Wired surveys the night of the living dead which is Righthaven, the company which has the distinction of having sued your blogger, UD.
A bunch of UD‘s friends and neighbors are featured in this Fox report about the dire USPS situation.
… and trying to worm your way out, once you’ve been accused, can also be ugly.
For an article about the rise of fascist movements, the Polish news magazine Przekrój used a cover image of Hitler’s face with a barcode instead of a mustache.
Very clever. Also very already done.
The cover artist argues it’s all a remarkable coincidence:
[T]wo artists arrived at the same conceptual solution independently … [T]he similarity is more a comment on the fact that we think and solve visual problems alike than anything more.
Unfortunately, the similarity lies in far more than the use of the mustache as a barcode.
… as university football season finally gets under way!
Maryland fans, with boos and taunting signs, turned the Hurricanes’ pregame entry into Byrd Stadium into a gridiron perp walk. Eight Miami players, including quarterback Jacory Harris, were suspended for at least one game for receiving improper benefits from a convicted Ponzi schemer and former Miami booster named Nevin Shapiro.
I come to praise GW.
It’s been a long dark wet day, and I’m just about to walk to the Foggy Bottom metro and go home. But first I want to praise GW.
When I got out of the metro station this morning, anxious about how well I’d do in my second week of teaching, since I’m not quite recovered from my surgery, it was impossible to feel anything but good. Good and strong and happy.
Because here after all was the world – the world of people – and I hadn’t had much to do with that for three or so weeks, as I lay in bed reading, blogging, and taking pain pills. Here were… Wellies! Wellies of all kinds – spotted, mid-calf, plaid, psychedelic, thigh-high. Gazing especially at the stylish GW women splashing around me, their elegant suede-like Wellies setting off black leggings and soft brown jackets, I was… I dunno… enamored. It was a hyper-urban scene – people jogging, servers setting out tables in front of the row of new restaurants across from my office, a wrecking crew working its way through what used to be a campus parking lot – and I realized I’d missed this, faces and bodies whirling around me, chic new foodie places coming on to me with their starched tablecloths and big pink container plants. It was opening day for Whole Foods. It was morning in the city, and even in the rain people were crisp and excited and beautiful.
… at the University of California Irvine, refused to take state-mandated sexual harassment training.
“I have consistently refused to take such training on the grounds that the adoption of the requirement was a naked political act by the state that offended my sensibilities, violated my rights as a tenured professor, impugned my character and cast a shadow of suspicion on my reputation and career,” McPherson said.
“I consider my refusal an act of civil disobedience. I even offered to go to jail if the university persisted in persecuting me for my refusal. We Scots are very stubborn in matters of this sort.”
Irvine removed supervisory responsibilities from him, threatened to reassign his courses, to put him on leave, boppity boppity boppity…
Eventually, McPherson did take the course, mainly because he became convinced his refusal was hurting some of his staff scientists. But he remained infuriated at the “coercive behavioral training,” which he called “insulting to the intelligence” and “a demeaning fraud.”
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McPherson might have been factually wrong that this no doubt squalid training session violated his rights as a tenured professor; but he was certainly right to call it squalid, and to protect his intellect, his individuality, and his own way of looking at things, from the state’s sensitivity facilitators.
With his irritable, articulate, and maybe slightly crazy refusals, McPherson represents the greatness of tenure in the American university. He is what he is, believes what he believes, and doesn’t care what his deans say. Far from finding tenure attractive because he yearns for lifetime job security (indeed at one point in the farce McPherson almost left Irvine for Buffalo), McPherson likes tenure because it makes it more likely that his right to privacy, and his freedom to resist various forms of bureaucratic intrusion, will be respected.
What McPherson is protecting, above all, is the sanctity and complexity of independent thought. He knows that however mentally defended he manages to make himself throughout the harassment session, his mind will in some important sense never fully recover from its exposure to staggeringly reductive simple-mindedness about the world. Tenure goes a very long way toward shielding Alexander McPherson from the idiocy, conformity, and hypocrisy of much of institutional life; it even goes some distance toward protecting him from the consequences of his hatred of idiocy, conformity, and hypocrisy. Tenure – and Scottishness – have given McPherson the confidence to hate bullshit and love truth.
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But tenure, Naomi Schaefer Riley argues in The Faculty Lounges, has just the opposite effect on American professors. It makes them lazy, cowardly, and truth-averse. Wedged into an enviable permanent sinecure, the tenured professor leans back and relaxes for the rest of her career, lecturing from yellowing notes, rewriting the same politically correct babble in journals no one reads… Oh, and running the university. As Riley describes it, the tenured faculty lounges about, nibbling on grapes or whatever… and at the same time holds all the power at the university. She talks about “the almost unchecked power of university faculties,” about administrators who “have no power,” and argues that only the abolition of tenure will check the irresponsible, complacent, self-interested machinations of professors. The faculty lounges and lunges.
