A reporter for the El Paso Times describes the University of Texas at El Paso, a school that’s sort of the moral equivalent of British Petroleum — only it’s trying to make its mess even worse.

… [U]niversities with high numbers of low-income students and unremarkable sports teams take more money from [their] students — in fees and in diverting money away from educational programs — to subsidize athletics programs.

The University of Texas at El Paso falls into the trend.

… UTEP diverted $774 per student into athletics in the year 2008-09 — the third-highest in Conference USA and significantly higher than the national average of $506.

Of 99 schools [recently] studied, UTEP had the highest percentage of low-income student in Division 1, with more than 62 percent of the students receiving financial aid.

… In April, UTEP students rejected the creation of a new athletic fund that would have more than doubled the amount UTEP athletics received from tuition and fees…

Yes, in this great land of ours, our forefathers had the foresight to see that university professors would someday attempt to block internet access in their classrooms. That’s why the founders enacted the Blocking Classroom Internet Access is Illegal law.

We’re building a new large lecture hall facility. [The writer is a professor on a campus architecture committee. She’s responding to an article Scott Jaschik wrote for Inside Higher Ed. I’ll get to the article in a minute.] I’m one of 3 faculty on the architectural committee. When I suggested software/electronic blocking technology as part of the 6 lecture halls of various sizes, our IT people said that was illegal. Anyone know if this is true? I can’t find it in my state’s laws (a Southern state) and it seems like lots of schools use such technology. As a faculty member about to teach (and want to) 450 students — I desperately wanted such software that I could turn on/off.

Well, you’re just gonna have to stay desperate! Especially down South the law’s really strict. If any professor tries in any way to get between a student and Facebook, the student can make an on-the-spot citizen’s arrest and incarcerate the professor for the length of her natural life.

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The article’s really neat if you’re UD. If you’re me, it gives you hope. A couple of professors at a recent gathering of professors went after technology in the classroom. They said all the same shit UD‘s been saying about it for five years.

… [T]he push to use technology in the classroom has diminished the roles of teaching and education. They said they feel that many sessions for faculty members about the use of technology are the equivalent of “Tupperware parties,” focused on convenience and not education.

… The concern about technology (in its entirety, rather than one tool or another) was summed up in a series of statistics reviewed by both professors showing that increasing numbers of college students are not prepared for work at the college level. At that point, the presenters asked: If technology is helping us teach better, why are we seeing so much evidence that students aren’t learning as well as we would like? Current college students have had more exposure to technology in high school and college than previous generations did, but are they better off for it?

[One presenter] stressed that he was not arguing that technology is the cause of educational failings. But he said that — given that technology costs money and takes time to learn — shouldn’t more questions be asked about whether the entire emphasis on technology has helped enough to justify its continued use?

“There is a science and an art to teaching,” he said. And if technology is part of the science, it’s time to focus anew on the art. Audience members traded stories about colleagues back home who — on a day that technology in their classrooms wasn’t working to allow for PowerPoints or other tools — canceled class because they didn’t know what to do. [Are you fucking kidding?]

Others talked about how seemingly forward-thinking ideas, like the “hybrid” course that mixes in-person and online instruction, can backfire. One faculty member spoke about how, at her campus, students sign up for the courses with no idea what they really are – sometimes unaware that they still must attend class and others not understanding how to work online. “It’s been a real disaster,” she said.

There was no real manifesto issued at the session, but there were repeated calls to take back the classroom.

[A presenter] talked about his revelation last year that he could ban students from using laptops or cell phones during class. He said he immediately saw the quality of discussion in class go up. Faculty members may think, as he did originally, that since they would have used laptops for note-taking (if they had had them as students), that’s how they would be used today — and not realize all the Facebook action and messaging and surfing that’s really going on.

Telling students that cell phones must be turned off, he said, requires firmness on the professor’s part. He demonstrated the looks he sees on some students as they are constantly glancing down on their muted but decidedly not off cells, anxious about any texts they may have missed. [He] said he isn’t heartless on the matter and that he has been known to tell some students “go outside and get your fix. You are in too much pain” from not being able to use the cell. But they must leave to do so.

And the professors said faculty members also need to be more questioning about whether PowerPoints are really the best way to communicate with students. [One] said that he believes that they may work well in some cases, but said that “when you are lecturing, you are unfolding ideas, and on the screen you have an immediate snapshot.” [Incredibly important point.   I’ve tried to get at it many times on this blog.  Significant ideas need to evolve slowly in all of their complexity and ambiguity in order to be grasped.  This means questions and comments  from students; it means students being able to witness the professor in real time herself evolving, through spontaneous speech and maybe through writing on the blackboard, those ideas.  This is known as the life of the mind, kiddies.  PowerPoint plops the endpoint of ideas down in front of you, all done up and dead.]

He said he finds that the act of writing on a board more accurately conveys the path he is taking an idea

[T]he real problem is that professors are over-relying on their PowerPoints, and are losing the art of improvisation. A good faculty member, he said, must be like a good comedian – “knowing the audience, responding to the audience” and either extending one line of thought or regrouping when something hasn’t worked.  [You can’t even see your audience when you’re giving head to PowerPoint.]

