Robert Smith, provost at Texas Tech, says, in the Houston Chronicle, that professors at public universities are moonlighting at the for-profits.

… During a panel discussion on “For-Profit Education” at the July 2010 meeting of the Council on Academic Affairs of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) in Portland, Ore., the president of The Art Institute of Portland and the chief academic officer at the University of Phoenix (UP) were questioned about how many members of their faculties held full-time jobs at public institutions.

… [T]he UP official responded: “Oh, we hire a lot of your faculty,” meaning faculty members in the 188 public institutions represented by APLU.

A follow-up question revolved around measures UP does or does not take to determine if those same public institution employees have permission from their public employers to teach at UP, which has more than 450,000 students, with all but 100,000 taking courses online. The response: “We leave that up to the individual.” Finally, the UP official was asked whether UP would be willing to publish names and addresses of its faculty employees. His reply: “We’ll have to think about that.” [What sort of university doesn’t list its faculty members? In its catalogue?]

… Are the profits of UP and other for-profit institutions coming at the expense of taxpayers — federal and state – as well as parents and students paying tuition at public institutions?

This is a new one on UD, some extra-credit corruption in an already impressively corrupt industry.

No wonder that Cal State Bakersfield professor handling 700 online students in an intro math class had trouble getting many of them to pass the course. The same guy was probably handling 14,000 Phoenix students.

Excerpts from Online Education: You Get What You Pay For, by Brian Fogarty in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

… Academe, the established nonprofit colleges — public and private — are being forced into competition with the fast-degree industry. Their response has been to adopt a corporate-style business model: On the one hand, cut costs by increasing class sizes and hiring more part-time faculty; on the other, grow and diversify in order to weather ups and downs in the supply of new students.

The problem is that the first option reduces quality, while the second incurs new marketing and administrative costs.

… The rush to market cheap and easy education threatens to gut [the] upper-middle range of institutions and create a two-tiered system of higher education. Many of America’s quality, nonelite colleges and universities will be pressured by competition to offer more and more prepackaged curricula, “managed” by de-skilled and part-time faculty, to appease consumer demand for cheaper and faster diplomas.

A few students will still go to the elite schools — enjoying real interaction with real professors — while the rest are consigned to the discount bin.

… A student taking classes online is immersed in a whirl of distractions — the gong of arriving e-mail, instant messaging, Facebook updates, online games and all the rest. The problem with i-College is that it fails to provide the one thing that a genuine college experience offers: an environment completely dedicated, if only for short periods at a time, to the world of ideas and the process of learning…

Here Fogarty isolates the specific nature of the thing we call a college or a university: It is a world apart, an entire intellectual environment — a location Bartlett Giamatti called a free and ordered space.

The university is free in that it is committed to free inquiry, free social engagement, free personal exploration; it wants to give young people scope to be reflective and daring and changed. But it is also ordered in that the campus is a physically constrained, historically established, and rule-bound place. You enter its gates — real or metaphorical (Even urban campuses like UD‘s GW, or like NYU, have a university presence of their own that sets them apart from the city around them.) — and you enter an institution with rituals, traditions, established moral and intellectual commitments…

Above all, the university stages, every day, the life of the mind. In the classroom, it offers difficult and rewarding and disciplined inquiry as a possible model for one’s life. The university wants to seduce you into its world, wants to appeal to your seriousness.

Although your professors wish you well, they are not thinking, as they engage you in their classrooms, about what job you’re going to get when you graduate. They are thinking about lighting a fire under your ass about a certain subject matter. They scan your faces, they ask you leading questions, in order to see whether there’s any smoke coming out of you.

Did you read any of Tony Judt’s obits? If a student of his missed one class — just one class — Judt sent the student a hectoring email. Get back in here! I want to see you every day! I’m giving you my all. You give me your all.

Sure, the university is a free space. You’re free to do many things, and the university wants you to have that freedom, because ideally your four years will turn out to have been a lasting synthesis of free thought and free social engagement. But under that experimental looseness lies the deadly serious ethos of real education, an ethos embodied by Judt’s insistence on your full presence in the world of the mind, your simple, committed being there. Those love notes from Judt meant that he needed you — needed your physical presence to share a space with his, needed the dialectic of his mind and yours, the clash of your ages, temperaments, cynicisms, personal histories, suspicions, hostilities, passions, all of it, you’ve got to bring it. It doesn’t work without you.

The Times of India:

[S]ome B-schools in [Bangalore] are seeing to it that students use laptops only when the `subject demands’, unlike the earlier no-holds-bar[red] usage.

… [W]hen students are permitted to get laptops for lectures, they either start surfing the net or chat online. The move is only to minimize such distractions in classrooms.

… [One school] defends the move on the grounds that engagement with laptops reduce[s] physical contact with teachers and interaction in classroom.

From an essay about writers and immortality, in the New York Times:

[I]n a new novel, “The Imperfectionists,” by Tom Rachman, … one of his characters, an obituary writer, interviews an aging feminist intellectual, Gerda Erzberger, who is dying of cancer. In a room that “smells of strong tobacco and of hospital,” she tells him that the greatest force in the universe is ambition.

