Even at high-tech schools like Case Western Reserve, the techno-divide between professors and students widens. The campus newspaper notes the scandal of faculty running counter to the technolust of the IT people.

One of the IT people exults that “Twenty-first-century learning allows us to be immersed in a digital landscape.” She, like the student journalists, seems confused by growing numbers of professors for whom the phase immersed in a digital landscape doesn’t correlate at all well to what they want students in their classes to be.

I suppose we can anticipate an alliance developing between IT and students at some universities, in which these two groups sort of gang up on faculty as it bans the classroom laptop.

University football is a delicate thing. It’s not like university admissions, where you want to be selective.

You want everyone in the stadium. Everyone. Ticket sales are the ticket. Imagine, along the same lines, making tailgating selective!

But – and here’s where the nuance comes in – in hawking tickets to everyone, and of course in providing alcohol to everyone in the stadium, you admit and then liquor up a certain number of obscene and violent drunks. (Same thing with tailgating, as the University of Georgia has been discovering.)

There’s plenty of money in this procedure, to be sure. There’s also plenty of risk. It can backfire in some obvious ways. Well-behaved season ticket holders may cancel their order because they don’t think spending thousands and thousands of dollars to sit next to … Well, here’s how it goes at the University of Maryland, according to a commenter at the university’s student newspaper:

Maybe Kevin Anderson would like to send out a letter to all of the season ticket holders and alumni because of the guy at the top of section 18 who decided it would be cool to tell Miami that they can “suck his balls,” “eat shit!” and my personal favorite, a call to “Ass-rape the ref.”

While Anderson didn’t send out a letter about that, he did send out a letter about the last Maryland football game, in which an eleven-year-old boy, a fan of Maryland

mistakenly cheered after a play benefited Miami. According to [an email his father wrote to the university], “a U of MD student turned around and screamed, ‘F— You’ and flicked him the middle finger and almost hit him with it.”

No room for mistakes in university football! Doesn’t matter whether you’re eleven or eighty – one false move and fuck you.

Nor does the fun end, at Maryland, when the game does. At Maryland, they do post-game riots. No mention of that in the editorial I’ve been citing (in which students argue that since all big football schools feature drunken threatening fans UM shouldn’t be singled out). It’s only about in-stadium behavior.

Anyway. As I say, it’s a delicate thing. You’ve got to protect the university’s interest in admitting everyone to the stadium so that it can make millions and millions of dollars from its sports program; at the same time, you have to figure out ways of controlling the drunks enough to keep them away from children so as not to alienate non-drunk ticket holders and lose their money. Of course there’s the option of turning the stadium into a kind of police state. But that’s expensive too. And visually… and school-pride-wise… kind of a downer.

… by money and other goodies from technology firms.

Clicker devices make it easier for students to cheat off what other classmates press into their device, or [to] answer… for another student if he or she was unable to attend class.

The Chronicle of Higher Education also believes clickers give students more opportunities to cheat and abuse the system.

In a Sept. 4 article, the Chronicle’s Jie Jenny Zou writes, “Students purchase remotes and register the devices in their names. Those who choose not to attend large classes can simply ask friends to bring along their clickers and get whatever credit the instructor assigns for showing up.”

But hell. That’s nothing compared to how you can cheat when the whole course is online.

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Editorial, The Baylor Lariat

UTAH RESEARCHER TEACHING SHEEP TO SELF-MEDICATE

A York student hears a professor say something anti-semitic, rushes out of the room in a rage, and informs on him all over the Jewish community. The professor is branded an anti-semite.

The professor, who is Jewish, was clearly using the anti-semitic statement in his lecture about prejudice as an example of a reprehensible opinion. The student failed to understand this.

Interviewed later, the student apologized profusely and …

No:

[Senior Sarah] Grunfeld said Tuesday she may have misunderstood the context and intent of Johnston’s remarks, but that fact is insignificant.

“The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”

Grunfeld also expressed skepticism that Johnston was in fact Jewish.

Asked directly by a reporter whether she believes Johnston is lying, she was unclear.

“Whether he is or is not, no one will know,” she said. “. . . Maybe he thought because he is Jewish he can talk smack about other Jews.”

York is about to graduate this woman.

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Mr UD’s reaction: “The same words came out of her mouth. Context be damned. Let the word go out.”

