Yet another advantage of online teaching: During his probation, Professor Larkin will develop online courses. After that, I gather he will teach them.
Yet another advantage of online teaching: During his probation, Professor Larkin will develop online courses. After that, I gather he will teach them.
Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass — the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper …
He anticipated even the names of our cars.
From Dry September.
A University of Pennsylvania professor died over the summer, but the university forgot to cancel his course. Students bought the books, showed up… and waited.
While waiting, they received an email from an administrator telling them their professor was dead.
They got the email while they were waiting in the classroom. Yup, they bought the books, showed up for class, and BAM, your Blackberry goes off with the news that the very guy you’re waiting for is dead and now you have the afternoon to go back to your dorm and think about your own mortality. That’s the worst part of this story — you can’t even go out and party after you get the news and be all, “Whoo-hoo class is canceled! Pack the bowl!” A guy actually died.
… yet another telling of the scandalous story of university football and basketball. The New Yorker headlines its bland review of current big time campus sports
THE END OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL?
Which has a distinctly New York Daily News ring to it. What happened to the New Yorker?
Fans don’t care as long as the games are played, universities as long as the television contracts are renewed…
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Andrew Zimbalist says that Taylor Branch is wrong about college presidents running the NCAA:
Branch’s assertion to the contrary, college presidents do not run the NCAA. It is run by athletic directors, coaches and conference commissioners, with a smattering of jock-crazed college presidents serving on NCAA committees who have done the bidding of the athletic programs and pass periodic reforms to help preserve a modicum of legitimacy for the system.
But I think Branch is right. The head of the NCAA is customarily a (former) college president; it used to be Myles Brand, and now it’s Mark Emmert. Surely Emmert’s successor will be Gordon Gee.
And there’s a whole lot more than just a smattering of jock-crazed presidents (and other highly ranked university administrators) on those committees.
And the NCAA can’t run without the greed and passivity of university presidents, so it absolutely must keep feeding those two things.
AND the NCAA needs college presidents to maintain the fiction that the organization has a shred of academic significance.
I’d say – along with Taylor Branch – that the power center of the NCAA is the university president and the university administration.
As Ellen Staurowsky says:
As commercial interests in college sport continue to grow, the fictions understandably become more difficult to sustain. The shame rests not with college sports per se but with higher education officials who have served as the architects and promoters of such a system.
It’s a review of a show she curated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
When we sat down in the front we were instantly approached by a young man who refused to look at me and my female companion but told us very forcefully that we immediately had to move to the back of the bus. We told him calmly that what we were doing was entirely legal but he refused to hear and told us that we were shayetz, abominations. Luckily we had a male companion who had joined us who told him to quiet down.
… After trying to rip down the sticker on the bus stating it’s legal for anyone to sit where they want to, the man came back towards us and with rage told our male companion that it was ridiculous for him to defend two shiksas.
This is the latest dispatch from one of Israel’s freedom riders, women who sit in the front of public buses in that country.
The response from the ultra-orthodox man in this scene is typical. Eventually one of these women will be injured, or killed.
UD proposes that Israel turn this problem over to its medical establishment. The law works slowly. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to work at all. Sedation would be an effective, short-term, safety measure. These men are a danger to themselves as well as others.
… joke schools.
[University of New Mexico Police Department spokesman Lt. Robert] Haarhues said UNMPD’s biggest problem is intoxicated tailgaters leaving the parking lot without attending [football games].
“More people end up leaving than going inside to watch the game, and that can be a problem with driving,” he said. “We are trying to get more people to stay, but the fact that people are leaving probably has to do with the lack of success of the team. If they were better, maybe more people would watch.”
UNM: Just a bar.
… Elaine Ellis Thomas, a Yale Divinity student, writes beautifully about the suicide of her son two years ago.
Suicide brings on a very particular and peculiar kind of grief. The guilt and second-guessing and pure horror that someone could end one’s own life cause excruciating pain for family and friends. I have learned more about this than I care to know in the time since Seth died. Although we still know very little about John Miller’s tragic passing, I thought it might be helpful to share some of that hard-earned knowledge.
You could not have prevented it. Even if you think that you could have on that particular occasion, there is no guarantee that it would not have happened some other time. If you are wondering why you didn’t go with John or ask him to come over if he seemed out of sorts, don’t blame yourself. Seth’s roommate was in an adjoining room when he died. Having someone nearby made no difference at all.
