UD has spent part of this weekend setting up the equipment Udemy sent her. She has been asked to prepare a series of lectures for The Faculty Project. Like Professor Garland, she has received her microphone, and some other stuff, from Udemy, and with her sister’s help she has begun to learn how to use it.

Her subject will be poetry. She will start writing the lectures as soon as she feels ready to use the technology.

UD hopes some of her readers will be interested in clicking on her course and communing with her that way. She will post updates here on University Diaries, as each lecture goes online.

… on higher education.

This post, by a recent University of Virginia graduate, is the best reflection on convicted murderer George Huguely I’ve so far seen. He captures the upper-crust/crapulous, gracious living/coked to the gills thing at the heart of many elite prep schools and colleges.

[A]mong athletes, lacrosse players are among the biggest partiers, according to a National Collegiate Athletic Association report published this year looking at substance use among college athletes.

… The survey found that male and female lacrosse players are more likely than any other kind of athlete to take amphetamines like Adderall, which many at U. Va., including Love, were prescribed for attention deficit disorder. And roughly 95 percent of the country’s male lacrosse players drank, the study claimed. Among women players, 85 percent consumed alcohol.

Two years ago, in the immediate wake of the crime, another college lacrosse player wrote well about his culture:

Aggression and alcohol abuse, of course, are hardly the province of lacrosse alone when it comes to men’s college athletics. But, when it comes alongside lacrosse, there’s an implied element of absolute indifference and arrogance as well.

He recalled something the lacrosse coach at Virginia said in a 1999 interview, long before his player Huguely murdered:

“Alcohol and lacrosse have gone hand-in-hand since my days at Brown [University] in the 1970s,” Starsia told The Washington Post… “Whether it is post-game celebrations or just in general, there was something about the sport and alcohol…”

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People don’t like being called arrogant and indifferent. Look at the comment thread on this Washingtonian piece.

Not the first bunch of comments; scroll down to the last five or six. These are enraged, indignant Huguely insiders insisting they did do things. They were not indifferent; they are not responsible. But as Anthony Schneck notes:

Although [the Huguely] story made national headlines in part because it seemed so shocking and unusual, the culture that allowed it to happen is not exceptional to UVA; it’s easy to protect the already privileged…

Easy; and far easier now than it was when The Great Gatsby, this culture’s iconic text (it features golf rather than lacrosse), was written. In Fitzgerald’s novel, Daisy Buchanan is protected after she kills a woman. Today’s Buchanans are vastly more Hummered up.

… the University of Florida football program.”

UF: keeping up with expectations. Surpassing them.

… at America’s worst university.

… alarms really should go off. You shouldn’t be surprised that people like Bharat B. Aggarwal are under investigation for

fabrication and falsification in a host of published studies [65 and counting, to be precise] about the cancer-fighting properties of plants.

I mean, look at the page, please. This person tells us he has seven professorships:

Member, University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Houston

Chief, Cytokine Research Section, in the Department of Experimental Therapeutics at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas

He’s published over six hundred papers… Of course, this number doesn’t raise eyebrows because other med professors say they’ve published a thousand… two thousand… a zillion squared…. When you’re one of thirty authors listed at the top of a page, when you’re a lab chief who probably did squat on most of the studies, the sky’s the limit. Go for it.

You’re seven professors at once, and you’ve published six hundred papers, and you’ve been invited to give 324 lectures in fifty countries… But you still have time to

[manipulate your] images – adding or subtracting features, cropping, stretching, rotating, flipping horizontally or vertically – to leave the impression the same ones represented different experimental conditions.

Any university can list; it can drift into a dead calm, an eerie sort of nihilism in which presidents give speeches at campus events, and football teams take the field, yet (quoting Stevie Smith), they’re not waving, but drowning.

The ship of Coppin State is listing, and its faculty have had it. They’ve overwhelmingly voted no confidence in the school’s president.

The second-highest administrative position in the university, the provost, has been filled by four people in the same number of years; the number of cabinet-level staff members has more than doubled under Avery, increasing the university’s debt; three of Coppin’s five schools have not had deans at their helms for several years; the institution [failed] to disburse $800,000 in need-based aide to students in 2011; and [there have been] questionable hiring practices …

The administrative nothingness is the most dire part. It suggests a president intent on autocracy, slowly dismantling the very apparatus of the school so as to assume complete power.

… when asbestos companies could sponsor industry-friendly research at some of our best universities!

A letter signed by dozens of prominent scientists, including some McGill faculty members, was sent to McGill’s top administrators the same day a documentary aired on CBC Television on the [asbestos industry]. Both the letter and the documentary suggested McGill researchers had been paid by the … industry to doctor research to make chrysotile asbestos seem less harmful to human health than it is, or than other forms of the fibrous mineral.

Back in ’02, a Brown University professor made the same claim to McGill, but I guess since it just came from one guy they dismissed it. Now a crowd seems to be forming.

Too awkward; but UD‘s long been telling you to — this blog has a category named — Beware the B-School Boys.

