Sing it.

Good Christian men rejoice
With heart and soul and voice!
Give ye heed to what we say
News! News!
Eight-page essay due today!
Tell us of the packing tape
Tell us of the anal rape
Play the game today!
Play the game today!

Good Christian men, rejoice
With heart and soul and voice
Now ye need not fear the law:
Peace! Peace!
All for one and one for all
Wheaton College hides your shame
So you can play His glorious game
You were born to play
You were born to play

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

UD thanks Jay and dmf.

Laura Kipnis’s endlessly repeated Title IX investigations at UD‘s befuddled alma mater, Northwestern University, begin to sound like the famous Beatles song. She keeps getting investigated for sex discrimination and found not guilty of it. Her life is heading into Groundhog Day territory, waking up every morning to the same effort to nail her for nastiness.

She wrote about her first investigation in a recent book:

Her prior Title IX investigation, she writes, “has made me a little mad and possibly a little dangerous. . . . I mean, having been hauled up on complaints once, what do I have to lose? ‘Confidentiality’? ‘Conduct befitting a professor’? Kiss my ass.”

Failing to bring her down via Number Nine, Northwestern tried to ruin her for incivility.

The dean ultimately found that Kipnis did not violate the civility policy…

Rats. How about her violations of The Free Woman policy? She’s been flouncing around being a free woman – can we go after her for that?

No. Let’s stick with Title IX. A law professor specifies, in the New Yorker, how it can be used:

Title IX can … be used to discourage disagreement, deter dissent, deflect scrutiny, or register disapproval of people whom colleagues find loathsome. The problem is not with Title IX itself, much less the generic capacity of any rule to be used as a pretext for unrelated ends. Rather, it is the growing tendency to try, in the words of Kipnis’s book, “to bend Title IX into an all-purpose bludgeon.” This warping is made possible by ambiguous and undisciplined understandings — misunderstandings — of sexual harassment and its harms… Title IX is too often conscripted to serve purposes antithetical to the education of citizens in a democracy, in which disagreement, dissent, or disapproval should lead to argument, not to an infinite loop of institutional investigation.

…response.

The University of North Carolina’s strongly expressed preference for professors who teach completely fictitious courses (which Nyang’oro did for years) over professors who want to teach courses that have actual content and class meetings and all means that history professor Jay Smith has been unable to teach his course in the history of college sports.

After all, this course, offered by a distinguished historian, is weighed down with actual intellectual material, whereas UNC prefers that its students earn their degrees by floating through sheer beautiful lovely fakery.

Kevin Guskiewicz, a dean who oversees the department, and Jim Dean, UNC’s previous provost, said that academic freedom “does not give individual faculty members the right to unilaterally decide what courses they will teach in a given semester or academic year.”

So true! The dean’s job is to make sure UNC maintains its strong brand as the go-to school for athletes who want to cheat their way to a degree; Smith represents legitimate academic activity, and therefore must be quashed.

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

Alas, the eyes of the world are still upon UNC onaccounta their latest fake courses scandal, and UNC has ultimately had to cave and allow this real course into its curriculum. Bummer.

UD loves this sentence from Edmund Wilson’s 1938 essay about Edith Wharton. Maybe because UD is such a tea drinker.

Kudos to Reed College, which has, under repressive conditions, found a way to continue to educate its students.

[Reed College professor] Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, a professor of religion and humanities, declined to lecture alongside [protesting] students who, he said, equated [his humanities] course — and by extension him — with white supremacy. He invited interested students to visit his office, and approximately 150 of them did so … resulting in an impromptu lecture.

Hidden in out of the way places, packed into private offices, the determined students of Reed pursue the life of the mind. It is the Polish Flying University system again. An underground system that has found its way – has had to find it way – to America.

… outs.

… a new challenge.

