… seems to have been alcohol-related. An investigation is ongoing.

A USA Today reporter asks the author of Onward Christian Athletes about “college sports evangelism” post-Tressel.

[B]ig-time college sports are a mess and a poor platform for the promotion of religious virtue. The central idea of sports ministry — use sports and famous athletic figures to promote the faith — seems more problematic than ever in view of what’s happened with Coach Tressel. …With regard to the concept of using sports as a platform to promote faith … At a certain point, the platform no longer works as a vehicle to promote Christianity, because the platform is corroded and decayed.

In an article titled The Default Major: Skating Through B-School, the New York Times describes the shoddiness of most business majors, and then quotes Henry Mintzberg of McGill University.

[A] dogged critic of traditional business programs, [Mintzberg] … says it is a “travesty” to offer vocational fields like finance or marketing to 18-year-olds.

The story goes on to note that “Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.”

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Yet, as Louis Menand points out, “The No. 1 major in America is, in fact, business.”

… [S]tudents majoring in liberal-arts fields — sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities — do better on [a college learning assessment exam], and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.

Sixty per cent of American college students are not liberal-arts majors, though… Twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in [business]. Ten per cent are awarded in education, seven per cent in the health professions. More than twice as many degrees are given out every year in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion. Since 1970, the more higher education has expanded, the more the liberal-arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.

… subpoenaed, Brown University students should think about their president’s contributions to this outcome.

Last year, UD‘s friend Roy Poses looked at the big picture.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg, who just won the Griffin Poetry Prize for her long elegy, Heavenly Questions, considers in that collection of poems the very sketchy life of a seashell, and the very sketchy life of human beings.

As in Is That All There Is?

I mean, sure, she spends a lot of time, in this consideration of the life of a shell, “Fusiturricula Lullaby,” on the miracle of life, yadda yadda… And not just life, accomplishment!

…Underwater ink enlarges, blurs,
In violet-brown across a spiral shell:
A record of volutions fills a scroll
With wondrous deeds and great accomplishings,
A record of a summons not refused:

Itself the writing, and itself the scroll
The writing’s written on; and self-aware
With never-ever-to-be-verbalized
Awareness of awareness of awareness…

The elegy is about Schnackenberg’s husband, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, and here, with the shell becoming a scroll of ideas, pearled not merely with wisdom but with the deep-lying, word-transcending convolutions of the philosopher’s self-consciousness, Nozick begins to appear.

And then disappears:

Fusiturricula slowly withdraws
Its being; self-enfolding; self-enclosed;
And all it toiled for turns out to be
No matter—nothing much—nothing at all—
Merely the realm where “being” was confined
And what was evanescent evanesced…

The historian Perez Zagorin was interviewed two years before his death about life with his wife, the artist Honoré Sharrers; and among the things he said about their existence together was this:

The greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western tradition and quite possibly of the literature the whole world is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and it begins with the theme that all men aim at happiness. But how do you – you don’t aim at happiness. Happiness is not a goal. Happiness is the byproduct of the things you do. And I could say, truly, I’ve had a happy life and I know Honoré’s had a happy life, and that was because we were all the time doing just what we wanted to be doing. Happiness emerged, it effervesced.

Emerged, effervesced, evanesced. These are the realms where being was confined and where it evanesced.

But – a shell. The poet undeniably chooses a shell, and this leaves open the possibility of life being a shell. Nothingness, emptiness, a shell game, a mere tantalizing taste of water on a tongue. Joan Didion writes about “the unending absence that follows” the death of her husband, “the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which [I] confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

Still, Schnackenberg’s final stanza consoles, with images of heaven.

All heaven and earth appear; and evanesce;
A self-engulfing spiral, ridge by ridge,
That disappears in waves that come and go
And all that could be done is done; and seven;
And six; and five; and four; and three; and two;
And one…and disappearing…far away…
Enraptured to the end, and all in play,
A spiral slowly turns itself in heaven.

West Virginia University’s English comp course rightly stresses the importance of argumentation in public discourse. You can’t just say boo. You can’t just say x. You have to say why boo. Why x.

WVU itself, however, seems not to have learned this. Its big-money new football coach is behaving badly in public, and the university is under attack. Here’s how WVU has responded:

After looking into its options, West Virginia University will take no action to refute allegations raised against the football program, athletic department and administration in separate columns published by two state newspapers over the weekend.

… WVU [is] assessing the validity of the claims it believes are false. University officials were also determining whether a response to the publications would be necessary.

A WVU source said Wednesday the university will not take any action, but “knows the Herald-Dispatch story had blatant inaccuracies.”

