University Life

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Daily Briefing” recently highlighted the merger of Philadelphia University and Thomas Jefferson University as an indicator of the consolidation zeitgeist that is grabbing higher education by the tassels these days.  And the excitement is building.  Look for the following provocative partnerships to make headlines in the months to come:

U.S. Military Academy (West Point) and University of California, Berkeley — “This is a natural for us,” beams West Point Superintendent Robert Caslen.  “We’re starting a semester-abroad program next year, and for most of our cadets, walking the streets of downtown Berkeley will be like visiting the moon.”  The response of USMA students has been enthusiastic.  As one anonymous cadet commented, “do you have any idea how hard it is to get high-quality weed on our campus?”

For her part, Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ is definitely on board for the pending nuptials between the two institutions.  What benefits will her students derive from spending time at the Academy?  “Three things,” she says.  “Better posture, a better haircut, and knowing how to keep your damn mouth shut when someone in authority is telling you what to do.”

Bryn Mawr and Florida State University — “Our students have a tendency to take themselves way too seriously,” claims Bryn Mawr President Kimberly Cassidy.  “At Florida State, many of the students probably don’t even know how to spell ‘seriously’, and certainly they don’t use ‘patriarchal hegemony’ in everyday conversation the way our students do.  We want our young women to start having some FUN in college.  Why not try out for the Seminoles cheerleading squad?  Or throw up over the balcony at an off-campus fraternity party every once in a while!  It’s also the case that Bryn Mawr students tend to be disturbingly pale, regardless of their racial background.  At FSU, ‘Applying Cocoa Butter’ is a required one-credit course for all first-year students, not just for those who major in Tanning.  Go for it!  What’s not to love?”

What will Florida State undergraduates get out of this arrangement?  “Tutors,” according to President John Thrasher.  “We desperately need more tutors for our varsity athletes.  Over 60% of FSU’s budget is spent on tutors and flash cards.  If every Bryn Mawr student volunteered just one evening a week to our tutoring program, we wouldn’t have to offer so many low-challenge online courses in subjects like ‘Sock Sorting’, ‘Taking Selfies with Your Cat’, and ‘Breathing’.”

University of Notre Dame, Brigham Young University, and Yeshiva University — This union promises to be a blockbuster, and will probably not be finalized until late 2019.  According to Notre Dame President John Jenkins, “Our goal is to become higher education’s premier religious multiplex, bringing together in one magnificent institution the elements of faith that make each of our respective belief systems the wacky wonderlands of cognition that Catholics, Mormons, and Jews swear by.  We’ve already contracted with Ridley Scott and Martin Scorcese to co-direct an HBO mini-series — tentatively entitled Armageddon Rapture — that will capture the drama of faculty in our new Tri-Theology Department developing a unified core curriculum.  It will star Sigourney Weaver, Mandy Patinkin, and Mitt Romney.”

Stream, Baby, Stream.

 

 

 

Auburn University made the front page of this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, but not in a good way.  With a title that conveys all the teasing luridness of a 50 Shades of Grey movie trailer — “Unrivaled Power: Inside Auburn’s Secret Effort to Advance an Athlete-Friendly Curriculum” — the lead article investigates the high percentage of male Auburn athletes majoring in Public Administration (PA), as well as the precipitous drop in PA enrollment that occurred once folks started sniffing around what many suspected was an academic dumpster.  (“Damn, this pulled-pork barbecue is rancid, Jesse!”)

However, there is a pungent question not addressed by the article:  If Auburn athletes are no longer majoring in Public Administration in large numbers, then what are they majoring in?  Well, according to Auburn President Steven Leath, the answer is……Orange.

That’s right, they’re majoring in the color orange.  Or, more precisely, burnt orange, which is one of Auburn’s two foundational school hues, the other being navy blue. 

Isn’t it a bit odd for a university to allow a student to major in a color?

Not at all, claims President Leath.  “Auburn has a prestigious Department of Art, and its interdisciplinary program in Orange Studies is world-renowned.  It has my full support.” 

The core courses that Orange majors take include the following:

ART 106 — Introduction to Intersectionality: Red + Yellow = Orange

HISTORY 331 — The Origins of “Orange”: Color or Fruit?

