… [Arguing before the Supreme Court,] University of Michigan law professor Richard D. Friedman [said in answer to] a question from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, … that [something] was “entirely orthogonal” to the argument he was making…
… Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stopped him.
“I’m sorry,” Roberts said. “Entirely what?”
“Orthogonal,” Friedman repeated, and then defined the word: “Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.”
“Oh,” Roberts replied.
Friedman again tried to continue, but he had caught the interest of Justice Antonin Scalia, who considers himself the court’s wordsmith. Scalia recently criticized a lawyer for using “choate” to mean the opposite of “inchoate,” a word that has created a debate in the dictionary world.
“What was that adjective?” Scalia asked Monday. “I liked that.”
“Orthogonal,” Friedman said.
“Orthogonal,” Roberts said.
“Orthogonal,” Scalia said. “Ooh.”…
Headline in Artdaily.org:
DEPAUL EXHIBITION EXPLORES PROCESS
OF PAIRING DOWN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
… in Central Michigan Life newspaper:
PROFESSOR DAVID CURRENT’S DEATH
WILL NOT CHANGE CLASS SCHEDULES
Former Texas Tech University football coach Mike Leach sued the college on Friday, claiming it defamed him, and suspended and fired him without cause. Leach has denied the school’s accusation that he abused an injured played by locking him in a shed because he suspected the student was faking a concussion.
In his complaint in Lubbock County Court, Leach claims the school’s statements were intended to injure his reputation and hurt him financially.
… He seeks damages for breach of contract, fraudulent inducement, defamation, deprivation of due process and seeks waiver of the school’s sovereign immunity…
What’ll they think of next?
Harvard University is one of 40 colleges that will be audited this year as part of the Internal Revenue Service’s review of the tax-exempt status of some nonprofit organizations, the school said in bond offering documents.
… Harvard is the world’s richest college with an endowment of $26 billion as of June 30, down from a peak of $36.9 billion in 2008. An alumni group criticized pay at the school’s endowment, known as Harvard Management Co., in 2003 after the top six in- house managers earned a combined $107.5 million the prior year.
… Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has been examining finances at universities, including how much funding rich schools give to student financial aid, and drug company payments to university researchers. Grassley called the IRS probe “long overdue” when it began in 2008.
This is a new one on me. Along with the worldwide celebration of Bloomsday on June 16 every year, there’s a Dead Dinner.
On the January night James Joyce’s story “The Dead” takes place, Joyceans in New York and Washington dress up in period clothes and reenact the big Christmas dinner and the singing at the center of the tale.
… [Stella] O’Leary recalls starting her Dead dinners the year John Huston’s film came out. It takes [guest] Ambassador Michael Collins just a few seconds to find the year of Huston’s film on his iPhone. O’Leary gasps and crosses herself, saying “‘87, 97 . . . so it’s 22 years”. Guests sing the lyrics of Thomas Moore’s Endearing Young Charms from their iPhone screens.
As [a guest] reads Gabriel Conroy’s closing speech, a website news photo on a phone of snowy Ireland is passed around the table.
… In New York, consul general Niall Burgess and his wife Marie also hold an annual Dead dinner.
… O’Leary’s guests were from the business and diplomatic community. New York is the capital of culture, though, and Burgess’s friends include the novelist Colum McCann, who won the National Book Award in November, the Tony award-winning actor Jim Norton and Gabriel Byrne.
… “Just as the English have A Christmas Carol and the Welsh have A Child’s Christmas in Wales, The Dead is our Christmas story,” [says] Burgess…
A few years ago UD wrote about the final paragraph of “The Dead.”
My New Year’s Inside Higher Ed column is about bondage, discipline, and the American university. In fact, it’s titled BDSM and the American University.
It’ll be up later tonight. As always, click on the title when it appears under the Latest UD Blogs at IHE column to your right.
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Here it is.
A student writes in the University of Saskatchewan newspaper:
… Think about what you’re paying for each class. In Term 2 there are approximately 24 lectures per course. With the course costing approximately $600 and the text at, oh say $100, that’s nearly $30 per class. For about an hour long lecture, is it really worth the money? For 30 bucks you could go see two movies … and even get snacks for each! Even if one of the movies sucks, you’re still getting more entertainment value than a prof reading some PowerPoint slides.
Oh, sure, sure, but school isn’t about entertainment. It’s about learning and education. Let’s not lie to ourselves; there’s not much of that going on. So if we aren’t learning we should at least be entertained. And as fun as it is watching documentaries when the prof is too lazy to give a lecture; it’s just not worth the moolah…
… [A] masterly new book argues [that the University of Chicago is] the United States’ greatest university.
