A student at Brown University assesses the presidency of Ruth Simmons.
Simmons took a voluntary pay cut from Brown of about $100,000, but that turned out to be a symbolic gesture when she stepped down from her $323,000-a-year gig on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs with $5.7 million in company stock.
Her resignation from Goldman, though, came only after she had tied Brown to the billions in bailout-backed executive bonuses she approved as a member of Goldman’s compensation committee, drawing the ire of the national media and dragging the University into the recession’s starkest example of tone-deaf corporate greed.
We’ve had years to examine for-profit education results at the higher education level. Companies like University of Phoenix and others cost taxpayers money, provide subpar education, serve as diploma mills, and prey on students who may never be able to pay back the tens of thousands of dollars in student loans they take on. They even prey on military veterans and active-duty service members.
We should be terrified of this happening to our public schools. Yet here it is happening nonetheless, all across the country.
This is Mr UD‘s verdict on every one of UD‘s efforts to come up with a catchy title for a post about the 92-year-old Polish farmer who since the Second World War has been hiding in an outhouse 300 “works of art from the Renaissance and German baroque periods, with the oldest painting dating back to 1532.”
From Bauhaus to Outhouse
The Hoard Shot Round the World
Grünewald Acres
Farm Follows Function
Looking at them, UD must admit the justice of Mr UD‘s judgment. She’s having a bad pun day.
… a veteran who fought in Afghanistan, dies in urban violence near campus.
He had met a friend and the friend’s girlfriend at a McDonald’s near the university campus at about 2 a.m. Friday. That’s when three men, possibly college students, harassed and provoked customers in the eatery, which caused an exchange of words between the groups, Paul Casey said.
Patrick Casey walked outside with his party and stood between his friend and one of the men from the group. As tensions appeared to subside, the unidentified man pounded Patrick Casey in the side of the head and ran off with the others, his father said.
“He was trying to step up and protect his friend,” Paul Casey said, citing what his son’s friend told him.
BISHOP SYMPOSIUM ATTRACKS SCHOLARS, POET’S DEVOTEES
From the Vassar student paper. They’ll probably correct it soon, but go there now and enjoy this wonderful word, which folds into itself both hate and love …
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Rats. They fixed it. A commenter called them on it.
A few moments ago, fed up with a female downy woodpecker at work on my house just outside my office window, I got up, went to the window, and stared at it, inches away, as it drilled. Its terribly black eyes suddenly locked on to me; and, just as suddenly, it went flying.
Now, finally, it’s quiet around here.
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UD pecked about in vain for a good poem, image, whatever, to accompany this post.
James, a reader, found one.
UD is grateful.
… the forthcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the absolutely immense text packed with every imaginable psychological permutation.
Allen Frances, editor of an earlier DSMV, cautions against what some are calling psychosprawl:
The greatest problem in the past 15 years of psychiatry has been diagnostic inflation and the over-treatment of people who really don’t need it. This misallocates scarce resources away from those who do most desperately need and can most use our help. I fear DSM-5 because it threatens to further medicalize normality and spread psychiatry too thin.
… if you’re looking for morally compromised faculty.
The student newspaper knows it.
…UD loved to read a blogger calling himself Fenster Moop. Fenster was witty, wise, and very well-informed about academia.
Fenster left the web for awhile, but he’s back with this new blog.
Ol’ T. Boone must be pissed. I mean, this is Oklahoma State, people! T. Boone who, with all his money and influence, really runs the team … really runs the school… endows OSU with yet another amazing gift: a huge new stadium! And the team is winning games!
But they can’t sell out the stadium.
A good lecture or seminar has its foundation in words but gains its texture and flow from countless other subtle cues and interactions in the classroom. These include the body language of the students that an alert instructor will observe and use in modulating the pace and content of the discussion, the pauses and inflections in student questions that would escape capture by a microphone, and the dynamism that occurs because each student, sitting among different neighbors at a unique location in the room, experiences and engages with the class slightly differently.
A course is also made effective by the unscripted interactions that occur as students gather before and after the class, and by the simple fact that the physical act of getting to class requires at least some investment of time and energy.
A UCLA professor says the obvious about trashy online ed.
What… that dipshit? He couldn’t find his ass with both hands and an assmap.
(UD is trying to imagine what Great Neck North High School administrators must have said in their conversations leading to the arrest of a group of students on criminal charges of cheating on the SATs.)
And talk about the burden of intellect! Here’s poor Eshaghoff “[flying] home from college primarily to impersonate two students and [taking] the SAT twice in one weekend.” The one guy with a brain is always on call.
… physical campus. It is one of her Online Makeover schools, schools so laptopped, over-crowded, and adjunctified that they should admit the obvious and fold as non-virtual locations.
But there’s a special additional reason for U Mass Amherst to cease operations. It is extremely violent and dangerous. It’s been a markedly nasty campus for years (UD has followed the riots), but now, just three weeks into the new school year, things have gotten totally out of hand.
The first weekend of school, police tried to disperse a large party, at a house on Meadow Street, and the students responded by throwing bottles at the cops.
The following weekend, one man was beaten and two students were stabbed at a party …
This weekend, police made 168 arrests and broke up a party of 500 to 700 people …
How long do you keep pretending you’re a university, when what you are, mainly, is a strain on police resources?