A recent Columbia University graduate, Chavkin has uncovered a little bit of Israel right here in the USA.
Israeli women are already fortunate enough to be kept off the main streets, in the backs of buses, out of the newspapers, and in very special orthodox cases even under burqas!
In America, we are only beginning to see these blessings extended to our women – as with the erasure of Hillary Clinton’s face from a group photograph in a New York newspaper. But Chavkin uncovered the fact that we’ve also got a bus — a public service, subject to all applicable laws — that’s just like the Israeli buses! Women to the back, and if you don’t go, get ready to be spat on and called a whore!
This earnest Harvard student, writing for the campus paper, even goes to the trouble of interviewing Facebooking fellow students. Why do they do it?
Two reasons emerge:
1. The professor is dull, confusing, off on tangents all the time.
2. They’ve got other urgent business to transact during class.
It’s true that you can now run, say, a real estate agency and sit in a lecture hall at the same time (Jared Kushner ran a real estate empire and went to Harvard – undergraduate – at the same time); and I think UD speaks for all professors when she says Fantastic. She wouldn’t think of interfering with her students making money while she talks about Keats.
The article writer takes the quality of teaching thing very much to heart; he notices that some of the famously good teachers at Harvard experience little Facebook use in their classes. But he makes a mistake when he concludes that the solution to the problem lies in professors being more like Facebook:
Rather than perceiving technology as a competing force in the classroom, our creative and distinguished faculty should explore innovative teaching methods that harness the same technological force to uniquely personalize class content and deliver it in a powerful, Facebook-type manner.
The hot professors the student singles out – Niall Ferguson, for instance – don’t compel attention because they’re Facebooky. They compel attention because in their lectures they meld a strong – even charismatic – personality with a restlessly polemical understanding of their field, and indeed of the world.
Ferguson wows classes by candidly sharing his strong opinions on world history and current events.
Far from the just-sitting-there information available on the web, strong teachers are up and about, exhibiting to students the crackling synergy of mind and material.
[The people who run the BCS] have allowed their athletic programs to run completely amok. The two people who symbolize what the BCS stands for are, without question, Miami President Donna Shalala, who did everything but rename her school “Shapiro U” while currently jailed booster Nevin Shapiro was lavishing money on her and the one-time “U,” and, of course, Ohio State President Gordon Gee, whose two trademarks are his bow tie and his foot planted firmly inside his mouth.
It was Gee who made himself the Neville Chamberlain of college athletics last spring when he was asked if he would consider firing Jim Tressel as football coach and he replied with a straight face, “Fire him? I just hope he doesn’t fire me.”
The shame of it is that Tressel didn’t stay at Ohio State long enough to get around to firing Gee before Tressel left in disgrace. Of course, the NCAA, led by its top stooge, President Mark Emmert, has been so busy calling meetings and being shocked to learn that cheating is going on that it has yet to take any action against anyone — and will probably come down with a really hard wrist slap when the time finally comes.
John Feinstein, Washington Post
During the reception after yesterday’s memorial event for David, UD‘s ‘thesdan playmate, a woman in her seventies or maybe eighties came up to UD and took her hand. “In your speech you talked about meeting David in a Latin class at Walter Johnson High School. I was a substitute teacher there in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, and I had David in one of my classes. It was awkward, because I already knew his mother, but I’d never met him. The last name told me it must be Rita’s son.”
“He must have been unpleasant to have as a student.”
“Yes. He was very smart, but condescending.”
“Yes.” UD recalled David’s imperious manner with their high school teachers.
“I once substituted for Virgina Baker’s Advanced Placement English class. Did you have her?”
“Did I ever! I remember that class very well… In my mind, Virginia Baker and Gertrude Stein are permanently merged, melded, enameled. They have become one and the same person.”
The woman laughed. “You’re right. Big intimidating demanding women …”
“I had a kind of a crush on her. I admired her rigorous no-nonsense thing. She’d seat herself at the front table, cross one leg over the other, lean back a bit, and not alter that position for the hour. She was a still point of burning intellect around which our mad young flames danced … I think she was the first really serious and learned, college-style teacher I’d ever had.”
“Both of my daughters had her. They used to speak with terror of having to write A Baker Paper.”
