When we sat down in the front we were instantly approached by a young man who refused to look at me and my female companion but told us very forcefully that we immediately had to move to the back of the bus. We told him calmly that what we were doing was entirely legal but he refused to hear and told us that we were shayetz, abominations. Luckily we had a male companion who had joined us who told him to quiet down.
… After trying to rip down the sticker on the bus stating it’s legal for anyone to sit where they want to, the man came back towards us and with rage told our male companion that it was ridiculous for him to defend two shiksas.
This is the latest dispatch from one of Israel’s freedom riders, women who sit in the front of public buses in that country.
The response from the ultra-orthodox man in this scene is typical. Eventually one of these women will be injured, or killed.
UD proposes that Israel turn this problem over to its medical establishment. The law works slowly. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to work at all. Sedation would be an effective, short-term, safety measure. These men are a danger to themselves as well as others.
… Elaine Ellis Thomas, a Yale Divinity student, writes beautifully about the suicide of her son two years ago.
Suicide brings on a very particular and peculiar kind of grief. The guilt and second-guessing and pure horror that someone could end one’s own life cause excruciating pain for family and friends. I have learned more about this than I care to know in the time since Seth died. Although we still know very little about John Miller’s tragic passing, I thought it might be helpful to share some of that hard-earned knowledge.
You could not have prevented it. Even if you think that you could have on that particular occasion, there is no guarantee that it would not have happened some other time. If you are wondering why you didn’t go with John or ask him to come over if he seemed out of sorts, don’t blame yourself. Seth’s roommate was in an adjoining room when he died. Having someone nearby made no difference at all.
If you’re trying to make rational sense of how something like this could happen to someone with such talent and such a bright future, you really can’t think about it rationally — there is no rational explanation. Normal people, those who are not sick in some way, do not kill themselves. Our most basic human instinct is for survival, so to cause one’s own demise subverts that in ways our healthy intellects can’t imagine.
If you’re thinking that John made a choice to end his life, I can’t agree. Whatever was tormenting him — depression, mental illness, some event that threw his mental wiring off kilter — that is what took him. As I said before, it isn’t a rational choice. Suicides are committed by people driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality. It isn’t really a choice.
Thursday’s suicide – John Miller, a dedicated musician and teacher – had all the marks of impulsivity and enigma that Thomas talks about. He jumped from an open window in a music department building.
An acquaintance describes Miller as a “‘workaholic’ who would log 18-hour days, only to arrive at the office again the next day at 6 a.m.”
A note from the Yale Daily News reviews the vexed business of covering these stories – in particular, the business of trying to avoid copycat suicides.
… the much-discussed Taylor Branch article about paying college athletes (background here):
Branch makes a compelling case, using a sixties-era civil rights lens, for compensating college athletes. But he seems to misunderstand the dynamics of the actual financial relationship between big-time college sports and the universities that sponsor them. As a result, his argument is incomplete at best.
By his account, big time sports are a tremendous financial boon to universities. Universities under this view end up addicted to the subsidy flowing out of athletics into academics, producing a host of bad effects. It is undeniably true that big money flows to some universities, that it ends up being spent, and that in the process of being spent it generates among those who receive it the kind of self-protective habits and behaviors that a flow of money always does.
What is far less clear is whether the net effect on the university bottom line is positive. Big winners there may be within the university, but seldom is it the case that they reside on the academic side. Most credible studies suggest that, but for a very few net winners, big time sports from a university financial perspective overall is a sucker’s bet.
The addiction of universities to big-time sports, then, is less a function of a corrupting subsidy to academics than it is the politics of the thing: the donors who prefer to give to the sports program even if their gifts result in an increase in financial pressure on the university, lawmakers with influence on the budget who think first about athletics and only in passing about academics, a public that demands spectacle and a press that is generally happy to stoke that desire. The net result is that in most cases the subsidy flow runs in the opposite direction, toward the already pampered and overfunded athletic program.
This has corrupting influences of its own, including an unwillingness to admit to the subsidy or to make clear its depth. Universities have shown themselves to be unwilling or unable to do much about these forces, even if they might like to. Under the circumstances, with universities lacking backbone even in the current situation, adding athlete compensation to the cost base would have the inevitable effect of forcing tongue-tied universities to up their subsidy even more, no doubt fudging the numbers in the process.
