“Autonomy is the disengagement of the state from the university,” she says, calling the results of the first wave [of university changes] disastrous:

“This is creating a lot of competition between colleagues, some of whom are now having to teach much more, and others who are having to do more research, and it is creating a lot of inequality.”

As the French university system attempts to become respectable, a professor at the University of Bourgogne, and a spokesperson for the main group resisting the changes, captures the source of faculty anger. Pretty much everybody has to work now. Plus, their work is being judged.

Steven Eisman, a hedge-fund manager known for having anticipated the housing market crash… [says that] [w]ithout tighter government regulation, … students at for-profit colleges will default on $275 billion of student loans over the next decade.

The New York Times explains why the federal government is now proposing new rules under which “for-profit colleges would not be eligible to receive federal student aid if their graduates’ debt load was too high to be repaid, over 10 years, with 8 percent of their starting salary.”

“These programs overpromise, underdeliver and load vulnerable students up with way too much debt,” said Chris Lindstrom, higher education program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, part of a coalition of education, consumer, student and public interest groups supporting the regulations.

In 2007, coalition members said, students at for-profit colleges made up only 7 percent of those in higher education but 44 percent of those defaulting on federal student loans.

Socially destructive? Morally bankrupt? The industry will tell you it’s taking the poorest Americans and giving them livelihoods. What the for-profits do is really more of a charitable vocation than a bottom-line business. Who else is going to care enough to drag homeless people off the streets and load them up with debt?

A surprising number of the people enrolled by these companies are homeless. According to Bloomberg, homeless people account for almost 5% of the students in the Newark, N.J., branch of Drake College of Business, a trainer of medical and dental assistants. In late 2008, Drake started offering $350 every two weeks to students who showed up for 80% of classes and held onto a C average. Carmella Hutson, a case manager at the Goodwill Rescue Mission in Newark told Bloomberg, “It’s basically known in the community: If you’re homeless, and you need some money, go to Drake.”

As someone once employed by one of these schools says, “The level of deception is disgusting — and wrong. When someone who can barely afford to live and feed kids as it is, and doesn’t even have the time or education to be able to email [enrolls], they drop out. Then what? Add $20,000 of debt to their problems — what are they gonna do now. They are officially screwed. We know most of these people will drop out, but again, we have quotas and we have no choice.”

And not only that, but almost all the money the companies pass on to these people as personal debt comes from us! It’s our taxes helping these people add tens of thousands of debt to their burdens!

A win-win situation…

A commenter on an article about the latest diploma mill travesty gets it right. It’s easy to find out if someone’s educational claims are fraudulent. In this case, involving a Saratoga New York pretend psychologist who’s been running around ruining people’s lives, “State Police were notified about [Steven] Feldman’s suspicious credentials by a person referred to Feldman for evaluation by a Family Court judge. That man researched Feldman’s credentials and came across evidence that one of the schools, Hamilton University, is not an accredited institution.”

Right. See, if you’re a divorced man desperate, let’s say, to retain custody of your kids, you’re very motivated to find out whether the person who gets to decide – or at least powerfully advise – on that question is qualified to do so. You do the research — which involves a couple of Google clicks — and you find out the guy’s a fraud. “Feldman allegedly claims to have college degrees from Richardson University and Hamilton University, diploma mills once located in a former Motel 6 in Evanston Wyoming.”

Hamilton’s fakery is especially easy to discover — it was the featured diploma mill in congressional testimony and in a 60 Minutes special a few years ago.

But the Public Defender’s Office and the County Family Court (both of which chose to employ Feldman) don’t care. When it comes to the welfare of Saratoga’s children, any lying piece of shit will do.

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

Steven Feldman faces four felony charges: grand larceny, scheme to defraud, falsifying business records and offering a false statement.

… for the murder of her brother twenty-four years ago.

… [P]rosecutors are presenting evidence to a grand jury that will decide whether criminal charges should be brought in the case, according to several people involved in the probe.

The decision by Norfolk District Attorney William R. Keating to take the case to a grand jury signals that a judicial inquest, which ended recently and issued a sealed report to the prosecutor, found there was enough evidence to potentially warrant charges against Bishop, now 45.

Oregon State Fires Chair-Throwing Coach, runs the headline at USA Today about LaVonda Wagner, the latest coach to cost a university millions of dollars in salary and then millions more in contract buy-out. Among the 129 comments in response to a local Oregon paper describing the scandal, the one that serves as the title for this post seems to me to express the situation best.

