12:01

Toward the White House end of the street, someone sings Hey Jude.

Wings flutter: The President’s helicopter flies over Washington Circle.

A car alarm.

White clouds float over a blue sky.

Wheels jangle at the university loading platform.

A FedEx truck in front of Rice Hall idles.

Flocks of swallows look black against the blue sky.

An ambulance wails.

A truck door rattles.

More music, from a car radio: You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.

High piping as a delivery vehicle goes into reverse.

Hammering at the construction site.

A cawing bird.

Police siren.

The clouds darken and move more swiftly.

A heavy jet engine roars.

The Hey Jude singer starts up again.

12:55

… Johns Hopkins conference on The Science of the Arts, the most intriguing came from a biologist who, when asked if he thought aesthetic creation and receptivity were hardwired in us for evolutionary reasons, said:

No, I don’t think so. Our brains are so powerful… art is an epiphenomenon of that power. Art has fallen out as a side-effect of our complexity and sophistication as creatures. Art is clearly about communication, which is a fairly low-level survival skill… We’re not hardwired to be appreciators of art at a Darwinian level; we’ve simply evolved an incredibly complex central nervous system out of which art appreciation has evolved. When you have levels of complexity that are extremely high, you get unexpected phenomena, like the art instinct.

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Speaking of evolution, UD notes that Leigh Van Valen, the University of Chicago scientist who originated the Red Queen hypothesis, has died.

Stephen Stearns, in a Yale course on evolution, said this about the Red Queen hypothesis:

[The hypothesis is that] all life on earth is in fact caught up in a coevolutionary web of interactions. And his evidence for that is that the long-term extinction rate is constant. If you look over the Phanerozoic, if you look over the last 550 million years, the probability that a species will go extinct, within a given period of time, has remained roughly constant.

There’s some slight evidence that maybe species have started to live a little bit longer. But, you know, broad brush, this claim is correct. Things have not gotten better at persisting, over the last 500 million years. So in some sense I think Leigh’s claim is probably true. Every time a species on earth tries to get a leg up, some other species compensates. So this is where that term comes from. This is an illustration from Through the Looking Glass by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). This–Alice is a pawn on a chessboard, and Alice is supposed to, in this mental game, march down the chessboard and get turned into a queen, when she reaches the end.

And the Red Queen, who is next to her, says, “Alice, this is a game in which you run as fast as you can and you can only stay in place.” So it’s like one of those nightmares that you have, where you’re running as fast as you possibly can, and you can’t get away. That’s Leigh Van Valen’s metaphor for evolution: everybody is running as hard as they can and they’re just staying in place; their fitness is not long-term improving.

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Further intriguing ideas from the conference, these from Pat Metheny:

It’s really all just ideas. Jazz improvisation is a narrative, linguistic experience… You’re dealing with a vocabulary and a language you work to refine in order to say what you mean, to express yourself honestly. Aesthetic success is when communicative flow happens, when a certain engagement happens.

Music is this wild thing – you can’t see it, taste it, smell it. It’s unreal. But it’s so effective as narrative, as basic communication…

What I’m getting at is elusive, and hard to quantify.

The idea exists before the instrument. If you ask me to play Funny Valentine on three different instruments, I’ll play it the same on all of them.

… FIRE.

This case seems tailored to that organization, which defends free speech rights in universities.

Louie Gohmert, a Texas pol with a hell of a temper, went and got the director of art galleries at Stephen F. Austin State University fired. The director mentioned in a conversation that he thought Gohmert was a fear-monger.

You’re not supposed to lose your job for stating your opinions.

… Art Museum all day, at a Johns Hopkins conference full of people trying to ground aesthetic experience empirically. I’ll let you know if they’re able to do it.

UD likes GW. A lot. She likes the student culture of the place.

I mean, she likes the culture she, in her innocent, ignorant world, gets to see. UD doesn’t go clubbing with them, after all…

But what she sees, she likes. Take this woman, Ms I’m A Dumbass. UD just now passed her on UD‘s way to the Foggy Bottom metro. They were rushing in opposite directions, UD contemplating existence, the woman yelling into her cell phone.

It was clear from her condescending, exasperated tone that the woman was talking to someone – a boyfriend? – who’d been offering excuses for her failure. Maybe illness, a bad professor?

NO!

She failed the course because she’s a dumbass, damn it…

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She was absolutely beautifully dressed. This is another thing disheveled UD loves about GW, especially this time of year, with the air getting chilly. All the women are wearing the following:

High burnished riding boots, spanking new, with a hint of sadism.

Black leggings.

Tightly tailored long black jackets.

The classiest scarves imaginable, worn with insolence.

Add to all this a generous helping of Incredibly Young, and you get the picture. They stamp their high hooves up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, cursing at their phones, adjusting their black shoulder bags, tossing their lustrous manes.

