The Cranky Professor

June 24, 2009

Hmm - what're the Classical topoi for the exposure of babies?

I read an interesting catalog from an exhibition about the depiction of children and childhood in ancient Greek art a couple of years ago - Coming of Age in Ancient Greece, but I am not remembering if there was anything much about the exposure of unwanted infants. Somehow I always think of this as a male response - but read this article about women and men responding babies with facial abnormalities. Hmm.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:39 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2009

Shipment Tracking?

I've commented before on the two-edged sword we have in shipment tracking. Worse, though, is when you get an email at 3 p.m. announcing that your new computer is on campus (two days earlier than expected!) but that you can't pick it up until the invoices are all complete and assembled!! Argh!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:27 PM | Comments (1)

June 17, 2009

Harvard Homicides through the ages

Who knew?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)

Why I've ordered a new 13" MacBook Pro

I have a cracked LCD, and that L really does stand for liquid. The oozing liquid is bad and getting worse pretty rapidly. I waited until Apple announced the new MacBook Pro lineup, paid off the remainder of the payroll deduction loan for the broken one, and have ordered a new one.

Oh, well.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:20 AM | Comments (3)

June 9, 2009

It's not just a job, it's an adventure!

I still get the Chronicle of Higher Education's weekly email jobs list of art history positions. After all, one never knows....

This week there's only one job - English Composition and Art History - in Kurdistan! The American University of Iraq - Sulaimani is hiring.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:29 AM | Comments (2)

June 5, 2009

Digitized Incunabula

Early printed books go online now! Here's the BBC story. Cambridge University has a grant from the Mellon Foundation to make books like the first printed Homer (first use of italics!) and their Gutenberg Bible available online.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:54 AM | Comments (1)

May 30, 2009

Economists and historians

It is hardly surprising, then, that the bond market is quailing. For only on Planet Econ-101 (the standard macroeconomics course drummed into every US undergraduate) could such a tidal wave of debt issuance exert "no upward pressure on interest rates".

Of course, Mr Krugman knew what I meant. "The only thing that might drive up interest rates," he acknowledged during our debate, "is that people may grow dubious about the financial solvency of governments." Might? May? The fact is that people - not least the Chinese government - are already distinctly dubious.

Niall Ferguson can't resist pointing out that he, the historian, was right and that Paul Krugman was not. I can't blame him.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2009

Diversity in Action

The White House tableau itself was history: A black president and his white vice president, Joe Biden, striding onto a stage in the ornate East Room with the nominee who grew up in a New York housing project where her parents had moved from Puerto Rico.

Yeah - you see, Joe Biden has neither of his earned degrees from an Ivy League institution. Delaware and Syracuse - diversity!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:28 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2009

Textbook Query

Yes, I'm late on this. I'm still on sabbatical until July 1 anyway!

So I'm choosing. I need to use a Bible* for European Studies 101 and for Art 270, the first half of Medieval.

I am relatively indifferent to versions / editions. I don't use anything not in Protestant versions in these courses, so they can use almost anything. I would like the book to be inexpensive and legible. I don't really care if it has good study notes or how the poetry sounds when read aloud (I'll bring in xeroxes of multiple versions of the Psalms we read, anyway).

The last time I taught 270 there was no course in Religious Studies that semester requiring a Bible (someone ordered the big Tanakh for one of the courses in Judaic studies, but that was as close as they got). I can not depend on the nominally Christian students having their own copies (you know, I found out I couldn't depend on the nice young ladies at Agnes Scott to have brought their Bibles from home, either).

Last time I used a paperback Jerusalem Bible that is out of print - or at least I can't find it. The book store carries a paperback King James Version in their trade section - that's almost unusable for modern students not raised with it.

Any ideas??

*Please don't tell me I need to say "Christian Bible." The things used by Jews have names other than "Bible."

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:31 PM | Comments (7)

May 14, 2009

Talk about an activity fee!

The mayor of Providence wants to tax Brown students directly.

The mayor of Providence wants to slap a $150-per-semester tax on the 25,000 full-time students at Brown University and three other private colleges in the city, saying they use resources and should help ease the burden on struggling taxpayers.

Mayor David Cicilline (sis-ah-LEEN-ee) said the fee would raise between $6 million and $8 million a year for the city, which is facing a $17 million deficit.

If enacted, it would apparently be the first time a U.S. city has directly taxed students just for being enrolled.

Of course the students' excuse that they spend money in Providence is true of people who have established legal residence in Providence, too. This will be interesting!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2009

Oprah at Duke

I heard a Duke University commencement address once - Ted Koppel, in 1987. I believe he had a daughter among the graduating seniors; he took an understandably paternal tone, but his talk was less annoyingly hypocritical than what I read about Oprah's.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:09 PM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2009

Santa Rosa Junior College is run by someone better suited to disapproving of the tshirts worn by high school students

There. I took the institution's name in vain. SRJC has threatened students who use the school's name or initials in private communications.

The school officials still don't see why it's a big deal that they're threatening students. However, their reasoning makes very little sense. "The reason for it is so the college doesn't get misrepresented in some way or make it look like the college is endorsing a product or issue," according to Santa Rosa Junior College President Robert Agrella. But that makes no sense. If a student uses an actual address from the university, wouldn't that risk be much greater? In other words, does the college really think that it's a bigger risk for someone to say something that the college does not endorse from nameSRCJ@gmail.com or name@santarosa.edu? Because it seems fine with the latter, but not the former. The whole thing smacks of college administrators who don't understand technology and have way too much free time on their hands.

"School officials" never do - but more typically they're high school officials who don't understand freedom of speech.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:32 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2009

Weirder and weirder - they've found the body of the UGa Killer Professor

What on earth? They found his naked body buried in the woods.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:41 PM | Comments (3)

May 5, 2009

Academic nostalgia

In the face of world-wide contraction in academic publishing, Duke is going to bring out a period piece - a 17 year old dissertation (wikipedia says she received her Ph.D. in 1992).

Of course, since it's by Obama's sainted mother it will probably sell.

Inside Higher Education's version, where you can find a link to the DUP press release.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:39 PM | Comments (4)

April 21, 2009

Farewell, Roma!

Off again!

I had a good visit - shorter than the last few, but long enough to get some serious work done. I've looked, drawn, and thought a lot, read some, and even - gasp - written. I'm not a natural outliner, but the Santa Prassede material is so disparate that I've had to be a better planner; I think I've got a pretty good working outline going.

I'm headed to Turin today. Why? Because I need to get to the North and because I've never been! Why not? Thence to Frankfurt and from there to Istanbul!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:57 AM | Comments (1)

April 1, 2009

Rather DIE than finish the semester?

I know the feeling, though I'm not suffering from it this year.

If it's any consolation, look at this tomb in Bologna from around 1400 when they knew how to honor professors.

The full-length figure of the entombed is in his academicals. Below on the main face he lectures from his canopied chair while hordes of eager students take down his every word.

Ah, the good old days! Click on the picture to go to the photo stream and see another, more charming tomb slab. I think I want one with books as my foot rests.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:01 PM | Comments (1)

March 28, 2009

Sun! Swedes!

There I was drinking a 2nd cappuccino and deciding whether to go into San Petronio before or after the Morandi Museum when the King of Sweden drove by - in a motorcade, of course.

Later in the day I finally found out why he's in Bologna in the paper - he's visiting Alma Mater. By the way, Bologna invented that phrase. The familiar name of the University is Alma Mater Studiorum, literally the Sweet Mother of Studies, but more properly the Wetnurse of Studies.

So when you call your old school Alma Mater you're harking back to that particular medieval tradition that sees study as nourishment.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:14 AM | Comments (1)

March 26, 2009

Off to Bologna!

The course is over, the weather is really chilly, and I'm off to Bologna!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:54 AM | Comments (1)

March 25, 2009

Pushback against moral claims of ownership

Yale University is resisting a claim that because the Soviet Union seized Van Gogh's The Night Café the University should return the painting to the 1918-owner's heir. Here's the AP story. Indeed, Yale is initiating a lawsuit to assert a claim to the picture. Interesting!

via InsideHigherEd

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:37 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2009

Headlines half seen - and maybe only a quarter read

Seals to shed light on life of Whales in Middle Ages??

