… (I haven’t read it yet) is getting bad reviews. Here’s the most thoughtful I’ve seen so far, in New York Magazine. It agrees with the other critics that the book’s too short, too cold, too static.

Point Omega, like 24 Hour Psycho [an art installation featured in the novel, in which the Hitchcock film is slowed down to a running time of twenty-four hours], offers many uncategorizable points of entry — which is to say that nothing much happens, and it happens very, very slowly. The book is narrated by Jim Finley, an unsuccessful thirtysomething director of conceptual documentary films. (His first movie consists of 57 minutes of old Jerry Lewis footage spliced together to a soundtrack of random sounds.) Finley has chosen as the subject of his next film the 73-year-old Richard Elster, an intellectual who has just finished helping the U.S. government plan the war in Iraq—although he’s done so in the most abstract and DeLillo-y way possible, as a kind of guru responsible for giving long oracular speeches that sound something like this:

“Haiku means nothing beyond what it is. A pond in summer, a leaf in the wind. It’s human consciousness located in nature. It’s the answer to everything in a set number of lines, a prescribed syllable count. I wanted a haiku war. I wanted a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things. This is the soul of haiku. Bare everything to plain sight. See what’s there.”

Elster has retired from the war effort to take a “spiritual retreat” in the middle of the California desert, where he fills his days with poetry, sunsets, and even more oracular speeches. Finley visits him there, hoping to persuade Elster to participate in the documentary. Speechifying ensues, much of it about Elster’s obsession with an idea he calls “omega point”: humanity’s secret collective desire to wipe out the burden of human consciousness forever with some kind of cataclysmic event.

The closest the book comes to real action is when Elster’s daughter shows up—although “shows up” is a strong phrase to use for a character who hardly seems to exist at all. “She was sylphlike,” Finley tells us, “her element was air.” Or, as her father puts it: “She was imaginary to herself.” When she disappears, mysteriously—the only major event of the novel—it seems like a formality.

None of the reviewers has mentioned Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit philosopher who originated the term and concept omega point. I’m wondering if the novel gets explicit about Teilhard. I’m also wondering, given descriptions of the novel, whether anyone has made a connection between Point Omega and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which also features a young man battling to encounter an older man (DeLillo puts the older man in a desert; Conrad puts him in a jungle) who speaks to him about horrors.

According to the Senate Council’s Resolution of Early Dismissals of Classes, the Faculty Senate “stands in strong opposition” [to] professors canceling classes prior to holiday and semester breaks for the purpose of accommodating early departures from campus. The resolution starts that such conduct is “professionally inappropriate” and “demoralizing to other members of the teaching staff.”

This description of a recent resolution passed by the Penn State faculty marks a small moment in a much larger story University Diaries has been chronicling for years — the physical disappearance of the American university, and various forms of resistance to this process of disappearance.

Physical classrooms with human beings looking at and talking to each other retreat from the national university scene a little more each day, as downloadable lectures, PowerPoint séances , and personal laptop play either empty classrooms altogether, or people them with mentally absent students and robotic, slide-reading professors.

Add to this, at a sports-mad school like Penn State, plenty of skipping for games, and there may not be much going on in some of its classrooms…

So what the hell. Might as well add more room-emptying, and cancel classes three, four, five days before each holiday….

The results of these industrious efforts to make rooms, students, and professors disappear must indeed be demoralizing to the losers on campus who actually schedule, hold, and teach classes. They are the Left Behind, a thin, ragged cohort at the end of days…

… hard-charging leftist historian, as famous for his running battles with Boston University president John Silber as for his People’s History of the United States, has died.

Boston’s Crappy Law Schools
Oppose Crappy State Law School

Italy’s firefighters may “tame the flames” but they could have trouble extinguishing a Latin expert’s objections Tuesday to their new motto.

The motto, unveiled with great fanfare in a nationally televised ceremony last month, contains a grammatical error, the punctilious Giuliano Pisani told AFP.

The Latin motto reading “Flammas domamus donamus cordem” — literally, “We tame the flames, give the heart” — contains the masculine ending on the Latin word for heart — “cordem” — which is in fact neuter, he said…

Yes, yes, of course. This be the link.

… have been sending UD novels set in universities. UD‘s been reading these novels and thinking about them, and she’ll be posting soon, probably over at Inside Higher Education, about these and other academic novels.

Curbs on wearing the full Muslim veil come a step closer in France today with a report that will call for a ban on the dress in post offices, universities, hospitals and state-owned premises, as well as public transport.

