One, which many scientists think is going on now and could accelerate in the not too distant future, is the almost complete liquidation of the last ice age. A lot of the earth's water is tied up in glaciers, enough that even the melting of a substantial part would cause the oceans to rise about 100 feet. If it all turned to water -- a very remote possibility -- it has been estimated that the sea level might rise as much as 500 or 600 feet.Alternatively, though, the Ice Age could return, and the sea level would fall. Three paragraphs at page 46 summarize.
With the great ocean extending its warm waters nearer to the poles and the refrigerating effects of huge ice masses gone, almost all the world would have the equable climate we associate now with the tropics. Fruits and vegetables would grow in soil which now has only tundra. It takes a large land mass to create the extreme changes of temperature we know in the temperate zone, and there would be no more land masses big enough to maintain the sort of weather we now have.That's the extremely long run. Starting at page 284 is a discussion of work by Swedish oceanographer Otto Pettersson, who proposes an 1800 year cycle of tidal magnitudes, influenced by the combined gravitational pulls of Moon and Sun.
On the other hand, a new ice age would cover with glaciers much of the territory on which people live, and the rest would have to take lessons from the Eskimos on getting along with cold. Caribou would return to the shores of the Mediterranean, where relics of primitive man show that these animals once thrived in an earlier ice age.
Neither of these glacial extremes is altogether fanciful. In fact, both have happened four times in the last million years or so, in the Pleistocene age. While most scientists believe that the earth is in a period of melting glaciers, and that this must go much further before another ice age descends, there is no certainty.
"Long Distance Trains: A Foundation for National Mobility," a new white paper by the Midwest High Speed Rail Association and the National Association of Railroad Passengers, recommends investing in long-distance routes such as the Lake Shore Limited. Such train service becomes more economically efficient when the routes travel greater distances, connect more cities and add more passengers, according to Brian Pitzer, executive director of All Aboard Erie.When your community has fewer trains than Penn Central operated on the eve of Amtrak, there has to be a lot of upside potential. Had Penn Central implemented the same sort of corridor concept from Buffalo to Cleveland and Toledo that it was implementing east of Buffalo, residents of Erie might already have more trains. As it is, people in Mendota, Illinois, Lynchburg, Virginia, or Sturtevant, Wisconsin, enjoy more frequency and connectivity than do residents of Erie, or, for that matter, Cleveland.
Ridership on long-distance trains has grown rapidly since 2000, the report says, and more growth could occur by making train routes longer; increasing frequency of service; improving tracks, signals and stations to shorten trips and improve on-time performance; and procuring high-performance, modern equipment, Pitzer said. You can read the white paper by visiting www.narprail.org.
What would the commentariat say about a hyperpower that put an end to the insurgencies in the most brutal and final way, never mind the collateral damage? And would that commentariat welcome the same sort of governmental ruthlessness, if applied to sharing the wealth or rebuilding the roads or making the trucking and airline companies pay more for their roads and airports, or imposing party discipline on the Congress?Jim Lacey takes the occasion of the removal of the last U.S. tanks from Germany to elaborate.
It is worth noting that our problems crushing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan were not a result of insufficient American power to do the job. Rather, they were the consequences of that almost uniquely American trait of rarely using all the power at our disposal. First off, we fought both wars with only a fraction of our latent power. More importantly, we fought them in a manner that few armies have ever shown a willingness to do.I'm intrigued, though, by a passage in the essay in which President Lincoln secures the withdrawal of French forces from Maximilian's Mexico with a warning that Grant and some of the Army of the Potomac might be headed that way. President Lincoln lived only a week beyond Lee's surrender, and Johnston's surrender to Sherman happened after that. Must. Conduct. Further. Research.
There is a formula for winning against insurgents. It is harsh, brutal, and often immoral. For examples, look at how civilized countries conducted earlier wars — how Britain won the Boer War, or how Belgium crushed rebels in the Congo, or what France attempted in Algeria. America eschewed those methods in favor of treating the population humanely, rebuilding nations and societies, and doing everything possible to keep our military power squarely focused on armed enemies. Were mistakes made? Yes; war is never as clean, as simple, or as antiseptic as we would like. Still, when the final histories of our involvement in the Middle East are written I am certain they will demonstrate levels of restraint and morality no other power would have troubled itself with.