No, it was Seals to shed light on life in Wales in Middle Ages

HISTORIANS will be reviewing more than 5,000 medieval seals relating to Wales, held at the National Library of Wales, as part of a new research project.

The team from Bangor and Aberystwyth Universities will look at the seals - used to authenticate and close documents - to find out what they actually tell us about the people who commissioned them, interpreting how they saw themselves and wanted others to see them and what they can tell us about the society that produced them.

Uniquely, one strand of the project will also be concentrating on images of medieval women.

The project is funded by an Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research grant of £490,000. Bangor and Aberystwyth Universities are collaborating their expertise for the work. The research project also includes digitising the collection, making it more accessible to the general public and creating a travelling exhibition based on the collection.

And here I was wondering about the transitive quality of sea-mammals in the Middle Ages and the value of comparing pinnipeds to cetaceans.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:48 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2009

Have I mentioned that I hate German syntax?

Hate is too strong - but gosh, German word order is rigid and counter-intuitive for this English speaker.

Yes, my final exam is Monday. Our teacher got a look at the test and told us that the verbs with obligatory prepositions we've been slaving over for the last 2 weeks* get ONE question. As someone who had to make final exams for high school Latin, I can sympathize - but still!

Ask me next month how much I think I've learned.

*you know, sich freut (auf/über), träumen von, sich erinneren an, that sort of thing. And yes, I know that English is just as annoying - we fight with our mothers but against enemies. When I was learning to speak Italian we always knew we were getting near the end of a book when we suddenly started reviewing the prepositions, which are hatefully idiomatic in Italian, too. I've gotten to the point in Italian that I just don't worry about them all that much - and strangely I seem to get them right a good bit of the time. Quantity always pays off in language - read more, speak more, and you'll do better.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:42 PM | Comments (4)

March 17, 2009

Collapsed Cologne Archive

The collapsed Cologne Archive was only a few blocks further south than St. Maria im Capitol, a church I particularly wanted to visit. So I walked on to see the depressing site. The rubble is covered with plastic and the whole site is roofed over - I pray they recover a lot.

The Archive's own web page - complete with a diagram at the bottom of the collapse (via Cronaca).

Updated coverage at Archivalia.

Great photo stream from Spiegel Online - including before and after aerial views.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:40 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2009

Focus

Yes, really, I went all that way for this photograph.

Einhard, Charlemagne's biographer, reports that shortly before Charles died the word PRINCEPS faded from the inscription sinopide scriptum, "written in red."

Magical thinking, or prophecy?

The mosaic inscription as it stands is a 19th Century restoration - but I like it.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:05 PM | Comments (1)

March 15, 2009

Sorry for the radio silence

But I was visiting someplace I think about way too often. More pictures to follow. I took 130 in Aachen - about half of which were useful. Digital is great! Um - Cologne. Köln. That too.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:34 PM | Comments (1)

March 5, 2009

Can some books make you dumber?

"Of course there is the whole correlation is not causation thing, but, I mean, duh," he added.

via Instapundit.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:30 PM | Comments (0)

March 4, 2009

Peer review and 'excellence'

This looks very interesting: How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment - reviewed here at Inside Higher Ed. For anyone who has ever not gotten a grant - or who has thought that getting a grant is proof of the excellence of something or other, this is recommended reading. Consider this: "One panel Lamont observed simply didn't award all the fellowships it could have because the reviewers wanted to leave for the airport."

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:12 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2009

Welcome to the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts

I meant to link to this before - the more manuscripts the merrier.

Further - sorry, I pasted a malformed link - it should work now!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:49 PM | Comments (2)

February 9, 2009

Pretending to be a Covered Muslima in Arab, Alabama

And surprised that people smiled at her. Bet they offered her sweet tea, too.

You know, the gullibility of people conducting what passes for experimental social 'science' never ceases to amaze me.

Of course everyone was sweet to her - it's Arab. That's where my mother was raised! They're all sweet, even some of our family who aren't so very nice.

Driving around in America and having people not be ugly to you because you're dressed funny does not mean they tolerate or fail to tolerate Muslims. I wonder how folks looked at my cousin the Orthodox priest when he was home for his father's funeral. I mean, he wears what might well pass for a dress and certainly looks warm.

Would American Muslims please remember that all this practice of covering the head in public is a very recently-ended phenomenon in the West. My not-so-very-long-ago-deceased Grandmother only stopped wearing hats and gloves when she went to Birmingham to shop about the time I was born?

Oh, well. Good luck, fake Muslima. Don't try Walmart if you're looking for someone to be rude to you!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:19 PM | Comments (2)

February 6, 2009

Appropriating Aristotle

What would Europe be without revolting students? I mean students protesting something or other - this time the introduction of some kind of fees for German higher education. Which, of course, should be free. Click and see their lame graphic design work.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:49 PM | Comments (2)

January 31, 2009

Why close the museum? To sell the art!

More on Brandeis from Felix Salmon at Portfolio, who found out about the bizarro valuation at $1 for each piece of art!

Clearly, Brandeis has come to the conclusion that by shutting down the museum, it can ignore all rules pertaining to deaccessioning, and worry only about the strings attached by donors to individual artworks.

Nathan also said something else which was extremely interesting to me: apparently all of the Rose Art Museum's artworks are considered to be assets of the university endowment, valued at $1 each. All the proceeds from the sale of any artwork, then, is automatically a desperately-needed capital gain for the endowment. [my emphasis]

This is one of the most underhanded financial twists I've seen a university do in a long time! Because they value each asset at $1, every actual sale will be a capital gain! Yay! Whoever thought that one up deserves a bonus - a big bonus! Maybe even a John Thain-style office makeover.

Earlier blogging on Brandeis.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:40 AM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2009

Studies show . . . or maybe not

American college freshmen know fewer facts about science than do their Chinese counterparts, according to a new study, but both groups have a comparably poor ability to reason scientifically.

In other words, the Americans tested were bone ignorant and the Chinese at least knew some facts. A lot of facts, if you trust the test scores. I think I'd rather teach a class of freshmen to reason who knew things than to teach a class who knew nothing both facts and how to reason - but maybe that's just me. Now this sounds likely:

Lei Bao, the study's lead author and director of Ohio State University's Physics Education Research Group, said this runs contrary to the commonly held belief that reasoning skills develop as students are "rigorously taught the facts."

O.K. - reasoning skills do not come automatically with learning facts. But unless you can show that teaching the Chinese students lots of facts made it harder to later teach them scientific reasoning I'm not sure this study proves that Chinese secondary science education is anything like as bad as that in America, which that first paragraph suggests. Go look at the comparative scores!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:22 AM | Comments (0)

So is it a masterpiece by Goya, a masterpiece by another hand, or have you changed your opinion of the painting entirely?

I think that's the question I would like to use to survey the specialists about The Colossus, which may or may not be a Goya.

You see, I specialize in a period without names - and medievalists see the problems created by the idolization of genius artists very clearly. Plenty of folks who specialize in fields with better attributions to individuals, from Chinese scroll paintings to the present, see the problem, but let's face it - lots of people don't see or won't admit a problem.

The questions: If the label changes to The Colossus, Asensio Juliá, will as many editors include the work in textbooks? Will the Prado keep it out all the time? Does your opinion of Goya change, or your opinion of the painting?

Here's an example of the Genius Artist approach in the Times Online:

Nigel Glendinning, a British art historian, doubted that anyone but Goya could have painted the work. He told the Spanish newspaper ABC: "I never said it would be impossible that [someone else] might have intervened in the work of Goya, but the painting is too audacious to be by Asensio Juliá, because of the centrifugal strength of the composition and its iconic power. I hope to be able to see the study and the proofs."