So pay student athletes if it seems just to you. But find some way first to divorce the entire mess from universities. To borrow a term from another sixties-era civil rights tradition, universities need big-time sports like a fish needs a bicycle.
In the course of a funny and perceptive essay about the fear of public speaking, Sam Harris touches on the scourge of PowerPoint.
Most speakers have learned that PowerPoint should be restricted to interesting images and other graphical aids, with a minimum of text. A few seasoned academics are holding out, however, and still oppress their audiences with walls of words, often in random fonts and terrible colors, so that they can turn their backs at regular intervals and consult a full set of notes… Imagine Martin Luther King, Jr., using PowerPoint, and the price will be clear: To truly connect with an audience, you want their attention on you. To change slides every thirty seconds is to be rendered nearly invisible by the apparatus.
On public speaking – I loved in particular this bit:
Pathological self-consciousness in front of a crowd is more than ordinary anxiety: it lies closer to the core of the self. It seems, in fact, to be the self — the very feeling we call “I” — but magnified grotesquely. There are few instances in life when the sense of being someone becomes so onerous…
For one who is terrified of public speaking, standing in front of a crowd exploits the cramp of self …Yes, that is the problem with being me. Ow… The feeling that we call “I” — the ghost that wears your face like a mask at this moment — seems to suddenly gather mass and become the site of a psychological implosion.
Duh. But Canada has these confidentiality rules that protect even professors who have been found guilty of extensive research fraud. The executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (I quote him in my headline) is calling for more transparency.
Especially in this case – where a professor simply made up scads of published studies – students, professors, and the public need to know who he/she is, so they can protect themselves. Since we’re also not told what field the pretender is in, we have to assume the worst. You need to be able to see people like this coming.
… it’s time to look at a chilled-to-perfection poem. Auden’s Brussels in Winter puts you inside how it feels when the world switches on what Stephen Dedalus, in Portrait, calls the refrigerating apparatus. What the poet describes is already (to him) an unknown world – the city of Brussels – and when this world freezes over, its mystery hardens into absolute darkness. In Brussels in Winter, each charter’d street evaporates, and the desperately lost poet desperately seeks his bearings. Or any bearings.
*********************************
Brussels in Winter
Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.
Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.
Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
********************************************
Look at how much poetry Auden packs in, how much implication, mood, and philosophy he cooks up in his few abbreviated rhymed lines… Look at his vanful of similes and metaphors as they speed by your eyes…
But slow it down. Take it little by little. See how a poem does what a poem can do.
Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.
There’s an unclarity of agency here. Who is wandering? Not its formula escapes me; its formula escapes you. The poem is written in an insinuating second-person, in which the poet assumes that the condition of existential lostness and self-alienation he’s about to evoke is certainly not his own alone, but is shared by his reader. He assumes that however grounded you may feel at this or that moment, you easily understand – because you’ve experienced it – the eerie dépaysement that occurs when you lose the formula of existence, the certainty that constitutes your life on earth as a thing, an object of familiarity and recognition.
As for style: cold streets/old string has the assonance, balance, and the near-rhymey feel that make that odd transition – from streets to tangled string – feel plausible. The linguistic proximity suggests a conceptual kinship.
The stopped flow of the fountains has an abrupt feel to it, instantly (along with the poet’s insinuating you) locating you alongside the poet in the same suddenly arrested cityscape.
And here’s another unclarity: Its. Its formula escapes you. It has lost. We don’t yet know to what it refers, which keeps us in the same confusion as the poet. Gradually it becomes clear that it is Brussels, the city.
Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.
Only if you’re trapped in some operatic theater of despair can you keep your bearings here. Frozen into place, you take your background part in a chorus of human misery. The reader hears the plaintive calls of the chorus throughout this stanza, with all its long O‘s and A‘s. It sings.
Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
How odd the world is; and to carry that oddness the poet finds odd figures. City apartments look like sudden outcroppings of the natural world – the world of bearings, groundings… Of course the desperate poet sees them in this way, as distant objects of desire – rich ridges, glowing farms. Warm things, glowing with the fire of their unstoppable being, their autonomous radiance as living, meaning-rich things-in-themselves.
