Author: Michael Morris

Financially troubled Cincinnati Christian University will close at the end of the Fall 2019 semester (no joke).  Among the Hail Mary passes it launched to save the school as the game clock ran down was, ironically, the establishment of a football program.  Pass incomplete.  Game over.  

If only CCU had followed the path of tiny Flemingsburg Bible College in eastern Kentucky, it might have survived.  Plagued by declining enrollment over the past several years, Flemingsburg scored a heavenly coup when it announced on Tuesday that God the Father (yes, that God the Father) will join the faculty as a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer for the Fall 2020 semester.  

“We’re overjoyed,” exclaims Dr. Gwendall Cistern, Flemingsburg’s President.  “The Almighty will be teaching four courses for us that semester.  It’s a heavy load, to be sure, but He is God, after all, and we won’t expect Him to publish or serve on any committees.  He’ll also coach the women’s field hockey team, but that’s something he volunteered for.   He will reside on campus in Eden Gardens, our graduate student housing complex.”

Here are the four Special Topics courses that God will offer in Fall 2020:

Biology 710  The Creation: An Insider’s Perspective — An in-depth analysis of how the Almighty multi-tasked during the seven days He fashioned the universe.  Will go far beyond the basic details provided in the Book of Genesis.  The course will be accompanied by an exhibition, at the college’s art gallery, of never-before-seen photos from that fateful week.  The longstanding question of what God did on the Seventh Day (His “day of rest”) will also be answered.  (Course can be taken with lab [4 credits] or without lab [3 credits].)

Philosophy 651  The Ethics of Tragedy — Why does God allow horrible things to happen to innocent people (e.g., typhoons, childhood leukemia, earthquakes, Lou Gehrig’s disease, chronic dandruff)?  In this course the Almighty will explain His reasoning.  Required Prerequisite:  Psychology 342  Mood and Behavior.  

Theology 531  Eternal Happiness — What do people actually do in heaven?  Is it perpetually daytime in the firmament, or are there evenings as well?  Do residents ever sleep?  What about haircuts, meals, and public transportation?  Are Netflix and HBO available?  If so, do heaven-dwellers get to see the new season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” before folks on earth do?  All these questions, and more, will be addressed. 

Metaphysics 317  Second Thoughts — An examination of decisions made by the Almighty that He believes don’t look so terrific in hindsight.  Topics have yet to be finalized, but are likely to include the following: baseball’s designated hitter rule, Twitter, mosquitoes, the Ivy League, and white people.  

The Fall 2020 semester will also feature guest lectures by the original Mary and the Holy Ghost, to be held in the Corinthians Amphitheater. 

SCHEDULE 

October 15th, 8:00 pm  An Evening with Mary: Question and Answer Session on the Immaculate Conception

November 12th, 9:00 pm  The Holy Ghost: My Life as a Dove

December 3rd, 7:30 pm  An Evening with Mary II: Challenges in Raising a Gifted Child

Applications to Flemingsburg for Fall 2020 have increased eight-fold when compared with those for Fall 2019.  Details concerning the Almighty’s compensation have not been disclosed, but as President Cistern notes, “having God on campus for an entire semester is a bargain at any price!”

 

True Fact:  In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article on diversity/inclusion challenges at the University of Iowa, an anonymous staff member observed that finding a partner can be difficult for a single person of color in a largely white environment.

A significant problem, to be sure.  But a little creativity can go a long way….  

Consider, for example, the University of Maine at Orono, a school located in one of the whitest states in the nation.  Beginning in September 2020, any faculty member of color who has been at the University for at least two years without finding a partner of color will be provided, free of charge, with a white spouse.  

According to University spokesperson Henrietta Kayak-Pine, “we’re not talking about connecting you with some random white person who’s been living alone in a yurt at Baxter State Park for the past decade, subsisting on alpine bearberry leaves and pond algae.  These folks will be thoroughly vetted professionals who’ll bring something of value to the relationship.  White people can make fine spouses, as long as you choose them carefully.  Sure, my husband Earl is an absolute jerk, but that’s not because he’s white, it’s because he’s a guy.  His idea of a night out for the two of us is sitting in our Ski-Doo in the driveway during a blizzard, eating Slim Jims and listening to a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band on his transistor radio.

