… by a reporter from the Xinhua news agency about the Amy Chua controversy. If her remarks make it into an article, she’ll link you to them.

UD thanks Andrew for alerting her to this story about a math professor at Cal State Northridge who’s been peeing repeatedly on the office door of a colleague he doesn’t like.

Women are kept from doing this sort of thing by the relative difficulty of the act.

… here.

… and very few doctors. This fact, reported by the Spokesman-Review, inspires some speculation in the comment thread – as to why.

Even if we build a medical school, why would those doctors want to stay in Idaho? We won’t adequately fund K-12 or college education for those doctors’ children, we won’t provide the kind of social services they can find in other states, and we’ve got religious and political zealots running the state government. What “cream of the crop” doctor would want to run a practice in Idaho?

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You know, you’re right. In fact, I’m surprised ANYONE can stand living in Idaho, when it’s full of inbred, toothless fascists running around, burning books, stealing from the poor and looting the environment so the entire state looks like a barren moonscape. This really is the worst place on Earth. If Obama only accomplishes one more thing during his term, maybe he could revoke Idaho’s statehood.

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Doctors move to cities for the economics and the lifestyle. Given the choice of 9-5 in a burb treating nice people vs pulling buckshot out of an Aryan’s bum at midnight, which would you choose?

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Buckshot out of an Aryan’s bum at midnight. There’s poetry in that.

The taste of Jim Calhoun still lingers on the palate; Robert Burton’s letter echoes in the ear; and now there’s Professor Kenneth Dautrich. All at the University of Connecticut.

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(UD thanks Dave for the link to the Burton letter.)

Mark DuVall, a democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives, has introduced a bill mandating the playing of certain songs at all University of Mississippi football and basketball games.

… with Daniel Bell.

Bell has died, at 91. I’ll have more to say later.

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The Times obit quotes Bell on the distinction between scholar and intellectual:

The scholar has a bounded field of knowledge, a tradition, and seeks to find his place in it, adding to the accumulated, tested knowledge of the past as to a mosaic. The scholar, qua scholar, is less involved with his ‘self.’

The intellectual begins with his experience, his individual perceptions of the world, his privileges and deprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities.

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Arguing the World is a film about Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol.

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From a 2004 interview:

[We’ve seen in the last two centuries] a triumph of the secular ideologies as against religion. [But this triumph] failed too. It failed with the end of communism, it failed with the collapse of Marxism, at least in its Russian and communist form. So that was really the end of ideology. … But I also said in 1960 that this was not the end of all ideology because you’ll always have credal warfare of new kinds, particularly with newly emerging states.

On the end of sociology as a discipline:

… I don’t think society is a system in which you have a single set of variables which control all the relationships of mankind. So if you can’t have a general theory and you can’t have sociology as a system, sociology has to go back to historical grounding. Now it can do very good empirical work and you can try to formalize it with mathematics, fair enough, if you think you can do it. In fact there’s a lot to be said for empirical sociology. But the notion that you can build out of this a general theory seems to me false, so [in that sense] that’s the end of sociology, not as an effort to look at different aspects of society, but to find a general theory.

Modernity, modernism, modernization.

I tried for my part to distinguish three things – modernity, modernism, and modernization. Modernity is an attitude to the world. You can find it in Diogenes, you can find it in the Elizabethan period. It’s an openness to the world, it’s a scepticism, rather than being fixed in certain positional modes. So modernity is not necessarily one element of time or a period but a more general element of human behaviour, or human aspiration… [M]odernism [is] a specific historical movement going back against romanticism … [and] traditionalism. Basically modernism is a certain kind of formalism. We think of the Bauhaus elements of modernism… Modernization is an effort to rationalize the administrative economic systems of the world.

… UD lived in an off-campus Evanston apartment with three – or was it four? – other women.

Turns out there was always a law – the beautifully named Brothel Law – prohibiting more than three unrelated people from sharing apartments and houses in Evanston.

So pissed off are Evanstonians about loud drunken students that the town has now decided to enforce the law. NU students – some of whom will be evicted – are furious. Five hundred of them packed a campus meeting about the situation.

During the forum, Weinberg junior Taylor Barrett read aloud responses from Evanston officials she received after e-mailing them Tuesday to “respectfully express her unease” about the ordinance. Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl apparently responded by suggesting students ask the administration to change NU’s alcohol policy.

“Perhaps you might consider talking with the NU administration about allowing drinking on campus,” she wrote. “Then all partying would not have to take place in the neighborhoods.”

Ain’t gonna happen. NU doesn’t want its students falling into the lake.

