Threats to Education

A friend of mine has a painting in her office. Two of the corners of the painting are labeled "Rock" and "A Hard Place," while the other two, diagonally positioned across the canvas, read, "Devil" and "The Deep Blue Sea." In the middle of the painting is a big "X" labeled "You are here." To some degree that's how campus security types must be feeling these days. With horrific shootings in Virginia and Illinois over the past twelve months, they can't afford to take lightly any sort of threat. That's why semesters have been interrupted recently at two schools: "Threatening Graffiti Leads College to Cancel Classes."
What are you going to do, if you're the decision maker at a school where threatening messages show up above the urinals? Probably the writing is the ranting of somebody with a dreaded exam on the date in question, but you can't take that chance, can you? Time was when campus security only had to contend with rowdy partiers and sloppy drunks. Today they have to worry about gun-toting psychos and harmless but frightening cranks. I don't envy them their job.

No Dancing on my Donation!

Reading a recent article on gifts to colleges, "When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit Universities," I found myself taken back to the good old days at my alma mater, William Jewell College. A school with Baptist roots, Jewell, for decades, never had a dance on campus. (Baptists, you see, have traditionally disapproved of sex, believing that it may lead to dancing.) Instead of a Homecoming Dance, we had a Homecoming Concert. This was in the days before moshing, but I am fairly certain, despite never attending one of these events, that there were curmudgeonly overseers strolling the aisles to ensure that the movement did not wax rhythmic.
Was there a point to this post? Oh yeah! William Jewell used to play its indoor sports in the lovely and ancient Brown Gymnasium. After the construction of a fine new fieldhouse, which opened in time to mark my arrival on campus, the Brown Gym became a bit of a redundancy. The Browns, I am told, gave the money to build the gym with the stipulation that if a dance were ever held on campus, the gym would be burned down. Although I rather doubt such a restriction actually existed, it makes for a fun story. When the college raised buckets-full of dough to convert the gym into a performing arts center and classrooms, they apparently decided that whatever stipulation was in force had fallen away with the conversion of the building from gym to catch-all.
Sometimes, an alumnus' generosity winds up putting more burden on the school than their gift is actually worth. I'm contemplating some sort of poison-pill donation to one of my several former schools. Perhaps I could donate a new theater with the understanding that plays by Edward Albee must be performed in Norwegian at least once every leap year. That sounds like fun.

Find Books at Bookfinder

You probably won't be surprised that I, as an English professor, am a book junkie. More than likely I will buy more books this year than you'll buy in your entire college career. If not, then welcome to the wonderful world of book hoarding. Regardless, you probably don't want to spend more money on the books you buy--whether they be Harry Potter hardcovers or textbooks--than you have to. That's where a site like Bookfinder comes in handy. This resource searches a host of sites in search of the best buy, new or used, on a book you specify. It's similar to Best Book Buys, but Bookfinder has the advantage of searching new AND used offerings. On the other hand, Bookfinder does not organize by ISBN, so you might need to sift through a number of listings, all with slightly different titles, in order to find the bargain you're seeking.
And I still haven't found the site that will search both Amazon's used books and eBay in one move. That would be something worth creating for a programmer, although there's no money in sending people to eBay listings.

How Not to Make a Fortune in IT

It seems that the days of infinite competition for tech jobs perished with the dot-com bubble a decade ago, but computer-related jobs still promise good pay and solid security if you're halfway dependable. Take my nephew, who didn't go to college at all and now works for Google, attempting to take over the world. They keep moving him around the world. I fully expect him to live on the moon within five years.
If you're wondering what will not help you earn the big bucks in the computer field, you might find this lovely article from Infoworld interesting.

Professorial Plagiarism?

Here's a dirty little secret coming out into the light of day. Any sneaky thing that you've thought of as a student, professors thought of years ago, and we do it more smoothly than you do. Take the case of--how shall we describe it?--"creative acquisition of scholarly materials." With the publish-or-perish gun pointed at the career's heads, many professors have succumbed to the temptation of what would, in any other situation, be called plagiarism. (It's called plagiarism in this situation as well.) Now, it seems, in order to avoid embarrassment over such materials, journals are taking the battle to their writers. In "Journals May Soon Use Antiplagiarism Software on Their Authors" you can read about how the professorial version of Turnitin is being turned on the tenure-track types whose work might be suspect. Maybe I'll have to think twice about submitting that article to College English!

High-Fallutin Ivy Leaguers

Those hoity-toity Ivy Leaguers are at it again. Now it's the president of Harvard criticizing the game of football in this aptly named article: Harvard's President Denounces Football. That's as unAmerican as denouncing pizza or voting or enormous SUVs! You're not surprised at this denunciation, are you? Those smarty-pants East Coast types think they know everything. I wonder what Harvard's record was last year. Probably if they'd gone to a bowl game, the Prez would be whistling a different tune. But here's the rub. The Harvard President is Charles Norton Eliot, and he made his comments in 1908.

Fear of Facebook

How many Facebook friends do you have? In a current Time article,Suffering from Facebook fatigue?, you can read about the perils of Facebook overload. At the risk of sounding like a complete Old Fogey, I have to say that I don't get it. I don't get why people invite zillions of people--like me--to join some group like "Let's all fall down the stairs" or why I get vampire bites or why I get asked about my preferences in movies or whatever? The same students who complain about not having enough time apparently change their profile picture every thirty seconds and engage in twenty-eight Facebook applications. Might this be an experience that sucks up just a bit too much of our time?