You can’t say Tom Harkin didn’t warn you.

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You know, fraud for fraud, diploma mills are looking a hell of a lot better to UD at this point than the for-profits.

The for-profits are getting all of this attention… And unlike the fly-by-night diploma mills, the for-profits, who have fancy people like ex-Princeton president Harold Shapiro running them, aren’t going away…

What I mean is, if you’re like Massachusetts politician Jeff Perry, and you’ve bought a diploma mill degree, and your congressional campaign’s tanking because people are laughing at you about it, you can say Look, the place was shut down by the authorities. The president’s in jail. I was the innocent victim of a fraud.

It’s much harder to dissociate yourself from the for-profits.

Not only that, but the diploma mill transaction is a straightforward one-shot deal: You pay $1,000, you get a PhD, end of story. No loans, no muss, no fuss.

… under an incredibly violent, sudden, early morning thunderstorm.

August in Washington is all about hot afternoons with thunderstorms at the end of them, yes, but here’s something else: A storm that woke me at seven with what sounded like a direct hit on one of our trees. It scared me.

How can it be that there’s still electricity, still internet? How can I be writing this to you? Won’t my words be writ in water (Jeez. Another heavy hit just to the left of my windows.) in a matter of seconds? I’ll post this so that you and I have proof PEPCO allowed us this much …

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Long rolling thunder. Though at least now I can see something out of my windows.

Our lights have flickered, but we’re still connected.

Two fast-moving streams have formed on either side of my house. They rush out to the street, where they join the Rokeby Avenue rapids.

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The storm’s moved off. What’s left are dark green walls. That’s all I can see — massive trees darkly shining.

… has a post up which distinguishes the responses of atheists and Christians when fear-and-trembling-and-sickness-unto-death starts up.

Like many commentators, Linker is moved and meditative at the spectacle of Christopher Hitchens talking with his characteristic candor about death.

Linker cautions us to expect no deathbed conversions from a confirmed atheist like Hitchens. When immediately threatened with suffering and extinction, atheists might be tempted, as Primo Levi once was, at Auschwitz, to beg for divine intervention; but Linker quotes Levi writing that if he had given in to this, he would have felt ashamed. It would have been a betrayal of the truth.

For the religious, Linker suggests, moments of deep anguish are precious epiphanic events that transport us to the truth of our fragile humanity, and our related dependence on God to grant meaning and transcendence to an otherwise pointless, debilitated, and unredeemed existence. For non-believers, on the other hand:

… [A] person’s capacity to determine the truth depends on his or her ability to think calmly, coolly, dispassionately. It depends on the capacity to bracket aspects of one’s subjectivity (like intense emotions, including fear of imminent death) that might distort one’s judgment or obstruct the effort to achieve an unbiased, objective view of the world in itself.

Religious people tend to believe that “human beings are truest to themselves — most authentic — when they are most vulnerable.” For “the champion of rational enlightenment, the secular intellectual and social critic,” on the other hand, episodes of naked vulnerability represent reversions to the animal incomprehension and fear ever at work beneath our efforts toward understanding.

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While this seems to me broadly speaking a useful distinction, it overlooks some important things. It presents too stark an either/or. If you consider secular intellectuals and artists like Hitchens, Richard Rorty, and Vladimir Nabokov, say, you discover that they seem impelled as much by a profound Romanticism as by reason.

On the edge of his own death, Rorty wrote that “reason can only follow paths that the imagination has first broken.”

Family members, Rorty reports, have asked him if, at this moment of greatest vulnerability, he has felt the pull of religious faith.

No. Neither philosophy nor religion seems to provide ballast.

…[N]either the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

Only poetry comforts and clarifies. Rorty repeatedly recites certain lines to himself:

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Calming but wholly human mantras, these, that take one intimately to what Hitchens in his autobiography calls “the fragility of love.” They pull us back from the precipice, at least emotionally, and strengthen us in the anticipation of our descent.

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Hitchens recently quoted — somewhat misquoted, but who cares — E.M. Forster: “Get on with your own work, and behave as if you were immortal.”

When you can’t get away with doing that anymore, it’s time to gather in to yourself your essential identity, an identity you share with many other people whose “temple,” Forster also writes (quoting him correctly here), “is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and [whose] kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.”

… readers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Log, a group blog dedicated to cognitive science.

If you’ve come here to scan UD‘s comments on the Marc Hauser story, here they are.

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UD has opinions about everything else, too, so feel free to poke around.

… is the ninth most expensive institution of higher learning in America. UD has visited its beautiful verdant campus, full of smart preppy students and excellent teacher/scholars.

Trinity gave Steven Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the Washington Post, the sophisticated literacy, the social polish, the cultural knowledge, and the personal contacts to launch a successful, high-profile, and lucrative career. UD‘s guessing that this sort of future is what Pearlstein, and his family, wanted for him when, as an eighteen-year-old, he began to consider what college to attend. They rightly figured that the expense of Trinity was worth it for the quality of understanding and the depth of experience it could give him.