The coach’s abusive ways cost the team almost all of its players — they left in disgust — but OSU’s athletic director did nothing. Not even after players’ parents sent angry letters to him and OSU’s president. After all, good coaching sometimes involves roughing people up a bit. Look at Bobby Knight and Mark Mangino. Reasonable people can disagree about what a university is, but I think we can all agree it’s a place where students ought to be traumatized by multimillionaire coaches.

… on her doorstep. She is not sure why
she is proud of this — why she’s proud
that a toad has chosen her doorstep on
which to settle and eat bugs — but she is.

As with a previous toad who lived on her
doorstep, UD has named it Elphaba.

A website discussion board asks:

WHAT MADE YOU A HARDCORE WEB SURFER?

One answer:

Brian Leiter, Robert Wolff, Margaret Soltan, a bunch of others.

Savannah’s one strange place. They’ve kept it as it was when Oglethorpe laid out all the squares – Orleans, Pulaski, Monterey – and they’ve let the oaks and the palms and the moss go wild in the wet air.

Everything’s muddy, muggy, muzzy.

In the middle of the squares immense cistern fountains push more water skyward.

Savannah’s green and gray and silver canopies, its sheltering and embracing branches, seem to keep time at bay. Each mild day rises gradually out of the greenery, and the growing warmth keeps you too at a gradual pace. On Jones Street you have time to notice how the houses glow with the love of people who’ve trained the potted vinca and straightened the liriope leading to the portico. How did they get those tiny leaves to stick to the sides of each one of their steps? How many years for each curve in the topiary next to the pond?

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

Now settle down, Savannah says, as you hurry up the shallow steps from the river back to Bay Street. All the time in the world, and it’s too hot to make a race of it.

The river sweats behind you, and you think of the oil in the Gulf and whether it’ll come here and make the gray Savannah black.

Meanwhile, there’s the Sweet Georgia Peach martini you just had back there, on the roof of Rocks on the River; and there’s the big view the roof gave of the white-cabled Talmadge Bridge across to South Carolina.

Even up there, in the too-bright sun, Savannah seemed submerged, the pale marsh grass across the river the outer skin of an invisible deepwater life. We walked, my sister and I, through the Oatland Wildlife Center along the marshes one afternoon, and my eye didn’t want to leave the pale green expanse once I saw an osprey break out of the water. I knew that living along the marshes meant seeing bits of secret life fly out of the depths.

The long green marshes reminded me of Bali’s rice fields.

Savannah was placid everywhere. Along the river, in the squares, on the edge of the marsh. Even shrieking birds angling right down to you from the crepe myrtles seemed part of the soft odd Savannah harmonic. Historic preservation really means please be quiet.

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

UD‘s currently angling down in an airplane to Dulles Airport. We’re skimming a massive cloudflow. Now we’ve pierced the clouds and it’s bumpy.

These quick trips to elsewhere are a kind of consciousness-nudge. The mind in its usual rounds is set going differently, and, in some inscrutable way, altered for good.

… used to chronicle the antics of a university unit he called Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds.

As UD‘s said on this blog before, no one absorbs federal funds — and pockets them — better than for-profit colleges. They’re absolutely brilliant at taking tax money and then failing to educate and graduate students.

It’s an amazing enormous con, and you’d think the government would do something about it, and it will do something about it as soon as it can … I dunno… pull itself together to do something about it.

One thing our mainly clueless Education Department has noticed is that university accrediting bodies (federal money doesn’t start flowing to your investors until you get accredited) are jokes. If I paid them enough, accreditors would accredit my ass.

Robert Shireman, deputy under secretary for education, said in an April 28 speech to higher education regulators that he feared accreditors don’t have the “analytical firepower” they need to fairly assess the schools they oversee.

Likening the accreditors to credit rating agencies that gave top marks to underperforming securities in the financial crisis, Shireman said the school agencies have an “inherent conflict of interest,” as they are funded by the institutions they are meant to critique.

Fees to join [one such group], for example, start at $17,500, according to the group’s website. Annual dues include a $2,500 base, 50 cents per full-time-equivalent student and $75 per degree site.

In a recent letter, the Office of Inspector General

blasted [a large regional accreditor] for approving Career Education Corp.’s (CECO) American Intercontinental University despite expressing serious concerns about its credit hour structure. The letter, which echoes a December preliminary report, says the accreditor’s failure to define a credit hour–the basic measure of a class’s rigor–allows schools to inflate a course’s value, improperly designate full-time student status and over-award federal student loans. Two other regional accreditors were criticized on similar grounds last year, including the group that previously accredited American Intercontinental.

Analytical firepower. LOL.

… for theft of Italian antiquities.

