It was only a matter of time before the Freakonomics guys at the New York Times got hold of creative writing.

For years, colleges have treated their students as consumers, building ever more elaborate facilities and hiring ever more dazzling star scholars to lure applicants. They did this regardless of how high these investments drove tuition, since easy credit meant families could stretch to cover the costs. But with the credit crisis come signs that the college bubble is bursting, as “consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college,” the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests. Further evidence: The New Yorker aims to deflate creative writing programs, “designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.”

A few universities – like the University of Toledo under its embarrassing president – are set to enjoy the benefits of peer instruction, as it’s known, not just in creative writing courses, but across the curriculum.

Toledo details here.

I think we all recognize, instinctively, the enormous budgetary advantages of making students teach each other.

Shooting reported at the Holocaust Museum here. Man with a rifle got in, shot a security guard, and then was shot by another guard. It all happened too recently – around twenty minutes ago- for any of this information to be guaranteed.

There’s the Harvard coffee guy (see below), and there’s the Johns Hopkins spy guy. The guy who boasted to the undercover FBI agent who caught him that he had “lots of medals” from Cuba. That’s because he’d been spying for them for thirty years.

One of his students reminisces about My Professor, the Spy. A writer for Politico wonders why, given the broad hints the spy dropped over the years, it took so long to catch him.

Lee Fleming,
a Harvard business school
professor, got angry when
some guy’s car partially
blocked his driveway. He
threw hot coffee on the guy.

Fleming was arrested.

He’s charged with
assault and battery.

The university is on pace to lose millions of dollars in revenue after enrollment projections fell drastically short last semester, a report shows.

The university’s fiscal year 2009 third quarter budget report revealed a spring semester enrollment figure of 19,099 — 399 students shy of the expected 19,498. The shortfall could account for nearly $3 million worth of lost revenue, Vice President for Financial and Administrative Affairs Corey Bradford said….

At least they’ve got a plagiarist president and a politically compromised board of trustees to deal with the problem.

Foggy. Weeks now of darkness and heavy rain and heavy thunder, and inside Garrett Park’s arboretum the world is a deeply dreaming green wall.

A wall, or a well — dark, deep, shaking with thunder and white at times with lightning.

Mourning doves coo inside invisible dogwoods. Thrushes sing misty.

So many foggy poems to choose among. This one, by David Mason, will do.

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

Fog Horns

Nothing was done then.
Nothing was ever
done. Then it was done.

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

These faint puffs of lines, these little brushstrokes, do the deed, make the mood. The haze so subdues the world that we can isolate, and hear, painfully, the wound of existence itself, bruises being born. When we’re out there, we’re vulnerable. We have to make our dim way through the world.

They’re too much for us, those hurts of sound that come blaring into the shut-in world in which we’ve made ourselves comfortable with a pot of tea.

We’re protected inside these small sunless days, inside the steamy fog of tea-time over and over again, where nothing ever happens. Nothing was ever done, says the poet. Comfortably numb.

But that’s its own hurt, because it will be done some day — Then it was done. — and we won’t have lived our lives.

… The Nuffield Review report is the biggest independent analysis of education for those aged 14 to 19 in fifty years, taking six years to complete. It was led by Professor Richard Pring and Dr Geoff Hayward, from Oxford, and professors from the Institute of Education and Cardiff University.

… The report says: “The increased central control of education brings with it the need for a management perspective, and language of performance management — for example, levers and drivers of change, and public service agreements as a basis of funding. The consumer or client replaces the learner. The curriculum is delivered. Stakeholders shape the aims. Aims are spelt out in terms of targets. Audits measure success defined in terms of hitting targets. Cuts in resources are euphemistically called ‘efficiency gains’. Education becomes that package of activities (or inputs) largely determined by government.”

It adds: “As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of questions, of trying to make sense of reality, of seeking understanding, of exploring through literature and the arts what it means to be human.”

