Today, no lights in my Irish Literature classroom (I rolled up the shades and enough light came in for us to manage); yesterday morning, no power of any kind in the Foggy Bottom metro station.

It was strange, entering that station and finding it almost totally dark. A massive cave. Metro personnel lit our way with flashlights. Tourists (tourist season has begun) hitched strollers over their shoulders and marched up the dead escalators.

Outages, as faithful readers know, have become a way of life for UD. Garrett Park, the town where she lives, often loses power. For the town’s upcoming musicale, UD wrote a song called The Garrett Park Outage Song.

Here’s UD‘s latest column (“A Hot Time in the Old Town”) in the Garrett Park newspaper.

Dan Berrett, at Inside Higher Ed, updates us on the corruption of the field of economics, and the profession’s glacial pace toward ethics and conflict of interest policies.

… [T]he Academy Award-winning documentary “Inside Job” has cast a harsh light on the chumminess of regulators, bond raters and bankers — and on the academic economists who were supposed to have rendered disinterested advice and analysis.

… [If] an ethics code and conflict of interest policy were to be adopted, …economists would state relevant sources of financial support, or ownership stakes in firms that might benefit as a result of policies they are advocating when writing op-eds or testifying in front of Congress.

[E]conomists at top programs, such as Harvard, Princeton and Stanford, share a somewhat common perspective and ideology about financial markets and regulation — and … professors from these departments also tend to get consulting work at private firms or at government agencies, thus circulating a fairly consistent ideology throughout the most influential agencies and universities.

There’s seems to be a kind of weird double-tracking going on in academic economics at the moment. Economists are either mooning over their own math (“[T]he central cause of the profession’s failure [to predict the economic collapse] was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess,” writes Paul Krugman.) or lusting after corporate liaisons. Either way, you’ve got a lot of academics distracted from respectable intellectual work.

… and we’re off! The French ban (the first of many, UD predicts, in Europe) has really gotten people talking, and UD is thrilled. Time for a real debate on the total cloaking of women and female children.

At the University of British Columbia, Farzana Hassan gave a lecture on April 16 in which she called for Canada to “pass a law denying public services to women in burqas.”

When she was finished, Najma Mohammed of the B.C. Muslim Association stood up and said she felt insulted.

Which doesn’t take us anywhere near a real debate. But let’s see what else Mohammed said.

Mohammed went on to accuse Hassan of “inciting differences” so that she can make money selling books, DVDs, videos, and CDs.

She said she wears her hijab because she wants to; no one insists that she do so. (Hassan’s law would apply only to the burqa.)

… Hassan asked, “Do you have a question?”

To that, Mohammed replied: “I’m not giving you a question. It’s a statement. I don’t think you are worth a question.”

Still not much progress toward a real debate.

Hassan cited the murder of a sixteen year old Canadian girl who refused to wear the hijab; she described “four-year-olds who are being coerced into wearing the hijab because, you know, the philosophy is they need to get into the habit of wearing it so that when they attain puberty — when this becomes mandatory according to them — they will not object to it.”

Mohammed failed to respond to any of this.

Mohammad needs to sit down and think about how she’s going to defend making children wear hijabs and burqas.

But meanwhile, the main thing is that France has galvanized debate on the matter. The university is a very good place to stage that debate.

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Peter Worthington:

What a woman wearing a burqa in a free society is saying, is that she is a repressed individual, the property of a man, someone who believes in sexual mutilation, and is a prisoner of cultural dogmatism.

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(Update: I originally identified the author of this statement as David Frum. UD thanks a reader for the correction.)

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Oh. Whoops! I thought women could debate. Sorry.

… is for sure the empty university stadium. The vast, cost-overrun arena with no one in it is clown school ground zero, the heart and soul of our you’ve-gotta-be-kidding higher ed enterprise.

Study Dada (“Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada.”) and you’ll discover the European roots of this grand gratuitous gesture.

UD covers tons of dada arenas – like the University of New Mexico’s baseball stadium – on this her blog, and there’s always another one waiting to be built.

A professor at Towson University describes the uncomfortable feeling she gets when she looks at her university’s dada arenas.

When watching the sports report on the 11 p.m. TV news, it is embarrassing to see 200-300 people in the stands in the 5,000-seat Towson Center Arena (with the possible exception of a few games with local rivals).

Since the stadium opened, attendance has been negligible, rarely ever coming anywhere near the 5,000 capacity. And, as if that was not enough, it was determined that the stadium size needed to be increased. And so the theory that “BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME!” reared its ugly head once again, and now there are 11,000 seldom used seats at the stadium, another embarrassment on the sports report on the 11 p.m. TV news.

The university’s president has now decided to “build yet another 5,000-seat arena to the tune of $68 million.”

DADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADA

The New York Times looks at high school online courses.

