Month: October 2017

In what appears to be a first in modern U.S. higher education, a university has appointed a President who does not possess a college degree.  At a press conference yesterday the University of Oklahoma announced that its next leader will be Mr. Timothy “Sparky” Cretch, a 22-year-old high school dropout with extensive experience in website design. 

According to Clayton Bennett, Chair of the University’s Board of Regents, “In the fierce, steel-cage death match that characterizes competition for college students today, a school without a killer website is toast.  Mr. Cretch is widely regarded as the premier website designer of his generation.  His Oregon company — Scroll, Baby, Scroll! — has grown from a $15,000 start-up in 2011, specializing in the development of sites for marijuana dispensaries and 10-lane bowling alleys, into a $325 million industry giant that works with numerous Fortune 500 companies and governments of foreign countries.  Sparky is the real deal!  Higher education is about more than just having a good Division I football team.  Prospective students want to interact with a website that provides them with a totally immersive scroll-and-click experience.  We don’t want you to simply ‘visit’ the Oklahoma website, we want you to climb inside its welcoming womb and be bathed in the nurturing amniotic fluid of our institution’s culture.  By the time you emerge, you’ll literally be drenched in your desire to become a Sooner.”

Mr. Timlin, who appeared at the press conference attired in cargo shorts, deck shoes, an inside-out Portland Trail Blazers tee shirt, and an Oregon Ducks baseball cap, joked that “I’ll probably have to buy myself some Oklahoma gear in the next few days, but I know that being President here is going to be AWESOME!  We’re going to have the first website in the country that provides a Five Senses Tour of the campus.  You’ll actually be able to smell the lawn on our quad, taste the ice cream in our cafeteria by licking the screen, and feel your body splash in the water of one of our Olympic-size residence hall swimming pools.  We’re going to blow away every other college website in the country.  But what’s up with this ‘Sooner’ nickname?    ‘Sooner’ than what, exactly?  I don’t get it.  It’s gotta go.”

The NCAA praised the University of North Carolina last week for including non-athletes in its long-standing practice of offering sham courses to students who needed an easy A with no work.  According to NCAA President Mark Emmert, “So often, colleges and universities bend the rules for athletes but don’t provide similar opportunities to rank-and-file students who are just as academically clueless as many Division I basketball and football players.  At North Carolina, every student could benefit from doing virtually nothing in a course while getting a passing grade.  This is a tradition that unites rather than divides athletes and non-athletes on campus.  We applaud UNC for its commitment to community.”

UNC Chancellor Carol Folt gracefully accepted the NCAA’s recognition: “Though UNC has been a pillar of the North Carolina Research Triangle for decades, we have always felt uncomfortable participating in a culture that celebrated academic excellence, a culture that called into question stereotypes of the American South as a cesspool of flaming ignorance.  Well, as a loyal Tar Heel I’m proud to report, “We’re bringing the STINK back, and that pungent smell is not just for athletes!”

In an October 13th article entitled “How the Academic Elite Reproduces Itself” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the authors cite research indicating that “graduates from a few elite institutions account for an outsized proportion of high-profile published work.” 

Hmmm…..sounds like there could be a scandal brewing here.  So, as a service to University Life readers, I put on my investigative reporter hat and conducted phone interviews with the Presidents of several of the institutions mentioned in the article, asking for their explanations of this finding.  Here’s what they said:

Drew Gilpin Faust (Harvard): “Virtually all of our doctoral students come from a eugenics breeding farm that the University maintains in Chesuncook, Maine.  It works out well for us, though occasionally a gene-splicing error produces a physics Ph.D. with an extra ear or a mathematician with zero interpersonal skills and poor personal hygiene habits.  Okay, okay….maybe the second problem occurs more than just occasionally.”

Ronald Daniels (Johns Hopkins): “It’s the crab cakes.  Here in Baltimore we have the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and those babies rock!  Incredibly tasty, and the ultimate brain food.  Make sure to use Old Bay High-Citation Seasoning and buy the lump meat, not the claw.  Psych students who get the less expensive claw meat end up publishing in places like Highlights Magazine rather than Developmental Psychology.  A damn shame.”

Martha Pollack (Cornell): “It must be all the hills on our Ithaca campus.  Climb, descend, climb, descend, climb, descend.  Up, down, up, down, up, down.  It NEVER ends.  Exercises the mind as well as the body, I guess.  But I’m so sick of it.  My lower legs look like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s during his prime, and they ache constantly.  If the Board of Trustees let me, I’d bring in a bunch of road graders and level the whole freakin’ landscape!  You’re not recording this, are you?”

Christopher Eisgruber (Princeton): “You’re kidding, right?  We’re PRINCETON!  God ADORES us.  Haven’t you heard of the Divine Right of Kings?  Everything we touch becomes golden, sparkly, and brilliant…..a snow globe filled with all the world’s knowledge, shimmering like the Aurora Borealis.  Why the hell we’re in New Jersey, I’ll never know.”

Carol Crist (Berkeley) and Marc Tessier-Lavigne (Stanford) [conference call]: “You have NO idea how much high-octane pot we smoke out here!  We buy it in 500-lb. bales, divide it up into compressed bricks, and then distribute the bricks to graduate students at orientation.  The impact on the quality of their scholarly work is MASSIVE!  Or maybe it’s just the Doritos.  Who the hell knows?  HA-HA-HA-HA-HA………. [raucous laughter continues for 10 minutes, with background noises suggesting that Tessier-Lavigne has tumbled out of his chair onto the floor].”

There you have it.  Question asked, and answered.  No scandal here, folks.

 

 

“Should Universities Ban Single-Gender Discussion Panels?”  This was the title of an October 4th article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which reported the recent controversial decision of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University to prohibit single-gender panels in order to increase the sharing of diverse perspectives.  Reasonable people can probably disagree over the wisdom of such a policy, but there’s little doubt that rigid adherence to it can lead to the sort of awkward situation that occurred last week at the Stubblefield School of Nursing at Northern South Central Community College in Wichita, Kansas.

In Obstetrics 231 the topic of the day was, “What Does It Feel Like to Give Birth?”  A panel of four NSCCC students — three young mothers and Toby Scalfani, a 20-year-old member of the men’s lacrosse team — participated.  A rich exchange among the three women occupied the first half-hour of the session, at which point Mr. Scalfani was asked to share his lived experience of childbirth.  “Wow, this is a tough one,” he responded, vigorously scratching his head.  “But now that I think of it, I did get hit in the crotch with a lacrosse ball during a game with Wichita State last year, and believe me, that was no fun.  I had to sit out the rest of the game, and I won’t even describe what it looked like down there.  Lacrosse balls are solid, not hollow like tennis balls.  When I got home that night, all I could keep down was some chicken broth that my mom made for me.  So, yeah, I kinda know what it feels like to have a kid.  It hurts big time!

“Did you know that a lacrosse ball can travel over 100 miles per hour when it’s flung by a lacrosse stick?  A couple of weeks ago my friend Spackle demolished the door of a Dodge Ram 1500 when he took a close-up shot at it over at the car dealership that Brad Guernsey’s dad owns.  It was midnight and we were pretty wasted.  Lacrosse rules, man!”

Results of the panel were mixed.  Several students in attendance decided to form a women’s lacrosse team, thereby strengthening NSCCC’s compliance with Title IX regulations.  On the other hand, nearly half of the females who completed a post-panel survey indicated that they were re-thinking their decision to have children, especially if those children might turn out to be boys.