Add to speeding ambulances, long shrieking political motorcades, CIA test-drones, constant jet traffic, presidential helicopters, political demonstrations, and rats… hospital transport helicopters:

George Washington University Hospital’s effort to repeal the District’s ban on helicopter landing pads in residential areas ignores the real risk to public safety of helicopter accidents and blindly accepts the claimed benefits. Unfortunately, helicopters — including hospital transport helicopters — can crash, and hospital helicopters have crashed on hospital helipads. A crash in the densely populated Foggy Bottom/West End area — which includes a busy Metro station — could be catastrophic.

… in Ireland.

The skinny on Harvard fellows.

More time to work on his mousse treatment.

[Erwin] Sniedzins, who said he was on the hunt for a master’s degree to “validate” his professional and life experience, thought [Kings Lake University] was real.

“It felt like they were more legit than the other ones. Their website’s pretty good. And when you phone, you get someone there,” Sniedzins said.

After his experience was “validated” by the university, Sniedzins said he paid the $8,100 fee, and received a master’s degree in education, specializing in technology in education.

The university mailed him the degree and several other signed, stamped and apparently certified documents. He said he even received a graduation cap and gown.

Sniedzins repeatedly told CBC Toronto that he never suspected a degree based on life experience that required no academic work, studying or exams could be fake as it was in line with his approach to education.

… Any doubts Sniedzins may have had were also eased by what appears to be a sworn affidavit, included in his package of documents, supposedly signed by former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry.

“I really feel stupid if [it’s a diploma mill], and I’m angry about it,” Sniedzins said.

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

UD thanks Jack.

This blog has chronicled the ways some professors exploit the sitting ducks, the trapped rats, they encounter each week.

There’s the professor (now in jail) who on the first day of class had everyone write down their social security number and pass it forward to him. The professor who used her graduate students as slaves. The professors who forced their students to sell tickets to sports events for them. A professor who simply stood in front of his graduate students and told them to hand over $10,000 or else.

But the most venerable method of making hay out of your students is the buying-my-book-is-a-requirement thing. A perennial favorite, b-m-b-i-a-r takes many forms, the most recent on view in Australia, at RMIT University, where a bunch of guys in the business school made buying their extremely expensive e-book an inescapable expense for all:

College of Business students were told they had to purchase textbooks written by their lecturers to access the mandatory tests.

These textbooks were sold on a website which Fairfax Media has found is owned by an RMIT lecturer.

The site sells textbooks written by a number of RMIT Business lecturers.

… “Your grades are behind a paywall and your money went into the course coordinator’s pocket,” [one student] said.

Another student, Renata Majdandzic, said she only bought a textbook from the site so that she could sit her tests.

“I just wasted $60 on a book for nothing,” she said.

“I never even looked at these books but we have to pay for them just to do a test that should be included in the [university] fees”.

… commission, General “Buck” Mnuchin couldn’t have come at a better time.

UD has amused herself over the years, compiling various stupid maneuvers professors perform to avoid banning laptops in their classrooms.

There was York University’s Henry Kim:

Kim is fully aware that his students aren’t listening to him because they’re watching shit on their laptops. Instead of banning laptops, however, Kim has taken a page out of Erich Honecker’s East Germany and turned his students into a spy network. If a student sees another student using her laptop for non-class purposes (Kim has already had his students swear some ridiculous pledge, etc.), she is to report that to Kim.

“It’s not meant to be punitive — it’s almost like a thought experiment, and the whole point is to create a new social norm in my class.”

Comrade Honecker speaks! Creating new social norms by encouraging students to turn in other students – that’s the solution to the laptop problem!

And now there’s some person at the University of Pennsylvania:

I had a professor last year who had the TAs sit in the back of the lecture hall, where they could see the screens of the students using their laptops. If they saw someone goofing off or not simply taking notes, they would ring a bell, and everyone would have to close their laptops for several minutes before they could reopen them to continue taking notes. This didn’t help anyone focus; rather, it stirred up anger in the students, that they were being treated like animals who needed to respond to the ring of a bell.

Same basic Honecker approach – designate a person or persons who tell on the naughty laptop user – but I love the addition of a bell… Like Captain von Trapp’s dog whistle… Another thought experiment generating new social norms…