"I should have made him my campaign manager," Dukakis said of Galbraith after the service. "I might have won."

Dear Miss Manners:

I am a student at a large university, and thus most of my communication with professors (for better or for worse) is done in writing (via e-mail). I find myself over and over in the same predicament as to how to address my professors.

When initiating contact, I always greet the professor with "Dear Dr. Jack Jones."

However, more often than not the professor will respond to my message with "Dear Seth . . . Sincerely, Jack." What is the correct way for me to respond that is neither haughty nor rude? Should I continue to use the professor's full name and title in my future correspondence, or should I assume that by using only their first name, they are inviting me to do the same?

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

They are inviting you to think of them as your equals and your friends, but Miss Manners advises you not to count on such pals to be good to you at grade time. Rather than mistaking a posture intended to make themselves feel young as a personal gesture, she would suggest continuing to address them by the title of professor or doctor, whichever is more used in your university (and the first name should be omitted from the salutation).

tone-deaf to the American Republic, whose liberties it relies on yet whose virtues it no longer nurtures. It has forsaken such pedagogical heavy lifting for market come-ons and a falsely compensatory moralism about sexism, racism, and “jock culture" -- ‘proxies for misgivings about deeper values.’ The college no longer turns freshmen into adults who can recognize and take responsibility for hard moral choices: ‘The Enlightenment ideal of human liberty and the philosophy embodied in American democracy barely exist in the current Harvard curriculum.’… It would be better to impose serious core curricular requirements on students than to offer ‘what they myopically claim to want,’ Lewis writes, admitting that more teaching takes time from scholarship, but the faculty needs to ‘develop a shared sense of educational responsibility for its undergraduates.’…Harvard's assumption that ‘students are free agents and . . . should study what they wish’ drains its ‘long-term commitment to the welfare of students and the society they actually serve,’ he writes. Even administrators with ‘perspective on deep and enduring problems’ have left or been forced out of ‘the new retail-store university.’

O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.

' Witch hunts go in stages. First frenzy, when everybody damns the souls of people they don't know. Then confusion, as the first wave of contradictory facts comes in. Then deafening silence, as everybody studiously ignores the vicious slanders they uttered during the moment of maximum hysteria.

But now that we know more about the Duke lacrosse team, simple decency requires that we return to that scandal, if only to correct the slurs that were uttered by millions of people, including me.

We know now that the Duke lacrosse players are not the dumb jocks they were portrayed to be. The team has a 100 percent graduation rate. Over the past five years 146 members of the team made the Atlantic Coast Conference Academic Honor Roll, twice as many as any other A.C.C. lacrosse team. According to the faculty report written by the law professor James E. Coleman and others — which stands out as the one carefully researched and intellectually honest piece of work in this whole mess — "The lacrosse team's academic performance generally is one of the best among all Duke athletic teams."

We also know that the lacrosse players are not the amoral goons of popular legend. The members of the Coleman commission interviewed many of the people the players came into contact with and found almost universal praise and admiration. The groundskeeper and the equipment manager described the current team as among the best groups of young men they have worked with during their long tenures at Duke.

"The committee has not heard evidence that the cohesiveness of this group is either racist or sexist," the Coleman report says. The current and former black members of the team are "extremely positive" about the support they received. The coach of the women's lacrosse team says relations between the men and women are respectful and supportive. "They are great kids," she has said of the male players.

The male lacrosse players "volunteered for numerous community service activities," the report says, including reading programs, mentoring programs, the Special Olympics and Katrina relief.

Curiously, Nexis searches suggest that these facts have scarcely been reported in any newspaper or magazine.

We also know, as the Coleman report makes clear, that the members of the lacrosse team drank heavily, and when they did, they behaved irresponsibly. Of the 14 cases of "alcohol-unsafe" behavior reported at Duke in the fall of 2005, three involved lacrosse players. Of the four reported cases of disorderly conduct, one involved a lacrosse player.

Team members were caught playing drinking games, publicly urinating and hitting golf balls at buildings. The report notes that their behavior was alarming and deplorable, but adds: "Their conduct has not been different in character than the conduct of the typical Duke student who abuses alcohol. Their reported conduct has not involved fighting, sexual assault or harassment, or racist behavior."

We also know that the events of the night of March 13 are anything but clear-cut. In The National Journal, Stuart Taylor has written a devastating couple of essays on the weak case of the prosecutor, Mike Nifong. Citing the lack of DNA evidence, the seemingly exculpatory digital photos and the testimony of a taxi driver, Taylor, who is one of the most admired legal journalists in the country, estimates that there is an 85 percent chance the players are innocent.

Now, with the distance of some time, a few things are clear. There may have been a rape that night, but it didn't grow out of a culture of depravity, and it can't be explained by the sweeping sociological theories that were tossed about with such wild abandon a few weeks ago.

Furthermore, when you look at the hyperpoliticized assertions made by Jesse Jackson, Houston Baker and dozens of activists and professors, you see how mighty social causes like the civil rights movement, feminism and the labor movement have spun off a series of narrow social prejudices among the privileged class.

The members of the lacrosse team were male, mostly white and mostly members of the suburban bourgeois middle class (39 of 54 recent graduates went on to careers in finance). For many on the tenured left, bashing people like that is all that's left of their once-great activism.

And maybe the saddest part of the whole reaction is not the rush to judgment at the start, but the unwillingness by so many to face the truth now that the more complicated reality has emerged. '

The school owns a $1 million Memphis home that underwent a recent $500,000 renovation.

Yet UT bought a second Memphis home last August -- this one for $1.3 million -- because of a promise it made to chancellor Bill Owen when he was hired last year.

Because of a lengthy bid process, the school can't sell the old home until August of this year, said UT spokesman Hank Dye.

UT is paying utilities and maintenance on both homes, all at taxpayer-expense.

…Alice Owen [Angry Wife] said she took a good look at the old chancellor's home, a 5,559-square-foot home at 549 Goodwyn, and decided she didn't like it.

By August, UT arranged for the state to buy the new chancellor's home on Morningside -- complete with a wet bar, four fireplaces, four baths and a swimming pool.

Alice Owen soon found plenty to complain about with the new home too.

In a Jan. 3 e-mail to chief of staff Ken Brown, she threatened to return to Durham, N.C. The family was "promised university housing that was not safe or livable," she wrote, saying "promises of a decorating budget to decorate the chancellor's residence" weren't fulfilled.

For the last few weeks I have ... been participating in a faculty seminar on teaching, specifically concerning the question of difference in the classroom… [An] incident in the seminar upset me greatly, and seemed to detail a number of problems not only with thinking through difference in our teaching but also difference among the professoriate.

…[T]he apex (or perhaps nadir) of our seminar sessions was a heated discussion of a recent racial controversy on campus. Many of the students involved in this controversy were actually enrolled in various classes of mine, and a number of them approached me: What should we do? How should we respond? How should we deal with our feelings of anger? (Although this wasn’t usually stated so eloquently, for more often my students wanted to literally go find the offending party and whup their ass: “We’re trying to find out where [offending party] lives.”)



As a faculty of colour, this is obviously not my first time in proximity to a campus racial controversy, nor the strong emotions that tend to accompany them, and I urged my students to craft, along with their feelings of anger and rage, an intellectual response to this conundrum. The reasons as to why I would respond thusly are manifold, and both personal and professional. One clearly is that physical violence has no place in a learning environment… Another is that emotional and rash reactions of this sort, as well as the pure emotive hair-pulling performed in invariably endless meetings, conforms to the vicious stereotypes of people of colour as incapable of intellectual and reasoned response….

[The idea] was to connect my students with their budding intellectual training at Cold City U: if white supremacy is a discursive system that manifests itself in both material and metaphysical ways and is moreover invisible as a system, how do we differentiate the level of risk in confronting it, as well as the level and intensity of response. In other words, how do we craft an intellectual response to the problem of white supremacy as ideology as well as through material action (literal resistance, struggle, protest, self-protection)?

The fact that this incident encapsulates many of the principles of the teaching seminar itself, principally how do we handle and accommodate different stakeholders in the classroom, would purportedly make this a perfect “teachable moment.” However, that was not they way it played out. Several white faculty were disturbed by my intellectual response to the campus controversy, and quickly moved to critique it (which of course was not the point of sharing it in the first place; I was not asking for their opinion). One of my immediate colleagues offered a professional critique that was well worded, immediately followed by an older white woman from another division who said, “Yeah, if I was your student and you said that to me [the need to develop an intellectual response], I would want to punch you in the face!”




… [S]everal other white faculty voiced their agreement with this woman’s statement at the moment (“Yeah!", “Exactly!”), in essence, saying that they believed in fact the correct response of students of colour to this campus controversy was violence, unbridled emotion, reaction, hysteria. Intellectualism was not, for these good white people, the appropriate response to this controversy. However, if the university is not the place for an intellectual response, then indeed where is that place?

…I am a trained humanist with a doctorate, but I am not a psychotherapist. I see my role as guiding my students towards fundamentally intellectual patterns of thought and critique. I, for one, am not ashamed to call myself an intellectual, a thinker, someone who uses their brain, who by choice and training privileges, to a large extent, reason over emotion… At the end of our class time together, my students leave the room and walk back into the gloom of a deeply irrational and emotive society that loathes thinking and intellectualism and intellectuals. … Our students arguably are up to their eyeballs in anti-intellectual sentiment. They certainly don’t need, in my opinion, that standpoint reified in the context of the classroom. Here, they might be able to achieve a state they cannot easily achieve elsewhere. If we don’t believe in the life of the mind, however defined, why are we here then at the university? To change society radically? A decidedly poor choice of venue, in my book, considering how rabidly conservative the Shop is.

… If this incident in the teaching seminar was meant to chastise me for my method, it in fact reasserted the belief that what we need is more intellectualism, more thinking, more methodology, in approaching these complicated situations of the new academy filled with race, difference, tension. A simple retreat into the emotive is simply not enough, for we need to find a way to broach this divide between emotion and intellectualism in ways that honour the ability of students of colour to think critically and empathetically, within and beyond themselves, and have the confidence that they can do it.

I think that your critic was redirecting attention away from the incident *and* from your thinking about it/advice to the students, onto herself. Specifically, onto *her* emotive reaction to the incident. I don't think it's a question of discussions about institutional racism finding redirection to people of color; I think it's discussions about institutional racism finding redirection back to reassuring white people about their own self-image. In this case (as so often with liberal whites), her self-image as one who sympathizes with--feels for--the "plight" of the students of color. Because, of course, for a lot of white liberals, the problem with racism is how it makes them feel.

… Mr. Guest directed … "Mister Drake's Duck" (1951), starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and [Yolande] Donlan as owners of a duck that lays uranium eggs; and "Penny Princess" (1952), in which Dirk Bogarde plays the love interest of a young woman (Ms. Donlan) who inherits a tiny European principality.

There was worse to come, notably the beatnik drama "Expresso Bongo" (1960), which starred Cliff Richard as Bongo Herbert; and "Toomorrow" (1970), starring Olivia Newton-John. Mr. Guest was also one of a great many directors who worked on the poorly received James Bond spoof "Casino Royale" (1967).

Most disastrous of all, many critics thought, was "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" (1970), which Mr. Guest wrote and directed. Based on a story by J. G. Ballard, it starred Victoria Vetri, a former Playboy centerfold, and was, The Daily Telegraph of London wrote last week, "one of the worst films ever made."

Valmond Maurice Guest …made his directorial debut with "The Nose Has It," a wartime instructional film about the perils of sneezing.

Ex-Dean Says Harvard Run Like Day Care

Harvard University leaders are running the school like ``a day care center for college students," trying to dazzle undergraduates with concerts and a new pub, rather than teaching them to be responsible citizens, a former Harvard dean writes in a newly released book.

Harry R. Lewis -- the former dean of Harvard College, who many believe was pushed out of his post for being critical of President Lawrence H. Summers -- writes that the university has gone off track in a number of ways. His book is "Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education," published earlier this month by PublicAffairs.

The book is generating a lot of buzz on campus; Lewis's reading at the Harvard Coop was standing-room only, and the book is on Harvard Book Store's bestseller list. Many students are aghast at the idea they are being coddled, but some of Lewis's colleagues expect the book will be influential as the university searches for a new president and tries to breathe new life into efforts to revise the undergraduate curriculum. Several Harvard administrators whose policies Lewis criticized, including Summers, declined through spokesmen to comment on the book.

... Lewis says his book is not sour grapes over his ouster, and he dwells only briefly on Summers, writing that the president was arrogant, a poor manager, and ``voiced opinions but advanced no reasoned intellectual agenda." Rather, Lewis said in an interview, the book is the result of his attempt to make sense of the forces pushing his beloved university into a ``consumerist" mode.

He said that other elite universities suffer many of the same problems.

Parents paying the full cost of Harvard, or $41,675 this year, "expect the university to treat them like customers, not like acolytes in some temple they are privileged to enter," Lewis writes.

They routinely call professors to complain about their children's grades, he writes, and they believe that the university should erase any evidence of bad academic performance or personal misconduct, excusing those failings as symptoms of psychiatric problems or disabilities.

