A student at Maryland’s Loyola University (UD‘s mother attended Mount Saint Agnes, a school that disappeared into Loyola many years ago) notes that all of her professors this semester have banned laptops. She goes on to say this:

The Aristotelian pursuit of knowledge for the sake of its virtue is over. Whether one believes that this is something to mourn or laud, the fact remains that most students attend college to get a job after four years of trudging through the core requirements.

I do not fault Loyola professors for wanting to prohibit laptop use so that they can better engage their students during the short periods in which the pupils, slumped in their seats and battling exhaustion, ennui or something of a bit more dubious nature, appear in class.

Yet, I do take offense to the haughty tirade that accompanies this announcement. Professors can ban laptops without making scathing generalizations about our generation.

I agree. Just put it somewhere on your syllabus that the devices aren’t wanted and let it go. That’s all it takes.

As to the death of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Yikes. Especially sad to read this from someone who’s attending a Jesuit school.

UD‘s friend Paul Thacker is now a contributor to Forbes, and his first article shifts our attention from the recent University of Miami football scandal to the ongoing University of Miami Charles Nemeroff scandal.

Nemeroff – arguably America’s most conflict-of-interest-compromised professor – left Emory University under a vast black misconduct cloud, and was immediately, enthusiastically, hired by Donna Shalala at the University of Miami.

Thacker wants to know why. “Why would [UM] … snatch up a physician with such a history?” Why would they ask him to be part of a proposed new ethics center?

Indeed, UM seems to have perceived Nemeroff, with his years of COI problems, as an ethical model. Almost on the same day Shalala announced new rigorous COI standards for faculty, she announced the hiring of Nemeroff. An astounded former faculty member wrote to her:

[H]is seeming lack of integrity in simultaneously accepting “consulting fees” from the very company (Glaxo) whose products were the basis of an NIH grant on which he was the [Primary Investigator] is absolutely outrageous… [H]ow can one reconcile [your recent statements about new ethics policies] with the immediately prior hiring of so questionable an individual to such a prominent position? Does the university not perceive that this may be seen as the worst sort of hypocrisy?

Of course Shalala now has far more dire ethical – and criminal – preoccupations… Still, it isn’t hard to see her bizarre handling of Nemeroff as a kind of precursor.

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Scathing local coverage begins. Paul’s piece only came out about an hour ago.

… hyper-disgusting big-time university sports… I’ll live-blog it...

Let’s see. Starts with an incident in the life of the way-bogus Knight Commission, when ‘sneaker pimp’ Sonny Vaccaro told all the university presidents in attendance that if he was a pimp, they were whores. “[T]here’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it.”

(Later in the article, a coach calls coaches “whoremasters.”)

UD has attended quite a few Knight Commission meetings and has been astounded at its self-regarding nothingness. Vaccaro is entirely correct.

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Moves on to an interview with a former president of schlock jock University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who confirms the sluttishness. “If television wants to broadcast football from here on a Thursday night,” he said, “we shut down the university at 3 o’clock to accommodate the crowds.”

It’s a mark of pride to cancel swathes of classes for the big game. A University of Utah vice-president exults that no classes is “a recognition of the reality that the stadium is now filling for every game.”

Branch now notes that concepts like student-athlete (“[S]uch is the term’s rhetorical power that it is increasingly used as a sort of reflexive mantra against charges of rabid hypocrisy.”) and amateurism are “cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

It is pretty amazing… I mean, it’s not amazing that the NCAA is cynical (“From the summary tax forms required of nonprofits, [one investigator] found out that the NCAA had spent nearly $1 million chartering private jets in 2006. “What kind of nonprofit organization leases private jets?,” [he] asks. It’s hard to determine from tax returns what money goes where, but it looks as if the NCAA spent less than 1 percent of its budget on enforcement that year.”) and that the Knight Commission is cynical. But it is kind of striking that so many universities are so cynical. After all, they’re educational institutions. Why do they only care about money?

Nothing prods students to think independently about amateurism—because the universities themselves have too much invested in its preservation. Stifling thought, the universities, in league with the NCAA, have failed their own primary mission by providing an empty, cynical education on college sports.

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Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.

