… know that UD spends part of the summer at her little house in the wilds of Upstate New York. As the academic year ends and August seems less distant, she begins to follow the news in the Leatherstocking Region — which is what her part of the state calls itself.
But maybe not for much longer.
The name has mystery, history and romance but tourism leaders say the name Central Leatherstocking Region doesn’t attract tourists.
After long discussions and a virtually unanimous vote at a recent meeting tourism leaders in that area agreed to now call the region ‘Central New York’.
The Central Leatherstocking was named for James Fenimore Cooper’s literary works ‘Leatherstocking Tales’. Cooper’s father founded Cooperstown and 4 of the 5 ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ were based out of the New York area.
“Of course Natty Bumppo was a prototype of the American frontiersman, wore leather britches. He was referred to as leatherstocking. He was Cooper’s hero in all five leatherstocking tales” says Paul D’Ambrosio who serves as chief curator for the Fenimore Art Museum.
Stephen Elliott who is the president of N.Y.S. Historical Association says the name Central Leatherstocking Region didn’t attract tourists to their area. “When people plan trips the practicality is that they know where it is so they know if they want to go there. While we may have lost that great romance connotation the fact of the matter is people know where [Central New York] is.” says Elliott.
A UD reader long ago pointed UD in the direction of Mark Twain’s essay about Cooper, which says everything I’ve thought about Cooper ever since Harold Kaplan, at Northwestern University many years ago, assigned Deerslayer in one of her American literature classes.
There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now… Now I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English of “Deerslayer” is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote.
I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that “Deerslayer” is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that “Deerslayer” is just simply a literary delirium tremens.
A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are — oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
(UD‘s house is in Summit, New York. She’s therefore introduced a new category with this post: SNAPSHOTS FROM SUMMIT.)
… Southern Connecticut State University’s journalism department, and indeed, when interviewed recently by the police, Jerry Dunklee said he was “under the impression that whatever he did in the privacy of his own home was his business.”
But there’s freedom, and there’s the law. The indecency law.
A Southern Connecticut State University journalism professor has been arrested for public indecency after neighbors say he was masturbating in his window.
Jerry Dunklee has also been charged with breach of peace.
Police in New Haven were called to Front Street last week. Dunklee’s neighbor told police that she had been dealing with his “odd behavior” for four years. The neighbor says whenever she walks her dog, Dunklee would run to his window, undress and begin masturbating.
Another neighbor told police that he would often see Dunklee dancing around his house naked.
When the neighbor was walking with officers around her yard, police noticed Dunklee standing naked in the window and when he saw the police, he quickly sat down.
“We are confident that Ms. Love’s death was not intended, but an accident with a tragic outcome,” Huguely’s attorney, Fran Lawrence, said Tuesday. “It is our hope that no conclusions will be drawn or judgments made about George or his case.”
A short article about the rough sex defense here.
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Update:
Search warrants reportedly say two witnesses found Love in her bedroom face down in a pool of blood on her pillow, according to the local NBC affiliate. Police officers reported that Love had a large bruise on the right side of her face, which appeared to have been caused by blunt force trauma.
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More:
Police say a Virginia lacrosse player suspected of killing a member of the women’s team shook her and hit her head repeatedly against the wall.
An affidavit filed with a search warrant says police found 22-year-old Yeardley Love face down in her bedroom with a pool of blood on her pillow.
Police also say the suspect, 22-year-old George Huguely, told them he had an altercation with Love and had kicked in her door…
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Update: Via Kate, a reader and a wonderful ex-student of mine, more sickening details at The Hook, a local paper. (Read the comments, too. They provide updates on details of the crime scene.)
Scratch the rough sex defense.
A Stanford student describes an early morning eco-walk around that university’s vast holdings. A well-written account of hidden Stanford.
… This ambitious annual event, now in its fourth year, takes a select group of undergraduates, biologists, professors and others on a 21-mile walk around the perimeter of Stanford land… By exploring the outer reaches of campus, Walk the Farm aims to use Stanford as a microcosm of the American West to display the changes climate change has wrought on the environment.
… The first thing I learned from the Walk – Stanford supports a heck of a lot of cows. More cows than any university should know what to do with…
… la clé to the future.
A vast multiversity’s being built just outside Paris, in Saclay.
In farm fields south of Paris, billions of euros are being ploughed into a new modern university campus designed to rival Harvard, MIT and Cambridge as one of the world’s best.