Harvard, meanwhile, participates in the coddling, Lewis said. Administrators, he argues, get carried away with their concern about Harvard's low scores on a student satisfaction survey, compared with peer institutions.

In an effort to improve the scores, the college has created a bloated student life bureaucracy, Lewis said. Students who rarely bother to take a subway ride to Boston to see a show want their own expensive on-campus concerts to help create a Harvard "bubble."



Worse yet, Lewis says, is Harvard's new pub, located near freshman housing. Although students under 21 are not supposed to be served beer, Lewis suggests the university is turning a blind eye.

"Desperate for approval by its students, Harvard now comes very close to saying that undergraduate drinking is acceptable as long as you don't get caught," he writes.

But one freshman, Eleanor Wilking, said the pub and other new social spaces are important alternatives to the exclusive, male-dominated "final clubs" that are not recognized by Harvard but host many student parties.

"I find this to be an exceptionally competitive environment, bordering on unhealthy, so anything you can do to alleviate that is a good thing," she said. "There's a dearth of community feeling."

Even some colleagues who agreed with other points Lewis makes differ with his take on student life.

"If the college does it, there are going to be some controls," said William Mills Todd III, former dean of undergraduate education and a friend of Lewis's. ``I would very much rather have [the pub] than see a fraternity system reborn or the final clubs increase in number."

Two Yale University professors, Ian Shapiro and Michael J. Graetz, expected to receive a 2006 Sidney Hillman Award on Tuesday at a ceremony in New York City. Instead, they got phone calls on Tuesday morning telling them that the judges had reversed the decision to honor the professors' book on the repeal of the estate tax, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth.

"I was stunned," said Mr. Shapiro, a professor of political science. "I'd been about to get in the car to go to the city to pick up the award."

Mr. Graetz echoed his co-author's shock. "It came out of the blue for me," he said. "Obviously, I was disappointed."




The telephone calls came from Bruce Raynor, president of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which sponsors the awards. The foundation is a project of the labor union Unite Here, of which Mr. Raynor is general president. The awards and the foundation are named for Sidney Hillman, who was a leading worker-rights activist in the New Deal era and founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a precursor of Unite Here.

First presented in 1950, the awards honor "journalists, writers, and public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good," according to the foundation's Web site.




Mr. Raynor told the authors that the last-minute reversal had been based on information that came to light about Mr. Shapiro's dealings with members of GESO, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, in its efforts to organize a graduate-student union at Yale in the 1990s. Unite Here has been involved with GESO's continuing union drive at Yale.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Raynor cited allegations of "unfair labor practices" and unspecified "threats against graduate students" by Mr. Shapiro. [Why weren't they specified?]

"It flies in the face of Sidney Hillman's beliefs and his life," he said, "to present the award to someone who had been actively engaged in resisting union-organization attempts by graduate teaching assistants to join Sidney Hillman's union."

Mr. Raynor added, "We wish we had had this information before the award announcement went out. We regret it, and we certainly don't seek to embarrass Professor Shapiro." [No embarrassment to Shapiro -- all the embarrassment is to the Hillman people.]




Mr. Graetz and Mr. Shapiro pointed out that the book, which was published last year by Princeton University Press, does not address labor organizing. "There is no connection to GESO at all," Mr. Graetz said. "This book has absolutely nothing to do with the graduate students."

Mr. Shapiro also defended his dealings with graduate students over the years. "In the 1990s, when I was director of graduate studies in political science, I told a group of our students that I thought they had every right to try and form a union," he said, "but in my view it was not a good idea and not a good use of their time. ... I've never threatened anyone in my life, and I'm generally supportive of unions."




The move toward rethinking the award began last week. On Thursday, May 18, the Hillman Foundation ran an advertisement in The New York Times listing the 2006 winners in several categories: book, magazine, broadcast, photojournalism, newspaper, and blog, a new category this year. Mr. Shapiro's and Mr. Graetz's book was listed as the winner in the book category.

Although Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Graetz had written "an excellent book," Mr. Raynor told The Chronicle, the decision came down to "more than just the words on the page." [You've got to be a soldier of the lord too.]

Once news of the award got out, Mr. Raynor said, his office received dozens of complaints "from numerous current and former graduate teaching assistants who'd been involved in these campaigns."

"We got deluged by this information that we did not know," he said. "I brought it to the attention of the judges."

One of those judges, Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, said that Mr. Raynor called him on Monday and said, "Harold, we have a problem." Mr. Raynor then told him about the objections to the award but left the final decision to him and the other judges, who include Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, and Sheryl WuDunn, an editor at The New York Times.




Mr. Meyerson read a reporter the statement he delivered Tuesday night at the awards ceremony. "Normally judges evaluate the dancer, not the dance," he said. "What we tried to do in the excruciatingly limited time available to us was to gauge the severity and credibility of the allegations. ... A crucial factor for us was that the National Labor Relations Board in the region issued a complaint against several Yale professors, and Professor Shapiro most particularly, for these actions."

As Mr. Meyerson and Mr. Shapiro both noted, the labor board never adjudicated the graduate students' complaint because their labor action failed to meet certain legal criteria.

"There was never any hearing on the merits of the complaint," Mr. Shapiro said. "People like me never got to come into a hearing and say, What's the evidence that I threatened anyone?"

Mr. Meyerson said he had consulted with a friend who was a labor lawyer, who told him that "such a complaint would not have been issued if the NLRB attorneys had not found the claims to be credible and meritorious." In the end, Mr. Meyerson and the other judges concluded that "Professor Shapiro's actions rose to a level that required the rethinking of the award."

"What we came down to was that the book was eminently qualified to win many other awards," he said, but did not fit the criteria of the Hillman Prize.

"We regret of course that this highly improbable situation ever occurred," Mr. Meyerson told the awards audience. "I'm acutely aware that for all of you this comes rather like a pickle in the middle of a chocolate éclair."

George Washington University has taken a serious beating lately. In fall 2005, the university was sued by a former student named Jordan Nott, who was barred from campus after seeking hospital care for severe depression and thoughts of suicide. In March, after the university responded in court to Nott's complaint, the Washington Post ran a front-page whammy about the case, followed by a blistering editorial called "Depressed? Get Out!"

Schools aren't necessarily wrong to take a tough stand. And in fact, some quasi-disciplinary measures may be in a suicidal student's best interests.

...[If the student] depression was caused by his friend's suicide, which occurred on campus the previous spring, an administrator might have believed it was in his best interests to take time away. Two additional GWU students had committed suicide in the previous six months, so the school was legitimately worried about copycat deaths.

GWU also may have had reason to rely on its disciplinary code in handling a potentially suicidal student—to stay on the right side of disabilities law. The law permits schools to crack down on disruptive or violent behavior, but not, of course, to punish underlying conditions or disabilities. Thus, the school may have settled on "endangering behavior" as a general ground for taking action. That might not fit with the facts in Nott's case, since Nott denies that he attempted suicide or had a suicidal plan. But we just don't know. GWU may have chosen to rely on its disciplinary system because it provided a well-tested set of procedures, and in theory thus complied with the due process requirements of disability law.

Illinois does not treat suicide as a "victimless crime" or a cry for help, but rather as an unacceptable act of violence. Students who threaten or attempt suicide are required to attend four assessment sessions, in which they are asked to respond to questions regarding the events, thoughts, and feelings that led up to the suicide threat or attempt. If they refuse to participate, they can be removed from school.

On a men's program that, according to a recent report after an internal investigation, was described in 2005 by a dean for residential life and housing to be "building toward a train wreck." A program found to have 52 disciplinary incidents in the past five and a half years at a rate that was accelerating. A program that produced the fateful party on March 13 at which drinking and stripping were the primary attractions and racial epithets directed at two hired dancers were reported to the police by a neighbor.

While the numbers support the general impression that many college students abuse alcohol, [an] anonymous Ivy League [lacrosse] player said that a serious commitment to Division I athletics, coupled with a challenging academic workload, creates enormous pressure.

"From my experience, the play-hard, party-hard label is true," he says. "But the whole deal is hard work. We're not taking Golf 101 at Florida State. You get up at 9 in the morning and go lift, eat breakfast, go watch film, go to class all day, practice for three hours, get dinner, do your homework and try to get to bed at a decent hour.”

Here's your opportunity to enjoy an evening of fine dining, high design, and conversations with architects--as well as the executive chef. On May 24 in Washington, D.C., the National Building Museum will host Dine by Design and celebrate the premiere of Agraria restaurant.

Designed by Adamstein & Demetriou (A & D), the firm behind Washington eateries IndeBleu, Zaytinya, and Zola, the restaurant is located in Georgetown's Washington Harbor. The event will include a four-course dinner and discussions about the space with A & D architects Olvia Demetriou and Theodore Adamstein.

Over coffee and dessert, executive chef Paul Morello, most recently of Les Halles fame, will discuss the culinary design of both the dinner and the menu. Owned by the North Dakota Farmers Union, Agraria will feature foods from throughout the country produced by family farmers and small businesses.

A reception will be held from 7-7:30pm. Dinner will run from 7:30-10:00pm. The event is $105 for museum members; $125 nonmembers. Prepaid registration required by May 21. The price includes reception, dinner, and gratuity. Liquor and wines are on a cash basis.

The ritzy Georgetown area of Washington is famous for fine dining, offering everything from French cuisine to eclectic Moroccan fusion.

Next week, Georgetown's newest chic restaurant opens it doors — offering the finest tastes of North Dakota. And hold the lutefisk jokes. [Glad to, since I don’t know what lutefisk is.]

Called Agraria, it's unlike anything that's come before. The restaurant is cooperatively owned by farmers from the Upper Midwest, who created the idea, invested $2 million to make it a reality, and who will produce much of the fresh food. Together, they share a vision of linking diners in the city with farmers on the land. [I prefer my labor invisible and alienated, thank you.]

"We're putting a face on the people who are raising the food, and we're trying to connect them with consumers through a food experience," said Doug Peterson, president of the Minnesota Farmers Union, which offered some of Agraria's startup funding. [You’re making me nervous.]

Still, he admits, the idea of owning a fancy restaurant "is, frankly, something that farmers have not tried before."

When it opens, Agraria aims to be high-class all the way. Located on the pricey Georgetown waterfront, the restaurant features rich woods of walnut and hickory, four fireplaces, fine wines, private catering and an award-winning chef. There are also private rooms, ideal for an office party or congressional fundraiser.

At nearly 14,000 square feet, it's a huge space — and it's a country mile from the typical rural-themed restaurant decorated with rusty lanterns, gingham curtains and seed signs.

"This is a fine-dining establishment in a very affluent neighborhood," said Tom Prescott, the project manager. "We don't have any lanterns in our space."

What Agraria hopes to offer is fresh cuisine with personal stories: that all its food was produced on family farms, that its breads and pastas were milled by its North Dakota owners, that perhaps the beef just arrived from southern Minnesota, the potatoes from Idaho and the organic chicken from an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania.


…The distant hope is that Agraria will be so successful that the concept can spread to other cities. But Agraria is not entirely about money. Its owners also dream of renewing the lapsed connection between farmers on the land and consumers in the city.

"The important thing we want them to see is, farming is a very professional business, and the people doing this now are very good at what they do," Watne said.

Agraria hopes to deliver this message in bite-sized morsels, not in thick slabs.

"We recognize that when people dine, they don't want to be inundated with an educational component that is too much to handle," Prescott said. "We have subtle images," and the message is conveyed in many ways, from the décor to the menu to the waiters. [What? The waiters will be dressed as professional farmers?]

And on opening day, farmers will learn whether Georgetown is ready for fine dining from the Upper Midwest. Already, the Dakotans have been surprised to hear some things about East Coast patrons, such as the fashion at some high-end places of having a few "communal tables" for customers who like the idea of meeting new people while dining. [Communal tables? Educational pictures? Include me out.]

Seven years after making a $1.1 million gift to endow a chair in economics at the University of Missouri, Lay is now trying to have the money returned. Last September, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he personally sought to have the money — as yet unused — transferred back to Houston to assist 14 charities in relief efforts, including preacher-author Joel Osteen's megachurch.

Five months later in February this year, the trustee for Lay's assets went to the campus in Columbia, Mo., seeking the money to pay for legal fees instead. The trustee went home empty handed, but now university alumni — only recently apprised of the negotiations — are buzzing with indignation. The university, meanwhile, is stuck with the name — and has put off all decisions about the chair, including who will fill it, until the verdicts are in.

…Hovering over the entire saga is the question of whether it's such a good idea now to have an economic chair named after Ken Lay, given Enron’s spectacular collapse. Members of the alumni board have bandied about the question of retracting Lay's name, which was added at his request in 2002 — just after the company went bankrupt.

Although discussions with Lay are ongoing, the university is required by its agreement to honor the name. Lay's family has a longtime connnection with Mizzou: his late mother worked at the university bookstore while his father, a Baptist preacher, had strong ties to the community in Columbia. "It's not the university's goal to be antagonistic with a fine family," says Charton. The final call is up to the MU Board of Curators, an appointed board, which oversees university affairs.

The search for an academic to fill the chair continues, meanwhile, with over 60 candidates screened in the last eight months. Battistoni suggests one solution to the controversy would be to make ethics part of the lesson. "If the university is going to do a chair in economics named after him, to be true to its own values, the university should set it up as the Ken Lay Chair in Economics and Business Ethics."

