Well…

Yes and no.

An interview in the Wall Street Journal with the dean of the Wharton business school.

WSJ: You’re increasing soft skills training — presentations and writing skills. Who pushed for that?

Mr. Robertson: Certainly faculty, and probably most importantly, our business community and our recruiters are saying that [they] want students who can read and write… Maybe Powerpoint and writing in bullet style has led to deterioration of the ability to write reports.

Mike Shields, a retired Marine Corps colonel and human resources director for U.S. field operations at Schindler Elevator Corp., rejects about 50 military candidates each year for the company’s management development program because their graduate degrees come from online for-profits, he said in an interview. Schindler Elevator is the North American operating entity of Schindler Holding AG in Hergiswil, Switzerland, the world’s second-largest elevator maker. “We don’t even consider them,” Shields said.

This sort of outcome makes paying your loans back difficult.

What’s up with Villanova, a Catholic institution? What’s up with its law school?

One of its recent grads is right out in front on the big insider trading scandal. Its last dean resigned for “medical reasons” (prostitutes). And now it turns out school administrators have been lying about entering GPA and LSAT scores for years.

‘Course, everybody lies.

UD takes sections of Judith Thurman’s marvelous 2008 New Yorker essay about paleolithic art caves, changes a word here and there, and makes a poem.

(There’s a new 3D Werner Herzog film about one of the caves.)

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

LETTER FROM SOUTHERN FRANCE

As the painters were learning
to crush hematite, and to sharpen
embers of Scotch pine for their charcoal
(red and black the primary colors),
the last Neanderthals were still living
on the vast steppe that was Europe.

The scratches made by a standing bear
have been overlaid with a palimpsest
of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder
if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition
that bear claws were an expressive tool
for engraving a record — poignant and indelible —
of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.

“As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper,
noting where they’d broken off stalagmites
to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say,
‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”

Halfway home to the mortal world,
we paused and turned off our torches.
It takes the brain a few minutes to accept
the totality of the darkness — your sight
keeps grasping for a hold.
Whatever the art means, you understand,
at that moment, that its vessel is both a womb and a sepulchre.

… and nobody came?

Almost nobody?

A recent controversy at Colorado State University arose when a rejection of eight athletes on the basis of academic disqualification led to their admissions denial being overruled by President Tony Frank.

Someone’s gotta do it.

UD‘s stomping grounds are described in this way in today’s Washington Post, and it seems about right (though Mr UD claims “We are not a village.”). It’s an article about all the generators people are buying, given the constant power outages.

Because I’m feeling a little better (I’ve got bronchitis), and because today was warm and sunny, I went out to our back acre and began removing the many limbs that fell during what people are calling the thundersnow. I broke smaller branches off of big fallen trees and tossed them into the woods next to our property. Then I dragged the stripped trees into the same woods.

One student is dead; eleven other people are wounded. Apparently a fight broke out at a party.

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

Correction: Not a fraternity house. A private house on the edge of the YSU campus, at which members of a fraternity had gathered for a party.

… to this book, Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia, an essay by Karol Edward Sołtan appears (UD‘s too lazy to slash the l).

But put that aside. This post is about Heller. (Mr UD remembers walking Heller back to her hotel from the Promises of ’68 conference.)

It’s about Heller and four of her colleagues in philosophy departments in Hungary. From an article in Science Insider:

It began last summer with what authorities describe as an anonymous tip to police that taxpayer-funded grants for philosophy research were being misspent. A police investigation began, but nothing was heard about it until last month. On 8 January, the office of the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, announced to the press that it was launching its own investigation into the use of grant money awarded to five Hungarian philosophers. The scholars have received grants totaling 440 million forints—about $2 million—to support dozens of research projects, postdocs, and students. The commissioner in charge of the investigation, Budai Gyula, did not name specific charges but implied that there was evidence of wrongdoing.

Outside Hungary, some journalists have called the move a government attack on dissidents. But the right-leaning Hungarian media took a different tack, according to critics. “The press has depicted these philosophers as a criminal gang,” says István Bodnár, a philosopher at the Central European University in Budapest. One of the accused philosophers, Agnes Heller, has appeared on YouTube (in English) to make the case that they are being persecuted.

Here’s Heller’s YouTube.

Here’s an open letter from members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to the president of that organization. There’s an online petition.

This latest attack aligns nicely with the Hungarian government’s new law repressing free speech.

Okay… But this makes it look as though New Mexico State still uses Security Concepts to protect its campus.