But that was Steven Pearlstein. For the rest of America, as Pearlstein writes in his defense of for-profit universities, the for-profit approach is good enough.

There is no reason that these cost-effective new ways of teaching and learning [the almost-exclusive use of online technology by the for-profits, that is] couldn’t be used effectively at traditional universities other than that they would disrupt just about everything — routines, hierarchies, to say nothing of the incomes and job security of the tenured faculty. That pretty much explains why the higher education establishment has been reluctant to embrace new technology and methods. The usual explanation is that education is not a commodity, that the process of learning and teaching is too nuanced, that the quality will suffer.

Put aside the fact that the for-profits are not at all cost-effective — they cost a fortune, much more than community colleges offering similar courses — and focus rather on the curious and specific high-handedness of Pearlstein’s approach to the for-profit problem.

He begins his defense by noting that Kaplan, a big shady for-profit educational outfit, is part of the Washington Post Co., but that “we in the Post newsroom have nothing to do with it.” It’s just back there somewhere, generating way-impressive profits for the newspaper (Pearlstein, a business writer, might ask himself how Kaplan can do that if its tuition is so low), but we don’t dirty our hands with it… He spends no time in his opinion piece doing what you’d expect him to do — to reckon, at least initially, with his own in-house for-profit scandal.

Indeed the Post newsroom has everything to do with Kaplan, since it is part of their corporation, and its ethical lapses are tarnishing the Post by association. Not only that, but Pearlstein’s salary and job at the sinking Post depend, presumably, on Kaplan staying afloat. There is a conflict of interest here that should have been addressed. You wouldn’t want to look as though you’re rushing to the defense of for-profits because your newspaper’s already shaky value is now much shakier in the wake of the congressional investigations of for-profits. (Kaplan was one of the fifteen big offenders in the GAO’s investigation.)

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The for-profit university industry in general is one Pearlstein has chosen to have nothing with which to do, although it was certainly up and running when he went to college. (I don’t know if he has children, or how old they are. If they’re college age, are they at Phoenix?) He and his family went to enormous expense to put themselves among the hierarchies, tenured faculty, and nuanced learning of Trinity College.

Yet now Pearlstein condemns the world of the Trinities as “the establishment,” thick with tenured elitists grasping at privileges.

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Tenure, as Timothy Burke notes, is decidedly on its way out at American universities. And most universities, including Berkeley, are busy onlining themselves.

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I mean, go ahead and defend the for-profits. Attack the non-profits. This blog attacks the non-profits all the time.

But better not to do it via hauteur and hypocrisy.

… explains to an interviewer that he was a hideously bad writer until…

What turned you around?

Going to school was the big thing for me. I read voraciously but I don’t think I understood half of what I read. Taking a simple lit analysis class was eye-opening. I was able to see the technique that went into great writing. It’s more than drinking a lot and scowling.

College – at least college as it used to be, complete with lit analysis classes – can make a difference.

The Wall Street Journal article includes a clip from the film.

Here’s the film’s trailer.

So says the Bulgarian diaspora minister about a remark he made last week. He was enraged by a group of Bulgarian archaeologists who might have found relics of St John the Baptist in that country, but want to wait for authentication.

The minister’s thing is Why wait? The whole area around the relics can be transformed into pilgrimage tourism. Now.

“Why, damn it, why, where is all this envy coming from?! This is what I cannot find an explanation with this fucking people, with these fucking colleagues.”

He also seems to have insulted the women of Bulgaria. Plus Ancient Thrace.

Anyway, it’s interesting to learn that fuck doesn’t have a pejorative connotation in Bulgarian.

Google Translator gives me дяволите, which does seem innocent enough.

Though when you put дяволите back into Google Translator for the English, it comes out DAMN.

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, wrote this last month about the “moral naturalists,” a group of evolutionary psychologists who argue that we’ve evolved an innate moral grammar, rather like Chomsky’s innate linguistic grammar.

He features the work of Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser:

… Hauser … began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate. By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense.

Yet now, with a heavy-handed irony that seems more the realm of fiction than real life, Hauser’s own morality is in serious question. He has taken leave from Harvard as a major investigation into his possible research fraud continues.

As far back as fifteen years ago, Hauser’s methods and results were being seriously challenged. He routinely seems to make claims about primate behavior unsupported by evidence, and has already retracted one influential paper.

“If scientists can’t trust published papers,” comments a fellow researcher, “the whole process breaks down.’’

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The subtitle of Hauser’s forthcoming book deepens the irony: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.

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UPDATE: Interesting to see that, back in ’06, Richard Rorty sensed some bullshit at work here.

The exuberant triumphalism of the prologue to “Moral Minds” leads the reader to expect that Hauser will lay out criteria for distinguishing parochial moral codes from universal principles, and will offer at least a tentative list of those principles. These expectations are not fulfilled. The vast bulk of “Moral Minds” consists of reports of experimental results, but Hauser does very little to make clear how these results bear on his claim that there is a “moral voice of our species.”

