First the double dipping couple; now this guy (still proudly claimed by his robbee), who seems to have stolen from the school this way and that way and this way and that way. And this way.
Kangari got reimbursed for more than $10,000 worth of trips to Las Vegas and Los Angeles where he and his family visited tourist attractions. The auditor called them “thinly veiled family vacations with no verifiable business purpose.” … “[I]nappropriate purchases” on his P-card [included] nearly $1,000 worth of textbooks, which matched his daughter’s class schedule, sent to him via email. He also bought nearly $4,000 worth of electronics, including a pink iPod Shuffle…. [According to school auditors,] “he was not even present at some of the events for which he requested reimbursement.” At some he said he sent his wife in his place. The audit also said Kangari falsified timesheets for an employee, costing the school an additional $1,800.
Gevalt.
Emanuelle Degli Esposti in The New Statesman:
… Italy is the only Western European country where the number of intellectuals leaving the country so grossly outweighs those coming in. The fact that a wealthy, developed nation with such a rich cultural history is being slowly leeched of its talent is a highly troubling development.
Because the sad truth of the matter is that the system that has failed its own people also fails to attract new talent to its shores. High levels of corruption, low spending on academic research and a convoluted and frustrating bureaucratic system mean that foreign brains end up looking elsewhere.
They just hired Cory Pickens.
The CEO who hired him “decided not to disclose Pickens’ background when announcing the hire.”
Yeah. I mean, why tell the community that he’s a recovering Oxycontin, oxycodone and hydrocodone addict who’s just been convicted of prescription fraud? That might make people reluctant to use his anesthesiology services.
… uh whatever. You know. The latest shit.
Oh yeah. Ohio State.
… [T]his entire exercise is part of the grand hypocrisy that defines the N.C.A.A.
… [T]he only ones in this con game who can make money are the coaches, the athletics directors and the bowl officials.
… The [big-time college sports] beast devours coaches, administrators and college presidents, and enjoys a steady diet of athletes who help generate the revenue that has turned college sports into a billion-dollar industry.
Beer vote is a-comin’
Our Bud is in sight
Beer vote is a-comin’
There’s dancin’ tonight
Why don’t-cha chuga chuga chuga Bud
Why don’t-cha chuga chuga chuga Bud
Look here! The beer vote is a-comin’
There’s dancin’ tonight
Coach is at the Cross Lanes
To show us the way
Coach is at the Cross Lanes
It’s a shiny new day…
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UPDATE: Hyuk!
Because if there was one thing some WVU fans weren’t already, it was drunk enough… [The athletic director] said the sale of beer… would, and I quote, “improve fan behavior”.
[He] also mentioned beer sales could provide around $500,000 in revenue for the program (ah, there we go).
A USA Today reporter asks the author of Onward Christian Athletes about “college sports evangelism” post-Tressel.
[B]ig-time college sports are a mess and a poor platform for the promotion of religious virtue. The central idea of sports ministry — use sports and famous athletic figures to promote the faith — seems more problematic than ever in view of what’s happened with Coach Tressel. …With regard to the concept of using sports as a platform to promote faith … At a certain point, the platform no longer works as a vehicle to promote Christianity, because the platform is corroded and decayed.
In an article titled The Default Major: Skating Through B-School, the New York Times describes the shoddiness of most business majors, and then quotes Henry Mintzberg of McGill University.
[A] dogged critic of traditional business programs, [Mintzberg] … says it is a “travesty” to offer vocational fields like finance or marketing to 18-year-olds.
The story goes on to note that “Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.”
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Yet, as Louis Menand points out, “The No. 1 major in America is, in fact, business.”
… [S]tudents majoring in liberal-arts fields — sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities — do better on [a college learning assessment exam], and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.
Sixty per cent of American college students are not liberal-arts majors, though… Twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in [business]. Ten per cent are awarded in education, seven per cent in the health professions. More than twice as many degrees are given out every year in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion. Since 1970, the more higher education has expanded, the more the liberal-arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg, who just won the Griffin Poetry Prize for her long elegy, Heavenly Questions, considers in that collection of poems the very sketchy life of a seashell, and the very sketchy life of human beings.
As in Is That All There Is?
I mean, sure, she spends a lot of time, in this consideration of the life of a shell, “Fusiturricula Lullaby,” on the miracle of life, yadda yadda… And not just life, accomplishment!
…Underwater ink enlarges, blurs,
In violet-brown across a spiral shell:
A record of volutions fills a scroll
With wondrous deeds and great accomplishings,
A record of a summons not refused:
Of logarithms visible and fused
With thoughts in rows of spiral beaded cords
As X goes to infinity; impearled;
Violet; and inviolate; self-endowed;
Itself the writing, and itself the scroll
The writing’s written on; and self-aware
With never-ever-to-be-verbalized
Awareness of awareness of awareness…
The elegy is about Schnackenberg’s husband, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, and here, with the shell becoming a scroll of ideas, pearled not merely with wisdom but with the deep-lying, word-transcending convolutions of the philosopher’s self-consciousness, Nozick begins to appear.
