… a Chinese novelist, wins the Nobel. Presumably we’re all off to read, among his novels, Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996).

… if you’re the New York Times editorial page, we expect better of you.

If Pakistan has a future, it is embodied in Malala Yousafzai. Yet the Taliban so feared this 14-year-old girl that they tried to assassinate her. Her supposed offense? Her want of an education and her public advocation for it.

As La Kid (UD‘s daughter, if you’re new to this site) would say, AWKward.

Here’s what you do.

You drop supposed.

You sit down and think about how confused your use of the phrase “want of an education” makes your reader. Do you mean desire for? Do you mean lack of?

You change advocation – which is certainly a word, and it means what you want it to mean, but it’s seldom used – to advocacy.

You think some more about how the way you’ve written the sentence makes it sound as though Malala is advocating for an education that’s wanting.

… attended, and among university observers generally, there’s a good deal of comment about the American university bubble. About how MOOCs and outrageous tuition and clouded job prospects are going to shut down or seriously shrink brick and mortar academic institutions…

At Harvard, Bill Kristol said the bubble thing after UD pointed out – in response to a lot of doom and gloom talk among her fellow attendees – that just outside the venue of our conference masses of people from around the world were using battering rams to gain admission to Harvard, a school whose almost forty billion dollar endowment looked to her like one hell of a tough bubble. And people said the obvious stuff about how exceptional Harvard is, etc.

Yet Harvard is one of maybe thirty spectacular private and public schools in the United States to which the battering ram image applies. Everyone’s writing today about the wealthy Chinese couple suing a former Harvard professor after they gave him over two million dollars to get their sons into Harvard or someplace similar. (The wise writer at Gawker points out their fatal mistake: “Always, always bribe the school directly. Can’t stress this enough.”)

I thought China was cleaning our clock. Instead the Chinese, the Indians, tens of thousands of Americans, and vast numbers of people from other countries, seem to be keeping the university bubble at bay.

Football brings so many obvious gifts to universities – broken budgets, academic fraud, a chance to become intimate on a daily basis not only with the local police, but often with the FBI… But there’s a more nuanced sort of gift football offers academic institutions, and this has to do with the atmosphere, the ethos, the gestalt, of these intellectual settings. It involves bringing coaches to campus and giving them the highest salary in the state and allowing them and their staff to impose Stalinist standards on student journalists.

Here are two of many examples of authoritarian coaches trying to shut down a free press at American universities. I mean, of course we know that virtually all university football programs refuse to discuss – or only very selectively discuss – their budgets (Penn State, before it was forced by circumstance to disclose all sorts of things to the world, was notoriously paranoid about any form of disclosure); but here we’re talking about the actual bullying of a free press.

The latest case of this activity – ever so slightly at odds with the nature of universities – has occurred at the University of Kansas, whose football coach is touchy about the fact that he’s doing a wretched job, and who considers campus journalists the functional equivalent of cheerleaders. This post’s title quotes a commenter on an article about the coach’s efforts to intimidate a staffer on the KU newspaper, and indeed the situation is very simple and very familiar from other big-time sports schools: You bully people on the field, you bully people off the field. Name of the game.

The coach tweets his incredulity:

Team slammed by our own school newspaper. Amazing!

Whoever heard of a university newspaper criticizing its own football team?? Amazing! So the coach had his staff tell the reporter he’d better shut up if he wants continued access.

As Deadspin puts it:

Weis is off to a 1-4 start in his first season at KU. Here’s a change in tone, Kansas: The shitty, incompetent coach of your shitty, incompetent football program had his pwecious fweewings hurt by the fucking school newspaper, and in response, your idiot factotum—instead of telling Weis to shut the fuck up and to concentrate on not losing by 40 to State next time—decided to be a smarmy, bullying little PR shit. Way to go, assholes.

*****************
UD thanks Dave.

… to a group of students I don’t know (I was substituting for a colleague), a woman came up to the podium to talk to me.

I don’t know why I want to share this with you, but… A couple of winters ago, I was sitting with a friend in her house during a terrible snowstorm. The house had big windows everywhere, and the snow was falling really beautifully in all the windows and we took out Catcher and spent the whole day taking turns reading it aloud to each other. Start to finish, one sitting, with the snow falling… This is why I’ll never forget one page of that book…

I told the student that was a beautiful story and I thanked her for it (and I wondered – as I often do – why students tend to share things like this with me privately, after class, even though I’d love it, and it’d be great for discussion, if they’d tell everyone…), and she rushed off before I had a chance to tell her my story along those lines.

