University Diaries
A professor of English describes American university life.
A professor of English describes American university life.
April 1, 2010 - 11:35am
"People seemed to run out of their own being," says Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman in American Pastoral, as he considers a privileged and seemingly fulfilled woman who lurches into self-destruction.
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March 13, 2010 - 5:50pm
The laptop ban story has broken out of its narrow precincts. Articles on the subject used to cover the handful of American law schools with institution-wide bans, or the scattered professors in a variety of fields who independently ban them from their classrooms. But now the story has hit the big time.
March 5, 2010 - 8:30am
Automated Touchless Dispenser it says on the paper towel machine in the bathroom near my university office, and I sometimes think, as the mere nearness of me excites the machine's red light and white sheet, that its noli mi tangere message carries over pretty well to what's happening between professors and students these days. Teaching's becoming a germ-free, high-tech, extrusion of data. You can see students trying to acclimate to the chill.
February 22, 2010 - 9:15pm
Why [do] people who [know] Dr. Bishop only through reading about her crime make excuses for her?
Jonathan D. Moreno, a professor of medical ethics and the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks reactions have to do with a long tradition that goes back to Plato. The idea, he said, is that someone who is very intelligent is assumed to be “morally wise.” And that makes it hard to reconcile the actions of Amy Bishop, with her Harvard Ph.D., her mantle of scientific brilliance.
February 13, 2010 - 4:01pm
Amy Bishop, a Harvard PhD, a wife and mother, a successful biology researcher, a University of Alabama professor whose students seem to admire her, took out a gun during a biology department meeting on the Huntsville campus yesterday, and shot everyone in sight.
She killed three of her colleagues, including the department chair, and left three people (two professors, one administrator) in critical condition.
Police arrived within seconds and took her into custody within minutes. Within hours, her apparent motive emerged: Denial of tenure.
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