The Paris-Saclay super-campus is France’s answer to years of decline in higher education, with the result that the nation’s best university only ranks 40th in the world.
… “Our goal is to rank among the top 10 universities in the world,” said Herve Le Riche, who heads the 4.4-billion-euro project (5.9 billion dollars) in Saclay, a plateau of grain fields dotted with clusters of modern buildings.
Already home to some top-notch colleges such as the Polytechnique engineering school, the new campus will start opening its doors in 2015 as a grouping of 23 universities, colleges and research institutes.
New laboratories, amphitheatres, student housing along with shops and transport will be built with a view to making France a destination for some of the best and brightest who now head to US and British universities.
… Sarkozy got the academic world talking when he announced that one billion euros of his 35-billion-euro national loan program would go to Paris-Saclay.
That’s on top of 850 million euros earmarked for the project under his government’s university reform program….
Let’s take a look at the first woman fined for doing so.
[Amel Marmouri, a Tunisian immigrant resident in Novara, an Italian town,] was in a post office when police officers stopped her and issued her with [a 500 euro fine for wearing a burqa].
“As far as I know this is a first in Italy,” said police officer Mauro Franzinelli.
Her husband, Ben Salah Braim, 36, said the family would struggle to pay the penalty.
He said his wife would continue to wear the full-length item of clothing because he did not want her to be seen by other men, but in future she would be forced to stay at home most of the time…
And what does Amel have to say?
Amel?
Amel?
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As for the struggle to pay the penalty: Wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia, which feel strongly about fully veiling their women, should establish a Save the Burqa fund for this purpose.
This is a big, fast-moving story. Here’s a link. Updates on their way.
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An interview Love gave last year at UVA.
Question: Who has most influenced your lacrosse career and how?
Love: My high school coach has definitely influenced my lacrosse career. She was an awesome coach that always pushed me to work harder. She not only prepared me to play at the college level, but she taught me important life lessons. She always put a strong focus on good sportsmanship and working together as a team.
Question: What made you decide to come to Virginia to play lacrosse?
Love: I had wanted to play lacrosse at Virginia since I was little, so coming here was like a dream come true.
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Nora, a reader, sends this link to Inside Lacrosse, which has links to a number of news sources.
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From the New York Times:
… “This is just an incredible story that has taken a life of its own because it’s so tragic,” [Charlottesville Police Chief Tim] Longo said. “Everyone who has children can relate to the families of what these young people are going through. These young people were literally on the threshold of their futures. That dramatically has changed.”
The top-ranked Virginia’s men’s lacrosse team is expected to be the top seed heading into this month’s N.C.A.A. tournament. The women’s team is in the top five and considered to be a strong contender to advance to the national semifinals.
The Virginia lacrosse community has endured its share of recent tragedy: the former Virginia men’s captain Will Barrow died of an apparent suicide in 2008 and the longtime assistant media relations director Michael Colley, who was the lacrosse team’s main contact, died of a heart attack in July.
Now the community is in shock again.
“Charlottesville is just a wonderful place,” Longo said. “Kids from all over the country come here, the best and brightest, and these are two of them, two successful athletes.
“It’s just an unbelievable situation. These are not the kinds of things we see in this community.” …
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Via Crimson05er, another reader, these local Charlottesville links.
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From the police news conference.
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One initial comment from UD. The story is very new — one wants not to say much. But here’s one piece of speculation in response to the remarkable speed with which Huguely was arrested.
Love was a strong and pretty fearless woman, from what I can gather. My guess is that she fought hard, and as a result Huguely may have sustained injuries consistent with someone trying to ward him off. I also think it likely that he confessed.
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A recent case that seems similar:
… Kevin R. Schaeffer, also a Gettysburg College student, choked [Emily Rachel] Silverstein, 19, a sophomore from Roosevelt, N.J., early Thursday morning and then stabbed her in the neck with a steak knife. He sat with her for 15 minutes before putting her in a bathtub, according to a police affidavit.
Mr. Schaeffer, 21, of Oley, Berks County, confessed to the crime, according to the affidavit. He told police he had been drinking that evening but was not intoxicated. He said he had recently stopped taking Zoloft, an anti-depressant, the affidavit said.
Police arrested Mr. Schaeffer that morning and charged him with homicide, aggravated assault, possessing instruments of crime and tampering with evidence.
… Preliminary autopsy results showed that Ms. Silverstein died from a combination of strangling and stabbing between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m.