One summer UD was alone for a couple of weeks at the little Soltan house in upstate New York, and, over the course of a few sunny quiet days, she sat on the deck in a butterfly chair and read Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The solitude, the slowness with which she read, the powerful natural setting — it made it so that, like her student today, UD took in that novel for good.

… already know about Tunisia’s Manouba University (scroll down), a school under siege by Salafists. Now the readers of the Washington Post know about Manouba too.

One of the two recipients of the Nobel for chemistry describes The Phone Call.

UD suspects, though, that hearing five Swedish accents might have the opposite effect. Might make you think it’s just a more elaborate joke.

Poor fellows keep taking gambles.

And damned if they didn’t just take another bad gamble.

I know we’re all supposed to have shifted our filthy-university-sports attention from Binghamton to the University of North Carolina, but Binghamton keeps hogging the limelight.

A Fifth Law School In Indiana!
And it seems that I can see
The unemployment rate escalate
Right along with bankruptcy.
The new law school sends all its students
To a field that has no work.
When I think about the law school on the Wabash
Then I long for a state not full of jerks.

… shot to death by a campus policeman.

He had taken LSD at a concert that evening and had gone on a rampage, attacking three other people before he got to the police station.

Video taken by a surveillance camera showed Collar nude and covered in sweat as he pursued the retreating officer more than 50 feet outside the building, Cochran said. Collar got within 5 feet of Austin and the officer fired once, striking the student in the chest, Cochran said…. [The Mobile County Sheriff] said he had “serious concerns” about the killing of an unarmed student when he first heard what had happened, but he better understood the officer’s decision to open fire after watching the videotape of the shooting.

“It’s very powerful,” [he] said …

Investigators are trying to determine who provided Collar with LSD and could charge that person with murder…

… inevitable.

Local reporting of the police killing of a naked and threatening University of South Alabama student makes ye olde diffuse/defuse error. The officer did not want to diffuse – as in spread, or enlarge – the situation. The officer tried to defuse the situation.

Typical pro-laptop bs. Centuries ago, still images of Picassos and volcanoes were flashed on one screen in front of students via projectors – a cheap, perfectly adequate way of providing visual material. Waters doesn’t note in his comment that laptops are about one long endless private self-service image-stream. His comment doesn’t note that instead of occasionally drawing students’ attention to one image at the front of the room, the PowerPoint prof quite often spends the entire class session hunched over images and blocks of words, ignoring the class, which is of course in return ignoring her.

But anyway. Faculty gatherings like this one at Elon College are all about the lovely PowerPoint/laptop classroom synergy coming out of the closet.

As always, it’s honest students instructing cynical professors:

“There is no reason to use them in a discussion class,” [an Elon student] said. “That’s where they become more of a distraction, because students that use them during discussions are most likely on Facebook or Pinterest.”

And as for the massive, no-discussion lectures laptops are so terrific for — this form of education is becoming obsolete, since it makes absolutely no sense to do a class of this sort in real time. Just gather all the clickers and laptops and PowerPoints and films and cellphones that you’re dragging into the classroom and, you know, take your toys and go home. Only an idiot – or someone drawing a salary – would continue with this scenario.

The most criminalized university in America.

And we haven’t even started talking about the medical school.

… the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

The interesting thing is, nowadays my career would have been impossible in the sense that I did classics, ancient Greek and Latin, all my school time and then had to switch to science. My poor parents had to pay an extra year of private tuition to get into science. In those days they were actually short of students in Oxford, and so I received a curious letter from the admissions tutor in Oxford that said they would accept me on two conditions. One was that I came into residence immediately, in a week’s time, and the second was that I did not study the subject in which I had been examined. This is unimaginable!

So, you were being ordered not to become a classicist!

Absolutely. They said I’m not suitable for that. I later met the person socially. He was the man, [Hugh] Trevor-Roper, who later became Lord Dacre, very involved in the last days of Hitler, and he told me privately that his mind was on greater things and he’d realized he hadn’t filled the places in the college, and so he looked down the list of unsuitable people.