Two things you can be sure of when you teach online via a campus platform:

1. Your university is watching.
2. There’s a written record of everything you say.

All sorts of eyes are peering into your online course: Your students, naturally; but also university administrators, on-campus tech people, the for-profit firm your school has probably hired to manage various course functions, etc. This is not a … freedom-rich environment. Not for blowing off the course and giving everyone an A, and not for sexual harassment.

MIT has removed the lectures of a retired faculty member from a popular online learning platform after determining that he had sexually harassed a woman on the Internet, the school’s News Office announced Monday.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology began investigating the matter after a learner on the platform MITx filed a complaint against Walter Lewin in October. According to the MIT News Office website, the alleged victim said the harassment began when she was a learner in one of Lewin’s online courses.

During the investigation, MIT also looked at additional interactions between Lewin and other online learners.

UD is guessing that the actual harassment occurred outside of the course’s comment threads; she’s guessing that some relatively light, slightly off-color badinage happened in those threads, and that the badinage at some point moved onto gchat or email exchanges… Though it’s always possible Lewin was stupid enough to put harassing words into the course interactions proper…

But anyway. Get a load of the picture the Globe ran with the piece!

The editorial board of the New York Times reminds us of a prevailing reality at increasing numbers of American universities — what a writer for the New Yorker, in a long piece about Duke University, calls “the coarsening of undergraduate life.”

At the bottom of the university hierarchy, business-model party schools desperately seek to maintain tanking enrollments through the massive availability of booze, drugs, frats, and sports. Any location dominated by this mix will see assaults and riots; any location whose life virtually depends on these things will see an increase in assaults and riots. Places like these, as they become notorious, draw unaffiliated disorderly people from the towns and cities around them, so that we see the phenomenon of huge tailgates composed of drunks with no intention of attending the football game attached to the tailgate; we see riots at Keene State College attracting hundreds of random non-Keene State people who like violence and know they can get some there; we see growing numbers of sexual assaults carried out by non-student opportunists infiltrating frat parties.

At the top of the university hierarchy, schools attended by the “cubs of some of our most successful predators” (UD loves this phrase, but can’t find its source) feature the same booze, drugs, frats, and sports mix — not because they need to in order to attract applicants (everyone wants to go to Duke, UVa, Vanderbilt…), but because the schools are modeling the work hard/play hard thing that their graduates will need as they prepare to become competitive in hedge fund culture. Some of these students, like poor George Huguely, show up on campus already well-bred, well-soaked, alcoholics; others learn the life.

In a New Yorker article about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, Adam Gopnik writes:

[F]or lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing [in] … what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor...

You don’t have to gaze at the shit-strewn post-tailgate campus of the University of Georgia to know that the Italianization of the American university campus is an achieved fact in plenty of places, and that there’s too much money at stake (consider, among many examples, the disquieting fact of fewer and fewer students attending football games, and the growing need to ply them with drink to get them to attend) to do anything but ramp up the Italianization.

It is terribly important to get an accurate account of the now-notorious reported rape at the University of Virginia; but we are well past needing to establish the fact that our Italianizing campuses are dangerous.

La Kid, last night,
was somewhere
in that choir,
doing her bit to
steal the show.

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

Here she is at the
reception after the
show, looking
impossibly elegant.

With Rachelle,
a fellow singer.

Wow. Something I’ve never seen before.

On a cold but extremely sunny day, a fox is currently sitting in complete relaxation (eyes vaguely scanning the birds at my feeder), steps from my deck. Like this. Just sunning itself, half asleep.

In May 2011, Mr UD went to Jeddah, to review an academic program at King Abdulaziz University. I remember thinking, listening to him talk about the school and Saudi Arabia, that this is arguably the weirdest country in the world. It has money, and seems to want various forms of international legitimacy (for its educational establishment, for instance). Saudi Arabia must look at rapidly progressing China and India and think I’ll have a slice of that…

Yet its deeply, absurdly, repressive culture (Mr UD described the way, as the plane touched down, every woman passenger assumed a funeral pall) makes any form of cultural progress almost impossible.

Saudi Arabia does have one university, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (its only mixed-gender university) that’s getting somewhere.

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Most countries do indeed look first at their universities as they seek a voice in the modern intellectual and scientific world; but because Saudi Arabia by definition (it not only lacks a scientific ethos; it is foundationally opposed to a scientific ethos) cannot attract or cultivate world-class intellectuals, it has tried to use its vast wealth to as it were attach academic respectability to itself.

