Instead of selling PhDs in a snap through online for-profit outfits – the way we do in the States – the Germans take the cumbersome “doctorate consultant” route:

… The consultants demand anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 euros to help aspiring doctorate holders with all the formalities and contacts needed to be accepted into a Ph.D. program – and more.

It’s the “more” that can cause problems, however. Doctorate consultants specialize in providing assistance in labor-intensive areas such as research and writing – tasks Ph.D. aspirants are normally expected to master on their own.

… [The firm] ACAD Write …employs around 250 staff and serves a customer base of 1,500. “Our clients are mostly managers, lawyers and others in the medical profession, who have little time. We help them optimize their time to earn a Ph.D….”

Well, the Germans will figure out that there’s a better, cheaper, quicker way to do it, and these firms will go under.

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It’s strange to think of a long, totally simulacral academic career, isn’t it? You buy all of your undergraduate papers; someone writes your doctoral thesis; firms like DesignWrite do all your publications; you outsource your grading to India… What am I forgetting? Is there any degree or activity associated with being an academic you can’t now just buy, or fob off on someone else, or onto some machine? Teaching? Teaching is showing films, having guest lecturers, organizing the kids into in-class discussion groups, having them present papers… And, if you really can’t avoid actually physically being in a room and talking, there’s always reading off of PowerPoints.

We don’t know who will write the definitive book about academia for our century. But we know what its title will be: She’s Not There.

… Anna Nicole, based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith:

[Can] a piece that celebrates the vacuity of contemporary American life – and to a depressing extent, our own – …rise above vacuity itself?

“… I don’t use PowerPoint in class because I want to be ‘out there’ in the classroom — I want the material to feel new each time I present it, even if it is material I teach all the time,” Aiken said.

An award-winning teacher at Arizona State University, on PowerPoint.

Brown University trustee Steven A. Cohen continues to attract a lot of attention. Bloomberg asked an expert to track his company’s trading patterns:

At Bloomberg’s request, Houman Shadab, an associate professor at New York Law School, reviewed SAC’s holdings in stocks that federal prosecutors have identified as subjects of insider leaks. He also reviewed the government’s complaints against Longueuil and Freeman.

“While the trades by themselves don’t prove insider trading or fraud, they are consistent with patterns federal investigators are examining based on trading of nonpublic information,” Shadab said in an interview Feb. 8.

Brown University students are beginning to wonder…

… cutting tree limbs overhead, trying to take down dead branches from the big snow storm.**

But that’s not important. Forget that. Forget that, in Stage One of its extensive lumber-liquidation chez UD, David Gregg’s Tree Removal Service is out there stripping our front oak. A grizzled man in a green tee sits in an open cab at the end of an Altec truck-mounted crane shaving and shaving…

But listen up. James saw this and sent it to UD. It’s written by a colleague of Mr UD’s at the University of Maryland. Read it all. Excerpts:

The culture of football worship [at universities] has gotten so out of control that I think the only solution is to get rid of it entirely…. [W]e need to eliminate football entirely from our universities if we want to maintain our pre-eminent position as the world’s scientific and technological leader.

He says everything UD‘s been saying ever since she opened shop. He gives a local example.

At the University of Maryland last year, the football coach fell out of favor with the athletic director, who wanted to replace him. (This despite the fact that the coach was very successful, with an overall winning record.) The problem was, he had one more year to go in his contract, and the university would have to pay him a cool $2 million if they fired him. U. Maryland doesn’t exactly have money to burn: for three years running, it has imposed furloughs on all employees and prohibited all raises, including cost-of-living increases. So you’d think that blowing $2 million to pay a coach to sit on the sidelines, and paying who-knows-how-much to hire a new coach, would be out of the question.

Nope. The brand-new President of the university, in office just one month, announced the hiring of a new coach, along with a $2 million payout to the old coach.

The author is afraid to write the thing. He’s scared. He says twice that he knows he’s going to get himself into trouble, attacking fabulous, fabulous football. Already he’s got commenters up the wazoo telling him he’s the Antichrist.

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** Inspiration for this post’s title here.

Talking about the Ralph Ellison novel with my American Lit students yesterday, I suddenly remembered a story Mr UD’s father used to tell.

The version I told the students was the one I happened to remember; later that evening, Mr UD gave me a more accurate account.

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An officer in the Polish army in the Second World War, Jerzy Soltan was captured by the Germans in 1939 and put in Murnau, a prisoner of war camp for these officers.

Let’s set the scene.

