Christopher Hitchens got a big laugh when, asked what the purpose of life without a belief in God would be, he answered “Gloating over the misfortunes of other people… Crowing over [their] miseries…” UD laughs whenever she watches him say this too…

Yet the astoundingly tanking fortunes of the outfit that last year sued UD has her thinking with some seriousness about schadenfreude. No doubt she’s got her share of it… But as one story after another of the financial desperation of the now universally ridiculed and reviled Righthaven pops up as a Google Alert in her email, she finds herself remarkably deficient in this response. The copyright troll whose threats and legal papers so frightened her two summers ago is this year a virtually bankrupt joke, taking outrageous beatings in every court it’s dragged into by people and organizations who – unlike UD – fought back.

Instead of anything emotional, UD seems to be experiencing that rather calmer it-is-meet-and-right thing that involves witnessing the reversal of wrongdoing.

As I look at the many faces in front of me as the school year begins, I see not only worry [about] enduring yet another PowerPoint presentation, but I also see eyes hungry for the dazzle of exploring and conquering new topics.

An American professor in Turkey notes the characteristic fear and misery on the faces of first-day-of-the-semester students as they anticipate PowerPoint use.

Simmons declined to speak on how involved she was in compensation discussions. She also declined to comment on the theory that giving Wall Street executives exorbitant pay to reward short-term profits could have contributed to the poor decision-making that precipitated the financial meltdown.

The president of Brown, facing the implications of her service on the Goldman Sachs compensation committee foursquare.

… still has the capacity to startle.

The president and dean of Bishop State College both bought their degrees from diploma mills.

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

UD thanks SS.

This is how its author writes.

Two seismic forces beyond our control — the advent of Web. 2.0 and the inexorable influx of tech-savvy millennials on campus — are shaping what I call the new digital shoreline of higher education. These forces demand that we as educators reconsider the learning theories, pedagogies and practices on which we have depended.

The book, whose clunky mixed-up title I’ll let you discover at the link, wants us to know that it’s all good — all the twittering shit our students trail into class is all good. And even if it isn’t, it’s… what’d he say? It’s a seismic force, so you can’t do anything about it anyway sucker. It’s Nature, baby! Beyond our control! You think you can keep The Tumblr Temblor out of Classroom 25A Soltan Intro American Lit? It’s fucking inexorable! I’m not gonna argue the thing ’cause we all know it’s just a … a …. thing and you can’t do anything about things.

Nor can you do anything about pretentious writers. Look at this paragraph, with its pseudo-urgency and its self-importance (what I call) and its we as educators …

Huh? Educators? What’s wrong with educators, SOS?

I dunno. I can only report the following. Every self-respecting professor I’ve ever known has at some point said to me something like: The worst dread I have about dying is that my obituary headline will call me an EDUCATOR. It’ll say LOCAL EDUCATOR DIES.

I mean, maybe they haven’t said something so strong. All have, however, expressed contempt for the word educator, and have shuddered at the thought of it being applied to them.

Is it because we’re cynical lazy shits who don’t truly educate? No. Au contraire. There’s something about the word. Again, I don’t really know. I only know it’s embarrassing. And it’s totally not surprising to find it here, in this empty pretentious paragraph, the guy patting himself on the back for being an educator.

And – you know – those teaching practices of the past… We haven’t just used them. No: We’ve depended on them. We’ve been in a co-dependent relationship with them, and we’re terrified of losing them to those uncontrollable seismic millennial things.

Mobile apps, content sharing and these tech-savvy students can become a professor’s best assets in the classroom, even if they sometimes seem threatening.

Threatening? It’s a fucking Phuket coming right at me! And there’s nothing I can do. I, Educator, have lost control of my classroom.

But here’s the good news:

These students are helping us — teachers at all levels — with new ways to communicate and they’re motivating us to truly see the potential of the vast, shared and co-created information resources that exist within interconnected nodes. We’re being challenged to rethink information creation, storage and delivery. They are time-slicers, shape-shifters, creators and mobile connectors. The playthings of our students’ youth are becoming the tools of their future.

I haven’t encountered language like this since my late lamented hippie youth. We are da yout! The last sentence is positively Cultural Revolution boilerplate: THE PLAYTHINGS OF OUR STUDENTS’ YOUTH ARE BECOMING THE TOOLS OF THEIR FUTURE. GLORIOUS FUTURE! DON’T BE SCARED, EDUCATOR! JOIN OUR YOUTH. TAKE UP THE CHALLENGE.

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

Send this guy a copy pronto.

There’s a beautiful synergy in play at Click-Thru U. Keep elementary, secondary, and then of course university students in front of computers and expensive software all the days of their lives, until they don’t even know that education used to mean human teachers and classrooms full of human beings discussing, questioning, scoffing, yawning, laughing… The jostle of real life, real encounters; the unscripted moments when, prompted or provoked by a brilliant lecture or an intense verbal exchange, you perceive something you never perceived before… when you come to knowledge as it lives its life, as it restlessly evolves, in a classroom with a passionate lecturer and focused students…

This is what the Click-Thrus will never know. All they will know is a continuation into schooling of the screen life they live outside the classroom. Theirs is all one seamless daily experience – Facebook, Gchat, texting, algebra, history, Facebook, Gchat, texting. No change of scene. No talking out loud. You want to say something, hit the keyboard. Feel something? Tap an emoticon.