Some of them are Mean Girls.

UD expects great things of them.

… medically evaluated?

I gotta teach a class. I don’t have time for this one.

They don’t let only students cheat. They let professors cheat. Sometimes on a massive scale.

A high-ranking professor/administrator in India apparently decided to make big money by running his own fake institute under the umbrella of his legitimate university, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur.

He graduated a whole class of students, all of whom subsequently discovered that they had a worthless degree. The Hindustan Times quotes from their letter to the head of the IIT, asking to be repaid.

UD wondered how the guy got away with it (long enough, at least, to collect a lot of money)… I mean, wouldn’t other people at the university notice that fake classes were going on? How would he have gotten the classes on the academic schedule, etc.?

Then a commenter on the article mentioned that this was almost certainly an online operation. And suddenly it all made sense.

In the school newspaper, a student at Connecticut College writes about student laptop use.

[W]e’re creeping toward a point where college life is more about being social and less about being intellectually engaged. The whole point of having a laptop in class should be to expand scholarship and increase efficiency, but I’ve found that they’re having the opposite effect. Strangely enough, classes have become something to be tolerated rather than the reason we’re here.

… All in all, professors seem to be supportive of the laptop trend, but I don’t think they know how widespread the problem is. After all, they can ultimately only see the glowing white apple on the back of their students’ computers. They have no idea what’s on the other side.

Sure they know.

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The writer makes an excellent point when he observes that “classes have become something to be tolerated rather than the reason we’re here.” UD hadn’t thought of that; but yes, the laptop can be seen as the permanent fixture brought into the classroom to positively protect you from an otherwise intolerable experience. It’s not a sometime distraction for when the class now and then becomes dull or makes you drift off a bit; it’s a regular feature of the fifty minutes, a powerful shield that enables you to suffer the insult to your private life which a public classroom represents.

Nothing special about the classroom, though. The laptop shields you from dinners in restaurants with your family; from concerts; from most of social life. When the student writes that “college life is more about being social,” he doesn’t really mean social. He means screen social.

“The first thing that has to be done is secure the border. … East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow… We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could do it, we could do it.”

Joe Miller’s answer to a question, at a public forum, about illegal immigration. Miller is running for the Senate from Alaska.

In North Miami.

[UD has bolded some words.]

It is time again for all NIU employees to complete ethics training.

Under the terms of the State Officials and Employees Ethics Act, all full-time and part-time, regular and temporary faculty, staff, graduate assistants, extra help and student employees must complete online ethics training. Everyone who receives a paycheck from the university must complete this training.

On Wednesday, Oct. 20, all employees will receive an e-mail notification with specific directions on how to access the online training.

… Ethics training begins at 8 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 20, and concludes at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 18. There are no extensions.

The state’s Office of the Executive Inspector General notes that employees who do not comply with the annual training mandate can be subject to fines and disciplinary action.

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NIU didn’t have to use threats. It could instead have told the campus community to complete its ethics training in honor of Rod Blagojevich, who instituted the policy.

From a review, by Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard, of The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

… “Wonder why Obama went to Harvard?” [the author] slyly asks. “Here is a clue: It is the leading academic institution in America. And here’s another: His father went there.” Forget that neither of these facts is a clue, technically. Surely the first assertion is enough to adequately answer the question without recourse to the second, which is simply gratuitous as well as conjectural. But [the author] always sees absence of evidence as evidence of something or other.

Let’s linger at Harvard a moment longer. “At Harvard … his real mentor was Roberto Mangabeira Unger.” Unger is a brilliant crackpot who championed critical legal studies, a left-wing academic fad of the 1980s. I’ve never heard before that Unger served as the president’s mentor. How does [the author] know it? “Obama took two of Unger’s courses,” he writes. Well, then. “Obama’s attraction to Unger’s work is obvious.” Obvious, but undemonstrated. “So what does Obama say about Unger in his speeches and writings? Nothing.” Aha! “Unger has simply disappeared from Obama’s official record, and not because his influence was minor; in fact, quite the opposite.” QED.

The chair of the Hernando County Planning and Zoning Commission got her Ph.D from a diploma mill.

Hammond defended her academic background and said she has “nothing to hide.”

She said she is in the process of obtaining her transcripts from the Southern Africa Policy Institute in Zimbabwe [UD gets nothing when she Googles this name.].

She also said the Ph.D she received from the now-closed and non-accredited Kennedy Western University (which later changed its name to Warren National University) was legitimate.

She disagreed with published reports that referred to the university as a “diploma mill.”

“If it is a diploma mill, then there are a lot of people in this country who are in a position they shouldn’t be in because they got degrees from Kennedy Western,” Hammond said. [If lots of people bought their degree there, it can’t be a diploma mill.]