(At one point, “Cam Newton compliantly wore at least 15 corporate logos—one on his jersey, four on his helmet visor, one on each wristband, one on his pants, six on his shoes, and one on the headband he wears under his helmet—as part of Auburn’s $10.6 million deal with Under Armour.”)

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Branch says we should pay these athletes.

Fun stuff going on at Brown, where students closed out of a course are introducing a market in its seats:

Bradley Silverman ’13, facing unexpected barriers to entry, decided to circumvent the regulations governing seats in those classes. Standing in Lecturer in Economics Maria Carkovic’s class ECON1540: “International Trade,” he displayed a sign reading “Dropping this class? I’ll pay $ for your spot!”

I mean it’s funny that at a school like Brown, whose president was a loyal Goldman Sachs trustee through its Ungodly Compensation / Take-down of the American Economy years, and on whose current board of trustees sit both Steven A. Cohen and Steven Rattner (actually, I don’t see Rattner’s name on the latest board list, but I don’t find any notice of his resignation either), you’ve got people lecturing students about the limits of markets in university settings. LOL.

And certainly “no [university] president has shown willingness to tamper with the entertainment product that sports provide, even when scandal has tainted the product.”

Howard P. Chudacoff, a history professor at Brown, considers the synergy of fanatics, cynical exploiters of fanatics, and paralyzed providers of entertainment products, that powers the typical American university.

… the concert hall. UD‘s friend Jeff sends her this essay by the LA Times’ music critic about the invasion of the concert hall by mobile devices.

[Some symphony] orchestras [are now] inviting audiences to wile away an hour with Tchaikovsky by tapping on their smartphones and iPads. [People have pointed out that] light is a disruption and that tweeting is an engagement in tweeting, not music.

… This has nothing to do with technophobia but with big and serious issues, and ones that go beyond classical music. But first let us note who is primarily advocating bringing phones and tablets into the concert hall. Social media consultants are increasingly being hired by orchestras and other arts institutions and given the mandate to fill theaters and museums with young bodies by creating online video games, misleadingly marketing classical music as if it somehow related to pop culture like, say, reality TV. Any novel idea to scam the social networking system to get the word out is apparently also OK.

Unfortunately, if the scammers have their way, the result could be an updated “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Treating classical music as if it were pop culture is no attempt to move an art form in a new direction but rather to find a convention for everything. We’re not talking pop people but pod people impelled to respond in a certain, single way. Technological fascism is not, I think, too strong a term for it…

The important point is that a classical concert provides an opportunity to untie the digital umbilical cord and replace it with chords that really do resonate. I don’t know about you, but I find turning off the cellphone a liberating experience.

… [H]olistic hearing comes from within — within music and within ourselves. Real innovation is what we don’t expect and tends to come when we don’t expect it.

It’s the inviolability of one’s private thoughts, one’s own consciousness, against the onslaught of mass consumption devices, that the critic is defending. Like UD, he’s trying to conserve environments in which the flow of fantasy, imagery, feeling, and idea, can remain free.

Audiences deserve the opportunity to approach something new without being told what to expect and be allowed the mental space to take it in.

Yes. Students deserve the same thing.

… reflects on the tenth anniversary of September 11.

For UD, mindful of Iris Murdoch –

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

– days like this are about attending to the drawn-out si…….lences of Henry Purcell.

But UD is also moved by this:

Elijah Portillo, 17, whose father was killed in the attack, said he had never wanted to attend the anniversary because he thought he would feel angry. But this time was different, he said.

“Time to be a big boy,” Elijah said. “Time to not let things hold you back. Time to just step out into the world and see how things are.”

Be silent. Then step out and begin to talk.

The sprightly violin. The distinctly speaking flute. Tis sympathy you draw.

… Swedish style.

… Jan Björklund, the minister of education, moved to tighten central control over [for profit] schools and is soon to launch a parliamentary inquiry into competition and free schools.

“Loopholes in the legislation have meant that free schools can elect not to have a library, student counseling and school nurses,” he complained. “And as they get just as much money as the municipal schools, the owners have been able to withdraw the surplus.”

… Much of the learning at the 32 schools in Sweden run by the company is done alone by students, using an online system, with one-on-one guidance from teachers once a week, interspersed with lectures in classes of up to 60 students.

