Month: June 2018

With many state legislatures reducing appropriations for higher education at an alarming rate, universities around the country are searching for creative ways to finance the upgrading of their crumbling physical infrastructures.  Leading the way is Louisiana State University.  In 2017, the World Health Organization declared that 72% of LSU’s bathrooms had achieved CODE RED status, meaning that the unhygienic conditions in these units could easily support the growth of Ebola viruses as large as a horse’s foreleg.  In the words of Tedros Adhanom, WHO’s Director-General, “that’s not good.  If one of those toxic bundles got loose, the entire population of the LSU campus could bleed out in a week, and the rest of the state’s residents would be wearing hazmat suits until 2050.”

Not content to sit on their germ-covered hands and wait for this epidemic to occur, LSU has become the first university in the nation to use the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform to pay for the rehabilitation of its bathrooms.

According to F. King Alexander, the school’s President, “we’re asking folks to invest in the bladders and bowels of the LSU community.  A $20 donation can purchase thirty 1000-sheet rolls of toilet paper, a necessity we haven’t been able to afford since 2015.  With a $50 gift we could buy three toilet seats.  LSU hasn’t had a functioning toilet seat since 2012.  We tried replacing them with extra-large cinnamon bagels from the cafeteria, but that was a disaster.  Trust me, you don’t want to know why.  

“And we definitely need new plumbing.  Flushing the toilet in our bathrooms is like playing Poop Whac-A-Mole.  What goes down in one bowl comes back up in another, just three stalls away.  Hell, we don’t even have three bucks for duct tape to repair cracks in the urinals.”

LSU hopes to raise at least $7 million in the first year of its Kickstarter campaign, which will operate under the slogan, “Join the Stream Team.”  Donors who give $100 (“Golden Club” members) will have a small, rust-resistant nameplate with their initials placed in a urinal on the campus.  Those who contribute $5000 will have a bathroom stall named in their honor, which will feature the donor’s full name and hometown in platinum on the door.  “We’re going first class,” says Alexander.

John Bel Edwards, Louisiana’s governor, is enthusiastic about the Stream Team initiative.  “I love this school’s can-do attitude.  Here’s my 50 bucks. Sign me up for a dozen mango-scented urinal cakes!”

We smell progress. 

Elite colleges and universities take pride in their low acceptance rates.  Indeed, achieving rates in the single digits has been known to make admissions directors scream louder — in ecstasy — than a howler monkey during foreplay. 

And now this: William Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Harvard, announced at a press conference on Tuesday that his university had accepted no one for the fall of 2018.  That’s right — an acceptance rate of zero.

Fitzsimmons noted that this year’s applicant pool of nearly 43,000 was the most highly qualified in the school’s history.  However, Harvard wanted to send a clear message that it was no longer simply seeking to enroll “the best of the best.”  As he put it, “we’ve decided to accept only the best of the best of the best.  We’re not looking for the inspirational high school valedictorian with perfect SATs who was raised by wolves in a dumpster next to a razed Wendy’s in the inner city.  Hell, kids like that are everywhere these days.  What we want are the kids who were abandoned by those wolves, and who then had to home-school themselves in the street while discovering a cure for pancreatic cancer using nothing but tweezers and a one-legged Norway sewer rat.  We’re all about performance, not just promise.”

When a reporter asked the Dean about the financial implications for Harvard of not accepting an entering class in 2018, he scoffed.  “Are you kidding me?  We’re not some tuition-driven trailer park.  God actually borrowed money from us last year to remodel his deck overlooking the firmament.”

What about all those highly qualified applicants who were turned away?  “Not a problem,” says Fitzsimmons.  “We encouraged them to attend a safety school like Yale, Princeton, or Williams for a couple of years and then reapply to us.  We’ll even accept a few transfer credits from those places, though we need to be careful, because students occasionally try to sneak in courses that were not taught by Nobel Prize winners.  What’s up with that?”

As the press conference came to a close, the Dean was asked if he thought a 0% acceptance rate might be viewed by the public as the sign of an insufferably snobbish, narcissistic institution.

“I certainly hope so.”

What would Thomas Jefferson think?  According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, renovations of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia could significantly decrease the amount of shelf space available for books, and many faculty are unhappy at the prospect.  To an English professor of a certain age, the musty fragrance of an 1861 edition of Silas Marner discovered in the stacks can be more potent than a bongful of premium-grade Venice Beach recreational marijuana.  

But let’s be fair.  What options do shelf-starved university libraries have in these challenging times?

Perhaps the most creative approach has been taken at the University of Arizona.  When its Main Library ran out of space for new books in 2012, the school entered into a collaboration with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and Classics Illustrated comics to produce shortened versions of every volume in the library.  That’s right…..every volume.  

According to Library Director Lazlo Kefler, “Over the past six years we have reduced the space needed for our holdings by nearly 60%.  For example, a typical paperback copy of The Brothers Karamazov is well over 700 pages.  Our version is 86 pages.  How did we do it?  We started by cutting the length of those ridiculously long Russian names.  ‘Fyodorovich’ became ‘Jones’ and ‘Alexandrovna’ became ‘Pam’.  Nothing of substance was lost.  No harm, no foul.  And then we removed lots of unnecessary prepositions, such as ‘in’, ‘for’, and ‘to’.  Once again, no harm done.  Finally, we got rid of two characters, Ivan and Dmitri, and all of the plot lines involving them.  That was a bit trickier to pull off, but we were able to do it without compromising the flow of the narrative.”

