Speaking of being called to a higher law and speaking of speaking....

In the previous post, we're talking about what Jesus wrote in the sand and what he said out loud, in the New Testament story where the scribes and Pharisees present Jesus with the question of what to do with a woman who was caught in the act of adultery. In the Gospel text, we're told Jesus that wrote on the ground, but not what he wrote, and we're told that he subsequently spoke and said "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her."

I'm putting up a separate post because I found the scene that sydney said he loved in the movie "The King of Kings." Made in 1927, it's a silent movie, so no one is saying anything out loud. We see what Jesus says written out on the intertitles, and we also see what he writes in the sand.



Beautiful filmmaking, particularly as the sand-words, not written in Roman letters, transform into our English words, naming the sins that the men in the crowd realize they've committed, and that's why they all turn and walk away.

That's not an accurate depiction of what happens in the biblical text though. The movie shows a mob on the verge of stoning the woman and Jesus intervenes and announces his rule about casting the first stone. Only thereafter, does he write the names of the sins in the sand. But in the Bible story, there is no angry mob with stones in hand. There are scribes and Pharisees demanding that Jesus deliver a legal opinion. Jesus bends down and writes on the ground instead of answering the question.  Only after they persist does he stand up and pronounce his new rule, which causes the scribes and Pharisees to walk away — "beginning with the older ones." The movie would have you see the members of the mob acknowledging their sins and their consequent lack of qualification to cast the first stone. But the text has intellectuals trying to box Jesus in on a question of law, and Jesus getting the better of a conversation he didn't want to have in the first place.

It's not surprising that a movie plays up the visible drama, and it's also not surprising that when I — a law professor — read the text, I see something akin to a law school class. The professors try to stump the student and the student transcends their tricky game. To me, the part where Jesus bends over and writes in the sand is like what happens in a law school class when the lawprof poses a difficult hypothetical and the students bend their heads down and go through motions of writing. They don't want to answer. It's not that they're writing something magically revelatory and startling. But if the lawprof keeps pushing and calls on someone, an answer will be spoken out loud.

I guess the law-professorly interpretation of the text isn't terribly cinematic. It's no wonder the movies present an angry mob with stones in hand and Jesus miraculously knowing and changing the hearts of the sinners. (And the adulteress is an actress evincing exactly the form of sexiness that was fashionable in the year the movie was made. I love the eyeliner!)

But to me the lawprof interpretation is thrilling and dramatic. The professors think they've got the upper hand. They know the legal text and it's tough. And then the brilliant student who will soon be the greatest professor of all gets on top of the dialogue and says something they must accept as correct: If you're going to have strict rules and severe mechanisms of enforcement, you must apply them equally to everyone. This is the structural safeguard of equal protection of the laws that is the necessary component of a democratic system. If there can't be exceptions and special treatment for preferred people, legislatures will resist imposing harsh rules and painful punishments.

In this context, let me give you my favorite Justice Scalia quote, which happens to include one of the key words of Christianity: "Our salvation is the Equal Protection Clause, which requires the democratic majority to accept for themselves and their loved ones what they impose on you and me."

"The great Arthur Miller sent his NYU 1L Civ Pro class the exam instruction sheet. Except… he sent us the whole exam. Lulz."

There may be a couple of solutions, but one is obviously the best, and that's what Miller did. The students got some "lulz," other profs experienced twinges of vicarious pain, and Miller got to teach the world 2 more lessons — what not to do and what to do.

"NYU Responds To Attacks That The Third Year Of Law School Is Utterly Useless."

Is the response: We get 50% more tuition with 3 years? No. It's: We're going to make 3d year different and special.

The school is expected to announce vast changes in its third-year curriculum, including the option of studying abroad—Shanghai or Buenos Aires—or working for the Environmental Protection Agency or Federal Trade Commission....

Including study abroad and internships? That's vast? Let's get see what else is included. Here's one more:

[Give] students the chance to build a specialty. Called “professional pathways,” the program will offer eight focused areas of instruction, including criminal law and academia.

I love the idea of "academia" as a specialty. Somehow that seems to underline the complaint that the 3d year isn't there for the students but for the law academy itself and those odd lawyers/not lawyers who find their way into the comfortable cul de sac that is lawprofdom.

There has been much debate in the legal academy over the necessity of a third year.... While classes like “Nietzsche and the Law” and “Voting, Game Theory and the Law” might be intellectually broadening, law schools and their students are beginning to question whether, at $51,150 a year, a hodgepodge of electives provides sufficient value.

