… burqa issue.

Drinking… fits comfortably with what some see as a just-regular-folks, anti-elitist strain in Wisconsin’s character. You know, the kind of people who would take an insult from Illinoisans – “cheesehead” – and turn it into a symbol of pride.

… Part of the anti-elitist attitude, [one observer says,] is a sense that we exemplify a true folk culture, and that “real people do these real things like getting drunk.”

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Last night, to toast her friend Courtney’s next stage in life (naval officer), UD sat at the bar at Sushi Damo in Rockville and hoisted an Asian Pear Martini. (Courtney had a Margarita.)

As an elitist, UD felt comfortable limiting herself to one low horsepower drink for the evening.

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Here is a long article (part of a series!) about why the state of Wisconsin leads the nation in drinking. (What does this have to do with universities? Hold on a minute!) It features a tidy paragraph of Reasons:

Climate. Ethnicity. The historical importance of the brewing industry. The interpersonal dynamics that govern how people learn to live comfortably in a group. The social nature of most drinking. A relative lack of newcomers who might foster change. The premium many here place on being just a regular person. The need for identity.

A shivery clannish German-derived person in search of identity… How can you stop being this and start being a temperate cosmopolitan solitude-seeking Jewish-derived person who puts a premium on being irregular?

Well, you can’t. You can’t make yourself over like that. Nor would you want to. You like being what you are just as much as UD likes being what she is.

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But when one of your state’s universities loses seven students in two years to alcohol, you have a problem. Administrators at the University of Wisconsin Stout are cracking down this way and that in an effort to save lives, keep students out of jail, and generally reduce mayhem and injury. They’re doing all the things universities do when they try to get out of the alcohol mess: Upping penalties for underage students in possession, and for riotous partying; begging some of the hundreds of bars just off campus to shut down or at least stop offering insanely cheap drinks; mandating alcohol education courses; increasing Friday classes…

But when even that high a body count has many Stout students taking to Facebook rebellion…

An American university is a refugee from drug violence.

The University of Texas at Brownsville, in shooting range of the protracted Matamoros gun battles, has shut down.

The university’s sports information director is the source of this post’s headline. During a soccer game, he and others suddenly realized that a war was happening close by. Evacuation ensued.

The campus has been closed at least twice before recently because of gunshots.

This gives you a sense of the layout.

… of how puke-on-the-floor sickening some universities have become.

Students at the University of South Dakota protest a stupid course – loudly. Bravo.

Look at this photo of the course in inaction. See the photo? Enlarge it and take a good look. Professor Phil Donahue doesn’t teach; he wanders hither and yon with a vague smile on his face asking if he can be of service. He tries not to notice that everyone’s dead or staring at their BlackBerry.

One student notes that the course “doesn’t have a purpose that students can appreciate. The university’s goal of instilling group work and critical thinking skills should already be achieved through general course work.”

Administrators’ defenses of the course are profoundly lost and confused.

“It takes all the best elements of a liberal arts education and helps show students that it has a real-world application.” One of them says this.

The best elements of a liberal arts education are sitting in a room with one hundred students staring at screens while a friendly ghost flitters among you?

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The real business world students are about to enter may indeed feature butt-numbing torpor in front of screens, and the constant need to tolerate unpleasant people; but is the purpose of a university to simulate these effects by way of preparing students for them?

Another administrator says: “Employers look for college graduates who can communicate, analyze and collaborate, which are all things the course is intended to teach.”

Look at the photo again.

And then the confusion comes in. Does the University of South Dakota create a curriculum based upon what educated people have always known and should continue to know? No. It makes two mistakes.

First it looks at the local accounting firm and says Hey what are they doing over there? Let’s do that over here.

Second, as another administrator says of the course:

“We’re still working on students’ needs.”

Not: What is the content of the liberal arts tradition in universities? But: What are our students’ needs?

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Let’s review. The university has (1) looked outside for what it’s supposed to do, and then (2) has looked at its students for what it’s supposed to do. Like Phil Donahue up there: How can I be of service?