Well, maybe he's been overestimating Goya or underestimating Juliá all these years - given that his own apprehension of iconic power depends on his belief that this painting is by Goya, even though he's dressing it up with some formalist language (composition). One of the great founders of formalist analysis of art, Heinrich Wölflin, called for an art history without names and never got it. Will Glendinning's opinion of Goya change, or his opinion of the painting change? What he's saying is that it's a masterpiece and therefore it must have been created by a certified genius. Goya. We'll see. But the medievalists are in the corner, nudging each other and laughing quietly.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2009

I hate packing

Someone pointed out to me that I haven't really blogged about what I'm doing this spring.

My idea of a fun sabbatical is 2 months of intensive German. So I'm off to Freiburg, Germany, for a Goethe Institut. I have reservations to come back in late April, but we'll see how the money holds out for some time in Italy after the German course. I'm thinking that I might finally get a week in Istanbul this trip!

Meanwhile, I got 90 days worth of asthma, sinus, and blood pressure meds today. I'm doing things like staring at my suitcases, wishing they would fill themselves without my intervention. Friday is going to be the usual mess of me wandering around cussing and wondering why I get myself into this kind of situation - why don't I just stay home with my hands folded and think deep thoughts quietly? Why did I have to become an art historian, whose life always involves running to LOOK at things? Why didn't I stick to literature!

But that will pass. I love being places - I just hate getting there. Especially by contemporary air travel. And deciding how many pairs of shoes I can take. The preliminary answer this year? Wear one, pack two, and buy boots or something snow-proof in Germany if it turns out I really need them. My stout walking shoes may be enough, if they shovel diligently. But things are going to Hell all over, and maybe German street cleaning will show that.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:42 PM | Comments (2)

January 26, 2009

Carnivalesque 46

An Early Modern blog carnival!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:08 AM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2009

Nine Pounds of Gold Coins found by metal detectorist

Let's admit it, academics - what most people like to see in museums is GOLD!

So when someone finds gold we need to play it up - it's a matter of funding for what we care about, which, of course, is the advancement of knowledge.

824 gold staters found in East Anglia. That's a lot. At about 5 g apiece that's over 4 kg of gold coins. A lot. With a picture of a lot of gold. [further: the article at the Daily Mail has a closer version of the picture - you can make out the horses on the staters!]

"It's a good, exciting find. It gives us a lot of new information about the late Iron Age, and particularly East Anglia in the late Iron Age.

"The discovery is important because it highlights the probable political, economic and religious importance of an area.

"It certainly suggests there was a significant settlement nearby. As far as we understand, it was occupied by wealthy tribes or subtribes," she said.

Such dignity. Such advance of knowledge. Such a jump in the sales of metal detectors!

The coins are dated from 40 BC to 15 AD - making them pre-Boudicca - but not by much. This reinforces pretty clearly why the Romans set up among the Iceni when they finally took over Britain under Claudius - if there was this kind of wealth in that tribe there was good reason to put a colony there.

Another important consideration is what British find law means for someone with a metal detector and 9 pounds of gold. Some people would melt down a find like this. At $843.15 an ounce, where it closed on Friday, that's over $120,000 anyway. Some people would sell the coins on the black market - there are a lot of them, after all. In Great Britain the well-behaved metal detectorist can hope for a fair reward when the find is declared treasure trove.

And so, the coins fall into our hands, academics - they'll end up in a museum! And we'll get to study them!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:25 AM | Comments (0)

January 9, 2009

Two ways to fight federal regulation of university endowments

We all knew that the big universities were going to scream big losses and poverty in response to Congressional moves to force them to spend 5% annually, but the Wall Street Journal reports a new twist from Princeton:

Still, Princeton had been among those criticized for alleged hoarding of its endowment, as some members of Congress discussed requiring colleges to spend at least 5% of their funds annually.

In recent years, Princeton has typically spent less than that. Thursday, the university said that with the declines in its endowment and the need to fund programs, its annual spend-out rate from its endowment could jump to 6%.

You see, in this time of straightened finances, when the losses on a 16.3 billion dollar endowment make you lie awake at night, you have to increase the payout to get through the hard times. Then, having weathered the hard times and the threat from Congress you can drop down to your sub-5% level and start rebuilding. Clever!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)

January 6, 2009

Academic Nepotism and Panetta

I know that lots of them on both sides of the aisle do this kind of thing, but it always offends me and the big man is in the news, so here you go:

The surprise selection of Leon Panetta as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in President-elect Barack Obama's administration would leave his public policy institute at CSU-Monterey Bay in the hands of his wife, Sylvia.

Applauding Panetta's selection for the top CIA post, university President Dianne Harrison said Monday she had been "assured by Leon that Sylvia will continue to run the institute and it will be business as usual."

. . .

Panetta and his wife founded the institute at CSU-Monterey Bay in 1997 in partnership with the university to provide studies in government, politics and public policy. Panetta played a key role in Congress and in the Clinton administration to get the university established on the former Army base.

So before leaving public office Panetta got a public university established somewhere, then he and his wife found an institute, which they control so tightly that he can leave her in charge while he goes back to Washington? Ick. Just ick.

Further: A little googlng gets me nowhere - I find nothing much about Sylvia Panetta other than her husband and her co-directorship of the Institute, though maybe she, too, is a lawyer. Don't know. Academic politics as usual.

Further still: Whoops! I mistakenly deleted a comment from this post in the midst of spam clearance. It had something in it reminding us that the academically significant institute at Monterey is the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy. Sounds important, hunh? Oh - go here, scroll to the bottom, and check out her academic credentials. Of course, Wikipedia is currently leading off L.P.'s entry with "Leon Edward Panetta (born June 28, 1938) is a Democratic politician and scholar . . . ." As far as I can tell, the reason the article claims he's a "scholar" is that: "[h]e is the founder and director of the Panetta Institute, serves as Distinguished Scholar to the Chancellor of the California State University system and is a professor at Jesuit-run Santa Clara University teaching public policy." He's a J.D. with a tell-all book about the Nixon administration, which sounds like "scholar" is a courtesy title.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:29 AM | Comments (1)

December 31, 2008

If they're fictitious paper gains, are they fictitious paper losses?

On the Yeshiva University front:

The university's chief financial officer, J. Michael Gower, said in an e-mail that the school's actual principal investment in a hedge fund linked to Madoff had been only $14.5 million.

On paper, that stake had exploded in value over the past 15 years to $110 million, but Gower said all of those "profits" now appear to be entirely fictitious, meaning that the losses were mostly fictitious too.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:08 AM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2008

Whatever happened to "don't put all your eggs in one basket"?

From an interesting Madoff article at Bloomberg.com:

U.S. foundations that invested with Bernard Madoff donated more than $73 million to nonprofit organizations in 2007, according to a tally based on foundation tax returns.

The Dec. 11 arrest of the 70-year-old New Yorker has directly affected some 400 U.S. nonprofits, from Amnesty International to the Death Penalty Information Center to the Lymphoma Research Foundation. A precise accounting of Madoff-related losses isn't possible. Each week brings new disclosures, and several foundations that said they had money with Madoff haven't indicated how much. He is accused of operating a Ponzi scheme.

. . .

The JEHT Foundation -- which gave away $24.2 million last year, primarily toward criminal justice reform -- and the Picower Foundation -- which distributed $268 million since 1989 -- both recently announced that they've been forced to close.

I don't really understand the chart at the link - how the JEHT foundation had assets of $7.5 million but gave away $24.2 million, but still. Maybe they left out a zero or two? The Picower foundation, which seems to have lost everything, had $958,425,057.

By the way - look at the number of higher education recipients in the lists. Ripples.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:44 AM | Comments (1)

December 22, 2008

How much HAS Harvard Lost?

At the Huffington Post:

Harvard University's admission that it lost $8 billion from its $36 billion endowment fund, as staggering as it sounds, may grossly underestimate the true magnitude of the loss between from July 1 through Oct. 31 2008. According to a source close the Harvard Management Corporation (HMC), which runs the fund for Harvard, the loss is closer to $18 billion if the losses on the fund's illiquid investment are realistically appraised.

