The feet of an impassioned, bizarre, and brilliant professor were worth sitting at. They (the professors, not the feet) challenged my perception of what reasoning was, what it meant to have an independent mind. (See Nabokov’s lectures on literature.) Would they get past search committees today?

The New Yorker

A Federal Trade Commission attorney criticized a controversial Anheuser-Busch …marketing campaign that features Bud Light cans decorated with college-team colors, urging the brewer to drop any plans for similar promotions.

Janet Evans, a senior FTC attorney who oversees alcohol advertising, says the federal agency has “grave concern” that the campaign could encourage underage and binge drinking on college campuses. Dozens of schools have protested the promotion, with some threatening legal action over trademark issues.

“This does not appear to be responsible activity,” Ms. Evans said in an interview Monday. “We’re looking at this closely. We’ve talked to the company and expressed our concerns.”

… On Monday, Michael Van Wieren, legal counsel of Licensing Resource Group LLC, which represents 160 colleges and sports organizations, said a dozen of its members have complained to local beer distributors. Last week, Collegiate Licensing Co., which represents about 200 colleges and other sports organizations, said at least 25 schools formally told Anheuser-Busch to stop distributing the themed beer near their campuses, citing trademark issues and concern about student alcohol abuse…

Patrick Walker, a recent graduate of Lakewood High School near Grand Rapids, Michigan recently unearthed a 10-pound mammoth tooth on the golf course where he works as groundskeeper. He credits paying attention in science classes for not backing down when his boss initially dismissed his find.

“Mr. (Douglas) Schmuck always told us to keep your eyes open, you never know what you’ll find,” Walker told The Grand Rapids Press. “He’s into archeology and taught us about that kind of good stuff.”…

… of so much online education.

Excerpts, from the student newspaper:

… With continuing budget problems, some may consider avoiding online education a bad move for Brandeis. Adding a few extra hundred students and going online could possibly fill some of the budget gap without having to build extra housing or hire extra faculty. Proponents of the online system claim that it could offer education to the poor and underserved. But despite all of these benefits, there are serious problems with online education.

The problem with online education is a matter of parity. Those on campus get a much fuller education than those sitting in a remote location taking online courses. Most of the learning in college takes place outside of the classroom. Speakers come from all over the world to impart their knowledge to eager students and faculty on the Brandeis campus. Unless Brandeis were to film all of those moments and offer them to students, those taking Brandeis courses online couldn’t really claim to have the Brandeis experience.

Interactivity is the next problem. In an online course, you can ask the professor questions and take part in group exercises. But talking with a group of fellow students over lunch is difficult if the participants are dispersed around the state or country.

First-class lecturers and interactivity create an atmosphere of ideas that is essential to the liberal arts education.

… According to U.S. News and World Report, Brandeis has a graduation rate of 85 percent. The graduation rate for the University of Phoenix Online is abysmal: According to statistics from the California Postsecondary Education Commission, only 281 students graduated out of 6,578 enrolled, putting the graduation rate at 4 percent. Those are the sort of numbers that could tarnish Brandeis’ reputation as a first-rate educational institution.

… The real-world college experience cannot easily be brought online-from speakers to late-night bull sessions to being involved in extracurricular activities. Brandeis should not belittle the quality of its education by going online and putting its students in danger of the lower-quality education and higher dropout rates that define the online college experience.

From US News and World Report:

… New research shows that students who did the most multi-tasking were less able to focus and concentrate — even when they were trying to do only one task at a time.

“The human mind is not really built for processing multiple streams of information,” said study author Eyal Ophir, a researcher at Stanford University’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. “The ability to process a second stream of information is really limited.”

… Frequent multi-taskers took longer to answer [test questions] than lighter multi-taskers, indicating they had a more difficult time switching between numbers-based and letters-based tasks.

“This was shocking,” Ophir said. “You’d think multi-taskers would be better at task-switching, but they were slower.”

The reasons for the decreased cognitive control are unclear, Ophir said. Researchers cannot say if the multi-tasking itself damages cognitive control — and if so, how much multi-tasking it takes for damage to occur — or if those who tend to multi-task with media have less cognitive control to begin with.