The University of South Dakota — assuming it is not aiming to be the University of Phoenix — is looking for a curriculum in all the wrong places; and in so doing it is insulting its students. Its students point out to the university that the foundation of a liberal arts education is to be found in general course work, not in Let’s make friends while playing together on our computers bull sessions.

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UPDATE: Cool. UD’s gotten a comment from a student currently taking this course. Here it is:

As I am writing this, I am sitting in XDIS210: Success and Happiness aka, pain and suffering. I searched the course and found this blog. Kudos for the post!

Let me first say I am not an apathetic student.

The problem with the course is not the information, it’s the structure. I have done more work and spent more time on this course than any other class I have taken at this university. Keep in mind, I graduate next semester. The syllabus is 22 pages long. The standardization of the class has allowed for no wiggle room. Our class is behind but due dates aren’t moved because it “wouldn’t be fair” to the other classes.

I come to this class three times a week and all I can think about is what I will write when my professor hands me the class evaluation sheet. I have learned absolutely nothing in this class. My writing of this DURING the class is proof of that.

Its sad to think that I spent $700 to take a class because someone was “awestruck” about the technology used at another university. Can they not incorporate this technology in other courses? Is it necessary to require it?

Moreover, title is Success and Happiness?! Its a slap in the face and the university needs to hear our concerns, instead of being so defensive. I have yet to speak to ONE student in this or any XDIS class that has any interest in the course.

Again, what I’m picking up on here is a combination of too much technology and insufficient intellectual justification.

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ANOTHER UPDATE: PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS.

Another student heard from. This one took an earlier version of the course.

I sat in a large lecture hall with at least 80 other students and learned nothing. In all honesty, I barely went to the class.

What did I walk away with? The knowledge that in the real world, I’m probably going to have to do things that I don’t enjoy doing and working with people I don’t like or don’t know. At least then, I’ll actually get paid to do it.

I didn’t go to college to learn how to work well with others. I was taught that in elementary school. I came to learn about a specialized career field of my choosing. If I wanted to take class in the realm of job preparation (which is what I think the university is trying to get at with IdEA and XDIS) then I feel like I, as an adult and a senior about to graduate, should hold the right to choose to do so. Or not.

The death of a poet of whom UD had never heard – Viola Fischerová – has UD grazing among her few online, translated poems (she was Czech). A series of excerpts from a collection of poems about being an old woman and mourning the death of passion is surprisingly and beautifully frank.

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A couple of days ago the buds burst
now the swollen tips of branches
gush down the avenue
Bared into nakedness
childhood reeks in the sun
of powder and urine
A heavy slow stream
falls
into the furrow of water and foams
Bodies hate
the rights they once had

… enters the Meat Industry Hall of Fame.

“I get credit for inventing the McRib fairly often,” [Roger] Mandigo conceded in an interview earlier this week… “We played an important role in the technology to bind pieces of meat to each other. I didn’t invent the McRib sandwich,” he said. “McDonald’s did that.”

From the front page of today’s New York Times.

… Is it possible to learn as much when your professor is a mass of pixels whom you never meet? How much of a student’s education and growth — academic and personal — depends on face-to-face contact with instructors and fellow students?

… Kaitlyn Hartsock, a senior psychology major at [the University of] Florida, [said], “My mom was really upset about it. She felt like she’s paying for me to go to college and not sit at home and watch through a computer.”

… [Ms. Hartsock, a] hard-working student who maintains an A average, she was frustrated by the online format. Other members of her discussion group were not pulling their weight, she said. The one test so far, online, required answering five questions in 10 minutes — a lightning round meant to prevent cheating by Googling answers.

In a conventional class, “I’m someone who sits toward the front and shares my thoughts with the teacher,” she said. In the 10 or so online courses she has taken in her four years, “it’s all the same,” she said. “No comments. No feedback. And the grades are always late.”

