UD alone saw it coming.
… all graduated from Johns Hopkins University. UD almost went there.
As Baltimoreans, all of these people knew and know that it’s Johns, with an S; but most people say John.
The university has finally tired of correcting everyone all the time. UD‘s friend Courtney, who works at Hopkins, sends her this article from the university’s website:
(Baltimore, April 1, 2010) The Johns Hopkins University announced today that it is bowing to the inevitable and officially changing its name to “John Hopkins.”
“We give up,” university President Ronald J. Daniel said. “We’re fighting a losing battle here. And we strongly suspect the extra ‘s’ was a typo in the first place.”
Since its establishment in 1876 as America’s first research university, Daniel said, anyone and everyone has stumbled over “Johns Hopkins,” omitting the seemingly superfluous “s” altogether or dropping it randomly into the name anywhere but where it belonged.
… Squads of staff members fanned out early today over the university’s campuses throughout the Baltimore-Washington area; in Bologna, Italy; and in Nanjing, China. They employed screwdrivers, chisels, spackle, spray paint – whatever it took to remove the annoying surplus sibilant from residence halls, lab buildings, buses and trucks.
“Thank heavens,” a history of art/flute double major said as she joined a grounds crew trying to pry a particularly recalcitrant consonant from the East Gate at the Homewood campus. “It’s bad enough trying to convince everyone that we’re not all pre-meds. But correcting people’s pronunciation 41 times a day? It’s just exhausting.”…
He has won his court battle. Slowly, England’s libel laws become more sane.
The science writer Simon Singh has won his court of appeal battle for the right to rely on the defence of fair comment in a libel action.
Singh was accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) over an opinion piece he wrote in the Guardian in April 2008.
He suggested there was a lack of evidence for the claims some chiropractors make on treating certain childhood conditions including colic and asthma.
The BCA alleged that Singh had in effect accused its leaders of knowingly supporting bogus treatments.
In May last year, high court judge Mr Justice Eady, in a preliminary ruling in the dispute, held that Singh’s comments were factual assertions rather than expressions of opinion – which meant he could not use the defence of fair comment.
Today, the lord chief justice, Lord Judge, master of the rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley allowed Singh’s appeal, ruling that the high court judge had “erred in his approach”….
From an article about SUNY Binghamton in the Wall Street Journal:
… “Basketball is the cesspool of college sports,” says James Duderstadt, a man too familiar with the game’s pitfalls. He was the University of Michigan’s president from 1988-96, a period marred by scandal. Federal charges were later brought against a booster, Ed Martin, and two others, for making illicit loans of more than $600,000 to four players. Mr. Martin pleaded guilty in 2002 to one count of conspiracy to launder money but died while awaiting sentencing; severe sanctions were placed on Michigan by the University and the NCAA. “It only takes a few outstanding players to make a program nationally competitive, which is why basketball is the source of such cheating. Universities don’t realize that it’s so visible that the blowback can cause enormous damage to the institution, damage that lasts for decades…
… is (who knew?) the house and garden and gravesite of Edna Saint Vincent Millay. It’s now open to the public, and UD, who will be in New York for most of August, will visit. And write about it here, on University Diaries.
As a kind of counterpoint to the terrible theme, lately, of university student suicides, there’s the following Millay poem.
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O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me, let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
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Too much beauty. Must be the hills of upstate she’s looking at, height of autumn. The passion the too-candescent world makes her feel stretches her apart; she’s about to burst. Her soul is all but out of her.
She asks God to knock it off – no more orange leaves, no more birdsongs – or she’ll perish of bliss.
…”got a running start and cleared a barrier on the observation deck, on the 86th floor” of the Empire State Building in order to commit suicide, was a Yale undergrad.
Berkeley College junior Cameron Dabaghi ’11, an East Asian studies major from Austin, Texas, took his life in New York City on Tuesday, Yale College Dean Mary Miller said in an e-mail to the College community Wednesday morning.
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UD thanks David for the link.
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Update: Some details —
A Yale University junior left a suicide note in his dorm room before heading to New York, where he apparently plunged to his death by jumping from the Empire State Building, police said Wednesday.
Cameron Dabaghi, 21, from Austin, Texas, jumped from the 86th floor observation deck Tuesday during evening rush hour. His note said he was sorry and he would be jumping from either the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River in upper Manhattan, or the Empire State building, police said.
There were seven other people on the observation deck at the same time, and one person tried to talk to the jumper as he climbed over the barrier, but was unsuccessful…
Not sure if this can be right – the part about “climbed.” He seems to have jumped over the barrier.
… Berkeley, but the University of Memphis?
The Faculty Senate passed a motion last week urging University of Memphis President Shirley Raines to stop subsidizing the athletic department $2.2 million from education and general funds.
After almost an hour of debate, 25 members voted for the motion, five voted against and six abstained.
Besides the athletic department subsidy, which increased from $1.5 million last year, education and general funds pay for scholarships, equipment upgrades, employee raises and other amenities to benefit students and faculty at The University…
To quote Michelle Obama: Damn.
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Oh. Not that these votes mean anything. Look at the latest on Berkeley athletics.
… is that many American universities routinely give millions of dollars every year to totally anti-intellectual coaches and athletic directors.