Step into my seminar and experience the life of the mind... the life of my mind.

NOTE: I fixed the math in the first sentence. I'd had "30% more." Shamefully typical innumeracy. Thanks to Panachronic in the comments for correcting me, a law professor.

"President Barack Obama will hold a campaign rally on Bascom Hill this Thursday."

Openly announces the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

After I went to all that trouble to critique the earlier attempt to frame the visit as historical and presidential, when it was really a campaign rally.

I can't believe the University is shutting down, closing buildings such as the Law School, depriving us of the rooms for regularly scheduled classes, for an entire day, to accommodate a campaign rally. The grounds and the students are provided for a massively intrusive photo-op. Of course, the students don't have to attend. But they will. They've paid their tuition for classes, which they're not getting, and their bodies are repurposed for political exploitation.

What should a UW student do?
	Celebrate a day of no classes doing whatever they please (other than attending the rally).
	Protest the cancellation of classes.
	See the President if they like him, and do something else if they don't.
	Everyone should take advantage of this excellent opportunity and see the President.
pollcode.com free polls

I'm shocked, shocked to learn that the Harvard Law School Human Rights Journal doesn't want right-wing articles.

If you're going to expose liberal bias on law student-edited publications, you'll have to show me something other than a journal that displays lefty pride in its name.

What's wrong with a student publication with a political bias? If conservative lawprofs want to publish more articles, let them found their own publication or hoodwink tantalize law students to work their right-wing will. Or cut out the middleman and blog.

Live freely in writing... or die.

Lawprofs, whining about not getting enough of what they deserve — is there anything less likely to inspire sympathy?

Because "law-school applications have fallen... prospective students have gained leverage" negotiating for more scholarship money.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Robert Rasmussen, dean of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, said students have become increasingly "price sensitive," and are pushing back on tuition figures and scholarship offers. "Students are much more willing to raise this issue than they ever have been in the past."

Enterprising or cash-strapped students have long negotiated with schools over the price of admission. But more than ever, schools are listening. For instance, the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law earlier this year sent letters to admitted students encouraging them to bargain. "We very much hope you find this offer competitive with others you have received," read one letter, dated March 2012 and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. "Please let us know."

It's a buyer's market: Don't behave as if you don't know it. Meanwhile, the sellers, the law schools, fret about the flow of information via U.S. News & World Report, which has the audacity to rank the law schools, partly based on GPA and LSAT, creating great power in the buyers of law school education who bring good statistics.

Applicants with high GPAs and LSATs are like the beautiful women who are served free drinks in bars, helping the bars draw more paying customers. So if you are one of the beautiful women, better get your drinks free. And if you're getting your drinks free and you're not that beautiful, maybe you wonder why you're patronizing that bar.

But there's no U.S. News & World Report ranking the bars according to beautiful people, not with specifically knowable statistics. If there were, and if everyone started marketing their beauty value to the best-ranked bar that would give them free drinks, there'd be a bar bubble, and it would have to pop. 

Of course, there is a law school bubble. It looks like this:


From: The Best Colleges

At least that's how it looked a year ago, when the champagne was much more bubbly.

"The problem is that the cost of a law degree is now vastly out of proportion to the economic opportunities obtained by the majority of graduates."

Writes lawprof Brian Z. Tamanaha, in a NYT op-ed:

... How did we get into this mess? And how do we get out?...

First, consider the loan system....

Then there’s the problem of the American Bar Association-imposed accreditation standards.... [B]y imposing a “one size fits all” template, these standards ensure that there is little differentiation among law schools — no lower-cost options and no range of choices comparable to what exists at the undergraduate level among community colleges, teaching colleges and research universities.

One solution to this problem is to strip away the accreditation requirements that mandate expenditures to support faculty scholarship — for example, deleting the requirement that the bulk of professors be in tenure-track positions, removing limits on teaching loads, not requiring paid research leaves for professors, not requiring substantial library collections and so forth....  Law students would then be able to choose the type of legal education they desired and could afford.

Tamanaha has a book: "Failing Law Schools."

200 NYC teens will have to retake the SAT because their seats were too close together.

The Daily News reports:

Educational Testing Service, which administers the SATs for the College Board, requires students to sit at least 4 feet apart during the exam to prevent cheating. But a company inspector who conducted a surprise visit that day found that the students were sitting much closer.