The public prosecutor’s office in Rome is after J. Michael Padgett, antiquities curator at Princeton, for export and laundering.

University Diaries will follow this story. But she anticipates that it will be long and murky and unedifying. Italy is corrupt to the core; so even if it’s right that some of its loot has been looted, it won’t be able to act justly in the matter.

I’m reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil while I’m here in Savannah. I’m only a couple of chapters in.

Having just visited Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, Midnight etc. seems a good title for all of O’Connor’s work.

I’ve taught her short stories for a couple of decades, and you know what? They don’t grow on you.

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

It’s not that I’ve stopped admiring the artist. No one saw better than O’Connor what a short story was, and what it could do. She powerfully influenced Don DeLillo and many others.

Her prose is stately and muscular and she can do it all: Irony…

But irony doesn’t really say it. What she’s got is a stealthy point of view, slinking among pity, amusement, disgust, horror, and indifference.

She foreshadows her outcomes elegantly, but her images amass a symbolic force that can only be called appalling.

She writes hilarious, spot-on, dialogue, but the spot she’s on about is so stupid as to be fundamentally mute.

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

Above all, there’s no denying the consistency and depth of O’Connor’s denunciation of humanity.

Flannery O’Connor seems unable to forgive us for remaining elusive in regard to our own suffering and in regard to what O’Connor takes to be our salvation. Unlike the much kinder James Merrill, who writes in his poem “Santorini” that most of us cultivate “an oblivion that knows its own limits,” O’Connor believes we’re blind fools blundering through existence in the baddest of bad faith. Bestially dumb to human and spiritual realities, we receive our inevitable epiphanies as cartoonish hammer blows to the head.

Here is Flannery O’Connor on the subject of Simone Weil:

The life of this remarkable woman still intrigues me while much of what she writes, naturally, is ridiculous to me. Her life is almost a perfect blending of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny. Well Simone Weil’s life is the most comical life I have ever read about and the most truly tragic and terrible. If I were to live long enough and develop as an artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel about a woman—and what is more comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?…

By saying Simone Weil’s life was both comic and terrible, I am not trying to reduce it, but mean to be paying her the highest tribute I can, short of calling her a saint, which I don’t believe she was. Possibly I have a higher opinion of the comic and terrible than you do. To my way of thinking it includes her great courage and to call her anything less would be to see her as merely ordinary. She was certainly not ordinary. Of course, I can only say, as you point out, this is what I see, not this is what she is—which only God knows. But I didn’t mean that my heroine [in a short story or novel] would be a hypothetical Miss Weil. My heroine already is, and is Hulga. Miss Weil’s existence only parallels what I have in mind, and it strikes me especially hard because I had it in mind before I knew as much as I do now about Simone Weil. …You have to be able to dominate the existence that you characterize. That is why I write about people who are more or less primitive. I couldn’t dominate a Miss Weil because she is more intelligent and better than I am but I can project a Hulga.

At least Nabokov, in writing about Lolita, acknowledges her power over Humbert Humbert as much as her primitiveness. At least he gives Humbert moral awareness. O’Connor needs to assume a world of moral morons over whom the writer has absolute control.

Simone Weil, with her ethical profundity along with her absurdity, can’t be aesthetically dominated; she can’t be tossed so easily onto the ship of fools and made to float along with everyone else.

Of course for O’Connor Weil is a fool -a particularly pathetic one, in fact, because she exemplifies the sinful pride that lies behind trying to use your mind to understand divinity: She was a “proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth.” What I’ve always seen as most impressive and human about Weil – her attraction to faith and her resistance to it – O’Connor sees as a pitiable farce, a comic parable about human vainglory and the way it blocks our acceptance of cosmic mysteries.

I see how in extreme and self-destructive gestures like starving herself in sympathy with suffering people Weil becomes an object of interest for O’Connor, who in story after story features extremists and compulsives doing weird self-destructive things in an hilariously distorted belief that they’re being spiritual, or, even worse, doing these things out of no belief at all, but rather out of some deeply obscure, deeply stupid need for self-expression. Weil, O’Connor writes, “parallels” such characters…. Yet how unkind of O’Connor, who routinely condemns the tawdry and deluded class snobbery of characters like Mrs Turpin in “A Revelation,” to see Simone Weil, of all people, as a mere variant of that.

“To look at the worst will be for [the writer] no more than an act of trust in God,” writes O’Connor; but actually I think she means to look for the worst. It was O’Connor’s strange mission to make us trust the actions of grace even in regard to the most lost among us (the wildly popular tv series, Lost, apparently featured O’Connor’s work); yet how can I trust a writer for whom it’s always midnight in the garden of good and evil? Who cannot grant us any clarity at all?

