“[Franco Moretti] attended the University of Rome as an undergraduate. Of the Italian university sector’s current fortunes and discussions about the need for reform, he observes: “Reform has already come to Italian universities, combining the worst of the national culture (a morbid passion for bureaucratic absurdity), and the worst of the rest (the British idea of weighing scholarship as if it were cast iron). The result is grotesque.”

… while we’ve been away at the beach. Late Wednesday night, two men walking on the tracks near our house were killed by a freight train.

[T]he train conductor saw the two men and applied the train brakes. They say the conductor also sounded the horn several times before the train hit the men.

It’s so cute to see the weapons our kids choose for their early college years. As Carlton’s social confidence at Arkansas State University grows, UD looks forward to following his progress from the AK-47 to the M16 and then maybe the Vz58.

Read here, reader, of its ivied walls and hallowed halls.

[A William and Mary adjunct professor] reportedly flaunted a gun in front of his [twelve year old] son and 10 of his son’s friends. [He apparently] got annoyed with the noise the boys were making, went in the room where the boys were and pulled out a gun.

Plagiarism and diploma milling, while popular in the west, are endemic in the east. Now that attention is being paid to him, Iran’s new president is dealing with the predictable charges.

Although “Dr Rouhani’s election campaign videos featured pictures of Glasgow Caledonian University and the former GCU student spoke warmly of his time in the city,” there is “some doubt over whether Mr Rouhani, who was a high-ranking official in the Islamic Republic during the 1990s, actually attended the British university in person or undertook his studies there by remote study.”

There’s also doubt about whether he wrote his dissertation.

… Airport.

University spokeswoman Karen Moon said in an email that a number of offices on campus are already involved in handling the new supplementary courses, and an email address and phone number have been established specifically for organizing the courses.

But calls and emails made by The Daily Tar Heel to both inquiry lines went unanswered.

Dee Reid, director of communications for the College of Arts and Sciences, and Chris Derickson, assistant provost and University registrar, both said the best information available at this point is that on the University’s website — the same proposals that were submitted to the accrediting agency.

The Department of African and Afro-American Studies did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

According to University documents, 304 alumni who received academic credit for “Type 1” courses — those which either did not exist or the instructor denied teaching and signing the grade roll for — will be given the option of returning to UNC for one supplementary course at any time over the next five years.

UD‘s sister took this picture of
World War Two observation towers

along the beach at Rehoboth.

… unusual.

Many are the adjectives used to describe big-time university sports. UD likes “unusual,” as used by Frank Deford:

We in the U.S. think, nostalgically, of athletics as integral to higher education, but perhaps they’re so unusual that they should be entirely separated from the academic and simply turned into an honest commercial adjunct.

In making this increasingly popular proposal, Deford chooses (from dozens and dozens of examples) to talk about the University of North Carolina at Wilmington:

The University of North Carolina, Wilmington provides a typical recent case. The Seahawks field teams in 19 Division One sports, but unfortunately, like many colleges, UNCW athletics are in the red, so the chancellor, Gary L. Miller, assembled a committee, which recommended the elimination of five sports: men’s and women’s swimming, men’s cross country and indoor track and softball.

Well, that produced a firestorm, especially with swimming, which has won the conference 12 years in a row and, which, financially, is about on budget. Now, by contrast, the basketball team has a deficit of a million dollars; the coach himself earns almost a half million a season, notwithstanding that the team lost two-thirds of its games and is academically on probation.

UD is aware that the only problem in this scenario, from the point of view of millions of Americans, is that the coach only makes half a million. But Deford is arguing that he could make ever so much more than most of us could even imagine if we freed him from the pointless restraints of universities.

“Let alumni and local businesses pay for sports,” says Deford. Do that, and the sky’s the limit.

…DOMA.

The most amazing physics instructor in the world: Denis Rancourt.

Stanley Fish is right. UD has read the same report about the crisis in the humanities that he has, and Fish nails it.

[L]aden with bland commonplaces and recommendations that could bear fruit only in a Utopia, [the report] will be dutifully noted by pious commentators and then live a quiet life on the shelf for which it was destined.