Professor Pring told The Times that policy language was “leading to a narrowing of the curriculum and impoverishment of learning”. He added: “We are losing the tradition of teachers being curriculum directors and developers — instead they’re curriculum deliverers. It’s almost as though they have little robots in front of them and they have to fill their minds, rather than engage with them.” …

The Times of London

… says smart things about creative writing programs.

Louis Menand’s New Yorker review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a history of the rise of university writing programs and workshops, is subtitled, “Should creative writing be taught?” Despite itself, the review does not encourage a positive answer. Menand tells us that “by 1975, there were fifteen creative-writing M.F.A. programs in the country. Today, there are a hundred and fifty-three.” And what do we have to show for it? McGurl says that the “system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period” shows that the writing programs have helped, but we don’t see how this can be proven: while the rise of American aerospace engineering, say, can be connected to America’s supremacy in space, we don’t know how you connect the explosion of writing classes to advancements in literary quality. The sort of cultural product that distinguishes America around the world, such as rock songs, blockbuster movies, and potboiler novels, can hardly be attributed to Bread Loaf. There is something to be said for fine literature, but America produced enough of that to suit our needs before schools started mass-producing MFAs.

Other insights from the review are equally discouraging: for example, that “university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit — the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace.” This makes writing programs sound like a make-work schemes for aesthetically-inclined redundant laborers, and stirs suspicion that many of us currently struggling as scribes have been unfortunately discouraged from more useful lives as upholsterers or surveyors. We often think so, anyway.

Menand does supply fun anecdotes about the trade (“[John Gardner’s] preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples”), and he looks back fondly on workshops, saying “I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.” Maybe writing programs, then, are the information-age equivalent of shop class. If so, tuition should be adjusted to reflect this.

… and there’s Nothing.  There’s writing that’s absolutely nothing.   Here’s an example. 

True nullity of expression demands that the writer pay heed to style as much as content.  Nothing style should be without human markings, the work of a word-generator.  It should aim to be dead on the page at the moment it hits the page, like nail polish that dries the instant you roll it out. 

Classic Nothing takes a significant social problem, a current issue of substance, and then, in an attitude of hearty, can-do concern, taps it lightly here and there with rhetorical questions and reassuring answers.   It’s like the fairy godmother in Cinderella transforming actual things like pumpkins into pretend things like coaches.  What is this problem?  Can we solve it?  Time will tell!  Let’s work together!  Let’s admit we have a problem! 

 Put style and content together in this way and what do you get?  Bippity boppity boo.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has long talked on this blog about Guy Style, an argumentative approach she likes very much.  Some readers may find it boring and unemotional, but, au contraire, SOS finds its cool, terse, deep-feelings-withheld effect stirringly masculine, like Clint Eastwood.

Here’s a good example of Guy Style.

Now that the intoxicating frenzy of the Michigan State basketball season has subsided, perhaps a sober reminder of the intent in establishing the university is in order. [Classic Guy Style opening:  There’s the world of sloppy drunks and there’s the world of coldly observing Guys.  Who would you rather read?]

The main objectives were set forth in Section 11 of Article 13 of the state constitution: “The promotion of intellectual, scientific and agricultural improvement, and stressed “instruction in agriculture and natural sciences.”  [He’s missing a quotation mark in there, so we’re not clear where the excerpt from the constitution ends.  Not the end of the world, though.  Clever move to go back to scripture.]

No mention was made of funding any sport program, much less spending money to scout the world for basketball players.

Is Tom Izzo’s position as coach of the men’s basketball team as important as that of MSU President Lou Anna Simon, MSU’s provost, 12 of MSU’s top professors, or that of President Obama’s?

If one were to equate importance with salaries received, Izzo’s position would top all the others – combined.  [I don’t claim Guy Style sizzles on the level of word choice; rather, I claim that GS goes to the heart of things quickly, and gets them said efficiently.  This argument already has power, and the guy’s only a few lines in.]