In the early afternoon [of April 29, 1945], on the orders of a German officer, Captain Pohl, the 40 or so camp guards relinquished control of the watchtowers and handed in their weapons. [The camp commanders knew the Americans were on their way.] Then, at around 3 p.m., as the American Army approached the town of Murnau from the north, a small group of cars with SS men approached the camp from the opposite direction. When the Germans and the Americans met just outside the front gate of the camp, gunfire erupted. Most of the SS cars turned around and fled back to town, but the lead car opened fire, which brought even heavier fire from the medium-tank platoon and their 76mm guns. Two SS men, Colonel Teichmann and Captain Widmann, were killed in the exchange of fire, as prisoners in the camp climbed on the front fence and watched the proceedings, cheering the Americans on. Also killed by a stray bullet during the exchange of fire was 2nd Lt. Alfons Mazurek, one of the prisoners.

Jerzy Soltan stood among the prisoners at the front gates, watching. To his left, he saw pull up a huge, shiny, Horch, inside of which sat an elegant SS man. To his right, Soltan saw trucks approach Murnau’s entry.

As he looked at the SS man, “I saw that suddenly he had been transformed into a general!” Come again? “His uniform suddenly went from green to red!”

Soltan wasn’t being funny. The moment was so surreal – liberation? death? – that this was simply the thought that came into his head.

A moment later he realized the SS man had been shot to pieces by the Americans in the trucks.

But where were the Americans? No one was driving the oncoming trucks. “They were black. I couldn’t really see them. I had never seen a black person.”

In the aftermath of a Brandeis student’s suicide, a professor speaks.

[T]hroughout the memorial, many expressed their exasperation at the senselessness of [Kat] Sommers’ death.

Professor Sabine von Mering … spoke about how Sommers had come to her office hours the previous week to help plan a trip for the class. Von Mering said she was about to read Sommers’ paper for her class when she received the news of her suicide.

“Is it us? Are we making people show us a face?” von Mering asked. “You have to know that the faculty does not expect you to show a face. If you do that, we cannot help you…”

[The German Defense Minister] told a swarm of reporters enquiring about the plagiarism allegations swirling around him: “I will temporarily – I repeat temporarily – give up my doctoral title.”

[Baron Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg] will do so, he said, while the university that gave him the doctorate completes its investigation into whether it really was all his own work.

Inherit one title, inherit another.

… for so long on forming a government that university students there have begun stripping in protest.

… José Cruz about the for profits:

Inaction is not an option. We have to rein in those that abuse our social investment and prey on our underserved population.

… just got even sicker.

I can’t tell you how much UD laughed when she realized that the going cliché among pushers of big time university sports is sports are the front porch of the American university. You want to see a big sports university’s front porch? Check out the piss-filled entryways of all the University of Georgia buildings after any tailgate.

This guy says the tree poisoning is symbolic of professional as well as university sports. True. But check it out: University sports get amazing tax subsidies. They take huge amounts of money away from academics and impoverish undergraduates through high athletic fees. They make the admissions and retention process a sick joke.

They play to ugly, invidious emotions, and generate endless sick behaviors.

You don’t think so? You think I’m overstating? Right, because no one says what I’m saying until the next, sicker thing happens. When the next, sicker thing happens, everybody says what I’m saying.

UD‘s excited. UD has a thing about the northern lights. (For years she’s been trying to put together a trip to Iceland or whatever to see them.)

Don’t worry. She’s prepared to be disappointed this evening. But she’ll be out there looking.

… on whether he plagiarized much of his University of Bayreuth dissertation.

Ja, the German defense minister is accused of “brazen plagiarism.”

“The duplication appears throughout the work and in all its substantive parts,” [Andreas Fischer-Lescano] said.

See for yourself.

Every class is an online class.

… [During one class, a student] was playing ESPN College Town, an Internet-based game in which one creates a fictional college and maintains it a la Farmville. Essentially I observed this student playing a game that simulates the college experience, while in a college classroom, participating in the college experience.

… As budget cuts force universities to begin looking for ways to save money, one of the most popular methods seems to be an increase in the number of online classes offered. While some may argue that online classes detract from a student’s ability to absorb the material, most students that attend large universities understand that for many students, whether it has an official designation or not, almost every class is an online class. This is because large lecture halls seem better fit for LAN parties than learning experiences based on the number of students who surf the web during class….

The University of Georgia’s Brett Tennent-Brown hails from randy New Zealand – land of Big Cock Energy Drink – and prides himself on his penis. Dr Brett specializes in large animal medicine. He got a grant for the following proposal: “Better Understanding of Colitis.” But the main thing he does is talk and write about his penis.

In response to complaints about him, the Equal Opportunity Office has had to parse Brett’s penis. It has had to determine whether his unflagging mention of his favorite subject is harassing, or just really stupid and disgusting. It has determined that the behavior is not actionable – yet – but the dude better watch himself.

Meanwhile, UD wants to convey to one of the note-takers at the EOO that it’s penile, not penal, thermometer.