Another professor joins the Teach Naked movement.
… [John] Kilbourne said he was asked about his use of technology, especially PowerPoint, when he applied for the job at Grand Valley. While not his first choice for lectures, he promised to be open-minded and give it a shot, converting most of his lectures to the program.
“At the start of my first semester I stayed true to my use of markers and board for the first few weeks of class. The students, like those from my previous college, seemed alive and attentive.
“When we got to Rome and the Gladiatorial Games I started using my PowerPoint slides. From almost the first slide I felt uncomfortable with this approach to teaching and learning and was made even more uncomfortable as I experienced the disquiet and anxiety of the students.
“Because the lights were now turned down and the room was darker I could no longer see interest in the students’ faces and as a result could not query them with a question or thought.”
During his third lecture, a student asked him to go back to his old style, using the board.
“I liked your lectures when you used the markers and board. It seems that every professor is using PowerPoint,” the student told him. “How do they expect us to read the notes, write them down, and think about the information all at the same time? I do not like PowerPoint.”
“Awestruck, I asked the class how many of them felt the same? Nearly every hand went high into the air.
“Following their near unanimous response I removed the disc from the computer and swore to them that I would never lecture with PowerPoint again. I followed my promise by leading a discussion with the class about effective teaching and learning, and PowerPoint.”
Kilbourne said students felt as though too often they were simply copying information to be memorized for regurgitation later on an exam.
… Kilbourne [has] had “Teach Naked” T-shirts made up to promote the movement…
So yesterday, Saturday, UD was
returning her sprinkler
to the side of the house, and near
the wall she saw a toad. An American
toad.
It was well-camouflaged, as it
is in this photo, but she saw it,
and she stared at it.
A few years ago, when she saw
a turtle in the front yard, UD
ran into the house and got La Kid
and Mr UD and they came out
and everyone stared at the turtle.
La Kid‘s off at college now, which
leaves Mr UD, and UD ran
into the house to get him.
She really did run, because she was
afraid the toad would hop away.
And then Mr UD would do
this elaborate stupid thing about
how UD made up the toad sighting,
or about how UD‘s getting old
and seeing things.
Sure enough, the toad was gone by the time
Mr UD hauled himself out there,
and sure enough he went into his old,
totally no longer funny routine about how
UD made it up, or only thought she saw it.
*************************
A few hours later, Les UDs went out
for a little weekend hike at Lake Frank.
They walked around the lake, and then continued
on to the nearby Meadowside Nature Center.
***************************
The minute she walked into its two
small rooms, UD felt a
strong sense of déjà-vu.
“I think,” she said to Mr UD, as they
surveyed the dusty, random,
exhibits (pioneer bunk beds, stuffed beaver,
whelks), “I must have been here last
when I was in elementary school.
Field trip? I’m definitely feeling something.”
Mr UD encouraged UD to think about that
while he hiked back to get the car.
UD sat on a couch and read
books in the teeny nature library about
the wildlife of Montgomery County, which
turns out to include bobcats.
UD now thinks she sighted one.
It was very early one morning, and loping
across Rokeby Avenue was a cat, she guessed,
but an insanely large cat…
Here’s a university angle on the thing.
Montana State University in Billings has
a bobcat:
“[T]he dean of business at MSU Billings…
has seen the bobcat several times in
the early morning hours. He called
[Fish Wildlife and Parks] Billings office
out of concern, but was told there
was nothing the agency would do.”
UD also learned, from her reading,
that the teeny nest she discovered
in the azalea bushes in front of her
house recently was a hummingbird’s.
Finally, UD discovered that since
the Meadowside Nature Center
was built in 1972, she… er…
without going into ugly detail…
could not have visited
it on an elementary school field trip.
… [S]everal clerics and high-ranking officials have taken aim at Islamic Azad University, which is based in Tehran and has branches around the country. The university is largely run by the family of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful moderate and leading opponent of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“This university must once again be purified,” Ayatollah Muhammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, the president’s spiritual adviser, said during a meeting with new cabinet members, the Rouydad Web site reported. “This purification must occur at the management level and other levels. You see just how many who do not believe in religion, Islam and God have attended and graduated from this university.”
