… aggressive.

Unless they’re shitfaced.

The University of Central Florida is full of students like Jackie Fulco, who think academics is more important than athletics. That just isn’t right. It’s “crazy,” it’s pitiful, “it just doesn’t add up,” writes a UCF reporter in the school newspaper. Why is the football stadium half empty?

It must be bad marketing. Word’s not getting out about the games. The student looks forward to a full stadium once word gets out. That will set things right, and UCF will start to look like a real university.

… has died.

He knew how to improvise. On one occasion, he gave a beautifully constructed and coherent talk at Stanford, even though the school’s president, after he introduced him, “inadvertently picked up Dworkin’s detailed lecture notes from the lectern.”

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“Each person must take his own life seriously: he must accept that it is a matter of importance that his life be a successful performance rather than a wasted opportunity.”

… Henry Mintzberg [scroll down], the head of Tel Aviv University’s undergraduate business program has urged students not to major in business.

“Study of academic disciplines prepares students to think scientifically in these fields and form the foundation for advanced studies in graduate degree programs,” he said.

One student is outraged:

“Too bad he doesn’t have the integrity not to head a department he doesn’t believe in.”

Do you have to insist on majors in order to believe in your department? UD says no. UD says it shows integrity to care about the quality of undergraduate education your business… minors?… are getting and steer them toward actual academic fields. (Wee UD herself found that the hard-bitten vocationalism of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism was not enough to keep the mind alive, and quickly transferred to the English department.)

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Meanwhile, on the business ethics front, a New York judge has sentenced an insider trading to lecturing.

“To the extent possible, Mr. Fortuna can speak at his college and school of business and other institutions about his own situation and how [easy] it is for him and others to have committed this crime and the difficulties he’s encountered as a result,” [Sidney] Stein said yesterday as he imposed the sentence.

UD foresees an entire industry of MOOCs arising out of the synergy between large numbers of incarcerated insider traders and the need for business schools to deal with their profession’s, er, ethics problems. The general title for these MOOCs would be INSIDER GATING, with subtitles specific to each incarceree’s case.

Ah, the wondrous rich diversity of the laptopped classroom.

… UD‘s latest Inside Higher Ed column, should be up shortly.

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Yep.

When the name of the game in big-time American university football is thug-management, it’s all about comparisons. Who recruits the most criminals? How bad – man to man offense speaking – are they? Do they steal laptops, or do they, like national champ Alabama’s crew, beat people senseless and pack heat?

Then there’s all the chatter about consequences. Ignore it? Suspend them for awhile? Suspend them indefinitely? Dismiss them?

These guys – these Alabama guys – are second stringers, so we’re being spared long articles ignoring what they’ve done and agonizing instead about how their being in jail is going to hurt the defensive line…

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UD thanks several readers for linking her to this story.

UD has told you about this form of campus malfeasance repeatedly. So common are engineering professors who set up their own firms and divert university money that UD has suggested armed guards be posted at their offices as a sort of discouragement to them.

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History here.

UD is back at the online education conference at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, where she continues to learn new words.

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But not just words. There’s the whole thing of whether universities will continue to exist at all if we can download MIT educations via MOOCs. (MOOCs are totally the star of this show. It sometimes sounds a like barnyard here – MOOMOOMOOc.)

The answer to that is you can’t download a college education, which includes not just the social, rite of passage stuff, but also immediate intellectual interaction with professors and smart fellow students – in classrooms, outside of classrooms.

Universities also collect smart people to think valuable thoughts and make valuable things. You can take all of those people and put them in think tanks and corporations, but only the university offers an environment reasonably free of ideology and the profit motive.

UD is aware that both ideologies and commercial activities exist on campuses; she is merely pointing out that unlike Brookings or the Heritage Foundation or Pfizer, the university stands at some remove from ideology and the profit motive. It enables a special sort of intellectual independence, and we rightly value and want to preserve that.

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“What is the unique value of physical presence?”

Too right. One of the breakout sessions lists this as a “very important” question.

A scurrilous voice of dissent in South Carolina dares to suggest that university coaches using state planes for recruitment may not be an appropriate use of taxes!

… when he weighed in on the controversy revolving around the boycott-disinvestment-sanctions speakers at Brooklyn College:

“If you want to go to a university where the government decides what kinds of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply to a school in North Korea.“

Yet you don’t need crude totalitarian censorship to shut people down – or to chill their speech – on important political subjects. UD‘s blogpal, Tenured Radical, wrote a column praising Brooklyn College for holding the sort of discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that needs to take place. She went on, however, to take issue with the tactic of academic boycott:

I … don’t think that there is any good historical evidence that silencing intellectual, academic and cultural workers on a comprehensive basis, and preventing any exchange of ideas between the Israel and the United States, will have any effect on Israeli politics whatsoever beyond isolating progressive intellectuals in Israel.

This perfectly reasonable objection to the strategy in this circumstance has drawn volumes of vicious abuse to TR , via her column’s comment thread, and in other places. For questioning the utility of the boycott, she has repeatedly been denounced as a liar, a racist, and a reactionary by some of the boycotters.

