Albert Hunt, New York Times:
…[T]he leaders of college athletics [will soon introduce in place of] the 64-team tournament, which balances quality and inclusiveness, … 96 teams next year.
This would encourage mediocrity and make more money. The latter is the dominant concern of too many leaders of higher education; it trumps the academic interests of the players and institutions and the desires of fans, whether it’s the basketball tournament’s expansion or the insistence on keeping the antiquated football bowl game schedule.
One of the top teams in college basketball this season was the University of Kentucky. Recent figures show that just 31 percent of its players graduate; a year ago the university brought in a hot-shot coach, John Calipari, who took two other schools to the tournament finals only to have those achievements wiped from the record books for rules violations (though Mr. Calipari himself was not directly implicated).
His Kentucky team was led by four fabulous freshmen, all of whom indicated last week that they would leave without graduating and play professionally next year. So much for the student-athlete concept.
Many of the basketball-crazed fans in Lexington, Kentucky, probably couldn’t care less about student athletes or graduation rates, or their coach’s possible ethical transgressions; he wins games…
La Kid called to see how her father was doing. We cancelled dinner with our friends the Elkins and the Swistaks. Mr UD spent most of the day listening to and watching Polish media. His nephew Andzrej called from Warsaw. Les UDs talked and talked and talked about the catastrophe.
When she wasn’t talking or reading about the crash, UD remembered 1992, her year in Warsaw.
She wrote about it here, in the journal Salmagundi , in 1994.
The article is an orderly little reflection on post-Communist Warsaw, on being an American and a woman and a Jew in Poland… But what went through her head today wasn’t pulled together like that. It was a series of disconnected but enduring memories of that Fulbright year, when UD taught in the literature department and Mr UD in political science at the University of Warsaw.
She thought first of her black jacket. UD had bought, in the States, an expensive quilted jacket, and it hung in the bedroom of the elegant small apartment Mr UD had found on Ulica Boduena.
The attractive young woman they’d hired as a nanny for two-year-old La Kid was lively and sweet with the baby, but she was also a thief. UD knew she admired the jacket, found it exciting, liked to try it on… And when UD left the apartment for a few days (giving a paper somewhere), the nanny took advantage of her absence to remove the jacket from the closet. UD almost never wore it, and the nanny knew this. The nanny also correctly recognized that UD was scatterbrained and might not notice anything.
And yet I noticed right away. I must have figured she’d steal it. I noticed and did nothing. I remember thinking Oh let her have it. Let her show off her expensive quilted black jacket. I don’t care.
I remembered another scene in that apartment. Our landlord, a successful thirtyish Warsaw entrepreneur, came to the apartment one day to fix something for us. Mr UD wasn’t there, and, on his way out, the landlord – who spoke good English – suddenly took me in his arms, said something ridiculous about how sad he was, and set about passionately kissing me.
I snorted and pushed him out the door. He went quietly…
… Czeslaw Milosz remembers friends killed at Katyn:
Crimes against human rights, never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of a friendship between nations. Anthologies of Polish poetry publish poems of my late friends – Wladyslaw Sebyla and Lech Piwowar, and give the date of their deaths: 1940. It is absurd not to be able to write how they perished, though everybody in Poland knows the truth: they shared the fate of several thousand Polish officers disarmed and interned by the then accomplices of Hitler, and they repose in a mass grave.
A plane carrying the president and other important officials has crashed in Russia. Mr UD tells UD that it was part of a delegation on its way to commemorate Katyn.
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Before he was president, Lech Kaczynski was a professor of law in Warsaw.
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“I fear,” said Mr UD just now, “a lot of historians may have been on board.” He’s having trouble getting to Polish news sites — too much traffic.
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Among those on board, former Deputy Prime Minister Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka:
For her opinions, she has been constantly attacked by right-wing parties and populists. The most spectacular offense, however, came from Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek. In 2002, he called her “a feminist block of concrete that will not change even by means of HCl acid.” The words were repeated by [everyone in the] media. “It did not discourage me at all. Women’s rights issues happily became crucial in EU politics, and more and more Polish politicians see that they are important. If there is a little of my input, I am glad. For sure, I am not going to back off.”
She was trained as an anthropologist, specializing in Mongolian cultures.
An editorial in the University of Oregon newspaper describes Mike Bellotti’s classy exit from his athletics director position at UO (background here):
… Bellotti believes he was promised a five-year contract, which would have given him an even larger buyout, though it’s hard to know without evidence in writing. He said in a press conference he is not taking anything that isn’t owed to him, a statement that seems out of touch amid the ongoing argument that the University places a higher priority on athletics than academics. It’s irresponsible for Bellotti to insist upon so much money, when as former athletic director, he knows the athletic department already owes $16 million annually to cover debt service payments for Matthew Knight Arena…
[A] midday ceremony [on a recent Monday in honor of its victorious basketball team] violated an internal Duke agreement established in 2006 that no such celebrations would be held during precious class time.