Kefler admits that some books are easier to condense than others. “Technical monographs with lots of mathematical formulas are a real pain.  You don’t want to leave out an important step that gets you from A to B in a calculus proof.  Our solution is to present everything in a continuous flow on the page with no spaces between the symbols, no punctuation, no new lines or indentations for next steps, and no +/-/÷/×/= signs.  This saves tons of room.  Of course, it also makes the formulas a bit more difficult to understand, but let’s be honest, these volumes have never been a picnic to read.  Math and science are hard!” 

On a more positive note, Kefler maintains that certain books actually become more comprehensible when you shorten them.  “Consider postmodernist literature.  We distilled the collected works of Michel Foucault into a pamphlet that — in its entirety — consists of the following two sentences:

Everything you think you know is made up by powerful interests that are out to screw you.  And they’re winning.

“Or take James Joyce’s Ulysses, another big fat novel.  We replaced it with a single photograph of a Dublin street from 1904, which is when Leopold Bloom’s story takes place.  The photo gets the job done, and students love the revised version!”

Looks like a win-win to us.  Well done, Mr. Kefler. 

 

 

Unless you reside in Texas, where it’s legal — and indeed, one is even encouraged — to carry a live hand grenade on campus, there’s not much you can do to bring to an abrupt close a tedious, dysfunctional faculty meeting.  However, there are actions you can take to prevent, at an individual level, the brain death associated with such gatherings.  The Chronicle of Higher Education recently took note of a professor who brought her knitting to meetings (no joke), news that prompted us here at University Life to scour the country for other examples of faculty strategies for surviving group deliberations.  It quickly became evident that professors are a creative bunch.  A sampling:

—  At the University of Oregon, Physics professor Marjorie Yesketh-Snaffle uses department meetings as an opportunity to give Freckles, her pet hamster, a bath.  “I put a stainless-steel bowl on the conference table, fill it with warm water, add some Palmolive dishwashing liquid, and voila, it’s time to suds up!  Freckles loves to be washed, so there’s no violent splashing around that my colleagues might find annoying.  In fact, they often take turns drying Freckles off after her tub time.  We’re a closer, more cohesive department now, and we have Freckles to thank for that!”

—  Craig Fleth, a Civil Engineering professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, builds ships in a bottle during Faculty Senate meetings.  “This activity requires intense concentration and attention to detail,” Fleth claims, “so it’s not unusual for a three-hour Senate meeting to fly by without my having the slightest idea of what issues were discussed or what decisions were made, which is fine by me.  For the most part, my fellow Senators are flaming a**holes.  And they’re always stealing my tweezers.”

—  At Brandeis University, Linguistics professor Abe Phlegmstein-O’Leary uses Tenure-and-Promotion deliberations to work on his long-term project of translating the Torah into a document composed entirely of emoticons.  “I want to make this sacred text accessible to a 21st-century audience.  It has been a challenging labor of love, to put it mildly, but it’s a damn sight better use of my time than discussing the scholarly worth of articles by preening, insufferable assistant professors on the erotic symbolism of alligator-infested swampland in Faulkner’s novels.”

So, what life lesson have we learned here? 

If you’re bored at faculty meetings on your campus, you have no one but yourself to blame.  For the love of God, buy a hamster.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Georgia State University has emerged as the “leader of the pack” in using predictive analytics to help develop strategies for increasing retention and graduation rates among its students.  

Nice job, GSU, but you’ve got a long way to go before coming close to the level of performance achieved by Flazmore College, a small, private institution located in Bamberg, South Carolina.  Over the past decade, Flazmore has raised its four-year retention rate from 27% to a remarkable 98.7%.  In other words, 98.7% of Flazmore’s freshman class are still there when senior year arrives. 

How can such an accomplishment be possible?  To explore this question, University Life interviewed Flazmore’s President, Dr. Penelope Dwange.

Dwange:  “How is it possible?  The answer is simple.  Once students get here, we don’t let them leave.”

UL:           “Huh?”

Dwange:  “All of our students live on Flazmore’s beautiful 750-acre campus.  Everything they could possibly want while they’re in college is right here, so there’s no reason for them to leave — not even for school vacations — before they finish their degree.  We’ve hired Blackwater, a private security services contractor,  to monitor the perimeter of the campus in order to prevent students from wandering off.”

UL:           “What happens if a student can no longer afford Flazmore’s fairly hefty tuition?”

Dwange:  “Not a problem.  We offer a comprehensive work-study program that employs students throughout the College, including on our farm.  Last year, our 20-acre cotton field produced an average of 963 pounds per acre, one of the highest yields in the state.  We couldn’t have done that without our student workers.”  

UL:           “Can financially needy students really earn enough from their campus jobs to pay their entire tuition bill?”

Dwange:  “Usually not.  That’s why we’re okay with a student not graduating in four years if they’re behind in their payments.  Our eight-year retention rate is 81%, and we’re very proud of that.”

UL:           “What happens if a student doesn’t have a high enough GPA to graduate after four years?”

Dwange:  “Once again, not a problem.  At Flazmore we don’t give up on students.  If their GPA at 120 credits is below the 2.5 threshold needed for graduation, we just keep them here, taking courses, until they get to 2.5.  We have a number of students in their mid-50’s who started at Flazmore when they were 18 or 19 years old.  Some of them have accumulated over 1000 credits but still haven’t achieved a 2.5, though a few are really close.  We’re confident that they’ll get there eventually.”

UL:           “You mentioned that Flazmore’s 4-year retention rate is 98.7%.  What about the remaining 1.3%?  Do these students escape from the campus?”

Dwange: “Well, they try to.”

UL:           “Do any of them succeed?”

Dwange: “No.”

UL:           “Are you saying that after they’re caught, they are…….”

Dwange:  “Yes.”

You can judge Flazmore College harshly if you wish, but you can’t deny that this is a school that takes retention very seriously.