fire.
Our football coach is sweet
His recruits can’t be beat
We fell for him like a child,
Oh, but the fire went wild.
We fell into a burning dumpster fire,
We went down, down, down as the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns,
The dumpster fire, the dumpster fire.
The shooter is at large.
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The victim, Ethan Schmidt.
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There are reports that the shooter is another professor. And that the shooter may have gone off campus after the shooting and killed him or herself.
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Begins to look maybe like a romantic entanglement.
Police said they are looking into the possibility that an earlier shooting in Gautier, Miss. — a five-hour drive from Delta State on the gulf coast — is connected to Schmidt’s slaying.
Officer Matt Hoggatt said the Gautier police department received a call shortly after 10 a.m. reporting a shooting at a residence located there. When police arrived at the scene in Gautier, they found a woman dead inside.
Hoggatt said that the suspect in the Gautier slaying is a man who at one time taught at Delta State and is believed to be romantically connected with the female victim, who lived with him at the home in Gautier. Hoggatt said that the suspect in the Gautier killing is believed to be the perpetrator in the shooting of Schmidt at Delta State, but declined to say what connects them.
The suspect’s vehicle was found on the Delta State campus Monday, but police have not yet found the man.
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A photo on the school’s website shows [the presumed shooter, Shannon Lamb, and Ethan Schmidt] standing together, smiling at a 2013 holiday party. That same year, Schmidt thanked Lamb in the acknowledgments of his book.
At Rutgers University, it’s OFFense, DEFense, and SUSpense, as eager fans wait to see who’s been suspended today.
It’s just the very very beginning of the season, and Rutgers has already tossed SEVEN players, which UD thinks (she is not sure) is a new world record.
Today’s guy – something about a big fight outside the Rutgers stadium after a game – brings this hour’s total to lucky seven.
The team’s indiscretions have gone from a list to a mnemonic device:
[P]ossible violation of impermissible contact stemming from an email [the coach] allegedly sent to a faculty member regarding the academic status of a player … the arrests of six players who have since been dismissed from the program over the last 10 days… [the suspension of a player because of a fight]…
Say that five times fast!
(Forgive the out of focusness.
I’m still learning.)
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UD‘s front stoop.
More front stoop.
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A typically messy God
knows what container
planting in the foreground;
in the background,
pachysandra, driveway,
lawn, butterfly chairs,
and a family
walking their dog.
The University of Memphis is a stinker of a sports factory with a venerable history of violations and voided seasons. Mafia-style basketball coach John Calipari brought his special approach to coaching to UM a few years ago (he’s now at Kentucky) and got them wins and voided wins in time-honored fashion and fine. We all know the deal and who cares about the voided part? We still won. We won the way you win in big-time university sports: Hired an incredibly expensive cheater (“Cal probably doesn’t have to cheat now as much as he used to, but he’s still the standard. The rest of us can’t even deal in his league. He’s the best.”) who cheated us there. So?
Oh but now some moral purists at UM are balking at honoring Calipari at a campus event as he’s inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame because oh no he was a cheater and because of him we had to void our wins.
Listen up.
[F]ans are mad… because Calipari left in the midst of an NCAA investigation into Derrick Rose’s eligibility, which eventually voided the 2007-08 season and the Tigers’ Final Four appearance. This is rich, because they sure didn’t seem to have a problem with Calipari’s methods when his teams were marching deep into the tournament every year, even though his previous Final Four appearance with UMass was also voided because Marcus Camby accepted money and gifts. They also think he stole Xavier Henry, who had signed a letter-of-intent, and DeMarcus Cousins, who had verbally committed, away from Memphis as he left, as if those players should’ve been forced to attend Memphis after the coach that recruited them left.
John Calipari is a good basketball coach and a great recruiter, and in some ways his open recruitment of one-and-dones and promise to get them ready for the NBA is the most honest arrangement in college basketball. Sure, he almost certainly looks the other way as his players and programs commit NCAA violations, but it’s not as if Memphis didn’t know that when they hired him, and it’s hardly as if he’s the only college basketball coach doing so.
Or put it like this:
[Memphis fans are upset because] Calipari’s 2008 Final Four run with Memphis was vacated by the NCAA after star player Derrick Rose was found to have cheated on his SAT. (Even though Calipari himself was never found at fault — and even though rule-breaking and rule-bending is ingrained in the culture of supposedly “amateur” college basketball.)
… their name.
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… $285 worth of merchandise was stolen from the campus store during a time when the store was open only to members of the football team.
Only way to make sure you’re not only caught but correctly identified.