In this brief interlude, while the United States remains a global hyperpower, no one in the world goes to bed fearful that America will misuse its power to dictate to other nations. More often the opposite is true. We live in a world where small pariah regimes (North Korea, Iran) feel free to continuously threaten the global peace, sure in the knowledge that our ire is slow to rise.
[USA Today sports photographer Steve] Mitchell was busy transmitting photos to his editors when [Chicago Bull center Joakim] Noah got thrown out of Game 2 Wednesday night. He said he didn’t even see the play, but once the commotion started, he grabbed his camera and started shooting.The back-story to the spectator caught behaving like a typical courtside basketball fan might be a parable of life among the noveaux riches.
“I see him arguing with the refs, so I quickly jump up and grab my Nikon 600 mm lens,” Mitchell said. “I see him get ejected and I see him walking and I’m just taking pictures, and as I’m taking these pictures, the shutter, which is a Digital SLR, is going so fast I can’t see her hand. I see him walking and I thought she was just trying to touch him.”
So who is the woman behind the finger?Sounds like quite the piece of work. The highlights, or lowlights, are enough to make a Marxist giggle.
She's the 47-year-old widow of a hedge fund owner who, under mysterious circumstances, was found dead five years ago in the pool of the couple's mansion. It was her fourth husband.
In the documents, Filomena Tobias described herself as a "housewife" who spent $47,000 in expenses a month, including $4,400 for clothes, $1,500 for beauty salons and $5,000 for the upkeep of her Porsche and Range Rover, according to a 2007 Sun Sentinel article.We've come a long way, though, from the adventures of Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel. Lawyers and hedge fund managers as exes are so declasse.
On Thursday, reacting to the backlash from Tobias' finger waving, her grown daughter told the Sun Sentinel in a phone interview that her mother "was having fun just like any other fan."
Victoria Racanati said her mother had this to say to her critics: "People need to get a life."
It’s not surprising, then, to learn that community colleges that rely heavily on part-time faculty have higher attrition rates and lower graduation rates — part-time faculty have (even) fewer opportunities to engage with students. In short, student engagement with other students and faculty on a community college campus promotes retention and academic success.There is, apparently, a frontier beyond which attempts to appear customer-friendly, or student-centered, becomes counter-productive.
One of my students described the importance of classroom-based interaction in a course evaluation. “My mindset was that it was just going to be another English class, and I was not going to try my hardest or get much out of it. I was taking it as a class that I needed to get out of the way for my program of interest. As time went on I realized how into teaching you were and that the people in the classroom really wanted to learn and to get something out of the class. I then decided that maybe I should apply myself and that was the best choice I made the whole semester.”
It’s highly unlikely this student would have had a similar realization in an online course that offered no face-to-face interaction.
Community college students often state they take courses online for the sake of convenience and/or because of a harried life -- two reasons accepted without debate -- in order to get done with school as quickly as possible. The course becomes merely an obstacle on the path to accumulating credits.Put another way, higher education involves effort on the part of both the student and the professor, and to neglect the role of either is to fail to educate. It's particularly encouraging to read an essay originating from a community college, as the lowering of standards at the comprehensives and mid-majors has too often been in a misguided attempt to mimic the convenience of the for-profits and the most retention-obsessed two-year colleges.
And community colleges -- driven by convenience, economics, and, ironically enough, the completion agenda -- are quick to respond to “customer demand” by offering more and more online courses.
But instead of promoting an online model of education, community colleges should be doing more to keep faculty and students on campus and to foster a classroom and campus-based culture built upon a sense of academic engagement and community. That may sound outdated and unfashionable, but it’s a model of education that, as research supports, actually increases community college students’ chances of being academically successful.