Baker was the polar opposite of today’s Frenetic Friend teacher, the Are You Being Served? mistress of ceremonies who scurries around classrooms asking comatose students staring at computer monitors if they need help with anything. Baker was a Buddha who sat immovable and inscrutable, a vast container of vast wisdom if we would only approach. Literature wasn’t valuable and fascinating because it made you feel things. Lots of things make you feel things. Literature’s primary value lay in its formal properties, about which even advanced students at a ‘thesdan school couldn’t be expected to know much.
I figured I wouldn’t find Virginia Baker on the internet, but I was wrong. Here’s a brief article she wrote in 1963 for The English Journal. It’s about the importance of making students aware of the variability of point of view in fiction – omniscient, limited omniscient, first person, etc. Although the piece is rather nuts and boltsy, I like her final sentence (I’ve made it this post’s title), in which she hopes that for some students she can create disciplines of writing which prompt Joycean epiphanies. I think she must have done this for me, though I don’t remember any particular epiphany. Maybe it’s more that she set going the gradual dazzlement Emily Dickinson describes as the way the truth works its way into us…
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“Tell the truth,” said David’s mother to me as we talked, at the reception, about the speeches his friends had just given. “But tell it slant. That’s best. That’s what you and the other speakers did.”
She was quoting the Dickinson.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
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Or think of Burnt Norton:
human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
And in fact even Dickinson’s poem, which seems a series of confident assertions about the truth, is actually artfully oblique and uncertain in regard to what truth is and how to tell it and how dangerous it is, etc. Dickinson, writes Gary Lee Stonum, “manifests a positive dislike for achieved stability.”
The hermeneutic zigzag of truth and error, blindness and enlightenment, or affirmation and insinuation may itself be a little dazzling. Indeed, the razzle-dazzle may be the point, and the zigzag is certainly the method. Dickinson’s double writing differs itself, always actively and often flagrantly, from any singularity it has itself signified. This poem accordingly works by both repeating and displacing the exhortation made in the first line, without ever arriving at a point where the divergent possibilities are gathered up into some more comprehensive or coherent view.
The poem itself is our safe, slantways approach to the truth: “We have art,” wrote Nietzsche, “in order not to perish of the truth.”
Virginia Baker’s successor in the responsive heart of UD was Erich Heller, all of whose comp lit courses at Northwestern she took; his essay, The Importance of Nietzsche, cites this famous statement.
Heller also, in that essay, characterizes modern secular minds as “plagued by a metaphysical hunger which it [is] now [with the disappearance of God] impossible to feed.” As with so many of Kafka’s characters, or Beckett’s, we are that absurd thing, a metaphysical animal without metaphysics. “The main condition of absurdity,” writes Thomas Nagel in a 1971 essay, The Absurd, “is the dragooning of an unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.”
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My friend David was, I think, a profound and wounded instance of this absurd condition. Plagued with a metaphysical hunger he could not feed, he spent his life in the hermeneutic zigzag. This was an honest and often rich place to be, no doubt; but there was no mistaking the sense of emptiness.
As health care groups join Occupy Wall Street, a UD update on the practice of corporate ghostwriting among medical school professors.
Ghost authorship … involves deliberate suppression of the fact that [a scientific research article has] been written by someone other than the named author or authors.
In most cases of academic ghost authorship … an article is written by a professional medical writer who is commissioned or employed by a pharmaceutical company.
The name of this ghost author is suppressed and the only names that appear on the article are those of researchers.
These “authors” (sometimes referred to as “guest authors”) are often prominent academics who might have been involved in conducting the research, but not in writing the article itself.
Evidence [suggests that] approximately one in ten research articles submitted to major medical journals has a ghost author.
He crapped out on giving the speech, but here’s part of it.
There are politicians and others who want to demonize people that have earned success in certain sectors of our society. They claim that these people have now made enough, and haven’t paid their fair share. But, pitting Americans against one another tends to deflate the aspirational spirit of our people and fade the American dream.
Keep the aspirational spirit flated! Two billion dollars per year per hedgie!
With a 7 percent decline in overall enrollment since 2009, a 42 percent drop in new enrollments between March 2010 and March 2011, a 9 percent six-year graduation rate (versus 65 percent for private colleges and 22 percent for all for-profits), a dependence on Pell grants and federal loans for nearly 90 percent of total revenue, excessive defaults on student loans, and intensified regulatory reviews, Phoenix wilted. Since March 2009, Apollo has ranked as the third-worst performer of publicly traded companies and the third worst among the S&P 500 in 2010. Apollo’s market cap nosedived 57 percent to $5.8 billion in 2011. In March 2011, Apollo reported a quarterly loss of $64 million and the stock price plummeted from a high of $90 in January 2009 to a low of $33.75 in November 2010. It currently trades in the mid 40s. Capital markets are no longer bullish on for-profit universities. Under the headline “Apollo Sent to Back of Class,” Barron’s declared in March 2011 that “shares are rightly getting a failing grade….We would steer clear of the uncertainty surrounding Apollo and its industry….”