“The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive,” O’Connor writes, with characteristic dismissiveness. Instead of seeing life as one long squalid torpor disrupted by a probably fatal but somehow spiritually bracing blow to the head, the reader will insist on something different… But that something different is not necessarily the kitschy grace that O’Connor imagines we’re after.

A reporter for the El Paso Times describes the University of Texas at El Paso, a school that’s sort of the moral equivalent of British Petroleum — only it’s trying to make its mess even worse.

… [U]niversities with high numbers of low-income students and unremarkable sports teams take more money from [their] students — in fees and in diverting money away from educational programs — to subsidize athletics programs.

The University of Texas at El Paso falls into the trend.

… UTEP diverted $774 per student into athletics in the year 2008-09 — the third-highest in Conference USA and significantly higher than the national average of $506.

Of 99 schools [recently] studied, UTEP had the highest percentage of low-income student in Division 1, with more than 62 percent of the students receiving financial aid.

… In April, UTEP students rejected the creation of a new athletic fund that would have more than doubled the amount UTEP athletics received from tuition and fees…

Yes, in this great land of ours, our forefathers had the foresight to see that university professors would someday attempt to block internet access in their classrooms. That’s why the founders enacted the Blocking Classroom Internet Access is Illegal law.

We’re building a new large lecture hall facility. [The writer is a professor on a campus architecture committee. She’s responding to an article Scott Jaschik wrote for Inside Higher Ed. I’ll get to the article in a minute.] I’m one of 3 faculty on the architectural committee. When I suggested software/electronic blocking technology as part of the 6 lecture halls of various sizes, our IT people said that was illegal. Anyone know if this is true? I can’t find it in my state’s laws (a Southern state) and it seems like lots of schools use such technology. As a faculty member about to teach (and want to) 450 students — I desperately wanted such software that I could turn on/off.

Well, you’re just gonna have to stay desperate! Especially down South the law’s really strict. If any professor tries in any way to get between a student and Facebook, the student can make an on-the-spot citizen’s arrest and incarcerate the professor for the length of her natural life.

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

The article’s really neat if you’re UD. If you’re me, it gives you hope. A couple of professors at a recent gathering of professors went after technology in the classroom. They said all the same shit UD‘s been saying about it for five years.

… [T]he push to use technology in the classroom has diminished the roles of teaching and education. They said they feel that many sessions for faculty members about the use of technology are the equivalent of “Tupperware parties,” focused on convenience and not education.

… The concern about technology (in its entirety, rather than one tool or another) was summed up in a series of statistics reviewed by both professors showing that increasing numbers of college students are not prepared for work at the college level. At that point, the presenters asked: If technology is helping us teach better, why are we seeing so much evidence that students aren’t learning as well as we would like? Current college students have had more exposure to technology in high school and college than previous generations did, but are they better off for it?

[One presenter] stressed that he was not arguing that technology is the cause of educational failings. But he said that — given that technology costs money and takes time to learn — shouldn’t more questions be asked about whether the entire emphasis on technology has helped enough to justify its continued use?

“There is a science and an art to teaching,” he said. And if technology is part of the science, it’s time to focus anew on the art. Audience members traded stories about colleagues back home who — on a day that technology in their classrooms wasn’t working to allow for PowerPoints or other tools — canceled class because they didn’t know what to do. [Are you fucking kidding?]

Others talked about how seemingly forward-thinking ideas, like the “hybrid” course that mixes in-person and online instruction, can backfire. One faculty member spoke about how, at her campus, students sign up for the courses with no idea what they really are – sometimes unaware that they still must attend class and others not understanding how to work online. “It’s been a real disaster,” she said.

There was no real manifesto issued at the session, but there were repeated calls to take back the classroom.

[A presenter] talked about his revelation last year that he could ban students from using laptops or cell phones during class. He said he immediately saw the quality of discussion in class go up. Faculty members may think, as he did originally, that since they would have used laptops for note-taking (if they had had them as students), that’s how they would be used today — and not realize all the Facebook action and messaging and surfing that’s really going on.

Telling students that cell phones must be turned off, he said, requires firmness on the professor’s part. He demonstrated the looks he sees on some students as they are constantly glancing down on their muted but decidedly not off cells, anxious about any texts they may have missed. [He] said he isn’t heartless on the matter and that he has been known to tell some students “go outside and get your fix. You are in too much pain” from not being able to use the cell. But they must leave to do so.