“All of the spouses provided by the Orono program will be graduates of a three-week summer training institute that focuses on how to be a good husband or wife, both inside and outside of the bedroom.  And you’ll know their score on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) before meeting them.  I’m just sorry that Earl never had the opportunity to participate in this training.  We’d both be a lot happier, and I probably wouldn’t have shot him in the leg last winter.

“Let’s be honest.  Although the racial demographics of the United States are shifting dramatically, Maine is likely to remain 95% white until at least the year 3000.  Convincing people of color to come to a place where 15% of the population marry caribou, and the state dessert is snow-on-a-stick, is not easy to accomplish.  We must do more.”

Indeed, you must.   

True Fact:  According to the Boston-based Online Learning Consortium, college professors are vulnerable to “neuromyths,” which are erroneous beliefs about learning that are based in misunderstandings of how the brain functions (e.g., the mistaken belief that a student learns best when taught by an instructor who employs the student’s preferred learning style).  

As it turns out, faculty neuromyths are not confined to their perceptions of students.  Here are some other examples:

“My department chair hates me!”  Reality:  Your department chair doesn’t hate you.  There’s a big difference between your chair hating you and your chair simply not caring about you.

“My dean hates me!”  Reality:  Actually, this one is true.  Sorry.

“The Provost has no idea who I am!”  Reality: The Provost does know who you are, but, as is the case with your department chair, doesn’t care.  

“The custodian is stealing change from my coin dish when he cleans my office!”  Reality:  It’s much more likely that your underpaid, non-unionized graduate assistant is doing this. 

“The reference librarians gossip about me behind my back whenever I visit the Circulation Desk!”  Reality:  You know that librarians are notoriously quirky.  They’re probably just sharing naughty limericks about the Dewey Decimal System.  It has nothing to do with you.  

“Servers in the Faculty Dining Room give me smaller portions at lunch than they give my colleagues!”  Reality:  Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?  They’re doing you a favor. 

“A Campus Police officer ‘keyed’ the side of my car with a corkscrew from his Swiss Army knife!”  Reality:  No, that would be your graduate assistant again. 

“The IT Department doesn’t like me.  It takes them a month to respond to my urgent Help Desk requests!”  Reality:  It takes them a month to respond to every Help Desk request.  They’re not singling you out. 

“The University’s Core Curriculum Committee is prejudiced against me!”  Reality:  Their rejection of your Special Topics course proposal — Blackface on Stage, Screen, and Fraternity Row: A Sentimental Journey — was mandated by the section of the school’s anti-racism policy that governs role-playing by faculty and students in class.  It had nothing to do with you personally. 

“At the All-Faculty Assembly last week, my colleagues appeared uninterested — or even worse, annoyed — when I attempted to discuss the unwarranted parking tickets I’ve been receiving on campus.  Dammit, no one EVER uses that part of the quadrangle lawn next to the Chemistry building!”  Reality:  This perception could be true.  University Life recommends that you pay the tickets. 

Have a healthy cognitive day. 

 

In ancient times, having a professor/mentor write a recommendation letter on your behalf was a pretty straightforward deal: you asked, and the professor said either yes or no (usually the former).  However, a step was added to the process a number of years ago.  In this incarnation, the professor responds to your request by asking you to prepare what is essentially a draft of the recommendation, which the professor will then review and presumably revise before sending it to a graduate school or potential employer.

The public rationale for this practice emphasizes the ability of a self-generated draft to produce a more fine-grained account of the applicant’s experiences, strengths, and characteristics than would otherwise be the case.  Of course, one can convincingly argue that such a detailed description is what personal statements are for.  But let’s not quibble over technicalities.  The real reason for self-generated drafts is that it reduces the professor’s workload.  We shouldn’t embarrass ourselves by pretending that this ship doesn’t sail in ethically compromised waters. 