Either way, you gotta wonder why they hired Security Concepts. The owner was “arrested in 1999 on racketeering and other charges in an investigation of crime in public housing that turned up allegations of illegality at [a] downtown Las Cruces bar.” Charges were dropped because they couldn’t find enough witnesses.

More recently (last month), the same owner was “charged with driving drunk with two loaded firearms in his vehicle.”

… [Michael] Gonzales refused to provide a breath sample … During a search of the Jeep, the deputies found an unloaded Phoenix Arms long rifle under the passenger seat, a loaded Charter Arms .38 Special and a Kel-Tec 9 mm Luger, which was not only loaded but had a round in the chamber …

… to better out of state universities.

The president of the University of Nevada Las Vegas says he’s losing faculty like mad because “They are frustrated with the perception that higher education isn’t valued here.”

UNLV can’t do much about faculty flight; but both UNLV and the University of Nevada Reno have “built programs that guarantee [their strongest applicants] what [UNR’s president] calls “tons of online classes taught by part-timers.”

No, no. Let’s try that again. “[O]ne-on-one … relationships with a distinguished faculty.”

Randall Stross, in the New York Times, talks online university education:

Candace Thille, the director of Carnegie Mellon’s [Online Learning Initiative], put it this way: “There is something motivating about the student’s relationship with the instructor — and with the student’s relationship with other students in the class — that would be absent if each took the course in a software-only environment.”

Those relationships — with humans in the flesh — help students to persevere. Online courses are notorious for high dropout rates.

And people are racing to put high school educations online! With their greater maturity, high school students will certainly do even better than university students at online education.

Stross points out that if your choice is a humongous statistics lecture course or an online statistics course (whose air traffic controller almost certainly will be handling more students than the in-class lecturer), you might as well go online (likely to be a trash course either way).

But in [the] case [of statistics], the subject matter is distillable into a handful of concepts, and the exams use questions with only a single correct answer. That’s not an option for just about all of the humanities and vast swaths of the social sciences.

Stross concludes by quoting Berkeley’s Wendy Brown:

“What is sacrificed when classrooms disappear, the place where good teachers do not merely ‘deliver content’ to students but wake them up, throw them on their feet and pull the chair away? Where ideas can become intoxicating, where an instructor’s ardor for a subject or a dimension of the world can be contagious? Where scientific, literary, ethical or political passions are ignited?”

If your answer is that most Americans don’t care about this sort of education, and just want to get a job, then go to it. Clean up Kaplan and the other shady operators and give America respectable online vocational institutions.

True, some of our universities are already purely vocational – or they’re well on their way toward being purely vocational. They should (UD has predicted that many eventually will) shut down their physical campuses and join the vocational onlines. But some universities are real universities of the sort Brown describes. Leave them alone.

On Elizabeth Bishop’s centennial, a reading of The Bight.

Go here for the poem uninterrupted by my commentary.

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

THE BIGHT

[A shallow bay. We’re in Key West, where Bishop lived for a number of years, and we’re looking at a harbor. The word bite, and the word blight (Bishop was fond of Gerard Manley Hopkins, author of Spring and Fall), should certainly be floating around in our heads while we read.]

On my birthday

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

[this. is. low. how. A simple poetic balance, and a calm straightforward assertiveness, express themselves right away.  And consider how low we are:  Already we’re at a bight; and now the bight’s at low tide.  Already a sense of melancholy.  Yet she says the poem’s written on her birthday.  Not in a very celebratory mood, I think.]

White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.

[As if the fluidity and depth of water weren’t compromised enough by all that shallowness, there’s also morbid skeletal marl sticking up out of the bight; and the anchoring pilings seem sadly pointless, since there’s so little water.  Upright, gathered, like sticks, they resemble matches.… Note the assonance throughout: tide, like, white, dry, pilings, dry.]

Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

[Low again.  And water like fire?  We’ve seen it before, in one of her most famous poems, At the Fishhouses:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.]

One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

[Baudelaire could make it sizzle; I cannot.  For me, the sound of nature is turned way down low.]

The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.

[That’s my music: An arid percussive click rather than any tonality; something strange and off the beat rather than something harmonic and measured.  That’s what I hear when I look most deeply at earthly life, when I dredge down to the truth.]

The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

[You see how she’s – what’s Gioia’s word? – slyly awakening emotions in us?  Emotions having to do with what — depletion, futility, the contrast between our immense efforts to understand the depths of existence, to get the goods of life, and the paltry products of those efforts: rarely coming up with anything to show for it.]

and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.