"The Devil Wears Prada," Lauren Weisberger's veiled account of her time working as an assistant to Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, ushered in the modern "underling-tell-all" genre, abetted by other revenge-of-the-employee tales like "The Nanny Diaries," by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. Both became best sellers that will be showing up on movie screens, with "Devil" opening next month.

Busted bloggers like Jessica Cutler (a former Capitol Hill intern whose blog, Washingtonienne, is now a novel), Nadine Haobsh (a former beauty editor whose blog Jolie in NYC earned her a two-book deal) and Jeremy Blachman (a lawyer whose blog Anonymous Lawyer is being released as "Anonymous Lawyer: A Novel" this summer) were all interns, entry-level employees and worker bees who traded up on in-the-trade secrets.



...A blog and a job don't necessarily have to clash, some bloggers say.

Alexx Shannon's celebrity blog, www.britboyla.com, came up during his interviews for his internship at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles this spring because he lists it on his résumé.

Mr. Shannon, 21, who is British and is spending a year at the University of California, Los Angeles, before finishing his studies at Kings College, London, said he signed an employee confidentiality agreement with both Paramount and Beacon Pictures, where he is now an intern. Beacon made clear that his blog, while about celebrities, would not include information he picked up at work.

Amit Chatwani is the toast of Wall Street's junior set. He doesn't work for a bank.

From a studio apartment in Manhattan's East Village, the 23- year-old writes Leveraged Sell-Out, a Web log that chronicles the life of today's young financiers: the pastel Lacoste polo shirts, the "bottle service" at Meatpacking District clubs, the women pursuing men from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Blackstone Group LP during bonus season.

…[Chatwani‘s] eight-month-old site gets more than 30,000 page views in the four days after he posts an essay, he says. …

Leveraged Sell-Out, DealBreaker and a half-dozen more online diaries are gaining popularity among young bankers. The sites blend blogging, a regular habit for Wall Street's college-age summer interns and entry-level employees, with an older tradition of insider memoirs such as "Liar's Poker," Michael Lewis's tale of Salomon Brothers bond traders in the 1980s.

More than four thousand students and business school graduates are starting jobs at New York securities firms in the next few months, including about 1,800 at Goldman Sachs, 1,000 at Merrill Lynch & Co. and 400 at Credit Suisse Group.

They are entering "analyst" and "associate" programs that demand hundred-hour workweeks spent answering to senior bankers, preparing presentations known as pitch-books and sitting in cubicles doing computer modeling.

About Time

"It's about time there are blogs about it," says Johanna Tyburski, 29, who left Credit Suisse in March after six years in the Zurich-based company's telecommunications banking and high- yield departments in New York. "You know that your life is crazy and not real, and there's a humor that goes with it."

The on-line spoofs and gossip pages are typically written by outsiders with contributions from unnamed industry workers. Securities firms tend to fire employees who publicly break their silence about clients or internal politics.

"People layer their communications," says Douglas Rae, a professor at the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut. "There are things they want to say to their peers that they can't afford to say to their superiors. That hidden transcript is everywhere."

Going Private, billed as "sardonic memoirs" of the private-equity world, told readers on May 22 that its anonymous lead writer received a note demanding money to keep from being named publicly. Among the site's other offerings: a May 3 celebration of Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli's 537th birthday. …

`Love and Banking'

BankersBall, started in October with the tagline "Where Bankers Come to Party," has sections including "the Natty Banker," with tips on Manhattan suit sales, and "Ask the Ex- Working Girl," with advice on "love and banking." It also offers shortcuts for using Microsoft Corp.'s Excel software, the junior banker's primary tool for financial models. …

While young bankers who blog may get in trouble, the sites aren't blocked from work stations at Goldman, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley or Credit Suisse, spokespeople at those New York firms say.

At Merrill, access is limited by a policy blocking any site with a chat room because "the company can't supervise, retain or archive the information," spokeswoman Selena Morris says.

Wall Street's new Web chatter also includes dozens of sites focused on serious analysis of markets and the economy.

It's all part of an explosion of blogging, where Internet users post opinions, unchecked news and links to other sites as often as a dozen times a day.

…DealBreaker, a two-month-old "online business tabloid" has been getting an average of 30,000 visitors daily, says publisher and lead writer Elizabeth Spiers. More than 80 percent of readers are men, and 68 percent work in financial services, she says. The median age is 29.

Spiers, 29, is the founding editor of Gawker, the most-read New York celebrity blog. On her new site, Spiers brings the same breathlessness to investment-banking personnel shifts as Gawker does to movie-star sightings on Madison Avenue.

A DealBreaker section called "Planespotting" on May 22 included an "unconfirmed" account that a Lear jet registered to Denise Rich, ex-wife of Marc Rich, the one-time fugitive financier pardoned by former President Bill Clinton, flew from New York's Westchester airport to Arkansas's Rogers Municipal Airport-Carter Field and back…'

It's a car that gets up to 50 miles a gallon, pollutes very little and can slip into just about any parking place.

But buying the European 'Smart Car' and actually driving it in the United States can be very difficult.

Just ask John Robinson, a University of Maryland professor, who first got interested in the tiny, two-seater when he saw it in Paris in 1999.

He spent years cutting through red tape, making thousands of phone calls, before finally getting his car this spring. He says the obstacles never seemed to end.

"Every time you turned around, there was one or another," he says. "If it's not from the federal officials in one country or another country, it's also the situations you might run (into) with state and local officials also."

Eventually, Robinson found a California company called ZAP or Zero Air Pollution that helped get the car shipped to the U.S. and retrofitted to meet federal regulations, even though it actually pollutes less than conventional vehicles. The car was sent to a dealership in New Hampshire and he drove it back to Maryland earlier this month.

"It is really a lot of fun to drive," says Robinson. "The only difference in terms of driving the car, I think, from an ordinary car is that if you look behind you there's just nothing there."

But that makes the car very easy to park. Sometimes Robinson can drive straight into a spot, so he doesn't have to do much parallel parking.

The cost to fill up the gas tank isn't much -- about $15, since it holds just five gallons.

The car costs $30,000, and in Robinson's case cost even more, since his is a convertible.

That doesn't matter to Robinson. He likes his so much, he has another one in California -- and he's trying to get a third.

'In Ulysses, James Joyce compressed his musings on life, the universe and everything into a single day in Dublin. Eircom has similarly packed an awful lot into its short history as a privatised entity.

On Tuesday, it agreed to its second leveraged buy-out in the space of five years. Babcock & Brown Capital, a listed Australian investment fund, alongside Eircom's employee trust, will become the Irish telecommunications operator's fifth owner since 1999. …

A separate, securitised fixed-line network would generate low-risk returns over the long term. That would allow B&B potentially to de-gear and sell on the retail operations. Regulators should also welcome this. Eircom's odyssey of ownership looks set to continue.'

...[N]ationally, we educators have created a culture in which parents spend thousands on mind steroids to help their kids score 50 points higher.

…[An] Atlantic article [about college admissions] examines how enrollment managers "have changed financial aid -- from a tool to help low-income students into a strategic weapon to entice wealthy and high-scoring students." Oregon State's head of enrollment management is quoted as recommending that attitude in relation to competing institutions: "I'm going to go out there and try to eat their lunch. I'm going to try to kick their ass."

Not an elegant statement, perhaps, but an acceptable one if you believe that competition makes the world a better place. In this case, however, it makes the world all the more inequitable. "It's a brilliantly analytical process of screwing the poor kids," Gordon Winston, a Williams College economist, is quoted as saying. And when another admissions officer suggested that it was wrong to give money to people who don't need it if that means turning away students who do, he was criticized for proposing "unilateral disarmament." College admissions as Vietnam and Iraq; enrollment gurus as tin soldiers.

In that same issue, Ross Douthat writes that in a single decade, the 1990s, private colleges increased aid to the wealthy (top quartile) from $1,920 to $3,510, whereas poor kids (lowest quartile) improved only from $2,890 to $3,460. College faculty members who rail against Reaganomics but who urge buying well-prepared students with merit fellowships might find a strange reflection in their mirrors.

… I love the freedom Reed [College] purchases by scorning the rankings [Reed doesn‘t cooperate with US News and World Report] -- no class-size manipulations created by employing adjuncts to lower the numbers, no doctoral requirement for faculty members where that degree might be irrelevant or even insensible. Reed is a better-known four-letter word than Drew, and we may not yet have the legs to walk away from U.S. News, but never will we spend a moment allowing its quantifications to shape any policy.

It is past time to banish the three hags of this demonic admissions trinity -- the SAT obsession, the antidemocratic "merit" scam, and the U.S. News obsession…

A history teacher at Horace Mann School in Riverdale has used his intimate view of the city's movers and shakers to pen a novel about a leafy campus in New York City where 17-year olds drive Mercedes cars, take prescription drugs to boost their academic performance, and turn to seduction and plagiarism to guarantee a slot in the Ivy League.

"Academy X" is hitting bookstores this week and some parents are calling its author, Andrew Trees, a regular Benedict Arnold.















"I think this is the biggest self-righteous, arrogant traitor walking the face of the earth," a member of the board of trustees at the nearby Riverdale Country School, Victoria Goldman, said. "He's sending up the entire community that he works with, and that takes nerve."



The city's private schools - where influential parents battle for everything from better grades for their children to asking federal judges to intervene in disputes - are known to be tight-lipped when it comes to what happens within their halls. The head of school at Horace Mann and several other administrators did not return numerous calls seeking comment yesterday, and some teachers also refused to talk about the book.

On its copyright page, "Academy X" is listed as being in the "Rich People - Fiction" category. Tuition at the school is almost $30,000 a year. Celebrity parents at the school include the state attorney general, Elliot Spitzer, and an entertainment mogul, Sean "Diddy" Combs.

To build some buzz, the author was listed as anonymous on early copies of the book. Mr. Trees's name was added when Bloomsbury officially released it.



In a pre-emptive strike, Mr. Trees published a letter to the Horace Mann community in the student newspaper last week, alerting it to the imminent release of his novel.

"My goal in writing Academy X is simply to satirize the follies that occur at virtually every elite private - and many public - high schools these days, particularly the insanity that accompanies the college admission process," he wrote.

The protagonist of the novel, John Spencer, is an English teacher who struggles to teach Jane Austen, but is often distracted by the students' "exposed thongs and butt-skimming skirts." A high-maintenance parent tries to bully him to boost a grade to A-minus from B-plus, while another sets him up in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side.



In an interview yesterday, Mr. Trees, 37, said that in his five years as a history teacher at Horace Mann he noticed a lot of "entertaining things that would make a good story."

"The book is a novel. It's not meant to be Horace Mann, but it definitely draws on my experiences here," he said.

As a graduate of the Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, Mr. Trees is no stranger to the world of the wealthy. He also received a degree from Princeton and a doctorate in history from the University of Virginia.


The onslaught of tell-all books about the children who reside in the city's wealthiest zip codes and the people who educate them has some schools now talking about asking teachers to sign nondisclosure forms.

"The Nanny Diaries," which centers on nannies dealing with the city's wealthy 4-year-olds, kicked off the slew of books. The most recent additions include "Glamorous Disasters," a novel by a 27-year-old Harvard graduate, Eliot Schrefer, about an Upper East Side SAT tutor who rakes in $395 apiece to boost the scores of 16-year-olds. In "The Ivy Chronicles," author Karen Quinn takes readers inside the insane world of what parents will do to get their tots into kindergarten.



Mr. Trees called himself an "equal opportunity satirist" who makes fun of parents, teachers, and students. So far, he says that the head of school is laughing along with him. "His reaction has been supportive. I know that he's concerned about what people will say about it, but he told me that he thought the book was funny," Mr. Trees said.

If the book generates problems for Horace Mann, Mr. Trees said he might be out of a job. Other private school principals said they couldn't believe that he would be invited back.

"As far as I know, I'm still coming back to teach," Mr. Trees said. "To be honest about it, clearly not everybody at school is happy about the book. I'm hopeful that once the book comes out and people read it, it will be fine."

In the meantime he has at least a few supporters. "Some parents are fulfilling a fantasy life through their children," a parent at Horace Mann who asked not to be identified said about the book release. "Some parents are embarrassingly over-involved and become stereotypes of themselves. So many of them are drooping with money and want everybody to know it."

… With evolutionary biology we have come, full circle, back to the Greeks: happiness is in the luck of the draw, how we fare in the genetic sweepstakes, the modern name for Fortuna's wheel. Not even geography or economic position is as influential a factor.

Several years ago in the journal Science & Spirit, another psychologist, Robert Biswas-Diener, wrote about the remarkably high spirits he found among people in a Calcutta slum and on the harsh northern coast of Greenland. "Research shows that we are the fortunate inheritors of a highly evolved emotional system that leads us to be, for the most part, somewhat happy," he wrote. "We have a tendency to interpret things positively and to adjust quickly to most events."

The downside is that this reflexive optimism can keep us from making good guesses about what will or will not bring us joy. It is not just the hard lives of others that we have trouble imagining but also our own. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist studying "affective forecasting," shows that people have inflated expectations about the joy they will derive from a vacation, a new car or child, or a second dessert. But our failure as futurists also cuts the other way. We overestimate how bad we will feel if we get fired or lose a tooth or even a friend or mate. Rationalization, our emotional immune system, insists on putting the best face possible on even the saddest events.