It was not clear why Ms. Silverstein was at his house. The two had recently ended a sporadic romantic relationship.
“They’d been on and off, and they had broken up again recently. He never hit her that we know of. But she broke up with him because, I don’t know, he had some issues,” Ms. Silverstein’s father, Robert Silverstein, said yesterday…
A much more detailed account. (Note: The earlier link wasn’t working. I found a better one.)
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It’s a weirdly local story for me. Huguely comes from an old Bethesda family; he went to school at Landon, the place where I rehearsed Handel’s Messiah last year.
Sing it, sister.
It’s a common experience – a dimly lit classroom, the low hum of the projector, and the soft glow of yet another bulleted list on the screen.
Eyes grow heavy. The professor stands motionless, ensconced behind a podium and laptop. Attention fades.
Across our great University, PowerPoint has become a crutch for teaching rather than a tool for learning. With more and more technology migrating into classrooms and students seeking an easy lecture crib sheet, these presentations have come to lead lectures rather than augment them.
Students recognize that the best professors make subjects come alive with interesting lectures, open discussion, and critical questioning. No teacher has ever derived effectiveness solely from sleek slides with cheesy fade effects. At its heart, much of education needs little more than a teacher, some chairs, and perhaps a book.
The New York Times recently covered a conference earlier this month in North Carolina where military leaders spoke openly of the hazard posed by dependence on the ubiquitous PowerPoints. Brigadier General H.R. McMaster warned that “it’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding, the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
And therein lays the crux of the problem. When lectures are molded to fit the constraints of PowerPoint, learning is compromised and subjects become pasteurized, homogenized, and intellectually boring. Abandoning this crutch will enhance learning and create more opportunities to practice extemporaneous public speaking with probing questions and answers. These skills challenge students to become better listeners and thinkers — qualities that are of critical importance in today’s increasingly complex world.
Extemporaneous public speaking with probing questions and answers. Sounds like teaching!
From Bloomberg Businessweek:
… The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest U.S. union for public employees and health-care workers, [has] advised its members to withhold their votes to re-elect Blankfein and President Gary Cohn, 49, to the board.
Two other Goldman Sachs board members have also been in the spotlight. Rajat Gupta, the former McKinsey & Co. senior partner who isn’t running for re-election, is suspected by U.S. investigators of tipping off Galleon Group LLC founder Raj Rajaratnam ahead of Buffett’s investment in the company, a person with direct knowledge of the inquiry said last month…
Stephen Friedman, a former senior partner of Goldman Sachs who has served on the board since 2005, resigned as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest because Goldman Sachs is regulated by the Fed. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said it plans hearings about why Friedman was allowed to buy Goldman Sachs stock even when he was playing a role in regulating it…
Blankfein’s flippant remark to a British journalist last year that he was doing “God’s work” may backfire at this year’s meeting as three of the seven shareholder proposals came from religious organizations such as the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, a Catholic missionary order based in Maryknoll, New York. Goldman Sachs’s board has opposed all of the proposals…
Our interest here at University Diaries is in the two Goldman Sachs directors with university positions: Ruth Simmons of Brown, and Bill George of Harvard. But it never hurts to get the bigger picture.
Why do companies like Goldman Sachs put academics like the president of Brown University on their boards?
Consider a set of comments about GS in the Washington Post.
Alan Webber, Fast Company magazine, writes:
… The reaction to Goldman today in the press is one of the things that happens when Americans see too clearly their reflection in a mirror.
Are we really that aggressive? Do we really play the game with that degree of cutthroat, win-at-all-costs raw power? Is that really the face of capitalism?
… What kind of capitalism do Americans want?
Casino capitalism? Wild West capitalism? Winner-take-all capitalism? Or are we looking for something that moderates raw, unfettered, ruthless cowboy capitalism with values that include social equity, the public good, the common cause?
It’s not simply a matter of more or less government regulation. It’s a matter of national values, national purpose and social philosophy.
When we look in the mirror after the dust settles over financial regulation, which face of capitalism do we want to see?
Because what we are is what we get.
We are all Goldman Sachs.
No, no, no. We are not all Goldman Sachs.
UD‘s colleague in GW’s business school whose main activity is making money by hastening the disappearance of the professoriate and with it the university — yes, sure, he’s Goldman Sachs. But not all of us are Goldman Sachs. UD, for instance, is not Goldman Sachs.