Against this background, University Life is pleased to offer draft-writers five suggestions to help make the final versions of the recommendations produced by their references credible and compelling on an individual level, and not so similar to one another on a collective level that they generate undue suspicion among readers.  To put it in psychometric terms, one wants the inter-rater reliability of these communications to be high, but not too high.

Suggestion 1:  Identify related but distinct minor flaws about yourself that underscore your humanness and can be distributed among multiple drafts.  The key here is to make sure the flaws are consistent with one another.  “Todd is prone to fits of screaming when frustrated” in Draft for Mentor A  doesn’t fit well with “Todd remains disturbingly passive in circumstances that would provoke righteous anger in others” in Draft for Professor B.  A better pairing with Draft A would be, “When Todd is in the room, the level of ambient tension increases markedly.”

Suggestion 2:  Emphasize aspects of your research or scholarship that are likely to be associated with a variety of opinions.  “Not surprisingly, Daphne’s dissertation research on cloning of human infants has been shrouded in secrecy, but I have high hopes for its eventual impact.”  This meshes nicely with “Personally, I have ethical reservations concerning Daphne’s proposal to clone upper-class children in the Hamptons, but there is no arguing with the brilliance of her Bouillon Model for Centrifuge-Based Replication.” 

Suggestion 3:  Speaking of ethics, don’t be shy about pushing the envelope.  Keep in mind that the very act of writing these drafts makes you complicit in an unsavory activity.  “Some might call Gavin unethical, but I prefer to see him as transcending conventional discourses of morality in pursuit of transformational knowledge.”  This could be a winning match with, “Is Gavin a bit of an a**hole?  Absolutely, but so were Steve Jobs and General George S. Patton.  Case closed.  You’d be lucky to hire any one of them.”

Suggestion 4:  Classroom teaching.  Anything goes here, so don’t worry about it.  “Harriet consistently receives abysmal student evaluations, but keep in mind that she does not pander to students by providing them with crutches such as syllabi, course objectives, or punctuality in showing up for class.  She understands that, ultimately, education is a journey you must take on your own.”  In another draft you can say, “To be sure, all the available evidence indicates that Harriet is a disaster in the classroom.  Not a problem.  She will be coming to you with enough long-term grant support to buy out her salary until global warming turns your campus into a bubbling Petri dish of throbbing organic matter.”

Suggestion 5:  Figure out multiple ways to say you’re altruistic.  “Sheldon is a giver.  Whether it’s helping a colleague jump-start her car in the parking lot when it’s 5 below zero, bailing a drunken advisee out of jail on Homecoming Weekend, or bringing recreational marijuana to the department Christmas party, he’s there for you.  Of course, sometimes he can be too there for you, knocking on your bedroom window at 3:00 am, bearing donuts and ready to discuss the spreadsheet he’s developed for scheduling intro courses.  But that’s just Sheldon: he’s a giver.”  On the other hand, sometimes less can be more: “Sheldon Chicklett is the finest being, human or otherwise, I’ve ever met.”

Well, that should get you started.  Writing multiple drafts of recommendations for yourself isn’t easy, nor should it be.  But don’t forget: once you’re hired or accepted into a doctoral program, you can have your students write their recommendations.  Is that cool or what?  Ultimately, everything evens out.  Isn’t that what the classic song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” is all about?  Okay, perhaps not.

Uh-oh.  The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa has agreed to provide its former Dean of Students with a “neutral reference” for future employment after some of the Dean’s tweets, published by Breitbart News, contributed to his resignation.  

A “neutral reference”?  Really?  

Before you get all uppity and start sputtering that this insipid concept could only come from a state that claims the Alabama red-bellied cooter (a pond turtle) as its official reptile, it must be acknowledged that the legal profession is apparently the true culprit here. 

Essentially, a neutral reference is a mechanism for preventing lawsuits.  Roughly translated, the implicit message of a neutral reference is, “We think this guy is an a**hole and/or incompetent and/or unethical and/or God-knows-what-else, but we’re not going to write any of this down (wink, wink). But we will tell you that he worked here.”