The report has indeed prompted plenty of humanities huzzahs, like this one from David Brooks, in which he quotes from an embarrassing letter written by a history professor at the University of Chicago…

Why embarrassing? Because it’s a completely stereotypical professor-complaint letter in which the professor pats himself on the back for his intellectual and emotional acuity, and bitches that his students (people who are between eighteen and twenty-one years old) don’t share his capacity for depth.

I feel like screaming suddenly: ‘Oh, God, my dear student, why CANNOT you see that this matter is a real, real matter, often a matter of the very being, for the person, for the historical men and women you are looking at — or are supposed to be looking at!’ … [W]hen I have spent an hour or more, pouring all my enthusiasm and sensitivities into an effort to tell these stories in the fullness in which I see and experience them, I feel drained and exhausted…

Yes, why can’t these recent high school graduates at the University of Chicago see and feel the very being of my stories? I pour my sensitivity out at them and then just feel drained and exhausted at the futility of my efforts! Oh, God, my dear student…

This is condescending, self-aggrandizing, crap. Brooks won’t go to the trouble of making the case for an historically deep education, so he quotes this heavy breathing and hopes we’ll nod our heads – the youth today! So soulless!

***********************

Everyone’s ready to agree that the humanities are in crisis (even if the picture isn’t all that clear), and the authors of the report are happy to stoke that crisis with language about the very security of the nation being thereby imperiled. But the language of the report is as empty as that professor’s letter. Fish notes:

[T]he key words — “framework,” “context,” “complex,” “meaningfully,” “understanding,” “diverse,” “sensitivity,” “perspectives” — are spectacularly empty; just where specificity is needed, sonorous abstraction blunts the edge of what is being asserted, rendering it unexceptionable (no one’s against understanding, complexity and meaningfulness) and without bite.

Grand emotions and grand abstractions attach themselves to talk of the humanities with the implication always that this form of study will make us better people and the world a better place. Like Fish, I see the humanities as “a cloistered and separate area in which inquiry is engaged in for its own sake and not because it yields useful results.” Reading novels like Lolita and The Tropic of Cancer and The Elementary Particles will have God knows what impact on your personal morality and your engagement as a citizen. These are funny, nihilistic, cynical works, and I’d hate to have to be the one to determine their moral or character-building potential. As Georg Lukacs long ago pointed out about Kafka (and what serious education in the humanities is without Kafka?), great writers of our time have a tendency to maunder on inconclusively about the hopelessly alienated consciousness; or they sketch a world with very little collective action in it… Writers like Don DeLillo, America’s greatest living novelist, routinely get called bad citizens.

No, the humanities aren’t evil; and yes, they can help you think about everything. But as Fish points out, they don’t mix well with our current outcomes-based mania, and it’s really not plausible to scare people (as this latest humanities report tries to do) with the degradation to the republic attendant upon insufficient care for them.

**************

UD thanks David.

Isn’t bald-faced theft enough to trigger dismissal? And the guy’s an assistant professor! In every case UD‘s covered of a physics or engineering professor creating a fake company to steal university/state/federal funds (she’s covered tons of them), the thief is like in his sixties. This guy has his scheme up and running in his twenties!

… Yi in the summer of 2011 pushed the purchase of a high performance illumination simulation tool that he said he needed for renewable energy research at CSI.

That fall, he submitted a memo to the City University of New York and the state Dormitory Authority stating that only one company, 3G Institute of Renewable Energy Inc., could supply the software.

But the Joint Commission on Public Ethics said Yi failed to mention that he was president of 3G…

The guy just has to pay a fine?

Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler
Is a most peculiar scholar:
Fucks with data for a dollar
Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler.

Alas poor Ulrich’s just been collared.
Mass retraction – ach, the squalor.
Now his output looks much smaller.
Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler.

(Put football colorado in my search engine.)

But at least now it’s bankrupting the school.

Excerpts from editorial commentaries at the Daily Camera:

If we think of football as a business, as we should, we should expect the campus CEO to tender his resignation.

Interim Athletic Director Ceal Barry stated, “We need to look at efficiencies”. Current inefficiencies include $9.8 million in football coach’s severance packages, the $1.3 million overrun in “miscellaneous expenses” and the $1 million in renovation of football coaching offices! There are 23 football coaches and directors. Men and women’s basketball has six coaching posts each, skiing five and women’s tennis two.