The synergy in this post’s headline should surprise no one – the process by which the parent of for-profit Click-Thru U scoops up all the software and makes it possible for every American student to experience an entirely digitalized education is well underway. As the Powerpointed, laptopped, clickered classroom becomes intolerably pointless for everyone, the software will be there waiting.

Of course the software isn’t teaching anyone anything much, as the New York Times, reviewing the studies, reports. But the United States is such a rich county, with such a booming economy, that it doesn’t really need educated people.

Hapless, high-security, high-tech, humongously overcrowded University of Central Florida keeps piling on. Its response to manifold cheating scandals (UD will quote herself here: A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you. ) is to flay students with doubleplusgood PowerPoints. This is so the answer to your problems, UCF!

Banned Books Week, in which we celebrate novels which have excited the legal system, has come and gone. The commemoration always reminds me of the singular moment in my life when, grazing the bookcases in my parents’ bedroom, I found Henry Miller’s much-banned Tropic of Cancer.

My father was an immunologist who studied cancer at the National Institutes of Health (and this was the heyday of Nixon’s War on Cancer), so maybe I initially assumed I was looking at a technical book. But something in its stark blue/black Grove Press binding drove me further, and I cracked it open, immediately discovering a use of the word crack with which I had been unfamiliar.

I’d opened Tropic to one of Van Norden’s notorious, hilarious rants about women, failure, and the dirt in his belly.

“All I ask of life,” he says, “is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt. … The trouble is, you see, I can’t fall in love, I’m too much of an egoist… You sort of rot here [Like Tropic‘s narrator, Henry Miller, Van Norden is an American living in Paris.] Would you believe it, I’ve never been to the Louvre – nor the Comedie Francaise. Is it worth going to those joints? Still, it sort of takes your mind off things, I suppose. What do you do with yourself all day? Don’t you get bored? … You go queer over here… all these cheap shits sitting on their ass all day bragging about their work and none of them is worth a stinking damn. They’re all failures – that’s why they come over here… I’m a neurotic, I guess. I can’t stop thinking about myself…. Ah, well, shit! I’m going to take a walk… wash the dirt out of my belly…”

Transfixed, I lowered myself to the bedroom floor and began at the beginning.

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

Inside the Whale George Orwell called his essay about Miller, and that’s just it. Tropic had brought me inside the vast dark unfettered head, a place where immersed thoughts swam mightily up and broke the surface. I badly wanted access to this disreputable underworld, and here it was.

The social reality outside Miller’s whale was ‘twenties Paris, a world, wrote Orwell, of

bug-ridden rooms in working-men’s hotels, of fights, drinking bouts, cheap brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling, and temporary jobs. [These were] the poor quarters of Paris as a foreigner sees them — the cobbled alleys, the sour reek of refuse, the bistros with their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the green waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the Republican Guard, the crumbling iron urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro stations, the cigarettes that come to pieces, the pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens …

This is Henry’s setting, and in it his thoughts reel back and forth from rage and despair at a cancerous world, a world where meaning and beauty and energy are all used up, to ecstasy at rare unbidden moments of meaning and beauty and energy that continue, somehow, to survive the deadness. By chance in a foul dark Metro station Henry finds a ticket to a Ravel concert one night; the stepped-on, rubbed-out, grubby ticket is Henry’s ticket to one of the most complete experiences of aesthetic bliss UD has ever read. The very neglect and chanciness of that ticket seem to generate the spectacular responses Henry has in the concert hall. Art needs something to transform, and the more deeply you’ve taken in the cancerous world, the more intense your receptivity to its transfiguration. The stronger the artist (here, Ravel), the more fulsome the embrace – and transfiguration – of the cancerous.

There’s nothing escapist or ephemeral about this transition from death to life – the point is that the art sweeps up all of the suffering degraded reality outside the concert hall and makes it art, just the way Miller’s novel itself takes in with such capacious, nervy, fascination “the imbecilities of the inner mind… the real-politik of the inner mind,” as Orwell calls them, that he ends up glorifying this stuff.

[T]he truth is [writes Orwell] that ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than writers of fiction usually care to admit. [Walt] Whitman himself ‘accepted’ a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the ‘grey sick faces of onanists’, etc.,etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

Henry puts himself in the way of decay, every day. Decayed streets, people, buildings. He revels in urinous medieval Paris and detests the fake shininess of new American cities. In giving words to this descent into the truth of everyday horrors, Miller offers us a known, though rarely exhibited, social and psychological reality. As Orwell notes, there’s nothing edifying here; Tropic doesn’t end, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sentimental story Babylon Revisited (which has the same time and setting and expatriate American narrator) does, with an assurance that the character will eventually reverse his losses. There’s only a primer on how to remain human and alive in corrosive times.