The Trinity social code is more subtle and insidious: It makes it impossible for Greek houses to exist. First of all, all campus "social organizations" must henceforth meet nearly 50-50 gender quotas, both in membership and leadership. So much for the traditional single-sex Greek structure. Then, they must be officially approved by the Trinity administration--and students who associate with unapproved groups "will be subject to separation from the College." The houses must also terminate their affiliations with national Greek single-sex organizations. Furthermore, Trinity has given itself the right to sieze and sell the houses of fraternities and sororities that do not comply with the above rules and turn them over to more compliant organizations. And notably, the code exempts campus athletic, musical, and academic organizations from its strictures: it's aimed squarely at the Greeks.Perhaps the chess club qualifies as an academic organization. What happens, though, if a model railroad occupies a substantial part of a floor in the student center?
Almost a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union disappeared, what’s remarkable is how much -- and how little -- has changed.Or perhaps, an unwillingness by a hyperpower to behave like an evil empire?
On the how-much front: Washington’s dreams of military glory ran aground with remarkable speed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, in 2007, the transcendent empire of capital came close to imploding as well, as a unipolar financial disaster spread across the planet. It led people to begin to wonder whether the globe’s greatest power might not, in fact, be too big to fail, and we were suddenly -- so everyone said -- plunged into a “multipolar world.”
Meanwhile, the Greater Middle East descended into protest, rebellion, civil war, and chaos without a Pax Americana in sight, as a Washington-controlled Cold War system in the region shuddered without (yet) collapsing. The ability of Washington to impose its will on the planet looked ever more like the wildest of fantasies, while every sign, including the hemorrhaging of national treasure into losing trillion-dollar wars, reflected not ascendancy but possible decline.
Under the circumstances, nothing could have been stranger than this: in its moment of total ascendancy, the Earth’s sole superpower with a military of staggering destructive potential and technological sophistication couldn’t win a war against minimally armed guerillas. Even more strikingly, despite having no serious opponents anywhere, it seemed not on the rise but on the decline, its infrastructure rotting out, its populace economically depressed, its wealth ever more unequally divided, its Congress seemingly beyond repair, while the great sucking sound that could be heard was money and power heading toward the national security state. Sooner or later, all empires fall, but this moment was proving curious indeed.What would the commentariat say about a hyperpower that put an end to the insurgencies in the most brutal and final way, never mind the collateral damage? And would that commentariat welcome the same sort of governmental ruthlessness, if applied to sharing the wealth or rebuilding the roads or making the trucking and airline companies pay more for their roads and airports, or imposing party discipline on the Congress?
What if, in the twenty-first century, going up means declining? What if the unipolar moment turns out to be a planetary moment in which previously distinct imperial events -- the rise and fall of empires -- fuse into a single disastrous system?On the other hand, what if the story of our times is this: centralized expertise, whether of the national security state or Big Finance or Big Business or Big Education, yields to the sovereign individual?
What if the story of our times is this: And then there was one planet, and it was going down.
The offending text, “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism,” challenges the validity of man-made global warming.Despite it being the end of the semester, the department's web-master had time to post (temporarily) a picture of the colleagues "testing the flammability" of the book.
The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, sent the book to the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at [San Jose State]. Department chairperson Dr. Alison Bridger and assistant professor Dr. Craig Clements eagerly posed for a photo depicting them applying a lit match to “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism.”
We wrote one of the scientists in the photo, Craig Clements, and he responded as follows:That's reassuring.
Thanks for your email. No, the book was never burned. We never intended to burn the book. The Department of Meteorology and Climate Science has removed the material in question from its website, and regrets what was clearly an ill-conceived attempt at satire. Please be assured the university does not condone book burning for any reason.It’s nice that they considered this a form of “satire,” but the symbolism was absurdly bone-headed.
Richard Herman doesn't have to do much teaching as part of his $212,000 faculty job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.You'd think that there'd be some interest in "Issuing Favors to Legislators and Calling it Access" or "Giving Lip Service to Inclusion While Serving Political Masters", but apparently not, nor for the expertise of some of the other fallen leaders.
When he resigned as chancellor after a high-profile admissions scandal, he made a deal to teach just two classes a year in the College of Education, where a professor typically teaches four.
But Herman's class this semester was canceled for low enrollment — the second time that has happened since 2011. His biography on the College of Education's faculty website is blank. Herman, who lives in Chicago, said through a university spokesman that he goes to campus about once a week.
