Lunch.

Is authentic tragedy, as George Steiner has argued, dead in the modern world? Do we overuse the word, attaching it to routine or random bad events, etc?

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Say what you will about the fate of the tragic in our time — When you happen on a headline that truly does describe, with chilling concision, a tragedy, you’re called upon to take note.

From today’s LA Times:

Euripides! Thou should’st be living at this hour.

Et in terra Pax homes in on us.

Mr UD‘s out panic shopping with the rest of ‘thesda; UD is au Metro on her way back from a meeting in Foggy Bottom; La Kid is at work. We’ve all got that vague hunched feeling that goes along with anticipating lost power and falling trees.

Of course for UD this is all ultimately about racing over to the nearest hotel, pulling multiple sheets blankets and throws from a kingsize bed, jumping in, ordering room service, and firing up the MacBook.

Mr UD will be all disapproval: Life is for meeting strenuous character tests like staying in dark cold houses with falling trees.

… says Buck Mulligan of troubled, brilliant Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses.

Robert Trivers, who describes himself as “one of the greatest social theorists in evolutionary biology alive, period,” seems a pretty impossible person, and his restless, aggressive ways with the world seem to be getting worse as he gets older. To the point where his employer, Rutgers University, has now suspended him (with pay, but they might be on their way to suspending him without pay). His department asked him to teach a course he did not want to teach, and he complained about this – to his class – so unpleasantly that he was removed.

This fascinating 2005 profile in the Guardian recounts Trivers’ long struggle with mental illness; his self-wounding insistence on picking fights with other people in the various fields in which he works; and his Morrissey-like self-regard.

He reminds UD – based on the little she’s read about him – of Larry Kramer. Both seem permanently pissed off moral purists. And although it’s not much fun for anyone – the purist or the purist’s targets – to be around people like this, they sometimes turn out to make enormous contributions to the world by being the way they are.

Trivers is seventy, and Rutgers no doubt decided they could wait him out. Rutgers no doubt figured that by the time Trivers got really problematic, he’d be on the verge of retirement. But – again, like Kramer, who has, against immense odds, made it to 78 – Trivers continues rolling along nicely. His belligerence-flame burns brightly.

Guys like these – guys like Kramer and Trivers – are powerful rebukes to Buddhism. Apparently you can thrive on anger.

As are many sexual harassment lawsuits, complaints, stories… This is one reason UD tends not to report them… They’re often a real mess.

This one at Northwestern now has a suit (against the university) and another suit (against local news outlets), and what actually happened between this student and the professor she claims harassed her? She does not seem to have filed a report with the police.

I cover this latest NU mess because I covered (a little) the Colin McGinn mess, and because there’s another mess in the philosophy department at the University of Colorado right now, and a larger messy discussion being carried on nationally about philosophy as a particularly sexism-ridden academic field.

Because it’s a major American university, and Ludlow’s an important philosopher, and the student’s lawsuit is a real whopper, this story will probably be pretty big. University Diaries will have to take note.

In a scientific culture that values quantity over quality charges of plagiarism should be neither surprising nor unbelievable. The obsessive drive to publish, to garner as many references and citations as possible, is extremely unhealthy. Quantity has become the enemy of quality and individual responsibility. I am always amazed when scientists and authors boast (or have others boast for them) about their CVs containing hundreds of publications. In my opinion this should be considered a badge of shame. The author is, essentially, admitting that he or she is willing to take credit for work for which he or she has had no involvement.

But big guns like Thomas Luscher are western culture’s last true heroes! Onward they ride, on the backs of their lessers, to glory!

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

The Charge of the Write Brigade

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Theft
Wrote the six hundred.
“Forward, the Write Brigade!
Ghost for the big guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Theft
Wrote the six hundred.

Yet another professor allows himself to be reduced to a low-level Stasi operative.

From the extensive official directives issued to students in a class at the University of Santa Clara:

(b) When in class, you may not disturb me or your classmates with irrelevant computer or phone activities.
(c) Examples of violations: watching videos, checking Facebook, texting, playing games, doing anything related to your phone, or walking in late yet talking loudly while getting settled.

L.R. 4.1 Penalties for violation:
(i) For each violation of L.R. 4, points will be deducted from the 200 “professionalism” points available this term. (That is the same value as your revised CF2 memo.)
(ii) I dislike public shaming, but to encourage professional behavior, when I observe impermissible conduct I will announce a reminder about the problem. I will also note the student(s) involved, and later email notice of how many points were lost.

It’s pretty clear that this professor spends most of his prep time drawing up class conduct contracts, and most of his actual class time calculating demerits. The simple expedient of banning laptops and phones seems not to have occurred to him. As it is, he’s well on his way toward becoming a higher-level operative.

The talk is called “The Effects of Sins” by an external lecturer called Ustadh Abu Ibrahim. He appears to be no firebrand, espousing moderate views that wouldn’t sound out of place in any mosque, church or temple. At the end, he stresses that the women at the back should be allowed to ask questions. “You have to be fair to the sisters,” he tells his audience.

So generous of him. All the way in the back, the sisters… They should be allowed to talk.

… bag.

The Oshkosh campus of the University of Wisconsin is number one among the nation’s colleges and universities, according to this guy, for alcohol-related arrests among its students.

The schools of the state of Wisconsin – famed for its hearty drinking culture – do well across the board for drug and alcohol related naughtiness (see the last chart on this page).