In case you missed me.

At four AM, all the electricity in the house – in the town – went out.

PEPCO said it’d be back on at eleven this morning. It’s still out.

I spent the day waiting for electricity and reading To the Lighthouse for my independent study group on postmodern fiction tomorrow (we’re starting with a modernist novel for comparison). I’ve read this novel many times – taught it often – and enjoyed it. This time, however, I found it tiresome, mannered, and depressing. Go figure.

When not reading the novel, I played happy Haydn pieces on my just-tuned piano, and went around and around my acre picking up twigs and branches from last night’s windstorm.

A rather frustrating day. I did get a poem out of it.

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

At Four a Windstorm Blew the Lights

At four a windstorm blew the lights.
I slid a door and hauled out of night
Florida air that purpled the sky
And made the dark house stand by

For some fireworks. Death flared!
I scanned the ceiling, scared:
Streamers of nothingness!
Infinite means measureless

I said. Measureless to man, like Xanadu.
So take the measure of infinitude
Just as it is, unsparked and uncandescent,
Unelectric charge inside the head, incessant.

The sparklers drifted and arc’d,
Their spectacular bursts unmarked
By carillon, spinet, or choir.
The only holies in that unholy fire

Were human faces.
Firing up the cosmic spaces.

The University of Limerick has denied allegations of nepotism over the appointment by the university’s president of his wife to a senior management position, without consideration of any other candidates.

University Diaries has already written about the outrageously mismanaged Chicago State University, with its thieving presidents and desperate faculty and students.

Really desperate faculty. They recently begged the governor to fire the school’s entire board of trustees, in order to stop the trustees from appointing another putrid president. The governor ignored them.

But whatever else might be wrong with the new guy, he did do some auditing.

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

He found out that a local politician has run off with one of CSU’s statues.

Officials from Chicago State University stopped just short of accusing State Representative Monique Davis of statue theft.

Davis, who recently made headlines because she allegedly owes $500,000 in back rent to the Chicago Board of Education, has in her possession a $25,000 statue of an African slave that belongs to Chicago State University.

And she’s refusing to give back the artwork, the Sun-Times’ Michael Sneed reports.

Chicago State University Police Chief Ronnie Watson tried to collect the 400-pound bronze entitled “Defiance,” but, perhaps poetically, Davis refused to relinquish the rendering of a slave girl in shackles with whip marks on her back.

… CSU originally purchased the statue to adorn its financial aid center. They used state funds that were set aside for the school.

But that doesn’t explain how Davis ended up with the bronze. She can’t explain it either, or, rather, she declined to explain it to Sneed.

… Newly installed president Wayne Watson, who is trying to revamp the school’s management procedures, uncovered the missing statue during a financial audit.

As far as UD can make out from reading a variety of accounts of this matter, Davis simply loves the statue. She loves it madly. She loves to look at it in her office. She has bonded with it and feels it belongs to her.

A writing program named after Joyce’s novel.

… isn’t working at the moment.

We’re trying to fix it.

A University of Manitoba professor is alleging a doctoral candidate twice failed his comprehensive examination, then appealed to be reinstated on the basis that he suffers from the disability of extreme examination anxiety.

The professor — who asked not to be named — said he has filed a complaint to the U of M senate alleging a senior administrator reinstated the student into the doctoral program and ruled that the student’s PhD be determined solely on the basis of his doctoral thesis…

UD‘s friend Tony Grafton sends her a letter the literary critic Gabriel Josipovici recently wrote to the Times Literary Supplement.

Josipovici is angry about various moves on the part of the British government to shut down humanities departments at universities and prop up career-oriented programs.

The question this raises is: Are universities really businesses? And if not, what are they? Are they to become forcing houses for the immediate economic development of the country and nothing else (ie, are Business and Media studies to replace Engineering, English, History and Philosophy)? If that is what the country wants, so be it. But we should be clear that it means the end of universities as they have been known in the West since the Middle Ages.

Readers with insanely long memories will remember that these were the founding questions I asked when I began this blog. On the very first page of University Diaries, I quoted James Redfield, from the University of Chicago [scroll down]:

The problem with universities is that universities are not operations which are constructed for making money. They are operations which are chartered to spend money. Of course, in order to acquire money to spend, they do have to acquire it. But their job is to pursue non-economic purposes. Or, to put it another way, their job is to pursue and, in fact, to develop and shape purposes within the society in some specific way. They are value-makers. They are not supposed to be pursuing the values of the society by responding to demand; they are supposed to shape demand, which is, in fact, what education is all about.