An email sent by the company Tuesday informed the kids, who came from 50 city schools, that their results would be invalidated and invited them to retake the test at another location on May 19.... Packer Head of School Bruce Dennis said that there’s no evidence that any of the kids cheated, and he’s looking into a lawsuit to prevent their scores from being scrapped.

Shouldn't the lawsuit be against the Packer Collegiate Institute? It screwed up the seating.

When Inside Higher Ed asks "When Can Faculty Show Porn?" that might not really be the issue.

First, it wasn't porn. It was a documentary about pornography that contained some pornographic images:

Jammie Price, a tenured professor of sociology at Appalachian State University, was suspended last month after showing a documentary about pornography in her introductory sociology class. She’s fighting the charges, saying the university is attempting to punish her for exercising her right to free speech in the classroom....

Price said the film, which she checked out from the university library, was graphic at times but academically relevant to that week’s topic of gender and sexuality. A Wheelock College professor who helped make the movie said it was “ludicrous” to discipline an instructor for showing the documentary, noting that interviews with gender studies scholars figure prominently in the film, which is critical of the porn industry but also includes brief explicit scenes of porn.

It was an anti-porn documentary. But the students were not warned that these sequences were part of the movie. And there were other charges against Price.
According to the disciplinary letter, she "'made disparaging, inaccurate remarks about student athletes,' strayed from her syllabus, forced her political views on students, said she didn’t like working at the university and criticized the college for having an old white coal miner as its mascot."

Price, a tenured full professor, said she had originally planned a lecture for that day but decided to show the film instead after a student complained earlier in the week that Price was hostile toward athletes. That allegation, which was included in Price’s disciplinary letter, centered on a classroom discussion about sexual assault accusations leveled against Appalachian State athletes and a resulting campus protest....

Price said she feared the athlete who complained would think her lecture on gender and sexuality was a form of retaliation, so instead she decided to screen the film.

It sounds as though the film was experienced by the students as a form of retaliation for the students' resisting what they felt was political indoctrination. But so what? Are students entitled to feel comfortable?

But it's usually the left side of the faculty that pushes for university rules and policies that protect the students from free expression that makes them feel bad. It's an interesting turnabout when a faculty member is suddenly confronting the students with shocking, sexually demeaning images. What happens to all the usual worries about sexual harassment then? And what if the professor really does feel hostile to the students, hostile to them because of their political viewpoint — specifically on the subject of the sexual subordination of women?

Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College, was a senior consultant for “The Price of Pleasure” and was interviewed in the film...

While she said professors should warn students about the content of the film and tell them they can leave without any repercussions (something Price didn’t do), she can’t understand why Appalachian State is taking action against Price. “This is what education is,” Dines said. “You expose them to the reality of the world they live in and you use that exposure to develop a critical scholarly discussion in class, which is exactly what she did.”...

“Sometimes students are going to be uncomfortable,” Price said. “The material they learn isn’t always going to be rosy. They talk about racism, they talk about sexism. Nowhere does it say we’re supposed to make them feel good all the time. Talking about pornography is one of those examples.”

Talking about.... Are images different?

Let's flip the politics and try this hypothetical:

A law professor is conservative, and the students tip leftward. The subject has been abortion, and the students have manifested a staunch commitment to abortion rights and seem to reflexively reject any efforts to explore the rights or interests of the unborn entity. So the professor puts together the next day's Power Point slide show, beginning, in typical fashion, with case names and key quotes from cases. "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Without warning, the next slide is a highly detailed picture of a delicate fetus sucking its thumb, with a quick click forward to the most gruesome dead-fetus photo the professor could find on the internet. The lecture continues, and the professor starts calling on students, requiring them to participate in Socratic dialogue — which counts for part of their grade. As individual students are speaking, trying to articulate the rationale in the abortion rights cases, the professor from time to time clicks back to a grisly or charming fetus photos.

The students go to the dean and complain. Questioned, the professor says: Students might like to feel comfortable, but this subject isn't rosy. Nowhere does it say we’re supposed to make them feel good all the time. Talking about abortion is one of those examples.

Discuss. Be consistent!

University president lambastes professor-blogger for finding some good in Rush Limbaugh's anti-Fluke rant.