One might ask how such an aberration from MSU’s core functions came about.  [Certainly by this point you see Clint’s sneer… You see the sneer that hides just behind the elaborate courtesy and restraint…]

Taxpayers were obliged to pay, in one form or another, $45 million for the construction of the Jack Breslin Center in 1989, with men’s basketball games intended as the main attraction. Major funding was obtained through the sale of bonds, toward which a liability of $22,722,000 remained on June 30, 2008.  [The highly emotionally controlled language skirts bureaucratic dullness.  But it’s kept from that fate by carefully selected details and a hint of Clint.]

Any attempt to compute the net monetary profit engendered by the team would be an exercise in futility.  [Sure, engendered is too formal.  Exercise in futility is a cliché.  Again, I’m not claiming verbal originality for Guy Style.  I’m merely claiming that, despite its weaknesses, it succeeds.  We’re paying attention; we’re getting the point.]

A Freedom of Information Act inquiry of the bonds’ interest rate and payment schedule drew the response of “No records exist on the data you seek because the debt you describe is contained within the university’s overall general fund commingled debt.”  [Drop of.  And don’t I always tell you to avoid the passive voice — a form of writing all over this piece?  I do.  Yet Guy Style may be the one place where the approach can be deployed – sparingly – to some effect.  The emotional content of that passivity does have to do with futility; it’s as if this guy’s style implicitly conveys the almost Beckettian absurdity of the university athletic system.]

No IRS-respecting private business would ever think of commingling funds from unrelated sources requiring separate accountability.  [Excellent point, strongly expressed.  For elaboration, read anything written by Andrew Zimbalist.]

Should the university take another look at its $796,000 bill to give 3,089 students choice season tickets at discounted prices to pay homage to gladiators on the court while dressed in “Izzone” T-shirts?

And why does MSU pay 13 talented basketball players the equivalent of $1,372,000 in tuition, room, board and books over a four-year period, and not pay anything to the thousands of astute students who are academically talented and may be our future Einsteins and Marie Curies? [The Einstein/Curie thing’s pretty hokey, but the rest of the sentence has power.]

Should taxpayer-funded universities with coaches on multimillion-dollar contracts be placed under salary caps, such as President Obama has ordered for executives of corporations that request bailouts with taxpayer money?

Some may offer that Izzo might seek a position elsewhere if his salary is reduced.  [Again, an awkward, bass-ackward sort of sentence, but, as with Clint, there’s something in the combination here of strong emotion strongly withheld — a tension that comes out as oddly formal speech — that’s riveting.]

There are those who thought MSU’s women’s basketball program would collapse after the departure of Coach Joanne P. McCallie.

Its success under Suzy Merchant has proven otherwise, and delighted many when it sent “Coach P” back to North Carolina on a blue note after beating the devil out of her highly touted team in March.  [When a Guy Style writer does allow himself a little emotion — beating the devil out of — it has a strong impact, given the background of emotional restraint.]

This is not meant to belittle Izzo’s coaching ability, but to question whether a well-meaning administration has been led astray from its fiduciary responsibility to help as many prospective students get a college education as possible – and not discriminate in favor of a small number of special interest students.  [End of argument.  Note that Guy Style writers get right to it, say it, and then stop.  They’re not about sculpting shapely polemics, so they’re not going to give you a texte de jouissance. You want heavy breathing, read the post just below this one — The Problem With Rants.]

Taking off from the University of Illinois admissions clout scandal, a writer for the Huffington Post shows you why SOS is always telling you to control your emotions if you want to argue something. Let’s take a peek.

… [In a recent] issue of the [Chicago] Tribune, the venerable sportswriter Bob Verdi refers to the NCAA and college sports as “our intercollegiate sewer system.” [Nice use of a strong quotation. So far so good.]

