You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
In keeping with Jeffersonian tradition, a hedge fund manager tears down a recently built 44 million dollar house to build a bigger house.
His architect explains:
Architect Jaquelin Robertson of Cooper Robertson Architects told the Sagaponack architectural and historic review board that the new home would be a cedar-shingled two-story Georgian Colonial-style house and compared the mahogany window trim to renovations at President Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, according to minutes from the board’s March meeting.
I for one refuse to worry about the future of a country whose founding values are so scrupulously maintained.
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Update: A role model for America’s future business elite.
… you’re a better man than I am.
… in this article from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs campus newspaper.
… “I have a blanket policy: no phones in my class for any reason, period,” said Chris Bell, director of the Oral Communication Center. “Laptops are fine, but I walk around a lot and I have grad TAs with me a lot of the time. Any of us ever see you doing anything other than taking notes, automatic full letter grade loss for the overall course. No questions, no excuses. My class is not your ESPN time.”
… “As far as phones go,” [said Todd Waters, a GTA,] “I have no tolerance whatsoever. Texting on a cell phone is the single rudest thing anyone can do to disrupt any communication context, including when the teacher is speaking, but primarily when another classmate is speaking/contributing to discussion. Basically, it’s a big, fat, massive [sic] you to everyone.” …
… has made for great UD viewing. It’s as if the people running the most corrupt of the spectacularly corrupt Bowl Championship Series games said to themselves What sort of writing can we produce to make UD optimally happy?
Put aside the alliteration-extension clever writers chronicling fiestal filth have already put into play. That’s a fun, but rather thin, amusement.
Look instead at the sudden renaming of the “Fiesta Frolic,” a golf junket for the NCAA (you wouldn’t want these guys actually overseeing what you do), to “Valley of the Sun Experience & Fiesta Bowl Seminars.”
MAKE MY DAY.
I mean here you get not only the gravitas of ancient history and myth (Valley of the Sun), but intellectual seriousness (seminar)… Frolic? Who said frolic? Did you say frolic? We speet on your frolic!
Then there’s this amazing bit of prose from the head of the Fiesta Bowl’s board of directors – a man who, fittingly, also runs an outfit called Waste Management. It’s one thing to underground diapers; it’s another thing to shovel this much shit.
Duane plucks real hard on our heartstrings throughout his defense of the sublimity of the Fiesta Bowl. I’ll let you read for yourself his sobbing insistence that they’ll come out of this better men. But I do want to reproduce Duane’s final lines.
… I received [an email] last week from Air Force Lt. Col. and Fiesta Bowl Committee member Bob Whitehouse, stationed at Balad Air Base in Iraq.
Half a world away, in the midst of an armed conflict, Lt. Col. Whitehouse sounded a rallying cry for his beloved Fiesta Bowl.
“In the face of adversity,” Whitehouse wrote, “We can either crumble and fail, or we can rise above it and reach even greater success.”
Our choice is clear.
Dr Johnson! Thou should’st be living at this hour.
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Update: They’re canceling this year’s event.
A Boston Globe editorial concludes:
[A] good education still requires an active exchange of information between professor and student. It’s harder for that to happen when one of them is cruising Craigslist. Wary of seeming behind the times, some colleges have encouraged the problem by extending Wi-Fi to lecture halls. This was a mistake. If students won’t unplug on their own, colleges should do it for them.
How was that again?
[A] good education still requires an active exchange of information between professor and student. [Yes. The paper is right to stress this primary point.] It’s harder for that to happen when one of them is cruising Craigslist. Wary of seeming behind the times, some colleges have encouraged the problem by extending Wi-Fi to lecture halls. [UD thinks something dumb like this probably was the original motivation. Since that time, she’d argue, some professors have grown quite, quite fond of a technology which removes students from their teachers’ sphere of responsibility. In many cases, a student with a laptop is essentially a student who’s absent…. Laptops make it so that professors don’t have to teach – especially if the professors are themselves using PowerPoint. They walk into a room and read slides aloud while students do fuck all on their laptops.] This was a mistake. If students won’t unplug on their own, colleges should do it for them. [This last statement will bring out all the I’m an adult and can do what I want; don’t talk down to me language from students and their cynical, laptop-lovin’ profs. How dare a university have codes of conduct!]
Andrew Sharp, at SB Nation, considers the latest Jim Tressel revelations:
… [J]ust what does a coach have to do to get fired? If Tressel’s still at Ohio State next fall, how can anyone associated with Ohio State keep a straight face? The moral high ground doesn’t really exist in college football, but you gotta admit, Jim Tressel sets about as horrible a precedent as anybody in the country.