And then disappears:
Fusiturricula slowly withdraws
Its being; self-enfolding; self-enclosed;
And all it toiled for turns out to be
No matter—nothing much—nothing at all—
Merely the realm where “being” was confined
And what was evanescent evanesced…
The historian Perez Zagorin was interviewed two years before his death about life with his wife, the artist Honoré Sharrers; and among the things he said about their existence together was this:
The greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western tradition and quite possibly of the literature the whole world is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and it begins with the theme that all men aim at happiness. But how do you – you don’t aim at happiness. Happiness is not a goal. Happiness is the byproduct of the things you do. And I could say, truly, I’ve had a happy life and I know Honoré’s had a happy life, and that was because we were all the time doing just what we wanted to be doing. Happiness emerged, it effervesced.
Emerged, effervesced, evanesced. These are the realms where being was confined and where it evanesced.
But – a shell. The poet undeniably chooses a shell, and this leaves open the possibility of life being a shell. Nothingness, emptiness, a shell game, a mere tantalizing taste of water on a tongue. Joan Didion writes about “the unending absence that follows” the death of her husband, “the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which [I] confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
Still, Schnackenberg’s final stanza consoles, with images of heaven.
All heaven and earth appear; and evanesce;
A self-engulfing spiral, ridge by ridge,
That disappears in waves that come and go
And all that could be done is done; and seven;
And six; and five; and four; and three; and two;
And one…and disappearing…far away…
Enraptured to the end, and all in play,
A spiral slowly turns itself in heaven.
West Virginia University’s English comp course rightly stresses the importance of argumentation in public discourse. You can’t just say boo. You can’t just say x. You have to say why boo. Why x.
WVU itself, however, seems not to have learned this. Its big-money new football coach is behaving badly in public, and the university is under attack. Here’s how WVU has responded:
After looking into its options, West Virginia University will take no action to refute allegations raised against the football program, athletic department and administration in separate columns published by two state newspapers over the weekend.
… WVU [is] assessing the validity of the claims it believes are false. University officials were also determining whether a response to the publications would be necessary.
A WVU source said Wednesday the university will not take any action, but “knows the Herald-Dispatch story had blatant inaccuracies.”
Uh huh. And what are the inaccuracies? If they’re blatant, they should be rather easy to refute.
Oh. WVU isn’t sure a response to blatant inaccuracies is necessary.
And it certainly doesn’t think reviewing the video footage of the coach’s most recent misbehavior is necessary. Why bother? Hell [spit]. Boys will be boys. And, you know, by and large, university football’s a nice clean business. You wanna argument? That’s my argument and I’m stickin’ to it. Hyuk.
Times Higher Education has a longish article stating the obvious: You can’t learn with your laptop open.
It also states the less than obvious: American university professors are beginning to realize this.
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Course, if y’all’d been reading University Diaries starting back in – I dunno – 2007 – you’d have had post after post screaming about how stupid it is to let your students use laptops in class.
Universities have dropped millions for technology (“The backlash against technology comes after universities have spent fortunes wiring their campuses for access to the internet.”); they’ve conducted all kinds of research to prove the self-evident (“[T]he students’ memories were disorganised; they fixated on irrelevant data, could not follow specific directions that required paying attention and wrote poorly.”); they’ve laptopped everything only to realize how stupid it is to laptop everything (“We have put the whole course online. We’ve videotaped it so that [students] can stay home and watch it in their rooms. We’ve put everything online so they have a reason to open the laptop. We’ve done this for them thinking it was progress. It confuses [students] when we now say: ‘Don’t open your laptop.'”).
So now where are we? Duh. Backlash territory. More and more universities are banning laptops from classrooms.
Sherry Turkle says it’s “the time of repentance,” but that’s horseshit. Universities weren’t thinking in the first place, so they’re not returning to thought now. They’re just embarrassed and confused by the mess they’ve created, and they’re trying to clean it up.
Universities created the mess because they’re lazy, and because they’re afraid of students. “[W]e make [laptop use in class] easy and allow people to get away with it. But if universities allow or encourage it, or don’t actively discourage it, then you’re creating a situation that does not just have short-term but also long-term effects.”
We’ll see how many professors and universities have the guts to cross laptop-loving students.
Huffington Post, via the Miami Herald.
Gabriel Mendigutia, a student at Florida International University dared his girlfriend, Ally Castro, to shoot him in the chest with a pellet gun last week. She did, almost killing him.
Mendigutia had been been drinking beer …