In other words, not a little less than a quarter, more like half. Yikes.

via Cliopatria. Though now that I look around, Prof. Soltan has a picture.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:14 AM | Comments (1)

December 18, 2008

UK schools and league tables

So what my colleagues here have built here (for I am just a relatively recent arrival) is not just a program that is top of the league table, but one that is stunningly good. Really, I'm a naturally shy and retiring guy (you know that), but facts must be faced.

The way the RAE worked involved a national panel which put out a call to all UK universities to pick out for each department or subject area those of their academic staff who were judged to be productive in research, and to submit four publications by each of those, plus various other data. In each subject a national panel worked for a year or so reading and grading everything submitted. They mixed in a score for the research environment and a small percentage for esteem indicators like major prizes and awards, and then presented the results as a vector of five integers: first, a rounded percentage corresponding to work of a quality that leads the world in originality, significance, and rigour (4*); then another corresponding to quality of international excellence but not at the very highest level (3*); another corresponding to internationally recognized quality (2*); another corresponding to nationally but perhaps not internationally recognized quality (1*); and a fifth corresponding to work falling below nationally recognized standards for research work (Unclassified).

One happy professor.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:37 PM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2008

Advice for academic job candidates, II

Candidates - don't settle for portfolio services. Develop enough of a relationship with your recommenders that they at least tailor something to different types of schools. The all-purpose to whom it may concern recommendation really isn't inspiring me to want to interview you.

I am appalled by how few recommendations mention our name(s) or even that magic phrase "at a liberal arts college." Do the recommenders not care enough to use mail-merge? Admittedly, I'm only half of the way through the files and one poor distinguished named chair kinda guy has already recommended five (5) candidates to us in glowing terms, so how much worse it would be with personalization I don't know. Maybe I could make some decisions between them? Perhaps he might indicate that he thinks one of the five people (among the 45 files I've read so far) would be better here than the others?

My previous advice to candidates is here.

Further:

Well, don't say that all professors are too burdened to write individual letters - that I can't get what I want. I spent much of today (Thursday) reading folders (and more! more files being completed by late arriving items!) and came across a nice example of what I would like to have seen more of. Distinguished professor of this'n'that has written recs for 4 out of the 63 candidates I've reviewed; the most recent folder from one of that professor's students had two letters via Interfolio (both boilerplated with greatness). Then came a letter from a department person where the candidate is currently teaching; the recommender visited every class taught there (ooh - we're a teaching-centered liberal arts college, too!). Finally, one letter came from the distinguished professor of this'n'that on stationary with colored letterhead. Colored ink signature. Aimed not just at the liberal arts market as opposed to R1s, but actually mentions our name twice (second occurrence in a locally acceptable short version). Does the candidate make the cut for a conference interview? Well, I have to say that if the candidate makes the cut, it is because the candidate is answering the advertisement (see earlier advice), meets the stated criteria, AND has 2 excellent recommendations pointed to our needs, not just the needs of every active search committee on the market. By the way, the distinguished professor of this'n'that's other 3 letters? Via Interfolio. So ask - perhaps you will receive.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:33 PM | Comments (5)

December 15, 2008

Living in your head

Have you ever been accused of living in your head? Well, take Susan Sontag as a cautionary tale - take a bath every day as an antidote.

And yet the innumerable tiny details that preoccupy Sontag over the years, the moments when she does describe her relation to the physical world, are revealing. There are a surprising number of entries in which she resolves to bathe more frequently. "Take a bath every day," she writes over and over, which somehow one doesn't imagine reading in the journals of an adult. But bathing is difficult for her; it involves a confrontation with the physical body she finds distressing. She tells us she sometimes falls asleep in her clothes. There is something endearing in this self portrait: the arrogant command of her authorial voice somehow belied by a sweet image of the unworldly woman writer, so uncomfortable with the basic physical demands of life, so flustered by soap and water.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:26 AM | Comments (1)

Why does higher education cost so much?

The Chronicle of Higher Education tries to answer that important question by looking at the University of Kansas.

I'm going on hearsay, folks, because I don't subscribe and the Chronicle has a lock-down policy on content that's worse than the Wall Street Journal. Here's what Erin O'Connor's gleans:

CHE points out that in the past twenty years, Kansas has tripled its operating budget, while maintaining a steady enrollment of 26,000 students. During that time, state support has doubled--but while state funding in 1988 covered 40 percent of the operating budget, it now covers only 22 percent. Grants and contracts cover some of the difference, but not all of it. Meanwhile, tuition for in-state students has quintupled. Kansas is still very affordable, at around $7,000/year -- and is much less expensive than rival flagships. Still, the tuition rate has increased at three times the rate of inflation over the past two decades.

Where is all the money going? To various things aimed broadly at enhancing student experience and so improving retention: new facilities (two science buildings, a fitness center replete with climbing wall, renovated dorms, a multicultural resource center, a performing arts center, a writing center, revamped high-tech classrooms, increased library services, IT), more professors, and more bureaucracy to administer all the new student services, to publicize them, and to study them. Energy and health care premiums also add to the total.

She also points out the thing that frightens us; is all the money making any difference?

All that aside, there is one thing that the article does not cover. With all its attention to how much money Kansas has pumped into the thesis that the spending will improve educational outcomes, no attention is paid to whether educational outcomes are any different than they were before Kansas began its spending spree.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:52 AM | Comments (1)

December 10, 2008

So is it bad that university endowments are doing so badly?

Harvard freezes faculty salaries and halts most searches. Their endowment dropped 30%.

The president of Bard College thinks pretending to be a bank was a bad idea all along for universities.

The Bard College president has for years been telling anyone who would listen that endowment growth in higher education was irresponsible and encouraged all the wrong strategies. He has called for colleges to spend the money they raise, rather than stocking it away. With the economy crashing, and tuition-dependent colleges like Bard worried about enrollment and wishing they had larger endowments, is Botstein sticking to his views? How does higher education look to the person who warned that endowment dependence was a terrible thing?

Botstein wants you to know that it's not Schadenfreude he's feeling. "I don't wish any of these institutions ill."

But to Botstein, what is happening now is proof that the endowment strategy doesn't work. "Institutions should not be banks. They are not good at it, and they are no better than anybody else. It should come as no surprise that as investing vehicles, there was a certain amount of arrogance and hubris," he said. "There was much too much time and money spent on getting richer and richer without being clear about why."

via Professor Soltan

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:39 PM | Comments (1)

December 9, 2008

The Mayor of Boston looks hard at payment in lieu of taxes - and wants more.

The mayor of Boston wants to renegotiate and standardize the payments in lieu of taxes currently in place between non-profits and the city. The article claims that non-profits of one kind or another own 50% of the property, but are paying $32 million in taxes. Here are two paragraphs you need to read:

Combined, tax-exempt institutions give the city $32.4 million annually in payments in lieu of taxes, a drop in the bucket when compared with what the city spends on police, fire, and other services. If their properties were taxable, the institutions would be writing checks for 10 times that amount - between $350 and $400 million each year, city officials estimated yesterday.

. . .

For example, Boston University contributes $4.6 million each year, the highest of any institution, while Harvard University - which owns twice as much land in Boston - pays $1.9 million. Northeastern University contributes only $30,600.

What a mess. I wish him luck.

via Inside Higher Ed

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:50 AM | Comments (1)

December 8, 2008

The Academic Job Search - hints for the Candidate I

I'm on sabbatical, but I feel the duty to serve on one of our searches this year. I read a bunch of the completed folders this afternoon.

Candidates: please, please, read the advertisement. Apply for the job advertised. I marked a bunch of NO columns on rubrics sheets because the candidates were not applying for the job we're offering. That's different from the people whose folders you have read and reread to see which parts they do and don't seem to have; no, some people are missing the basics. Some people's folders make you wonder if they read the advertisement other than to get the mailing address.