Yes, the Clout University scandal is shady, shabby, ridiculous, pathetic, disgusting, despicable, etc. But what irritates and baffles me is the public’s indifference to our wasteful, unconscionable, unfair, unreasonable practice of giving, not dozens, but tens of thousands of tickets of admission into our universities to young people many of whom would have no chance of being accepted into a higher-ranking university, or any university at all, strictly on their intellectual merits. [The first ridiculously long list is fine; the writer seeks to summarize what everyone’s saying, and he’s doing it in an exasperated, amusing way. But the rest of the paragraph’s also over-written, and here it’s not strategic; instead, it’s angry and uncontrolled.]

Of course I’m talking about the so-called “student-athletes.” [Two sins in one sentence: The juvenile so-called, and the quotation marks. Just as he’s packing too many words into his sentences, so he’s overloading his point about the inauthenticity of students selected for their athletic skill. Once you’ve said so-called, you don’t need the quotation marks; or, if you go with quotation marks, you don’t need the so-called. Though if you ask SOS you don’t really need either of them. Just use the term student-athlete and be assured that your reader will understand, from the prose around the phrase, that you disbelieve in the concept.] Our Illinois politicians, dastardly sneaks as they undoubtedly are, were not the first, nor the most culpable, offenders against intellect. We all decided long ago that many qualities were more important than mind in deciding who goes to college.

For example, community service. And extra-curricular activities. And exotic hobbies. And “a wide range of interests.” And being closely related to a previous graduate of the college. And, most important by far, performance in organized high school sports. [Why the quotation marks around wide range of interests?]

The truth is that none of these activities and qualities should enter into a decision about who gets into college. That’s right, none. [The writer makes it easy to reject his argument by taking so extreme a position.]

To deny the validity of what I’ve just said and to tacitly endorse a “system” [Note that he can’t stop with the quotation marks, which continue to add a juvenile element to his anger.] which awards seats in an institution of teaching and scholarship to the stupid, the indifferent, the anti-intellectual, and the duffers is to take a low revenge on Intellect, cultivate mediocrity, and degrade and prostitute the Alma Mater we say we cherish. [Way over-written. There’s a weird nineteenth century elaborateness to his style, complete with capitalization and grandiloquence.]

As indefensible as the custom of letting politicians decide who goes to school and who gets scholarship money may be, it does far less harm to higher education than our worship of sports and athletes.

“Beer and circus.” That’s what Murray Sperber, Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Indiana University, called the sports-spectacle atmosphere of college athletics two decades ago. That’s what we’ve turned our colleges and universities into. [The argument never gets going, does it? Reason: He settles for bombast and bitchery rather than substance.]

College presidents and faculties aren’t running higher education. (How many letters to the editor decrying the politicians’ influence on admissions have you read from faculty members at the University of Illinois?)

Young, male, beer-sodden dolts and screeching ESPN announcers give the predominant tone to our universities….

SOS should love this piece, shouldn’t she? But it doesn’t do her side any good. The writer merely exhibits his self-righteousness.

… is a big-budget film about Allen Ginsberg, centering on the writing and then the scandal of his famous poem.

Here’s an excerpt from Howl that includes references to universities, the subject of this my blog. The “who” in the first line refers to friends of the poet and their various disturbing fates.

… who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia…

… bloomed today. You can watch it.

This is better.

This University of Connecticut video is informative.

… keep on earnin’!

With the latest resignation — they keep going up the food chain at North Carolina State; today it’s the chancellor — in the Mary Easley scandal, UD finds herself modifying her position vis-a-vis Mary, who, despite non-stop begging and bullying from a bunch of guys at NCSU desperate to get her out of her politically rigged, massively overpaid, totally corrupt job on campus, has refused to leave.  (Today we also discover, via just-released emails, that her husband — at the time the governor — got the job for her.)

