Archives for University Diaries

Congratulations on your “national syndication.” (Oops, scratch those quotation marks.)

Your many local readers who got the above inside joke will now have to grudgingly share you with The World. But we can take consolation from the fact that The World will be better for it.

R.J. O’Hara, at 12:15 pm EDT on May 30, 2007

Endless forms

I’m the polar opposite of UD’s unreconstructed ’sixties person — not old enough to have been constructed as one in the first place, and now devoting a lot of time to deconstructing the vestiges of that era — but I’m with her on this subject for sure.

The more selective universities, despite their professed attraction to “diversity,” can be far too homogeneous. Their search for well-roundedness leads them to assemble a student body with few points and sharp edges. I taught for a time at one of the most selective liberal arts colleges in the country, a campus with more than 2000 students, and over the course of three years I saw only one person with green hair. That’s just not a normal representation in a population that size. Those who go on to be truly great are often those who are not so well-rounded, at least when they are of college-entrance age; where shall they go to school? Let’s pay less attention to well-roundedness and aim for pied beauty instead:

http://margaretsoltan.phenominet....ed-beauty-each-college-contains.html

R.J. O’Hara, The Collegiate Way, at 3:50 pm EDT on June 6, 2007

NCAA and Academics

I can see the job posting now “...team allegiance and general knowledge of college sports desirable". Each time the direction of a program is changed by a rising need by the university for one thing or another, slowy erodes at a department and its standards for quality research, academics, and student achievment. Not unlike the impact on our programs by corporations wanting a higher level of techno-literacy, many universities focused two positions towards folks who were, shall we say, technophiliacs rather than theoretically inclined/informed. Reforms such as the proposed call for governance of university athletics by tenured professors will follow the same direction that the technology reform in that instead of taking time away from existing scholarship (learning how to do technology and Shakespeare) political hirings for sports enthusiast with a generalist knowledge of writing and literature will ensue. Eventually, these external demands /reforms cause the mishaping of goals as educators in that we do not respond to needs from the internal position but from external pressure placed upon us by “special interest” groups where we might find temporaneous financial rewards.

DIA, Special Hirings for Sport Enthusiast?, at 10:05 am EDT on June 18, 2007