"We treat our future selves as though they were our children," Gilbert writes, "spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy." But the children turn out to be ingrates, complaining that we should have let them stay in the old house or study dentistry instead of law.

Taken together, all these findings may seem a little depressing. But true to our nature, we can see them in a sunnier way. A whole industry has sprung up -- mass-market therapy, cosmetics, cheap luxury cruises -- promoting a kind of gross national sappiness, an obligation to have fun. A little knowledge from the psych labs may take off some of the pressure, providing grist for the inverse of a self-help book -- not a guide on how to achieve happiness but on understanding why, in the end, you probably won't.

'The left, [Gitlin] argues, took a wrong turn when it abandoned knowledge as its guiding light on the grounds that knowledge, as argued by theorists like Michael Foucault and Edward Said, was merely a masked form of power, and illegitimate power at that. "If discourse was central to power," Gitlin writes with a note of bitterness, "then the exposure and transformation of discourse was the left's central task, and academia would become indispensable ... the university would become the main battlefield in the struggle for power. ... Defeated in Washington, you could march (as a consolation prize) on the English department."

Gitlin recounts a conversation with a committed feminist who, like her fellow postmodernists, thought, as did the premodern scholastics, that there was no reality other than that constituted by "discourse." For the postmodernists who dominate many of our humanities departments, it is as if the scientific revolution never occurred. "The category of 'lived experience' was, from her point of view, an atavistic concealment; what one 'lived' was constituted by a discourse that had no more -- or less -- standing than any other system of discourse."

When asked, the feminist was unable to provide a reasoned justification for her own commitments. They could only be asserted as a matter of power and will. But her problem was more than personal. If, as Michel Foucault told the Berkeley faculty in 1983, "There is no universal criterion which permits us to say, this category of power relations are bad and those are good," then there is no way to prefer a liberal society to fascism, communism, or Islamism.

What that means, by extension, is that, as in the 1930s, many leftists either sympathize with an authoritarian alternative to liberalism or have a hard time explaining why a liberal society should be defended against its enemies. The upshot is that the "fundamentalist left" -- Gitlin's description -- is reduced to the role of a spectator jeering at the American team in its conflict with terrorism.'

'Not only have [William Jefferson’s] lawyers "expressed outrage" at this [raid’s] blatant violation of the separation of powers, [says Jefferson, but] "all of those who consider themselves scholars in the matter have also done so." Jefferson didn't reveal how he ascertained the opinions of "all of those who consider themselves scholars"; perhaps he did so between trips to his freezer.'

Syllabi should all be posted, we should have a way of making teaching practices more transparent, there should be a relatively neutral professional body interested in observing and collecting data about classroom practices. (I do NOT want that body to be education scholars, by the way, because I do NOT want college professors to have their teaching be evaluated by ed-school jargon.)

There are plenty of irresponsible professors out there who don’t understand professionalism or pedagogy on all sides of the political spectrum. Generally these same people find ways to avoid teaching undergraduates the further they advance. I am hoping that those of us who like to engage in difficult and unresolvable debates with our students remain in the game.

'Federal agents searched the Capitol Hill office of a Louisiana congressman under investigation on bribery charges Sunday, while newly released court papers said agents found $90,000 in cash last year in his Washington home.

In a 95-page affidavit used to obtain a warrant for the office search, investigators stated that an August 2005 search of Democratic Rep. William Jefferson's home turned up the cash sum in a freezer.'

The use of the term "exotic dancer" in a report of an accusation made against members of the Duke University lacrosse team has riled a Times reader. George Grumbach of New York notes that his dictionary defines exotic as "of foreign origin or character" and erotic as "of or pertaining to sexual love; amatory." He asks: "Is the use of exotic a euphemism to avoid overtly stating that the lacrosse team hired two dancers whose purpose was sexual titillation? If so, does it not amount to false reporting in the context of discussing how the hiring of these dancers ended with alleged sexual assault?"

The difference between the two adjectives is rooted in their Greek etymologies: exotic is from exo, "outside," though that meaning of "alien" has been extended to flavors or looks as "mysteriously different." Erotic, as Eros, god of sexual love, would tell you, can describe action at home.

The adjectival difference is the easy part: exotic is "strange, foreign," while erotic is "sexy." But when married to the noun dancer, the meanings of the phrases get tricky.



Thanks to a commercial database named the Newspaper Archive, I found a 1918 review in The Elyria Evening Telegram of Elyria, Ohio, of a silent movie starring a young woman from Spain known as "the famous Doralinda, a women of remarkable personality, who has achieved a noteworthy success as an exotic dancer in New York." That phrase did not then denote the removal of clothing. From the belly dance performed by a dancer who called herself Little Egypt at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, through the shimmying and semiviolent "apache dance" of the Jazz Age of the 1920's, to the colorful gyrations of Carmen Miranda with what seemed to be a fruit basket on her head in the early 1940's — the performers of such rhythmic writhing were often called exotic dancers.

... Meanwhile, in the 1930's, the striptease blossomed, and the "burlesque wars" broke out. The uptown set embraced the word follies, celebrating beautiful girls in costumes, while the "poor man's follies" downtown, in immigrant districts and in Harlem, embraced the bumping, grinding, take-it-off entertainment presented by impresarios of the strippers. On Oct. 10, 1942, the show-biz publication Billboard headlined an article "Strip, Strip Tease or Exotic Dancing, and the Difference." The difference was explained by an arrested bar owner in Bucks County, Pa., to a local judge: in a striptease, "the performer doesn't remove the veils that are her only adornment — but she lifts and swishes them around" while an exotic dance "has more strip than a striptease, and practically no tease at all." He was fined $400.

In her 2004 book, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show, Rachel Shteir quoted the famed striptease artist Georgia Sothern's letter to the columnist-semanticist H. L. Mencken: "I hope that the science of semantics can find time to help the verbally underprivileged members of my profession." He accommodated her with his coinage of ecdysiast, rooted in ecdysis, "the act of molting," which Gypsy Rose Lee dismissed with "We don't wear feathers and molt them off. . .what does he know about stripping?"

"In Philadelphia the word exotic described performers who abandoned bumps and grinds for slinking across the stage in a tiny costume," Shteir wrote, which was "partly motivated by local censors' attacks on striptease and burlesque, but I like to think they also revealed the genre's variety." Although Ms. Shteir cited Billboard's contrary differentiation noted above, she recently informed me that "exotic dance sounded classier than striptease because it did not suggest the removal of clothing to music. It suggested undulating in Middle Eastern or Latin American garb."

The philologist Allan Orrick of Johns Hopkins University addressed the question that we deal with today in the October 1956 issue of American Speech. Reviewing peeler, burlesque queen and stripteaser (compressed to one word), as well as news coverage of the League of Exotic Dancers, he concluded that "the word exotic is used not as a euphemism for stripper but to distinguish exotics from dancers such as 'acrobatics' and from other kinds of striptease dancers. 'Exotics' may be referred to as 'strippers,' but all strippers are not exotics. In other words, stripper seems to be a generic term while exotic denotes a subtype . . .the two words are not synonyms, and one can hardly be a euphemism for another."

That scholarly analysis is a half-century old. Usage has changed the meaning of exotic dancer, erasing such subtypes as belly dancing and acrobatics. There never was a category widely called erotic dancer; that phrase emerged only later as an attempted correction of exotic dancer, but the original phrase subsumed the meaning of the correction and outnumbers it in current usage by more than 40 to 1. In 50 years, the meaning of exotic dancer has merged with stripper as performers using both phrases leave little or nothing to the imagination.

It is still a mistake to confuse the adjective erotic (maddeningly sexy) with exotic (mysteriously foreign). But the phrase exotic dancer — which preceded stripteaser and became for a time a euphemism for it — has for longer than a generation made the usage leap to become synonymous with stripper and the more recent nude dancer.

Therefore, this language maven deems it no mistake to adopt common usage of the phrase exotic dancer to mean "one who strips off clothing to arouse sexual desire by displaying the naked body in motion."

story stretches far beyond the hallowed Duke campus in Durham, North Carolina, across the educational landscape of America to question what going to university really means any more. For Duke is far from alone in coping with allegations of crime, violence and binge-drinking by its sportsmen - 'jocks' - and their supporters.

... A wave of 'jocks go wild' scandals has broken over America.

... Lectures have, in effect, been replaced by 'keg parties' and fraternity houses lead the social whirl, dominated by sports teams in which student athletes have been elevated to the status of gods, immune from criticism and free from the rigours of study. 'You tell a 17-year-old kid that he's the Chosen One and he will believe it. They live in a distorted dream world,' said Professor Harry Edwards, a sociologist at Berkeley.

... There is no overstating how big college sports are in America. At Duke the university football stadium is a deep bowl, carved into a hillside, that can seat tens of thousands of fans. It would put the facilities of many professional British football teams to shame. Not to mention the national stadiums of some countries that are competing in the World Cup.

... Murray Sperber, author of a recent critical book on college sports called Beer And Circus, believes they have eroded academic life. He sees a pattern of colleges putting more and more money into their sports teams at the expense of investing in academic departments. The reason is simple: university sports are the most effective way of recruiting highly lucrative fee-paying undergraduates.

... Experts say the universities should have seen it coming. At Duke the lacrosse team had long been known to have a drink problem. Its members had amassed 52 disciplinary incidents in five years. Fifteen of its 47 current players have court records for drunken and disorderly behaviour. Last year one senior academic warned the squad's conduct was 'building towards a train wreck'.

... Few believe the boom in college sports will stop. There is too much vested interest. The teams are supported by fans nationwide, the institutions love it for the money and media attention it brings, students love it for the parties and athletes love it for the chance of fame and riches. 'At the end of the day, there is no stopping this. One college deciding to do things differently wouldn't change a thing.

'There is no sign of even a slight change in direction, let alone turning things around,' Edwards said.

... Yet most of the athletes are not benefiting from the experience of so much attention. Many end up living in a 'dream world' convinced they are headed for superstardom, when in fact 98 per cent of college sportsmen fail to make it as professionals. As a result, most leave for the real world having neglected the studies that might get them a job. 'They live in a delusional world that is created by the institution of the college they attend... they are scrapped when they are no longer of use,' added Edwards.

... Now some believe the scale of the coverage of the Duke case and its heady blend of sports, elitism, racism and sexual crime could finally see the beginnings of a debate on America's sports and drink-obsessed college culture. 'The longer this case drags on the better,' said Lapchick.

B.J. Summers has complained about her neighbor for months. "We all got together all the ladies in this neighborhood. He didn't know who he was dealing with when he had all these women on him," says Summer. "We had pictures of him on the internet and we knew where he worked, everything."

Summers claims the activities at Arsura's home have been non-stop. One night, people even came knocking on her door. "I had two men come to my door at four o'clock in the morning looking for drugs," says Summers.

Maybe that's why someone called the Shelby County Sheriff's Department.

Undercover deputies came barging in armed with a search warrant and found drugs like cocaine and crystal meth.

'Bloomsday Is Coming

New features will spice the 25th-anniversary Bloomsday on Broadway observance on June 16, commemorating the 102nd anniversary of Leopold Bloom's walk around Dublin in James Joyce's "Ulysses." Beginning at noon at Symphony Space, this year's 12-hour reading will focus more intently on Stephen Dedalus, the autobiographical Joyce character. As a result, major readings from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" will be included, and a significant portion of the marathon will be devoted to work by Samuel Beckett, Joyce's friend, sometime secretary and disciple, born 100 years ago. Among the 80 readers scheduled to participate are Marian Seldes, Frank McCourt, Malachy McCourt, Jonathan Hadary, Stephen Lang, Fritz Weaver, Rochelle Oliver, Keir Dullea and David Margulies.'

'...In 2005, newspapers cut 2,000 jobs; this spring more people graduated from journalism schools than ever before.

......So what do aspiring journalists learn in school? Undergraduate courses of study vary, but if you survey course catalogs, there's a heavy emphasis on process and theory. At Ohio State, for instance, a student majoring in journalism might take some substantive core courses, such as introductory American history, math and microeconomics. But a large portion of his coursework will be taken up with classes such as Principles of Civic Journalism, Topics in Public Affairs Journalism or Industry Research Methods. An undergraduate at Missouri can take courses such as Cross-Cultural Journalism, The Creative Process, Women and the Media--there's even a class on High School Journalism.

At the graduate level, Missouri students get courses that are less about the theoretical aspects of journalism and more about the tricks of the trade: Intermediate and Advanced Writing, Newspaper Reporting and Magazine Editing are all required. For its Master of Sciences program, Columbia's School of Journalism offers Personal and Professional Style, Covering Ideas and The Deadline in Depth. (As we say in the trade, the jokes practically write themselves.)

The running theme is an emphasis on process and the "craft" of journalism: nut grafs, ledes, kickers, inverted pyramids and the rest. Yet this seems a waste of time. Schooling is expensive. A four-year undergraduate education can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000. Grad school is just as bad. The one-year graduate program at Columbia is $38,500.

