… at ScienceBlogs.
… reaches its apotheosis.
… James Stoner, chairman of [Louisiana State University’s] political science department, recently taped three 30-minute constitutional lectures for the new “Beck University,” which was announced Monday.
… “I read [Beck’s] use of ‘university’ as ironic or kind of a TV thing,” [said Stoner].
*****************************
Read all of UD‘s posts about online education by clicking on this post’s category. Or go here.
… is the title of UD‘s latest post at Inside Higher Ed.
I can’t find this apparently food-obsessed professor listed at Washington State.
A Washington State University faculty member is under arrest for Felony Voyeurism. He’s accused of taking a picture up the shorts of a 21-year-old student.
The student told Pullman Police that she caught 36-year-old Prodyut Kumar taking the picture while she was shopping at Safeway.
Officers were able to get video of Kumar taking the picture from the store’s security cameras. [Did he wait until she was, like, leaning over the apple bins? Or did he get on the floor and snap her?]
He was arrested at Sunnyside Park during the Pullman Fourth of July Celebration when an officer spotted him. [So many reassuring words – Sunnyside, Safeway… the Pullman Fourth of July Celebration! — revolving around such an untoward event.]
Officers also searched Kumar’s home computer for evidence.
Kumar is listed as a faculty member in the School of Food Sciences. [Can he claim this was part of his research?] He told officers he is a visiting scholar from India. [I’m finding a Professor Chew at their faculty page, but no Kumar. Chew teaches ADVANCE HUMAN NUTRITION. Is that an imperative, or a title?]
SOCIALISTS TO BOYCOTT BURKA VOTE
France’s opposition Socialist Party will refuse to vote on a bill banning full-face cover, the party’s MPs decided on Tuesday ahead of the opening of the parliamentary debate on the much-publicised proposal.
“We are against the burka but we believe that the means chosen to outlaw it are not good,” party leader Martine Aubry said after telling deputies that they should not take part in the vote scheduled for 13 July.
Earlier the Socialists were against passing a law on the question, arguing that the perceived problem is “marginal” and that President Nicolas Sarkozy was exploiting it to continue the “nauseating” debate on national identity.
But, after a year of intense debate and with opinion polls showing support for the move, they have backed away from outright opposition…
That’s it. Instead of at least taking part in the discussion, put your head in a sack and sulk.
I mean, franchement, if you hate the fucker, vote against it. If you think it’s an expression of personal liberty, vote for it. If you’re all je ne sais quoi about it, share your uncertainties in the political arena. Saperlipopette.
UD has written a longish post about Gillian Rose, Christopher Hitchens, and humanism, and sent it off to her other campus at Inside Higher Education. It will appear there at around noon today.
… and this seems right for it.
There’s no smog or honking in this commute. And the only rushing Ty Hopkins hears is the creek flowing alongside him as he pedals up and down the winding canyon roads. Sometimes, his iPod keeps him company, while other times, he quietly soaks up the early morning sun as it trickles through the treetops.
Just a simple morning bike ride.
A “simple” 36.75-mile-with-an-11-mile-uphill-climb-from-American-Fork-to-Provo ride. No biggie.
… [A] 39-year-old father of four girls and an associate professor in exercise science at BYU, [Hopkins] has always been a mountain biking aficionado, but he wasn’t really a cycling fan until he discovered that road bikes offered an incredibly convenient way to combine triathlon training and commuting.
So in the summer, rather than drive the 30 minutes from his American Fork home to his Richards Building office, he bikes it — just call it the 140-minute Alpine Loop extreme nature commute…
Fine, you’ve got to name the place your university’s teams play after the bank or the pizza parlor that paid for it. That’s tacky enough.
But the University of Louisville has taken corporate affiliation to a new level.
Before University of Louisville men’s basketball season-ticket holders started to choose their seats at the new KFC Yum! Center, the university set aside more than 6,000 for corporate sponsors and its own employees, students and friends of the school…
But let’s look closer at the article.
In interviews with more than two dozen [season ticket holders], many complained that they had to pay more to get less — seats higher and further away from mid-court than those they enjoyed at Freedom Hall.