Richard P. Chait and Zachary First, in Harvard Magazine.
In the grand tradition of Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein, another tough guy – the House Majority Leader, for chrissake – has cantered (might as well keep playing with his name) away from a public speech because protests were planned.
Eric Cantor claims Wharton (Wharton! He was among friends! One of whom, angry at the protestors – but why not be angry at his hero for backing down? – hung a sign out of a Wharton window for the protestors to see: GET IN OUR BRACKET.) told him it’d be a nice civilized talk open only to the amazingly well off, or at least people guaranteed to agree with Cantor’s take on the whole 1% / 99% thing… Wharton says au contraire – “there [has] been no change in the attendance policy.”
The Wharton speaker series is typically open to the general public, and that is how the event with Majority Leader Cantor was billed.
A number of amusing things were said along the way to this latest retreat coming from the God forbid unseemly envy of the successful should tear this country apart crowd. One student remarked, “I think it’s a little too much to bring the protest to a college campus.” Of all the places for a protest!
Another Wharton student sweetly said: “I definitely understand the anger. …But they have to realize that corporate greed is not taught at school. If you spend time at this school, never is greed, unfairness, and immoral behavior ever taught or propagated.”
Then how did so many of your only recently greatly celebrated alumni (start with Raj Rajaratnam) learn it? This student should glance over the Wharton rap sheet. Short version: It’s long.
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Update: Note to Cantor: Here’s how it’s done.
A University of Maryland hospital has been sued by the US of A for medical reimbursement fraud. In 2004, Kernan Hospital had zero cases of the rare, extreme form of malnutrition known as Kwashiorkor; then, by 2007, it had spiked to 287 cases, as though a hospital in Baltimore Maryland had inexplicably begun admitting droves of desperate African babies.
Here’s the lawsuit.
… and already a winner.
A pointless new law school has, within minutes, lost its new president.
[A] University audit revealed $2,235 in [personal] expenses which should have been reimbursed.
The whole point of a new public law school, you recall, was that “the school won’t fall back on taxpayers.” Whose money did the president just spend on family travel? How much will buying out his contract cost? Hiring headhunters to find a replacement?
The absolutely pointless University of Massachusetts law school: Already a class act.
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UD thanks Andre.
Or should I say Très SEC… Brown University’s bouquet has been very Securities and Exchange Commission lately, with the distinctive aroma of federal investigation wafting in particular from the school’s board of trustees. Steven Rattner (after his, er, troubles he seems to have left the board), Steven A. Cohen (a current trustee)… And of course from the school’s president, a loyal Goldman Sachs trustee during the wonder years.
Cohen, a perennial SEC object of interest, has yet again been informed that his firm is under investigation for insider trading… Leaving Brown University with a venerable intellectual dilemma: Hold onto him because some day he’ll give us a slice of his fortune? Drop him before he dries up and goes the route of Rajaratnam?
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UD thanks Roy.
Almost 60 years ago, the Bell Telephone Company launched a program to address rising concerns about the education of its managers. W.D. Gillen, president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, felt that many of these managers would eventually rise to positions in which they’d need a broader point-of-view…
To that end, Gillen established the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives, a 10-month immersion program that amounted to a complete liberal arts education. The program required more reading than the average graduate student had to complete in a similar time frame. They also visited museums and art galleries, attended orchestral concerts, and listened to guest lecturers. The program’s capstone came in eight three-hour seminars devoted to Ulysses.
Sadly, the program didn’t last past 1960. Multiple assessments found the executives to be more confident and intellectually engaged, but also less interested in putting the company’s performance ahead of their family and community commitments.
Irony-ridden because Hauser, who left Harvard having been found guilty of research misconduct, and who has now been accused of plagiarizing the ideas of another scholar, specializes in morality.
A philosopher at Princeton argues that in one of his books Hauser used many of the ideas in an unpublished manuscript by a younger scholar – ideas which Hauser sometimes presented as his own. Not only should Hauser “have waited [for the younger scholar] to publish his book before going ahead,” but the more senior scholar should have acknowledged his indebtedness to the younger much more generously and clearly in his book.