It's Joel Seligman, president of the University of Rochester, issuing a statement:

I was deeply disappointed to read UR Professor Steve Landsburg’s recent blogs praising Rush Limbaugh for a “spot-on analogy” with respect to his offensive remarks about Georgetown student Sandra Fluke (although Landsburg parted company with Limbaugh for calling Fluke a “slut”). Landsburg went further. He stated that Ms. Fluke’s position deserved “only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered.” He further stated that the right word for her position was “extortionist,” characterized those who disagreed with his view as “contraceptive sponges,” and added that there is nothing wrong with being paid for sex.

Contraceptive sponges... now, that is clever.

... I am outraged that any professor would demean a student in this fashion. To openly ridicule, mock, or jeer a student in this way is about the most offensive thing a professor can do. We are here to educate, to nurture, to inspire, not to engage in character assassination.

To openly ridicule, mock, or jeer a student in your classroom may be one of the most offensive things a professor can do, but when a student is a political activist who testifies before a congressional subcommittee on a specific policy question that you disagree with, it's not that horrible to blog about that. (It's not the approach I, as a professor, felt like taking. If you look at my first post on the subject, I said "I've been avoiding weighing in on this subject, in part because, as a law professor, I don't like talking about an individual law student," and then my discussion wasn't about the young woman, but all the political leveraging that was going on.)

Of course, Seligman is a political actor. He's got to deal with his intra-university constituencies. I'd like to know who's been pressuring him to push back Landsburg.

Landsburg now has made himself newsworthy as one of Limbaugh’s few defenders. I wish he had focused instead on the ideal of a university as an institution that promotes the free exchange of ideas and lively debate at its best in an atmosphere of civil discourse in which the dignity of every individual is respected.

Lively, but not too lively, apparently. And please don't stick out "as one of Limbaugh’s few defenders." The more people are all on one side of an issue, in Seligman's view, the more important it is for everybody to get over on that side. And Landsburg ought to focus on... what? Some abstract ideal that Seligman seems to be violating in the process of mushily stating?

Here's the Inside Higher Ed article that pointed me to Seligman's statement. Added facts:

On Wednesday, about 30 students protested Landsburg's comments by coming to one of his courses and standing between him and the class while he continued to lecture.... They left after 15 minutes but then came back at the end of the class.

And the university president sides with the students... in lofty pursuit of the free exchange of ideas and lively debate in an atmosphere of civil discourse in which the dignity of every individual is respected. Okay.

"We are here to educate, to nurture, to inspire, not to engage in character assassination." Where's the character assassination? Landsburg disagreed with the policy Sandra Fluke promoted. In Congress. Professors have the obligation to "nurture" and "inspire" her from afar by refraining from taking on her ideas? Is that some special kid-gloves treatment for women? Ironically, that would be sexist. Should we be patting the female political activist on the head and murmuring good for you for speaking up? That is dismissive. It's better feminism to react to what a woman in politics says and to respond to her with full force the way you would to a man. And that's what Landsburg did:

[W]hile Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position — which is what’s at issue here — deserves none whatseover. It deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered. To treat it with respect would be a travesty....

To his credit, Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery. To his far greater credit, he did so with a spot-on analogy: If I can reasonably be required to pay for someone else’s sex life (absent any argument about externalities or other market failures), then I can reasonably demand to share in the benefits. His dense and humorless critics notwithstanding, I am 99% sure that Rush doesn’t actually advocate mandatory on-line sex videos. What he advocates is logical consistency and an appreciation for ethical symmetry. So do I. Color me jealous for not having thought of this analogy myself.

Now, Landsburg's an economist. Note the references to externalities or other market failures. He goes on to say a little something about prostitution. He goes on find the the analogy to prostitution flawed. Fluke is, he says, more of an "extortionist" — an "extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement." For some reason Seligman thought he needed to throw in his position on prostitution:

I totally disagree with Landsburg that there is nothing wrong with being paid for sex.  

Landsburg, rejecting the prostitution analogy, had written "Ms. Fluke is not in fact demanding to be paid for sex. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)" Seligman continues:

Having been a Dean of two law schools with clinics that addressed violence against women, I am all too aware of the terrible correlation between prostitution and the physical and emotional demeaning of women.

Oh, a correlation? Well, then, by all means, totally disagree with a professor who entertains the notion that the exchange of money for sex might not in itself be wrong. Because you're all about the free exchange of ideas and lively debate!

"2Ls With Higher LSAT Scores Goof Off More With Laptops in Class, With No Effect on Grades."

Interesting... but if that's happening in your class, professors, I'd say your class needs to be taught on a more challenging level, and it needs to be apparent that the way things are presented in class will matter for exam purposes.

