Whatever the caliber of play, a few hundred students attended the games. The university was known more for eggheads than big biceps, and at halftime, instead of a marching band, a giant kazoo was brought onto the field. Fans followed with smaller versions of the instrument, moving about haphazardly rather than in formation, an activity meant to celebrate the concept of Brownian motion, the random movement of particles.
… differences in rigor, value… even legitimacy… among university courses.
In response to Donna Shalala’s insistence that Miami’s athletes are academically on a par with Stanford’s, Politifact notes her dependence on APR scores for the football team.
The APR measures, as its title suggests, progress — not academic achievement; students get points for being academically eligible and staying in school. To the APR, a student-athlete who scores all C’s in music therapy would “look” the same as one who scores A’s in organic chemistry.
… Mark Nagel, a professor in sport management at the University of South Carolina, described the APR as a “public relations mechanism” created by the NCAA.
“What APR is telling you is that the students are remaining eligible and retained on campus,” Nagel said. “It is not telling you their majors, educational outcomes or what they are learning.”
… “It’s kind of shocking (Shalala) would consider APR to be a valid comparative measurement or the most important measure of academic achievement,” [another observer] said.
Italian police on Friday said they discovered a fake university in the north of the country where around 10 students were paying around 7,000 euros ($9,600) for a worthless, unrecognised degree.
… Four people attached to the fake university were reported to justice officials for fraud, the police statement said.
… Rate My Professors is a good source of information about university teaching.
Why does ratemyprofessors work as well as it does? Researchers at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire answered that question by surveying students about their use of ratemyprofessors. They found that people who post on ratemyprofessors are basically typical students — although men were more likely to post than women, and students in the arts and humanities posted less than those in other disciplines. The motivations for posting are varied, but the two most important are “warning others about an instructor” and “communicating that an instructor was excellent.”
From the campus newspaper at Sacramento State University.
The classes where students can text on their iPhones the entire class because they are not missing anything by not paying attention [are] a waste of time. Professors who stare at text, recite, and never bother to look up, are a sign the class is going to be useless.
“The (professors) that are there for the [pay]check just run PowerPoint or read out of the book,” said senior business major Anita Yaroshuk. “I could read out of the book at home.”
Yaroshuk said she thinks about 75 percent of her professors care about their students.
Meaning 25%…?
Now this man here says “Texas got greedy,” but I think it’s more like all universities want their own tv network so they can show games and recruits and shit. What’s a university for if not your own three hundred million dollar sports network?
Now jump over to this story and you find out that the suckers at UT can’t watch the network! Or I mean they can but it’ll cost them big. “It’s not good if it’s a network that no one can watch,” notes a UT professor. Haha, soak the students for more fees.
Back to this article, which calls the whole deal a “fiasco.” No, UT can’t do prep telecasts. Yes, it’s alienating the members of its (dwindling) conference.
The article’s author compares UT to the head of a mafia organization.
This thing is just getting started, and the free publicity it’s generating for the university is amazing!
Even at high-tech schools like Case Western Reserve, the techno-divide between professors and students widens. The campus newspaper notes the scandal of faculty running counter to the technolust of the IT people.
One of the IT people exults that “Twenty-first-century learning allows us to be immersed in a digital landscape.” She, like the student journalists, seems confused by growing numbers of professors for whom the phase immersed in a digital landscape doesn’t correlate at all well to what they want students in their classes to be.
I suppose we can anticipate an alliance developing between IT and students at some universities, in which these two groups sort of gang up on faculty as it bans the classroom laptop.
University football is a delicate thing. It’s not like university admissions, where you want to be selective.
You want everyone in the stadium. Everyone. Ticket sales are the ticket. Imagine, along the same lines, making tailgating selective!
But – and here’s where the nuance comes in – in hawking tickets to everyone, and of course in providing alcohol to everyone in the stadium, you admit and then liquor up a certain number of obscene and violent drunks. (Same thing with tailgating, as the University of Georgia has been discovering.)
There’s plenty of money in this procedure, to be sure. There’s also plenty of risk. It can backfire in some obvious ways. Well-behaved season ticket holders may cancel their order because they don’t think spending thousands and thousands of dollars to sit next to … Well, here’s how it goes at the University of Maryland, according to a commenter at the university’s student newspaper:
Maybe Kevin Anderson would like to send out a letter to all of the season ticket holders and alumni because of the guy at the top of section 18 who decided it would be cool to tell Miami that they can “suck his balls,” “eat shit!” and my personal favorite, a call to “Ass-rape the ref.”