Case in point: The same university Mr UD visited has been throwing tens of thousands of dollars a year at highly cited researchers in the US and elsewhere in order to get them to list an affiliation with King Abdulaziz University. They don’t have to go there or anything; in exchange for the money, they call themselves adjunct professors. They make contact with one or two professors on the campus; they may talk vaguely about scholarly cooperation. But really it’s about cash for flash: You give us your name, we give you $70,000 a year.

It’s also about gaming the international university ranking system:

Citations are an indicator of academic clout, but they are also a crucial metric used in compiling several university rankings. There may be many reasons for hiring highly cited researchers, but rankings are one clear result of KAU’s investment. The worry, some researchers have said, is that citations and, ultimately, rankings may be KAU’s primary aim.

Indeed a Berkeley mathematician describes his shock on seeing that “a little-known university in Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in mathematics [in the US News and World Report rankings] — despite the fact that it didn’t have a doctorate program in math until two years ago.”

The adjunct ploy has spawned some busybusybusybusyBUSY professors:

[There’s] Jun Wang, director of the Beijing Genome Institute, whose affiliations are BGI (60%), University of Copenhagen (15%), King Abdulaziz University (15%), The University of Hong Kong (5%), Macau University of Science and Technology (5%). Should he also acknowledge the airlines he flies on? Should there not be some limit on the number of affiliations of an individual?

Take that, Morris Zapp!!

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You have to give KAU this: They understand numbers. And they understand human psychology. (As one scientist who went for the deal explained to the Berkeley guy, “It’s just capitalism.” A professor who turned down an invitation from KAU writes, in a comment on the Berkeley guy’s blog, “I got one of these invitations from King Abdulaziz University too and I said ‘No’ to it… But believe me, the offer of $72K ‘easy money’ even made me think for a minute or two before saying ‘No.’ It was tempting! Some people have children to send to school, and their salaries are not enough.”) Maybe for this alone they deserve their ranking.

The residence also offered indoor and outdoor pools, commissioned artwork by the graffiti artist Retna, and an operating room in the basement. “It’s not like it’s set up to take out your gallbladder,” said Mark David, a real estate columnist for Variety, who has toured the house. “It’s for cosmetic procedures — fillers, dermabrasion, that kind of thing.”

I thought university football was already “truly professionalized,” but according to this, there’s much more to come.

UD has predicted that most physical campus life will disappear as everyone goes online; but she has also – naively – said that the only place on campus where students will continue to congregate in real time will be the football stadium. Wrong.

Even though college football is as steeped in its history and culture as any sport in the country, with the amount of money flying around the sport, it’s just more efficient to play games in these huge stadiums, sold to the highest bidder. The strange thing is that—national title games aside—these stadiums are often empty, particularly for conference championship games. (None of the major conference championships—the Pac-12, Big Ten, or SEC—is expected to sell out their games at neutral sites this weekend.) That doesn’t really matter for the people selling these games: Television stations, particularly ESPN, who just need the programming. (The fans in attendance are essentially just atmosphere—extras.) This is the ongoing trend, too: Fewer and fewer students are even showing up to campus games anymore. In the future college football world, you won’t even need them: These games might as well be played on sound stages.

I mean, yes, UD has been blogging for some time about disappearing students; she just thought that … you know… while they’d be totally gone from physical classrooms, there’d still be “the few, the proud” in the stadiums. (Thanks, Andre, for that link.) Apparently not.

(Silver lining: They’ll still show up for the tailgate and the riot.)

That being the case, UD will make another prediction.

It’s very embarrassing to the schools, these empty televised stadiums. (“[On] average, only 8 percent of U.A.B.’s 18,600 students attended home games this year.”) Soon many universities will revamp their entire admissions systems. They will seek above all in a student the willingness and ability to sit – not too drunk; reasonably excited – in a stadium for the entire duration of a football game. Extras Scholarships will go out to students who can document (via admissions portfolio videos of their high school game attendance) their capacity to simulate being a fan of the university’s football team.

Required reading for the credit-bearing freshman-fan training course will be DeLillo’s White Noise, and in particular the simulacral German nuns scene:

“Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life.”

Real fans are gone; no one cares about a fake tv spectacle. But a large group of people must sit in the stands looking like students who give a shit. Someone must appear to care.