Now, you might think if students are going to go off task during class that they'd just skip class, but the laptop is a great compromise for the student. You have a complete defense against boredom. If you can go on line, you're able to do what you'd probably be doing if you'd skipped class. And there's the added bonus of putting in an appearance and being able to engage with the class at any point.

Presumably, a good student has learned the rhythms of the less-than-challenging class. He knows how it feels when the prof is drifting into a languor — repeating things, reciting the facts of the case the student already read, riffing on the general themes of the course, amusing himself with stories about some judge he's always fawning over. And this good student can half-listen and reengage when he hears key words and changes in intonation that signal that something useful might be happening.

Profs, don't take the laptop away from the student. Take the student away from the laptop.

Anti-law school propaganda.

Yikes. That was mean. I must say I laughed at the law professor (at 1:50): "I will assign you an enormous amount of reading, and then proceed to humiliate you during lecture." (No real law professor would say that. Even if he'd admit to an intention to humiliate students with the Socratic method — and I've never run across a law professor who did — he wouldn't refer to the Socratic dialogue as "lecture." And he probably wouldn't assign a lot of material. The most Socratic fun/torture is done with just a couple cases per class.)

(Via Prof. Jacobson.)

Things that make law students go "off task."

This is from a study of students using laptops in class, but the researcher was able to gather data that is more generally useful to teachers, because it identified some very specific things that cause the student to look for something to do other than paying attention:

1) Student laptop users tend to go off-task when X-(anything) occurs for 4 minutes or more...

2) When professor is engaged in Socratic method with one student...

3) When a classmate engages with professor...

4) When professor is monotone, or, overly uses one linguistic intonation style...

5) Approximately 40 minutes into class...

6) When professor calls on students in expected order...

Apparently, students like variety... and not listening to other students.

"President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob."

"You're good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to tests that aren't taught by some liberal college professor."

That's something Rick Santorum said on Saturday. On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos asked him: "Now getting to college has been part of the American dream for generations, Senator. Why does articulating an aspiration make the president a snob?"

Santorum observes that "there are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don't include college."

And to sort of lay out there that somehow this... should be everybody's goal, I think, devalues the tremendous work that people who, frankly, don't go to college and don't want to go to college because they have a lot of other talents and skills that, frankly, college, you know, four-year colleges may not be able to assist them.

Stephanopoulos reminds him that he said on Glenn Beck's show that "Obama wants to send every kid to college, because they are indoctrination mills. What did that mean?" Santorum says everybody knows that "how liberal our colleges and universities are and how many children in fact are." Conservatives are "singled out" and "ridiculed." He said that he "personally... was docked for my conservative views."

(I genuinely wondered what he meant by saying he was docked, looked it up on line, and ended up in the Urban Dictionary. What a distraction! Anyway, I think he means "docked" in the sense of deprived of some benefits. But, in light of recent discussions of Satan, it might mean he had his tail removed or shortened.)

Santorum continues, going on about the "real problems at our college campuses with political correctness" and "politically correct left doctrine." Then he says he wants to "to make sure that conservative and more mainstream, common-sense conservative and principles that have made this country great are reflected in our college courses and with college professors." I wonder how a President might go about making sure of something like that? I would think that one of the conservative principles that made America great is the President sticking to the proper work of the President.

2 things stand out to me here:

1. Obama is the university professor, promoting the product/process that lifted him up and that he bestowed on others. His vanity/self-esteem are all wrapped up in the ideology of education. But Santorum's self-image is that of the student. He was oppressed and bullied. He still feels angry and ripped off. Which attitude resonates more with the American people today? That is, do Americans identify with the professor or the student?

2. The important thing, in my view, is that every young person in America — regardless of their cultural and economic background — needs to see clearly that they can get a higher education — that they belong there if they choose to go there — and that they have a choice that should be based on what will work out well for them. They should to go to college for a good reason, and one particularly good reason is to study science and engineering. If they are going to study in some softer, less career-oriented area, the mushy notion that everybody ought to go to college is not enough, even if the President of the United States tells them it is.

"Even though the percentage of incoming freshmen who identify as conservative has stayed relatively stable..."

".... those students and the rest of their peers are shifting away from hard-line conservative stances on issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, marijuana legalization and affirmative action...."

Even though on an issue-by-issue basis the opinions of incoming freshmen are becoming less conservative, the number of liberal students per se is not necessarily on the rise.