While Anderson didn’t send out a letter about that, he did send out a letter about the last Maryland football game, in which an eleven-year-old boy, a fan of Maryland
mistakenly cheered after a play benefited Miami. According to [an email his father wrote to the university], “a U of MD student turned around and screamed, ‘F— You’ and flicked him the middle finger and almost hit him with it.”
No room for mistakes in university football! Doesn’t matter whether you’re eleven or eighty – one false move and fuck you.
Nor does the fun end, at Maryland, when the game does. At Maryland, they do post-game riots. No mention of that in the editorial I’ve been citing (in which students argue that since all big football schools feature drunken threatening fans UM shouldn’t be singled out). It’s only about in-stadium behavior.
Anyway. As I say, it’s a delicate thing. You’ve got to protect the university’s interest in admitting everyone to the stadium so that it can make millions and millions of dollars from its sports program; at the same time, you have to figure out ways of controlling the drunks enough to keep them away from children so as not to alienate non-drunk ticket holders and lose their money. Of course there’s the option of turning the stadium into a kind of police state. But that’s expensive too. And visually… and school-pride-wise… kind of a downer.
… by money and other goodies from technology firms.
Clicker devices make it easier for students to cheat off what other classmates press into their device, or [to] answer… for another student if he or she was unable to attend class.
The Chronicle of Higher Education also believes clickers give students more opportunities to cheat and abuse the system.
In a Sept. 4 article, the Chronicle’s Jie Jenny Zou writes, “Students purchase remotes and register the devices in their names. Those who choose not to attend large classes can simply ask friends to bring along their clickers and get whatever credit the instructor assigns for showing up.”
But hell. That’s nothing compared to how you can cheat when the whole course is online.
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Editorial, The Baylor Lariat
A York student hears a professor say something anti-semitic, rushes out of the room in a rage, and informs on him all over the Jewish community. The professor is branded an anti-semite.
The professor, who is Jewish, was clearly using the anti-semitic statement in his lecture about prejudice as an example of a reprehensible opinion. The student failed to understand this.
Interviewed later, the student apologized profusely and …
No:
[Senior Sarah] Grunfeld said Tuesday she may have misunderstood the context and intent of Johnston’s remarks, but that fact is insignificant.
“The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”
Grunfeld also expressed skepticism that Johnston was in fact Jewish.
Asked directly by a reporter whether she believes Johnston is lying, she was unclear.
“Whether he is or is not, no one will know,” she said. “. . . Maybe he thought because he is Jewish he can talk smack about other Jews.”
York is about to graduate this woman.
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Mr UD’s reaction: “The same words came out of her mouth. Context be damned. Let the word go out.”
Surfism, or the tendency to make fun of surfing degree programs, sounded the death knell for beach and surf studies at Swansea Institute, but that’s not stopping San Diego State University’s Center for Surf Research, which will “teach surfers about the social, cultural and environmental costs of surfing.”
So West Virginia University goes after some jerk in the stands wearing a West Fucking Virginia t-shirt?
How about not having hired Rick Rodriguez? Don’t you think if you hadn’t hired Rick Rodriguez that might have helped your image? Or how ’bout that Dana Holgorsen?
Nah – let’s not go after coaches. Let’s go after … that guy! See that guy in the picture? No, not that one. The one wearing the shirt. See?
Let’s liquor up our students and then release big old letters about them to the national press when they act stupid!
That’s how we deal with our students. Coaches? Well, policy there is like this: Give them millions of dollars and let them act like shits and then either
1. keep them on the payroll anyway; or
2. give them millions in severance.
Now how you gonna get around a nepotism policy and hire the coach’s daughter?
Let’s see. Well, make sure the coach is right there, of course, in the room with the trustees. So they can see her rich powerful daddy.
A divided University of Kentucky Board of Trustees on Tuesday narrowly approved hiring Kirby Willoughby, the daughter of UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart, as a graduate assistant in the athletics department.
The trustees voted by voice, and no individual votes were counted. When reporters polled trustees as they left the meeting, eight of the 19 who were present said they voted against the hire…
After the meeting, chairman Britt Brockman said he did not hear enough opposition to request a roll call vote.
… [The coach] was present for most of the meeting…