[Please, take a few moments to mop up the hypocrisy-induced barf you just spewed onto your lap.]

On those unfortunate occasions when your institution’s legal counsel has instructed you to write a neutral reference, feel free to use the following sample, provided at no charge by University Life, as a template:

Dear Hiring Committee:

I am neither pleased nor displeased to offer this reference letter regarding Professor Harold Twembly.  On the highway of professional life at our university, Professor Twembly occupies the median strip, where he has parked his 1972 AMC Gremlin and watches the traffic.  His research and scholarship have not advanced the field but, on the other hand, they have not retarded it.  Put another way, he has left his discipline undisturbed; think of his work as ink that disappears as it dries.

Professor Twembly’s students, when they can recall him, describe him as neither a good professor nor a bad one; he’s just “a professor.”  As one senior who took three courses with Professor Twembly wrote on his course evaluation, “he was there.”  End-of-course assessments indicate that his students do not learn anything, but none of them have grown more stupid, except for Vince Yorpelson, a tight end on the school’s football team who experienced three concussions during the Fall semester.   

Outside of class, students report that during visits to Professor Twembly’s office he neither smiles nor frowns.  “Imagine a cantaloupe with a lobotomy,” wrote one junior.  “He never has much to say, which is OK with me.  Really, it’s fine.”  

As a colleague, Professor Twembly is neither helpful nor unhelpful to fellow faculty members.  He just “is.”  He has never encouraged me to do anything, nor has he discouraged me.  In department meetings he radiates a Zen-like presence that resembles a small, odor-free tureen of vegetable broth served at room temperature.

In sum, Professor Twembly can be described as a human organism that has taught at our university for the past seven years.  I hope you have found this reference letter to be neither useful nor counterproductive when making — or not making — a decision — or no decision — concerning Professor Twembly.

There you have it.  No need to thank us.  At University Life, we always have your back.  

 

 

 

Let’s be honest, you knew this was coming.  What we’re referring to here is a New York Times October 7th headline: “Do Works by Men Toppled by #MeToo Belong in the Classroom?” The Times wonders, “should they be canceled — banished from public engagement like some of their creators?” 

Well, the fever is spreading, and the targets are no longer just males accused of sexual misbehavior.  In Topeka, Kansas, the city’s main public library has removed every Dr. Seuss book from its children’s collection.  According to Willard Dwenz, Chief Librarian, it has been recently documented “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that in 1978 Theodor Geisel punched a cat in the face in his home.  The feline, a Persian named Sprinkles, had scratched Geisel’s left arm, but only slightly.  Geisel proceeded to hit Sprinkles so hard with a right hook that he fractured her tiny nose.  Sprinkles never fully regained her sense of smell, and was on anti-depression medication for the rest of her life. 

Says Dwenz:  “After reviewing a videotape of the incident, there was no way we could justify keeping his books on our shelves.  This man, the author of “The Cat in the Hat,” was an abuser of kittens, for God’s sake!”

Or consider Rachel Carson, the acclaimed environmental activist who authored “Silent Spring” and “The Sea Around Us.”  Last month it was revealed that Ms. Carson did not separate paper from plastic when recycling, and thought nothing of tossing hamburger wrappers, half-filled soda cups, and mangled French fries out of her car window when traveling the pristine roads of coastal Maine. 

Responding to this discovery, Bates, Colby, and Bowdoin — all prestigious Maine colleges — announced that they will no longer allow professors to assign Carson’s books in their courses.  In a strongly worded joint statement released on October 10th, the Presidents of the three schools asserted, “it is clear that Rachel Carson was a trash whore whose reprehensible behavior betrayed the ideals she so eloquently wrote about.  She is dead to us as a legitimate commentator on the state of our planet.”

This just in:  The days of “Pride and Prejudice” and “Little Women” may be numbered.  You don’t want to know what University Life recently learned about Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott.  You’ve got to trust us on this one.  Imagine the worst possible scenario, and then quintuple its depravity.  That wouldn’t begin to describe what these women did…..and then bragged about.  

It is not for us to forgive them. 

