… in the Wall Street Journal today about the wee problem of ethically challenged MBA graduates. Scathing Online Schoolmarm has rarely seen deader writing, and she’s seen a lot of writing.

We need to better prepare our students for leadership. This requires creating a deeper understanding of the difficult decisions they will face, often under enormous pressure. We must make them aware that these decisions will challenge their values, and that, consequently, they need to clarify the values they stand for. We need to make sure they engage in a continuing dialogue with classmates, faculty and alumni, and learn to hold themselves and their peers accountable for the commitments they make.

This writing has You Can Safely Ignore Me written all over it. It’s empty. Vapid. Void. It’s written in response to a real problem, not an empty one: People with fancy MBA’s go out and Ponzi the country to death. But this writing, which pretends to be a real response to it, is entirely unreal, a cloudy succession of clichés: deeper understanding, difficult decision, challenge their values, clarify the values, engage in a continuing dialogue, hold themselves accountable… It’s ALL clichés.  All of it.

The writers don’t even say what they’re going to do, how they’re going to teach MBA students to avoid Ponziing us. Something about “small group structures” and “generating a deeper dialogue”…

Lazy, cynical, bullshit.

The Oregon Lineman.

Glen Campbell sings.

I am a lineman for the Beavers
And I drive the offense
Lookin’ in the bar for another overload

I hear you singing in your office
I hear you singing out to me
And the Oregon Lineman
Must now take a pee

I know you called the p’lice department
I know I should have worn pants
But I want you to watch me
Do my naked three-point stance

And I need you more than want you
And I see you in my dreams
And the Oregon Lineman
Got thrown off the team

… article on the front page of the New York Times about the slow but steady acceptance of a far better model of disseminating and evaluating scholarly work than antediluvian peer review.

Excerpts:

… [T]he prestigious 60-year-old Shakespeare Quarterly … [has embarked] on an uncharacteristic experiment in the forthcoming fall issue — one that will make it …the first traditional humanities journal to open its reviewing to the World Wide Web.

Mixing traditional and new methods, the journal posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts — what Ms. Rowe called “our crowd sourcing” — were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised versions were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.

… Today a small vanguard of digitally adept scholars is rethinking how knowledge is understood and judged by inviting online readers to comment on books in progress, compiling journals from blog posts and sometimes successfully petitioning their universities to grant promotions and tenure on the basis of non-peer-reviewed projects.

… In some respects scientists and economists who have created online repositories for unpublished working paper like repec.org have more quickly adapted to digital life. Just this month, mathematicians used blogs and wikis to evaluate a supposed mathematical proof in the space of a week — the scholarly equivalent of warp speed.

In the humanities, in which the monograph has been king, there is more inertia. “We have never done it that way before,” should be academia’s motto, said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of media studies at Pomona College.

… [T]he debates happening on the site Sociologica.mulino.it “are defined as being frontier knowledge even though they are not peer reviewed,” [commented one scholar.] …

Exciting, cutting-edge stuff.

These are excerpts from a strong-minded article about universities with virtually non-existent graduation rates.

I’ve covered scads of scandals at two of them: Chicago State and Texas Southern.

… Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny.

… [D]ismal institutions like Chicago State … prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing.

… Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation.

… As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”

… [We have] to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.

… No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair.

And how, pray, will they be shut down? That is precisely the job of the accrediting agencies. In taking away accreditation, they make it impossible for the schools to operate. But they don’t remove accreditation even from Chicago State, which has a 13% graduation rate.

Shut down the accreditors. Start a new agency that’s not just as corrupt as the schools it ignores.

… by a reporter for The Hatchet, George Washington University’s student newspaper. Subject: Texting. Has it damaged my students’ writing?

Stay tuned. I’ll link to the article as soon as it appears.

… does a full work-up on George Washington University.

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

UD thanks Bill for the link.

… presses his case to the voters of Vermont.

The primary is tomorrow.

Mr UD loves it — as do many of their friends — and since he does the food shopping, we eat a lot of Joe’s food.

A longish article in Fortune tries to explain the market’s appeal.