[I]n 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and a sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture of helplessness, even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had been a soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got hold of Prufrock than The First Hundred Thousand or Horatio Bottomley’s Letters to the Boys in the Trenches. I should have felt, like [E.M.] Forster, that by simply standing aloof and keeping touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was carrying on the human heritage. [Hence] the passive, non-co-operative attitude implied in Henry Miller’s work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people ought to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they do feel. Once again it is the human voice among the bomb-explosions, a friendly American voice, ‘innocent of public-spiritedness’. No sermons, merely the subjective truth. And along those lines, apparently, it is still possible for a good novel to be written. Not necessarily an edifying novel, but a novel worth reading and likely to be remembered after it is read… [Henry Miller] is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.

No, our moment is not 1917; and no, not all novels have to rub our noses in horror and imbecility. But there will always be high value in capturing and recording the human undercurrent – its stuttering resentments and rages and bewilderments and obscenities. For this – along with our delicacy, hopefulness, and high-mindedness – is our subjective reality, and we are right to ask from our artists the peculiar mix of reportage and transcendence the best of them bring to it.

Sweet, sweet, story.

… a major Washington think tank has appointed the felled-by-plagiarism Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg a “distinguished statesman.” In response, the head of CSIS speaks of redemption, etc.

Ok, says McDuffee, but why so soon? The former German defense minister was only a few months ago found guilty of having plagiarized massive amounts of his PhD thesis.

UD is also struck by the suddenness of the appointment.

The ghostwritten, self-exculpating autobiography, for instance, has not yet appeared.

… Steve Roberts is trashing books he hasn’t read, he probably shouldn’t do that. Not a good message to send to his students.

… it could win some serious journalism awards. Even more than scandal-rich University of Miami, Columbia University, with its notorious business school professors, insider-trader-tinged medical school professor, and – most recently – Medicare fraud-accused faculty (that last one cost the university a million dollars in settlement money), represents a spectacular opportunity for ambitious young journalists.

They simply have to start bundling. Rather than deal with each breaking story, the Spectator staff needs to pull them all together in a long series of articles featuring financial corruption at the university.

… San Raffaele Life-Health University, in Milan. It has it all – plaything of politicians, ripper-off of the health system, and currently under investigation for “fraudulent bankruptcy.”

Nor can it be a good sign that its administrator just shot himself to death in his office.

…a Washington Post sports reporter, to make playing football a university major. [Scroll down.] Now a UD reader sends her the latest Jenkins dispatch, in which she provides details of a sports major which would grant students academic credit for their on-field efforts. It would also toss in courses on, like, The Cultural Meaning of Play.

Jenkins writes strangely, and says strange things. Here’s her first paragraph:

If we would quit being half-ashamed of college sports and assign them some real value, we might just cure some of their corruptions. The NCAA should stop treating athletic departments as ticket offices attached to universities like tumors and instead treat them as legitimate academic branches. In fact, why shouldn’t we let kids major in sports? Aspiring athletes should be able to pursue their real interest, as a business and an art.

Let’s take this step by step.

If we would quit being half-ashamed of college sports and assign them some real value, we might just cure some of their corruptions. [Americans are fully-proud of college sports, and they assign them stupendous value. What is Jenkins talking about?] The NCAA should stop treating athletic departments as ticket offices attached to universities like tumors [Way strange simile, though it fits, I guess, with her use of the word “cure” in the preceding sentence. But does she really think the NCAA, of all places, considers college sports a cancer? For the NCAA, college sports is precisely a cure – a cure for poverty.] and instead treat them as legitimate academic branches. In fact, why shouldn’t we let kids major in sports? Aspiring athletes should be able to pursue their real interest, as a business and an art. [A college education, after all, is a four-year opportunity for students to pursue their real interests, be these dribbling balls, building meth labs, playing video games, or whatever. When it comes to constructing a curriculum, colleges should inquire of students what they would like to do. Then they should build buildings and hire people to help them to do those things.]

UD finds this sentence a bit vague:

Varsity athletes deserve significant academic credits for their incredibly long hours of training and practice, and if they fulfill a core curriculum they deserve degrees, too.

I get the first claim – that purely physical activity warrants intellectual credit. Pant, Run – three credits at an institution of higher learning. Okay.

But the second claim – that if athletes fulfill a core curriculum they deserve degrees – confuses me. Where in this piece does Jenkins say anything about core courses? It’s all about colleges letting athletes do what they want to do – play sports, and major in sports. Jenkins compares a sports major at, say, Auburn, to a theater major at Yale. She says nothing about this — the extensive field of academic requirements you’ve got to get out of the way before Yale lets you be a theater major. She alludes to an academic core, but that’s all. She’ll let other people figure out how to, uh, tackle that one.

… quickly degenerates into a disappointing article.

UD thanks MattF for sending her this.