No – here’s one of the better scenarios: The town of Evanston now has NU’s attention. Big time. Evanston knows which houses and apartments are the major offenders, and it should, with increased campus and town police presence on weekends, aggressively target them. NU sends letter to the students and their parents threatening suspension, whatever. Evanston leans on landlords, who also send letters. This high-profile activity scares other students into better behavior.

And he was chair. Of Temple University’s opthalmology department.

An alleged alcoholic; and an alleged fraudster.

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a 144-count indictment against Kubacki for

falsely claiming between 2002 and 2007 to have provided more than $1.5 million in services to patients at a clinic run by the ophthalmology department. The indictment says Kubacki… made notations in the charts of patients, seen by other doctors, indicating that he also had seen and evaluated those patients – when he hadn’t. In some cases, he wasn’t even in town when the patients were seen.

His false statements, the government said, allowed Temple to bill Medicare and other insurance companies for more than $1.5 million.

For Temple, there are questions of repayment as well as questions of responsibility. How long did it maintain a department chair apparently scorned by students because he was drunk? (Patients, of course, didn’t have the option of avoiding him.) Why did it take five years for Temple to notice the Medicare fraud? And why isn’t there a statement somewhere on Temple’s website about all of this? There should be.

In the New York Times, David Leonhardt points out that

most dropouts today are not students unable to keep up with college work. Instead, they generally attend colleges that, research shows, are neither very rigorous nor very engaged in students’ lives. Many of these colleges devote little energy to thinking about — let alone improving — their graduation rate. Changing the funding rules could help change that mind-set.

He calls for cutbacks on badly targeted, inequitable college loan programs.

… Phil Knight. (The Nike guy.)

Or T. Boone Pickens or something.

The opening wedge.

Eventually all American university courses will be taught at coffee houses.

Dinner last night at ‘thesda’s Cafe Deluxe with fellow blogger and former student and current professor Ryan Cordell. We played Hangman with his daughters on the restaurant’s paper tablecloth.

Hilarious review of Erik Olin Wright’s latest book, by Russell Jacoby in Dissent. Excerpts:

… The book is startling and depressing evidence of what has happened to American academic Marxism, at least its sociological variant, over the last thirty years. It has become turgid, vapid, and self-referential. Wright lives in a bubble of like-minded sociologists and political theorists. On page 322, he thanks Marcia Kahn Wright, his wife, for suggesting to him “the term ‘interstitial’” as a way of expressing something about “strategic logic,” whatever that is. Apart from Mrs. Wright, Erik Wright’s favorite source is Erik Wright. He has read all of his works and finds them remarkable.

… We are only on page thirteen and already we have utopias that depend on a social science that depends on a theory of justice that breaks down into two parts, social and political, the first of which subdivides in three ways.

… Wright has to be given credit for parading his anticapitalist sensibilities, but his critique reads like a lecture at the hootenanny weekend of the Socialist Hiking Club, Berkeley Chapter… “Capitalism is efficient in certain crucial aspects.” “Capitalist commodification supports important broadly held values.” What sinks Wright’s little boat is exactly such vacuous and clumsy statements coupled, as they are, to a relentless faux precision of definitions, diagrams, and graphs.

… Wright [now warms] up for his ensuing discussions of “interstitial” and “symbiotic” transformation, which are numbingly baroque and that he clarifies with diagrams that might as well be satires. He gives us a graph of “Interstitial Transformations Paving the Way to Rupture” with one axis: “Historical Time.”

… [Wright] says little about anything. The empirical information he provides is perfunctory at best. His command of Marxism seems limited. His historical reach extends to his own earlier works. His vast theoretical apparatus is jimmy-rigged and empty. The graphs are inane, the writing atrocious. To call this book dull as dish water maligns dish water.

… In a blurb, Michael Burawoy, a previous president of the American Sociological Association and a prominent leftist sociologist, calls the book “encyclopedic” in its breadth and “daunting” in its ambition. He states, “Only a thinker of Wright’s genius could sustain such a badly needed political imagination without losing analytical clarity and precision.” With the correction that Wright is no genius and that the book is suffocatingly narrow in scope, impossibly cramped in imagination, and irreparably muddy in execution, the blurb is accurate.

Smokin’.

[Q.] If you had to rank the great Irish writers as earners, who would be in your top five?

[A.] Well, Joyce is obviously first and foremost. He’s huge on the international market and has held his value very well. Second, Wilde. We’ve got a few signed first editions of his. Third, Yeats. Fourth, Beckett. He also holds his value on the international market but unless it’s a signed Waiting for Godot, not at the same level. Finally, of course, Seamus Heaney.