If Canadian business guy Ian Telfer is convicted of insider trading (he’s an object of an Ontario Securities Commission probe), it won’t be entirely wonderful for the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management to be featuring his name on every piece of silverware. It will need to consult with Seton Hall University here in the States – a school which has blasted more names off of more business school walls than any other. Experience counts.

.. if that’s your thing…

It’s totally UD‘s thing… She can’t get enough of the genre. Favorite plot points from her latest can’t-put-it-down:

Then a frustrated colleague approached him after one of his [go-tech-in-the-classroom] talks: “I implemented your idea, and it just didn’t work,” Mr. Wesch was told. “The students thought it was chaos.”

It was not an isolated incident. As other professors he met described their plans to follow his example, he suspected their classes would also flop. “They would just be inspired to use blogs and Twitter and technology, but the No. 1 thing that was missing from it was a sense of purpose.”

Chapter Two: A Sense of Purpose and How to Get It.

It doesn’t matter what method you use if you do not first focus on one intangible factor: the bond between professor and student.

… “PowerPoint [says a technophobe master teacher] takes away, I think, from a true engagement…”

Exactly how he connects with a roomful of students is unclear to him, but he senses that it happens.

… “The messenger, ironically enough, is more important than the message,” he says. “If the messenger is excited and passionate about what they have to say, it leaves a good impression. It stimulates students to see what all this excitement is about.”

Messenger… Oh, you mean professor! But that’s medieval, authoritarian, fascistic, you really have control issues, don’t you… Standing up there being all I KNOW SHIT, Il Duce strutting about telling people things instead of leaving them alone to teach themselves and the people sitting next to them. No, the thing to do is step aside, shut up, let them fiddle with the technology, drop by their desk and glance at their screen occasionally, say a few encouraging words… Or if you really want to communicate excitement and passion, turn out the lights and stand very still with your head down and read words on your computer screen that someone else wrote.  Sizzle!

The things that make a good teacher are difficult — if not impossible — to teach, he thinks. Which is why technology may be so attractive to some teaching reformers. Blogging, Twitter, and other digital tools involve step-by-step processes that can be taught….

Think of it in terms of our country’s pill obsession. Americans are determined to believe that you can use fast mass-manufactured substitutes to achieve slow human things.

Technology rarely plays more than a passing role in the work of teacher-of-the-year winners, says Mary Huber, a consulting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching who has overseen the judging process since 1991. “We see people making interesting use of technology without it being the star player,” she told me.

She said it is not too surprising that others have had trouble replicating what Mr. Wesch did. “None of this work is off-the-shelf,” she said, noting that the group promotes a “scholarly approach” to teaching. “That means you aren’t just picking something and plopping it in there, but you’re really thinking through what its value is and what you would have to do to change it.”

… simply can’t be kept out of the tabloids.

Of course, he’s also all over the respectable press.

The doctor in charge at Sloan-Kettering
Found his previous gig somewhat fettering.
“That job at U Penn?
This is now; that was then.
I’m simply engaged in self-bettering.”

Could go to prison for as many as forty years. My guess is that he’ll get twenty.

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Huguely’s father will testify as part of the sentencing deliberations. Given the gin-soaked existence he and his son both apparently led (Huguely wrote to Yeardley Love days before he killed her that “alcohol is ruining my life”), he may not be the best person to give this testimony. He will probably break down on the stand and speak of his mistakes and his feelings of guilt; but while this will certainly make him and his son look pathetic, it will not necessarily stir sympathy.

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Update: Huguely’s father did not testify. Good call.

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Another Update: He has been sentenced to 26 years.

Dadaist sensibilities characterized much of the remainder of Buffluxus’ performance: members of [the University of Buffalo’s] PressBoardPress lowered rolls of toilet paper from a balcony into the audience, Melgard performed Emmett Williams’ “Is La Monte Young in the Audience?” (which consisted of posing that very question – a comment on the nature of performance), and a rendition of Metz’s own “There is no good or bad, only placement” was “interrupted” by incessant coughing fits from Basinski and Melgard.

The Toronto Research Group’s half of the presentation started with hefty helpings of irony and disconcertion: Poet and troupe member Chris Sylvester beseeched those in attendance to leave their seats and proceed to the back of the room for security pat-downs, all the while mimicking the tone and disposition of airport security. The implicit political comment was not lost on the audience.

Sylvester’s charged and insistent irony was immediately counterpointed by McCaffery and the rest of the Research Group – made up of the two aforementioned men plus McCaffery’s wife and adjunct English professor Karen Mac Cormack – imitating the detached and sterile instructive pleasantries of flight attendants. The skit was complete with humorous instructions for various safety devices that could aid the audience throughout the rest of the performance.

… and UD has been meaning to extend formal welcomes to people boarding her blog from elsewhere. So – UD welcomes readers from

The Atlantic

Chronicle of Higher Ed

Marginal Revolution

I’m glad you’re here. Take a look around.