… for those new to this blog, is one of UD‘s much-used Categories.
Why?
Because PowerPoint really pisses students off.
Reading directly from a plain, white PowerPoint presentation [is likely] to induce a coma lasting approximately two hours and 40 minutes.
… The other day I sat through another painfully long lecture. I spent the entire class period reading the textbook instead of copying down notes from the PowerPoint, and by the end of class I had enjoyed myself and understood more of the material than I had in the past five weeks. I left the class quietly seething under my breath and shooting my professor plainly dirty looks because there I was, wasting a beautiful afternoon in a class that wasn’t worth more than its $92 textbook.
Jessica Lynch, University of Colorado
Here’s another one, from Amanda Joinson at the University of Massachusetts:
The classes where the professor is standing in the front of a cavernous lecture hall on a podium accompanied by a poorly executed PowerPoint presentation are perhaps the worst. I swear that ten minutes into the class the audience has been lost, and the professor’s voice turns into that “Blah, blah” that echoes in the background of Charlie Brown cartoons.
These classes often come with the monotone professor who mumbles while looking down at the podium the entire time, while reading from notes that probably have not changed for years.
Both writers use the same Charlie Brown blah, blah or (in the case of Lynch, Charlie Brown wah, wah), meme.
… it must be college football.
[The Ohio State University scandal: the] latest offering from a septic tank of a system that’s unlikely to be flushed out in our lifetime.
Sports Illustrated
A professor at Utah Valley University cheated – just a little! jumped ahead of the line! – at the golf course, and when called on it by rule-abiding golfer Timothy Deason, got annoyed:
Deason told police Williams hit him on the back of the head with a golf club, breaking the club and knocking Deason to the ground. While he was down, Black [Williams’ golfing buddy] hit Deason in the back with a golf club and Williams stabbed him in the back of his left thigh with the shaft of the broken golf club, the affidavit states.
But hell. UVU put him on leave while he was in jail and all, but now that he’s paid a fine and gone on probation, it’s time to come home!
At the time of the incident Williams was working as a full-time associate professor of aviation at Utah Valley University. [Here’s his way-sketchy faculty page.] He … has since returned to work.
Cheating, and then beating a man bloody when he challenges your right to cheat! If there’s one place this man belongs, it’s back in a classroom.
Brad DeLong first quotes Benjamin Barber calling plagiarism charges against Saif Gaddafi “garbage.” Then he quotes a bunch of plagiarized passages.
According to a new study:
… [Of] 29 reviews, or “meta-analyses,” of earlier drug trials — culled from top journals like JAMA and The Lancet — only two reported who had funded the original trials included in the review.
And none of the reviews mentioned whether the authors reporting on those trials had been paid by drugmakers.
… [M]ore than two-thirds of the original drug trials that ended up being included in the 29 reviews were funded by pharmaceutical companies.
Only 318 of the 509 trials reviewed gave the conflict-of-interest information in the first place.
… When the [research] team contacted the reviewers, the majority admitted they hadn’t even looked at the issue.
Dan Drezner writes, on the subject of professors and Libya:
For a scholar, engagement with power should not be automatically rejected, particularly if it means altering policies in a fruitful manner. When the exercise morphs into intellectual kabuki theater, however, then disengagement seems like the best course of action.
Those scholars who stopped participating after it was obvious that Qaddafi wasn’t really interested in genuine change don’t deserve much opprobrium. By that count, [Benjamin] Barber really has a lot to answer for, while some of the others seem to have emerged relatively unscathed.
Yes – the calendar matters. When did people withdraw from involvement? And in the case of Libya, was it ever much more than theater?
But money also matters. Getting paid is fine; getting paid strikingly large sums should raise eyebrows, because it threatens to compromise the consultant’s intellectual integrity.
Finally, conflict of commitment matters. Barber writes:
[This] is about whether academics should stay in the ivory tower and do research and write books[.] Or engage in the world on behalf of the principles and theories their research produces? Do you simply shut your mouth and write? Or do you try to engage?
First, note the way he paints it – There’s the tremulous tight-lipped unengaged ivory tower dweller, and there’s the bold intrepid earth-changing Barber. This is a ridiculous either/or — plenty of academics engage politically in plenty of ways short of writing obsequious op/eds about authoritarians.
And second: How much teaching do professors like Barber do? (Barber no longer teaches, but taught recently at the University of Maryland and at Rutgers.) How often are they even on campus? A certain amount of traveling on behalf of democratic change is fine; but when professors become mainly consultants, when they appear maybe one day a week on campus, something’s terribly wrong.
