… I would join SeekingArrangement.com.” A Columbia University student, fresh out of a physics class where the professor took off his clothes in front of a film about 9/11, wonders why her required class requires her to watch things like this.
There are of course precedents. Denis Rancourt didn’t strip, but he did other crazy political shit in what were ostensibly courses about physics.
What is it about physics? I guess you take the big picture, and then it becomes imperative that you WAKE UP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE! your captive audience.
It’s always possible, of course, that Emlyn Hughes is having a mental breakdown in front of his class. Plenty of precedent for that too, sadly.
And, finally, it’s possible Hughes is just a mad attention slut.
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UD thanks Jon.
… Southern Methodist University today, shall we? There are scads of colleges and universities in this country, but only a few – Florida A&M, Penn State, University of Miami, University of North Carolina – get to hog the spotlight. So profound is our ‘radically present’ orientation (to quote the theorists of postmodernity) that we tend to miss precisely those schools with the deepest histories of squalor.
In the case of SMU, which adds piquancy to its sordidness by including a religious denomination in its name, it’s been notably vile ever since its long-ago death penalty, a signal distinction within a national landscape of dirty sports programs. SMU has not let the fact that the program remains moribund stop it from accumulating – last year – a one hundred million dollar athletic deficit.
Nor has the fantastic campus culture of the sports factory faltered in the wake of SMU’s misfortune. Secrecy about the budget even as they soak the students for higher and higher athletics fees? Check. Sodden frat boys befouling all they touch? Check. Violent hazing? Check. I mean, that last one – hazing – hit the news today, but it got lost, since hazing and sexual assault and all that seem de rigueur, comme il faut and la chose normale at SMU. I just thought I’d draw your attention to it for a moment.
“The relationship between professors and their doctoral candidates has often been minimized down to a lazy wave-through.”
There are many illuminating statements in this interview with a German ghostwriter of dissertations.
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Markets work in funny ways.
Instead of creating a backlash against ghostwriters, however, cases like Guttenberg’s have actually had the opposite effect. His case was actually how many people first learned about the existence of doctoral ghostwriters at all. Since the beginning of the 2000’s, the number of ghostwriters … has risen and prices have fallen for the service.
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The interviewed ghostwriter shares the self-justifying bullshit that gets him through the night.
“Everything is for sale: sex, people, doctorates. I am only a cog in the wheels of capitalism.”
You keep telling yourself that, honey.
The University of Central Florida is full of students like Jackie Fulco, who think academics is more important than athletics. That just isn’t right. It’s “crazy,” it’s pitiful, “it just doesn’t add up,” writes a UCF reporter in the school newspaper. Why is the football stadium half empty?
It must be bad marketing. Word’s not getting out about the games. The student looks forward to a full stadium once word gets out. That will set things right, and UCF will start to look like a real university.
… has died.
He knew how to improvise. On one occasion, he gave a beautifully constructed and coherent talk at Stanford, even though the school’s president, after he introduced him, “inadvertently picked up Dworkin’s detailed lecture notes from the lectern.”
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“Each person must take his own life seriously: he must accept that it is a matter of importance that his life be a successful performance rather than a wasted opportunity.”
… Henry Mintzberg [scroll down], the head of Tel Aviv University’s undergraduate business program has urged students not to major in business.
“Study of academic disciplines prepares students to think scientifically in these fields and form the foundation for advanced studies in graduate degree programs,” he said.
One student is outraged:
“Too bad he doesn’t have the integrity not to head a department he doesn’t believe in.”
Do you have to insist on majors in order to believe in your department? UD says no. UD says it shows integrity to care about the quality of undergraduate education your business… minors?… are getting and steer them toward actual academic fields. (Wee UD herself found that the hard-bitten vocationalism of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism was not enough to keep the mind alive, and quickly transferred to the English department.)
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Meanwhile, on the business ethics front, a New York judge has sentenced an insider trading to lecturing.