And the professors said faculty members also need to be more questioning about whether PowerPoints are really the best way to communicate with students. [One] said that he believes that they may work well in some cases, but said that “when you are lecturing, you are unfolding ideas, and on the screen you have an immediate snapshot.” [Incredibly important point.   I’ve tried to get at it many times on this blog.  Significant ideas need to evolve slowly in all of their complexity and ambiguity in order to be grasped.  This means questions and comments  from students; it means students being able to witness the professor in real time herself evolving, through spontaneous speech and maybe through writing on the blackboard, those ideas.  This is known as the life of the mind, kiddies.  PowerPoint plops the endpoint of ideas down in front of you, all done up and dead.]

He said he finds that the act of writing on a board more accurately conveys the path he is taking an idea

[T]he real problem is that professors are over-relying on their PowerPoints, and are losing the art of improvisation. A good faculty member, he said, must be like a good comedian – “knowing the audience, responding to the audience” and either extending one line of thought or regrouping when something hasn’t worked.  [You can’t even see your audience when you’re giving head to PowerPoint.]

Faculty members who base their classes on PowerPoint, he said, seem to lose that flexibility, which he said was crucial to reaching students. “Just because your machine tells you to go, you go.”  [You’re a machine slave; your students staring at Facebook are machine slaves.  Way to learn.]

Universities sometimes forget, in thinking about the benefits of big time sports, this one: Guaranteed permanent employment of a large, high-profile legal staff.

The bigger your athletic program, the more likely it is that, like Texas Tech, you’re currently being sued for tens of millions of dollars in a case followed by the national press.

It’s all about coaches. Lots of coaches are fine and upstanding. But if you keep hiring new ones long enough, you’re almost certainly going to end up with a drunk, a sadist, a loser, a guy who doesn’t know how to cheat without getting caught, or a quitter.

The quitter’s always leaving for a job that pays more. The sadist wallops his players real bad. The drunk gets caught plastered inside his Porsche. Even though you give the loser most of your endowment, he can’t win a game. And you know you’ve hit the bottom of the coaching barrel when the guy can’t even cheat like all the other coaches without getting caught. Only a death wish can explain that.

So all these guys sue, see. Or you sue them. I mentioned Texas Tech. A judge just ruled that TTU’s latest legal desperation move ain’t gonna work:

A judge says former football coach Mike Leach’s lawsuit over his firing from Texas Tech can move forward.

State District Judge William C. Sowder on Tuesday struck down the university’s claim of sovereign immunity from the lawsuit’s breach of conduct claim.

… The university fired Leach on Dec. 30, two days after it suspended him amid allegations he mistreated a player with a concussion.

… [Adam] James has said his coach twice ordered him to stand for hours while confined in a dark place during practice.

But here’s one other thing to keep in mind about big time university sports and constant expensive high-profile litigation: Fans love it. It’s an expected accompaniment to the story on the field, another game to follow. You gotta pay to play.

… beautifully about Don DeLillo:

… Of all our novelists, Don DeLilllo is perhaps the most priestly; indeed, it is his example of high-minded renunciation that makes any literary behavior but the writing of rigorously modernist texts seem at best a vulgarity, at worst a betrayal. He is the most purposefully removed of our novelists this side of Thomas Pynchon or Philip Roth; and yet because he is concerned with a very specific condition of modernity — private befuddlement in the face of incomprehensible public events — he is engaged to the point of being oracular. Thanks to his unsurpassed talent for capturing and conjuring free-floating dread, he even has the reputation of something of a prophet; there can be no event so horrific but that DeLillo seems to have anticipated it, from 9/11 to the financial collapse and now to the spill or the blowout or the hemorrhage in the Gulf.

No, he has never written about Top Kills and Junk Shots and the odd flutter of hope elicited by the words “Containment Dome.” But in their suggestion of corporatized violence and above all in the violence they do to the language, they are DeLilloesque. In what is known as his breakthrough novel, 1985’s White Noise, he made his signature contribution to the American language when he wrote of an “airborne toxic event” that results from an accident of chemical cars in a trainyard. The chemical that he created for the occasion, Nyodene D, is less important than the fact that the airborne toxic event is just that — an event that people talk about, argue about, even as it tragically envelops them. And of course what they talk and argue about most of all is what to call it: “They’re not calling it the feathery plume anymore,” one character says. “They’re calling it the black billowing cloud.”

What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.

No, Don DeLillo has never written about what about BP, Transocean, the MMS, and our thirst for oil have wrought in the Gulf of Mexico. But 25 years ago he imagined the name for a disaster that would come with its own excruciating and tantalizing Zapruder, and that would allow us to talk it — and ourselves — to death:

The underwater toxic event.