Yet how to square this Oblomovian oligarchy with Benjamin Ginsberg’s argument in The Fall of the Faculty that “Power on campus is wielded mainly by administrators,” with faculty “shunted to the sidelines”? Ginsberg attacks the corporatization of the university, its takeover by anti-intellectual bureaucrats who, in their quest for power and money, ignore professors; he wants professors to get their asses out of their labs and libraries long enough to retake their schools.
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Of the two writers, UD finds Ginsberg more convincing. Though he overstates the power and menace of administrators, the salient numbers are on his side, especially the insane growth of such positions at universities in the last few years. Riley might take comfort from the fact that tenure is steadily shrinking all by itself, without her having to break a polemical sweat. Administrators way up; tenured professors way down – that’s the way it is.
And it’s too bad. Because although of course Alexander McPherson is an extreme example, he nonetheless symbolizes well enough the subversive sangfroid of the free, even insolent, intellect. As our universities winnow people like McPherson and stock up on vocationally-minded, business-minded administrators, they risk their own demise.
As in – you know – the famous final lines of that Stevie Smith poem, Not Waving But Drowning:
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
Two recent books about American university professors span the waving/drowning thing in their very titles: One’s called The Faculty Lounges, and attacks tenured American university professors as larking about and waving at suckers with real jobs; the other, The Fall of the Faculty (reviewed here by UD‘s buddy Carl Elliott), has us drowning in administrative “blight.”
I’ll have comments about both of these books later on today.
Alma mater, ’tis of thee…
“The doping, the raping and the shooting,” is how he refers to his last few months at Oklahoma, where he was 157-24-1 and won three national championships. He points out with his rebel streak that “the academia, the presidents and the board of regents” always get upset when he describes that time that way, but the descriptions are accurate and efficient, if cold. The people around the library always get a little uncomfortable when the athletic department is unmasked like that and brought out into the light, but Switzer has spent his life around the good and bad of sports. He knows this ugly, beautiful beast. And he cuts to the heart of some issues when he points out that the coach who doesn’t loosen his morals is going to lose to the one who does – or, like [Miami’s Randy] Shannon, lose his job.
“Why did you recruit the guy who shot his roommate with a .22?” he begins. “Well, if I hadn’t, he would have been playing at Notre Dame, Texas or Texas A&M. He was the No. 1 defensive back in the state. Started as a freshman. He was a great player. Did a dumb-ass act, probably because he was on drugs …”
On to the raping …
“The first one, two or three she had sex with, that was OK,” Switzer says. “But the fourth or fifth or sixth, she says, ‘No,’ that becomes rape. She should have never been in the dorms. The guys who brought her in there, they went to prison and served their sentence.”
Switzer loses his place.
“Oh, what was the other one?” he asks.
The doping …
“Oh, Charles Thompson was set up – great player, great QB – in an FBI sting. Talked into doing it with a bunch of buddies, thugs that came from high school. Set him up because they were three-time losers and they had a bug on him. Basically, they were trying to get me and my program. He relented after turning them down a dozen times.”
The shocking condition of Greece’s universities – a corrupt, violent, state tax collection system – has finally mobilized legislators. They’ve passed a strong reform bill, insisting on admissions standards, administrative autonomy and accountability, limits on the number of years people can be students, rational curricula, etc., etc.
As the opinion writer in my headline notes, the most staggering fact about Greek universities (scroll down for earlier posts about them) is their purposelessness. Of course in response to the legislation their complacent stakeholders have moved to shut them down, trash them, etc. But how to tell the difference between this and the status quo?
A lengthy, thoughtful account of the expensive, destructive, technology revolution in our schools.
[The University of North Carolina’s] problem can no longer be cast as a terrible farce in which big-money college sports runs sneak plays behind the backs of the bespectacled and bewildered professoriate.
Did professors get in the game, participating in the corruption of both the university and the students they are supposed to shape?
A Duke University economist broaches the subject.
A local person comments on an article welcoming yet another year of on-field nothingness and off-field bankruptcy to Missouri State University (background here).
MSU, with its recent history of sports accounting scandals, is gearing up for another Samuel Beckett season (I can’t go on I’ll go on), degrading itself to the big boys in sure-to-lose games in order to pick up a check; sending its latest interim interim interim president out to say to the press that they’ve got to keep football because it gives the school band something to do… And because a program like MSU’s “helps build student spirit” …