Uh huh. And what are the inaccuracies? If they’re blatant, they should be rather easy to refute.

Oh. WVU isn’t sure a response to blatant inaccuracies is necessary.

And it certainly doesn’t think reviewing the video footage of the coach’s most recent misbehavior is necessary. Why bother? Hell [spit]. Boys will be boys. And, you know, by and large, university football’s a nice clean business. You wanna argument? That’s my argument and I’m stickin’ to it. Hyuk.

Times Higher Education has a longish article stating the obvious: You can’t learn with your laptop open.

It also states the less than obvious: American university professors are beginning to realize this.

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Course, if y’all’d been reading University Diaries starting back in – I dunno – 2007 – you’d have had post after post screaming about how stupid it is to let your students use laptops in class.

Universities have dropped millions for technology (“The backlash against technology comes after universities have spent fortunes wiring their campuses for access to the internet.”); they’ve conducted all kinds of research to prove the self-evident (“[T]he students’ memories were disorganised; they fixated on irrelevant data, could not follow specific directions that required paying attention and wrote poorly.”); they’ve laptopped everything only to realize how stupid it is to laptop everything (“We have put the whole course online. We’ve videotaped it so that [students] can stay home and watch it in their rooms. We’ve put everything online so they have a reason to open the laptop. We’ve done this for them thinking it was progress. It confuses [students] when we now say: ‘Don’t open your laptop.'”).

So now where are we? Duh. Backlash territory. More and more universities are banning laptops from classrooms.

Sherry Turkle says it’s “the time of repentance,” but that’s horseshit. Universities weren’t thinking in the first place, so they’re not returning to thought now. They’re just embarrassed and confused by the mess they’ve created, and they’re trying to clean it up.

Universities created the mess because they’re lazy, and because they’re afraid of students. “[W]e make [laptop use in class] easy and allow people to get away with it. But if universities allow or encourage it, or don’t actively discourage it, then you’re creating a situation that does not just have short-term but also long-term effects.”

We’ll see how many professors and universities have the guts to cross laptop-loving students.

Gordon Gee tries to take your mind off of it.

Huffington Post, via the Miami Herald.

Gabriel Mendigutia, a student at Florida International University dared his girlfriend, Ally Castro, to shoot him in the chest with a pellet gun last week. She did, almost killing him.

Mendigutia had been been drinking beer …

Stephen Dedalus, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, finally confesses all to a priest.

In the wake of the Strauss-Kahn affair, France, like Dedalus, is letting it all trickle out. Georges Tron has quit; and now Luc Ferry, a former education minister, accuses a former high official of child sex abuse.

Here are two.

The first, from UD‘s old friend Dave, comments on the resignation, this week, of Ohio State’s sweater-vest-wearing coach, Jim Tressel:

A mountain of sleaze (size: Everest)
Has finally buried the sweater-vest.
On this day of slow news,
Free cars and tattoos
Have brought about change for the betterest.

The second has to do with a professor at the University of Houston who reportedly served his students marijuana on a trip abroad:

So how did I spend time in Ghana?
I guess you could say marijuana.
Some reefer and buddha,
With weed and construda,
And cannabis too if you wanna.

… Ghana Juana.

… University of Colorado.

(UD thanks Bill for the link.)

There’s a grief that can’t be spoken.
There’s a pain goes on and on.

These lyrics from Empty Chairs at Empty Tables (Les Misérables) instantly formed in my mind when I read this morning about the ex-husband of Laura Blank, a woman who works at the City University of New York.

One of the sources Steven Simkin used to pay his divorce settlement was a collapsed Madoff fund (sounds like an unsuccessful soufflé).

When the couple split their assets evenly, the largest chunk of money was invested with Mr. Madoff. Mr. Simkin kept much of his funds in the Madoff account, which was held in his name. Ms. Blank, who said she had no interest in investing with Mr. Madoff, received her settlement proceeds in cash. Shortly after Mr. Madoff admitted wrongdoing in December 2008, Mr. Simkin, a lawyer at one of the country’s most powerful law firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, filed court papers to drastically alter the terms of his divorce settlement. Ms. Blank, he argued in the lawsuit, should be required to turn over millions of dollars that she had received in their settlement to make up for the substantial losses he had sustained in the fraud.

The hardship claim is based on Simkin’s having moved from a 5.7 million to a $4.1 million house.

From the trial of a woman just convicted of health care fraud.

[Isachi] Gil signed dozens of documents claiming that she was providing …diabetic services when, in fact, she was attending classes at Florida International University, evidence showed.