The Pope quits.
The Pope quits.
Hold your horses. You know the scene. A dark rainy very early Washington morning. The conference hotel has an entrance directly from Metro Center – underground, see, so you don’t have to deal with the rain – but UD‘s wild guess as to which entrance took you to the Grand Hyatt was as wrong as it’s possible to be, so she just splashed through three long blocks but is now richly rewarded with a BIG ol’ breakfast buffet in one of your basic insanely beautiful American hotels. Everything’s brownish spartan eco in style — huge bamboo crammed into speckly brown containers kind of thing.
UD has been invited by a very confused organizer to attend this NSF-sponsored event which seems to be about er computers and their implications for higher education. Or something! It’s a mark of how wrongheaded this organization was in directing its invitation to UD that she barely understands its… er… ground of being. But she’ll blog this. Whatever.
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Humanoids? Okay, well, we’re all stretched out at long table-clothed tables and we’ve all got our scones at the ready and our laptops fired up. Bit of conversation behind me:
And you’re the director of … what?
For a bunch of techies, seems a genial, outgoing group. Many small gatherings chatting at the long tables. Fifty fifty men women? Think so. No doubt UD‘s invitation is about evening out the gender thing… What? Because she blogs? Has two blogs? Has a poetry MOOC? UD has also lately been invited to be on a panel at next year’s MLA about technology and the status of women in the profession… A colleague has asked her to talk to his grad seminar about the digital humanities which UD isn’t even sure what the fuck that means… Her photo is emblazoned on the front page of the last edition of the George Washington University newspaper, featuring her as the first GW professor to have a MOOC…
So is UD a pioneer??? A tech pioneer? Lordy.
I mean, read this category, Technolust. No, UD is not a Luddite, exactly – but she has always had strong Luddische tendencies… I think it’s safe to say that over the last thirty years UD has resisted every single new form of screen technology offered her… And she’s got that cranky old English professor thing about technology really being our enemy… But over the years she has gradually caved.
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Introduction taking place. Guy pronounces academia as if it’s macadamia.
“How do you do high-quality online education” seems to be the focus.
Uses “ideation” for “thinking.”
“Recent awareness of MOOCs and whatnot.”
“The elephant in the room is the MOOC phenomenon.”
“Cheating is a big problem.”
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Okay, so I knew some of this was going to piss me off and here we go. A totally stupid PowerPoint about how all students are bored in school because school isn’t like a Facebook session in your bedroom. Bullshit, honey. Have you ever heard of different experiences, different places for different sorts of experiences? Oh no – universities have to be exactly like online gaming dens or we’re failing our young people!
AGENDA: CURRENT EDUCATION IS BORING AND INEFFECTIVE.
Oh yeah we need to wire and film every moment of our students – are their fingers moving faster on the mouse? Great! They’re excited! Wire their fingers! Follow their fingers.
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WHY DO WE LOOSE JOBS?
She cannot even spell. She reads this big PP headline off the page for us – pointing her lighted pointer right over it – and lots of us laugh but she doesn’t even notice. She doesn’t notice that even as she pontificates about the importance of education, she cannot spell LOSE.
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Next speaker seems offended by MOOCs because they don’t reflect the educational technologies he prefers. He complains that there’s no science and research behind MOOCs. First, that’s not true. And second, even if it were, so what? He spends the rest of the talk flacking his particular journals, ed-tech approaches.
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Bio break.
Collaboratories.
UD learns new words.
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“There’s an audio narration that worked on my pc last night.” Plenty of tech fuckups in these way-tech settings.
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UD has just taken part in a breakout session (she thinks of acne and Alcatraz, but it just means a discussion made up of only some participants in a conference) in which computer science guys from MIT talked with UD about whether computers could capture the sort of thing she does – or say embodies – in James Joyce seminars. Of course the answer is no bloody way, but we tossed it around.
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Big Data. That’s this hour’s buzz word.
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Plus Affective Computing, where you connect a sensor to my groin while I check out the best deer poisons, and find the phrases that get me going.
This commenter, responding to a typically mushy article about teaching ethics in American business schools, says what UD always says about this subject. Either you scare b-school grads into good behavior, or forget it.
I mean, plenty of b-school grads are good people and will follow the law yadda yadda. Plenty aren’t good people, however, and they won’t follow the law. Are b-schools responsible for trying to change the not-good people into good people before they leave their business programs?
UD thinks it’s sweet of them to try, sweet of them to rig up be-good courses. But it don’t make no nevermind and you know it and I know it.
In line with this sensible commenter’s comment, UD, she reminds you, has proposed the following:
1. Drop all business ethics courses.
2. Initiate a program of visiting lecturers drawn from convicted business fraudsters residing in local prisons.
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UD thanks David for the link.
This is an example of the corrosive skepticism undermining the American university’s greatest asset.
You can say it was a long time ago… standards were different then… you were in a hurry… the university passed you, after all, so it’s their problem… it’s all political… you’re going to sue the school because you swear that you didn’t… you were just a little sloppy…
You can say all the things people caught plagiarizing say; but at the end of the day you’ve been done in by a plagiarism-detection technology you could never have foreseen, and you’re going to lose your job.
Annette Schavan, German Education Minister, has resigned.
Why sure. You might have noticed that football – and hockey – are extremely violent. Most of the people who play them aren’t violent off-field, but some are.
On-field brawls are common, as at the Super Bowl, when officials had to keep breaking up fights.
Fans and viewers barely notice. It’s structural to the game, college and professional.
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You don’t have to be the University of Miami – America’s best-known Thug U – to have thuggish people on your team, and it shouldn’t be a big deal when this or that commentator notices the thug-factor, especially when it begins to produce a crime-wave in your community.