POLITICAL SCIENCE 215 — The U.S. Presidency in the 21st Century: White, Brown, Orange

ENGLISH 468 — Cheetos in 19th-Century British Fiction (online)

CIVIL ENGINEERING 821– Current Topics in Traffic Cone Design

ANTHROPOLOGY 514 — Seminar: The Lived Experience of Bolivian Pumpkin Carvers

PHILOSOPHY 162 — Carrots and Zen

Leath maintains that “these are not gut courses.  I audited Carrots and Zen last fall, and all I can say is: WOW!  Try staring at a carrot for 2 hours a day, every day, for 15 weeks.  If that doesn’t change your view of the world, nothing will.  Right after the course ended I went out and bought a rabbit.  My relationship with Flopsy is very special, but not in a way that would make anyone uncomfortable.”

This is one higher education scandal that appears to have had a happy ending.

 

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled “Keeping Tenured Professors Engaged,” a number of strategies are discussed, including peer-to-peer guidance and modifying the allocation of faculty’s responsibilities among teaching, scholarship, and service.  It’s unlikely, however, that any institution has been more creative in addressing this issue than Stanford University, which will initiate its Noble Slumbers program in September 2018. 

In a press conference held on Thursday, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne noted that “historically, Stanford has been a leader in research on the functions of sleep, as well as sleep disorders.  And, like other schools, we face the challenge of dealing with tenured faculty members in their late 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s who, quite frankly, are sometimes no longer able to consistently ‘get the ball over the plate,’ if you know what I mean.  Increasingly, our students complain about professors who nod off while delivering lectures, resembling  horses that doze, standing in their stalls, before they’ve finished their hay.  This is an incredibly awkward situation when you have 300 students sitting in a large lecture hall.  It’s not unusual to have a student in the back of the auditorium yell, ‘Is he dead?  I’m pretty sure he’s dead.  If he’s dead, can we leave?’  Almost always, the answer to the first question is NO, and the professor is profoundly embarrassed.”

In the Noble Slumbers program, any tenured professor who is 55 or older can fulfill his or her teaching load by serving as a subject in a sleep study conducted by a Stanford researcher.  Four days a week the faculty member will come to campus at 9:00 am and go to bed in one of the University’s sleep labs.  At 3:00 pm he or she will be awakened and allowed to go home.

The offices of these professors will be assigned to adjunct faculty, so that the latter will no longer need to hold office hours in Stanford’s small number of uni-sex bathrooms scattered around the campus.  In the words of President Tessier-Lavigne, “This is a win-win!  No more faculty-student discussions of term paper topics while toilets flush — or even worse, don’t flush — in the background!”

Most of the tenured faculty who are eligible to participate in Noble Slumbers are excited at the prospect.  As Stanley Grosk-Yippen, a 73-year-old chemistry professor who hasn’t discovered a new element for the Periodic Table since 1981, observes, “I admit that my days as an academic wunderkind are in the distant past.  This new program will give me an opportunity to………….”

Zzzz.

May the REM cycle be with you, Professor. 

 

“We don’t like to brag, so we’ll let others do it for us.”

Thus begins the full-page advertisement for the University of California at Irvine in the February 9th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.  The ad proceeds to reference high rankings for the school in both The New York Times and U.S. News & World Report before mentioning the “record-setting” number of applications it’s received this year.

Ahem.

It’s clear that UC-Irvine has taken the art of bragging to a new, post-modernist level.  It involves two easy steps:

STEP 1:  Claim that you’re not going to brag, and then…..

STEP 2:  Brag.

When asked to comment on this PR sleight-of-hand, the school’s Chancellor, Howard Gillman, was a bit sheepish.  “Ever since we stopped requiring our Communications staff to take an undergraduate course in Aristotelian Logic, and allowed them to substitute an accelerated online course, Reasoning for Marketers, we’ve had this problem.  At this point I’m not sure what to do.  I get caught in a Mobius strip of argument every time I try to engage our Strategic Communications leadership on the matter.  I think I’m making progress, and then find myself right back where I started.  I’ve got to stop smoking so much pot!

“Can we please talk about something else?”

 

It’s not often that a university president smiles broadly when sharing news of a major scandal at his or her institution.  But that’s exactly what Mississippi Wesleyan President, Dr. Beauregard “Bo” Sternum, did when he announced on Monday that 30% of the school’s sophomore class had been expelled due to a cheating scandal. 

In a hastily called press conference, Sternum began, “My friends, I’m proud to say that the misdeeds I describe to you today do not concern lecherous predators among our faculty, sexual assaults by frat boys, protests against controversial campus speakers, NCAA recruiting violations, trigger warnings, gender pronouns, trigger pronouns, gender warnings, censorship, or graffiti targeting racial minorities and LGBTQ members of the Mississippi Wesleyan community. 

