* Harvardgate : (-) + (-) = (+) ?

Once before Harvard banned its own, in 1838 after Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his now famous and infamous Address to the Divinity Students, which cut America loose from old world theology to explore anew.

That ban lasted thirty years until Emerson's world-wide fame as a titanic lecturer and thinker shamed Harvard into welcoming him back into its crimson fold.

Harvard has now shamed itself again, 125 years later, after an administration memo was leaked to the Press addressed to Harvard's residence hall deans/lecturers suggesting that they invite students who had cheated on a "Government 115 test" to voluntarily withdraw rather than be expelled.

Now the scandal has metastasized,  into a Harvardgate, with the revelation reported in this morning's New York Times that the Harvard administration has searched the emails of those same deans/lecturers to try to identify the Julian Assange (or Bradley Manning) among them.

O my Transcendentalist God!

Is the world so confused that the highest members of its own Academy must dishonor the Academy to save their own face?

Two negatives do make a positive  in algebra, but we are not doing algebra here:

It's as simple as kindergarten even at Harvard:  two wrongs do not make a right

*Uncanned Culinary Resemblance: Claudine and Christina

* Why No Traumatic Brain Injury in Woodpeckers and Rams?

* Good Word XVI

The Magisterium in the Roman Catholic Church, is the "teaching authority of the Church."

I would argue that Pope Benedict XVI's resignation---- the first resignation of a Pope in six centuries ---- is the most subversive instrument of teaching which could possibly penetrate the Magisterium.

What Benedict (whose self chosen name as Pope means "Good Word"  in Latin) has done in resigning is to take the magic out of the papacy.

If the Pope is "God's chosen representative of Christ on earth", (i.e. "the Vicar of Christ") then by resigning, Benedict XVI has chosen to undo God's choice-----a pretty heretical act. 

 And he has chosen to do it in a way which says "I'm just a guy. No magic in me." (as does this week's New Yorker cover of the Pope lounging in bathing suit in a hammock on a desert island) 

It's taken centuries to build up the magic of the Magisterium, and one 86 -year-old German Cardinal crowned  Benedict XVI, has thrown the magic out the window.

Another German,  Martin Luther,  must be tap dancing in heaven.

* Turning High School into a Service Industry for College

* A Strange Wedding: May Produce Strange Fruit: Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un

DRIBBLE DIPLOMACY

Dennis Rodman told George Stephanopolous in an ABC interview today that North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, had whispered to him that what he really wants is not war, but for "Obama to call me."


The State Department has already "distanced itself"  from basketball star and noted cross-dressing eccentric  Dennis Rodman, who made an unexpected visit to North Korea last week where he spent more time with the North Korean leader than any other living person outside of North Korea, a fact which one State Department official called "frightening" in Stephanopolous's opening segment featuring Rodman on ABC 's This Week.

Stephanopolous gave Rodman a copy of the Human Rights  Watch Report outlining North Korea's violations of human rights, and sanctimoniously suggesting Rodman might want to read it before consorting with the heads of governments which commit such atrocities as imprisoning 200,000 citizens in concentration camps.

Really?

Should Churchill and Roosevelt have refused to consort with mass-murderer Stalin?

Should Nixon have refused to meet with Mao, also a mass-murderer?

Should Reagan have refused to meet with Gorbachov, whose country kept millions in subjugation?

Perhaps Stephanopolous (a former White House Press Secretary himself) and the State Department are a bit envious that they didn't arrange the first meeting ever between North Korea's new leader and a Western official, if Mr. Rodman can be called an "official".  And isn't it interesting that Rodman got Kim's ear while Google's president Eric Scmidt was snubbed on a recent "private" trip to North Korea.

Maybe envy isn't the cause of the irritation .  Maybe it's just the same stupid pride which has kept us from normalizing relations with Fidel Castro's Cuba long after the "communism" he espoused had disappeared from both Russia and China.

I have six words for President Obama:  "Mr. Obama, pick up the phone.""

* Yale Daily News Caves in to Bureaucratic Baloney Manufacturers

CLICK ON EACH POST FOR ORIGINAL ARTICLE IN YALE DAILY NEWS

theantiyale 

 12 hours ago

• 
  

The trend over the last 50 years that I have been a student in four colleges (Bread Loaf; YDS; Kent; Ithaca) has been to diminish the autonomy of the professor and tangle him/her up in the flypaper of adminsitrivia which results from the consensus nonsensus of committee governance.

If a person drove their car the way professors (and teachers in public schools, for that matter) are being pressured to run their classrooms, there's be a smash-up on every corner.

Get the damned committee out of the professor's classroom and gradebook.

Trust professionals to be professional.

Stop this obsessive Michelle Rhee-micromanaging-mania which is metastasizing across education, masquerading as "educational reform."

Paul D. Keane,

M.A., M. Div., M.Ed.

________________________________________________________________



theantiyale
2 days Ago



http://gradgrindfoundation.blo...

DATA! DATA! DATA!

Lord God Almighty

Blessed of New Icons

Singularity.

Praise DATA, from whom all Word docs flow;

Praise IT all ye algorithms here below;

Praise IT above ye heavenly Cloud;

Praise DATA's digits,

all aloud.

I am not going to mince words.

This editorial or "view" is yet another example of our culture's idolatrous worship of the false god, DATA.

It reminds me of the old 1950's "curved grading" where a teacher was persuaded by statistical analysis to adjust his or her class's grades according to a "standard curve".

As Mark Twain observed, "There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics."

Watch out what you wish for. 

You are turning the entire world into a Data Sheet.

Charm, beauty, eccentricity and authenticity will be the casualties of this idolatrous obsession.

Shame on the Yale Daily News' "editorial board".

PK

_____________________________________________________________

theantiyale • 4 days ago

"Are there really meaningful differences between a 94 and 96 on similarly structured literature papers, or is it more likely to be attributed to how recently a novitiate teaching assistant refilled his or her coffee mug."

All grades should begin at A-, until the student demonstrates ether dereliction or distinction.

The big hurdle should be GETTING IN to Yale. Remaining with distinction should be a goal worth working for. Inadequate performance should be rewarded with a "Gentleman's B" or Gentlelady's B." Two or three of these should be a flag that one is goofing off or needs help to return to A- level.

Who is YALE afraid of with this "grade inflation" alert? The New England Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools accreditation agency?

YALE ? ----pushed around by the most nitpicking nonsense organization of bureaucratic baloney manufacturers on the planet ?

Come now. Really!

____________________________

theantiyale • 12 hours ago

The whole thing is screwed up.

All the money should be reversed and poured into universal EARLY education. That would reduce the remedial treadmill we are on for 12 yearsbecause kids come to school with understimulated cerebral pathways.