Faculty members who base their classes on PowerPoint, he said, seem to lose that flexibility, which he said was crucial to reaching students. “Just because your machine tells you to go, you go.”  [You’re a machine slave; your students staring at Facebook are machine slaves.  Way to learn.]

Universities sometimes forget, in thinking about the benefits of big time sports, this one: Guaranteed permanent employment of a large, high-profile legal staff.

The bigger your athletic program, the more likely it is that, like Texas Tech, you’re currently being sued for tens of millions of dollars in a case followed by the national press.

It’s all about coaches. Lots of coaches are fine and upstanding. But if you keep hiring new ones long enough, you’re almost certainly going to end up with a drunk, a sadist, a loser, a guy who doesn’t know how to cheat without getting caught, or a quitter.

The quitter’s always leaving for a job that pays more. The sadist wallops his players real bad. The drunk gets caught plastered inside his Porsche. Even though you give the loser most of your endowment, he can’t win a game. And you know you’ve hit the bottom of the coaching barrel when the guy can’t even cheat like all the other coaches without getting caught. Only a death wish can explain that.

So all these guys sue, see. Or you sue them. I mentioned Texas Tech. A judge just ruled that TTU’s latest legal desperation move ain’t gonna work:

A judge says former football coach Mike Leach’s lawsuit over his firing from Texas Tech can move forward.

State District Judge William C. Sowder on Tuesday struck down the university’s claim of sovereign immunity from the lawsuit’s breach of conduct claim.

… The university fired Leach on Dec. 30, two days after it suspended him amid allegations he mistreated a player with a concussion.

… [Adam] James has said his coach twice ordered him to stand for hours while confined in a dark place during practice.

But here’s one other thing to keep in mind about big time university sports and constant expensive high-profile litigation: Fans love it. It’s an expected accompaniment to the story on the field, another game to follow. You gotta pay to play.

… beautifully about Don DeLillo:

… Of all our novelists, Don DeLilllo is perhaps the most priestly; indeed, it is his example of high-minded renunciation that makes any literary behavior but the writing of rigorously modernist texts seem at best a vulgarity, at worst a betrayal. He is the most purposefully removed of our novelists this side of Thomas Pynchon or Philip Roth; and yet because he is concerned with a very specific condition of modernity — private befuddlement in the face of incomprehensible public events — he is engaged to the point of being oracular. Thanks to his unsurpassed talent for capturing and conjuring free-floating dread, he even has the reputation of something of a prophet; there can be no event so horrific but that DeLillo seems to have anticipated it, from 9/11 to the financial collapse and now to the spill or the blowout or the hemorrhage in the Gulf.

No, he has never written about Top Kills and Junk Shots and the odd flutter of hope elicited by the words “Containment Dome.” But in their suggestion of corporatized violence and above all in the violence they do to the language, they are DeLilloesque. In what is known as his breakthrough novel, 1985’s White Noise, he made his signature contribution to the American language when he wrote of an “airborne toxic event” that results from an accident of chemical cars in a trainyard. The chemical that he created for the occasion, Nyodene D, is less important than the fact that the airborne toxic event is just that — an event that people talk about, argue about, even as it tragically envelops them. And of course what they talk and argue about most of all is what to call it: “They’re not calling it the feathery plume anymore,” one character says. “They’re calling it the black billowing cloud.”

What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.

No, Don DeLillo has never written about what about BP, Transocean, the MMS, and our thirst for oil have wrought in the Gulf of Mexico. But 25 years ago he imagined the name for a disaster that would come with its own excruciating and tantalizing Zapruder, and that would allow us to talk it — and ourselves — to death:

The underwater toxic event.

Avner Magen, a computer science professor, and Andrew Herzenberg, a biologist, were climbing a glacier in Alaska.

… Maureen McLaughlin of Denali National Park and Preserve, said avalanches are “not uncommon this time of the year in the area where they were climbing. The temperature gets warm and snow gets heavier . . . and we see avalanches.”

The park is best known among climbers for Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America.

In the middle of Monterey Square,
in a hot city with – on this day –
occasional wind and rain, stands
one of many American monuments
to the memory of Kazimierz Pułaski,
who fought for American independence.

(Click on the image to read the inscription.)

The monument emerges out of a mist made
up of trailing tree moss. From the pretzeled
limbs of live oaks, the gray veils part to
reveal iron railings, an obelisk, and a pale
slab under which may or may not lie the
remains of the soldier.

And Tom Petters gave millions to Miami University of Ohio to set up an ethics center. (Miami has returned the money. Not to Petters. He’s in prison for fifty years. To a court-appointed receiver.)

What are we to make of Merkin, Blagojevich, and Petters?

Well, read your Elmer Gantry.

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[UD thanks Daniel for correcting her on the name of the university.]

… is, as you know, a category on this blog which watches the ways a university’s trustees can wreak havoc.