While Herman still plans to meet the teaching requirement in his contract this year, the situation raises the question of whether the cash-strapped university is getting its money's worth. Herman is one of several top U. of I. officials who resigned under pressure in recent years and subsequently moved into high-paying faculty positions.
In addition to Herman, other top officials who have moved into faculty roles include former U. of I. President Michael Hogan, who resigned last year after months of controversy with the faculty. He is now on a paid sabbatical, but in keeping with his contract to teach two courses a year, he plans to teach two history courses this fall on the Springfield campus. His salary will be $285,100.What's revealing, though, is a paragraph of elaboration on the chancellor's difficulties filling his classes in the College of Education.
His predecessor, President B. Joseph White, is assigned to the Urbana-Champaign campus' College of Business, where he receives about $288,000 a year and has been keeping a regular teaching load, including two classes during some semesters.
But Herman, 71, has had a more difficult time fulfilling his teaching obligations, and has twice switched to teaching online classes to make up for on-campus courses that were canceled for low enrollment. He did not respond to requests for comment from the Tribune, instead relaying his answers through university spokesman Thomas Hardy.
In response to a question about whether he thought Herman was meeting his responsibilities, U. of I. President Robert Easter replied: "I look forward to an increasing portfolio of activities in the future."
Herman, chancellor of the state's flagship university from 2005 to 2009, resigned in October 2009 after a Tribune series revealed that the campus had a shadow admissions system that allowed well-connected applicants to get into the public university over more qualified students.
"I don't think you should expect him to teach a freshman calculus section with a ton of students, but on the other hand, you don't want to give him an easy out when he is supposed to live up to the agreement," said U. of I. emeritus aerospace engineering professor John Prussing, who has served in various faculty leadership positions.The concluding paragraphs of the story suggest he already has been given an easy out.
Herman's current teaching arrangement goes until 2014, at which point campus officials will decide whether he should continue teaching in the College of Education and how many courses he should teach.I'm not sure how mathematics departments operate. In economics, the understanding is that any microeconomist is capable of offering price theory, and any macroeconomist, income theory. Assigning a former chancellor a section of calculus, when one of the usual professors is on sabbatical or managing a grant, strikes me as feasible, and there are probably lots of sections of
A mathematician by training, Herman has indefinite tenure as a mathematics professor at the Urbana-Champaign campus.
Don’t try this at home. For all of these elements to come together, for all of this sausage-making to make a sausage, you need high-level strategic skills plus extremely high-level connections.Or being saved by one of His Majesty's favorite cushions?
Also, it probably doesn’t hurt to have inside information which, if released, could ruin the careers of the high-level connections.
The idea of a negative income tax (NIT) is commonly thought to have originated with economist Milton Friedman, who advocated it in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom. Others, notably the late Joseph Pechman, long-time tax dean of the Brookings Institution, credited the University of Wisconsin's Robert Lampman with at least simultaneous discovery and with bringing the concept to the attention of government policy planners in 1965.Cornell's Robert Frank explains, though, that getting the outcomes right is not as easy as it looks.
In its purest form a NIT promised a revolution in American social policy. Gone would be the intrusive and costly welfare bureaucracy, the pernicious distinctions between "worthy" and "unworthy" recipients, the perverse disincentives for work effort and family formation. The needy would, like everyone else, simply file annual—or perhaps quarterly—income returns with the Internal Revenue Service. But unlike other filers who would make payments to the IRS, based on the amount by which their incomes exceeded the threshold for tax liability, NIT beneficiaries would receive payments ("negative taxes") from the IRS, based on how far their incomes fell below the tax threshold.
Mr. Friedman’s policy prescriptions were shaped by his desire to minimize adverse economic incentives, a feature that architects of earlier welfare programs had largely ignored. Those programs, each administered by a separate bureaucracy, typically reduced a family’s benefits by some fraction of each increment in earned income. Rates of 50 percent were common, so a family participating in four separate programs might see its total benefits fall by $2 for each extra dollar it earned. Under the circumstances, no formal training in economics was necessary to see that working didn’t pay. In contrast, someone who worked additional hours under Mr. Friedman’s plan would always take home additional after-tax income.That is, if the earned-income tax credit is in fact a poverty program. In Salon, Michael Lind (via Mahablog) suggests that the credit is the latest regressive transfer to the remnants of the planter aristocracy.