UD now thinks Mary should stay.  Whenever a bunch of guys beat up on a woman it pisses me off.  Screw them.  They did all they could to get the little lady a big money do nothing gig at Patronage Acres and now they’re losing their jobs because they wrote emails to each other about what they were doing.  Mary did everything right according to the Corrupt Southern University System Handbook.  She kept her head down.  She didn’t write any emails.

She gets to stay.

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

Update: Mary just got canned.
Tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
Floor strewn with dead bodies, up to and
including Gertrude.

SOS has said it before on this blog: If, as a writer, you’re bringing bad news, you might want to use humor. Here’s an earlier example of what I have in mind – a University of Wisconsin Madison graduate student telling readers of the school’s newspaper that the campus lake is full of shit.

SOS‘s sister, the Morrissey fanatic (just back from a bunch of Morrissey concerts in England), sends her this charming example of the form, from the Baltimore Sun.

When Gregory Glass and his colleagues set out to trap rats in Baltimore neighborhoods for a recent study, they were welcomed by two-legged residents who were more than happy for the scurrying rodents to be taken away to a lab. They had just one concern. [Note two good qualities of intro paragraphs, newspaper-journalism-style: A rich, complex sentence, and a conclusion to the paragraph that makes you want more. What concern?]

“You’re not bringing them back here when you’re done, are you?” they asked.

No, after their DNA was extracted, all 277 rats collected in 11 alleys were killed, [Note how the writer smuggles in research project details without making them dry.] which is a good thing, given that what Glass learned was that death is among the few things that will get a Baltimore rat to leave the place it calls home. [Adorable. Note the intentional writerly awkwardness that makes this funny: what Glass learned was that death is represents pretty pedestrian prose on its own, but in this context it feels as though the writer’s amusingly easing us into this icky subject. She’ll get, we know, more explicit with each paragraph.]

In fact, the Baltimore rat is so wedded to its home turf, typically an alley a few hundred feet long, that at the molecular level, an East Baltimore rat is distinct from a West Baltimore rat. [The writer has intrinsic interest going for her too. Who knew this?]

“Give me a rat,” Glass brags, “and I can tell you which side of town it’s from.” [It’s another bit of luck that the study’s author is funny and warm.]

And it goes even beyond east is east, west is west, never the twain shall meet – the study, published recently in the journal Molecular Ecology, found that most rats apparently spend the bulk of their lives in the space of about a tenth of a mile. [Again, note how she seeds the piece with specific details. The details don’t get crammed, rat-like, into one paragraph.]

“Most rats are like people in Baltimore,” said Glass, who after 25 years in the city has had occasion to observe both. “They marry someone next door or down the block at most, and are happy to live in the neighborhood they grew up in.”

It’s that quality – our rats, ourselves – that makes the paper such great reading, both as science and local culture. It is the well-observed local quirk, the Baltimore homing instinct, rendered in charts, graphs, Euclidean distances and, of course, adjacent-allele heterozygotes. [Our rats, ourselves is very nice. Parts of the article are a bit hokey as the author pushes for humor, but basically what she does succeeds wonderfully.]   [I love the way she writes of course before the well-known adjacent-allele heterozygotes.]

The upshot: Nearly all the rats – more than 95 percent of them – exhibited what the researchers call “site fidelity;” they were bred and born in the alley in which they were trapped. (It made me feel a little sorry for one very lost rat that ended up in one of the traps, a veritable stranger in town whose DNA revealed it was unlikely to be from any of the alleys studied.)

“Most rat movements were limited within individual city blocks,” the paper concludes.

Here I’d always thought I was just a very grounded person; now, after reading the paper, I realized I am almost as site-faithful as the local rodent population. My first apartment here [Drop this here. Or the one at the beginning of the sentence.] was a couple blocks from the hospital where my elder sister was born. (My family moved to Harford County shortly afterward, which is where I was born, but then we moved away.)