As students over the past couple of years have become more likely to self-identify politically as “middle of the road” (47.4 percent in 2011, up three percentage points since 2009), the percentage who consider themselves “liberal” has actually declined more than that of those who say they’re “conservative.”

"Cathy N. Davidson, an English professor at Duke, wants to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog."

Matt Richtel writes in the NYT:

Across the country, blog writing has become a basic requirement in everything from M.B.A. to literature courses. On its face, who could disagree with the transformation? Why not replace a staid writing exercise with a medium that gives the writer the immediacy of an audience, a feeling of relevancy, instant feedback from classmates or readers, and a practical connection to contemporary communications? Pointedly, why punish with a paper when a blog is, relatively, fun?

Because, say defenders of rigorous writing, the brief, sometimes personally expressive blog post fails sorely to teach key aspects of thinking and writing. They argue that the old format was less about how Sherman got to the sea and more about how the writer organized the points, fashioned an argument, showed grasp of substance and proof of its origin. Its rigidity wasn’t punishment but pedagogy.

That's a bogus complaint. Just require the blog posts to be well-written! Davidson has her students "regularly publish 500- to 1,500-word entries on an internal class blog." These are as long as the essays law students write on the exams that often constitute the entire basis for their grade in a semester long course. These entries are essays, and they are no more "personally expressive" (read: indulgent) than a term paper if the teacher states that the assignment is to write something structured/neutral/scholarly (or whatever the directions for a term paper are).

The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: “old literacy” refers to more traditional forms of discourse and training; “new literacy” stretches from the blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and audio essay.

These are just different ways of publishing. It's the content that matters. But, obviously, different technologies promote different kinds of thinking and writing. For example, when we used typewriters, we didn't do as much redrafting as we do with computers, and when we publish on line, we tend to go public faster.

Andrea A. Lunsford, a professor of English at Stanford, says "that students feel much more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging with it. They feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade."

There's a certain sort of teacher who's always imagining stimulating the students to new levels of passion. I suspect students can find this quite annoying and burdensome. Not only does the student have to write a lot, he's supposed to be all excited about it. Because teacher says blogging is exciting. But the blog can be a slog. It's not a slog for me, because I'm motivated from within. I make my own projects and do what I want. The intrinsic reward is fantastic. But I don't imagine that I could make students feel the same thing if they have to write when and where I tell them to and submit to my judgment for a grade.

Here's Davidson's book — which I just bought — "Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn." I'm interested in this subject, but also skeptical. Back in the 1960s I read "The Medium Is the Massage," by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, and I chanced upon a copy of it last week at Waterloo Records in Austin — the greatest record store in the country (maybe!). Yeah, I bought a book about media in a record store. One of my reading things is to read books that were once and within my memory a big deal in our culture.

On the drive home from Austin to Madison, as the passenger, I read the entire old book out loud. It's full of effusions about how are brains have changed because of "the high speeds of electric communication." McLuhan and Fiore were talking about television.

Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors in the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.

That was in 1967! If what they're saying were true when they wrote it, by now — with the internet and mobile devices — we'd all be crazy.

(Yes, yes, maybe we are crazy now. How would we know? By looking at election results?)

IN THE COMMENTS: FedkaTheConvict said:

Duke's Group of 88 Cathy Davidson?

Oh, my... The internet comes back to bite a pundit of internetology.

Cougar mascot rejected as offensive to women.

It was the students' top choice, but "principal Mary Bailey said carries an ugly connotation that is disrespectful to women."

Mary Bailey? Where have I heard that name before?



"She's an old maid... she never married... she's just about to close up the library."

NYU student emails her outrage about being forced to do an ethnography of Occupy Wall Street...

... and now it's in the news, which is full of insinuations about her mental health.

More — including all the email — here:

Sara Ackerman’s beef with NYU started over an assignment that involved going down to Zuccotti Park and writing an ethnography on the Occupy Wall Street protestors. Sara says she refused to go down because of ethical disagreements and concerns about “the criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill people” that were there. She requested an alternative assignment, but wasn’t granted one by CAS Dean Kalb until, she had already gone down to OWS “with two other young girls, who are quite attractive and thin, and don’t look particularly physically fit enough to take on a potential predator, rapist, paranoid schizophrenic, etc” and felt like she “escaped an extremely dangerous — and even, life threatening — situation.”

IN THE COMMENTS: Jay said...