As it has at the University of Montana, where for years now its football team has really been acting up. The latest thing is a lot of rape cases, and when a member of the board of trustees stated the obvious about them –
“The university has recruited thugs for its football team and this thuggery has got to stop.”
– he got in all kinds of trouble, with the school and fans issuing indignant denials that the team is thuggish.
But – you know – a lot of football teams are thuggish. Some of the best – the winningest – are on the thuggish side.
What do we gain by denying that even well-bred university lacrosse players can be thuggish? A lot of these university sports guys drink and drug too much, are treated like royalty, etc., etc. It’s just not a good situation. It’s a situation that can create mayhem.
Rather than attacking messengers like Pat Williams, communities like Missoula should look a bit more squarely at how they recruit and treat athletes. That they have created an ongoing problem is a (you should excuse the term, given what we’re finding out about long-term health outcomes for football players) no-brainer.
Go here for background.
I
UT and CPRIT have different numbers for the amount of money the [state] agency has allocated to the University in grant funds [for cancer research], and neither institution was able to explain the discrepancy.
[A University of Texas spokesperson] said UT has been awarded $29.3 million by CPRIT so far, while the agency’s website states CPRIT has granted $38.4 million to UT since 2010. The page lists individual grants awarded by CPRIT.
CPRIT information specialist Ellen Read said financial employees at the agency do not know why there is a discrepancy, but that they believe the agency granted $37.9 million to UT-Austin, not $38.4 million.
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II
The recipient of the biggest grant given by the state’s cancer-fighting agency had spent $1.3 million — or one-sixth of its taxpayer money — on nonallowable costs such as bonuses, moving expenses and honorariums for board members before it ceased operations, Texas lawmakers were told Wednesday.
The Statewide Clinical Trials Network of Texas, or CTNeT, shut down last week after the state stopped advancing it money.
… Two of the [CPRIT’s] top executives, Bill Gimson and Alfred Gilman, who helped approve a $25 million grant to CTNeT, also served on CTNeT’s board.
… CPRIT had advanced the network $8.6 million of its total grant … [N]onallowable costs — cited as $301,000 in [an] audit – [have] grown to $1.3 million.
[M]ost of that increase was to pay CTNeT board members $9,000 apiece each quarter for attending board meetings. …Gimson and Gilman …were drawing $300,000 and $700,000 annual salaries from CPRIT…
… CTNet officials tried to “backdate” the paperwork to justify the honorarium.
Let’s see… Cancer or me? Cancer or me? … Me!
… you become a laughingstock.
“With the revocation of her Ph.D. title, the life’s work of Annette Schavan has been destroyed. As German education minister, she is the leading figure for professors, postgraduates and students. She has been education minister for more than seven years — education and research are her core values, the basis of her political actions. When now, of all things, it comes to light that the education minister has cheated on her doctoral thesis, it’s as if the finance minister were caught hiding his money in Switzerland or the transportation minister were driving drunk.”
Swathes of MBA candidates are being rejected across this land of ours because they plagiarized their admissions essays. This article cites the “Managing Director” of Penn State’s b-school –
Many of the new cases are international applicants from East Asian countries, where borrowing from published sources without attribution is not considered wrong…
– and UD’s gotta ask: Huh? Did you just say that people in East Asian countries don’t think plagiarism is wrong? I mean, yes, people plagiarize like it’s going out of style in East Asian countries… But do you really think that means these people – who come from cultures of education Americans are supposed to envy – don’t understand the ethical implication of …
Are you sure you wanna call it ‘borrowing’?
Are they planning to return it? Are you saying they think it’s okay because they fully intend, after they use We shall fight on the beaches, to return it to Churchill?
… has certainly boosted its rank with its sordid abuse of the new, incredibly generous, state cancer institute, CPRIT. The good people of Texas agreed to give a lot of tax money to this agency, which promised to improve cancer research and treatment for them.
But as soon as its board got hold of its three billion dollars, they allegedly began gifting themselves huge salaries, tossing huge grants to their friends, and ignoring huge swathes of rules and regulations. As one of UD‘s oldest friends – a grants specialist at a local university – writes to her:
Bottom line: a state agency with a gigantic budget and a mission of curing cancer in our lifetime has run amuck – spending huge sums of money in a manner that appears to be governed by favoritism, fails to hold grantees accountable, and fails to manage actual or perceived conflicts of interest. To me, the most damning aspect is the resignations of high ranking officials – they must know even more than what has been revealed to date, and they appear to be abandoning the sinking ship.
A local journalist writes:
[W]e suspect that Governor Perry has been sluicing cancer research money to his buddies.
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How gross is this?
As gross as it gets.
And most of the state’s major universities have been along for the ride.
… on the campus of UD‘s beloved University of Chicago.
[A University of Notre Dame hockey player] was asked to leave Brothers Bar and Grill Sunday night after patrons accused him of taking beer from their tables. [Police say the player] punched the [restaurant’s] 35-year-old manager in the face and stepped on her head when she fell.
… may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.
The University of Düsseldorf on Tuesday evening stripped the doctorate of German Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan for plagiarism…. In 2011… popular defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, was forced to resign when it was uncovered he had copied large chunks of his doctoral dissertation.
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UD thanks Chris.
… context. You look at a school like Syracuse University, which had a bad on-campus brawl early Sunday morning (major fighting; several arrests), and you ask yourself What else? What’s it been like on that campus for the last few months? You scroll through various corruption and violence related posts that pop up on this blog when you type syracuse into UD‘s search engine…
And it’s clear that Syracuse has got what you call a trend.