Nor is it the whole story to say, as Webber does, that we have casino capitalism, etc.
We have casinos masking themselves as social service agencies. We have cowboys masking themselves as Renaissance humanists.
Because it goes both ways. Cowboys want to get themselves on university boards. Cowboy corporations want university people on their boards.
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Why did a cowboy like Bernard Madoff give a shit about getting himself on the board of trustees of Yeshiva University?
University, baby! University! What does the word say to you? What does it make you think of? The wild west? Winner take all? Raw unfettered ruthless? Nah… Placid, peace-loving. Gently blanketed ivy walls. Springtime gatherings of robed figures thinking higher thoughts. The tamed west! Loser take all! Cooked, fettered, ruth!
The university is cover. It’s what you join, or what you invite, to give yourself or your corporation the look of respectability.
Archana Ramesh, a graduate student at Columbia University, contributes this to the Post discussion:
In his book “Leading Change,” James O’Toole argues for values-based leadership and a consistent display of respect for followers. This paradigm of leadership is not one stressed in business schools, which train our future investment bankers and traders. So while we can look at how leaders at a particular institution have behaved as symptoms of a marketplace without values, we have to wonder about the root causes of these behaviors.
What are the gaps in our educational and social curriculum that make it acceptable for some of our most influential business leaders to forget their duty to followers? Where is the business case made for leading based on respect and trust? Have we as a society become so short-term and bottom-line-focused that making values-based decisions becomes a liability?
Of course you can find many interviews and speeches and articles by another Goldman Sachs director, Harvard professor Bill George, in which he gasses on about values.
George is notorious for defending GS executive compensation.
So it’s not that you’ve got on one side evil ruthless capitalists and on the other side good values-based people. You’ve got cowboys, dressed up, for public consumption, in academic gowns. Every business ethics course at universities pumping out Goldman Sachs traders is dress-up.
UD can faintly — very faintly — recall her mother reciting the first lines of the poem Desiderata and then laughing at them. She used a fake British accent and a high-pitched voice.
She can recall her father joining her mother in this laughter.
UD didn’t know, then, that they were laughing at a poem — it was just some language her parents thought funny.
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Desiderata turns out to have been a wildly popular inspirational poem. It still is.
Terre Haute now has a sculpture of Desiderata‘s author, Max Ehrmann, sitting on a city bench.
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Deteriorata was the inevitable parody of Desiderata.
Sitting in my women studies class, an odd tranquility filled the room. [Awkward opening sentence. Makes it sounds as though a tranquillity was sitting in the room. Rewrite along these lines maybe: “An odd tranquillity filled my women’s studies classroom.”] Although the day’s topic revolved around sex-change surgeries, there were no obscene noises made by keyboards, no glare from a computer screen logged on to Twitter, and I was not subjected to watching a random YouTube video playing on a screen in front of me. Perfect tranquility for those of us who were trying to learn.
From day one, our professor was very adamant about her non-computer policy — simply, no computers allowed. “The following activities disrupt an educational environment and will not be tolerated: talking, texting, phone calling, giggling, playing Texas HoldEm or other games, im-ing, emailing and surfing (on the web). Should you engage in any of these, you will be asked to leave,” states the class’ syllabus. [Giggling?]
The student paints a scenario:
“I’m only going to take notes,” you might be telling yourself, but let’s paint a scenario. You’re in your chemistry class and your professor is rambling on about something you learned two quarters ago. You are, at the moment, taking notes on your laptop. What to do? Option A: Google something random. Option B: continue to take notes, despite the fact [that] you are falling asleep. Most if not all would choose option A. Although I myself take pride in my note taking abilities, I have been known to wander the path of YouTube occasionally during class. It seems as though human nature takes part in this attempted compensation for boredom. Even with insane multi-tasking abilities, students will more than likely miss a vital part of lecture and end up suffering come grade time.
… was on the Compensation Committee.
… Shareholders suing Goldman Sachs over executive pay packages are seizing on investigations of the Wall Street bank by the Senate and Securities and Exchange Commission.
A shareholder pay complaint filed earlier this year in Delaware was amended this week to take into account the Senate’s findings and the SEC’s civil fraud case alleging that Goldman misled investors about securities tied to home loans.
In addition to claiming that Goldman directors breached their fiduciary duties by allowing excessive pay for employees, the shareholders now say Goldman officials failed in their fiduciary duty to properly oversee the company…