Ackerman sent seven very long e-mails and a total of 4,000 words to everyone in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis

Gee, what could go wrong?

Here's an idea for an "alternative assignment": do a "social and cultural analysis" of the 4,000 words of email. If we're doing "ethnography," step back and see the larger picture of the 5-foot-1-inch, 105-pound female forced by her elders into a rough city milieu. She's an interesting object of ethnography as she resists being an ethnographer to people she feels intimidated by. And whatever happened to feminist analysis? There is formal equality when all students receive the same assignment, but in a more subtle understanding of equality, there is discrimination against tiny women.

"Students Laugh When Obama Tells Them 'You Inspire Me.'"

Hey, those students inspire me! They know how to detect bullshit.

In Madison, Wisconsin, "the Occupy movement isn't resonating with people."

Todd Finkelmeyer observes ruefully, in Madison's pathetic newspaper, The Capital Times ("Your Progressive Voice"). He's found one UW student who is into the protest and who "has struggled to find fellow students willing to join him in making a visible and vocal protest on behalf of the youthful 99 percent."

By "the youthful 99 percent," I presume Finkelmeyer means the portion of the 99% that happens to be adult but not yet middle aged. I suppose, depending on how you define young, the percent might be something like 30%. But young people who find themselves at the lower end of the income scale have the least to gripe about. They're just starting out. The question is: Can they move up over the course of their careers? If they are students at a fine university, they ought to think they can or they're wasting their time. Whether making it in America today is easy or hard nowadays, these students are better off studying than protesting. I congratulate the students for their good sense in resisting the protest scene.

But Finkelmeyer chides them:

But in Madison, despite its reputation as a hotbed of student activism — notoriety that dates to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the city served as an epicenter for those protesting the Vietnam War — college students are slow to jump on the Occupy bandwagon.

"From the very beginning of Occupy Madison, from the very first general assembly at Reynolds Park and in the following weeks, there was a noticeable lack of students," says [that one UW student], who in late October helped organize two Occupy UW marches as a member of the Direct Action Committee of Occupy Madison. He had hoped those would turn into weekly on-campus protests, but only 15 people showed up for the second march and no more were held due to a lack of interest.

"I don't think the outreach we did was as good as it could have been, so it didn't grow and Occupy UW has sort of been put on the back burner," says Phillips.

Maybe people don't want to be organized — by others, that is. Maybe the UW students are organized within their own lives and are pursuing an education and aiming toward a career path. Back in the not-so-good good old days of Vietnam protesting, you couldn't just concentrate on getting started on the path to economic well-being. The military draft was staring you in the face.

And, by the way, Finkelmeyer, mixed metaphor alert: "hotbed... epicenter...  bandwagon."

The article goes on and on, with lots of quotes from professors and other politicos who wonder why the students are resisting the pull of protests. The delightfully named Elizabeth Wrigley-Field — "a New York native who is pursuing her Ph.D. in sociology from UW-Madison" — "cautions" us not to "over-generalize" and say that the students are apathetic.

"I think part of the strength of the Occupy movement in most areas is that it's a novelty of sorts... But we already had that here with the occupation of the Capitol (in February and March) and then we had Walkerville...."

So maybe they're not apathetic; they're sick of all the protesting. Or they're passionate about their own individual lives and they need to study to get to a solid place for themselves in this risky economy. That tent-city out on East Washington Avenue is — by contrast — a horrifying alternative. It's irrational to think that hanging around in a parking lot with a bunch of left-wingers hoping for a revolution is going to work out better for you than concentrating on your school work and your job search.

IN THE COMMENTS: sean said:

Somewhat akin to what Prof. Althouse said, my back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that there are about 12 million Americans of college age, of whom perhaps 400,000 go to colleges of the caliber of Wisconsin or better. (The majority, of course, don't go to college at all, at least not to four-year institutions.) So Wisconsin students are in the top 3% of their age group, if not the top 1%, and obviously they aren't disposed to protest on behalf of other people.

And Patrick said:

I had the good fortune of being in Madison on Christmas eve day. As we drove down E. Wash, past the Occupy parking lot, it looked barren, save for some tents. I'd assumed that if they were still "occupying," they'd be up at the Capitol. What sort of impact could they possibly imagine having from that parking lot? "Occupy Parking Lot" just loses whatever zing those clowns ever had. Total failure. They need to "move on."

I responded: "It's the parking lot of what used to be a Don Miller car dealership, so we always call it 'Occupy Don Miller.'"