The sheer personal cruelty of the comments is striking; and TR, also reasonably, wonders (in an email to UD) whether participating in the boycott debate is worth it:

[R]ather than be subjected to that kind of treatment again, and risk my reputation further, [maybe] I would be wise to never go near this topic again or ask questions about features of BDS that affect how it functions in a university setting.

There are a number of ways, short of outright censorship, to censor people. You can come down on them like a pile of bricks, for instance, when they say something you don’t like.

The Pope quits.

Hold your horses. You know the scene. A dark rainy very early Washington morning. The conference hotel has an entrance directly from Metro Center – underground, see, so you don’t have to deal with the rain – but UD‘s wild guess as to which entrance took you to the Grand Hyatt was as wrong as it’s possible to be, so she just splashed through three long blocks but is now richly rewarded with a BIG ol’ breakfast buffet in one of your basic insanely beautiful American hotels. Everything’s brownish spartan eco in style — huge bamboo crammed into speckly brown containers kind of thing.

UD has been invited by a very confused organizer to attend this NSF-sponsored event which seems to be about er computers and their implications for higher education. Or something! It’s a mark of how wrongheaded this organization was in directing its invitation to UD that she barely understands its… er… ground of being. But she’ll blog this. Whatever.

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Humanoids? Okay, well, we’re all stretched out at long table-clothed tables and we’ve all got our scones at the ready and our laptops fired up. Bit of conversation behind me:

And you’re the director of … what?

For a bunch of techies, seems a genial, outgoing group. Many small gatherings chatting at the long tables. Fifty fifty men women? Think so. No doubt UD‘s invitation is about evening out the gender thing… What? Because she blogs? Has two blogs? Has a poetry MOOC? UD has also lately been invited to be on a panel at next year’s MLA about technology and the status of women in the profession… A colleague has asked her to talk to his grad seminar about the digital humanities which UD isn’t even sure what the fuck that means… Her photo is emblazoned on the front page of the last edition of the George Washington University newspaper, featuring her as the first GW professor to have a MOOC…

So is UD a pioneer??? A tech pioneer? Lordy.

I mean, read this category, Technolust. No, UD is not a Luddite, exactly – but she has always had strong Luddische tendencies… I think it’s safe to say that over the last thirty years UD has resisted every single new form of screen technology offered her… And she’s got that cranky old English professor thing about technology really being our enemy… But over the years she has gradually caved.

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Introduction taking place. Guy pronounces academia as if it’s macadamia.

“How do you do high-quality online education” seems to be the focus.

Uses “ideation” for “thinking.”

“Recent awareness of MOOCs and whatnot.”

“The elephant in the room is the MOOC phenomenon.”

“Cheating is a big problem.”

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Okay, so I knew some of this was going to piss me off and here we go. A totally stupid PowerPoint about how all students are bored in school because school isn’t like a Facebook session in your bedroom. Bullshit, honey. Have you ever heard of different experiences, different places for different sorts of experiences? Oh no – universities have to be exactly like online gaming dens or we’re failing our young people!

AGENDA: CURRENT EDUCATION IS BORING AND INEFFECTIVE.

Oh yeah we need to wire and film every moment of our students – are their fingers moving faster on the mouse? Great! They’re excited! Wire their fingers! Follow their fingers.

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WHY DO WE LOOSE JOBS?

She cannot even spell. She reads this big PP headline off the page for us – pointing her lighted pointer right over it – and lots of us laugh but she doesn’t even notice. She doesn’t notice that even as she pontificates about the importance of education, she cannot spell LOSE.

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Next speaker seems offended by MOOCs because they don’t reflect the educational technologies he prefers. He complains that there’s no science and research behind MOOCs. First, that’s not true. And second, even if it were, so what? He spends the rest of the talk flacking his particular journals, ed-tech approaches.

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Bio break.

Collaboratories.

UD learns new words.

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“There’s an audio narration that worked on my pc last night.” Plenty of tech fuckups in these way-tech settings.

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UD has just taken part in a breakout session (she thinks of acne and Alcatraz, but it just means a discussion made up of only some participants in a conference) in which computer science guys from MIT talked with UD about whether computers could capture the sort of thing she does – or say embodies – in James Joyce seminars. Of course the answer is no bloody way, but we tossed it around.

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Big Data. That’s this hour’s buzz word.

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Plus Affective Computing, where you connect a sensor to my groin while I check out the best deer poisons, and find the phrases that get me going.

This commenter, responding to a typically mushy article about teaching ethics in American business schools, says what UD always says about this subject. Either you scare b-school grads into good behavior, or forget it.

I mean, plenty of b-school grads are good people and will follow the law yadda yadda. Plenty aren’t good people, however, and they won’t follow the law. Are b-schools responsible for trying to change the not-good people into good people before they leave their business programs?

UD thinks it’s sweet of them to try, sweet of them to rig up be-good courses. But it don’t make no nevermind and you know it and I know it.

In line with this sensible commenter’s comment, UD, she reminds you, has proposed the following:

1. Drop all business ethics courses.

2. Initiate a program of visiting lecturers drawn from convicted business fraudsters residing in local prisons.

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UD thanks David for the link.

This is an example of the corrosive skepticism undermining the American university’s greatest asset.