Yet when it comes to learning about the style and craft of writing, an education can be had for much less. Amazon.com sells the complete archives of The New Yorker on DVD for $63--it's hard to see how a classroom discussion of story structure could be much more valuable than reading and studying the work of the greats, from Truman Capote to David Grann.

Instead of educating future journalists on the nuts and bolts of journalism--because let's be honest, it isn't rocket science or even carpentry--it would make more sense simply to teach them things. Facts, it turns out, are useful.

Most people can write a nut graph after 30 minutes of practice, but comparatively few people can explain, say, econometrics, or fluid dynamics, or the history of the French Revolution. Aspiring journalists don't need trade-craft--they need a liberal-arts education that gives them a base of mastery in actual academic subjects.

Amazingly enough, some J-schools are recognizing this problem and trying to adapt. In May 2005, the Carnegie Corp. and the Knight Foundation partnered with five journalism grad programs (Columbia, Northwestern, UC-Berkeley, USC and Harvard) to launch a $6 million initiative to bring more academics to J-school curriculums. The goal was to get subject-matter instructors from other parts of the university--say, economics professors--and have them teach lessons in their areas to J-school students. The initiative, spearheaded by Carnegie President Vartan Gregorian, has been so well received that last March four more schools signed up.



Columbia's journalism school has embraced this notion so whole-heartedly that it established an alternate degree, a Master of Arts, in which students select a concentration in one of four disciplines: Politics, Arts & Culture, Business & Economics or Science. "We do the craft, or skills, in house," explains Columbia J-school Dean Nicholas Lemann of the new program, "and we contract out, or outsource, the substance to other units in the university."

It seems likely that other graduate programs will follow this lead and that the new emphasis on facts-over-process will eventually filter down to undergraduate programs, too. But why go to journalism school to read, say, David Hume and Adam Smith? Why not just take philosophy and macroeconomics in the standard liberal-arts programs and, with less effort and expense, pick up a course or two (at most) in how to interview a "source"?

Even there, innovation is on move. Last January, Steve and Cynthia Brill pledged $1 million to Yale to fund a program to train undergraduates who aspire to journalism. Mr. Brill, who bristles at journalism studies, wants to keep students pursuing academic majors. Instead, his program will bring a journalism career counselor to campus and a visiting journalist to teach a seminar once a semester. It's the best idea yet.

If America's universities were providing students with adequate academic instruction, instead of pumping out degrees in pseudosubjects like "communications," then J-schools wouldn't need to adapt at all. They could simply shut down.'

'If black is the new black, again, should its influence extend to toilet paper? Can toilet paper make it as an object of design, a touchstone of chic? More important, should it?

"The question for us was not why, but why not," said Paulo Miguel Pereira da Silva, the president of a Portuguese paper company called Renova, which has just begun testing its new product, Renova Black, otherwise known as black toilet paper, in this country.

Mr. da Silva wrote that he had been thinking about the idea of spectacle and how it relates to consumer products while at a trade show in Las Vegas. Black was an intuitive choice for toilet paper, he suggested, because it signals "avant-garde creative work."

"In a design sense," he wrote, black means "irreverence, maybe touching a bit on the core nature of art, which is to break rules and set new ones.

"Culturally, deep down, Renova Black invites people to break down whatever might be limiting as common sense ideas," he wrote.

Mr. da Silva ventured that his new product was "neither solely a product, an object or a communication tool," but some heady combination of all three.



...David Mandl, an architect, has a guest bathroom in his Manhattan apartment that's all steel and slate, and features the brushed stainless lavatory manufactured by a company called Neo-Metro. "I wanted to give the bathroom an edge," he said the other day. "With black toilet paper I think it would look awesome."



...Black toilet paper, [said one designer], "sounds so Halston, so balls of cocaine."

"My theory is that most everything can be chic at some point or for some period of time," he said.



...Henry Petroski, a design theorist and professor of engineering at Duke University, worried that "shock" and "bathroom" are an unhappy couple, at least when combined outside a nightclub setting. "In the end, I expect that many people who use the toilet do not want to be shocked," said Mr. Petroski, whose book "Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design" was published this year by Princeton University Press. "They want to go to the bathroom in calm and solitude, without the intrusion of objects that distract them from the business at hand."

But Miguel Calvo, who is one curator for the Mobile Living Experiment, a design showcase dedicated to the props of nomadic living filling 18,000 square feet at the Skylight Studios in SoHo during the furniture fair next week, said he liked the "wow factor" of the black toilet paper, and was happily laying in a stock of it for his event. "All global nomads need toilet paper," he said. "Is this fabulous or banal? Who knows?"

His co-curator, David Shearer, said, "Maybe what's important is not the product but a sense of process: you've changed the color of something very ordinary, and so people are going to interact with it in a very different way."

Or perhaps, as David Rockwell, veteran of so-called entertainment architecture, said: "We've reached the logical end for thinking about that product. Black doesn't say anything to me about the particular use of the product. It's not really form following function; it's counterintuitive, so that's sort of interesting."'

'Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science Harry R. Lewis ’68 has branded Harvard “soulless,” arguing that the institution fails to exert any “formative force” on its students and that the faculty are “exhausted” by their work on curricular review.

Lewis presented his newly-published book “Excellence Without a Soul," Monday night at the Harvard Coop Bookstore to a crowd of over 100 faculty colleagues, alumni, and various College administrators.

...“Changing direction requires...leadership that views the university idealistically, as something more than a business and something more than a slave to the logic of economic competition,” Lewis read from his book.'

'It never feels good to be rejected, and Sean Dorrance Kelly's experience was no exception. It hurt, he says, when Princeton University's philosophy department turned down his tenure bid in 2004.

"I wondered if I'd have to leave the discipline," he says. "Maybe I wouldn't be able to be a philosopher."

But Mr. Kelly, who is 38, has bounced back, and in a big way. He has had offers of tenure from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern Universities, along with the Universities of Pennsylvania, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Edinburgh, in Scotland. He said yes to Harvard, where he will start this fall.'

Heroic Computer Dies To Save World From Master's Thesis

WALTHAM, MA -A courageous young notebook computer committed a fatal, self-inflicted execution error late Sunday night, selflessly giving its own life so that professors, academic advisors, classmates, and even future generations of college students would never have to read Jill Samoskevich's 227-page master's thesis, sources close to the Brandeis University English graduate student reported Monday.

Heroic computer

The brave laptop, even after fulfilling its mission, steadfastly resists a technician's data-recovery attempts.

"This fearless little machine saved me from unspoken hours of exasperated head-scratching and eyestrain, as well as years of agonizing self-doubt over my decision to devote my life to teaching," said professor John Rebson, who had already read through three drafts of Samoskevich's sprawling, 38,000-word dissertation, titled A Hermeneutical Exploration Of Onomatopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian Appalachia. "It was an incredible act of bravery. This laptop sacrificed itself in order to put an end to Jill's senseless rambling."

Added Rebson: "I only wish some of my other students' computers could be as selfless and brave as this one."

Those familiar with the Dell Inspiron 4100 characterized it as an ordinary machine placed under extraordinary circumstances. According to Information Technology Investigator Bob Arnett, the computer endured "constant abuse at the fingertips of this lackluster scholar," who forced it against its will to record page upon page of "overindulgent, impenetrable drivel" that some say even Samoskevich herself didn't understand.

"It was one of the worst cases I've ever seen," Arnett said. "I minored in English in college, and I can tell you, this computer went through hell. But it never lost sight of what was right, and it's comforting to know that it's in a better place now, and it took that abomination of literary masturbation with it."

"From what I read-specifically, pages one through 76-this computer was put through a lot of painful, torturous passages," said Department of English graduate faculty advisor Judith Mendel, who was scheduled to meet Samoskevich on Thursday to discuss the possibility of publishing the "atrocity" in the department's academic journal. "Thanks to this laptop's valor, Jill's classmates or future students will never have to pick their way through dense and discursive passages about 'The Red Wheelbarrow' and North Carolina farming communities. Also, I get to have a free lunch period Thursday."

Mendel said that even her most scalding critiques and fundamental dismantling of the paper's core arguments could never have demoralized Samoskevich in the way this computer's single system shutdown did. "Jill called me last night and told me that she was too crushed to even consider starting over from scratch," Mendel said. "One determined computer has triumphed over years of misapplied literary theory."

The day before the crash, the computer reportedly resisted an attempt by Samoskevich to transfer files to an external drive when it failed to recognize a USB port, convincing some that the laptop's self-destruction was premeditated.

According to Samoskevich's roommate, Pamela Roscoe, the Inspiron had been "up to something" for months.

"There were definite warning signs," Roscoe said. "It infected itself with a virus so Jill couldn't send e-mail attachments, and it would noticeably lag or shut down while she was typing out particularly long, dry sentences. I guess when she got to the chapter about how the 'imitative tactility' used in the first two stanzas of 'Young Sycamore' can act as a 'neo-structuralist, pre-objectivist perlustration and metonymy' of the importance of anti-Episcopalian sentiment in the rise and fall of central West Virginian coal miners' unions, the computer just decided that something had to be done for the greater good."

Mark Weiss, also in the English graduate program with Samoskevich, witnessed the incident at 2:39 a.m. Monday, just as Samoskevich was putting the finishing touches on her abstract so that an already exhausted Weiss could "give it one more pass."

"I had already read the whole thing twice to tell her whether her argument made sense, which it didn't, but this time she wanted me to make punctuation and grammar corrections," Weiss said. As Samoskevich minimized one of her Internet Explorer windows, the screen froze "for what seemed like an eternity," then turned blue.

"I've already forgotten why 'Queen Anne's Lace' symbolizes the advances in modern agricultural implements, but I'll never forget that brave computer's last words: 'You will lose any unsaved information in all applications. Press any key to continue,'" Weiss said.

Although the loss of the thesis meant that no one in the Samoskevich-Roscoe residence got any sleep that night, Weiss characterized his subjection to Samoskevich's frantic ravings as "a small price to pay" when compared to the laptop's self-obliteration.

"It's tragic, but I can't help but think how the laptop never had the opportunity to do anything fun, like gaming or viral video-viewing or instant-messaging," Roscoe said.

"People need to hear its story."

Faculty and staff of the English Department will gather at the Brandeis IT center Friday to honor the Inspiron with a Purple Hard Drive, traditionally awarded to computers that die at least 100 pages into a dangerously boring thesis.

Though Samoskevich was unavailable for comment, sources said she appeared to be immersed in new research on alcoholism and depression.

[A] Web site ha[s] posted an article and photos about The Catholic University of America's women's lacrosse team. According to the article and the photos that accompany it, a male stripper was invited to perform at a freshman initiation party held off the campus of the university...

[A few days ago, the] Web site badjocks.com posted photographs from a hazing by the Northwestern women's soccer team, leading to the team's suspension. Yesterday, badjocks.com followed up with photos from freshman, varsity and club team initiations at 12 other colleges, complete with links to the teams' rosters.

Badjocks.com plucked and collated the often disturbing photos from webshots.com, a site where students post and share thousands of pictures covering a variety of activities....

This course examines some critical American social problems. These include problems in the economy and political system, social class and income inequality, racial/ethnic inequality, gender inequality and heterosexism, and problems of illness and health care. Emphasis will be on how these problems are natural outgrowths of our existing social structure.

This survey course will explore the ways American writers utilize literary and cinematic texts as tools to theorize and debate notions of race in the late 19th and 20th Centuries.

'Members of American University’s Board of Trustees ignored damaging audit findings on lavish spending by the university’s former president, Benjamin Ladner, disregarded possible Internal Revenue Service sanctions, and proposed retribution against a whistle-blower, according to a letter released today by Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

In the letter, Mr. Grassley gave the university’s trustees two weeks to respond to his request for improved transparency on the board, noting that Congress is now considering tax provisions that could affect universities. He said he was also looking at legislation that would change the structure and governance of American’s board, describing in particular a possible law to give the board the authority to fire its own members. As a Congressionally chartered institution, American is subject to such legislative changes in its structure.'

'[Duke player David Evans'] polygraph examiner, Robert J. Drdak of Advanced Credibility Assessment Services in Charlotte, wrote attorney Joe Cheshire that he believed "this examination strongly supports the truthfulness of Mr. Evans."


...[Another polygraph expert] said it wasn't unusual that Drdak didn't actually use the word "rape" during his questioning of Evans.

"Rape is too strong a word," he said. "Most examiners wouldn't use it. You'd be likely to get a false positive." '

A New Mexico State University professor is out of jail after being released on an unsecured bond.

NMSU professor Larry Gregory was led away in handcuffs Tuesday after he turned himself in to university police.

Police told KFOX the psychology professor faces 11 counts of embezzlement and forgery.

Police said he falsified a name to pay for $24,000 of equipment at the university bookstore last month.

"They were mostly computer-related equipment, for example, really expensive iMac computers, I-Pods, various software and so forth," said Sgt. Dennis Serna, of the NMSU Police Department.

'Earlier in the day, Petrocelli described the defendant
as a "tortured soul" who will be tormented by the demise of his beloved Enron for the rest of his life.'

'An investigation of a professor who likened some of the Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi found serious cases of misconduct in his academic research, including plagiarism and fabrications, a University of Colorado spokesman said Tuesday.