There’s a strictly limited number of ways, but with a really bad board of trustees, you don’t have to do too much to make a school take a tumble.

The crucial characteristic really bad boards of trustees share is cronyism. They’re all sort of buddies. With each other and with the university’s president. Culturally, they’re very similar to one another. Almost no outside voices are heard. It’s an insiders’ game.

Take scandalous, conflict-of-interest-ridden, Yeshiva University. Several on its all-male board had special financial dealings with fellow board members Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. That didn’t work out well for them, or for the school, whose Madoff-related woes aren’t over — another Yeshiva trustee and Madoff investor, Elie Wiesel, is currently threatening a high-profile lawsuit against a playwright who put him in a play she wrote about Madoff. And even without Bernie and Ezra, Yeshiva seems to have a notably conflicted board…

As does Shaw University. Shaw’s been in the news lately because its alumni association is trying to get its entire board of trustees to resign.

This is a rather dramatic gesture, but you can understand their desperation. This isn’t merely about conflict of interest (“[T]he university contracted for insurance coverage with the relative of an unnamed board member.”); it’s about institutional corruption and financial irresponsibility generally:

Citing “gross neglect,” Shaw University’s national alumni group has called for the school’s board of trustees [which includes “boxer Evander Holyfield and boxing promoter Don King”] to step down or be dismissed, an appeal addressed to multimillionaire lawyer, alumnus and board Chairman Willie Gary.

The May 14 letter from the alumni association’s president, Emily Perry, cites no specific grievance, but says: “We can no longer stand by and allow Shaw to appear to deteriorate due to poor judgment. … We have serious concerns regarding conflict of interest, fiduciary responsibilities, adverse interest and commitment.”

Shaw, the South’s oldest historically black college, has spent the last year trying to shovel its way out of debt exceeding $20 million. The May 14 letter is not the first rebuke. In March, the school’s Florida alumni group sent a letter to Shaw administrators saying it was “amazed” that giving among board members totaled only $41,089 since July, despite Gary’s pledge that each of the roughly 40 board members would chip in $50,000.

When the alumni refer, in their letter, to “continued mistrust, negative news media coverage, hostility, calls, faxes and letters,” they allude to the predictable outcome of trustees who don’t attend board meetings, who may be financially corrupt, who hand out contracts to relatives (or to themselves), who have financial dealings with other trustees, and who simply do not understand what a university is.

… at ten pm at the raucous Crystal Beer Parlor was all it took to get UD all silly last night in Savannah.

She felt silly even before the drink, actually, because Savannah’s hopping and you want to hop along with it.

She’ll take a long walk now, and then meet her just-graduated student, Carolyn, for lunch at the Soho South Cafe. Carolyn lives ’round these parts.

… describes the NCAA.

… Corruption is the NCAA’s life partner. Passing itself off as an institution promoting the ideas and values of “amateur athletics” is a fraud so bold and laughable that it borders on criminal.

The NCAA’s goal is profit by any means necessary. That’s why TV dictates that college football and basketball are played nearly every night of the week at all different hours. That’s why kids who have no intention of pursuing an education are enthusiastically welcomed on campuses.

It’s greed…

From the Washington Post:

The Republican candidate for President Obama’s old Senate seat inaccurately claimed to have received the U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award for service during NATO’s conflict with Serbia in the late 1990s.

Rep. Mark Kirk, a Navy reservist elected to Congress in 2001, acknowledged the error in his official biography after The Washington Post began looking into whether he had received the prestigious award, which is given by top Navy officials to a single individual annually…

Kirk, an Appropriations Committee member, changed his Web site last week to incorporate a different account of the award. Kirk wrote on his blog that “upon a recent review of my records, I found that an award listed in my official biography was misidentified” …

Eric Elk, a spokesman for Kirk’s campaign, would say only that “we found the award was misidentified and corrected the name.” …

UD will be in Savannah for a few days.

Blogging continues.

A cat looks at a queen.

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UPDATE: We’ve seen Mina Dulcan on University Diaries before. The earlier post quotes University World News citing a statement Dulcan made to the BBC:

Mina Dulcan, editor of the Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry which published a study on paroxetine and children, told the BBC investigative show Panorama two years ago that she was not bothered by the fact the published article was at odds with the data and appeared to have been ghostwritten.

“I don’t have any regrets about publishing at all. It generated all sorts of useful discussion which is the purpose of a scholarly journal,” Dulcan said.

Way queenly!

… on you.

All our magical doctors put a spell on us. They toss their mystic parchments into a brew and sing

Doctors, Doctors, PhDs,
Honor’ble those, Honor’ble these,
‘Plomas of birth-strangl’d thought
Express-deliver’d, sold and bought…

The magical doctors teach at universities and run legal systems and lead political parties and keep us on the true path at church.

The charm is firm and good.

An editor of the Brown University newspaper writes a remarkable little essay about irony — the irony of Brown students, and the irony of Brown’s president, a longtime director of Goldman Sachs.