Surfism, or the tendency to make fun of surfing degree programs, sounded the death knell for beach and surf studies at Swansea Institute, but that’s not stopping San Diego State University’s Center for Surf Research, which will “teach surfers about the social, cultural and environmental costs of surfing.”

So West Virginia University goes after some jerk in the stands wearing a West Fucking Virginia t-shirt?

How about not having hired Rick Rodriguez? Don’t you think if you hadn’t hired Rick Rodriguez that might have helped your image? Or how ’bout that Dana Holgorsen?

Nah – let’s not go after coaches. Let’s go after … that guy! See that guy in the picture? No, not that one. The one wearing the shirt. See?

Let’s liquor up our students and then release big old letters about them to the national press when they act stupid!

That’s how we deal with our students. Coaches? Well, policy there is like this: Give them millions of dollars and let them act like shits and then either

1. keep them on the payroll anyway; or

2. give them millions in severance.

Now how you gonna get around a nepotism policy and hire the coach’s daughter?

Let’s see. Well, make sure the coach is right there, of course, in the room with the trustees. So they can see her rich powerful daddy.

Then ask for a voice vote.

A divided University of Kentucky Board of Trustees on Tuesday narrowly approved hiring Kirby Willoughby, the daughter of UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart, as a graduate assistant in the athletics department.

The trustees voted by voice, and no individual votes were counted. When reporters polled trustees as they left the meeting, eight of the 19 who were present said they voted against the hire…

After the meeting, chairman Britt Brockman said he did not hear enough opposition to request a roll call vote.

… [The coach] was present for most of the meeting…

A student at Maryland’s Loyola University (UD‘s mother attended Mount Saint Agnes, a school that disappeared into Loyola many years ago) notes that all of her professors this semester have banned laptops. She goes on to say this:

The Aristotelian pursuit of knowledge for the sake of its virtue is over. Whether one believes that this is something to mourn or laud, the fact remains that most students attend college to get a job after four years of trudging through the core requirements.

I do not fault Loyola professors for wanting to prohibit laptop use so that they can better engage their students during the short periods in which the pupils, slumped in their seats and battling exhaustion, ennui or something of a bit more dubious nature, appear in class.

Yet, I do take offense to the haughty tirade that accompanies this announcement. Professors can ban laptops without making scathing generalizations about our generation.

I agree. Just put it somewhere on your syllabus that the devices aren’t wanted and let it go. That’s all it takes.

As to the death of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Yikes. Especially sad to read this from someone who’s attending a Jesuit school.

UD‘s friend Paul Thacker is now a contributor to Forbes, and his first article shifts our attention from the recent University of Miami football scandal to the ongoing University of Miami Charles Nemeroff scandal.

Nemeroff – arguably America’s most conflict-of-interest-compromised professor – left Emory University under a vast black misconduct cloud, and was immediately, enthusiastically, hired by Donna Shalala at the University of Miami.

Thacker wants to know why. “Why would [UM] … snatch up a physician with such a history?” Why would they ask him to be part of a proposed new ethics center?

Indeed, UM seems to have perceived Nemeroff, with his years of COI problems, as an ethical model. Almost on the same day Shalala announced new rigorous COI standards for faculty, she announced the hiring of Nemeroff. An astounded former faculty member wrote to her:

[H]is seeming lack of integrity in simultaneously accepting “consulting fees” from the very company (Glaxo) whose products were the basis of an NIH grant on which he was the [Primary Investigator] is absolutely outrageous… [H]ow can one reconcile [your recent statements about new ethics policies] with the immediately prior hiring of so questionable an individual to such a prominent position? Does the university not perceive that this may be seen as the worst sort of hypocrisy?

Of course Shalala now has far more dire ethical – and criminal – preoccupations… Still, it isn’t hard to see her bizarre handling of Nemeroff as a kind of precursor.

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Scathing local coverage begins. Paul’s piece only came out about an hour ago.

… hyper-disgusting big-time university sports… I’ll live-blog it...

Let’s see. Starts with an incident in the life of the way-bogus Knight Commission, when ‘sneaker pimp’ Sonny Vaccaro told all the university presidents in attendance that if he was a pimp, they were whores. “[T]here’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it.”

(Later in the article, a coach calls coaches “whoremasters.”)

UD has attended quite a few Knight Commission meetings and has been astounded at its self-regarding nothingness. Vaccaro is entirely correct.

