… writing an Inside Higher Education post. Title: LEMONIZING THE UNIVERSITY.
No, not demonizing. Lemonizing. Should be up in a few minutes.
…Ooh. Just checked. It’s up.
Joan Gussow, locavore, is interviewed in the New York Times about reconstructing her garden along the Hudson River after floods.
The NYT writer quotes from one of Gussow’s memoirs, in which
[Ms. Gussow writes] that, to her surprise, she did not miss her husband [after he died], or even grieve for him.
“I kept experiencing it as a strange liberation from things I hadn’t known I was imprisoned by,” she writes.
… a great love poet, has died.
UD finds this YouTube of Scots reciting some of his poems beautiful and moving.
From an opinion piece in the Washington Post. The author, a sports lawyer, calls for the privatization of university football.
… [T]he sole focus for many star college players is getting ready for pro ball … [C]oaches are looking for financial security on the backs of teenagers … There isn’t anything inherently wrong with these goals…
True, true. Mr UD and I have always sought financial security on the back of La Kid. And people with full scholarships to American universities should certainly spend that money getting ready to play pro ball. Yes.
… for UD is receiving review copies of books on subjects of interest to her and her readers. UD knows that truly fancy people find getting these things annoying.
[click on the image for a larger view]
Indeed one of UD‘s memories from a long-ago weekend in John Kenneth Galbraith’s Vermont house involves her coming across, on a table by his bed, an enormous pile of review copies of all sorts of books. UD sat down in an ecstasy and lost herself in these just-published goodies, but it was clear that JKG himself didn’t feel as happy about it.
UD just picked up, at the Garrett Park post office (remember that her town doesn’t get home delivery), a review copy of White Coat Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, by Carl Elliott. She’s reading it now.
… eloquently defends the fundamental principles of universities against forces of reaction.
Background on Menachem Mautner.
Miami Today:
… When [Florida International University] got into big-time football in 2003 it charged all students $30 a year in athletic fees to help shoulder the load. By this year, an FIU student taking 15 credit hours per semester is paying more than $435 a year in athletic fees.
For all of that sports zeal, FIU’s conference ranks near bottom on sports — and academic — spending. The Sun Belt Conference was spending $41,895 per athlete per year in 2008, but just $9,691 for all students for academics…
A tamarin monkey named Wowzer
Worked closely with Dr. Marc Hauser.
Her lifestyle was fab
She had run of the lab
But nothing he did could arouse her.
A Perth judge has ordered that a Muslim woman must remove a full burqa while giving evidence before a jury in a fraud case.
Judge Shauna Deane today ruled that the witness must remove her niqab, or burqa face covering when she gives evidence to the jury…
… a nicely written but somewhat bland and evasive review of a new book about American universities. It’s in the New York Times book review section. Here.
UD wrote about the same book here.
President Knapp’s response to the authors’ call for universities to drop their medical schools, for instance, is rather weak:
Consider, for instance, the proposal that universities divest themselves of medical schools: they are, the authors think, too distracting and costly, if not in dollars, then in their demands on a president’s attention. A tempting suggestion, many a president will agree!
But what an odd suggestion from the pen of authors who lament the self-enclosure of traditional academic disciplines. This is an era, after all, in which some of the most searching inquiry — and most exciting teaching, including the teaching of undergraduates — is taking place precisely at the intersection of medicine and other fields, not just engineering and physics but also fields like anthropology and history. It is a time when some of our most engaged undergraduates are fascinated by fields like global health, which brings medicine and the social and human sciences together in ways more rich and subtle than students of my generation could have imagined. And where are the humanities more alive, right here and now, than in seminars in bioethics that expose undergraduates to searing and quite possibly unanswerable questions about the beginning and end of life?
I mean, maybe — I’m not sure Knapp’s right that this is the hottest deal in the humanities at the moment. But what’s more important is his implicit characterization of medical schools as bursting with intellectuals who want to lead bioethics seminars. Aside from the fact that you typically draw such people not from medical schools but from philosophy and the social sciences (and maybe law), his comment overlooks the fact that med schools are mainly about practicing physicians and empirical research.
Anyway, Knapp doesn’t engage with the authors’ larger point – that major institutional distractions (athletics and professional schools, mainly) and an overvaluation of research over pedagogy, have combined to degrade the essential function of a university: high-level teaching.
A blogger at the Washington Post offers local examples of university presidents getting themselves and their universities in trouble by sitting – and doing nothing – on corporate boards.
… John Casteen III, who has just left the presidency of the University of Virginia, [was] a director of Wachovia Corp. for years, before the North Carolina bank racked up losses of $23.88 billion in 2008 and was forced into a shotgun merger with Wells Fargo National Bank, using taxpayer bailout money.
Wachovia stumbled because it got involved in subprime mortgages, notably by buying Golden West, a subprime mortgage lender. Casteen, who did not respond to questions, was on the board during that takeover and throughout all of the drama when the financial crisis hit in late 2007, spelling doom for Wachovia.
Today, Casteen is a defendant in a massive lawsuit brought on by pension fund managers who say they were cheated by Wachovia. If that weren’t enough, Wachovia has settled with the federal government by paying fines of $160 million for its involvement in the laundering of drug money through Mexican currency exchange houses, something that occurred when Casteen was on the board. In 2007, Casteen’s total compensation amounted to $243,500 from his service on Wachovia’s board and stock ownership…
The writer offers other examples.
… the literary critic, has died.
The New York Times.
… [H]e almost invariably tied what he wrote to a recurring central concern of his: what the English literary critic Lawrence S. Rainey, writing in the London newspaper The Independent, described as “the conflict between the human need to make sense of the world through storytelling and our propensity to seek meaning in details (linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are indifferent, even hostile, to story.”
For instance, in his best-known book, “The Sense of an Ending,” Mr. Kermode analyzed the fictions we invent to bring meaning and order to a world that often seems chaotic and hurtling toward catastrophe. Between the tick and the tock of the clock, as he put it, we want a connection as well as the suggestion of an arrow shooting eschatologically toward some final judgment.
Yet, as he pointed out in “The Genesis of Secrecy,” narratives, just like life, can include details that defy interpretation, like the Man in the Mackintosh who keeps showing up in Joyce’s “Ulysses” …