The rector of Kosovo’s state university Ibrahim Gashi resigned on Saturday following protests by students over reports [that Gashi and other] professors had forged academic works.

This is how it works; this is how hugely corrupt countries and their institutions slowly become less corrupt. Those students hit the streets every day and got tear gassed for one reason: They were disgusted to live in a country where mindless political hacks get jobs running universities, where the position of head of a university is nothing but a political perk.

I mean, they might as well be living in Alabama.

So — under immense pressure from outraged students the hack has fled. Bravo.

… that they really cannot think of anything besides athletics for their universities to do.

I know you have trouble believing this; you will point to the existence of professors and administrators on all public university campuses. You will point to the baseline definitional truth – unmissable even to the most doltish – of universities as places of learning.

But the mere existence of professors and administrators at any campus of, say, the University of Hawaii system, proves nothing. You need to look at the fact that schools like UH do virtually nothing, decade after decade, but throw money down a sports hole. It is clear that no one in the state can think of anything else a university might be for.

Except for kickbacks from contractors.

Those are the two things:

1. Staff makes money via bribes.

2. Football games are staged.

Here’s the latest:

[The chancellor] cleared the department of a nearly $15 million deficit last summer and gave the department three years to balance its $30 million budget or face cutting sports offerings.

Dat’s right. He just up and used funds, available to educate people, to erase the athletics department’s fifteen million dollar deficit.

Since then, they’ve lost all their games, no one attends the games, they already have another two million dollar deficit, and UH is going to raise the student athletics fee.

One observer, complaining about the ten million dollars in athletics bailout money from Hawaii taxpayers the university looks likely to get, notes that even in this grim situation there is something for which to be thankful:

[N]o one was present when the ceiling in a classroom on the third floor of Moore Hall collapsed inward due to a leaking pipe.

UD presumes no one was present because, well, physical campuswise… no one’s ever present… There’s no there there as ol’ Gertie put it…

Again, UD would suggest that states like Hawaii actually cannot conceptualize university. And there’s no cure for that.

I’ve tried all number of ways to [educate my writing students] outside of class meetings – marking papers extensively, using Track Changes, real-time online collaboration– and it never, ever works. Most them don’t look, and most of them don’t care, unless there’s the basic human accountability of sitting down with them at a table and going through the changes together. That’s how I drag them to the skills they want.

… [With the move to online education,] not only will we be erasing the very notion of individual instructor attention, we’ll be particularly targeting the most vulnerable, most difficult to educate students, the ones who now either never make it to college or drop out at huge rates. This is the perfect expression of an educational discourse that has no connection to the reality of what most schooling is like for most students.

… I’m dedicated to the task of getting as many marginal students in and through as possible, and I think that’s an absolute moral need for our colleges and our society. But … online models are precisely the opposite of what’s likely to work.

… We can build a vast edifice of online higher education where, as happens with for-profit online schools now, we all agree to juke the stats, grading and graduating students who lack even basic skills, and degrading the very notion of higher education. That’s an option.

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

UD would add two things to this.

1. It’s not merely the “basic human accountability” that only takes place face to face; it’s students witnessing and talking to, week after week, a human being they respect being serious about something. Wanting in some sense to be like your professor is not a contemptible desire; on the contrary, many people who become serious, reflective citizens probably got there in part through having been inspired by engagement with a serious, reflective teacher. Remember what Tony Judt wrote about one of his professors, who

broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history. He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect. That is teaching.

Which leads me to my second thing:

2. What good professors are ultimately serious about is their students. That is, this human mutual accountability or whatever you want to call it goes both ways. In the classroom, you are looking at me, and I am looking at you. I am looking at you as a young, smart, promising human being wanting to clarify aspects of human life. This sight moves me; and I want not only to talk to you about human complexities but to exhibit to you what one older person (me) who has had a reasonably disciplined exposure to some of those complexities looks like, sounds like, acts like. I want to do exactly what Judt’s professor did: Listen with great care to what you say and how you say it; and then analyze what you have said in a way that maybe moves you forward in your relationship to it. Maybe makes you less emotional, more analytically neutral; maybe makes you aware that other people before you have formulated things in a way similar to yours, but somewhat more nuanced, etc., etc. That is teaching.

On the up side, the person who died was only a woman.

… the University of North Carolina continues – it should be remembered – to feature people like Charles van der Horst on its faculty.

van der Horst was recently arrested.

… He was arrested along with other Moral Monday protesters on May 6 in Raleigh for trespassing, violating building regulations and illegal gathering in the Capitol Building. The day before, he ran a relay race in California and grabbed a red eye flight back to North Carolina.

… Police slipped plastic restraints around van der Horst’s wrists and led the protesters to a bus that took them to Wake County jail where van der Horst was booked and fingerprinted.

“The attached arrest documents shows that I was arrested for my ‘singing,’ something I am sure my family would say was completely justified,” he wrote in his journal…

He marched with his father during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, worked in the Vietnam anti-war movement in high school and appealed to the N.C. General Assembly in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic… Van der Horst’s father was a member of the NAACP in New York, and his mother was a Holocaust survivor.

… Van der Horst said the state’s decision not to expand Medicaid pushed him to join the Moral Monday protests. He believed that decision was based on politics, not on what would be best for the state.

… He also protests voter ID laws, anti-abortion legislation and low teacher pay.

“For God’s sake, I think South Carolina pays its teachers more,” he said.