As with many college football articles, this one is written with what you might call rhetoric-desperation. How much more intensity, the writer seems to ask, can I lend my language? How can my prose ever hope to measure up to the sheer unmitigated shittiness of big time university sports?
The governor couldn’t be prouder
To reappoint Robert E. Lowder.
A trustee supreme
For a school that’s a dream!
(Though of course there are one or two doubters.)
Glenn Poshard got away with it.
But Yoo Kwang-chan, head of Korea’s Jeonju National University of Education, has gotten caught plagiarizing almost all of a textbook that appeared under his name. The newspaper JoongAng Ilbo reviewed the text and found, for instance, that the entire first chapter, word for word, was taken from another book.
Yoo, by the way, makes his students buy the book.
Paul Campos, in The New Republic, shaves so many points off of official law school job placement figures that by the end of his essay he’s whittled the business of legal employment to practically nothing.
After revising the bogus reassuring numbers down and down and then down again, Campos concludes with a cui bono.
Yet even this does not exhaust the dire news for those about to enter the legal profession. Some schools have adopted the practice of placing their graduates in temporary positions, which, whatever the rationale, has the benefit of helping to inflate their employment numbers…
Nor have we considered how the “lucky” winners in the big law lottery often accept jobs that make them miserable, featuring insane hours and unfulfilling work, but which these graduates conclude they must take in order to pay their often astronomical educational debt (adjusted for inflation, public law school tuition has quintupled, and private law school tuition has nearly tripled, since the mid-1980s). If you’re a law professor and you want to get depressed, try to figure out how many of your recent graduates have real legal jobs that pay enough to justify the tuition that funds your salary, and also involve doing the kind of work they wanted to do when they went to law school.
All of this suggests the extent to which prospective law students need more and better information. Of course, such information will make law school look like a far worse investment than it does at present. Still, if we assume that the point of academic work is to reveal the truth, rather than to engage in the defense of a professional cartel from which law professors benefit more than almost anyone else, then this work needs to be done.
Humanities professors might not graduate many gainfully employed humanities professors, but few humanities professors receive between $150,000 and $300,000 in compensation each year.
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Update: Two of my readers (see comment thread) have pointed out that my original attempt to come up with a reasonably plausible figure for law school professor compensation seemed inflated. In response to their comments, I’ve done some more poking around in the statistics. I now offer (see above) what seems to me a reasonable compensation range.
We’ve already encountered male-bashing, self-pitying Caitlin Flanagan on this blog.
Now she’s calling for the closure of all fraternities. So terrified by them was she when she began to attend the University of Virginia that she… left.
My fourth night at school, I went with some friends to Rugby Road, where the fraternity houses are located. They are built of the same Jeffersonian architecture as the rest of the campus. At once august and moldering, they seemed sinister, to stand for male power at its most malevolent and institutionally condoned. I remember standing there thinking I’d made a terrible mistake. It wasn’t worth it, I decided. The next day I withdrew from the university.
Good God, woman.
The student newspaper responds to one notorious defense of lax conflict of interest rules at universities.
Concerns have been raised that stricter policy stipulations and implementations would make Columbia less appealing to high profile faculty — but what sort of professor would reject an offer from Columbia due to high ethical standards? Any professor or researcher who finds strong disclosure policies a shortcoming is not an individual we want at our University.
UD would only add that Columbia should have an open door policy when it comes to inviting low ethical standards money people to the university after they’ve been put in prison. Already there’s a bustling trade in financial criminals giving cautionary lectures at business schools all over America.
A commenter at the Duke University student newspaper calls for beefed up campus security services.
The incident that prompted the comment is recounted here.
Last night, and then this morning, I heard extended high-pitched shrieks coming from the back of my woodland acre.
Theories:
1.) Rabbits being seized, killed.
2.) Fox kits? I think they’re being born about now. We have gray and orange foxes.
3.) Coyotes?
With everything in bloom, and with birds everywhere, I take lots of walks every day around my woods and garden.
On a hidden path lined with vinca I stopped a moment ago to study an eastern box turtle, quite motionless, head extended.
The white flowers on our azalea bushes are popping out; they’re a calm counterpoint to the harlequin madness across the street, where our neighbors exhibit massive mixed azaleas in a ring around their house and in a path to their door. UD‘s friend Al Teich took a picture a few seasons ago.
Our white flowering dogwood got absolutely hammered in the big snowstorms this year – we had to pull down dead branches. Yet it’s glamorous again already.
More glamorous. The thinning made it delicate, Japanese.
Major infestation of rabbits, natch, and they’re eating my hostas. One of them hops across my front yard as I write this. Fuck the Easter Bunny.
… reviews the still pretty pathetic pharma-dependency issues at American medical schools.