“Instead, what we’ve got here is a good, old-fashioned case of exams being stolen from faculty offices by one group of students and sold to another group of students.  This is a damn fine tradition that has been around as long as there have been schools, and while the offenders must be punished, let’s keep in mind the goals of the individuals who were involved: the sellers were endeavoring to pay for their college education without taking out high-interest loans, and the buyers were striving to get good grades.  I think these are ambitions that we can all identify with — and even praise.  We hate to say goodbye to these young men and women, but I wish them well at the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State, and if any of them ever needs a letter of recommendation, they need look no further than Bo Sternum, a man who was not averse to writing an answer or two in the palm of his hand back in the day.”

In what is certainly one of the more depressing interviews ever published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Bryan Caplan (George Mason University) discussed his new book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. 

You can read the gut-wrenching details for yourself, but let’s just say that higher education, as currently structured, doesn’t fare very well in his analysis.  Of course, Dr. Caplan is a Professor of Economics, a discipline not known for the cheery disposition of its practitioners.  That being said, this gentleman’s vision is especially bleak, even when compared with the views of his dyspeptic colleagues.

Like a gigantic, frozen cow pie dropped from a Black Hawk helicopter into the middle of a tranquil Maine pond on a hot summer’s day, the ripple effect of Caplan’s critique is generating collateral damage on campuses across the country.  On Tuesday, for example, 32 humanities faculty at the University of Buffalo rented a school bus, affixed a banner that said “We are deeply sorry for taking our students’ money,” and drove off the cliff at Niagara Falls.  The sole survivor inhaled a lethal dose of toxic dry-erase marker (hidden in her parka) before rescuers could intervene. 

At the University of Virginia, a sociology professor walked onto the school’s fabled Lawn (actually, it’s called The Lawn), assumed the lotus position, softly declared his remorse for having pursued an academic career, ingested a dozen habanero peppers, and then spontaneously combusted as puzzled students looked on.  As one frisbee-tossing sophomore remarked, “THAT WAS BEYOND COOL!”

Finally, Wesley Splenn, an arts lecturer at Dartmouth College, encased  himself, naked, in a Winter Carnival ice sculpture of a baby puffin in order to draw attention to the existential void that is higher education.  That night, over 200 students held a candlelight vigil to honor the frozen Splenn, but all those tiny flames produced the unintended consequence of melting the sculpture and saving his life.  He was both annoyed and undeterred (sort of).  “I’ll try again next year, unless Dartmouth offers me a tenure-track position, in which case all bets are off.”

 

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that an associate professor of psychology at Harper College in Illinois was recently terminated by the school after being arrested for shooting at truck drivers and exchanging gunfire with state troopers near an interstate highway (no joke).

If only Harper officials had paid more attention to the student evaluations of this wayward faculty member on RateMyProfessors.com.  Consider, for example, the dimension of “Likelihood of Discharging a Firearm during Class”: the professor’s score was 4.8 out of 5, well above the 2.7 average for Harper faculty overall.  Also, student comments included, “It always freaked me out when he would clean his guns while we were taking exams,” and “If discussion started to lag on the topic of the day, he would open the classroom window and start shooting at pigeons.  Seemed kind of weird to me.  Easy grader, though, so I’d recommend taking him as long as you’re okay with the pigeon thing.”

Colleges and universities should take note:  although RateMyProfessors might be too unreliable to use for tenure-and-promotion purposes, we could be underestimating its potential for preventing gun violence. 

 

 

Should a TED talk be a required part of a faculty member’s tenure-application portfolio?  That’s the question stirring up controversy at Princeton University these days, following the decision of the school’s Tenure and Promotion Committee to deny tenure to Carsden Pik, an Assistant Professor of Physics. 

Pik’s publication record in prestigious scholarly journals is impressive, and in 2015 he was nominated for a Nobel Prize for his work demonstrating that black holes are actually dark grey.  However, these accomplishments were not sufficient, according to the Committee.  The decision letter sent to Pik, which he shared with the press, states that “student course evaluations were the only evidence you provided of your teaching ability.  The severe limitations of these measures have been extensively documented in the research literature.  A more valid indicator of your teaching performance would be videos of TED talks you have delivered.  Unfortunately, you have never been invited to present a TED talk.  If you are indeed the excellent instructor you claim to be, why have you never been invited to give a TED talk?  What’s wrong with you?  Virtually everyone in academia, including custodial staff, has given a TED talk in the past few years.  Why haven’t you?  We ask again:  What’s wrong with you?”

In response, Dr. Pik maintains it is not his fault that the color of black holes is not a topic sexy enough for a TED talk.  “I guarantee you, if I did a show-and-tell highlighting kittens playing with yarn, those clowns at TED would erect a statue in my honor.  Princeton’s T & P Committee can just go bite me!”