“Either way, the prescription is to multi-task less,” Ophir said. “The big take-away from me is to try to build periods of focus, to create times you are really focused on one thing.”

Media multi-tasking includes doing one or more activities at once, including e-mailing, surfing the Web, writing on a computer, watching TV, texting, playing video games, listening to music or talking on the phone…

I’ll tell you one of the reasons I love to blog.

When I analyze a poem by W.D. Snodgrass, his widow writes to tell me I got it right.

When I discuss an essay by Richard Poirier, the publisher of the book at Harvard University Press – a friend of Poirier’s – writes to tell me I got it right.

Man. How often does that happen?

More than you’d think, if you blog.

A former chief financial officer at Hadassah is claiming that she had an affair with Bernard Madoff.

Sheryl Weinstein reportedly makes the claim in her book “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me,” which is set to be published Aug. 25 by St. Martin’s Press.

… The Jewish women’s organization has said that it invested $40 million with Madoff from 1988 to 1997.

… Weinstein served on the Hadassah committee that decided to invest with Madoff…

University Diaries follows with interest the now-global university controversy involving burqas and guns and other things students might wear and carry in classrooms.

Right now, there’s serious trouble in Mangalore. The men there are so “lecherous,” explains a woman thrown out of class when she insisted on wearing the burqa, that it’s only wise to wrap yourself in a full-body blanket in what her interviewer notes is a city with “stifling heat.”

No question but that a damp sheet with a vitamin deficiency is a turn-off, so UD won’t quibble there. The question — since this behavior is either a pathology (“[I]t’s hard to explain why someone might willingly cloak themselves in a black covering in an area dominated by hot deserts and put themselves at high risk for a variety of serious illnesses caused by vitamin D deficiency.”) or a crime against women — is whether Mangalore’s universities are within their rights to forbid it. So far they are maintaining their policy, but there’s growing civil unrest about it. Protesters insist that women must continue to be made so off-putting that the panting men of Mangalore will decide to keep their wicks dry.

And then there’s the kirpan problem. Sikhs will wear this pretty big curved sword to class, and if their professors are wary, too bad for them.

UD wonders: Will the same students and professors militating against guns on campus in America also be willing to militate against the sword?

From The Canadian Press:

HALIFAX, N.S. — With Atlantic provinces looking at a plunge in the number of high school graduates in the next decade, universities in the region are casting a wider recruitment net and becoming more competitive as they fight to attract students from a dwindling pool of applications.

After ten years of growth across the country, fewer students are enrolling in undergraduate programs, according to information released by Statistics Canada in July.

… Schools are increasing their out-of-province recruitment efforts and expanding their presence on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

In June, Acadia’s Twitter account, Acadia4U, announced they sent out “Good luck on exams” cards and a bag of tea to potential students…

…UD begins using this

as face cream, she
knows that it is finally
time for her to go shopping
at the mall. She needs
everything. It will take
hours. She returns to
University Diaries when
it’s all over.

… in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune from the president of hopelessly conflicted University of Minnesota. He had to say something; the newspaper’s been all over the many ongoing conflict of interest scandals in the UM medical school.

What he’s produced, though, is too lacking in content for SOS to take hold of anything from it for discussion purposes. The piece makes no reference to particular COI cases — a basic requirement under the circumstances.

If you’re in the mood for meaningless reassurance and groundless self-congratulation, go to it.

… hasn’t had the “renovating the Hamburg mansion” problem? What I’m saying is, judge not the German professor who last year sold sixty doctorates from Hannover University, lest ye be judged for your own mansion renovation needs.

He’s in jail now, this guy, but at his trial he explained that he worked with a local diploma mill, collecting hundreds of thousands of euros in bribes in exchange for arranging bogus degrees, because “he needed the money to renovate his Hamburg mansion.”

Turned out the Hannover guy was the tip of a need iceberg. Police began investigating the diploma mill, and today they announced that “100 professors across the country [are suspected of having taken] bribes to help students get their doctoral degrees.”