The Iranian government
frees itself of free thinkers.
One home game… one shooting…
Live, from Tallahassee, it’s Saturday Night. Let the fireworks begin!
[I’m an alumnus.] I have no qualms with the UNIVERSITY, it’s the senseless youth and thuggish behavior at the games [and] campus … parties, and frankly [I] quit going to games because of fear for mine and my children’s safety and exposure to vulgar language and violence. You are right by thinking that it’s not fair to judge others for the actions of the few, but the few are becoming the many and frankly I don’t like the way the campus acts most of the time.
Campus gunplay after FAMU’s first football game of the season injures one of their running backs.
The quotations are comments from local readers on an article about the shooting in the Tallahassee Democrat.
… things are hotting up at another local university, Howard. Montgomery removed its non-functional president swiftly, and with little bloodshed, but Howard’s problem isn’t confined to one person. Its entire administrative apparatus fails to function.
Hundreds of students have been gathering in front of the administration building to protest crucial paperwork that never appears, buildings disabled students can’t enter, and a general attitude of arrogance and apathy on the institution’s part.
Forest Labs budgeted $100,000 for ghostwriting articles about its antidepressant Lexapro. The news came in a copy of Forest’s 2004 Lexapro marketing plan, unveiled by the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging. [Forest] budgeted $100,000, including “honoraria” for authors, for articles that would appear in medical journals, consumer publications, and on the internet.
… The document will doubtless be of interest to federal prosecutors, who in February sued Forest for allegedly promoting its anti-depressants for pediatric use without FDA approval, and paying kickbacks to doctors to encourage prescriptions. The complaint also alleges that the company hid a negative study that later was used by the FDA in a decision to give both drugs black box warnings.
The document also indicates that Forest expected to put Emory University on its payroll.
******************************
Our anti-depressants are rife.
We give them to you and your wife.
With no ifs or maybes
We give them to babies
And make them pill-poppers for life.
… Robert Zemsky, a very intelligent critic of universities who has a post up on how not to reform schools at Inside Higher Ed. She heard him talk at the last meeting of the Knight Commission. Here’s her post about his remarks there. If you don’t want to go to the trouble of clicking on that link, here’s some of what he said:
Trying to describe the place of athletics in the larger context of higher education is like trying to describe a burnt-out desert. You see, this discussion today — it isn’t going anywhere. We came here to talk about cost-containment, and it isn’t going anywhere. And that’s because any sense of values is missing.
Since you people don’t have any values, you put the marketplace up as the only thing that matters. That’s why you’re not ever going to reform at all. You’re part of the general loss of aura, loss of particularity, at our universities in America. Football on your campus is just like the NFL, you say, and, see, you’re proud of it. So what makes you a college? Absolutely nothing.
Used to be universities were supposed to be like churches — separate, special places, dedicated to higher things. They’re not special anymore. They’re just like any other business. So why tenure? Why tax exemptions? Look at Harvard and places like that. University endowments aren’t charitable donations; they’re hedge funds. University presidents make million dollar salaries, just like other CEOs.
It all tears at the fabric of the specialness of the university. You’ve all helped make that happen. Since you’ve been in business, things have gotten a whole lot worse. The university athletics engine will certainly stop running. But it will never reform itself. It’ll just run out of gas.
UD of course loved all of this, though she was puzzled by the run out of gas thing. The university athletics engine is a massive SUV with guns and fists and phalluses sticking out of it. It’s barrelling down the road at high speeds and is equipped with no moral or financial brakes. Everyone adores it. Everyone’s mesmerized. ESPN has run the tape of the Blount punches pretty much non-stop since he landed them, and everyone adores it. Everyone eats it up. Violence!
As long as human beings enjoy enormous stadiums housing violent spectacles, big time university athletics will be fine.