… The University of Chicago is, in [the author’s] contention, “our closest approximation to the idea of a great university. … It is a meritocracy of ideas, a place where ideas flourish in an open way.”…
As jobs for attorneys disappear, campuses like UC Irvine and the University of Massachusetts establish new law schools. Debt-burdened unemployables are loosed upon the world.
A win-win situation, and since the American Bar Association accredits anything with a pulse, we can expect more of it.
An opinion writer at the Los Angeles Times gives some background and makes some suggestions:
… From 2004 through 2008, the field grew less than 1% per year on average, going from 735,000 people making a living as attorneys to just 760,000, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics postulating that the field will grow at the same rate through 2016. Taking into account retirements, deaths and that the bureau’s data is pre-recession, the number of new positions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.
… A recent working paper by Herwig Schlunk of Vanderbilt Law School contends that with the exception of some of those at the best schools, going for a law degree is a bad investment and that most students will be “unlikely ever to dig themselves out from” under their debt.
… Today there are 200 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S., with more on the way, as many have been awarded provisional accreditation. In California alone, there are 21 law schools that are either accredited or provisionally accredited, including the new one at UC Irvine…
[G]ive [accrediting] authority to an organization that is free of conflicts of interest, such as the Assn. of American Law Schools or a new group. Although the AALS is made up of law schools, it is an independent, nonprofit, academic — not professional — group, which could be expected to maintain the viability and status of the profession, properly regulate law schools, curtail the opening of new programs and perhaps even shut down unneeded schools. The AALS has cast a very skeptical eye [for instance] on for-profit schools, compared with the ABA’s weak hands-off accreditation policies…
Once professors retire and become emeritus, they retain certain campus privileges. These might include parking, library, maybe an office if there’s enough space, catalog listing …. stuff like that. This Faculty Retirement page from the University of Oregon is pretty typical.
Although the UO page doesn’t mention it, it turns out that retired professors there can also rent university space to hold meetings.
One UO emeritus, who seems to be a Nazi, regularly invites his friends to campus in order to exchange fascist salutes and get up to date on what other white supremacists around the country are doing.
So far the university has issued badly worded statements about what a disgrace this is. But you gotta wonder: What kind of policy forces a school to host brown shirts? I think it’s nice that the University of Oregon respects its retirees, but this seems excessive.
UD admires T.S. Eliot. She recently, on this blog, discussed a short poem of his.
As UD prepares to teach – next week – a course on modernism, she checks to make sure Eliot’s cultural centrality numbers are as high as ever.
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Here’s her first hit on Google News for T.S. Eliot, from the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette:
“Not with a bang but a whimper.”
T.S. Eliot was talking about the end of the world, not the power-charged Pontiac, proud maker of Firebirds, GTOs and other muscle cars.
You could probably have gotten a good deal on a Pontiac this week – such as a discount and 0 percent financing – with GM phasing out the brand at year’s end ..
The Waste Land is the Eliot poem everyone knows about, of course, but The Hollow Men — its last lines anticipating the death of the GTO — has also worked its way into the popular mind.
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Two items of interest about The Waste Land convey how powerful that work remains.
The beach shelter at Margate, where Eliot went for a few weeks in 1921 to recover from a mental breakdown, and where he wrote an early draft of the poem (“On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.”), has been designated a protected Special Architectural or Historic Interest site. “To anyone that cares about poetry, the shelter is a shrine, a temple, a small monument to a great genius,” comments Andrew Motion, a recent poet laureate.
Plus there’s a current production of The Waste Land on a London stage. Excerpts from the show, and some conversation about it, here.
First Kansas, then Texas Tech, and now the University of South Florida. Where will it end?
Texas Tech fans are outraged, and I’m sure we’ll hear from USF fans shortly as their own beloved sadist is fired. As Texas Tech people have pointed out, violence against your players when they’ve fucked up is a venerable coaching tradition in university football. Bottom line, it works. That’s why university coaches have the highest salaries on campus.
… proprietor of the blog You
Made Me Theorize, sends her
news of the latest edition
of a Joseph Conrad classic.
A Limerick About An Asshole
An envoy from Guinea-Bissau
Got a ticket for two hundred thou.
I was over the limit? Oops. Sorry.
You know how it is with Ferraris…
I’m immune from your laws anyhow.