If you’re trying to make rational sense of how something like this could happen to someone with such talent and such a bright future, you really can’t think about it rationally — there is no rational explanation. Normal people, those who are not sick in some way, do not kill themselves. Our most basic human instinct is for survival, so to cause one’s own demise subverts that in ways our healthy intellects can’t imagine.
If you’re thinking that John made a choice to end his life, I can’t agree. Whatever was tormenting him — depression, mental illness, some event that threw his mental wiring off kilter — that is what took him. As I said before, it isn’t a rational choice. Suicides are committed by people driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality. It isn’t really a choice.
Thursday’s suicide – John Miller, a dedicated musician and teacher – had all the marks of impulsivity and enigma that Thomas talks about. He jumped from an open window in a music department building.
An acquaintance describes Miller as a “‘workaholic’ who would log 18-hour days, only to arrive at the office again the next day at 6 a.m.”
A note from the Yale Daily News reviews the vexed business of covering these stories – in particular, the business of trying to avoid copycat suicides.
… the much-discussed Taylor Branch article about paying college athletes (background here):
Branch makes a compelling case, using a sixties-era civil rights lens, for compensating college athletes. But he seems to misunderstand the dynamics of the actual financial relationship between big-time college sports and the universities that sponsor them. As a result, his argument is incomplete at best.
By his account, big time sports are a tremendous financial boon to universities. Universities under this view end up addicted to the subsidy flowing out of athletics into academics, producing a host of bad effects. It is undeniably true that big money flows to some universities, that it ends up being spent, and that in the process of being spent it generates among those who receive it the kind of self-protective habits and behaviors that a flow of money always does.
What is far less clear is whether the net effect on the university bottom line is positive. Big winners there may be within the university, but seldom is it the case that they reside on the academic side. Most credible studies suggest that, but for a very few net winners, big time sports from a university financial perspective overall is a sucker’s bet.
The addiction of universities to big-time sports, then, is less a function of a corrupting subsidy to academics than it is the politics of the thing: the donors who prefer to give to the sports program even if their gifts result in an increase in financial pressure on the university, lawmakers with influence on the budget who think first about athletics and only in passing about academics, a public that demands spectacle and a press that is generally happy to stoke that desire. The net result is that in most cases the subsidy flow runs in the opposite direction, toward the already pampered and overfunded athletic program.
This has corrupting influences of its own, including an unwillingness to admit to the subsidy or to make clear its depth. Universities have shown themselves to be unwilling or unable to do much about these forces, even if they might like to. Under the circumstances, with universities lacking backbone even in the current situation, adding athlete compensation to the cost base would have the inevitable effect of forcing tongue-tied universities to up their subsidy even more, no doubt fudging the numbers in the process.
So pay student athletes if it seems just to you. But find some way first to divorce the entire mess from universities. To borrow a term from another sixties-era civil rights tradition, universities need big-time sports like a fish needs a bicycle.
In the course of a funny and perceptive essay about the fear of public speaking, Sam Harris touches on the scourge of PowerPoint.
Most speakers have learned that PowerPoint should be restricted to interesting images and other graphical aids, with a minimum of text. A few seasoned academics are holding out, however, and still oppress their audiences with walls of words, often in random fonts and terrible colors, so that they can turn their backs at regular intervals and consult a full set of notes… Imagine Martin Luther King, Jr., using PowerPoint, and the price will be clear: To truly connect with an audience, you want their attention on you. To change slides every thirty seconds is to be rendered nearly invisible by the apparatus.
On public speaking – I loved in particular this bit:
Pathological self-consciousness in front of a crowd is more than ordinary anxiety: it lies closer to the core of the self. It seems, in fact, to be the self — the very feeling we call “I” — but magnified grotesquely. There are few instances in life when the sense of being someone becomes so onerous…
For one who is terrified of public speaking, standing in front of a crowd exploits the cramp of self …Yes, that is the problem with being me. Ow… The feeling that we call “I” — the ghost that wears your face like a mask at this moment — seems to suddenly gather mass and become the site of a psychological implosion.