[C]ollege football has been accused of being an unpaid farm system for the NFL. This winnowing of the ranks [of universities with football teams], and the increased ability of Power Five schools to compensate players, could make it that much closer to a formality. If we accept—as the Northwestern [University] union lawsuit claims—that these players are more “athletes” than “students” (and thus more employees than subjects) then they’re essentially professional leagues already. You can see this eventually—maybe not as early 2025, but someday—becoming standard operating procedure, and having the Dallas Cowboys go ahead and make Baylor or Texas A&M their “farm” team.

The effect on academics? Well, first of all there will be a synergy with the movement of the university’s teaching business to online. There won’t be any angst about academic integrity, because everything will be invisible. Nothing to see here! And the new honesty about the tv-run, paid-player, farm-team, nature of the university, coupled with the obsolescence of the NCAA itself (“one of the last connections any of these athletic departments have to ‘academics’ at all”) will truly clear the way for more and more American universities to drop the whole “university” pretense and get down to business.

Comparing Adolf Hitler with Josef Stalin, [Humboldt University professor Jörg] Baberowski claimed that Hitler was not “a psychopath, he wasn’t cruel, and he tolerated no mention of the extermination of the Jews in his presence”.

… for her relentless efforts to combat conflict of interest in the practice of medicine.

Wen has just been named health commissioner for the city of Baltimore.

Apparently the woman at the center of the case has told conflicting versions of the story.

The fraternity, too, will soon begin defending itself against her claims.

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

A note from Rolling Stone. UD thanks Chris, a reader, for the link.

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I should have been more skeptical.

[Mustafa] Marrouchi primarily stole from works published in the London Review of Books and would often change just a few words, specifically words with British spellings to American spellings.

He cut his teeth at death-penaltied Southern Methodist U, so Pete Mangurian knows what you have to do to inspire a team… But the snobs at Columbia have hated him since he was recruited, and I guess it doesn’t help that the team loses all of its games…

… Plus, according to some, the coach is a mite rough with the lads… Ignores concussions… is physically abusive… after a recent loss told the team You are terrible [expletive] people… The world would be a better place without you.

Which, okay, given the suicide rate among undergraduates, might not be the most politic thing to say if your university cares about the welfare of its students…

But by prevailing standards the man is a pussycat.

The overwhelming majority of fraternity men are not rapists nor would they ever consider committing or condoning sexual violence, but as President Sullivan said on Monday, “There is great concern that a sexual predator can hide out in a fraternity, and therefore that fraternal social activities pose literal dangers to their guests.” This has nothing to do with whether fraternities contain a vast majority of good people (I have no doubt they do). It has everything to do with the fact that fraternities have houses with unwatched upstairs and padlocked doors, the ability to widely distribute unidentifiable mixed drinks to unknowing first-year girls and national organizations with comprehensive systems for deflecting liability. A rapist on a college campus is three times more likely to participate in a fraternity than not and sorority women are 74 percent more likely to be sexually assaulted than nonaffiliated women. Again, whether most people in fraternities are well-meaning individuals is beside the point; the faceless institutions in which these good people exist are flawed.

… It’s drinking-up time at the American university, and although we know all conditioned things are impermanent, a lot of people seem really, really pissed about it.

Yes, yes, only one football program has actually shut down.

As for fraternities [aka eat or be eaten clubs, dahling]: Like vampires, they cannot truly be killed. Fraternities can be suspended while crews hose down the vomit, but they almost always come back to haze again, until once again they are suspended, etc.

Even when a school or a national organization officially shutters them, fraternities live on as rogue operations just off campus.

Fraternities will never authentically be threatened with extinction. They are too important to the nation. The behaviors and attitudes you learn at a fraternity are structural to the leadership of America’s elite financial organizations. Fraternities are not about college; they are about Goldman Sachs.

And on law schools… How has it come to this? Can we actually be about to witness the shuttering of some of them?

Probably.

It’s all about the tragic confluence of the we’ll accredit your Aunt Tillie’s ass ABA, the ne touche pas my salary and course load law professioriate, and a collapsed job market.

In response to the collapsed job market, the ABA continues to accredit new schools.

I know you think that this cannot possibly be true, but it is. Every ten seconds the ABA accredits a new American law school.

Well, not every ten seconds. But frequently.

Even?

What is this former member of a sorority at San Dildo State University trying to tell us?