The university foundation of California State University, Stanislaus, is under fire for hiring Sarah Palin to speak at a $500 per ticket, gala black-tie fundraising event in June, to celebrate the university’s 50th anniversary. The foundation is refusing to disclose Palin’s fee. And students, professors and even a state lawmaker, point to the former half-term governor of Alaska’s vitriol, divisiveness and her hefty speaking fees of at least $100,000, as not appropriate for a University celebration. Her lack of intellectual curiosity is cited by Zoology Professor Patrick Kelly, who started an anti-Palin Facebook page, pointing out her distinct lack of academic accomplishments. In other woods, the academic community of CSU is outraged and embarrassed to have their school’s 50th anniversary celebration represented by a know-nothing, polarizing woman, whose major contribution to the public discourse has been inflammatory rhetoric…
Most coaches don’t give a shit about academics — they pressure their universities to admit students bound to fail and drop out; they have the highest salaries on campus (sometimes the highest salaries in the state) because they don’t see why they shouldn’t drain resources from students.
Palin’s populist tirades against professors and universities differ in no way from the contempt lots of coaches routinely express for these things. When you reward the coach with four million dollars a year, and then get upset when a university gives Palin – What? She’s probably getting a paltry $100,000 – you’re being a mite hypocritical.
… but a sensible enough article in the Huffington Post.
… The cause of suicide is not Ivy League pressure or the social and academic expectations that distinguish one school from another. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people between 15 and 24 years of age: the college years simply fall within this period.
The brain changes that occur in adolescence–specifically the pruning of gray matter that makes our brains more efficient and capable of complex, intellectual operations–are often responsible for adolescent angst as well as the onset of serious psychiatric disorders. The first peak of depression typically occurs around age 13-14; schizophrenia first appears around 18-19; and adult-onset bipolar disorder, or manic depression, tends to begin suddenly around 19-20.
… Don’t think … that the Arizona sunshine, or the prestige of Harvard, or the Florida beaches will cure your child’s psychiatric disorder…
China today:
Academic corruption is on the rise, while the quality of papers is declining. Paying for papers to be published has become common practice. A great many professors and students are not ashamed of plagiarism on the excuse that [it is] the norm. How absurd that a medical paper has been plagiarized six times by 25 people!
University of Oregon athletics doesn’t like to do contracts.
As all criminal syndicates know, if you write down what you’re doing, other people can figure out… what you’re doing.
Do you remember any scenes of Al Pacino signing contracts in The Godfather?
So when the school’s athletic director left the other day to take a tv job, and the school just, you know, gave him $2.3 million dollars even though he wasn’t fired – he quit – and even though it was all done via secret handshakes, the state Justice Department decided to investigate.
The UO says it had no signed agreement with Bellotti on the terms of his employment or departure when he took over the job of athletic director last summer, yet the university said it will pay the former football coach the $2.3 million to fulfill unspecified “commitments” that were never put on paper.
Bellotti negotiated the terms of his employment orally with UO President Richard Lariviere in July, when both of them were beginning their new jobs, a UO spokeswoman said last week. The UO is not making those terms public. Less than nine months later, the two settled on the details of a deal allowing Bellotti to leave for the television job with the multimillion-dollar payout.
Nobody at the university has any comment to make to reporters.
Reporters want to know how a once-respectable university became such a cheesy outfit.
Via Eric, a reader, SOS relishes the retro
pleasures of a wonderfully written
– handwritten – letter.
It’s by a Chicago blogger whose gym’s
cancellation policy insists that you send
them a letter you penned yourself.
(Click on the image to enlarge it.)
From the student newspaper, University of Maine:
… [T]he athletic department is losing millions of dollars annually. Other financial documents indicate the university is spending less of its budget on educational instruction now than it was in previous decades.
In the current fiscal year — which runs July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010 — athletics is projected to cost the university $7.3 million more than the revenue it brings in.
Athletic Director Blake James said the athletic department is subsidized by the university, but that the projected loss of $7 million sounded high. James said he thought the actual loss would be closer to $5 million.
… The budget for fiscal 2010 projected the athletics department would generate about $4.5 million in revenue, falling far short of its expected $12.2 million in expenditures. This discrepancy would be covered by revenue in the general university budget, the vast majority of which comes from tuition and state appropriations.
… The bulk of sports teams’ operating costs comes from coaches’ salaries and benefits.
… There appears to be a historical trend in the financial documents from decennial accreditation reports indicating student education has been slipping on the university’s priority list…
Well, where would you put student education on a university’s priority list? Tenth? Twelfth?
… newspaper, talks about some of the professors he’s had.
His writing is a bit awkward, but UD admires his stress on real encounters between human beings in university classrooms.
[Some] professors … are impersonal. Perhaps this is best seen in the voice of reason. If the professor poses some voice of cool logic, then they are probably ignoring your question for the sake of convenience. These are the types to stay close to their scripts, reading their power points as if power points were the last say on knowledge. Generally speaking, the bigger the class size, the more impersonal it gets.
What a rush of joy it is for these people not to have to answer real problems, real questions, real intelligence.
… Real relationships, real exchange of teaching and learning are hard to come by. The problem is facilitated by the sleeping student, the texting student and the student on Facebook during class. No one can know the authority is corrupt when they know nothing about the authority…