[An elaboration of the effort-and-futility idea: We struggle (man-of-war) toward meaning (transcendent rather than earthly here, on impalpable drafts) until the sheer effort of it makes us tremble.]

The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.

[There’s something annoyingly stupid and pathetically messy about the ongoingness of human existence.  Although the scene is junky and depleted, eagerly panting little boats still keep coming in, their crappy cargo hanging out of their mouths.]

There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.

[A sharp dry eat-or-be-eaten world.  No treasures here.]

Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,

[Wonderful pun on stove – gas fire, but also the little boats crushed in any old way.]

and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.

[Nothing to show for the boats, relics of the last, not-yet-overcome trauma.  There’s something vaguely guilt-inducing about their abandonment and open vulnerability, something of  O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this! This is everyone’s messy moral and emotional life, bursting with compromise and unfinished business.]

The bight is littered with old correspondences.

[Since Baudelaire’s been mentioned, we might think here of his most famous poem, Correspondences.  But there’s nothing in Bishop’s poem akin to the almost mystical “profound unity” between our subjectivity and the natural world that appears in Baudelaire. “The unnamed correspondences [in Bishop] are not ecstatic, Emersonian revelations of relationship; rather, they are almost wholly negative,” writes Brett Candlish Millier.]

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

[The sharp bite of the dredge’s jaw unearths more white marl.  Same old shit.]

All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

[We conclude how?  We conclude that, looked at with biting lucidity, the shabby contingency of life is simply awful.  A blight.  Yet, contemplating another birthday, another setting out into more life, we’re compelled to note also the sheer survivability of it all, the way most of us are in it and what the hell.]

The Worcester Telegram announces a birthday commemoration for the poet Elizabeth Bishop:

On Tuesday, Bishop’s 100th birthday, there will be a gravesite ceremony at Hope Cemetery in Worcester at 4:30 p.m. The gathering will include a reading of Bishop’s poem, “The Bight,” whose last lines provide the inscription of her tombstone: “All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”

(Here’s a charming film about Bishop’s grave, and its inscription.)

There will also be Tuesday readings here and here, and a birthday party at a Halifax restaurant.

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Bishop’s work is a villa of the mysteries; we feel her assuming the full weight of human life; we feel her somehow gently housing that weight in her poems. Because she brings experience under the control of language, because she shapes it poetically, we say she is a powerful poet. Yet she gathers power not through imposing any architecture of ideas or feelings upon reality, but rather simply through offering reality a roof for the night. Shelter here, in these lines. Let me lodge you, look at you.

“The more one reads a Bishop poem,” writes David Orr in the New York Times, “the greater the sense of huge forces being held barely but precisely in check … [One feels] the enormous patience and skill that allowed her to hold the volcanic feeling on exhibit here in the poised vessels of her finished poetry.”

A vessel poised above huge forces – this describes a good deal of the best art. Leonard Bernstein describes Mozart’s G Minor Symphony as “a work of utmost passion utterly controlled.” Brahm’s Fourth, says Roger Scruton, conveys a “tragic feeling that is nevertheless utterly controlled, and utterly in control.” The sublimity of Beethoven, Dmitri Tymoczko suggests, lies not in strident statement and emotion, but instead in the way a passage like this one in the Tempest sonata (click on the image and then zoom in)

symbolizes both desire – in the form of the chromatically ascending chords – and limitation, as represented by the fixed upper note. It is as if Beethoven were suggesting that, while no amount of effort on his part would enable him to leap beyond the limits of his piano, his music demands that he try – as if the world of sticks and wires, the ordinary physical realm in which pianos exist, cannot be reconciled with the world of Beethoven’s aspiration. …[T]his coupling of an exhortation to transcendence (here heard as an inexorable chromatic chordal ascent) with a warning about the impossibility of success (the stubborn pedal point at the top of the piano) recalls Kant’s conception of sublimity. Like the Temple of Isis, the music seems to question its own adequacy, giving with one hand what it takes away with the other.

Passion and a strategic yielding to limitation – this combination gives Bishop’s poems their remarkable soundness, what Anne Stevenson calls “a kind of interior sense of rightness and excellence.” “We see the place, the person or the thing [in her poems] as if we were truly there, and we feel emotions that the author doesn’t state overtly but slyly awakens inside us,” writes Dana Gioia.