UD‘s George Washington University experienced multiple student suicides earlier this year; the University of Pennsylvania continues – with Amanda Hu’s apparent suicide last Sunday – to deal with this horrible event.
UD‘s George Washington University experienced multiple student suicides earlier this year; the University of Pennsylvania continues – with Amanda Hu’s apparent suicide last Sunday – to deal with this horrible event.
One thing you can say for American university football. It’s giving writers an opportunity to have their Martin Luther moment and make a huge deal out of having a conscience.
For here is yet another football (well, Michigan football) boycotter, a person eager to share with us her willingness to, in good conscience, put up with scummy Rick Rodriguez as coach of the team, but not Brady Hoke… Brady Hoke who is about to cost the University of Michigan even more millions to get rid of than Rodriguez, and Rodriguez cost it oodles of millions…
Yes, it’s all been a pretty spectacle – The multimillionaire coach keeping a concussed player in the game is just the latest classy move from a school increasingly indistinguishable from Auburn. Scroll through my University of Michigan posts over the last few years (start here) if you have the stomach for it.
(Oh – and the game the latest Here I Stand fan is boycotting? It’s against Rutgers. Rutgers! Talk about a scum cosmic convergence. Rutgers.)
Yeah, shut up and watch the game, kiddies.
[Nicholas Johnson, an architecture student at the University of Arizona,] said the plagiarism first caught his eye as he prepared to submit his master’s thesis for a review that would determine whether he’d graduate. He stumbled upon it, he said, while searching online for the thesis [his UA professor] had done for her own master’s degree, which he planned to compare to his to make sure he’d done it right.
Fearing his future could be jeopardized if he spoke up, he initially kept quiet, he said.
The document Johnson came across in his search was a “statement of interest” [his professor] posted online in 2010 to apply for a visiting professorship at an architecture school in London…
Some of the wording was identical to Johnson’s thesis proposal. “At first it was hard to believe my eyes,” he recalled.
Paul Krugman’s right: There’s too much to see around here.
I mean, for sure UD sees the luxury cars.
But she’ll have to get on the Acela to Manhattan to see the copters. One thing at a time!
Big time. No question. And not just the University of Kentucky administration:
… UK’s basketball and football teams and their boosters … are rich and powerful and prone to trouble. [The programs] bring in a lot of money, and some of it goes to academics. But not nearly enough.
Sports are fun and exciting diversions. But at UK, as at many universities, athletics has become the tail that wags the dog.
[UK’s] rabid fans … think the university exists to support a sports franchise, rather than the other way around.
Basically everyone at UK is way dedicated to football (plus basketball, natch). The school’s academic ranking shows it: 112 in 2007; 129 today. Rah.
Still… with the whole nation lately beginning to absent itself from university football games, UK is no exception.
The weather forecast for tomorrow [UK vs Vanderbilt; UK won] is gorgeous; lower level tickets can be purchased for $20; and Kentucky is expected to win its first SEC game since 2011. So what’s the problem?
Last year’s average attendance in Commonwealth Stadium was 59,742, roughly 8,000 more than what we’re currently looking at for tomorrow.
This writer warns darkly of “ramifications down the road,” and we know what that is. Expect that academic ranking number to improve if UK’s not careful…
Add to this the fact that the sport itself is so spectacularly grody that it is “referred to in the news and by late-night comedians as a national shame,” as one professor notes (read this Guardian article from which the quotation is taken only if you get a kick out of witnessing car wrecks) and a university almost exclusively devoted to sport has its work cut out for it.
[Recently, more] than 100 faculty members at the [University of Chicago] called for the [China-run] Confucius Institute at the [university] to be discontinued.
The institute had too much influence in determining “what’s worth teaching, what’s worth researching” and “what counts as knowledge,” Bruce Lincoln, a professor of the history of religions at the university’s Divinity School and an organizer of the petition, told The Chicago Maroon, the college newspaper, in early May.
A news article in a Chinese daily praised the swift and strong disciplining of the rebellious U of C by Xu Lin, the apparatchik who runs the institutes.
“Many people have felt Xu Lin’s toughness,” The Jiefang Daily wrote admiringly, citing a letter it said Ms. Xu wrote to the University of Chicago’s president in response to the petition.