[A]round the country skeptics say online courses are a stealthy way to cut corners… The fastest growth has been in makeup courses for students who failed a regular class. Advocates say the courses let students who were bored or left behind learn at their own pace.

But even some proponents of online classes are dubious about makeup courses, also known as credit recovery — or, derisively, click-click credits — which high schools, especially those in high-poverty districts, use to increase graduation rates and avoid federal sanctions.

“I think many people see online courses as being a way of being able to remove a pain point, and that is, how are they going to increase their graduation rate?” said Liz Pape, president of the Virtual High School Global Consortium. If credit recovery were working, she said, the need for remedial classes in college would be declining — but the opposite is true.

The article points out what everyone has noticed about online college courses – Lots of people cheat their way through them. You can’t determine who’s actually taking the course. And it’s the rare air traffic controller (UD‘s name for faculty who teach online courses) with the time or inclination to catch plagiarism (the NYT article features an online student copying material from the web, something that many online students, high school as well as college, apparently do).

From click-click credits in high school to click-thru u — what a way to go.

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Update:

“The problem with distance learning is that we know we are trying to teach, but we don’t know if they are trying to learn,” said sociology Professor Allen Martin of the University of Texas-Tyler, an outspoken critic of online education.

“The dropout rate is enormous, and there is an enormous amount of cheating that goes on. It just doesn’t work very well.”

Over time, I identified a single factor that makes the biggest difference between a great meeting and a poor one: PowerPoint. The best meetings don’t go near it.

PowerPoint presentations inevitably end up as monologues. They focus on answers, and everyone faces the screen. But meetings should be conversations. They should focus on questions, not answers, and people should face each other. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve found that even the hum of the projector discourages dialogue.

But hundreds of thousands of American university professors keep using it.

A hoax is brewing around the wildly popular book Three Cups of Tea, and the charitable activities of its author.

60 Minutes tomorrow will claim that Greg Mortenson fabricated stories in his books, has not built many of the schools he claims to have built, and has enriched himself on his charity’s earnings.

When Bad Prose Happens to Good People might be one way to subtitle this blog’s ongoing and best-known feature, Scathing Online Schoolmarm. SOS identifies and analyzes unfortunate writing – writing so bad that it can get an otherwise blameless person into serious trouble.

A sad and much-discussed current instance is Dr. Lazar Greenfield’s Valentine’s Day column in the official organ of the American College of Surgeons. His column so outraged members of that organization that the entire issue of the newspaper was taken down and the otherwise dedicated and admired Greenfield removed from his editorship. Other high positions he holds within the ACS are also imperiled.

Read the entire column here and get back to me.

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… Hokay.

SOS suggests that the heart of the matter, the essential offending language, lies here:

[There are] ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient.

… [N]ow we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.

SOS read these sentences to a randomly encountered man in the street – Mr UD – and awaited his response.

“Ick,” he said.

“Ick?” said UD.

“In arguments about ethics there’s this thing called The Ick Factor,” Mr UD explained. “The idea is that there might be something revealing about our moral intuitions in the ugh response to a situation or a statement or a person or whatever.”

“You’re talking about what my younger sister calls oogie?”

“Oogie, ick, ugh, call it what you will. Immediate visceral disgust.”

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Writing that’s obviously intended to be lighthearted and maybe a tad risqué turns out to be for many readers unfunny and gross. Let’s get clinical about why.

Clinical is part of the problem. This clinician has brought the stark unamusing language of the surgical field (richly vascularized, compounds, deliver/recipient) to his little editorial sally; and while mismatches like these can be funny if they’re self-conscious and over the top, their use here is simply a mismatch, simply an indication that the writer cannot exploit the jargon of his field for comic effect.

In fact there was a comic effect for me when I got to richly vascularized vagina; but it involved my laughing at a clueless writer’s weird paean to an organ.

My response to Greenfield’s language is not so much ick as … what? I mean, yes of course the content is off-putting – the best Valentine’s gift a woman can hope to receive is a spray of semen – but it’s off-putting because the writer is, as the Retraction Watch blog notes, “rather strange.” Good writing is supposed to pull you in, not repel you. Greenfield has written something as weird as it is disgusting, and in this alienating combination lies its failure.

Nobody was terribly skeptical about this at the time — except for the local paper and a few bloggers. I mean, sure, seven hundred women … Sounds about right …

But then lots of money started disappearing from her office too, and the university decided to investigate.

Beeman has now pleaded no contest to embezzlement and falsifying accounts. She was accused of a bunch of other felonies too, but she cut a deal. She might go to jail, or she might get probation. Plus restitution.

As for her incredibly cynical and destructive play with crime statistics — She’ll suffer no consequences for that.