 

True Fact: The undergraduate population of the University of Montana at Missoula has decreased by more than 40% over the past 8 years.  It is, by far, the biggest drop in undergraduate enrollment experienced by a public flagship institution in the United States.  Appropriately, on September 26th a Chronicle of Higher Education headline asked, “What’s Going On?” at Missoula.

University Life has spent the past two months investigating this question, and the answer is clear:

Bears. 

Montana is home to black bears and grizzlies, both of which inhabit the woods on the edge of the Missoula campus.  According to Campus Police Chief Seth “Deer Tick” Crick, “global warming is diminishing the availability of the bears’ traditional food supply, so they’ve started to replace that supply with our students.  Undergraduates who walk back alone to their dorms from the cafeteria right after dinner are particularly vulnerable, especially in the winter months when it gets dark early.  As the bears see it, these kids are just calorie-laden snacks.  And let’s face it, most college students these days are pretty self-absorbed.  By the time they look up from their smartphones to identify the source of the heavy breathing behind them, it’s too late.  Often, the only thing we find left on the sidewalk is a smartphone, and occasionally a stray sneaker.  It’s a damn shame, but there’s only so much we can do.  We encourage students to walk in groups at night, and never to wear honey-scented cologne, perfume, or body spray.”

It’s the rare Missoula student who hasn’t lost a friend or classmate to a bear.  Says sophomore Nate Cleghorn: “My roommate Skip was a terrific guy.  At home football games he would dress up as Monte, the grizzly mascot of our school.  It’s really ironic that he was carried off by an actual bear.  Or maybe it’s really ‘paradoxical’; I always get those two terms confused.  I have the same problem with ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.  Regardless, I miss Skip a lot.”

As an anonymous staff member in the University Admissions office put it, “it’s hard to recruit students when they know there’s a good chance they’ll be eaten before they graduate.”

Addendum:  This installment of University Life is dedicated to Tyler Krill, a beloved UL reporter who doggedly pursued this story.  Tyler was a relentless investigator, and the last entry in his notebook — found on a nature trail near the campus — was, “I think I’ll check out those rustling sounds coming from the bushes next to that cave opening.”

With Tyler, it was always about getting the story.  

From the September 14th New York Times:  The University of Alabama “is rewarding students who attend [home football] games — and stay until the fourth quarter” with priority access to tickets for the post-season.  Wait, there’s more.  “Alabama is…using location-tracking technology from students’ phones to see who skips out and who stays.”

On September 21st, this new policy almost resulted in a world-class disaster at Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium, where the Crimson Tide was playing the University of Southern Mississippi.  Here’s what happened, according to University of Alabama Police Chief John Hooks:

“We had a full house at Saturday’s game: 101,821 to be exact.  The students in attendance were afraid that if they left their seats to go to the bathroom, the tracking system would report that they had exited the stadium.  So, virtually every student wore a ‘stadium buddy’ that day, a device that enables you to urinate while staying in your seat.

“Over the course of the game, the stadium buddies of tens of thousands of students were filling up.  Did you know that urine is really high in nitrogen?  I didn’t.  Well, by the time the fourth quarter rolled around, Bryant-Denny Stadium was basically Ground Zero, a massive reservoir of volatile nitrogen just waiting to be ignited.  All it would have taken was a tiny leak from one of the containers, trickling a line of pee that encountered a bit of salt from a discarded box of popcorn or random potato chip.  The resulting chemical reaction would have been BLAMMO!!!

“I checked with one of our Physics professors, and she said that the explosion would have been visible from Minneapolis, and that the force of the blast would have made the Hiroshima cataclysm look like a butterfly sneeze. 

“We dodged a bullet last Saturday,” says Hooks.  “Actually, we dodged a lot more than a bullet.  It would have been the worst catastrophe in Alabama football since we lost to Notre Dame 37-6 in 1987.  We’ve got to change this attendance policy!”

Crimson Tide students appeared to take the near-calamity in stride.  When Dwayne “Turnstyle” Willis, a sophomore, heard the news while skateboarding across campus wearing his 24/7 stadium buddy, he simply flashed a big grin and exclaimed, “AWESOME!”