Another quick hint - if you're going to write a single cover letter for all jobs on the market, don't mention your eagerness to teach graduate-level courses. Just say you are eager to teach. That way you'll cover both graduate institutions and places like this. Two people I've already read got the NO mark because once I read that line in the cover letter I looked for any evidence of actual interest in teaching undergraduates at a small liberal arts college and didn't find a lot. I might have read more generously at this stage if you hadn't annoyed me on page 1 of your file.

Finally, be sure to use the correct name for the institution. We're Hobart and William Smith Colleges, not Hobart Smith College. There's no need for you to learn about the complicated history of the coordinate colleges unless we hire you, but don't make the committee wonder about your reading skills. That leads to a NO on the ol' rubric sheet.

All that said, good luck! Because luck is a lot of what it takes.

Here's the second piece of advice.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:24 PM | Comments (2)

December 3, 2008

Great reading rooms of the world

Well, actually I'm in the Manuscripts and Archives reading room next door, but it's a fine place to work, if a tad less aggressive in its grandeur. I'm playing about with Richard Upjohn and the Hobart chapel - and I'm satisfied about 2 points I needed to settle.

And I've requested photos of some plans and elevations - interesting to see the stages of his revisions!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:08 PM | Comments (1)

November 24, 2008

Just what we need - MORE Ph.d. holders

Yes, even in this year of aborted searches and hiring freezes people can stand up with a straight face and be pleased with rising rates of Ph.d. completion. I'm pleased that Inside Higher Ed uses the headline Doctorate Production Continues to Grow, as though we're talking about an industrial process rather than the individual accomplishment of scholars. Since the story admits that "the overall gains continued to be driven by significant numbers of Ph.D.s and other doctorates awarded to non-Americans," perhaps they're right. We import an increasing number of graduate students to keep the doctoral programs churning.

Our provost said aloud in the monthly faculty meeting last year that there was a coming shortage of doctorate holders on the market. The room burst into laughter.* And that was before this year created another cohort of the accidentally unhired. Ah, to own a taxi company in New York City!

Luckily, though, the story has this hopeful bit: "...the number of Ph.D.s awarded in the humanities dropped by 4.6 percent, to their lowest point since 1994."

*to be fair to the provost, perhaps she was thinking of the disproportion of PhDs being awarded in the sciences to non-citizens and the difficulty in making a hire under those circumstances. Surely, though, in a world with more than 250 complete applications for a position in the English department (hearsay, but from a member of the search committee) it's not disastrous if the number of degrees in the humanities drops by 5 or 6 percent?

Further - Oh, I should add: no hiring freeze here; we're going ahead with our searches, though there may be less ready replacement for people on leave and such next year.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 AM | Comments (1)

November 23, 2008

Carnivalesque 45 - a blog carnival of Ancient and Medieval findings

Welcome to Carnivalesque 45 - a blog carnival of Ancient and Medieval findings!

Lots of people are talking conferences - it's a way of not thinking about grading, of course. J. J. Cohen at In the Middle gets some organizational information about what sort of audience to expect for his paper at the Leeds Congress and breaks out into a rash:

Yeah, nooo pressure at all. I'll just wear a nice suit and juggle oranges on a unicycle while reading from my translation of Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself into medieval Latin. Slowly.

Dr. Virago complains at Quod She about her future office, but then she shows pictures of the Modern Panopticon! She's right - those are a lot of windows to clap to.

What brings people to the blogs they read? Jonthan Jarrett at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe (IN a Corner of Tenth-Century Europe? I'm not sure) looks at his referrer logs and decides to do something for the searchers.

If I leave aside the porn searches and count only strings that look academic, the two things that bring people to this blog from search engines more than anything else are, firstly, my piece on the First Crusade, which is good as that's what it's there for, and secondly, the piece I wrote about Charles the Simple, because it includes a reference to and a map of the Treaty of Verdun. It's searches for "treaty of Verdun" that bring people to that, and they can't really be getting what they want out of it. I'm not going to try and fill that gap here, because there are already better sites out there explaining what the Treaty was, but I will do two things. Firstly, I will make an important point about the Treaty's effect, and then I will do what I do best, or at least most, and tell you a story from a charter that helps to illustrate the sort of thing that was going on.

Dr. Weevil is also checking meta-blog information. He blogged a bit from 14th century essayist Yoshida Kenko that reminded him of the essence of blogging:

If I fail to say what lies on my mind it gives me a feeling of flatulence; I shall therefore give my brush free rein. Mine is a foolish diversion, but these pages are meant to be torn up, and no one is likely to see them. (Kenko, Essays in Idleness 19, tr. Donald Keene)

Then a little later,

Belatedly wondering if anyone else had quoted Kenko's proto-blogger manifesto, I did a Google search on "Kenko + blogger + Idleness + flatulence". The first result of "about 93" was my own 11:57pm post, dated (timed?) "9 minutes ago", which means that Google had it in their database approximately 25 minutes after I posted it. I would be less impressed if I had even 0.1% (e.g.) InstaPundit's traffic.

Speaking of meta-blogging, how many of us started out as anonymous bloggers only to be outed? Or noticed? It just happened to Another Damned Medievalist.

Disiecta membra! Got to love them! Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval shows us a marginal guy ripping himself apart! And monkeys!

We don't always have to reinterpret the same ol' same ol' - we can dig up new stuff! But then we find ourselves in an arms race with, you know, the public. Who sometimes dig things up without consulting the experts. Alun Salt at Archeoastronomy considers all sorts of issues along these lines - starting with Great Britain's current finding regime, the Portable Antiquity Scheme. The broader consideration is of how we might encourage a world in which a conserved heritage is more valuable than a marketed heritage. Lots of links for people interested in ethics and morals of archaeology. Here's the Portable Antiquity Scheme in case you don't already have it bookmarked.

Talking about the ethics and morality of archaeology, Dr. Martin Rundkvist at Aardvarchaeology offers a guest entry by Florian Freistetter of Astrodicticum Simplex - who manages to go to a lecture and restrain himself from standing up and shouting by taking diligent notes:

A few weeks ago, on 17th October, I had the dubious pleasure of attending a lecture by Erich von Däniken with the title Götterdämmerung, "Twilight of the Gods". The great hall in Jena's Volkshaus was rather full: I believe there were 650 to 700 people there. It was a strange feeling, being in the same room as all those people and knowing that most of them would probably believe what Däniken was going to tell them.

Speaking of aliens, Michael Drout, in his only political blog posting, asked Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?

Gesta at On Boundaries posted on a Chris Wickham lecture, 'The problem of the dialogues between medieval history and medieval archaeology.' Gesta links comments on the same lecture by Jonathan Jarrett and Magistra et Mater, and notes:

What is interesting from my point of view is that clearly I had my teaching head on rather than my research head in this lecture. While Magistra and Jonathan were mulling over the implications for the way they write history, I was pondering how we start to address the problems at undergrad level. I fear I am becoming institutionalised.

Do you know what Zenobia really looked like? Judith Weingarten has some ideas. Coin pictures at Zenobia, Empress of the East!

And since we're turning to the classical world, let's talk Classics as a major - and one of those awkward conversations we sometimes have this time of year during registration for Spring classes. Are your students declaring majors? Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has Ed Turner's letter to young Ted Turner (yeah, that Ted Turner) on the subject. Ed wrote:

"I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on my way home today."

How would you help Ted answer Ed?*

Edward Cook at Ralph the Sacred River tells us why the Jesus Bowl is just another crock. Everyone loves Magic Bowls, but this one's nothing special.

And a different sort of bowl - and back to the idea of the morality of digging up or owning things, Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber talks about buying a Song dynasty bowl. Read the comments.

Just remember, don't go buying things as if the sales catalog is accurate! David Nishimura at Cronaca pointed out a couple of stories about a Fatimid ewer selling at Christie's for 3.2 million pounds. The same piece had been cataloged in January of 2008 as a 19th century claret jug and valued at 100-300 pounds. Jug, ewer - is it the price point that inflects the nomenclature? Whatever - caveat emptor!

The December 2008 (early modern) will be hosted at Investigations of a Dog. Go make suggestions!