… Roger Cohen.
There’s a video of Dr. Alia Brahimi of the London School of Economics greeting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as “Brother Leader” at the school three months ago, and presenting him with an L.S.E. cap — a tradition, she says, that started when the cap was handed to Nelson Mandela.
It may be possible to sink to greater depths but right now I can’t think how.
Calvo-Goller said yesterday that she had not yet studied the ruling and thus had not yet decided whether to appeal. But she said the complaint was aimed at forcing reviewers to be “more responsible” …
The court’s ruling is aimed at making people like Karin Calvo-Goller more responsible.
She has been ordered to pay compensation to her victim.
[T]he [modern] scholar, the writer, and the artist may not be parasites dependent on aristocratic patrons, but that does not mean they are truly free. The desire for applause tends to inspire servility in anyone subject to it — and it is a short step from flattering one’s public to flattering monsters who wield influence and power.
Paul Rahe weighs in on Benjamin Barber.
UD followed, when the story first arose, the heavily indebted University of Central Arkansas president who forged the names of some UCA administrators on a letter to the school’s trustees. The letter told the trustees to give Lu Hardin a big ol’ deferred compensation package now, pronto. The remarkably incurious trustees (All pals of Hardin’s, maybe? Hardin’s a Mike Huckabee protege, by the way.) went ahead and did this. Then some damn newspaper began investigating.
University presidents aren’t supposed to steal from their schools, and Hardin now faces thirty years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering.
The University of Kentucky has so much to be proud of: Its sports program; its stewardship of the state’s arts and letters… And now there’s something else: It’s hired its first invisible professor, a man students and colleagues will almost never see.
Boasting that he represents a world “now digital and global,” this education professor guy (Why should I bother going back to the article to check on his name?) will sit on his ass in Iowa and send emails to UK.
He does worry that he’ll “miss out on some of [UK’s] culture.”
Nah!
What a boon to the UK campus! I trust we’ll all profit from UK’s groundbreaking initiative and let everybody but our football players stay home.
… in trying to get a grip on the London School of Economics/ Benjamin Barber/ Other Academic Friends of Libya controversy, scandal, whatever you want to call it. Start with a university story that has nothing to do with Libya.
Frank Rich recently wrote, in the New York Times:
[Lawrence] Summers [did] consulting work for [a] hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. [Summers was] moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.
And he was making millions and millions of dollars. At a one day a week job.
He was paid, what, $800,000 or so to be Harvard’s president.
Put aside whether, as Ben Stein suggests, such a beneficiary of Wall Street money could ever, in his government capacity, “crack the whip” against it (“Wall Street knows how to get its hooks into government. This is how the world works. Money talks.”) and ask rather, from the point of view of the university, whether his raking it in while president is seemly.
It’s not unseemly if you regard a university as an institution like any other in a capitalist economy, primarily geared toward generating profits (in its athletic program, in its entrepreneurial scientific work) and generating personal wealth (for consultants to money funds, like Summers, for consultants to wealthy dictatorships and other countries, like Barber, and for university presidents like Shirley Ann Jackson, who sit on corporate boards and earn millions to attend board meetings).
As Barber says, in his defense, “Everyone gets paid.” It’s exactly the same way university presidents defend giving four million dollars a year to football coaches: There’s a market for everything, and everyone gets paid the going rates.
Absolutely none of this is unseemly (I’m not talking, by the way, about the astounding salaries made by presidents of for-profit colleges. These guys are for profit, baby, and you better believe it.) if a university is a corporation with classrooms, run and staffed by people seriously distracted by big money elsewhere. But a lot of people have a nagging feeling that universities are something more. Indeed these people note that our government seems to feel they are something more, since they receive remarkable tax benefits. Some of them are even public institutions (Barber taught at two of these, Rutgers and the University of Maryland), direct recipients of taxpayer dollars. What happens to Americans’ support for non-profit universities when so much that goes on at those places is outrageously profit and personal wealth driven?
The Libya dust-up is only the latest lesson in a gradual education taking place among the American public as to what really goes on in higher ed.
… at the Arena Stage. Along with anything written by Frank Zappa, this play’s script has provided UD with sayings that have enriched her life over decades.
Albee’s stuff comes in handy mainly in domestic situations…
YOU CAN TAKE IT. YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!
THAT IS A DESPERATELY SICK LIE.
These are for sure my favorites, but there are others.