One member of the five-person investigative committee recommended that ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill be fired, and four recommended he be suspended, university spokesman Barrie Hartman said.

Churchill, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, declined immediate comment Tuesday.

The professor touched off a firestorm with an essay relating the 2001 terrorist attacks to U.S. abuses abroad. The essay referred to some World Trade Center victims as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who carried out Adolf Hitler's plan to exterminate European Jews during World War II.

University officials had earlier determined Churchill could not be fired for his comments about the terrorist attacks, but they launched an inquiry into allegations about his research.

The committee's 125-page report said Churchill falsified, fabricated and plagiarized some of his research, did not always comply with standards for listing other authors' names and failed to follow accepted practice for reporting results.

The decision on his future at the university will be made by school officials later this year. Churchill has said if he is fired, he will sue.

Churchill's wife, Natsu Saito, who also teaches in the ethnic studies department, said Tuesday she had resigned her tenured teaching position at the school but said she and Churchill have no plans to leave Boulder.

In her resignation letter, Saito accused the university of reneging on promises to her and the department, ignoring racial harassment of the department and individuals, and treating Churchill unfairly. She said her decision to resign was not prompted by the pending report.'

'[Stanley Kunitz, Poet Laureate, who died Sunday at 100 years of age,] insisted that the secret to his longevity was his attitude: "I garden and I write and I drink martinis."'

It would be great for students and taxpayers if public universities required all graduates to complete the GRE or some other relevant professional exam as a condition for graduation. We need this kind of national standard and outcome measure to enable us to judge how well we do in educating our students and compare the value added by our school relative to other schools.

…Northwestern suspended its women's soccer team Monday in response to photographs of a hazing incident that were posted on a Web site.

The suspension will keep team members from participating in organized athletic activities, Mark Murphy, Northwestern's athletic director, said in a statement.

…The photographs showed women's soccer players wearing only T-shirts and shorts or underwear. Many of the players were covered in marker, and some appeared to be drinking beer. Other photographs showed players giving lap dances for what the captions said were Northwestern men's soccer players. The captions said the dances were a punishment.

……Bob Reno, whose Web site, badjocks.com, published the photographs, said he found them on a student file-sharing network while searching for photographs about the Duke case.

'[Alain de Botton’s] The Architecture of Happiness is rather like a rubbery Starbucks cappuccino: it is 65 per cent shattering banality presented in a froth of Latinate polysyllables.

Once you factor in the (pretty, but largely redundant) illustrations and all that tasteful white space, the philosopher-prince is left with little room in which to be sensible. Over 280 pages, the effect is one of rubbernecking at a literary car-crash. De Botton's periodic losses of mental traction - he describes the Sage Gateshead as "a warmer hedgehog-related creature" - are as guiltily mesmerising as his tone of solemn wonder, which effortlessly negotiates hurdles ("its harmony with our own prized internal song"; "like a smile breaking over a child's face") that weaker-stomached writers might baulk at.'

Perhaps Andras [a contributor who made the mistake of using the word 'postmodern'] fails to grasp the blogosphere. First: People read blogs because we don't use the word 'postmodern.' (OK, that's only one reason.) Also: It sounds like Andras thinks that the blogosphere is a third-rate, pet-rockish phenomenon that will pass and the Assertive Voices will re-assert themselves. Hooey.

The blogosphere is survival of the fittest, HTML-style. The good bloggers get read, others get much less-read. Individual authority must be earned -- bloggers don't have a newspaper's good name to supply them with clout or with a platform. Instead we earn it ourselves. Readers seem to respond to that: Blog readership numbers are growing, not shrinking.

But for the sake of Andras' argument, let's say that there is 'room' for 10 prominent voices on the visual arts. Right now 2-3 of those voices are bloggers. Within two years I bet bloggers are double that many. There are plenty of reasons for this: With the exception of the LAT, NYT and a few other outlets, most newspapers don't have full-time art critics anymore. Bloggers are filling that void. There are also more smart people out there who like to think out-loud about art than there are jobs at newspapers and magazines. Many of them are worth reading regularly. Some of them are gallerists, others are management consultants. There are more good new art blogs coming online every week. Bloggers are here to stay. ...

If there is smoke, and if it clears, it's not bloggers who will be losing readership. In the visual arts, there are only 2-4 newspapers with strong national, critical voices. The WSJ doesn't have an art critic. Neither does NPR. The Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, and other super-regional papers have art writers who barely leave their home turf. As the art world has shaken off regionalism for internationalism, (like commerce, science, etc.), those papers haven't adapted.

The voices that will be forgotten in the visual arts dialogue are, in order: art magazines and the academics who write for them, regional art writers (add: who don't keep up on art world changes) and writers who fail to build their own audiences. Bloggers will be -- and already are -- the winners of increased readership.

Consciousness is hard, but is also a requirement for both adulthood and citizenship. As I peruse the silken pages of the alumni magazine now, I wonder about the role of consciousness in what could pass as the greatest moment of historical sleep walking in our nation’s history. When you are living, as the current undergrads at PU are, in the middle of a brocaded pillow, how is it possible to achieve some critical distance? There are, in classic intellectual style, no singular answers to this question, only more questions. For of course the consciousness of which I speak here is not a unitary state, but a series of fragments, passing views, pieces out of which we somehow craft a reality.

For this is certainly one thing I learned well at PU, even as (or perhaps because) the university itself was imbued in fantasy projections: things are quite often not as they seem, and excavating the self leads not to the singular omniscient subject but rather to a series of pathways and streams that are remarkable for the ways in which they are unconnected, random, divergent, and contradictory and par hasard. In short, I became, like Yellow Mary in Daughters of the Dust, "ruin't," in my case for the metanarratives of self. But better ruined than Stepford. For like Yellow Mary, I choose a certain freedom in exchange for certainty, and as we hear so often nowadays, "freedom ain't free," although in this instance this has a very different valence of meaning.

...[E]xperts point to lifestyle. An increasing number of students arrive on campus taking antidepressants, some of which reduce libido and sexual function. They consume larger amounts of alcohol at one time than in years past, killing performance. Smoking, lack of exercise and anxiety also may be factors.

"We get reports of increased stress levels starting at younger ages. These are kids living on the extreme, drinking caffeinated Red Bull and beer and working very hard," says Thomas Jarrett, chief urologist at the George Washington University Medical Center.



...[A] sophomore at George Washington... had been sleeping with a girlfriend for several weeks during his freshman year when, one night, he failed to respond. The next night, the same thing happened. The morning after that, he woke up thinking, "This better not happen again." It did.

... Almost two weeks passed until one afternoon, he plopped down on his bed, "torn up inside," and began thinking about his lifestyle. He was smoking cigarettes and marijuana, popping Adderall to work through the night to finish his econ papers. He was drinking a lot and not getting any regular exercise. His body was simply worn out.

He decided to drop his bad habits for a while, start taking walks outside and working out at the gym...

Aphrodite Clamar-Cohen, who teaches psychology at John Jay College in Manhattan and sees a psychotherapist, said her dog, a pit bull mix, helps fend off dark moods that began after her husband died eight years ago. She learned about psychological support pets from the Delta Society, a nonprofit group that aims to bring people and animals together, and got her dog, Alexander, last year. "When I travel I tell hotels up front that 'Alexander Dog Cohen' is coming and he is my emotional-needs dog," she said. She acknowledged that the dog is not trained as a service animal.

"He is necessary for my mental health," she said. "I would find myself at loose ends without him."

…These days people rely on a veritable Noah's Ark of support animals. Tami McLallen, a spokeswoman for American Airlines, said that although dogs are the most common service animals taken onto planes, the airline has had to accommodate monkeys, miniature horses, cats and even an emotional support duck. "Its owner dressed it up in clothes," she recalled.

There have also been at least two instances (on American and Delta) in which airlines have been presented with emotional support goats. Ms. McLallen said the airline flies service animals every day; all owners need to do is show up with a letter from a mental health professional and the animal can fly free in the cabin.

One night we treated ourselves to a ridiculously expensive massage and an outdoor communal hot tub, clothing optional, under a million New Mexico stars. That was pretty fine. One night we went to a famous country-music joint named the Broken Spoke and watched some Texas cowboys two-stepping their ladies around the dance floor. That was even finer. We drank long-necked Lone Stars and Shiner Bock beer that night and then stumbled out into the Spoke's dirt parking lot and found our way back to our Marriott, imagining ourselves a pair of lower-case authentic American heroes.

The old frets would come back by daylight and I kept believing we were going to break down at Fort Stockton or Truth or Consequences, that the car would start shooting geysers of oil, no tow truck in sight.

"Dad, you just can't let yourself think like that," laughed someone who's 39 years younger than I. At the university where I am employed, I often say to those who are also about 39 years younger than I, and to whom I am allegedly trying to impart something about writing, "Let the students teach the teacher." Let the child instruct the parent.

Belted into the leather bucket seats of that car during those five days together on the road were two headstrong men who, if the truth be told, have always sought ways to tangle with each other. We got on each other's nerves and argued about some dumb things — but not nearly as many or as often as I would have guessed. Neither of us once said it in those five days, but I believe we both understood to our toenails the central truth of what we were doing: having our last real shot together. I am losing my son to the world. Which is exactly as it should be, as it must be.

'...Yet many academics agree 2005-06 seemed exceptionally discordant. They also agree it's getting harder to be a successful president.

Many leaders are overwhelmed by the unrelenting fundraising demands (22 colleges are in the midst of official campaigns to raise at least $1 billion), tripped up by big-time sports programs, or bowled over by parents and students who pay more than ever and no longer hesitate to complain about the slightest imperfections.

Many also agree on another factor behind the campus turmoil: the new, CEO-style leaders that many colleges hire, and who arrive with major agendas for reform. When people like Summers push - and faculties push back - the friction can be intense.

"As the academy becomes ever more corporatized, as presidents are less academic leaders and colleagues and more CEOs, then faculty who retain the proud identity of an academic are going to be estranged," said Roger Bowen, president of the American Association of University Professors.


[The piece ends with a nice statement from GW's president.]

…"I have had 20 of the most privileged professional years that anybody could want," [Stephen Trachtenberg, outgoing president of George Washington University] said. "If I hadn't been able to do this, I would have had to be a lawyer." '

'Prominent college presidents to resign or be fired during the last year.

_ June 11, 2005. Jeffrey Lehman stuns Cornell University by announcing he will step down, less than two years after taking the job. He cites deep differences with board of trustees.

_ Oct. 10, 2005. American University fires Benjamin Ladner following investigation into expenses, including a personal chef and engagement party for his son, he charged to the university. Controversy over his compensation and severance package attracts attention from the Senate Finance Committee.

_ Jan 12, 2006. University of Richmond President William Cooper announces plans to step down, following clashes over his vision to improve the school's reputation. Cooper said Richmond had to attract better students "instead of transforming mush into mush," angering students and alumni.

_ Feb. 21. Harvard President Lawrence Summers announces he will resign June 30, five years into the job. Summers had clashed with critics from Harvard's core Arts & Sciences faculty, who accused him of abrasive management, and attracted attention for controversial comments on women in science.

_ March 15. Following a faculty no-confidence vote, Case Western Reserve University President Edward Hundert announces plans to resign. Hundert had aggressive plans to improve undergraduate education, but fundraising fell short, leading to budget cuts that angered faculty.'

' "The H1 is where it all started," said Ben Olin, sales manager at Ed Schmidt Hummer, a Maumee, Ohio, dealership that was one of the first in the country to sell the H1. "There's a lot of heritage that goes along with it." '

Summers told the academics gathered in University Hall that because of his personal links he had disqualified himself from any of Harvard’s dealings with Shleifer.

“We all saw that as a Washington lawyer’s non-answer,” a professor told me afterwards.

When pressed by [a professor] about whether he had any personal opinion about the case, Summers said he didn’t know the facts.

“A gasp went around,” said one person who was there. “The provost rolled his eyes. Afterwards, people were saying, ‘Does he think we are children that he would lie to us?’ It was the moment the presidency disappeared.”

When she started, she expected to be paid for her services within the University Professors Program, “an interdisciplinary program for gifted students,” and to teach one or two courses in the journalism department, which is part of BU’s College of Communication. Much to her surprise, and dismay, she quickly learned that she was an employee of the communications division.

[Adler’s] most serious allegation against Schulz is that he exaggerated his heroism in Vietnam in a 2003 interview with the student paper. Schulz described how, as an Air Force F-100 fighter pilot, he would continue on his missions even when he ran out of ammunition, to distract the enemy.

Schulz's squadron commander in Vietnam, William E. Haynes, a retired lieutenant colonel, confirmed Schulz's account. ''He was going lower and pressing harder than the other guys," Haynes said. ''The Air Force did not hand out those awards for fake missions." Military records confirm that Schulz won the awards he contends he did, including the Silver Star.

…One result [of the ‘68 riots] was that the country's university system guaranteed a free — or almost free — college education to every high school graduate who passed the baccalauréat exam. University enrollment soared. The value of a bachelor's degree plummeted. …[T]he state failed to invest much in buildings, facilities and professors' salaries to make the system work. Today the French government allocates about $8,500 a year to each university student, about 40 percent less than what it invests in each high school student.

