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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
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(Rate Your Students)
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except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

SCATHING ONLINE SCHOOLMARM
Borderline Depressed Writing



UD now predicts that President Glenn Poshard of Southern Illinois University, who has led by negative example, and whose plagiarism case is only the latest among recent fallen SIU leaders, will resign.



There are reasons the world envies America's public and private universities. The crucial reason is one of legitimacy: To an amazing degree, by global standards, we maintain a reality-based higher education establishment, in which the quality and substance of scholarship and teaching undergoes authentic and frequent scrutiny.

This scrutiny is both external, in the form of things like the US News and World Report rankings and Rate My Professors, and internal, as in tenure review. Some of it's sort of internal/external, as in our remarkably free market of professors, a market whose operations make administrators aware of their best faculty, since they're the ones who can move somewhere else.

Even in advanced European countries, and certainly in many other countries, as UD has chronicled at length on this blog, nepotism, abuse of power, meager admissions standards, illegitimate procedures in faculty hiring and retention, laziness or corruption in research activity, extensive government control, and restrictions on free speech are common. The core problem in many of these countries is the politicization of higher education, its primary use as a patronage machine, or as a place to stash unemployed young people for awhile.



Many weak American universities look a bit like European universities. They're run by people like Poshard, political hacks without intellectuality -- without, really, a grasp of what a university is.

UD understands why public systems in particular would find the prospect of political machers running them attractive. These people are powerful, well-connected, can make things happen in the legislature, etc. But without personal academic legitimacy, and without an understanding of the ethos of the university, such presidents and chancellors represent a real risk. Frank Brogan of Florida Atlantic University has a resume similar to Poshard's -- a life in politics, degrees in education (Brogan only went as far as a Master's) -- and he demonstrates, in the way he runs the school, the same embarrassing unawareness of the nature of a university.

Observers of American higher education warn that the model of the intellectual president who can also run things (George Washington University's new leader, Steven Knapp, looks to be one of these) is being displaced by the CEO-type for whom the mega-university is a profit-driven business. But we have just as much to fear from hacks who don't know what they're doing. Poshard still doesn't know that he plagiarized. In his world, you eke out an ed degree because you need the credential, and everyone knows the work in it is shabby but no one cares. That's why he was able to say, when asked, that his committee didn't care whether he cited stuff, so why should he?






When you can't defend a person intellectually, there's always a temptation to go the emotional route. This is almost always a mistake. SOS says lookee here:


To the Editor
: In regards to the recent stories concerning Glenn Poshard, I feel [In regards is a clunky formulation, best avoided; and SOS has already warned you off the emotive, girly I feel thing.] this is nothing more than the efforts of disgruntled individuals, Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption, who by remaining anonymous, give little credence to their allegations and in fact are cowardly. [Awkward word order, and ad hominem: disgruntled, cowardly...] This perpetuates the efforts of some to keep this university from moving forward. [The claim here is simply wrong. SIU was not moving forward as a university before this latest disgrace; and if it is going to move forward, it'll do so by finding a better president.]

We would be hard pressed to find anyone who cares more about SIUC or has done more than Glenn Poshard. [The writer needed to cite one or two achievements here. As to Poshard's caring, this is the emotive rather than substantive problem again. You can care a lot about something and destroy it anyway.] He is certainly not without his warts but to nit-pick improper or missing citations in a dissertation written 23 years ago, and approved by faculty, is petty and mean spirited. [Image of a nit-picker picking a wart not pretty... We're talking about vast uncited stretches of prose; doesn't matter how long ago it happened; faculty approval only deepens the scandal.]


I am tired [I feel... I am tired... Trust me: No one cares.] of this divisive, constantly attacking culture we seem to have fallen into. [Breaking out into vast cultural generalization is a real mistake here. Along with the hankie-shredding, it makes the reader suspect that you don't really have a substantive case and are trying to distract her attention from this by going cosmic.] Whether its [Apostrophe missing.] national politics or local gossip we have become so focused on the politics of destruction [Thunderous cliche.] versus getting something done it's no wonder people walk around in a borderline depression. [Hey baby, I'm fine. I don't walk around depressed. And my position on the Poshard question will have little to do with what outcome will cheer you up.] My best recommendation is to tackle the real issues and move on. This issue does not deserve the ink or time it's generating.

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