“I was just reading something last night from the state of California that … seven or eight of the California system of universities don’t even teach an American history course [Rick Santorum said at a campaign stop]. It’s not even available to be taught.”
MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow on her Monday broadcast called the Santorum statement “100 percent untrue” and “hysterically wrong.”
She then read from the University of California, Davis, course calendar naming several courses from the Davis catalog and the classes’ instructors.
Courses include “History of the United States,” “The Gilded Age and Progressive Era” and “War, Prosperity and Depression, 1917-1945.”
Davis officials said they were pleased with the unexpected exposure.
“We were thrilled that a national TV audience was able to see the breadth of our course offerings in a very important subject,” UC Davis spokesman Barry Shiller said Tuesday.
All campuses teach multiple American history courses.
… has been found dead in a midtown Manhattan hotel under odd circumstances — maybe suicide, maybe an assignation gone wrong… or maybe natural causes:
Detectives were treating Richard Descoings’ death as suspicious after finding his cellphone on a third-floor landing as if “it had been flung out the window,” a police source said.
Descoings, director of the prestigious Institute of Political Studies in Paris, was found dead about 1 p.m. in his seventh-floor room at the Michelangelo Hotel.
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Update: The clues (if they’re reliable; it’s still early in the story) point to suicide. Friends have apparently told police Descoings was depressed; empty liquor bottles and anti-depressant pills were found in the room. No marks of trauma were on the body. Someone had hurled his laptop and cell phone out of the room, onto an exterior landing.
One possible sequence of events: Suicidal, but not wishing to kill himself at home, in France, he determined to wait until he was in a hotel room (it’s not uncommon for suicidal people to choose hotels – hotels are anonymous, and you spare the people who live with you the trauma of discovering your body). He drank a lot of liquor (alcohol for that matter may have been a factor in his depression), maybe took a bunch of pills… In a kind of rage, or in despair, he threw, as it were, his life away – the laptop, the phone – and then lay down.
This would explain his condition when hotel security came to check on him on the morning he was supposed to appear at a conference. Colleagues, concerned that he hadn’t shown up, contacted the hotel. Hotel personnel said they heard him snoring.
Some time later, they checked again, and found him dead.
Pure speculation, of course – but, again, if the clues are correct, it’s a possibility.
There are also reports that he had visitors to his room that night. So something very different might have happened.
Professors at the University of Ottawa want the right to ban laptops from their classrooms; the school will soon vote on a proposal along these lines.
Okay so for what it’s worth UD anticipates that the intriguing Minerva Project will be a failure. Here’s why.
Whenever your dominant, overriding motivation is profit, you’re going to create a shitty education.
Minerva bills itself as a new Ivy League American university. It’ll be totally online and totally expensive.
It will cost about half as much as elite university tuition, to be sure, but this will still be much too pricy for what students will get, which is basically a classier version of other online for-profit schools. No campus, no contact with professors or students (unless you pay yet more to live in an apartment building in some random city that Minerva will designate for their students), no experience at all besides watching a high-profile professor give lectures and then doing interactive sessions with a teacher.
I’m not sure what ‘teacher’ means here. Someone with an advanced degree, says the article I’m reading; but that could mean a person with an MA and little to no actual classroom experience…
Let us regard skeptically Minerva’s claim that it will be “the first elite American university launched in a century.” I’m afraid you don’t launch elite universities. It takes quite a lot of time for people to know you exist, much less have this great reputation. Look how long the elite American universities have been around, and tell me whether you think you can whip one up pronto.
[Minerva’s founder] says that the genesis for Minerva was in learning how many academically-qualified students were being rejected from America’s top universities. “Harvard’s dean of admissions, for example, said that 85% of applicants are qualified, but less than one in ten is actually accepted… and it’s particularly difficult for foreign students trying to get into American schools. There is a basic supply and demand imbalance.”
Yeah, well, once a person who’s qualified for Harvard is turned down, she doesn’t start looking for online schools. She goes to Cornell (or any of a healthy number of other very good to great schools) instead.
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UPDATE: Back in ’09, Frank Rich detailed the remarkable commitment to personal enrichment on the part of Minerva’s chief advisor, Larry Summers:
Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”
Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.
But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.
Summers’s dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried — and, mercifully, failed — to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers’s potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies.
You can be sure that Summers will bring this same innovative education/personal enrichment mix to Minerva.
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A discussion forms at Inside Higher Ed.
… which was quick. But already the university (and Yale, where Yaron Segal got his PhD) is being featured in news stories about this fatally stupid genius.
In Harper’s, the political scientist Benjamin Barber called [Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind] “a most enticing, a most subtle, a most learned, a most dangerous tract.”