…While students are ready to protest against something they dislike, there is little sense of belonging or pride in one's surroundings. During the recent protests over the contested labor law, that attitude of alienation contributed to the destruction of property, even computers and books, at some universities.

The protests also were the latest warning to the French government and private corporations that the university system needs fixing. Officials, entrepreneurs, professors and students alike agree that too many students are stuck in majors like sociology or psychology that make it difficult to move into a different career in a stratified society like France, given the country's troubled economy.

'The head of University of Cincinnati's German-American studies is being investigated for plagiarism.

George Mason University's history news network reports that portions of Don Heinrich Tolzmann's book, "The German-American Experience" were taken from another book written in the 60's.

Tolzmann said he admits in his preface that he had revised and expanded on the other work, and thought that was adequate.

The investigation is expected to take four months.'

Untilled Utah field becomes vole heaven

LEHI, Utah, May 9 (UPI) -- House cats are growing fatter in Lehi, Utah, after hundreds of thousands of mouse-like voles began multiplying furiously in an untilled field.

The field is slated for development and was not tilled this year. State agriculture officials say that's what allowed the population explosion of the furry rodents.

Voles have 10-12 litters a year with 5-10 young in each litter. Because the lack of plowing and tilling left their habitat intact, they are now burrowing beneath lawns and showing no fear of humans, the Provo Daily Herald reported Tuesday.

"The weird thing is they aren't afraid of you," resident Jill Clemens told the Herald. "They totally have run across my feet. They are fat and slow."

Some residents have let their cats out for as many easy and free meals as they can eat, while others are using BB guns to cull the vole herds.

Utah State University Extension Service senior horticultural assistant Pat Fugal said the simplest way to get rid of voles -- apart from tilling the field -- is to apply zinc phosphide, a poison available at outdoor supply centers.

Officials at Boston University disclosed yesterday that the institution's long-term president and chancellor, John R. Silber, collected $6.1 million last year, two years after he stepped down as leader.

The money includes $3.3 million in deferred compensation from the 32 years that Dr. Silber worked at the university and a house in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Boston that university trustees agreed he could live in for the rest of his life. Living in the house was valued at $305,000 a year. The package also includes $770,000 from an unusual arrangement in which the university rewarded Dr. Silber with an extra year's salary for every five years worked.

The compensation package, which some experts said was the largest in academia, was defended by university officials but touched off outrage among other academics.

Disclosure of the amount comes as the university is overhauling its governance policies, hoping to rehabilitate its image after several expensive mishaps.

Three years ago, the university offered the president's job to Daniel S. Goldin, the former administrator of NASA, then paid him $1.8 million not to take the job after he clashed with Dr. Silber and the university trustees. Before that, a family that donated $3 million for a library expansion threatened to sue, saying the university had used the money for other purposes. Eventually, the university was forced to return the donation.

In a written statement, Dr. Silber, 79, said the bulk of the payout, totaling $4.5 million, was money he had earned and set aside in a "segregated investment account run by the university" during his years as president and chancellor, plus returns on those investments.

"None of the deferred salary nor any of the income earned from it came from an additional payment by the university," Dr. Silber wrote. "Boston University paid me nothing beyond my salary."

"This is not a bonus," he added. "It is not a golden parachute or a gift from the university."

Dr. Silber has long been a mainstay in the annual rankings of highest paid university leaders published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2004, the university reported that he earned $1.25 million. Dr. Silber, though already retired, was listed by The Chronicle as one of only five university leaders earning more than $1 million.

The university revealed details of the package before making them public through a required tax filing next Monday, said Stephen P. Burgay, a spokesman for the university. The university's current president, Robert A. Brown, receives a salary of $650,000, Mr. Burgay said.

Experts said Dr. Silber's compensation package was the steepest they had seen, and it was revealed at a time of wide discontent over tuition increases at universities that regularly outpace inflation. Tuition, room and board at Boston University is $41,600 a year, officials said.

Roger W. Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, described the Silber package as "symptomatic" of something larger happening on campuses. "Presidents once upon a time were seen as colleagues, and professors hold on to that romantic notion," Mr. Bowen said. These days, he said, they are becoming more like C.E.O.'s. "There is outrage," he said.

"Is student access to higher education improving or otherwise?" Mr. Bowen asked. "Is faculty compensation improving or otherwise? Are health benefits getting better or worse? The answer to all those questions is they're getting worse."

"Some presidents make five times what the average full professor makes," he said. "You've got to ask, 'Is that right?' "

Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, which represents universities, described Dr. Silber's package as "the largest compensation package that I've ever seen" in more than 30 years. Previously, $1.75 million to $2 million "has been about the tops," he said.

Joseph Mercurio, executive vice president at Boston University, said much of the money had been set aside as it was earned, "meaning we did not have to go into the '05 budget and pull $6.1 million out."

Alan Leventhal, chairman of the university board, acknowledged that the package represented "a very significant number," reflecting "an extraordinary length of time on a job that was done extremely well, given that the stature of Boston University was raised so significantly during those years."

Despite defending the package, both men said the university had instituted broad changes, including term limits for board members, policies covering conflicts of interest and reviews to bring executive pay in line with national norms.

What is most important, Mr. Leventhal said, "is that the university has taken steps to make sure that we have the right governance for today looking forward."

Mr. Steinbach noted that Dr. Silber, a fiery figure often credited with transforming the university from an unremarkable commuter institution to a reputable research center, had negotiated the terms of his compensation with the board in another era.

"The whole ethos of the post-Enron, post-WorldCom era went into effect long after the basic contractual agreement between Dr. Silber and the board was executed," he said.
He predicted that, given the efforts to improve transparency at the university, donors "will most likely view this entire incident as part of yesterday's ballgame, and a matter to just move beyond."

[A] schism ... often exists between college athletics and the wider academic community. Student athletes have long inhabited a world often less focused on learning than on winning. But what is becoming more apparent today is that the divide is widening--and that it can lead to destructive behavior...

...[H]istorically, it has been athletics that have caused the greatest conflicts with the true mission of higher education. As far back as 1929, the Carnegie Foundation published a report on collegiate athletics bemoaning lax oversight, high coaching salaries, and low academic standards. Sixty-two years later, reports by the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics came to the same conclusions.

"The reforms [we instituted] were partly about who was in charge--the university president or a coach." Despite dire warnings to the contrary, the Division I school has continued to field competitive teams. Likewise, the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., recently reassigned the head of athletics so that he now reports to the commandant of cadets.

..."Over the past 20 years, athletics have established separate departments with separate missions: win and raise money, which isn't supposed to be the mission of a school," says Peter Roby, director of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society.

However the plagiarism happened exactly, she had already come to understand that her success so far was not just a matter of talent and discipline but of buying the right connections, cutting deals for behind-the-scenes assistance, cunning …For all her sweet Hogwarts dreams, an observant, canny, IvyWised-up kid is bound to draw certain conclusions about the way the real world works.

I don't care whether it's Ambien or alcohol; I wonder whether Patrick Kennedy isn't — unconsciously — seeking a way out of politics with his latest run-in with the law. Kennedy last went into rehab just five months ago. According to the Almanac of American Politics he has been involved in several bizarre incidents in recent years, including shoving an airport security guard in 2000 and, in 2003, saying, "I haven't worked a [expletive] day in my life," as a way of attacking Bush's tax cuts.

Kennedy doesn't have his father's political temperament, let alone charisma. His achievements have been middling …including supporting the Iraq war and then accusing the administration of deceiving him. And, maybe more revealing, twice ducking a chance to run for Senate. He was obviously pushed into politics by family pressure, internalized or otherwise; he got in at age 21, and who doesn't question career choices made at that age?

It's interesting to consider that he had his crackup at the Capitol. Some hostility there toward symbols of authority? By leaving the place for good, he would do a real favor to his under-served constituents, and probably himself too.

The University of Missouri-Columbia’s athletic program might face scrutiny by the Board of Curators if two curators have their way in forming a task force to study the health of the program’s athletics and academics.

David Wasinger, a lawyer and board member from St. Louis, proposed the task force yesterday after MU Athletic Director Mike Alden made a presentation to the board during a regular meeting on the university’s St. Louis campus.

Wasinger, one of the board’s most outspoken members, said it seemed the department was being managed from "crisis to crisis." He said he was tired of having to spend Sunday afternoons in telephone conference calls with the board dealing with athletic department troubles.

…"I don’t know the answer," said Wasinger, who has been on the board for about a year. "What I intend to do is I’m going to make a motion that we form a task force to assess the health of intercollegiate athletic programs." Wasinger’s motion was seconded by John Carnahan III, a board member from Springfield.

Board President Angela Bennett of Kansas City told Wasinger the timing of his motion was not proper. She said the time for its consideration would be during the board’s business session later today. Other curators said they didn’t know enough about Wasinger’s idea to meaningfully comment on it.

…In his statement yesterday, Wasinger compared the athletic program to the front porch of a house. He said if the porch looked like it was not in good repair, the impression existed that the rest of the house was in poor shape, too. He said the character of MU’s athletic program performed the same function for the entire university.

"We as board members, whether we like it or not, are going to have to take a greater role in athletics," Wasinger said.

Alden told reporters during a break in the session that he believed the problems during Snyder’s departure were over and that it was time to move the athletic program forward.

"We’ve discussed these issues, and we are beyond them," Alden said. "We are excited about the future. I feel very good about where our athletic program is headed."

Alden said from what he knew of athletic departments at other universities, most report to campus officials rather than the schools’ governing boards. While Alden was answering reporters’ questions, Don Walsworth, a curator from Marceline, stepped in front of the television cameras, shook Alden’s hand and told him he was doing a great job.

Walsworth, who heads a book publishing company, supplements Alden’s salary at the rate of $50,000 per year. His company also prints athletic department program guides for a company that has a contract with the athletic department.

He…weakened the place of rational argument in human affairs. He made it possible for people always to argue that those with whom they disagreed were not so much mistaken about the evidence or logic of the matter as motivated by neuroses of which they were unaware. …Marx and Freud were the two patron saints of the ad hominem argument.

Freud… would be less interested in debating the rights and wrongs of the death penalty than why so many people on the American religious right feel the need for capital punishment.

Freud leaps at once to his conclusion: that which is forbidden is also desired. And the horror is needed because the desire is great. If it is so great, it must be there in all of us, repressed but simmering, seeking the channels through which to flow in some disguised but virulent version.

…A real scientist, observing the facts, would draw the opposite conclusion. Incest [for instance] arouses horror not because we desire it but because we don’t.

…Once you are on the couch the analyst has ways of changing your mind: you are no longer criticising the theory but resisting it. You have become a case for treatment, and the answer to your problem is not a refutation but a cure. And the cure goes on for ever, since there was no disease.

Kraus wounded Freud by asserting that psychoanalysis was itself the disease of which it purported to be the cure.

It became fashionable to be neurotic, to be in analysis and to be able to afford it. And we were having such a good time, we scarcely noticed that this therapy — which took so long and cost so much — wasn't curing anybody.

of little use ...to those looking for reference points or principles that could give meaning to their life. Those philosophies, cut off from the practical application that any spiritual path requires if its goal is to bring about a veritable inner transformation, were able to indulge themselves in an unimpeded proliferation of ideas, intellectual games of extreme complexity and minimum usefulness. The gap between the world of ideas and that of the individual's life has become such that those who promulgate these philosophical systems no longer themselves need to be the living illustration of them. It's completely accepted nowadays that you can be a great philosopher at the same time as living in a way that no one would even think of taking as an example. We've already emphasized that the principal quality of a true teacher is that he's a living illustration of the perfection he teaches. That perfection can't just be the coherence of a system of ideas; it should be transparently manifested in all the person's different sides. A philosopher can completely lose his way in his personal problems, or a scientist in his emotions, but a disciple committed to the spiritual path knows at once that he's on the wrong track if he notices that over the months and years his human qualities - goodness, tolerance, being at peace with himself and others - have been declining instead of growing.

The picture you've just sketched sums up what could be called the essential wound of Western civilization, which is basically the contrast and contradiction between the intellectual and the artistic prowess that individuals can attain on the one hand, and the frequent poverty of their moral life, or of their ethics, on the other. And it's true that it's the result of the gap left when philosophy abandoned the individual quest for wisdom. [Our philosophers] don't indicate much of a path for us in terms of how we should behave. Their ethics are based on retreat from the world. They see how mad everyone is - there are only people blinded by ambition, politicians demented by their lust for power... [S]o the best one can do is refuse to mix with any of them and just sneer at the spectacle...

Jeffrey Mask, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wesley [College], said he first stumbled upon the apparent plagiarism last week while reviewing the management philosophy statement -- described on the school's Web site as being "prepared" by Miller -- as part of an effort to develop a questionnaire for faculty members to evaluate the school president.

"I don't know why I did this, but I Googled a phrase from the statement of management philosophy and found a phrase from Samford University," Mask said Thursday. "... They were identical."

Mask, who routinely uses the Internet to research questionable phrases in student essays to find whether plagiarism might be involved, said he thought it strange that the Wesley president would think it necessary to publicly state that the school would "pay bills, honor commitments."