… [S]tudents paid between euro4,000 to euro20,000 ($5,700 to $28,500) to the company, which promised to help them get their doctorate degrees through its extensive contacts within university faculties.

The Neue Westfaelische newspaper reported that “hundreds” of students were involved, and that the company paid professors between euro2,000 to euro5,000 when their clients had successfully received their Ph.D.’s. …

Rap for the JAP, von Stuck for the Stuck Up, Beardsley for if you went to Brearley, Plath for the Upper Clath — Frederick Seidel’s suddenly much-talked-about poetry offers pilled-up and plastic-surgeoned Americans an insider’s view of their insides. Listen to his comic drawl as he recites tons of his poems here.

Frederick Seidel affords access to Bernard Madoff’s mentality, and we need that. But looked at from the point of view of literature, Seidel’s poems are barely poems. They’re one-offs. William Logan is correct to complain that “Seidel’s jet-set tastes and upmarket sinning get pretty tiresome.”

Sinning itself is of course far from tiresome. UD could sun herself under a sinning sky all day long. But the sky must speak to her; it must have poetry in it.

Seidel finds clever ways to express his hellcats-of-the-gravy world (“I want to date-rape life.”), but these are not poetic ways. His poems are bunches of what Logan calls “blunt phrasings.” He declaims. His recited poetry is riotous because he’s a performer. The poems are performances.

Superficiality is super and – as a take on twenty-first century Manhattan – illuminating; but the poems become tiresome because Seidel refuses depth of any kind, even as a sort of faintly recalled antiphony. There’s no Why am I what I am? There’s only This is what I am. The obsessive childish word pairings throughout Seidel’s work (china vagina), coupled with the crystal-shattering self-presentation, eventually makes you feel you are reading The Cat in the Hat, with Seidel as the Cat, Thing One, and Thing Two.

In an excellent appraisal of Seidel in The Nation, Ange Mlinko compares him to one of UD‘s favorite novelists. “Mostly I’m reminded of Michel Houellebecq, another quiet chap with a virulent literary persona and a thing about sex and Islamic fundamentalism.” I see her point, and yet there’s an important difference: Houellebecq actually does use language to explore the vile bodies and minds of his dissolutes. By the time his best-known novel, The Elementary Particles, is over, its main character, in a gesture toward seriousness, has decided to move to Ireland — a country that attracts him in part because, unlike France, it’s still seriously Catholic.

But hey. How about a poem. Nothing like talking about a poet without giving you a sample. Here goes.

ODE TO SPRING

I can only find words for.
And sometimes I can’t.
Here are these flowers that stand for.
I stand here on the sidewalk.

I can’t stand it, but yes of course I understand it.
Everything has to have a meaning.
Things have to stand for something.
I can’t take the time. Even skin-deep is too deep.

I say to the flower stand man:
Beautiful flowers at your flower stand, man.
I’ll take a dozen of the lilies.
I’m standing as it were on my knees

Before a little man up on a raised
Runway altar where his flowers are arrayed
Along the outside of the shop.
I take my flames and pay inside.

I go off and have sexual intercourse.
The woman is the woman I love.
The room displays thirteen lilies.
I stand on the surface.

The writer, Brian Cook at The Sporting Blog, explains how the NCAA handles the criticism that it’s the most profit-driven non-profit this side of Harvard University.

When its greed becomes so rank that the national legislature smells it and starts threatening to take away its tax exemption, the NCAA shifts from, as Cook says, its basic money money money orientation to a we’re all about educating America’s kids orientation …

Amazingly, this approach continues to work, even in the face of a system that schedules farcical football games like the one coming up between the University of Florida and Charleston Southern. Point spread: 73 points. Why does Charleston Southern do it?

Two reasons.

One, as Ron Morris points out, Florida will pay Charleston Southern $450,000 to play with it.

Two: It’s an act of God. “There’s a lot of parallels you can use with regard to faith, and for us to be in this position [the speaker is Charleston’s coach] is an act of God, first and foremost.”

What sort of loving God would allow that point spread?

… for my other blog, over at Inside Higher Education.

Title: RICHARD POIRIER, VAGUELY

Link to the post: HERE.