Dr. George Nichols, Kentucky’s former chief medical examiner, said he was so mad at U of L for failing to honor his loyalty to Cardinal basketball that he told his alma mater he would never give it another dime.
Actuary Kenneth Hohman said he was so appalled with the seats available on the day he was to make his pick that he walked out and abandoned the season tickets he had had for 25 years.
“I always thought U of L valued loyalty,” said Hohman, who had asked to buy two seats in the first row of the second tier, “but I guess it’s a one-way street.”
… [A spokesperson] acknowledged that instead of assigning patrons seats that approximated where they sat at Freedom Hall, the school opted to allow people to buy their way into better real estate with additional contributions to the Cardinal Athletic Fund.
As a result, some fans who had supported the basketball program for decades found themselves displaced by Johnnies-come-lately with bigger wallets. University officials said they didn’t know how much fans had donated to procure better seats.
“It is our job to raise money,” [a spokesperson] said, defending the decision. “Certainly people had an opportunity to make additional gifts to improve their position.”…
Nice seat you’ve got there. Pity if anything were to happen to it.
The newspaper finds a sociology professor:
Why is seat selection such a big deal? Jonetta Weber, who teaches a class on the sociology of sport at U of L, where she is also the director of academic services, said that for some, it’s a status symbol.
“We are a society which values economic success, competition and materialism,” said Weber, who hopes to go to a few games with her boyfriend, also a faculty member. “Sitting courtside — or as close to the court as you can get — feeds into those values. We see celebrities courtside at NBA games, and we associate the proximity of their seats to the court with prestige, power and money.”
In fact, “Trial lawyer Gary Weiss … was so angry in May that he threatened to file a class-action suit against the university…”
… to be sure, but the University of Michigan — which pays millions to a negligent president and many more millions to Rich Rodriguez, an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, crooked football coach — seems to be on an even faster schedule than that. Every moment it spins out some new way to get taken.
The latest involves $350 an hour legal fees:
The NCAA investigation into Michigan’s football program has cost the university nearly half million dollars so far, and expenses continue to mount.
According to invoices from the law firm Lightfoot, Franklin and White released this week as part of an open-records request, Michigan has paid $446,951 in legal fees and other expenses since contracting attorney Gene Marsh and others to handle its internal investigation last September.
The payments are for services rendered through April, and do not include a busy May, when the university released its findings and self-imposed penalties in response to the NCAA’s Notice of Allegations.
… Michigan, in a letter dated Sept. 15, 2009, agreed to pay … the former head of the NCAA Committee on Infractions, $350 an hour to lead its investigation. Other attorneys were billed at $300, and paralegals $130 an hour…
Check out the article’s comment thread if you want a sense of the reality on the ground. If UM were a public university in a financially distressed state, this would be a real scandal.
… Fourth of July parade.
This will be a stuttering sort of post. I’ve just pulled my gray Adirondack chair forward to the edge of my driveway and have already been caught up in a long pleasant conversation with Caroline, a new neighbor. She’s British from the sound of her, but has a big ol’ American flag on her porch, a red and white bandanna on her dog, and plenty of excitement about the parade, which will be passing by our houses shortly.
I’ve put bug spray on. I’ve considered topping up the sphagnum on my topiary bulls and rejected the idea. They look okay. I’ve walked the dog and put him inside.
Here’s Mr UD, with some more chairs. “So where are the crowds?” he asks. Garrett Park has three hundred families, and our parades are très Lake Wobegone.
The weather is not hellish! Amazing.
**********************************
Sousa marches are sounding on Kenilworth Avenue!
Mr UD is telling me about a review he just read of the new Porsche Something. “The guy says there are two problems. Everyone is jealous and hates him for having one. And it goes too fast.”
More marches! Closer!
Mr UD says he’s not that excited. “It’s not like Netherlands beating Brazil.”
Mayor in an Audi convertible greets us: “Say hello to the Deputy Mayor.” A dog of course.
Guy in a Nixon mask: “I am not a crook.” (This year’s theme is Our Heroes. I’m confused.)
Firefighters.
Albert Einstein.
Soup kitchens.
Girl Scouts.
Washington Capitals.
… seems to have been fired. Sometimes a person behaves too repellently even for the University of Georgia.