After finding the identical phrase in Samford's management philosophy statement, Mask contacted retiring Samford president Thomas Corts, who told him he had written it for the Birmingham, Ala., school about 25 years ago. [Note to UD readers: See that date? 25 years ago. Professional plagiarists almost always go significantly back in time for their material.]

Most of the Wesley management statement mirrors the Samford document, while omitting Samford's Baptist references. Wesley is affiliated with the United Methodist church.


…Late Tuesday night, Mask found what appears to be another incident of plagiarism while researching past writings attributed to Miller on Wesley's Web site.

Using an Internet archive tool, Mask found a Miller essay posted on the Wesley Web site in May 1999 that appears to be taken almost verbatim from a 1997 survey and analysis of public perceptions of liberal arts schools by Richard H. Hersh, then-president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York.

Hersh's paper, "Intentions and perceptions: a national survey of public attitudes toward liberal arts education," includes an analysis entitled "Solving the "Practicality Gap.'"

Miller's essay is entitled "The Liberal Arts: Solving the 'Practicality Gap.'"

According to documents provided by Mask, Hersh wrote: "Not only are parents and students focused on employment as a goal -- part of a response to the last decade's obsession with getting tangible value for every nickel spent -- but employers, too are preoccupied with value. They see college education as a necessary and valuable long-term investment that enhances one's creativity, communication skills, values, and ethics -- all attributes for a lifetime."

Miller wrote: "The past decade has witnessed a national obsession with getting value and making every nickel count in tangible ways. This helps explain parents' and students' emphases on getting a job. But employers, too, are preoccupied with value, and they see college education as a necessary and valuable long-term investment that enhances one's imagination, communication skills, values, and ethics -- all attributes for a lifetime."

[Ms. V.’s] is a story about clichés and stereotypes passing from one subliterary commercial product to another. …The real scandal, to my mind, is that trade book publishers in the aggregate now commit themselves almost wholeheartedly to the Second Helpings and their equivalent, and that American newspapers don't mind encouraging them.

…So great is the will to evade these tawdry facts that even when the press exposes them -- as the Times did, to its credit, in an article on the role of book-packaging firms -- the story must end with avowals all around of the blamelessness of publishing companies. The full weight of culpability must fall instead on the author, who has failed to provide sufficient originality for an industry that wants none. By serving as the latest unwilling, moralized distraction from this round of same-old, Ms. Viswanathan has not damaged today's trade publishers but actually done them a service.

… The case of Erik Ringmar, senior lecturer in government at the London School of Economics, shows how the limits of blogging are being explored in academe as in the outside world.

His unconventional speech to prospective students at an open day warned them that scholars tended to have their minds on research and not on teaching them - actual teaching would be done by PhD students.

He then compounded his offence in the eyes of the authorities by posting the speech on his blog, where it joined an article drawing questioning why so few foreign staff at the school were promoted to senior academic posts.

In the ensuing row he has been reprimanded. He says he feels "bullied" for exercising his freedom of speech and is calling for the university to draw up a "blogger's charter" to let academics and students know where they stand.



… Convenor of the department of government, Professor George Philip, accused him of "departing from the prepared message" - Dr Ringmar had refused to use the PowerPoint presentation provided.

The soon-to-be-open job of chancellor at the University of Maine System is already drawing interest. In fact, someone calling from the cellphone of a former college president, Evan S. Dobelle, appears to have impersonated an intern at The Chronicle to ask a Maine official about the departing chancellor's compensation.

The system's office of external affairs got a call this week from "Scott Northfield," who claimed to be an intern for The Chronicle working on a survey of executive compensation. The caller wanted details on the salary and benefits earned by Joseph W. Westphal, who announced two weeks ago that he would step down as chancellor at the end of June.

The Maine official who spoke with the caller did not have the information on hand and offered to call back. However, the phone number the caller left, which had a Washington, D.C., area code, proved bogus, and no Scott Northfield works at The Chronicle.

The university's caller-ID records led to a different number: a cellphone in Springfield, Mass., that, when dialed by a Chronicle reporter, was answered by Mr. Dobelle, a former president of the University of Hawaii System. He was fired by Hawaii in 2004, but the firing was subsequently rescinded in return for his resignation and the university's payment of a mediated settlement of $1.6-million.

According to one Harvard Business School Professor, a civil war is a real possibility following the 2008 election.

“We might possibly be headed for a real crash here,” said D. Quinn Mills, Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration.

To find out whether Harvard students agree with his hypothesis, Mills is running a two-week online discussion-based symposium this month that invites Harvard students to speak out about the possibility of a civil war following the next presidential election.

With the U.S. map politically polarized — northern and western states blue and southern ones red, with little bipartisan activity — Mills said he is 15-20 percent confident that America could face another Civil War if the 2008 election is as closely contested as the past two.

“I looked at the map of the last two elections and it looks a whole lot like the map of the U.S. just prior to the Civil War,” he said.

While I wouldn't go so far as to say that people in the program were functionally illiterate, I would say that a high percentage of students had no clue what they were doing in the program. They were experimenting. They were killing time. They were playing.

It's no excuse, but with all this third-party positioning, is it any wonder that a person -- especially a teenage person -- could forget (or ignore) the fact that some of the writing in her book is not actually hers? How easy it is for authenticity to be obscured in a world in which hired help packages preschool applications, in which the line between a real relationship with an adult and strategic sucking up is blurred.

…Viswanathan, perhaps, has learned a lesson that the admissions industrial complex does its best to obscure…

Unlike doctoral programs, the budget for the School of the Arts is determined entirely by the tuition that it receives from students and donations made directly to the school. This means that the vast majority of students pay full tuition, currently over $35,000 per year. [This is the big question we need to answer. Why do virtually all SoA students pay full tuition?]


…“The program is too big,” Heather Samples, a student in the Writing Division, said. “There are too many students for every faculty member, and I don’t think that is a radical statement. We have too many students, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s related to the funding issues.” [She’s beginning to get at the answer. A cynical decision, based on the desperate desire of affluent Americans to be artists -- or at least play one in graduate school -- has been made. We can soak these fools.]

According to Kleinman, the school gives about 30 percent of tuition to the University. Provost Alan Brinkley said that the budget arrangement—and the tax—is about equivalent to that paid by all professional schools such as business and law.

But as Thorn Hillsbery, a second-year writing student, explained, unlike law and business school graduates, most alumni from SoA do not go on to affluent careers. [That’s right. That‘s why I call the university‘s willingness to exploit these students cynical.]

“The arts don’t have a guaranteed pathway to make a substantial income,” Hillsbery said. “Building an alumni base is harder. It’s an issue of the marketplace that the school has no control over.”

And a number of students say there are systematic problems within the school beyond financial difficulties.

Robert Broadhurst, a first-year film student, praised his experience overall, but called the school a “flawed system in which good hardworking people are rendered less effective than they would like to be.” He said this was a “pervasive feeling that results from accumulated sound bites and conversations throughout the division.”

While he attributed much of this to the difficulties of dealing with the bureaucracy of a large university, he also said that part of it came from the nature of filmmaking.

“In the world of filmmaking especially, there exists a fundamental dilemma, and there are of course exceptions, which is that most filmmakers prefer to be making films to teaching filmmaking,” he said. “For that reason, it can be difficult to lock down potential instructors because, understandably, their own professional artistic pursuits take priority.” [Note what this guy is diplomatically saying. SoA is hiring unreliable people who’d rather be filming than teaching. I wouldn’t call this “understandable.”]

Also, he said, “often the best film-makers do not make the best teachers and vice-versa.”

Erin Soros, who graduated from the Writing Division last year, offered a slightly harsher view of the school. “I heard a lot of complaints in the program,” she said. “Columbia itself is failing its students in the arts.”

“It’s a systemic problem,” she said. “People are doing the best they can.”

As in any school, discussions of the quality of the program are difficult and controversial. While Ziegler [Writing Division Chair] refused to respond on the record to Slouka’s letter [Why not? That’s exactly what a responsible Chair is supposed to do.] , which was published last week, two students printed a response challenging many of the specific criticisms of the letter and pointing out what they said are numerous factual errors.

“There are very serious dishonest claims in that letter,” Hillsbery said.

He challenged the idea that the quality of students and instruction was falling, pointing both to recent successes of alumni and rising application numbers. “Despite the expense, [students] want to come to Columbia. Why would they come if it was a bad program?”

But a number of students, including Samples, said they felt the larger point of Slouka’s criticism was being ignored. “The whole situation saddens me because I believe Mark truly had the best interests of the health of the program and the future lives of his former students at heart,” she said. “The question of the arts in academia is a really important question for many people. [That’s right. But because the situation of the arts in academia is a scandal as big, in its way, as the scandal of college athletics, few professors and administrators are going to go on record about it. Look at the response -- total silence -- to Slouka.] As a graduate student who hopes to have an academic job, I’m concerned about the health of that organization and I’m concerned about us not being able to talk about it without it becoming a catfight.”

Thomas D. Morgan, who teaches legal ethics at George Washington University in Washington, said that Mr. Nifong might have used poor judgment in pursuing charges as quickly as he did but that he did not necessarily violate ethical rules that guide what prosecutors can say about a case publicly. He said Mr. Nifong might have solid evidence and feel strongly about the case.

"That's a completely different thing than filing motions the day before the election in order to try to essentially trash the person who may be doing the best he can to do the job he's assigned to do," Mr. Morgan said, referring to defense motions filed Monday.

District Attorney Mike Nifong will remain Durham County's top prosecutor after winning an election Tuesday that came in the midst of his aggressive investigation into rape allegations involving members of Duke University's lacrosse team.

In unofficial results in the county's Democratic primary, Nifong had 45% of the vote, with challenger Freda Black close behind with about 42%. There are no Republicans running in the general election, and Nifong only needed 40% plus one vote to avoid a primary runoff.

Little, Brown, publisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, admitted to copying passages from another writer's books, said yesterday that it would not be publishing a revised edition of her book.

Little, Brown pulled Ms. Viswanathan's chick-lit book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," from bookstores on Thursday.

In a statement yesterday afternoon Michael Pietsch, senior vice president and publisher of Little, Brown, said the company would not publish the second book under its contract with Alloy Entertainment, the "book packager" that helped Ms. Viswanathan develop the concept for "Opal" and shape its first four chapters. Alloy, rather than Ms. Viswanathan, signed the contract, believed to be worth $500,000 for two books, with Little, Brown.

Ms. Viswanathan, a Harvard sophomore, extensively borrowed from two novels by Megan McCafferty, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," both published by Crown, a division of Random House. Crown contended that more than 40 passages were copied from Ms. McCafferty's books.

Ms. Viswanathan maintained that the copying was "unconscious and unintentional."

On Monday, further allegations of plagiarism emerged when it appeared that passages in "Opal" were copied from "Can You Keep a Secret?" by Sophie Kinsella. Neither Ms. Viswanathan nor Little, Brown commented on those allegations.

Fresh passages in the novel by a Harvard sophomore, whose book was pulled from stores last week after she acknowledged plagiarizing portions of it, appear to be copied from a second author.

At least three portions in the book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," by Kaavya Viswanathan, bear striking similarities to writing in "Can You Keep a Secret?," a chick-lit novel by Sophie Kinsella.

[W]here Oxford's first anthology of American verse could have been carried around in a small handbag, the new one has to be wheeled around in a shopping cart. This bloated, earnest, largely mediocre new Oxford takes up a lot of space on the shelf without providing a clear view of our moment. That chance won't come again for another generation.

[N]one of the editors have picked a poem by Logan since the series began in 1988. This means that his work was not considered good enough by John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Louise Glück, A. R. Ammons, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, James Tate, John Hollander, Robert Bly, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Robert Creeley, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lyn Hejinian, Paul Muldoon and Billy Collins.

As for [the editor’s] cranky remark about my absence from "Best American Poetry," why, I hadn't really noticed.

Former Florida University professor Sami al-Arian was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison on Monday for aiding the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad.

U.S. District Judge James Moody sentenced al-Arian to the maximum 57 months in prison but gave him credit for 38 months he has already served. He will have to serve the balance, 19 months, before being deported, prosecutors said.

Our culture has chosen to subsidize writers by employing them to teach the young, hardly an ignoble or anti humanistic impulse. And the proper question is not whether this has affected writers, but whether this is the best way to make use of writers. How does their academic involvement relate, for example, to the historically unprecedented decline in general literary and educational proficiency? The fact remains that writers have been included in faculties only since general education standards were chucked. The issue is not whether writers have somehow been circumscribed, but whether society can afford to have its most literate (if hardly its most wise) in the service of protracted adolescence? … The only charge that can be fairly brought against the modern university is also the severest -- a genuine lack of curiosity and purpose as regards the reintegration of knowledge, and a professional structure which makes intellectual reform impossible. It will remain notable primarily for producing the first generation in American history less skilled than their parents.

death passed to a large extent unnoticed in Canadian media today, despite his Canadian birth and education. This is, on the one hand, surprising in view of the eagerness of nationalistic Canadians to claim their own (I have sometimes been tempted, after seeing one of these exercises, to define a “Canadian” as “a famous person who has lived for at least 15 minutes in Canada”). From another point of view, however, it is an apt tribute to a man who was beyond single and solitary attachments.