Zemsky seems in fact to agree with this in his IHE piece:
It’s already too late to reverse the tide of athletic commercialism. The sums are too large, the constituencies too powerful, the absence of agreed-upon purposes all too readily apparent. Is reform necessary? — yes. Is it possible? — no…
[There’s been a] cascade of scandalous acts that, against a backdrop of institutional complicity and capitulation, threaten the health of American higher education.
… The best higher education can hope for is that eventually universities will cut loose their programs in football and basketball, making the university a sponsor rather than an owner of the enterprise.
I think Zemsky’s making one explicit, and one implicit, argument here. His explicit argument has it that it’s not worth universities’ time to try to clean up their football and basketball programs. Too much money and power is concentrated in those programs.
His implicit argument seems to be that if we just let the SUV keep barrelling down the road, eventually it will crash and burn. Let the programs get worse and worse, in other words, as they certainly will — Let coaches make twenty million dollars a year. Let players rape burn and pillage. Let university presidents become total castrati. Let students get so drunk they destroy downtown after every game, not just championships. In this way, university sports won’t run out of gas so much as implode under the force of its own vileness.
UD‘s already posted on the absurd over-production of lawyers in this country, a fact overlooked for so long by law schools that now even the most elite boast plenty of unemployed graduates.
That hasn’t stopped any number of new law schools from opening their doors in the last few years, and UCLA professor and blogger Stephen Bainbridge proposes one particular demolition as part of a solution:
In 2006, California did not need a fifth public law school. We certainly didn’t need one in Irvine, when much of the growth in UC admissions is in places like Riverside.
Today, with state revenues having plummeted faster and further than Regent Montoya might have expected, we simply can’t afford Irvine’s law school. Odds are, with the California economy doing even worse than the nation as a whole, we have even less need for extra lawyers than we did when the [California Postsecondary Education] Commission rejected the Irvine proposal back in 2006.
I’m firmly convinced that UC Berkeley and UCLA will come out of the current troubles in excellent shape. We have great alumni whose support continues to grow despite the economy.
But I see no reason for the state to spend a dime on Irvine. Kill it now and put the money to better use, such as helping reverse some of the cuts to undergraduate education.
UD wrote the same thing a week before Bainbridge did:
UD’s angle on the new Irvine law school has nothing to do with whether its liberal dean can get a balanced faculty. UD wonders why America’s opening another law school. You want a debacle, look at the number of lawyers in this country. Many of the new graduates among them can’t find jobs. Harvard alone, which each week seems to add about ten new faculty to its law school, could train most of the nation’s attorneys.
How in the hell does this new law school justify itself?
I know a rich guy gave Irvine twenty million because he wanted the school to do this. But, you know, you’re not supposed to just lie there and do what rich people tell you. Rich people can be eccentric. This one likes the prospect of lots of unemployed California attorneys. Your university doesn’t have to agree with him, even if he’s waving money at you.
Annmarie Surprenant has resigned.
Pas surprenant.
Background here.
Her once-student, now-friend Courtney Wang played for a Washington team called Scandal (they did pretty well, too).
Courtney sends me this great photo of her in action that day.
Unhappy presidents are pretty much all alike.
(To mess with Tolstoy’s famous opening lines from Anna Karenina.)
UD means that in her blogging experience (she’s been following universities for years) successful college and university presidents are successful in all sorts of ways — they’re amiable and upright and quietly persistent in their policies; they’re wild and crazy and adorable and no one can say no to them because the president loves the school so much, works so hard, and has such charm; they’re a bit robotic and businesslike, but no one can argue with their results; they’re absurd and corrupt and care only about the sports teams, but in these things they mirror their constituency, so they get on like gangbusters, etc, etc.
Unhappy presidents, like the just-booted president of Montgomery College here in ‘thesda, tend to share the following characteristics:
1. Personal greed. They abuse their university-issued credit card. They use university funds for their dog’s amazing living quarters, for massive limos to take them from their just-redecorated offices to their compulsive shopping sprees, for first-class airline tickets or, hell, private jets, etc.