So okay here we are mid-August and we’re starting to get all the stories about how if you study the tech phenom it turns out that laptops and iPads and e-readers and e-textbooks make you learn less well. Here’s a recent story.

The reason that student up there in my headline stays with regular textbooks is that they force you to stay focused on one thing, and they force, as well, an active intellectual relationship to an argument, narrative, formula, whatever. It’s just your mind and the text, just you alone grappling with a particular aspect of history or science or art as it unfolds, as it presents itself in a certain chronological fashion.

Writers of textbooks work hard to introduce a topic, give some background, start with easy stuff, move up to more difficult stuff, etc. If you aren’t able to follow the course of this presentation, you are unlikely to absorb what the book wants you to absorb.

You absorb this material because your focused, engaged mind is allowed independently, over time, to shape an understanding of a certain thing, to see an idea emerge naturally from earlier ideas, to see how ideas develop and become more complex, etc. One researcher says:

“When I asked study participants why they didn’t use their laptops to look something up, I heard some version of ‘because that’s my distraction.’ “

With a laptop, you’re all over the place – Facebook for five minutes, something vaguely relevant to what you’re studying for three minutes, email for seven minutes, French taunting in Monty Python and the Holy Grail for six minutes. You simply can’t think straight.

“[W]ho is [online] right for?” asks a community college president. “[I]t’s really great for certain groups of students, but … to be online, you have to be very self-disciplined. It’s one thing to get up for a 7:00 a.m. class. It’s another thing to see your computer, and you can either play … some cool computer game with guns and stuff, or you can do your economics class. Probably the temptation for some students is not to do the econ class, and so we still probably need to think about ways to really make a connection with students, and really with faculty.”

All of this is obvious, mes enfants.

But it doesn’t matter. As with anti-depressants, there’s a universal market in these goods, and they’ll get shoved down our throats.

Admit it. Haven’t we all wanted to do just this?

A professor at an Indian university refused to teach in a burqa. The student union told her she had to.

The university refused to back her up. She went to the media and made a humongous fuss.

In the wake of a “public outcry,” the minority affairs minister intervened.

After not being able to teach for three months, she is back in the classroom. No burqa.

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Says here that all of the other women teaching at this university have agreed to wear the burqa.

Now that Sirin Middya has lifted the veil, I wouldn’t be too sure about that.

… Beetle.

… note the caption accompanying this photograph of model Naomi Campbell (currently in a bit of trouble over diamonds she got from Charles Taylor) on her way to her court-mandated community service stint a few years ago.

As ever, Barmak Nassirian says it best. Here his subject is the recent exposure of systemic corruption among for-profit universities; and Jennifer Epstein, reporter for Inside Higher Ed, rightly concludes her long piece updating the for-profit story with his remark:

“If [for-profits] really wanted to seriously enforce any kind of a code of ethics, the whole business model would be upended because the business model here is consumer fraud,” he said. “The margins involved can only be produced if you can shortchange people on the substance of what you purportedly sell, which is education.”

In other words, if they stop lying to hordes of clueless applicants in order to get them to enroll in their school — at which point investors and management at the schools enrich themselves via the federal education loans that attach to said people — if they stop doing this, their very industry collapses. I’ve just described, as Nassirian says, the for-profit business model.

UD loves the way the industry has been, throughout this inevitable congressional exposure, desperately pressing every button in the populist cockpit, hoping to get enough lift not to crash. Here’s a representative of an industry trade group back in June, before the shit hit the fan:

“Elitist Wall Street stock manipulators, rather than higher education experts, have been driving hyperbolic media coverage, creating the impression that outliers are the norm, and insulting millions of hardworking students and graduates in the process. We have every expectation that the GAO, using facts and figures, will provide a full and fair review.”

UD’s been covering the industry for years and she can’t tell you how much of this crap she’s read. Ooh that elitist Harvard with its elitist president — whose salary, around $800,000, compares curiously with the typical salaries of her for-profit peers — from five to ten million dollars a year…

But they’re working hard for the hardworking real people! Why can’t ordinary hardworking American ever catch a break? It’s not insulting for CEO’s to make millions of dollars at the expense of misinformed people who want to better themselves; it’s insulting for the media to cover the story.

… [Harry] Whittington’s work was brought to widespread popular attention by Stephen Jay Gould in his 1989 bestseller Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.

[F]ew would dispute Gould’s observation that, in his description of the Burgess Shales, Whittington had undertaken some of the most elegant technical work ever accomplished in palaeontology. Gould added that if there was a Nobel Prize in the subject, Whittington and his research team should be the first recipients.

… [Whittington’s removal as chair of a department during an administrative shakeup] probably came as something of a relief to [him], who was in any case too modest a man to care much about status.

His official retirement from the [Cambridge] Woodwardian professorship in 1983 made no difference to Whittington’s routine and he continued to put in a steady morning’s work at the Department of Earth Sciences every day until shortly before his death.

Of some 200 published papers, around 50 were published after his retirement, the last in 2009 shortly before his 93rd birthday…