“Even from earliest childhood it dominated me,” she said. “I longed for achievements, to be influential — that, in particular. To sway people. This has been my religion: the belief that I deserve attention, that they are wrong not to listen, that those who dispute me are fools.”

A hotel in Amsterdam.

You know how happy birthday presents make you! Toys!! Toys!!!

Now listen carefully to Mr. Weiler, boys and girls. Your university got a birthday present. From its best friend, Mr. Knight. A wonderful shiny present.

This present looks so pretty! See the present? Pretty presents are pretty!

… “Its a really nice building,” University sports marketing senior Taber Webb said, “but I don’t understand why the best building on campus is reserved for less than one percent of the student population. My tuition is spiking every year because supposedly Oregon doesn’t have enough money, but then you see things like Jaqua and its quartz stone fireplace on the first floor, and you begin to wonder what the deal is.”

… University spokesperson Phil Weiler emphasized that the Jaqua Center was a gift from Knight and the University had no control over how the donated money was spent.

“The building was a gift,” Weiler told the Oregonian. “When someone buys you a birthday present, you don’t ask them how much they spent for it.” …

Someone bought you a present, Taber! A pretty present!

UD‘s often had occasion to feature hucksters on American medical school faculties, researchers whose work is farcically compromised by their massive financial interests in – and often active advertising of – the compounds they’re studying.

She’s particularly intrigued when members in excellent standing of the country’s highest mandarinate are exposed.

David Sinclair, of Harvard medical school, has already embarrassed himself and Harvard with his excited endorsement of longevity supplements. University Diaries covered the scandal here. Here he is using patented huckster language (A MIRACLE!) during an interview with the New York Times.

Now Sinclair’s corporate colleague, Christoph Westphal, on the Board of Fellows of Harvard Medical School, has also gotten into trouble over the same miraculous longevity compound (the compound seems likely to shorten both Sinclair’s and Westphal’s life via stress). Although an employee of Glaxo, which has rights to the compound, Westphal’s been selling it (or a close relative) via the website of a nonprofit he runs (How can it be a nonprofit if… ?).

Pharmalot explains (UD thanks Barney for the link):

Two years ago, Glaxo ponied up $720 million to buy Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, which is famous for trying to develop medicines based on a chemical in red wine known as resveratrol. This generated intense interest because it may have an effect on aging … The science has since been questioned, but meanwhile, two key Sirtris execs assumed important roles within Glaxo’s hiearchy – Michelle Dipp became senior vp of Glaxo’s Center of Excellence for External Drug Discovery and Christoph Westphal now heads SR One, a venture capital unit.

As it turns out, this dynamic duo had joined a non-profit called the Healthy Lifespan Institute to sell resveratrol supplements online …

… Glaxo didn’t know about the online sales. A Glaxo spokeswoman writes us: “Until today, Glaxo was not aware that the Health Lifespan Institute was selling a resveratrol formulation on the Internet.” And so, the drugmaker has “instructed” Dipp and Westphal to “cease their association with this activity.” Consequently, the pair will also resign from the non-profit board…

The spokeswoman adds that the formulation of resveratrol sold by the non-profit is not identical to the one Glaxo has been testing, an effort to reassure investors that its research was not being undermined by two of its own executives…

The Wall Street Journal covers the story here; here’s the New York Times.

You’ve got a Harvard med school faculty member and a Board Fellow of Harvard med. This is seriously hoitsy toitsy stuff. But these guys are so hungry for money — even though when they sold their business to Glaxo awhile back they made zillions — that they’re beginning to be a problem. Harvard, you know, is a university.

… minutes.

… the University of Florida.

Highlights:

… [Football coach Urban] Meyer is essentially a crook. For a head coach who prides himself on supposed discipline and intensity, it’s a joke that he is the leader of a team that has had over two dozen players arrested in his first four seasons at Florida.

… The NFL loves to sit back and wonder why it has had such a problem over the years with violence off the field. Players like Ray Lewis, Donte Stallworth, Adam “Pacman” Jones, Plaxico Burress and Matt Jones were all stellar college athletes given every chance to succeed.

… The NFL will continue to work hard on its end, but the problem really starts with these powerful college programs. The University of Florida obviously values football victories over morality…

More on what beauty is, as UD prepares to teach aesthetics this semester.

A New York Times blogger proposes that the recognition of one’s own ugliness can be a spur to philosophy:

That original self-conscious, slightly despairing glance in the mirror (together with, “Is this it?” or “Is that all there is?”) is a great enabler because it compels us to seek improvement. The transcendent is right here right now. What we transcend is our selves. And we can (I am quoting Sartre here) transascend or transdescend. The inevitable dissatisfaction with one’s own appearance is the engine not only of philosophy but of civil society at large.

As long as we try to be beautiful, we evade our essentially imperfect – improvable – human condition:

In trying to be beautiful, we are trying to be like God (the “for-itself-in-itself” as Sartre rebarbatively put it). In other words, to become like a perfect thing, an icon of perfection, and this we can never fully attain.

