… on what she calls Insider MOOCs, will be available for viewing this evening. I’ll link to it when it’s up.
… on what she calls Insider MOOCs, will be available for viewing this evening. I’ll link to it when it’s up.
Read UD‘s explanation. It is the most-read of her writings.
You’re describing mainstream big-time American university athletics. Nothing to see here.
… die in a nightclub fire there.
… is your blogger’s latest dispatch from her hometown, Garrett Park, Maryland.
The place has an astounding consistency. Jockshop di tutti jockshops, it now has its trustees busy looking into two new degree offerings:
How to Keep Turfgrass Looking Good.
… perhaps German’s plagiarist ex-Defense Minister – now known for all eternity as Baron von Googleberg – will give it a break. Perhaps he’ll stop trying to get speaking gigs at places like Dartmouth (where an online protest petition forced him to back out) and Yale (where much of his audience got up and left as he began to speak).
To those who say this is shutting down free speech, a Dartmouth professor responds.
“No one debates his right to express his views …Academic institutions are just not the place.”
[She] said that a person who has committed such blatant acts of academic [dishonesty] does not belong in an academic setting like Dartmouth.
“You wouldn’t invite Lance Armstrong to give a talk at a sports academy,” she said.
… “It sheds a bad light on Dartmouth.”
Ouch.
This is a line from a letter written to the president of Harvard from an alumnus, a pissed off rich guy. The letter is quoted in the Crimson.
The guy is an Ivy League T. Boone Pickens. An east coast Phil Knight wannabe. He’s in a rage because he’s just seen his investment in the school’s basketball team get shot to hell because of a cheating scandal.
You can understand his anger. A titan of industry takes over a sports team, he expects it to win. T. Boone’s luxury box tantrums when Oklahoma State football fucks up are the stuff of legend.
But wait a minute. This is Harvard University the guy’s talking about. When he says like many the Faculty of Arts and Sciences assigns he’s not talking about some jock shop. He’s talking about Harvard University!
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So. Let us put this matter into perspective. Let us look at the problems that conspired to produce the cheating scandal that broke up the basketball team this guy was bankrolling. Let us then consider solutions.
1. Yes, Harvard’s notorious for short-changing undergraduates. This isn’t going to change. Catering to professors who only want to teach graduate students is a Harvard thing. If you want to teach at a first-rate school that takes undergraduate and graduate instruction equally seriously, leave Harvard and go to Princeton.
Harvard’s relative indifference to its undergraduate component will inevitably produce some stupidly designed courses like this one, with its absurd take-home exam (take-home exams are invitations to cheat), inexperienced instructor, etc.
2. Bogus, easy-A, jock courses are the name of the game at big sports universities (for details, see recent events at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill), and no one cares, since winning is more important than educating the people recruited to play on the teams. Harvard is supposed to have a different ethos, but as long as it’s got a sports program that rich guys like the letter writer blow lots of money on, it’s going to have courses like this on offer.
3. Et ainsi, the letter writer can’t have it both ways. Either you put your money on a truly competitive team some of whose players are – inevitably – not scholars, or you settle for a reasonably but not dramatically competitive team made up of scholars. If the guy had put his money on a legitimately scholarly team, he’d be writing pissed off letters to Drew Faust about what losers they are, how she has to take recruiting more seriously, etc. He put his money on a not legitimately scholarly team, and now he’s pissed off because they’re not legitimately scholarly.
Solutions:
There’s only one solution.
1. Harvard should do what Oregon and Oklahoma State have done, and give the team to the titan. Phil Knight and T. Boone run basketball and football at Oregon and Oklahoma State. They basically own the teams. They bought them. Make Thomas Sternberg pony up Knight/T. Boone levels of support and give him the damn basketball team.
Like most other plagiarists, Chris Spence, former Director of Education of the Toronto District School Board, made a habit of it. It wasn’t a technique; it was a way of being. Once one instance of his plagiarism was found, hundreds of others emerged.
All of his books contain plagiarism. Steven Kupferman goes through a bunch of examples.
For a reader, the irony [of Spence’s thefts] can sometimes be unbearable. At one point, Spence writes: “It takes hard, steady work to improve student achievement, yet the culture around us values convenience, short cuts, expediency, and painless learning. These and other obstacles can seem daunting, but we must not let them daunt us.”
A fine defense of never taking the easy way out.
Except that those words were first used in a 1999 speech [PDF] by a career education advocate named M. Hayes Mizell.
… stand for all. Let this soul, dead in his bed from heroin and alcohol, represent all of the students who, this academic year, will drug to oblivion.
Not far from graduating from Oklahoma State, he’d been a wrestler in high school, and the autopsy notes his hardiness. “The body is that of an unembalmed, well developed, well nourished white male appearing consistent with the reported age of 22 years.”
The language of the autopsy is somehow beautiful.
The body is clad in a white hospital gown.
Needle marks are noted; a fatty liver. He had been in a hospital before, for toxicity, but this time had been too much.
I’ve said that. Haven’t I said that? Haven’t I, in my occasional posts about how attractive and fashionable GW students are, pointed out their texture-drivenness? Or if I haven’t said exactly that, I’ve implied it. UD has always been struck by the stylishness of her students.
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A different heel, texture or shape of the booties can have a huge affect on any outfit.
The author of the article from which I’ve taken this post’s title is a GW freshman. She has plenty of time ahead of her to discuss affect and effect with UD.
… social work, which positively attracts first responders. What happens to those of us who teach aesthetics? Three of our students gather round us and recite Keats (Milton?) as we expire?
“[G]ases from the melting, brown load hindered firefighters.”
Pretty funny first sentence.
Another high-ranking German is being investigated for having plagiarized the thing that enabled her to call herself doctor.
UD‘s old pal Paul Lafolley is featured in the New York Times.
UD has never been a fan of his work, which has at once a sort of all over the place New Agey thing going on, and a pretty obsessive rigidity to it…
“Mr. Laffoley has yet to encounter a system of mystical thought he could not absorb into his own project.” Right. This is a nicer way of saying what I just said.
“Mr. Laffoley’s works may seem impenetrable, but they are not nonsensical. They limn a richly provocative cartography of consciousness itself and its heretofore under-realized possibilities.” Rather pretentious formulation there, and note that the critic never says what place or places in particular this map designates for consciousness to realize.
Because work like Paul’s is all over the place conceptually, its power and legitimacy rest heavily on the artist himself, as a sort of mystic sage. I’ve never been able to grant Paul that status, and his art as such is for me too catch-all to express anything in particular.