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Moves on to an interview with a former president of schlock jock University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who confirms the sluttishness. “If television wants to broadcast football from here on a Thursday night,” he said, “we shut down the university at 3 o’clock to accommodate the crowds.”

It’s a mark of pride to cancel swathes of classes for the big game. A University of Utah vice-president exults that no classes is “a recognition of the reality that the stadium is now filling for every game.”

Branch now notes that concepts like student-athlete (“[S]uch is the term’s rhetorical power that it is increasingly used as a sort of reflexive mantra against charges of rabid hypocrisy.”) and amateurism are “cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

It is pretty amazing… I mean, it’s not amazing that the NCAA is cynical (“From the summary tax forms required of nonprofits, [one investigator] found out that the NCAA had spent nearly $1 million chartering private jets in 2006. “What kind of nonprofit organization leases private jets?,” [he] asks. It’s hard to determine from tax returns what money goes where, but it looks as if the NCAA spent less than 1 percent of its budget on enforcement that year.”) and that the Knight Commission is cynical. But it is kind of striking that so many universities are so cynical. After all, they’re educational institutions. Why do they only care about money?

Nothing prods students to think independently about amateurism—because the universities themselves have too much invested in its preservation. Stifling thought, the universities, in league with the NCAA, have failed their own primary mission by providing an empty, cynical education on college sports.

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Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.

(At one point, “Cam Newton compliantly wore at least 15 corporate logos—one on his jersey, four on his helmet visor, one on each wristband, one on his pants, six on his shoes, and one on the headband he wears under his helmet—as part of Auburn’s $10.6 million deal with Under Armour.”)

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Branch says we should pay these athletes.

Fun stuff going on at Brown, where students closed out of a course are introducing a market in its seats:

Bradley Silverman ’13, facing unexpected barriers to entry, decided to circumvent the regulations governing seats in those classes. Standing in Lecturer in Economics Maria Carkovic’s class ECON1540: “International Trade,” he displayed a sign reading “Dropping this class? I’ll pay $ for your spot!”

I mean it’s funny that at a school like Brown, whose president was a loyal Goldman Sachs trustee through its Ungodly Compensation / Take-down of the American Economy years, and on whose current board of trustees sit both Steven A. Cohen and Steven Rattner (actually, I don’t see Rattner’s name on the latest board list, but I don’t find any notice of his resignation either), you’ve got people lecturing students about the limits of markets in university settings. LOL.

And certainly “no [university] president has shown willingness to tamper with the entertainment product that sports provide, even when scandal has tainted the product.”

Howard P. Chudacoff, a history professor at Brown, considers the synergy of fanatics, cynical exploiters of fanatics, and paralyzed providers of entertainment products, that powers the typical American university.

… the concert hall. UD‘s friend Jeff sends her this essay by the LA Times’ music critic about the invasion of the concert hall by mobile devices.

[Some symphony] orchestras [are now] inviting audiences to wile away an hour with Tchaikovsky by tapping on their smartphones and iPads. [People have pointed out that] light is a disruption and that tweeting is an engagement in tweeting, not music.

… This has nothing to do with technophobia but with big and serious issues, and ones that go beyond classical music. But first let us note who is primarily advocating bringing phones and tablets into the concert hall. Social media consultants are increasingly being hired by orchestras and other arts institutions and given the mandate to fill theaters and museums with young bodies by creating online video games, misleadingly marketing classical music as if it somehow related to pop culture like, say, reality TV. Any novel idea to scam the social networking system to get the word out is apparently also OK.

Unfortunately, if the scammers have their way, the result could be an updated “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Treating classical music as if it were pop culture is no attempt to move an art form in a new direction but rather to find a convention for everything. We’re not talking pop people but pod people impelled to respond in a certain, single way. Technological fascism is not, I think, too strong a term for it…

The important point is that a classical concert provides an opportunity to untie the digital umbilical cord and replace it with chords that really do resonate. I don’t know about you, but I find turning off the cellphone a liberating experience.

… [H]olistic hearing comes from within — within music and within ourselves. Real innovation is what we don’t expect and tends to come when we don’t expect it.

It’s the inviolability of one’s private thoughts, one’s own consciousness, against the onslaught of mass consumption devices, that the critic is defending. Like UD, he’s trying to conserve environments in which the flow of fantasy, imagery, feeling, and idea, can remain free.

Audiences deserve the opportunity to approach something new without being told what to expect and be allowed the mental space to take it in.

Yes. Students deserve the same thing.