Who’s a fan of Trader Joe’s? Young Hollywood types like Jessica Alba are regularly photographed brandishing Trader Joe’s shopping bags — but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor reportedly is a fan too. “What’s not to like?” says Costco (COST, Fortune 500) co-founder and CEO Jim Sinegal. “They’re very good retailers, and we admire them a lot.” Visit a Trader Joe’s early in the day, and there are senior citizens on fixed incomes shopping for bargains; on weekends and evenings a well-heeled crowd takes over. Kevin Kelley, whose consulting firm Shook Kelley has researched Trader Joe’s for its competitors, jokes that the typical shopper is the “Volvo-driving professor who could be CEO of a Fortune 100 company if he could get over his capitalist angst.”

But Mr UD hates Volvos.

This blog even has a category for it.

Beware the B-School Boys.

This is the third story along these lines that UD has covered. A business school professor offers his students an investment opportunity. The fools give him their their money, which he is now accused of having stolen.

“Being a college professor, I know it’s stupid now, but I didn’t even think about it being a scam. I thought, ‘This is just incredible,’” said Turnage.

Aaron Turnage, a Clayton State student, got taken by Stephen Williams, his business school professor. Williams also reportedly stole from his students when he taught at Georgia State.

Williams discovered something that Bernard Madoff and countless others have also discovered: A university affiliation (Madoff was a Yeshiva University trustee) is the most powerful character-colonic known to humankind.

Beware.

With Marc Hauser as background, Gerald Koocher, in an NPR interview, spells out some categories of research fraud.

… The kinds of things that the federal government focuses on for federally funded research is mostly what’s called F, F and P: fabrication, which is making up data out of whole cloth; falsification, which is modifying your data to fit your needs; or plagiarism, passing off someone else’s work as your own.

But we are also concerned, for example, about questionable authorship practices, where you take credit for something that someone else really did most of the work on or where you list an honorific author in the hopes that their prestige will get you published, or when you are careless, such as sloppy record keeping, or when you intentionally rig your samples so that – or your methods so that you bias the results; when you don’t adequately supervise your research assistant so that some mistakes are made and never detected, and inappropriate data gets incorporated in the analyses…

… have produced many Giant Puffball mushrooms. They’re out there right now, only yards from my office window. They look like the brains of aliens that have been dropped from spaceships. Effing ginormous.

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

PUFFBALL UPDATE: In the space of an hour, I’ve gone from being repelled by them, to being afraid of them, to being fascinated by them (I got online and did some reading), to putting on my gardening gloves, picking through my woods, and pulling one of them up.

It’s not the biggest, but – in its pasty pocked surface-of-the-moon way – it’s the most lovely.

I took it to Mr UD, who held, stroked, and sniffed it. I took it to La Kid, who drummed it like a bongo and sank a nail into it. I sent an email to Gabe Mandel, my foraging chef neighbor, and told him to take the rest and cook them.

As you know if you follow this blog, UD is about to teach a course on beauty. She has assigned, among other texts, this Oxford anthology.

As she thinks about this course, she’s writing a series of blog posts about art, aesthetics, ethics. Here are a couple of sample entries.

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

The George Washington University School of Engineering, the Elliott School of International Affairs, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences — her students in this course come from all over.

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

UD has also been gathering news articles of interest to people interested in beauty. There’s the Council Bluffs sculpture controversy, generating coverage from as far away as Australia. There’s the Vogue oil spread.

The wee story of the Wee Frees in Scotland isn’t about the visual realm. It involves efforts on the part of some congregants of this austere Presbyterian denomination to change the way they sing in church.

Which is acapella. And only the psalms. No hymns. No musical instruments. Just the Old Testament psalms, in unison, or sometimes with mild harmony. Sounds like this.

Here’s a whole page of their singing.

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

What’s being held on to when people hold on to this as their sole musical worship?

… from the blog All Things Shining.

UD wrote about the blog’s author back in 2006.

If you’d like to read more of her prose analyses, click on the category Scathing Online Schoolmarm.

Whenever UD worries that the currency of the title “Professor” has been devalued, she reads articles like this one in USA Today, about the styling of the latest Mercedes-Benz model, and heaves a sigh of relief.

“The new CLS points the way forward for the future perceptible design idiom of Mercedes-Benz”, explains Professor Gorden Wagener, head of design at Mercedes-Benz. “At the same time it takes its inspiration from the great tradition of stylish, refined sportiness which has always been a feature of Mercedes coupés.”

If Mercedes-Benz thinks it’s a plus to put “Professor” in front of the names of its designers (this guy’s predecessor was also Professor), I guess we’re still prestigious.

… at Petra.