Princeton’s President, Christopher Eisgruber, has chosen not to reverse the Committee’s decision. “I feel bad for Professor Pik, but he’s his own worst enemy.  For the love of God, man, stop hiking your corduroy pants up to your nipples and wearing ketchup-stained shirts to work every day.  Maybe then you would get a nod from the folks at TED.”

Well, it’s about time. 

On January 16th the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) declared tenure-track faculty to be an endangered species in North America.  According to FWS Deputy Director Greg Sheehan, “the decrease in the percentage of full-time faculty that are tenured or tenure-track has reached a point where extinction is a distinct possibility if ameliorative action is not taken soon.”

As a first step, FWS is collaborating with the Harvard Museum of Natural History to display eight tenured Ivy League professors (one from each school) in separate diorama exhibits that can be viewed by Museum visitors.  Jane Pickering, Executive Director of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, states that “these will all be professors in excellent health — four women and four men — who will go about their daily lives in habitats constructed especially for them.”

Each diorama will consist of a small office that includes a mahogany desk, ergonomic chair, bookshelf, faded Oriental rug, personal computer, and printer, as well as wall posters of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Doris Kearns Goodwin.  A feeding station equipped with a water fountain and high-nutrition-food-pellet dispenser will be located in the corner.  Toilet facilities and sleeping quarters will occupy rooms adjoining the dioramas, not visible to visitors.

Pickering promises that “the care the professors will receive at the Museum will rival in quality what is provided to those priceless pandas at the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C.  We want these folks to thrive, mate, and reproduce.  Vibrant, multi-colored academic robes will be worn  by the male professors during the high-fertility wine-and-cheese season (April and May) in order to help them attract their female diorama colleagues.  Our goal is to produce at least one tenure-track baby by June 2019.  We saved the bald eagle, and we can save tenure-track faculty!”

Well said, Ms. Pickering.  Well said. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that both Arizona State University and the University of Kansas recently rescinded honorary degrees they had awarded to noted television journalist Charlie Rose, in the wake of accusations that Rose had engaged in sexual harassment.

The Chronicle dubbed these reversals “clawbacks,” surely one of the less pleasant words in the English language.  In any event, clawbacks are gaining momentum, and not just in the realm of dealing with sexual mischief.  Exhibit A: Amherst College, one of the most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the United States, announced yesterday that it will be revoking the degrees of graduates who benefited from grade inflation at the school dating back to 2000.  According to Amherst President Carolyn Martin, “during a faculty retreat in late May there was a spontaneous outpouring of guilt and shame over grade inflation that was all-consuming.  Many professors were flogging themselves with leather bookmarks dipped in vinegar, while others engaged in rampant, intentional paper-cutting.  It was a remarkable display of existential angst.  I had never seen anything like it.”

It all began when a sociology professor rushed the stage during the retreat’s opening session, grabbed the microphone from the facilitator, and wailed, “I have never given a student a grade that he or she truly deserved.  I am a coward and an insect!”  The session turned into an AA-type meeting, with one person after another standing up and proclaiming, “My name is _______, and I inflate.”  It wasn’t long before a Catholic priest was summoned from the College’s Spirituality and Sushi Center to hear confessions. 

According to President Martin, “the whole day ended up being a journey to hell, with lots of uncontrolled sobbing and remorse over selling one’s soul in order to satisfy, as one professor put it, ‘demands of the relentless demon spawn of wealthy parents’.”

As the retreat came to a close, faculty vowed to take action that would go beyond the five Hail Mary’s that Father O’Shaughnessy instructed each offender to recite as penance.  They committed themselves to reviewing every grade they had awarded since the Spring 2000 semester, making adjustments when necessary.  This task took all summer.  The result: nearly 40% of all Amherst graduates since 2000 will have their bachelor’s degree rescinded.  On January 15th, 2018, these individuals will receive registered letters informing them of the College’s action.  The newly minted non-graduates will be afforded an opportunity to take the re-graded courses at a discounted tuition rate.  “It’s the least we can do,” says Martin. 

President Martin realizes that Amherst’s clawback will generate controversy, but she stands by the decision.  “I had a professor come up to me a week after the faculty had voted to take back the degrees.  She said that she’s sleeping better than she has in a decade.  Her recurrent, cold-sweat nightmares of living in a dystopian universe where the only letter in the alphabet was ‘A’, and the only number was 4.0, had ceased.  She hugged me, cried, and then fell asleep in my arms.”

For the record, pharmacies in Amherst, Massachusetts report that sales of Ambien have decreased 73% in the past two months.