Those who, like Sartre, acknowledge their inescapable ugliness early, are more liable to be able to philosophize. Indeed, the beautiful among us must, if they wish to be serious in this way, mar their looks:

I suspect that the day Britney Spears shaved her own hair off represented a kind of Sartrean or Socratic argument (rather than, say, a nervous breakdown). She was, in effect, by the use of appearance, shrewdly de-mythifying beauty. The hair lies on the floor, “inexplicably faded” (Sartre), and the conventional notion of femininity likewise. I see Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot in a similar light: one by dying, the other by remaining alive, were trying to deviate from and deflate their iconic status… Perhaps this explains why Camus, Sartre’s more dashing sparring partner, jotted down in his notebooks, “Beauty is unbearable and drives us to despair.”

UD‘s been writing about an exhibit, in Austria, of North Korean propaganda paintings.

A New York Times reporter has described the event, and it turns out that UD‘s initial assumption about the art for art’s sake attitude of the organizers (Don’t know, don’t care, about politics; this is about art.) was ill-founded.

[The] catalog essay lament[s] that “our Western ideological lenses cloud, if not entirely distort, the view of other realities” and urg[es] museumgoers to “bid farewell once and for all to Eurocentric and culturally imperialistic attitudes.” The show … “proves that cultural differences can be bridged with mutual respect.”

Listen to this prose. Read it out loud.

It comes from the bellowing mouth of a beribboned teenager at a Pyongyang youth rally. BID FAREWELL ONCE AND FOR ALL TO CULTURALLY IMPERIALIST ATTITUDES.

*******************************

UD is about to teach a course called Aesthetics at George Washington University.

She has been collecting a file of current events in America and elsewhere that have a bearing on beauty and art and politics and morality. Stuff like the Italian Vogue oil thing …

Along these lines, the New York Times piece on the North Korean exhibit quotes the German paper, Die Welt, calling the show “obscene.”

[I]n a “terror regime” like North Korea there is “no perceptible visual art according to an acceptable understanding of any sort.”

In a sense, that’s the whole burden of my aesthetics course – maybe of any serious thinking about aesthetics. What sort of acceptable understandings are we talking about? Where does Die Welt get the confidence to call any public exhibit of created images obscene? How is it able both to declare this work not art, and to claim that a terror regime like North Korea’s cannot produce art?

I mean, let’s imagine a Western spectator of these big blow-up cartoon North Korean propaganda images who finds them a pleasing accompaniment to the very similar cartoon images – Asian and otherwise – she spends all of her time looking at, on screens, and in comic books. Her aesthetic life is entirely about moving from one hypertrophic set of cartoon images to another; the North Korean images are more of the same…

Or think of the character Molina in Kiss of the Spiderwoman, adoring the romance of his fascist propaganda tales.

***********************************

One thing to say about all of these examples – the Vogue oil images, the Nazi love stories, the North Korean paintings – is that they cast the aura of art over their content. They glamorize – aestheticize – make beautiful – ugly things, thereby both diverting our attention from the ugly things in their political and social actuality, and making the ugly things charismatic, alluring, chic, offbeat.

In the case of the Korean objects, exhibits like the one in Austria help make them sought-after consumer items as well. There’s already a hot market, among sophisticated European collectors, for Korean propaganda art; exhibits like this one, that honor and mainstream the work, strengthen the market for it. Similarly, the Vogue oil images are accompanied by ads for grunge chic, the look that goes with the Roseate Spoonbill corpse you carry with you.

Ellen Schrecker, in Forbes, describes the process whereby tenured professors become contingent instructors who in turn become internet traffic directors.

She begins with a story.

… California State University’s Bakersfield campus decided to cut costs by replacing all the sections of the remedial mathematics course in the fall of 2009 with an online computer program overseen by a single instructor. Unfortunately substituting the Internet for personal contact with a classroom teacher proved disastrous, especially for the 700-plus ill-prepared undergraduates who needed intensive work to bring their math skills to a college level. When these students took their final exams only about 40% passed, compared with a 75% success rate the prior year.

One instructor, 700 students. Online. What could go wrong?

… gets us all fired up for more techno-classrooms as fall semester approaches.

… [M]ass information technology out of the box was not developed for education.

Microsoft Office is great value at academic discounts. But Word has become a mini-desktop publishing and collaboration program for corporate users, Excel’s statistical analysis and graphing are limited, while its mainstream financial power is more impressive. And the bulleted style of PowerPoint, while widely used, has inspired a classic of academic backlash…

Quite the green thumb.

Ruby Hamad, an Australian-born Muslim, writes in the Sydney Morning Herald:

… [B]y decrying all criticism of the burqa as bigoted, we are actually consolidating its previously tenuous position within mainstream Islam in Australia, and thus hindering the religion’s progression in this country.

When even the so-called permissive West is staunchly defending an article of clothing whose primary function is to deny the sexual autonomy of a human being based on nothing other than her gender, what recourse does a lone Muslim woman have to stand against it?…