Archive for May, 2008

08w19:5 Indiana Jones denied tenure

by timothy. 0 Comments

Back from yet another globetrotting adventure, Indiana Jones checks his mail and discovers that his bid for tenure has been denied | Andy F. Bryan
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/10/10bryan.html
“January 22, 1939

Assistant Professor Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr.
Department of Anthropology
Chapman Hall 227B
Marshall College

Dr. Jones:

As chairman of the Committee on Promotion and Tenure, I regret to inform you that your recent application for tenure has been denied by a vote of 6 to 1. Following past policies and procedures, proceedings from the committee’s deliberations that were pertinent to our decision have been summarized below according to the assessment criteria.

[…]

Meets professional standards of conduct in research and professional activities of the discipline:

The committee was particularly generous (and vociferous) in offering their opinions regarding this criterion. Permit me to list just a few of the more troubling accounts I was privy to during the committee’s meeting. Far more times than I would care to mention, the name “Indiana Jones” (the adopted title Dr. Jones insists on being called) has appeared in governmental reports linking him to the Nazi Party, black-market antiquities dealers, underground cults, human sacrifice, Indian child slave labor, and the Chinese mafia. There are a plethora of international criminal charges against Dr. Jones, which include but are not limited to: bringing unregistered weapons into and out of the country; property damage; desecration of national and historical landmarks; impersonating officials; arson; grand theft (automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, and watercraft in just a one week span last year); excavating without a permit; countless antiquities violations; public endangerment; voluntary and involuntary manslaughter; and, allegedly, murder. Dr. Jones’s interpersonal skills and relationships are no better. By Dr. Jones’s own admission, he has repeatedly employed an underage Asian boy as a driver and “personal assistant” during his Far East travels. I will refrain from making any insinuations as to the nature of this relationship, but my intuition insists that it is not a healthy one, nor one to be encouraged.”

08w19:4 Elephants

by timothy. 0 Comments

 
Wash Your Clothes: Elephants Can Smell You a Mile Away | Henry Fountain
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/nytimes/elephants/
“Lucy A. Bates and Richard W. Byrne of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and colleagues have demonstrated that using odor and visual cues elephants are able to classify subgroups within a predator species. The species in question? Homo sapiens. In a report in Current Biology, the researchers describe their experiments in Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Elephants in the region encounter different ethnic groups, including the Maasai, whose young men spear elephants, and the Kamba, agricultural villagers who pose no threat at all.”
 


Serra’s Monumental Vision, Vertical Edition | Steven Erlanger
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/nytimes/serra/

08w19:3 Teacher vs Student

by timothy. 0 Comments

Dartmouth’s ‘Hostile’ Environment | Joseph Rago
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120995103004666569.html
“The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their ‘anti-intellectualism’ violated her civil rights. Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional expose, which she promises will ‘name names.’ […] Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is ‘science studies,’ which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, ‘teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.’ She continues: ‘Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.’ The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan’s seminar, then, was to ‘problematize’ technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the ‘problems’ owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was ‘intolerant of ideas’ and ‘questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways.’ Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.”

Socrates in the classroom develops students’ thinking and changes the distribution of power
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-05/src-sit050708.php
“When students have the opportunity to participate in “Socratic seminars” on a regular basis, a different classroom culture evolves. The students collaborate more and more voices are heard. The students develop their thinking skills in a cooperative and investigative atmosphere. This is shown in a new dissertation in Pedagogy by Ann S Pihlgren at the Stockholm University in Sweden. The Socratic dialogue is a particular way of developing children’s, as well as adults’, thinking skills through cooperative dialogue where significant human ideas and values are discussed. By participating in Socratic seminars regularly every other week, preschool children and older students develop their thinking skills. The seminars address literature and art work, with questions such as these: is Pippi Longstocking is a good friend, is Jack is stupid or smart when he sells his mother’s cow for some beans or are we born good or evil. In the beginning the students have difficulty expressing their thoughts, but with time their ability to express themselves and to examine ideas critically and logically develops.”

08w18:3 What the Old Farts Don't Get About the Economy

by timothy. 0 Comments

Young earn less than parents did: Census | Tobi Cohen
http://www.thestar.com/article/420331
“Young people entering the job market today may be better educated, but they’re earning less money than their parents did a generation ago, according to new census data released Thursday by Statistics Canada.”

08w18:2 What the Old Farts Don't Get about Obama-mania

by timothy. 0 Comments

What The Old Farts Don’t Get
from The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

Your old farts really do miss the point completely, don’t they? These younger people were convinced that political involvement was useless because the the system was so broken. They came of age anywhere from the second Clinton term (Lewinsky) through the disaster of the Bush years. They have no reason to believe that politics can work, or that it is possible to effect any large scale change, so they work locally or just opt out.

This is what Obama has tapped into. The reason all those thousands of young Dems registered for the first time and voted in a primary was because he made them believe honorable politics was possible. And if someone like Obama gets chewed up by the system because the Obamasignsjeffhaynesafpgetty forces arrayed against him are too strong — just look at the sworn enemies who are teaming up to bring him down, united by nothing more than a vested interest in the status quo — then they will conclude that the system is as broken as they thought it was.

The mistake is reading this as an Obama personality cult, in which case “grow up” would be appropriate. But the Obamaniacs I meet are nothing like that…they don’t sing his praises, they sing their own. They are intoxicated by the idea of a politics where things they thought were not possible become possible, and people talk to each other like adults. They don’t think he’s going to fix things, they think they are.

What the old farts might want to consider is that these young people who have no particular vested interest in the current system might be seeing the rot much more clearly than the fogeys who have been entangled in it for decades. And the mature folk might want to accept that the burden of proof is on them to show why such a viscerally disgusting political game is worth playing.

Opting out of that is not immaturity, it’s intelligence.