*Fun fact to know and tell - Ted Turner started Latin under the same man I did, W.O.E.A. Humphreys at the McCallie School. Note that I am not listed as one of the notable alumni.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:22 PM

Another Salvo in the SAT Wars

As highly selective colleges drop their SAT requirements for graduation, there's this article to consider from someone who had a lot of information at his disposal - Peter Salins, who was Provost of the State University of New York System from 1997 to 2006 on Does the SAT Predict College Success?

Salins has one criterion for success - graduation in 6 years. He had a big system with some variety in the schools to look at. His answer? Yes. Go read and see.

You'd think this is a question we could have answered to general satisfaction long ago, given the energy that's been poured into it. Perhaps that in itself is a lesson about the social sciences?

via Joanne Jacobs.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:59 PM | Comments (1)

November 20, 2008

Early Medieval Church Silver at Dumbarton Oaks

I got to visit Dumbarton Oaks last weekend with my nephews (and sister!) - the Sion Treasure is a highlight for me. It was the perfect preparation for someone to spend the week reading the Liber Pontificalis and its telegraphic mentions of the largesse of the popes. Here's what the LP (in Davis's translation, linked above) says Paschal I gave to the church of Santa Caecilia, which he rebuilt:

For love of the venerable saints [Agatha and Caecilia], to decorate this church [Sta Caecilia in Trastevere] this holy prelate provided an apse adorned with mosaic and a silver canopy of wondrous size, weighing 600 lb 8 oz. He finished and marvellously embellished the holy altar's propitatorium* and the confessio** inside and out, and its grills, with silver sheets, weighing in all 154 lb 15 oz. At this virgin's holy body he presented an image of silver sheets weighing 95 lb. In front of the altar's vestibule he provided a cornice covered in silver sheets and 2 columns, where he placed 1 arch and 2 chevrons, weighing in all 100 1/2 lb. There too he presented 3 sliver-gilt images weighing 48 1/2 lb. For this church's arches this prelate provided 26 great silver chalices weighing in all 109 1/2 lb. There too he presented 2 silver canisters*** with six wicks, weighing 2 lb 9 oz; a fine gold bowl weighing 3 lb. This pontiff provided 2 silver canisters with nine wicks, weighing 10 lb; 3 silver bowls weighing 5 lb.; a silver gilt thurible weighing 1 lb. (LP, Life 100: chapters 19-20)

And that's before the biographer lists the fabrics Paschal donated.

This kind of amazing silver work - Dumbarton Oaks' example probably coming from a provincial monastery in Lycia in Anatolia - was not uncommon in the Mediterranean world. Click and see two other views of the stuff from the same site.

The inscriptions in silver are also splendid and eye-catching - and help liven up for me some of the tedious textual inscriptions I study as evidence for how patrons wanted people to see and use their buildings.

Moments like this also make the neo-Baroque so common in modern 1962 Missal arrangements seem quite dull. This is real silver, not gold leaf or gold thread embroidery. Imagine what people thought about their altars in the 6th century as opposed to what we might surmise from the plaster and gold leaf decorations of the 17th?

*propitatorium - well, it's the word the Vulgate uses for whatever was on top of the Ark of the Covenant - what the KJV calls the "mercy seat." It doesn't show up often in the Liber Pontificalis, so we're not exactly sure what it is except that it was associated with the altar. Some people translate it as "altar frontal." I find that more convincing than "ciborium" or some kind of rear ledge over the altar.
**confessio - the container for the body of the saint.
***cannister - some kind of cylindrical floor-based oil lamp

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:28 PM | Comments (2)

Scholarly Moodswings

I don't know about you, but I go through life with a kind of academic bipolar disorder. I read things and think thoughts and suppose that they've already been thought - and published, usually in German. Then I swing around and realize that nothing has been said before - nothing! There's so much work to do!

I'm having one of those up moments this week. It's a nice way to be about your reading.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

Against Legacy Admissions

This is a strange article at Inside Higher Ed about challenges to legacy admissions. Evidently law professors are trolling for cases to take to court to test their theories?

But this week -- for the second time this year -- a law journal is publishing a legal analysis that suggests that legacy preferences are illegal. The new issue of the Santa Clara Review features an article -- whose lead writer would like to find plaintiffs to test his theory -- arguing that the 1866 Civil Rights Act bars legacy admissions at public and private institutions. An article earlier this year in the Washington University Law Review argues that the "nobility clauses" of the U.S. Constitution ban legacy admissions at public institutions.

I find the argument from the "nobility clauses" strangest. Oh, well.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:31 AM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2008

The Return of Martin Guerre Lives! Or something like that.

Have you ever seen or taught The Return of Martin Guerre, book or film? Of course you have! It's a staple of humanities courses! (aside - I wonder how much Natalie Zemon Davis made off that? It was well-deserved!) Man goes to war, man returns from war, another man returns from war who is proven after lengthy court struggle to be the real man - you know.

Here's a kind of real-life version in Chile. Man disappeared during dirty war. Body declared his in 1995. Wife receives compensation payments. Body declared not his in 2006. Man returns from just over the Andes, where he's been living (the original Martin Guerre was working in Spain). Excitement ensues.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:49 AM | Comments (1)

November 18, 2008

Admissions officers bewildered by this year's Early Decision applicants

You see, they're up. The applications. Almost everywhere anyone asked. They were supposed to go down, because:

Admissions experts predicted that the binding nature of early decision would discourage students and families in a year when many are uncertain about their personal finances and would want to consider public college alternatives or to weigh aid offers from a range of colleges before committing.

This is good - no one wants to be Beloit, cutting 40 jobs because they fell 36 student short this year.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:45 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2008

College death

For all we go on about huge university endowments and scandalous college president salaries it is useful to remember that colleges can die - especially in a troubled economy like this one. Here's an interesting article about college closings.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:15 AM | Comments (1)

November 13, 2008

You just might be a scholar if . . .

. . . the sentence "You've got I.L.L." makes your heart leap! Inter Library Loan - where would we be without it?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:55 PM | Comments (1)

Campus Priorities

Lucky B.A.W.! Go read the whole thing.

As someone more on the admin side, I was flabbergasted that these science faculty, who are supposedly all about the grants and the funding, couldn't see the writing on the wall in terms of where their cash will be coming from in the future. This is a land grant institution. We've been asked for a sizeable budget cut THIS YEAR, with more to come. And when things get better, do you think that money's gonna magically reappear?

Given our state's history, my Magic Eight Ball says, "Signs point to no."

The icing on the cake? As I was leaving the auditorium, earnest chick was behind me speaking sotto voce to her companion. Her major complaint (other than those previously aired, that is)?

"He kept saying 'guys' a lot. I think that sort of gendered language bodes ill."

Right. Keep on keepin' on, sister-girl. You'll have no funding, and the university will have no coherent vision for staying competitive, but at least the Vice-Chancellor won't use pronouns in an offensive manner. Thank God that you're able to save us from ourselves!

And thank God that I'm not the chair of this hiring committee.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)

The Dream - or Nightmare - Palace of the Wittgensteins

I've never cared for what little I knew about Wittgenstein the person - but this book may explain why he was so very odd. And we wonder why Freud turned out the way he did? It was the clientele in Vienna!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)

Someone training for the wrong line of work at the University of Iowa

UI anthropology student Morgan Hansen, who is seeking a certificate in museum studies, felt "unnerved" by the idea that art could have been stolen during the flood.

That's a student who should consider other degree certifications; she's quoted about the University of Iowa's failure during the floods this year to move all the art objects to safe storage and then back again without a few things going missing.

