University Diaries

UD's buddy Jonathan alerts her to the latest in the Jane Goodall plagiarism story: The release of her book bemoaning our laying waste to the plants and trees of the earth has been delayed. The publisher will eventually pulp all copies.

Everyone's talking about Emlyn - Emlyn Hughes, the Columbia University physics professor who began his students' immersion in his subject by turning down the lecture theater's lights, stripping off his street clothes and putting on a ninja uniform, and then showing a film featuring disconnected images of violence and atrocity - the destruction of the Twin Towers, goose-stepping Nazis, Mussolini strung up, Major Kong on his bomb from Dr. Strangelove.

For the last two days UD has been in Washington DC, at a high-level gathering of federal government, Gates Foundation, and university people, all of whom convened to talk about how to use online technology to improve education for American students, from elementary to graduate school.

Everybody - but everybody - is over the moon about MOOCs. The latest thing is Tom Friedman and fellow biggies at Davos hyperventilating about them. UD has a MOOC, on poetry, and although it's relatively small (2,000 rather than 200 billion students), it has earned her a modest acclaim. She is currently preparing a new MOOC, on the novels of Don DeLillo.

Okay, since injury and death at the hands of our universities' Greek culture is clearly becoming the story of the year, let's begin by getting one thing straight. We're not going to get anywhere with this subject until we excise the phrase Greek culture.

"Kentucky is the ugly truth the NCAA wants to hide, and Duke is the hysterical lie they hide it with."

"Kentucky is the ugly truth the NCAA wants to hide, and Duke is the hysterical lie they hide it with."

... the University of Hawaii system; and UD has spent as little time as possible scrutinizing its zillion-dollar-and-rising-by-the-minute athletic deficit, its pilfering administrators, the shady politicians who oversee the joint, etc., etc.