Duh. But Canada has these confidentiality rules that protect even professors who have been found guilty of extensive research fraud. The executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (I quote him in my headline) is calling for more transparency.
Especially in this case – where a professor simply made up scads of published studies – students, professors, and the public need to know who he/she is, so they can protect themselves. Since we’re also not told what field the pretender is in, we have to assume the worst. You need to be able to see people like this coming.
… it’s time to look at a chilled-to-perfection poem. Auden’s Brussels in Winter puts you inside how it feels when the world switches on what Stephen Dedalus, in Portrait, calls the refrigerating apparatus. What the poet describes is already (to him) an unknown world – the city of Brussels – and when this world freezes over, its mystery hardens into absolute darkness. In Brussels in Winter, each charter’d street evaporates, and the desperately lost poet desperately seeks his bearings. Or any bearings.
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Brussels in Winter
Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.
Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.
Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
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Look at how much poetry Auden packs in, how much implication, mood, and philosophy he cooks up in his few abbreviated rhymed lines… Look at his vanful of similes and metaphors as they speed by your eyes…
But slow it down. Take it little by little. See how a poem does what a poem can do.
Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.
There’s an unclarity of agency here. Who is wandering? Not its formula escapes me; its formula escapes you. The poem is written in an insinuating second-person, in which the poet assumes that the condition of existential lostness and self-alienation he’s about to evoke is certainly not his own alone, but is shared by his reader. He assumes that however grounded you may feel at this or that moment, you easily understand – because you’ve experienced it – the eerie dépaysement that occurs when you lose the formula of existence, the certainty that constitutes your life on earth as a thing, an object of familiarity and recognition.
As for style: cold streets/old string has the assonance, balance, and the near-rhymey feel that make that odd transition – from streets to tangled string – feel plausible. The linguistic proximity suggests a conceptual kinship.
The stopped flow of the fountains has an abrupt feel to it, instantly (along with the poet’s insinuating you) locating you alongside the poet in the same suddenly arrested cityscape.
And here’s another unclarity: Its. Its formula escapes you. It has lost. We don’t yet know to what it refers, which keeps us in the same confusion as the poet. Gradually it becomes clear that it is Brussels, the city.
Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.
Only if you’re trapped in some operatic theater of despair can you keep your bearings here. Frozen into place, you take your background part in a chorus of human misery. The reader hears the plaintive calls of the chorus throughout this stanza, with all its long O‘s and A‘s. It sings.
Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
How odd the world is; and to carry that oddness the poet finds odd figures. City apartments look like sudden outcroppings of the natural world – the world of bearings, groundings… Of course the desperate poet sees them in this way, as distant objects of desire – rich ridges, glowing farms. Warm things, glowing with the fire of their unstoppable being, their autonomous radiance as living, meaning-rich things-in-themselves.
And now the poet picks up a bit of language as it passes him on the street. French? Dutch? His effort to recapture his lost sense of existing has him grasping onto it as definitive in significance, if only he can understand it. But it drives on.
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
Again the poet’s desperation finds the very history of humanity in the expression of a random face… a face also quickly lost in the old, hungry, and humbled winter crowd.
A look contains the history of man, and a body – any random streetwalker’s body – is the embodiment of the shivering city itself. This body carries the frozen city’s pathos, its wispy uncertain half-thereness; and, in the way of humanity, the poet, suffering horribly from his estrangement, comforts himself with the thought that through the streetwalker’s body he can rather cheaply purchase at least a momentary sense of possessing an otherwise tangled and elusive reality.
America, America. Can’t say we don’t know how to make money. Especially off of dying people.
I mean, you know, suck it up. You’ve got kidney disease, and you’re going to die… So you’re going to shell out the $23,000 for that little vial. Aren’t you?
Which is going to make one particular university professor very happy. Columbia University’s Andrew Bomback, in what sounds like the same form of business relationship Chip Skowron cultivated, has been talking to rich hedgies about his medical research… and it all has that je ne sais quoi, insidery tradery, feel to it, according to the state of Massachusetts.
Mr. Silverman [the hedgie], after talking with Dr. Bomback on June 14, 2010, invested $846,889 in Questcor [the company with the little vials] between July 6 and Sept. 9, the Massachusetts filing showed. He paid an average of $9.80 a share. The stock closed Friday at $27.27 a share, giving him a paper gain of $1.5 million.