 

Uh-oh.  According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “faculty members at Miami University [in Ohio] are protesting a proposed policy that would require employees to report their own criminal activity or that of their colleagues to the university’s lawyers…..failure to do so could mean disciplinary action, up to dismissal.”

If this weren’t bad enough, the Miami administration plans to extend the policy in 2020 to a variety of non-criminal faculty offenses, including the following:

—  leaving pee dribbles on toilet seats in campus bathrooms

—  putting too much text into PowerPoint lecture slides

—  failing to clap when the applause sign is lit during Presidential addresses to the faculty

—  encouraging adjunct faculty to seek higher pay and better working conditions

—  pouring an excessive amount of Thousand Island dressing on your salad during lunch in the faculty dining room; taking a pat of butter but not using it

—  nodding off at department meetings in the midst of discussions of course re-numbering

—  delivering course lectures in bathrobe and slippers 

—  using the same multiple-choice questions on exams for three consecutive semesters

—  being “generally annoying” or “weird”

—  mouthing the words to the Star-Spangled Banner, rather than actually singing them, prior to campus sporting events

—  promising to bring cocktail shrimp, hot wings, and recreational marijuana to the department Christmas party, but not following through

—  putting chewing gum and French fries in the paper-only recycling bin outside of your office

—  frowning or scowling at colleagues who greet you as you walk across campus

—  not erasing the white board at the end of class

—  erasing the white board with your tongue at the end of class

—  stating or implying that Michel Foucault has had a positive influence on academic discourse

—  telling students that the “real Miami University” is in Florida, and that they’d be better off attending school there

—  taking the floor at a General Faculty Meeting under the pretense of asking a question, and then proceeding to give a speech about an administrative decision 15 years ago that you’re still angry about

According to Miami U. Police Chief Garrett “Buzz” Saffron, the list of non-criminal offenses will be updated every six months starting in June 2020.  As he put it, “people shouldn’t think of this as some ‘Big Brother’ type of policy.  What we’re aiming for here is a ‘We Are Family’ vibe — loving but watchful.”

Somewhere, Sister Sledge is smiling.

 

Yes, it’s true: For over a decade the University of Maryland at College Park has sent incoming freshmen a welcome box that includes a container of Old Bay seasoning and a crab mallet.

Overall, the program has been a success, but occasionally there have been missteps, according to Dining Services spokesperson Bart Hipple: “In 2016 we thought it would be a nice touch to put a steamed hard shell crab in the box.  Unfortunately, the boxes were assembled three weeks before they were mailed, so the students received crabs that were not, to put it mildly, ‘digestion friendly’.  The aroma the students encountered when they opened the box should have tipped them off, but not all of them were aware that a cooked hard shell crab shouldn’t smell like a pit latrine in Calcutta during cholera season.  We documented about 400 cases of food poisoning around the country that could be traced to the welcome boxes.  Trust me, it wasn’t a fun summer for Dining Services. 

“The following year, 2017, we tried to regroup by placing a sedated live crab in the box, along with instructions on how to steam it.  The problem was that we didn’t realize Maryland blue crabs become REALLY agitated when they’re confined in a small space for an extended period, regardless of how much you’ve drugged them.  When the boxes were opened, these feisty little crustaceans came out fighting!  Most of the injuries to students were minor — scratches and small puncture wounds — but at least five students lost one or more fingers to a particularly strong set of pincers. 

“Well, that ended the crab-inclusion experiment.  We’ve returned to just giving students the Old Bay and the mallet.  Of course, a few of the more adventurous kids can always be counted on to use their bong to smoke the seasoning after lacing it with oregano and powdered kale, but I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t produce much of a high, and it leaves your throat incredibly raw.  Now we include a sticker on the Old Bay container warning folks not to do this.”

Note to Mom and Dad: It’s probably a good idea to be in the room when your offspring open their welcome box from the University of Maryland.  It might be your last opportunity to offer parental guidance before your child heads to college.