Hammond said she has also never referred to herself as a “doctor” in referencing her position. [Why not, if you believe your Ph.D degree is legitimate?]

In the Guardian, a philosophy professor distinguishes between training and higher education.

Instruction leaves a person trained and better informed – but otherwise unaltered. To stand at the threshold of an education, by contrast, is to stand poised before the possibility of an achieved formation and temper of mind which widens perspectives and matures the power of critical judgment. It is this that we commend when we commend education for itself. To be educated is to stand in a critical and creative relationship to ideas, crucially through contact with teachers, who exemplify in their words and demeanour the life of the mind.

If a university has a soul it is to be found here, in the engagement of teachers with their students, in the critical transmission of ideas, including ideas about human nature, that their students have to struggle with and grasp, a struggle that shapes their souls. But this education is becoming more fugitive and teachers less available through a terrible absence of mind, as the ideas that inform the policy and practice of universities slowly eat into their soul.

Nicely written, and an echo of everything etched on UD‘s template lo these many years… Yet these arguments are difficult to make, vocational training being a straightforward thing, and soulful alteration elusive.

I mean, here’s the deal on soulful alteration:

1.) Not everyone wants it. It sounds weird, intrusive, unpleasant. Plenty of people want to go to football games and learn accounting, and professors aren’t proselytizers. If you don’t want UD to muss your soul, fine.

And don’t tell me that because you teach geology you’re not about the soul. Geology is full of ideas having to do with environmentalism, religious history, evolution, aesthetics, and is an important part of the widened perspectives about which the Guardian columnist writes …

2.) Not everyone has enough soul for me to work with. Soul here suggests a reasonably rich internal life capable of being made richer. If you’re a total product of visual culture, if you don’t even have your own masturbatory fantasies in your own head —

The answer for this cross-species difference, I’m convinced, lies in our uniquely evolved mental representational abilities—we alone have the power to conjure up at will erotic, orgasm-inducing scenes in our theater-like heads … internal, salacious fantasies completely disconnected from our immediate external realities. One early sex researcher, Wilhelm Stekel, described masturbation fantasies as a kind of trance or altered state of consciousness, “a sort of intoxication or ecstasy, during which the current moment disappears and the forbidden fantasy alone reigns supreme.”

— if you can’t even do that much by way of readying yourself for a seminar in the short story, I’m not sure we can work with you.

[I]n a world where sexual fantasy in the form of mental representation has become obsolete, where hallucinatory images of dancing genitalia, lusty lesbians and sadomasochistic strangers have been replaced by a veritable online smorgasbord of real people doing things our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt up even in their wettest of dreams, where randy teenagers no longer close their eyes and lose themselves to the oblivion and bliss but instead crack open their thousand-dollar laptops and conjure up a real live porn actress, what, in a general sense, are the consequences of liquidating our erotic mental representational skills for our species’ sexuality? Is the next generation going to be so intellectually lazy in their sexual fantasies that their creativity in other domains is also affected?

Teaching basic erotic mental representational skills? Not my job, man.

And oh, 3.): Do you think teaching people desouled by image-life is best done via PowerPoint? Huh? Yes, throw more images at them! That’s the ticket! And smile when they bring their laptops to class…

When even professors can’t form, or convey, mental representations, the theater-like head has gone dark.

It’s Sunday. It’s autumn. Geese honk, the dogwood bronzes, the sun rises through rattling maple leaves.

Time for a sermon!

Our opening text is this YouTube, in which a wise woman reads Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation, by Stanley Kunitz. She weaves her life into her reading, recognizing in the doomed-to-grub worm her own earth-bound condition, and in the worm’s passive gestation of “parasitic flies” her sense of herself as a mere carrier of other beings’ vitality.

All her life she’s dreamt of uplift, transformation into a free, illuminated realm; but now she’s in her sixties, and she sees in the Kunitz poem a truth: “Maybe not.”

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Stephen Dedalus transforms.

His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he was soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.

When we next encounter Dedalus, in Ulysses, he’s a worm again.

Does ripe fruit never fall? asks the woman in Sunday Morning.

Change me, change me! says The Woman at the Washington Zoo.

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Primed for epiphany, we wait. We hate Philip Larkin’s dour, self-accepting useful to get that learnt. It’s Mr Ted Heathcliff Hughes who makes our heart race …

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Why not conceive of epiphany more calmly? The terminus of our insistence on transformation is Mitchell Heisman’s Suicide Note, with its petulant rejection of a world that doesn’t soar with meaning. After nearly drinking himself to death, Stephen Dedalus begins to perceive, in Leopold Bloom, a modulated form of epiphany, a digging in to the world as it is that is not a wormy digging but a human one — having traits like the love of earthly beauty, a capacity to forgive, and pleasure from the play of the mind…