If students prefer to play cards and chat all day, it’s up to them.

[The author of a recent study] argued that such systems were brought in as much to save costs as to improve education.

Kunskapsgymnasiet’s IT-based teaching system allows it to cut the number of teachers it employs in Malmö to 5.1 teachers per 100 students, compared to an average of 8.2 teachers per 100 students at municipal schools.

“Many municipal schools are horrendously bad,” Vlachos said. “But the difference between the free schools and the municipal schools is that the free schools actually have a profit incentive to reduce quality.”

Hey! Same here!

Pharma loved Harvard because of its big ol’ name.

That has changed, as a Harvard professor who studies the interaction between industry and med school professors notes. “For a long time in medicine, not just at Harvard, but everywhere, there was a culture that said doctors were entitled to industry perks, but that culture is breaking down,” [Eric] Campbell said. “Doctors no longer assume it is their right and duty to accept these perks from industry.”

But hey. One school keeps the perk banner waving — and it’s UD‘s own GW!

“It’s just a rough environment,” said Dr. Lawrence DuBuske, [a Massachusetts] allergy specialist… “The industry wants very little to do with Massachusetts.”

DuBuske, who has been a top speaker for GSK and AstraZeneca about asthma medications, resigned from Brigham and Women’s last year, rather than give up his speaking appearances. Since then, he has landed a job at George Washington University School of Medicine and Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

WKU: a perennial University Diaries favorite:

“Our president has great vision and does not settle for anything less than excellence,” [coach Willie] Taggart said. “The school has put a lot of money and resources into upgrading the football program. We have unbelievable facilities and the budget to get the job done. It won’t happen overnight, but we’re going to get this thing rolling again.”

Western Kentucky has struggled mightily since leaving the I-AA level in 2007, compiling a 4-32 record the last three seasons. WKU posted a 2-10 mark in Taggart’s first season at the helm, snapping a 27-game losing streak along the way. The Hilltoppers have not won a game at Houchens Industries-L.T. Smith Stadium since Sept. 20, 2008. That home losing streak currently stands at 15 games.

The University of West Bohemia law school (Plzeň, Czech Republic), was famous for its fast-track law degree, awarded tout suite to anyone with money, until some journalists got hold of the scam and it had to shut down.

Now there’s a lawsuit from a guy pissed that he can’t make people call him Magister anymore (his degree was rescinded). He wants his diploma mill degree back.

Closer to home, there’s this pathetic guy, who bought his PhD at a diploma mill and made everyone call him Doctor until some journalist noticed that Madison University is way bogus.

Asked who was on his dissertation committee, Rogers said, “Oh, God, it’s been eight years. I don’t remember.” Asked for a copy of the dissertation, he said all his copies were at his house in Norfolk, Virginia…

and he lives in North Carolina now and is unable to access it.

… her grandfather, Joe Rapoport, ran Rapoport’s department store in Port Deposit, Maryland. This red brick building

was Rapoport’s. (Click on the photo for a bigger image.) UD remembers visiting there – the long dark store with clanging registers and rows of dusty shoes in the back, and the upstairs apartments (we slept in the rooms on the second level; the balcony overlooks train tracks and the Susquehanna River).

Port Deposit has been evacuated; the Susquehanna has overrun the place.

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I found the photograph here.

UD thanks her sister.

Uh, yeah…

Some are, I guess.

Not Ohio State, though.

…[S]everal Fort Hays freshmen are currently living in a Motel 6 across town from campus because… there isn’t enough dorm space to house them. The problem isn’t fixed, and students stuck at the motel have to shuttle to and from classes and on-campus events.

People are instead worried about wasting time bidding on an autographed copy of Jordy Nelson’s autobiography to further contribute to this stupidity.

Again, I wonder if Hays knows how lucky it is to have Fort Hays State University. If it did, its citizens would be more worried about providing better student life and academic quality than donating money to an athletic program that rarely accomplishes anything.

… Apparently, a current weight-lifting room, a wrestling room, a track and two gyms isn’t adequate to house a football team that hasn’t won a state championship in decades. Their prestigious history of never winning anything must demand more.

Excellent writing from Josh Dreiling of Fort Hays State University.

… from UD‘s house in Summit, is under water.