The negative income tax was never adopted in the end, because of concern that a payment large enough to support an urban family of four might induce many to go on the dole. With a payment of $6,000 per person, for example, rural communes of 30 would have a pooled annual payment of $180,000, which they could supplement by growing vegetables and raising animals. Because these groups could live quite comfortably at taxpayer expense, there would be an eager audience for accounts of their doings on the nightly news. Political support for such a program would be difficult to sustain.
Instead, Congress adopted the earned-income tax credit, essentially the same program except that only people who were employed received benefits. One of the few American welfare programs widely adopted in other countries, the earned-income tax credit has proved far more efficient than conventional programs, just as Mr. Friedman predicted. Yet because it covers only those who work, it cannot be the sole weapon in society’s antipoverty arsenal.
Ruthless and callous as they are, the old families and nouveaux riches who make up the Southern elite don’t want their workers to starve. On the other hand, they prefer not to pay a wage adequate for the necessities of life. The solution favored by the Southern oligarchy is the earned income tax credit, a wage subsidy to workers that tops up a too-low wage paid by the employer.Perhaps so. But as the research on the negative income tax discovered, workers are also capable of migrating to higher-wage locations, or perhaps to jurisdictions with more generous public assistance.
The major champions of the EITC in national politics have tended to be conservative Democrats from the South, like the late Lloyd Bentsen, a reactionary born into the South Texas aristocracy, and Louisiana’s Sen. Russell Long. What makes the EITC so appealing to Southern Democrats and Southern Republicans alike is that it forces the Northern and Western states, by means of the Internal Revenue Service, to subsidize low-wage businesses in the South, even as the South is using the poverty of its workforce to lure high-wage businesses from the North and West. Every penny spent on the federal EITC is a penny that Southern state governments and Southern employers do not have to spend on Southern workers to keep them from starving. By paying taxes to the federal government to fund the EITC, Americans in high-wage states are literally subsidizing the South’s job-stealing program. The progressive policy wonks who prefer a higher EITC to a higher minimum wage are useful idiots, from the perspective of the crafty Southern political-business elite.
Finally, there is the welfare state. Universal, portable social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare increase the bargaining power of workers, by reducing the penalty for quitting a job because of poor wages or poor treatment. If they quit, they don’t endanger their healthcare access or their retirement security. Workers with adequate social insurance are more likely — to use a time-honored Southern phrase — to be “uppity.”
Apart from a high federal minimum wage, nothing could be a greater threat to the Southern cheap-labor economic strategy than universal, standardized federal social insurance. In order to maximize the dependence of Southern workers on Southern employers in the great low-wage labor pool of the former Confederacy, it would be best to have no welfare at all, only local charity (funded and controlled, naturally, by the local wealthy families).
But if there must be a modern welfare system, then the Southern oligarchy prefers a system that allows state governments, rather than Washington, D.C., to control eligibility and benefit levels.
Competition from welfare was a severe problem for the New Jersey experimenters. Many of the families in the study were actually receiving welfare benefits worth more than the experimental payments. Therefore, some experts questioned the experimenters' findings that the NIT had only a minimal effect on work incentives, and indeed questioned whether the experiment had really measured anything at all. HEW attempted to solve these problems by launching subsequent income-maintenance experiments in Seattle and Denver (SIME/DIME). These experiments more carefully integrated existing welfare programs and offered more generous NIT plans. But the generosity of most of the tested plans made them unlikely to be replicated on a national scale, and more complicated to analyze.Furthermore, because an earned income tax credit is portable, residents of any state are not placebound by the social policies of that state.
The Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which analyzed the SIME/DIME findings, found stronger work disincentive effects, ranging from an average 9 percent work eduction for husbands to an average 18 percent reduction for wives. This was not as scary as some NIT opponents had predicted. But it was large enough to suggest that as much as 50 to 60 percent of the transfers paid to two-parent families under a NIT might go to replace lost earnings. They also found an unexpected result: instead of promoting family stability (the presumed result of extending benefits to two-parent working families on an equal basis), the NITs seemed to increase family breakup.
Robert Moffitt, an economist at Johns Hopkins University and a leading authority on the NIT, notes another advantage of the program over other forms of state assistance: “No stigma attaches to the NIT.” Everyone fills out the same forms, and no infantilizing government meddles with a household’s food, shelter, and health care, as under the current system. The NIT simply provides the poor with money, which they can use to meet their various needs. Friedman strongly believed that individuals have the capacity to promote their own interests.Taken together, there's little economic evidence to suggest that a relatively small negative income tax contributes meaningfully to the entrenchment of the planters' aristocracy.
Yet another NIT advantage is a freer labor market. No minimum wage would be necessary, since a minimum income would now be guaranteed. This would boost employment: as economists recognize, a legal minimum wage tends to increase joblessness by discouraging employers from recruiting unskilled labor. The NIT would reduce illegal immigration, too. Managed by the IRS, it would apply only to citizens and legal residents, and since it would eliminate welfare programs, aliens would have less incentive to cross the border illegally for government benefits (though local authorities would still have to decide whether to grant them access to schools and hospitals). “From an economist’s perspective, the negative income tax is the perfect design,” Moffitt says. “The only reason an economist would oppose it would be from a strict libertarian perspective—opposition to any kind of government-managed welfare.”
Go ahead and criticize developmental classes if you want, but get it right. They’re well-intended, but flawed, holdovers from an earlier time. They’re not anti-student conspiracies, financial aid scams, or profit centers. If they were, the for-profit colleges would have embraced them. Instead, the for-profits ducked them, and community colleges are starting to figure out that the for-profits may have had a point, even if for different reasons. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that it’s nefarious. It may just be mistaken.Some of the comments on the post suggest that remediation, er, development, doesn't feel like college to students, and contributes to student disengagement. Since remediation comes close to paying for high school twice, perhaps that's not totally out of place. Yes, that post is from eight years ago. I've seen nothing to reconsider my position.
The logical choice for a spring break trip in the midst of a mid-March Erie deep-freeze would be to head south to hit the beach. So in February my wife, Deb, and I set our sights on sunny Florida, with visions of basking in sunshine and hearing the crack of the bat.They were able to procure coach tickets on the Lake Shore Limited, a train that is often sold out, and their family experience was positive (no mention of lounge car passengers who had too much to drink, or of immigration authorities behaving like East German inspectors on the Hamburg to Berlin service). The concluding paragraphs, however, make the case for increased frequency and capacity.
Yet our enthusiasm faded considerably when we checked on airfare for a family of four. Then every hotel, condo or rental I called or e-mailed was booked solid. There were some rooms to be had at Disney, but the thought of wading through spring-break crowds didn't feel much like a vacation.
We were nearly resigned to just staying home when Deb threw out a curveball -- what about New York City? We'd been wanting to take Ben and Sara there, and it had been years since Deb and I visited the Big Apple. I liked everything about the idea -- except the prospect of driving to and through New York where daily parking costs more than a tankful of gas. And the idea of flying into a frantic New York airport followed by a long and pricey cab ride downtown didn't hold much appeal either. Then Deb offered up the answer to all of my misgivings. "Let's take the train."
Would we do it again? Absolutely. We're already thinking of a future trip to Boston -- and perhaps the Chicago run if we wrap our minds around catching the train at 1:30 in the morning. Maybe that trip is next spring break, if the long Erie winter doesn't drive us south -- no matter what the cost. Or if Amtrak ever comes up with an Erie-to-Florida route, we're all in.On one of my trips to Milwaukee, a number of Syracuse basketball fans depended on the Lake Shore being punctual enough to get them to Union Station in time to catch a Hiawatha Service train to Milwaukee in time for the tip-off of a Marquette game. Milwaukee and Chicago have proper frequency and some connectivity, apart from some late night departures for people going to the shows or the sporting events.