“To the extent possible, Mr. Fortuna can speak at his college and school of business and other institutions about his own situation and how [easy] it is for him and others to have committed this crime and the difficulties he’s encountered as a result,” [Sidney] Stein said yesterday as he imposed the sentence.
UD foresees an entire industry of MOOCs arising out of the synergy between large numbers of incarcerated insider traders and the need for business schools to deal with their profession’s, er, ethics problems. The general title for these MOOCs would be INSIDER GATING, with subtitles specific to each incarceree’s case.
Ah, the wondrous rich diversity of the laptopped classroom.
… UD‘s latest Inside Higher Ed column, should be up shortly.
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Yep.
When the name of the game in big-time American university football is thug-management, it’s all about comparisons. Who recruits the most criminals? How bad – man to man offense speaking – are they? Do they steal laptops, or do they, like national champ Alabama’s crew, beat people senseless and pack heat?
Then there’s all the chatter about consequences. Ignore it? Suspend them for awhile? Suspend them indefinitely? Dismiss them?
These guys – these Alabama guys – are second stringers, so we’re being spared long articles ignoring what they’ve done and agonizing instead about how their being in jail is going to hurt the defensive line…
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UD thanks several readers for linking her to this story.
UD has told you about this form of campus malfeasance repeatedly. So common are engineering professors who set up their own firms and divert university money that UD has suggested armed guards be posted at their offices as a sort of discouragement to them.
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History here.
UD is back at the online education conference at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, where she continues to learn new words.
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But not just words. There’s the whole thing of whether universities will continue to exist at all if we can download MIT educations via MOOCs. (MOOCs are totally the star of this show. It sometimes sounds a like barnyard here – MOOMOOMOOc.)
The answer to that is you can’t download a college education, which includes not just the social, rite of passage stuff, but also immediate intellectual interaction with professors and smart fellow students – in classrooms, outside of classrooms.
Universities also collect smart people to think valuable thoughts and make valuable things. You can take all of those people and put them in think tanks and corporations, but only the university offers an environment reasonably free of ideology and the profit motive.
UD is aware that both ideologies and commercial activities exist on campuses; she is merely pointing out that unlike Brookings or the Heritage Foundation or Pfizer, the university stands at some remove from ideology and the profit motive. It enables a special sort of intellectual independence, and we rightly value and want to preserve that.
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“What is the unique value of physical presence?”
Too right. One of the breakout sessions lists this as a “very important” question.
A scurrilous voice of dissent in South Carolina dares to suggest that university coaches using state planes for recruitment may not be an appropriate use of taxes!
… when he weighed in on the controversy revolving around the boycott-disinvestment-sanctions speakers at Brooklyn College:
“If you want to go to a university where the government decides what kinds of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply to a school in North Korea.“
Yet you don’t need crude totalitarian censorship to shut people down – or to chill their speech – on important political subjects. UD‘s blogpal, Tenured Radical, wrote a column praising Brooklyn College for holding the sort of discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that needs to take place. She went on, however, to take issue with the tactic of academic boycott:
I … don’t think that there is any good historical evidence that silencing intellectual, academic and cultural workers on a comprehensive basis, and preventing any exchange of ideas between the Israel and the United States, will have any effect on Israeli politics whatsoever beyond isolating progressive intellectuals in Israel.
This perfectly reasonable objection to the strategy in this circumstance has drawn volumes of vicious abuse to TR , via her column’s comment thread, and in other places. For questioning the utility of the boycott, she has repeatedly been denounced as a liar, a racist, and a reactionary by some of the boycotters.
The sheer personal cruelty of the comments is striking; and TR, also reasonably, wonders (in an email to UD) whether participating in the boycott debate is worth it:
[R]ather than be subjected to that kind of treatment again, and risk my reputation further, [maybe] I would be wise to never go near this topic again or ask questions about features of BDS that affect how it functions in a university setting.
There are a number of ways, short of outright censorship, to censor people. You can come down on them like a pile of bricks, for instance, when they say something you don’t like.