OF COURSE people steal from art museums during natural disasters, and one should automatically plan to watch the movers carefully. Never heard of things "falling off the truck?" Maybe she shouldn't go into museum work - she's too optimistic about human nature.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:21 AM | Comments (0)

November 5, 2008

A Superfluity of Andrews

I'm at a friend's campus trying to use VPN to get into my home network to use the Visual Resources Collection. It's not working. They have firewall issues with VPN. So I want to email that nice Andrew in I.T. who I was talking to and ask if there's a work around. I don't know his email address (we have multiple ways of naming people) so I go to the look up page for that kind of thing and search by first name. We have 40 people on campus named Andrew or with the last name Andrews. I'm not sure what the proper word for a group of Andrews is, but I'm suggesting that we have a Superfluity of them.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:43 PM | Comments (0)

November 3, 2008

Choosing publishing venues by journal grades - or lose your departmental budget!

Here's an interesting article at Aardvarachaeology (with a bias toward Scandinavian archaeology - but hey, you learn things all over) about the grading of journals in Europe and why scholars have to pay attention to the grades:

Suddenly, humanities scholars will have to start paying a lot more attention to where they publish. In Norway and other countries, a department's funding is directly linked to the ERIH [European Reference Index for the Humanities] grade of the journals where its faculty publishes.

Grade A means global readership. Grade B means international readership. Grade C means national readership. Only good respected scholarly journals get graded at all. Here's a rundown of grade A and B journals focusing at least to a great part on Scandinavian archaeology (not including e.g. Mediterranean archaeology practiced by Scandinavians). My emphais.

Some of the external reviewing systems in European universities would give us fits! American professors might well have the sense that their tenure or promotions might depend on the grade or quality or something of the journals where they publish, but not something larger like departmental funding!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:54 AM

CNN.Money's 10 Most Expensive Colleges

CNN.Money's 10 Most Expensive Colleges:

Price is tuition only.

George Washington University - $40,437
Sarah Lawrence - small liberal arts
Kenyon - s.l.a.
Vassar - s.l.a.
Bucknell - s.l.a.
Carnegie-Mellon
Colgate - s.l.a.
Columbia University
St. John's College Annapolis - eccentric s.l.a.
Wesleyan - hmmm - kinda s.l.a., though they have ph.d. programs. - $38,934

I've seen other versions, but this struck me this morning.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:38 AM | Comments (2)

November 1, 2008

Genetic engineering we can all use: beer with resveratrol

Genetic Engineering we can use, from a student research project at my alma mater!

College students often spend their free time thinking about beer, but some Rice University students are taking it to the next level. They're using genetic engineering to create beer that contains resveratrol, a chemical in wine that's been shown to reduce cancer and heart disease in lab animals.

Rice's "BioBeer" will be entered in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition Nov. 8-9 in Cambridge, Mass. It's the world's largest synthetic biology competition, a contest where teams use a standard toolkit of DNA building blocks -- think genetic LEGO blocks -- to create living organisms that do odd things. Notable past iGEM creations include sheets of bacteria that behave like photographic film and bacteria that smell like mint while they're growing but like bananas when they stop growing

It doesn't sound from the press release that they'll be chugging this genetically modified product at Beer Bike this year.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:30 AM | Comments (1)

October 30, 2008

Returning Art Looted by the Nazis

Here is a good article about the process one museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, has gone through with one painting, a Fernand Leger, before returning it to the heirs of the 1939 owner.

After 10 years of detective work, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has concluded that a $2.8 million painting it has owned for decades was stolen by the Nazis. The museum has returned the 1911 painting, Fernand Leger's "Smoke Over Rooftops," to the French heirs of a Jewish art collector who died in 1948.

"Having researched this to the end of the road, we decided we had to return the painting; it was the right thing to do," said Art Institute Director Kaywin Feldman.

Other museums have faced similar challenges to their collections. The institute's saga began in 1997 when the museum received a letter claiming that the painting had been taken from Alphonse Kann, a legendary French collector who owned "tons of Picassos, Braques and late-19th-century Impressionist paintings," according to Patrick Noon, the institute's paintings curator. His story helped inspire a 1964 movie, "The Train," starring Burt Lancaster, about a trainload of art that the Germans tried to spirit away before the Allies liberated Paris in 1944.

First they had to decide this was the right one - Leger painted at least 5 other "Smoke Over Rooftops." Then they had to deal with the awkward sales history - once in 1942 to one Parisian gallery owned by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the great dealer in everything Cubist and a German Jew himself, and once to a second gallery owned by a German specialist in selling degenerate modern art for and to the Nazis.

It sounds like this was an expensive process, and the MIA hasn't released a figure yet. The conclusion, though, says something about the strength of their collection:

Initially the museum hoped Kann's heirs would lend or give it to the museum but that proved impossible. Asked if the institute would try to buy it back if the Leger were to be offered at auction, Feldman and Noon smiled ruefully and shook their heads.

"We have two other very nice Leger paintings in the collection," Noon said.

If art history undergraduates ask why they should learn French and German (and Russian would be useful for this line of work, too), tell them this story.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2008

The Little Things in Life

Click and follow the photostream for a quick explanation of how the little things can sometimes make or break a day.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:29 PM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2008

Why the Corporate World Needs University Endorsements

Prof. Soltan writes at Inside Higher Education about how someone like the execrable Prof. Nemeroff can drag down the name of Emory University:

Keep front and center the fact that in this sense the university is immensely valuable, even to people like Nemeroff, for whom the shabby, earnest ethos of the institution is a joke and a personal insult. To play the professor is to play the man with integrity, the man who has eschewed the corporate world because he's above single-minded profit-taking. He's motivated by science and altruism.

And it is precisely everyone's appraisal of the university professor as a serious person, motivated more by ideas than money, that Nemeroff and his corporate clients exploit. Professor Nemeroff shares with you his admiration for our new drug! This admiration emerges solely out of his intellectual scrutiny of its properties. You can trust his sober, disinterested point of view because... he's a professor...

The character emerging from what UD's been describing comes out of a nineteenth century novel. The fraud, the poseur, the hypocrite, the confidence man who breaks the rules more and more flagrantly because he's sure he can get away with it. The world, after all, is a cynical place. He knows how to play it.

This is a comic character, full of high sentence and secret hoardings. The only writer today who can do him justice is Tom Wolfe.

Charles Nemeroffs are amusing in novels. Their reality is sad, sad, sad. If you care about the American university. (my emphasis)

I wonder how much further into the 21st century the idea of the sober, disinterested pursuit of truth will survive as a characteristic attributed to professors in general. I think Prof. Soltan is right that it does still operate now. I'm not certain what will break it up faster - revelations like those about the corruption of science by Prof. Nemeroff or the realization by the broader public that Republicans are correct when they say that almost all professors are members of or contributors to only the parties of the left.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:16 PM | Comments (1)

Everyone builds trebuchets . . .

. . . but at Arizona State folks are building a mangonel. Here's the story: Beware of Flying Pumpkins During Homecoming.

Update: Aha, the Hobart & William Smith Trebuchet Contest was in the Spring of 2004, back before the total collapse of my blog database in January 2005. No wonder I couldn't find any entries with the search term "trebuchet." So I have to re-post the picture from that time, now very long ago.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:24 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2008

Put your money where your mouth is.

Alan Bennett donates a bunch of manuscripts to the Bodleian and criticizes the tuition-policies of British higher education. So, has he founded a scholarship to keep one student at a time out of debt?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:09 PM | Comments (5)

October 21, 2008

Narcissim rewarded with high office in Higher Education? Say it's not so!

"I have created an organization that is more driven by relationships than reporting lines." If there's a more succinct summary of narcissistic management, I haven't seen it.

That from the regular Confessions of a Community College Dean column at Inside Higher Ed. The Dean thinks: "I suppose it's possible that W[ashington] S[tate] U[niversity] is the land of milk and honey, in which peace and love reign, and into which an outsider attempted to introduce sin. Anything's possible, I suppose."

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:55 PM | Comments (1)

October 20, 2008

Can a middle-aged professor learn new tricks?

I may have succeeded in turning over one of the heaviest of new leaves. For many, many years I have bought bottles of vitamins and taken about half of them and then drifted off into unfortified existence, little caring about my vitamin D or calcium levels. Today I can report that I am about to finish a bottle of Wegman's Complete Multi Vitamins and Minerals with Important Antioxidants.