“The Bulldogs [teams] are a brand, and [Athletics Director Damon Evans is] in charge of controlling that, definitely, from the business side. If it was one of the top three or four folks at Delta [Airlines] who did this, you wonder what would happen to them,” [a University of Georgia booster] said.
… a witty and – someone else used the word mordant today and I can’t improve on that – mordant novelist has died.
Melvyn Bragg, in the Telegraph, says a very beautiful thing about her: “Her private complexity alchemised into the clarity of her books.”
It’s a beautiful sentence in itself, with the lovely, unexpected, and exactly right word alchemised, and with its poetic repetition of K sounds: complexity alchemised clarity books.
But it’s a beautiful idea as well, applying, I think, to any successful writer — I mean, that ability to use your self, your past, your pain, the messy inchoate stuff of each person’s experiences… To transmute it somehow into the coherence and elegance of an achieved artform and thereby to a significant extent understand what it is, what you are, what happened, what it meant, what your patterns are, etc.
More than that, this process tends to be therapeutic, cathartic, and indeed Bainbridge always said as much. She always said that putting her horrible childhood into her early novels made most of the anger and bitterness go away.
It’s enviable, this ability to free yourself, somewhat, through aesthetic detachment and formal organization, from the otherwise unliftable weight of one’s particular story…
Of course, you don’t have to be a novelist to enter into this alchemic procedure by which you gain precious leverage over a threatening and depressing sense of contingency, over a complexity which seems hopelessly private and unassimilable. A serious literary, philosophical, historical education… a liberal arts education, let’s call it, can produce something similar in you.
*************************************
Anyway, I’ve scanned the obits. Here are the good parts.
A writer for the Guardian visited Bainbridge in 2001.
I noticed a misprint in her new novel, egg yoke for egg yolk, and when I pointed it out, she said, ‘Which word’s wrong? Egg?’
… Her apparently daffy manner, her apparently chaotic house, are all part of her continuing appeasement of the world. She believes that looking harmless is the best defence. Better to be dismissed as eccentric, silly, childlike, than to be attacked. She cannot bear any sort of argument or confrontation.
… [The father of her third child] showed up for Rudi’s birth, but then went downstairs saying he was going to get a book out of the car and never came back.
From an appreciation in the Telegraph:
… She fell in love with Austin Davies, a scene painter at the Playhouse. He didn’t believe in God, and was forever trying to rid himself of the enamoured actress. “I became a Catholic,” recalled Beryl Bainbridge, “to get away from Aussie. Then I could never marry anyone, I could live a life of purity and pray the whole time. I remember being terribly happy: that Lightness, the sin removed. I was a Catholic for about ten minutes.”
… [Her] garden … [is] full of plastic roses and daffodils. “There’s more to gardening than growing flowers,” Bainbridge would remark, to mystified green-fingered friends.
… At first she had to supplement her retainer and her royalties with various jobs, including a stint in a bottle factory. This inspired The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), in which two Englishwomen become embroiled in the lives of the Italian immigrants at the bottle factory where they both work. The outing of the title goes hideously wrong and ends with one of the women dead, her body popped into a wine barrel and dispatched across the sea.
Brenda, the surviving Englishwoman, is soulfully sanguine about her friend’s fate, concluding: “It was the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, if they were tall and they were grabbed in the bushes by a small man.”
… Brian Murray is under house arrest on charges of insurance fraud and theft, accused of stealing more than $1.3 million in premium payments collected from an assortment of businesses, schools and other organizations.
… Mr. Murray, 67, former head of Murray Insurance Agency Inc., was arrested late Thursday by agents from the state attorney general’s insurance fraud section and arraigned before Magisterial District Judge John Pesota. Some of the victims of the alleged fraud include Moses Taylor Hospital, Mount Airy Casino Resort and several Jesuit universities, including the University of Scranton, which gave Mr. Murray, an ardent financial supporter, an honorary degree in 2006. Mr. Murray allegedly took their premium payments but left them uninsured…
… at the University of Georgia.
But don’t read it. Content yourself with this New York Times backgrounder.
God forbid UD should be accused, what with the Damon Evans thing and all, of piling on.