2. Paranoia. The just-booted Montgomery College president is rumored to have placed listening devices in various rooms, and to have ordered employees not to talk to the trustees. He dismissed a faculty report detailing his absences from the job, his over-spending, and his mental instability as a pack of “vicious” lies, the very intemperance of his language confirming the report’s claims about his lack of personal control.
3. Grandiosity. Bad presidents cannot handle their ascension to the pinnacle of university management. Throw a few hundred thousand at them and give them a big office with a view and they become the Sun King.
4. Substance Abuse. Not all, but remarkably many, failed presidents deal with their emotional unreadiness for ascension by sucking at the tit of Jack Daniels.
*************************************
The faculty of Montgomery College did everything right. They took a deep breath, compiled a report detailing the president’s activities, did a no-confidence vote, talked to the press, and waited for the trustees to do the right thing.
Je suis sick of people, like this person, this Canadian person, defending university professors who use ghostwriters.
Let me take up each of this person’s points.
POINT ONE: Professors are too busy to write their own papers.
RESPONSE TO POINT ONE : If you are a professor too busy to write papers, get another job. Professors are two things – teachers and researchers. If you want primarily to teach and not be under pressure to produce research, teach in a high school, or in a teaching college.
POINT TWO: Medical school professors are terrible writers.
RESPONSE TO POINT TWO: English professors are terrible writers. Most of them. Not only do they do their own writing despite this, they get their writing published. You must write your own papers even if you are a terrible writer.
ADDENDUM TO POINT TWO: If medical school professors are total illiterates — a claim that is also sometimes made — they should not be professors in universities. Professors may certainly be bad writers, but they must not be so non-functional that they, say, cannot read a ballot in order to register their vote in an election. Such people must not be propped up with ghostwriters. They must be removed from the premises.
POINT THREE: Medical school professors are retarded. They are slow. Ghostwriters get crucial research results out fast.
RESPONSE TO POINT THREE: If medical school professors are so dull-witted that they cannot release a research results paper before the chemical composition of human beings has shifted, they must be removed from the premises.
POINT FOUR: The editorial staffs of research publications are so busy that they need ghostwriters to clean up the submissions they receive.
RESPONSE TO POINT FOUR: The editorial staffs of research publications are editorial staffs. It is their job to respond editorially to submissions they receive. If editorial staffs of research publications are not editorial staffs, they must be removed from the premises.
SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS:
This writer paints a tragic portrait of UD‘s fellow professors. Alone, all alone, they toil night and day in their labs, doing the best they can given their inability to read and write English. There’s no one on campus to help them write; there’s no one to help them write on the editorial staff of the journals to which they send their work. Their only hope of publication and advancement — and our only hope, as people whose very lives depend on the publication of their research results — lies with the ghostwriters.
But wait. There is someone on campus to help them write! I mean, first of all, most articles of this sort have twenty or so authors. I’ll bet among all those people you might find one, even at a med school, who knows how to write a sentence. And not only that, but all universities have writing centers, where people help students and professors understand why plagiarism, ghostwriting, buying papers online, and related activities of the busy illiterate, are wrong.
These same people at the writing center can help you write your paper! You just head over there from the lab with your scribbled notes… Or if you can’t even manage scribbled notes, just talk to the person at the writing center and she can help you organize your thoughts and start learning how to write them down.
I know. You’re scared. You’ve never written anything on your own before. Just go. Just give it a try.
From an editorial in The Hindu:
It is scandalous that ghostwritten papers that mimic well-researched science manage to get published in reputed medical journals. The effect is to mislead doctors by playing down the harmful effects of the drug and encouraging them to prescribe it to more patients. What is shocking is the willingness of researchers of repute to lend their names to the ghostwritten papers.
A commenter on the editorial writes:
The consequences of such misleading literature are particularly disastrous in third world countries like India where most practicing physicians & surgeons base their knowledge on medical journals and technique reports rather than on expensive hands-on workshops and courses.
Students protesting
curricular changes at
the Victorian College
of the Arts and Music
(part of the
University of Melbourne)
paraded about with
Save the VCA
written on what
UD‘s parents taught her
to call their tushies.