“Eventually we have to ask if professors such as Dean Hubbard do the things that they are exposed to be doing in the film, do we want such people to be the deans of our business school, where we teach 21st-century ethics and responsibility courses?” Yu asked.

“No one is holy here,” she added. “We have to think whom do we want [at Columbia], not just bend to authority because people happen to be the dean.”

A grad student at Columbia University, a member of the Student Affairs Committee of the Faculty Senate, reviews the Business School dean’s performance in Inside Job. She doesn’t like it.

This was the first question my American Literature students asked me as we arranged ourselves in a tight circle outside yesterday.

Outside? UD doesn’t do outside! Teaching outside is a waste of time! Too many distractions! (GW ain’t Kenyon.) No one can hear anything! I’ve tried it before!

But it’s the end of the semester; it was a spectacularly beautiful day; and my students, who charm me right down to the ground, were insistent. They pointed out that we were discussing one of Annie Dillard’s nature essays (we trashed her), and it was all too inescapably appropriate for us to talk about her while staining our slacks with grass.

And so we sat in the mild sunlight, surrounded by flowering cherry trees and daffodil beds. A few yards away, a student from my DeLillo course gently played a guitar.

Everyone heard everyone else perfectly, and we had a terrific discussion in which almost every member of the seminar (there are fifteen students in it) took part…

But first they wanted to express their anger at the now-famous Fox News headline: GW SUICIDE TRAGICALLY COINCIDES WITH OBAMA SPEECH.

Fox has taken the story down, but as The Daily What says: Fox News: Just like the Onion, minus the kidding.

(click photo for bigger view)

One senior accounting major at Radford, who asked not to be named so as not to damage his job prospects, says he goes to class only to take tests or give presentations. “A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”

We all know the drill, the way students can get through four years of college without doing or learning much of anything. There’s good old PowerPoint in the classroom, of course, keeping them absent forever. Lots of things to say in favor of technology (laptops in class) in this regard.

But there are also certain majors — the ones the big-time athletes get directed toward — that create perfect non-learning conditions. Business, as this New York Times piece suggests, is among the best. Moronic group projects galore, almost no writing required… And, above all, no body of knowledge. What is business? I mean, as an academic subject? What is journalism? If there’s no body of knowledge, there’s nothing to teach. What you teach is a way of doing stuff, a way of being with other people doing that stuff. These are vocational majors, not academic majors.

Henry Mintzberg, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, … is a dogged critic of traditional business programs. He says it is a “travesty” to offer vocational fields like finance or marketing to 18-year-olds.

But they’re getting prepared for the job market!

And what about employers? What do they want?

According to national surveys, they want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data, and they’re perfectly happy to hire English or biology majors. Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.

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UD thanks Dirk for the link.

… Poul Thorsen, once an autism researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, is currently under indictment here in the States for theft. We’re trying to extradite him.

While a visiting scientist at the CDC a few years back, Thorsen scored some big CDC grants, for research to be carried out in Denmark. When he got back to Denmark, he “submitted false invoices for research expenses and had Aarhus University, where he held a faculty position, transfer the funds to his personal account at the CDC Federal Credit Union in Atlanta, prosecutors said.”

He used the money for cars, a house, and a motorcycle.

Thorsen no longer teaches at Aarhus; if you Google Thorsen and Aarhus, you get a statement about him from the Managing Director of the university which notes that although Poulsen continues to act as if he’s still on the Aarhus faculty, he most certainly is not.

The university also notes in this letter that Poulsen took a full-time position at Emory (Emory! Emory? Wake up! Get this guy’s mug off your website!) while still employed full-time by Aarhus.

Conflict of interest at universities is one of those things. It’s what Samuel Beckett called a tragicomedy.

Universities make a big fuss about COIs paperworkwise, and hotairwise, but at any given time significant numbers of faculty members in med and business schools and economics departments are way out of compliance with COI and disclosure policies. They’re consulting here, they’re consulting there, they’re consulting everywhere.

Their model, their king, their god, their guru, their gold standard, is the last president of Harvard. As Frank Rich notes:

[Lawrence] Summers [did] consulting work for [a] hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.

That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. [Summers was] moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.

If it’s good enough for the president of Harvard, it’s good enough for me!

These guys are very competitive. As long as they’re not making the five million or so Summers made from his one-day-a-week consulting job, they’re going to keep at it.

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Columbia University has its share of non-disclosing and possibly conflicted professors, but, as the title of this post indicates, it has lax COI policies.

Two of its COI-challenged professors have starring roles in the documentary film The Inside Job, however, and seeing as how the film won an Oscar and all, a lot of people have watched it, and Columbia, says one administrator, is embarrassed. So on Friday the faculty senate’s going to gather and watch the film (the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, will be there to answer questions afterwards). And almost certainly Columbia will, shortly after that, alter its COI policies.

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UD thanks Roy for the link.