“In just one sentence she said, ‘Should your college decide to withdraw, I’ll agree,’” the article said. In Chinese, that sentence carries connotations of a challenge. It continued: “Her attitude made the other side anxious. The school quickly responded that it will continue to properly manage the Confucius Institute.”
Uh, right away, party leader!
… But no. On reflection, the University of Chicago decided it didn’t want to attend the party at all.
Join the crowd.
Sorta says all you need to know about the University of New Mexico, don’t it?
Derek Lowe is talking about conspiracies, and the fun people like Delaware State University professor Cyril Broderick have with them. Broderick
has written an article for a newspaper in Monrovia telling Liberians that the Ebola virus is a manufactured bioweapon from the pharmaceutical companies and the US Department of Defense. And he goes on to say the the WHO, Doctors Without Borders, and the CDC are all in on the plot. Isn’t that nice?
This in a region where suspicions run so high that doctors, officials, and aid workers are being killed by angry mobs already. Now Prof. Broderick has given his Liberian countrymen more reason to fear some of the people who are best equipped, of anyone on this suffering world, to actually help them.
… shuts down its fraternities (relax: they’ll be back in business in no time), you know that public attention to the hazing/football nexus has grown so alarmingly that even pathetic Clemson (famous for having gamed its US News and World Report ranking by rating “all programs other than Clemson below average” on the US News survey) has had to look sharp. Its drunken carnage is definitely trending up a bit, so it’s decided to give everyone a chance to take a deep breath and think about how they can avoid killing more pledges once frat life starts up again. Very creditable of them.
The future of football will be determined not by a mass boycott or a government crackdown but by individual fans who confront the brutal realities of their favorite sport and act as their own consciences recommend.
You want to keep students far away from the capacity to have that confrontation.
Another slow-witted tech expert finally bans laptops from the college classroom. Turns out
Asking a student to stay focused while she has alerts on is like asking a chess player to concentrate while rapping their knuckles with a ruler at unpredictable intervals.
Turns out
[D]esigners and engineers have every incentive to capture as much of my students’ attention as they possibly can, without regard for any commitment those students may have made to me or to themselves about keeping on task.
Turns out
[M]ultitasking on a laptop poses a significant distraction to both users and fellow students and can be detrimental to comprehension of lecture content.
Turns out
Allowing laptop use in class is like allowing boombox use in class — it lets each person choose whether to degrade the experience of those around them.
Turns out
(To the people who say “Students have always passed notes in class”, I reply that old-model notes didn’t contain video and couldn’t arrive from anywhere in the world at 10 megabits a second.)
Turns out
Anyone distracted in class doesn’t just lose out on the content of the discussion but creates a sense of permission that opting out is OK, and, worse, a haze of second-hand distraction for their peers. In an environment like this, students need support for the better angels of their nature (or at least the more intellectual angels), and they need defenses against the powerful short-term incentives to put off complex, frustrating tasks. That support and those defenses don’t just happen, and they are not limited to the individual’s choices. They are provided by social structure, and that structure is disproportionately provided by the professor, especially during the first weeks of class.
Wow. Who knew.
Everyone. A decade ago.
… advertises his wares from Canada.
[Luis-Andres Guimont-Mota, an award-winning football player for McGill University,] was arrested Wednesday afternoon and will be arraigned Thursday on charges of assaulting his girlfriend, theft and uttering threats… He pleaded guilty last February to an assault charge after he and two accomplices beat up a young man outside a Quebec City bar in May 2010.
A career assaulter! Expect a bidding war here soon.
For those of us impatiently awaiting Tom “Kristallnacht” Perkins’ successor, Vinod Khosla has arrived not a moment too soon. It’s his beach, and he’ll sue all the way to the Supreme Court if he has to.
There’s even a wonderful mine, mine, all mine cosmic convergence here: For years, Khosla worked for Tom Perkins’ venture firm.
***********************
Khosla has progressive academia’s endorsement as a trustee of Berkeley’s Blum Center (and Mr. Blum... eh. Nuff said.)
Maybe Robert Reich, who has been eloquent on the corrosive social and moral effects of income inequality, can take Khosla aside for a chat. Reich too is on the Blum board.