Now I’ve heard everything. You mean to tell me that people are pointing fingers at a school one-fourth of whose trustees are former football players for the school? That has a total of two women on the board? Among whose trustees sits the Amazing!!!! Bobby Lowder? A school that has the longest record of sports scandals in the history of the universe?

Puh-leeze.

From Ilya, a UD reader: A philosophy course at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock:

PHIL 1340 Ethics & NCAA Rules

Required for all incoming (first year and transfer) athletes. NCAA requirements concerning amateurism, recruiting, agents, benefits, and eligibility in terms of general ethical considerations, the history of college athletics and the NCAA, and ramifications for the university and the college athlete. Ethical support for NCAA compliance stressed. Three credit hours.

If you really wanted to place Snoburbia, though, Sullivan says you could do worse than the more affluent and advantaged parts of Montgomery: Chevy Chase, Garrett Park, Potomac, Kensington, Bethesda.

A blogger down the road from Garrett Park, in Kensington, chronicles the snobbery of Garrett Park residents like UD.

… titled PARTY ON, reviews a new book: The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child, and What You Can Do About It.

… v. ruminants.

UD‘s always hearing about how low standards are in the humanities classroom, because the field is so vague… So it’s refreshing to see truly low standards in math, of all places.

The University of Manitoba just gave some person a math PhD even though said person, claiming a diagnosis of extreme exam anxiety, not only failed his comp exam (twice), but did not complete “the required graduate courses.”

This outcome so pissed off one of the math professors at Manitoba that he went after “a court injunction in September against the awarding of the PhD.”

This outcome so pissed off the university that they have suspended the math professor for the rest of the year, without pay.

Manitoba says it’s upset about his having compromised the student’s privacy. You and I know the school’s upset because the professor made their degradation of their own degree public, and thereby deeply embarrassed the University of Manitoba.

… some of America’s best schools of medicine in the last few years involves the painstaking, expensive training of doctors who almost immediately stop practicing and instead go for megabucks as investment managers. Why make half a million a year using the knowledge you’ve learned at Yale medical school to heal people, when you can make five million dollars a year doing trades and not get your hands dirty?

I mean, so what if you took a hotly contested seat in a Yale classroom — a seat hundreds of people actually dedicated to medicine tried to get and failed?

For instance: Chip Skowron, Yale MD and PhD, used a lot of taxpayer money to get himself all educated as a clinician/researcher and then said Fuck it. I’d rather be a hedgie.

Skowron put quite the spin on his decision in this 2003 Bloomberg article on doctors abandoning medicine for hedge funds:

Skowron said that during his residency, senior doctors complained about administrative burdens, declining pay and the strain of paying insurance premiums. “My current job allows me to look at the newest developments in oncology and to translate that into investment opportunities,” said Skowron, who manages health-care investments at Greenwich, Conn.-based FrontPoint Partners LLC, another hedge fund.

I guess I was little dim! Spent years and years in med school and grad school and it never occurred to me to discover the nature of the vocation for which I was training. Finally, in my residency, the horror of medical practice became apparent – the soullessness of paperwork, the growing impoverishment of physicians… I’ve gone from the meaninglessness, the shabbiness, of clinical medicine, to offering the world investment opportunities…

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But you know what they say: No opportunities without risks. Medicine may have its drawbacks, but so does trading.

When FrontPoint Partners came to light on Tuesday as the unnamed hedge fund that federal authorities said had traded on inside information from a French doctor, so did the name of another doctor: Chip Skowron.

FrontPoint said late Tuesday that it had placed Dr. Skowron on leave indefinitely. The firm’s announcement follows the arrest of Yves Benhamou, the French doctor accused of tipping off an unnamed fund manager about setbacks in a clinical drug trial by Human Genome Sciences.

FrontPoint, which is being spun off by Morgan Stanley, would not elaborate beyond its statement. But the firm’s announcement of Dr. Skowron’s suspension provided an obvious No. 1 guess for anyone trying to figure out the identity of that mystery portfolio manager.