My second apartment in Baltimore was two blocks away from the first one. Then in a fit of uncharacteristic wanderlust, I bought a house that was two whole miles away. I lived there until moving three blocks to my current house. [Drop uncharacteristic.]

Hopefully, that’s where the rat in me ends. [Drop hopefully.] Glass, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, tells me a rat burrow basically has a pair, an alpha male and an alpha female, that goes about breeding the next generation. Given what the paper calls “high fecundity and generation overlap in Baltimore rats,” the alley ends up as a community that is [Drop that is.] something like that song about a family filled with so many intermarriages that, as the narrator sings, “I’m My Own Grandpa.” [Drop as the narrator sings.]

More grossly interesting, or interestingly gross, [Charming. And notice she’s going to some trouble not merely to organize this through the use of transitional phrases, but to make those phrases witty.] facts about rat life: There’s only room for one alpha pair per burrow, so eventually some rats leave home and create their own communities. They’ll fight, “blood and skin,” Glass says, over territories. But they generally stay close to their ancestral home – there can be four or five burrows in a single alley, he said. The study found that rats within an 11-block area were part of one extended family. [Drop eventually and generally.]

The Jones Falls serves as a natural barrier dividing east- and west-side rats. The differences between them are at the DNA level, but after years of studying them, Glass has noted that there are [Drop that there are.] rats with black coats “and a beautiful white star on the chest” in one east-side neighborhood, around Jefferson Street above Orleans Street. “You go a couple blocks away, and they look normal again,” he said, “mostly yucky-brown.”

No doubt most urban rats behave like our own, but it is the Baltimore rodent that oddly enough is one of the most studied populations. [Note that she has a to be verb problem. Rewrite: but Baltimore’s rodent’s the most studied.] Glass and others in the field frequently cite 1940s research on Baltimore rats that probably were the ancestors of our current vermin. [no doubt ancestors of our current vermin. See how, in rewriting, I’m looking for ways to eliminate forms of to be?]

Rat scientists likely were drawn to Baltimore for the same reason Willie Sutton was drawn to robbing banks – it’s where the rats are. As a result, our rats have developed a certain je ne sais quoi among rat researchers. [I love her choice of je ne sais quoi. Like her choice later of Boswell, it’s the Oscar Wilde technique of yoking the lowest of subjects to the highest. Try it.]

“People from New York are always asking me to send pieces of Baltimore rats to them,” Glass said. “I think, ‘You’re in New York, you have your own rats.’ ”

Glass has a wry sense of humor, but it is unclear whether that is the cause or the effect of his choice of research subject. If you’re interested in studying biodiversity within animal populations, he said, “one way to do it would be to go to the Serengeti and look at lions.” He’s pretty much to the opposite side of the spectrum, and as a result, Baltimore rats got their very own Boswell.

The study details how researchers picked Baltimore alleys – mostly older neighborhoods known from previous studies to harbor rats in ample supply. Or, as the paper describes them in the kind of language that would make a real estate agent faint: “Areas characterized by row houses with small backyards comprised of concrete parking pads and small garden areas often occupied by rat burrow systems.” The lucky areas had what the researchers estimated was, on the average, a density of about 50 rats per alley.

Glass’s interest in rats comes from a public health rather than a cultural standpoint. While the rest of us view rats as horrid creatures that basically spread revulsion, he studies them for how they spread viruses and bacteria. Although most rats don’t stray much, enough do – they’re known as the “super spreaders” – that they remain potential carriers of various diseases.

Still, I have to ask Glass: Why does the rat, unlike the chicken, generally not cross the road?

Blame it on the two-legged creatures and their generosity, putting trash in plastic bags.

“Rats will move a long distance to get food,” Glass said. “But if they can get food, get a drink where they live, they won’t.”

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

My favorite part of this very nice piece of writing appears after the article:

RELATED TOPICS: Population, Biotechnology Industry, Ecosystems, Genes and Chromosomes, Conservation, Human Body, Real Estate Agents

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