I think the National Football League is over, just nobody knows it yet. And there's a chance to save it. It's not totally gone, but it's on track. It has all the ingredients for being a target. It has all of the modern relevant ingredients the left doesn't like and sees as an opportunity to change or eliminate.Part of his case is a John Kass column suggesting football is headed downscale, as has been the fate of boxing, the perennial status of wrestling, and mid-week horse racing. (I ask readers to imagine Churchill Downs on any day other than the first Saturday in May.)
Football is dead in America. Even through all the chatter and cheerleading and media hype, football as an American cultural institution lies in final spasm. It's as dead as the Marlboro Man. And, if the professional game survives at all, it will be relegated to the pile of trash sports, like mixed martial arts or whatever is done in third-rate arenas with monster trucks and mud. It won't be as American as apple pie. Instead, football will become the province of people with face tattoos.Perhaps so, although at University Diaries football may still have a place as long as it is a source of revenue.
Already – in coach buyouts alone – university football is destroying the financial foundation of many schools. Those same schools will not hesitate to pay out hundreds of millions more in personal injury claims.Perhaps so. Watch, though, the television contracts for the mid-majors. The end of Wednesday night college football is an outcome much to be desired. The nonrenewal of those ESPN contracts is likely, as well, to be a signal that the revenue is no longer there.
The model here will be big pharma. As a corporate endeavor,pharma cheats and injures, but as long as it can afford to pay out billions every year in legal settlements and still make a big profit, it will continue to do so. Universities will hit up students for higher and higher athletic fees, and students – even more subject to these passions than alumni, it seems – will willingly give.
I have truly attempted to live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve used it so very often) that “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.There's much more of substance in the essay.
After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.Indeed.
Reading Day is an upbeat euphemism for “Dead Day,” the end of “Dead Week,” in which colleges and universities in theory relax assignments, projects and tests.Maybe. Maybe not.
Fun fact: Google thinks a search about Dead Day is really a search about Day of the Dead, the celebration of dearly departed relatives and friends that’s popular throughout Latin America.
Anyway, the reason teachers should chill is to give students time and space to prepare for finals.
Until a few decades ago, many colleges really did observe Dead Day/Week, but it wasn’t a vacation. Classes, notes and reviews occurred; people learned. The learning was purposeful, more reflective, slower and less painful.
Nowadays (if the Internet is any indication), what happens is that far from chilling, faculty members are serving extra helpings of papers, projects and tests.
We do this because we’re sadists, bad planners and as foreplay to the big event – finals – next week.
The syllabi [c.q.] faculty are required to disseminate the first week of classes are legal documents that clearly specify what’s required, when it’s due and how grades are calculated. If they read syllabi, students know what’s coming nearly every day. Many assignments can be accomplished without penalty in advance.Perhaps it's the usual, plenty of time to do it at the last minute phenomenon at work. Or perhaps, something more nefarious is at work.
No one ever accused me of being deficient in cynicism, but whenever I hear that colleges should be run more like businesses, my first reaction is that that mindset is one of the main things wrong with colleges.I'd be more sympathetic to the gripe if I were more confident that calling meetings and changing focus on short notice were an occupational disease of deans and deanlets only. In 34 years in the service of various institutions of higher learning, I can assure readers that that is not necessarily the case.
The main point of a college education now is to help get students a job. It’s preparation for a culture of work in which short-term profits are valued more than long-term quality, where projects, meetings and priorities unfold at crushing speed and often without legitimacy, where people at the top get ridiculous paychecks while the wages of those in the trenches remain flat, and so on.
"Being listened to and being heard is an experience that doesn't happen terribly often," he muses. "To listen compassionately or nonjudgmentally to another person — not to get too heavy about it — but I once heard somebody say that was a form of real prayer."Yes, and a counselor or psychologist must be compassionate and nonjudgemental in a way that a priest hearing confessions or a professor hearing explanations doesn't have to be.
“We need to broadcast who we are or we will waste away, as other very sophisticated and successful universities dominate public discourse and the search for knowledge,” Herbst said during her address.It's the usual business bafflegab, despite pieties to the contrary.