The 2006 agreement was spearheaded by Richard Hain, a math professor at Duke since 1991, who waged a four-year campaign to limit those activities to evening hours. Hain sent me an e-mail message about the breach and also formally complained to university officials.
“This is the first time since that agreement was made that Duke’s men’s BB team has been to the Final Four,” Hain wrote. “This year, the agreement was completely ignored.”
In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Provost Peter Lange, who negotiated the original agreement with Hain, said: “There was a planning meeting, and someone at the meeting was assigned to check in with me about whether there was an agreement. That person never got in touch with me.”
Hain asked, “How can somebody schedule a major event that wipes out basically all undergraduate classes the whole afternoon, without talking to the provost?”
Lange added, “That mistake obviously is never going to be made again because, obviously, now everybody’s aware of the mistake.”
The team, flying back from Indianapolis, arrived an hour late, further disrupting students’ schedules…
… on whistleblowers in university sports.
It’s part of the College Sport Research Institute‘s annual conference, this year held at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
UD‘s excited that Sally Dear will be on the same panel.
“Without the athletic teams, nobody outside the state of Maine would even know the university exists.”
… why the thrill is gone.
… [M]ost of [my education here] revolves around manipulating the system to my advantage: learning the art of answering multiple choice questions, or when I can zone out during PowerPoint presentations. Discerning what the professor cares about and will probably put on the midterm, while ignoring the rest.
… I believe that the problem itself lies in the structure of Cal’s undergraduate program. Conducted in large auditoriums, much teaching is based mostly on lectures in which a professor simply transfers his or her ideas to the students. Even if you’re lucky enough to get into a good discussion section, there is still inadequate time allotted for student-generated discussions or ideas.
… Which has made me realize that, in the midst of heightened student activism and concern for California’s educational system, we need to expand the list of things that we are fighting for. That we should focus not only on budget cuts and the privatization of public education but on how we are educated as well: on our right to intellectual curiosity, critical thinking and the opportunity to pursue the passions that brought us to Berkeley in the first place…
An engineering professor at the University of Regina has been accused of plagiarizing a student’s work and trying to publish it in an academic journal in a case the university is declining to talk about.
Former student Shahryar Ali Khan, now a petroleum engineer in Calgary, laid a complaint with the university but says officials haven’t told him what, if anything, they’re going to do about it.
Khan said he learned something was wrong in the summer of 2008, when he submitted a paper for publication in the Journal of Canadian Petroleum Technology.
It was based on the research he did for his Master’s thesis at the University of Regina, a document titled “A Simulation Study of Water-Coning Using Downhole Water Sink Technology.”
Khan got a surprising response — the journal staff said his submission closely resembled another paper received six months earlier, one that bore the same title.
The earlier paper, which was never published, listed his academic supervisor — associate professor Ezeddin Shirif — and three other people as authors. …
UD knows Stuart Umpleby, a colleague of hers at George Washington University, very slightly. A business professor, he teaches Management 201, one of whose recent students (Fall 2007) appears to have been the Qatari diplomat who dealt with being caught smoking on a plane the other day by quipping that he was trying to light his shoe.
Here, via a link provided by Mike, a reader, is a scholarly paper with 144 authors. UD‘s used to seeing thirty or forty med school professors listed at the tops of papers, but these are astronomers, and — as Carl Sagan used to say — there are billions and billions of them.
A writer at the Times Higher Education Supplement points out that there are 36.3 words per author in this piece, so assuming authorship is truly shared among the 144, each one wrote about two sentences.
From a review of Professor Untat, a new book by Uwe Kamenz and Martin Werle:
…. [P]rofessors [in Germany] have an extreme form of tenure, so that for them, unemployment simply does not exist. There are also no real controls within the system, so they are left very much to their own devices.
The result, the authors argue, is that only a third of the large body of German professors work hard and with integrity, while about a fifth abuse the system to the limit.
[They get] their doctoral students to do a large proportion of their teaching and administration, and most or even all of their research, while still passing themselves off as the authors.
… These beleaguered doctoral students work incredibly long hours on all manner of activities and projects. They often have little time during the week to work on their own doctorates, and receive little in the way of supervision.
All of this is possible because professors in German academia are in a position of total power over their doctoral students – and because the latter desperately want to earn their degrees.
Some of the activities described in Professor Untat take some beating. On the teaching front, professors block their courses so that they need to be on campus only two or three days a week – during semesters, that is.
Furthermore, “lectures” often comprise little more than PowerPoint presentations prepared by doctoral students. In such cases, the latter inevitably are more in command of the material than the academics who present it.
In the worst cases, sabbaticals are used either for extended holidays or to engage in lucrative consultancy work…