This would be the Benjamin Barber most enticed by the most subtle, most learned, Muammar Qaddafi.
The Barber who wrote countless opinion pieces praising Qaddafi, a man he called “a poet of democracy.”
[A]thletic success does not seem to imply higher [academic] quality, at least not for the Final Four. Looking at rankings of overall institutional quality as measured by US News & World Report in 2012 , the “Kentucky Arms Race” does not seem to have had an effect. The ranks for the elite eight’s losing teams, Baylor (ranked 75th), Florida (58th), Syracuse (62nd) and UNC (29th) are far better than those for the final four. Of the final four, just one, Ohio State (ranked 55th), is in a comparable academic league. Louisville is ranked 106 spots away from the team it beat last weekend (Florida) and at 124th, Kentucky’s athletic prowess does not seem to be translating into academic accolades.
… before that person gets in any kind of trouble?
If that person is a football coach – Joe Paterno – or an athletic director – the University of Montana’s Jim O’Day – the answer is a lot. A lot of bad shit can go down before you have to answer for it; and even as you’re answering for it, your loyal fans will express outrage that some university president had the unmitigated gall to make you answer for it.
Everybody knows about Paterno; but now people in Missoula are outraged, baffled, wounded, shocked, stunned (some of the words that recur in news reports) that an athletic director who has been in charge of sports at Montana during two major, extensive scandals (one in 2009, and a current one) on his teams might be considered something less than an asset by his school.
I think. I’ve been doing major garden work today, and there are always a few macabre discoveries. The skull I’ve brought in and put on the desk in front of me (I’m gazing at it as I type) still has quite a few of its little teeth, and its head is a perfectly intact pearly thing bisected by thin wavy lines. I’ve just Google Imaged
rat skull
fox skull
squirrel skull
rabbit skull
and found that the rat’s teeth are all wrong, the fox is totally something else, the squirrel is too small, and the rabbit — well, the rabbit’s just right… And when you think of how many rabbits UD‘s garden has, and how they’re always getting eaten by the foxes who live at the top of UD’s hill — and how the bird’s eye view of the skull looks just like this (upper left) — I think we’ve got a match.
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Update: Next day. My sister
(with whom I’ve just finished
filming my fourth lecture
on poetry for the Faculty
Project) took a picture
of the skull from above:
Joe Nocera, in today’s New York Times:
… Is it true that black male athletes have a higher graduation rate than other students? It is not. The N.C.A.A. has created several other Orwellian concepts, such as an Academic Progress Rate, which allows it to use data to create the illusion that athletes are doing better academically than their peers.
… In comparing college basketball players with their true peer group — full-time college students — … data show that the athletes are 20 percent less likely to graduate than nonathletes. [When you parse the data by race,] of the teams in this year’s March Madness, for instance, the black athletes are 33 percent less likely to graduate than nonathletes.
… In his great novel about totalitarianism, “1984,” George Orwell described the three slogans of The Party: War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.
The N.C.A.A. has its own equivalents. Athletes Are Students. College Sports Is Not About Money. Graduation Is The Goal.
But spare a thought for organizations like the Knight Commission, whose offering to Oceania is the regular convocation around conference tables of men in their best suits who look worried about the situation. The N.C.A.A. couldn’t do what it does without them.
A professor at Colorado State University writes about the desperate ploy of a desperate university: Invest tens of millions in football, and get rich and famous.
A letter-writer to the same newspaper picks up on Matt Taibbi’s now-famous Goldman Sachs metaphor:
[CSU is beginning to look like a university where] a powerful athletic establishment has become a virtual vampire squid, tentacles wrapped around the university and dominating the directions, programs and missions of what had been an academic and scholarly community, while demanding ever greater funding, facilities and support for an ever-expanding sports entertainment complex now entrenched in an educational community.
… Glenn Poshard (scroll down here for UD‘s posts about one of the few old-time political hacks running an American university). Before Hungary’s president showed that you can plagiarize your thesis and not have plagiarized your thesis (scroll down), Poshard was already there, doing the same thing and holding on – to this day – to his position as president of Southern Illinois University.
But just as No-Quit Schmitt is under strong pressure to leave his post, so Poshard finds himself under threat. The governor’s office and some high-ranking SIU trustees are trying like hell to get him out (faculty are leaving; fewer and fewer students are applying; Poshard and his cronies are fatally tied to the Blagojevich regime), to the point where Poshard has actually had to try to talk. Which never works out well. “My leadership has been one of a positive nature on this university.” That’s your president speaking, kiddies.
Poshard’s problem is that the current government of the state of Illinois is very embarrassed and seems to be on an anti-corruption kick.
The people at the Faculty Project
have created an image for
UD‘s course on poetry.