The new primary wordmark – presented as “UCONN,” in all capital letters – lies at the center of the University’s visual identity and has been designed to create a powerful symbol that is representative of the University as a whole. Recent University research indicates that the University of Connecticut is widely known today as UConn; a number of other institutions have similarly embraced shortened school names as their primary naming convention for their academic and athletics programs, including MIT, UCLA, Georgia Tech, Pitt, and Penn.
“As an institution, for years we have made use of ‘UConn’ as an institutional nickname of sorts,” Herbst said. “Recognizing that there is great value and recognition in this unique identifier, going forward, we are adopting ‘UConn’ as one primary visual wordmark for the entire institution.”
The newly adopted wordmark has been created for institutional and academic use across the University. It is a modified version of the wordmark developed in recent years for the UConn Athletics program, which began working with Nike last year to unify the numerous disparate logos used by various UConn athletics teams.
“We’re not breakfast cereal, and we’re not a detergent. But we still need to communicate what we do, why we do it, how we do it, and that we do it well. So branding actually matters a great deal,” Herbst said. “As an institution with a global reach, we must compete on an international level for virtually everything: for students, faculty, staff, grants, awards, donations – you name it. And when we compete, we need to present ourselves at our very best, because how key audiences perceive our academic strength and overall reputation influences the choices they make.”So for all the money they spend, they got this.
Over the course of the past few weeks, UConn has gradually unveiled its “New University Visual Identity Program” which will make UConn the school’s new “wordmark” with a unified appearance, and will require a change in the Husky Dog logo from its current mascot to a more “powerful and aggressive” looking logo. In your Second State of the University Address, you spoke to the reasoning behind this re-branding and logo change, and these justifications left me overcome by waves of anger and frustration. As a UConn student who is proud of my University’s academics and my future degree, I feel frustrated; as a woman student living at this campus I am outright offended. I am appalled by the selective amnesia these justifications display and angered at the superficiality of this Visual Identity Program.Whatever. Herbert Matter could put new paint on the New Haven and on the Boston and Maine, but if the trains were unreliable, it made no difference. In like manner, ZooConn can replace its old logo with this one, and if the administration starves the academic departments of resources, it will make no difference.
One of the mysteries of academe is why English departments have self-destructed. We understand how it happened — professors moved into esoteric literary theories based on Marxism, feminism, and other -isms, neglecting their traditional duties such as teaching freshman composition. (That’s now handed off to graduate students and adjuncts; what they don’t accomplish is left to “writing across the curriculum” policies.)A business consultant offers a proposal that will probably turn off a lot of people by its use of the current corporate bafflegab.
But why? From self-interest alone, you would think that teaching the basics of writing would be wise because well-taught introductory courses (especially when required) bring in new students. Some will become majors in the department and expand the department and provide job security. But the number of English majors has taken a nose dive.
English departments can be restored to prominence if they re-focus, re-brand, and re-market their curricula to adapt to the needs of their students and meet the demands of the marketplace. I say that as a business consultant who mentors many new graduates, but my views are not that different from those of [William M.] Chace, an emeritus English professor and former president of Emory University.The consultant's conclusion, also, is too laden with business bafflegab to persuade many people, although much of his substance is correct.
Now, English department faculty may not like this advice. I understand that English departments are focused more on theory than on literature itself—some say they have shifted from love of English literature to deconstructing it. Yet they remain the natural place for teaching how to communicate.
As Chace wrote, English departments “should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression.”
If English departments could be the locus of this learning, they would have that “definable expertise” that they lack now. They would create an emotional connection with incoming students, increase synergy with other departments within the college, and establish a foundation to create a brand within the college and grow exponentially through extensions within the department. Since most students would study this curriculum (in my view, it should be required), the English department’s gravitas would dramatically increase.It works something like this.
If English professors are so devoted to "theory" that they don't see themselves doing anything so mundane as teaching composition, then someone else may sieze the opportunity. That someone may not be in the university at all. As higher education begins to change, there will be more chances for entrepreneurs (inside and outside universities) to offer education in unconventional ways.