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

An economics major at the University of Oklahoma writes an opinion piece which makes absolutely clear why the university – British and American – is becoming a sort of first-responder unit to socioeconomic emergencies (UD‘s comments in response to his argument are in blue):

The core curriculum is an inefficient model of education that keeps students in universities much longer than is necessary. It is absurd and childish to force adults who have chosen to major in economics to study cell structures, just as it is absurd to force biology majors to understand the Keynesian national income model.  [See how Redfield’s whole idea that universities are about creating values, shaping demand, is DOA here?  Redfield regards the university as intellectually transformative:  It takes young people who are not yet liberally educated in a serious and disciplined way, and it trains them in rigorous forms of thinking even as it introduces them to the best which has been thought and said.  But this model assumes an open-minded person, eager to uncover,  grapple with, and organize the profoundest historical, aesthetic, philosophical, theological, mathematical, and scientific material.  This student regards freshmen as adults infantilized by an institution which thinks they have something more to learn than a trade.]

The rationale behind the liberal arts model of education is that “the whole individual” should be educated. This of course is simply an impossible goal, for there are endless academic pursuits necessary to educate “the whole individual,” from ethics to ballet to ancient French.  [The liberal arts curriculum has an ancient and well-elaborated character and rationale which has nothing to do with pablum like ‘the whole individual.’  But one can forgive this student for thinking that the term ‘liberal education’ refers to mush, since many universities have so compromised this curriculum as to make it look way random.]

The core curriculum, aside from forcing us into several classes we simply do not care about, also makes classes less valuable for those who are genuinely interested in the topics discussed. One only needs to peek at the masses of freshmen texting and doodling during their introductory lecture halls to see that this is true.  [The coercion principle is of course a problem here too.  What a liberal arts student would consider a well-considered requirement, the trade school student considers arbitrary authoritarianism.]

… The reason this model still exists is an entire college degree is still worth the entire cost of tuition to students. We’ve all heard the numbers about lifetime earnings for those with degrees rather than only high school diplomas, and that’s why most of us are here.  [Most of the students at the University of Oklahoma, in other words, jolly along the university for most of their years there, only in order to get a higher salary when they finish.]

However, it would be much more cost-effective to shave off the useless requirements of our liberal arts degrees and only require students to take those classes which are relevant to our chosen major or majors.

For many students, such as my fellow economics majors, this would shave as many as two full years off the time necessary to complete our degrees. This creates two additional years to pursue internships, travel or gain real work experience while we’re still relatively young.  [Time-managementwise, who could argue with this?  But he could save even more time and money doing an online course in accounting, macro- and micro-economics.  He could even do it on the weekends, so that he could take that full-time job he’s panting for.]

For others, such as Petroleum Engineers, abolition would probably not save them an extra year in college, but would allow them to focus more heavily on their career-oriented studies.

One effect of the core curriculum many people ignore is it can actually prevent students from truly delving into a second or third subject. Because we are required to meet so many different requirements, students may find they do not have time to pursue a minor or a second major.  [Again, from the start, it’s about picking and choosing.]

Even if the core curriculum were abolished, there would still be students who choose to pursue minors and dabble in other subjects. Some would even choose a liberal arts education, pursuing many tracks.  [Dabble says it all, eh?]

To these students, additional classes are worth their tuition. Many of us, however, would choose to explore other topics in our free time (as most of us already do) and focus our time at the university toward our future careers.

Abolishing the core curriculum forever would allow students to earn their degrees in less time. It also would allow them to customize their education to their own goals and desires rather than requiring them to satisfy some administrator’s definition of “well-rounded.”  [Just some damn administrator, after all.]

Do you suppose anyone at the University of Oklahoma will think it worth their while to respond to this student’s polemic with a defense of the university as a liberal arts institution, rather than a trade school?

With many professors using Blackboard and Powerpoint presentations during their lectures, it becomes difficult to take notes in a notebook, look at visual aids and listen to the professor lecture, some students said. “You constantly have to take notes while looking at other stuff. So it’s easier to take notes on a laptop,” said Katie Curren, a senior journalism student.

Blackboard, Powerpoint… maybe you’re also texting back and forth on your phone. Not a pretty picture…

I mean, nothing but a picture, really. You’re jumping from screen to screen to screen, capturing a blur of an image here, a rush of language there.

You gotta figure the first thing to go is the actual meaning of anything the professor’s saying. That’s why you’re passively transcribing all of her words on your laptop.