And now the poet picks up a bit of language as it passes him on the street. French? Dutch? His effort to recapture his lost sense of existing has him grasping onto it as definitive in significance, if only he can understand it. But it drives on.
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
Again the poet’s desperation finds the very history of humanity in the expression of a random face… a face also quickly lost in the old, hungry, and humbled winter crowd.
A look contains the history of man, and a body – any random streetwalker’s body – is the embodiment of the shivering city itself. This body carries the frozen city’s pathos, its wispy uncertain half-thereness; and, in the way of humanity, the poet, suffering horribly from his estrangement, comforts himself with the thought that through the streetwalker’s body he can rather cheaply purchase at least a momentary sense of possessing an otherwise tangled and elusive reality.
America, America. Can’t say we don’t know how to make money. Especially off of dying people.
I mean, you know, suck it up. You’ve got kidney disease, and you’re going to die… So you’re going to shell out the $23,000 for that little vial. Aren’t you?
Which is going to make one particular university professor very happy. Columbia University’s Andrew Bomback, in what sounds like the same form of business relationship Chip Skowron cultivated, has been talking to rich hedgies about his medical research… and it all has that je ne sais quoi, insidery tradery, feel to it, according to the state of Massachusetts.
Mr. Silverman [the hedgie], after talking with Dr. Bomback on June 14, 2010, invested $846,889 in Questcor [the company with the little vials] between July 6 and Sept. 9, the Massachusetts filing showed. He paid an average of $9.80 a share. The stock closed Friday at $27.27 a share, giving him a paper gain of $1.5 million.
… differences in rigor, value… even legitimacy… among university courses.
In response to Donna Shalala’s insistence that Miami’s athletes are academically on a par with Stanford’s, Politifact notes her dependence on APR scores for the football team.
The APR measures, as its title suggests, progress — not academic achievement; students get points for being academically eligible and staying in school. To the APR, a student-athlete who scores all C’s in music therapy would “look” the same as one who scores A’s in organic chemistry.
… Mark Nagel, a professor in sport management at the University of South Carolina, described the APR as a “public relations mechanism” created by the NCAA.
“What APR is telling you is that the students are remaining eligible and retained on campus,” Nagel said. “It is not telling you their majors, educational outcomes or what they are learning.”
… “It’s kind of shocking (Shalala) would consider APR to be a valid comparative measurement or the most important measure of academic achievement,” [another observer] said.
… Rate My Professors is a good source of information about university teaching.
Why does ratemyprofessors work as well as it does? Researchers at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire answered that question by surveying students about their use of ratemyprofessors. They found that people who post on ratemyprofessors are basically typical students — although men were more likely to post than women, and students in the arts and humanities posted less than those in other disciplines. The motivations for posting are varied, but the two most important are “warning others about an instructor” and “communicating that an instructor was excellent.”
From the campus newspaper at Sacramento State University.
The classes where students can text on their iPhones the entire class because they are not missing anything by not paying attention [are] a waste of time. Professors who stare at text, recite, and never bother to look up, are a sign the class is going to be useless.
“The (professors) that are there for the [pay]check just run PowerPoint or read out of the book,” said senior business major Anita Yaroshuk. “I could read out of the book at home.”
Yaroshuk said she thinks about 75 percent of her professors care about their students.
Meaning 25%…?
Now this man here says “Texas got greedy,” but I think it’s more like all universities want their own tv network so they can show games and recruits and shit. What’s a university for if not your own three hundred million dollar sports network?
Now jump over to this story and you find out that the suckers at UT can’t watch the network! Or I mean they can but it’ll cost them big. “It’s not good if it’s a network that no one can watch,” notes a UT professor. Haha, soak the students for more fees.
Back to this article, which calls the whole deal a “fiasco.” No, UT can’t do prep telecasts. Yes, it’s alienating the members of its (dwindling) conference.
The article’s author compares UT to the head of a mafia organization.
This thing is just getting started, and the free publicity it’s generating for the university is amazing!