There's hope for you! Change!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:15 AM | Comments (3)

October 16, 2008

Self-pity, bronchial division

I am very tired of prednisone and how it makes me feel. I'm in the maximum dosage stage* of my second course of the nasty stuff, which always makes me feel miserable, dry-mouthed, and sleepless. Ugh.

On the bright side, we get a training session today for the Xerox multi-function device that replaced all the desktop printers at Houghton House - finally I may be able to fax again!

*40 mg per day for 4 days, 20 mg for 4 days, 10 mg for 4 days. Ugh.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:36 AM | Comments (2)

October 15, 2008

Those Bonobos - the chimps that made love, not war

Well this is a relief. Science has proved, once again, that conflict is more natural than peace. Me, I'm not surprised, but people who took college anthropology courses might be, if their professors liked to make analogies between people and animal behavior.

A type of chimpanzee known to use sex for greetings, reconciliations, and favors may not be all about peace, love, and understanding after all. A new study reveals that some bonobos--one of humankind's closest genetic relatives--hunt and eat other primates. [I love that weasely "some". Let's face it - bonobos eat monkeys. Where were all the qualifications of "the bonobos we have observed so far" back when they were telling us how the bonobo showed that free floating sex produced peaceful chimps? Don't believe my report of utopianism - go read the wikipedia entry, where the females are also reported to have a higher status. So far it doesn't have any monkey-eating.]

Groups of the endangered chimpanzee subspecies were observed stalking, chasing, and killing monkeys they later consumed.

Scientists have long known from stool samples that some bonobos eat rodents and small antelopes in their natural forest habitats in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but many researchers thought this was the extent of their hunting activities.

Gottfried Hohmann and Martin Surbeck, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, thought differently.

"We saw that their relations with neighboring monkeys were frequently hostile and found a black mangabey finger in bonobo feces last year," Hohmann said.

"We did not know if the mangabey had been killed by another predator and then scavenged by the bonobo or if the bonobo had killed the mangabey itself, but this raised our suspicions."

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:22 PM | Comments (0)

My next desktop

When I come back from leave I get to request a new school computer - but Brian Tiemann explains in considerable detail why the new 24 inch LED Cinema display is what I need.

The clincher is the power connection for your laptop running out of the display. One step closer to the goal of charger-brick-less living!

Further: Ack! Via John Gruber's Daring Fireball I find that my MacBook won't run this new screen without an adapter. And at that point the MacBook will only be 18 months old, so that doesn't sound likely. Hmmm.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:32 AM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2008

Worried about economic collapse? Get over it!

Apocalypse postponed. Normalcy restored.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:42 PM | Comments (2)

October 9, 2008

Smug - it's the new black

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:20 AM | Comments (2)

October 1, 2008

So what do we mean when we say we teach Arabic?

Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article on Arabic pedagogy. The problem is deciding what to teach - Arabic is a complicated phenomenon. I blogged about the difficulties of diglossia (multiple languages or dialects inside a single package) a while back and compared a lot of American instruction in Arabic to teaching Latin and then sending our students to Italy and Spain. Really, that's not an unfair comparison.

From today's article:

Teaching conversation skills in an Arabic classroom may seem like an uncontroversial thing. It would be standard, after all, in many introductory courses for other languages. But when Munther Younes started integrating instruction of the formal written language with a spoken dialect in Cornell University classrooms 18 years ago, he was a pioneer.

"What we're doing that's different ... is that other programs either teach the classical language by itself - they're a small program and they don't have the manpower or support. Other programs that are bigger introduce a spoken dialect, but they do the two in separate tracks. What we do at Cornell is integrate the two into one track, with two sides, so students learn to read what Arabs read and write, and they learn to speak what Arabs speak," says Younes, a senior lecturer and director of Cornell's Arabic program.

"So it's an honest reflection of what really happens in the Arab world."

Arabic is characterized by a so-called "diglossic" situation, in which the formal, uniform written language (Modern Standard Arabic) differs considerably from the various spoken dialects. Traditionally, and still, the former has been privileged in foreign language classrooms -- in some cases to the total exclusion of -- the latter.

The reasons are complicated. Some are pedagogical -- fear of confusing students in constantly switching between varieties. Some are practical -- native Arabic speakers pick up the dialect at home and study Modern Standard Arabic in school, and carry that tradition to the North American classroom. And some are ideological or political. Modern Standard Arabic is the language of literature and Arab culture, while the dialects lack respect. Arab students, Younes says, "would be condemning the dialect in the strongest terms [while speaking] in the dialect."

Among other things, the Cornell program has decided to teach Levantine Arabic (Syria, Lebanon, etc.). That's at least mutually intelligible with Egyptian. But what about other Arabics?

This is a real problem for American higher education. As is the problem of trained instructors - which also comes up in the Inside Higher Ed piece. Here at these Colleges we're supplementing our meager offerings with visiting native speakers. I hope it helps.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:33 AM | Comments (1)

September 23, 2008

Debunking those College Admissions Season stories

Inside Higher Ed has a story about the survival of early decision admissions, despite Harvard having dropped the practice in 2006. I was glad to see this paragraph:

Despite some media hysteria about the difficulty of getting into college, most institutions admit most applicants. Nationally, 68 percent of applicants are admitted. Those institutions that admit fewer than 50 percent of applicants receive only 31 percent of all applications, and enroll only 18 percent of first year students. My emphasis.

I don't think I realized what a small percentage of the nation's students end up attending selective institutions (though I would've if I'd thought about it for a minute). I knew that most people have more problems getting organized to apply than actually being admitted.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:14 AM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2008

Room and Board

I had not fully understood the burst of dorm-building at community colleges in Upstate New York. Here's the Student Housing page from Finger Lakes Community College. And from Monroe (that's Rochester) CC.

This piece from Inside Higher Ed's Confessions of a Community College Dean made me think a little more about what's going on:Perversely Enough, We're Upscaling.

I knew that recessions (or economic slowdowns, since I’m really not interested in splitting semantic hairs here) generally bring increased enrollments at cc’s. The reasons are straightforward enough: the opportunity cost of education is lower when jobs are scarce, the need for a degree is higher when jobs are scarce, and our low tuition becomes much more attractive when things get precarious. This is old news. People who otherwise might have gone somewhere more expensive will take a second look at the local cc when money is an issue.

Unless – and this was the part I didn’t realize – they’re so ridiculously broke that the logic circles around. According to my source, who’s in a position to know, some of our increasing number of homeless (or intermittently homeless) students are actually transferring to four-year schools earlier than they would prefer. The draw is financial aid for dorm rooms and meal plans.

Financial aid at the cc only covers tuition, fees, and a (low) estimate for books.* It doesn’t do anything for living expenses, which aren’t getting any cheaper. But financial aid at the nearby residential four-year colleges includes room and board. If you’re intermittently homeless, the prospect of aid covering a place to live and a meal plan is nothing to sneeze at.

So the perverse impact of the economic downturn is that we get more people from the upper end of the economic scale, since they’re playing it safer by choosing the low-cost option, and fewer people from the lower end, since we don’t offer subsidized room and board. Perversely enough, we’re upscaling.

And here's the Monroe CC faq where we ask and learn the answer to "Can Financial Aid be used to cover the cost of living in the MCC Residence Halls?"

Quick answer, yes, depending on eligibility.

When I first read about the new dorms going up for FLCC I figured it was a way to get money out of the state-run bonding entity, the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, and use it to build revenue-generating dorms. After all, we funded our new dorms the same way at about the same time

I'm used to the mission-statement version of Residence Life - that we foster the whole person by providing housing and programming. I also knew a little about the financing of dorms. I had never really thought that NOT having dorms could in certain circumstances cause a higher transfer rate out from community colleges to four-year schools. The Higher Education Industrial Complex never ceases to surprise.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:01 PM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2008

Fun facts to know and tell - Accreditation or Property Protection - which came first??

In the course of writing a comment at Tim Burke's (about the post linked below) I happened to visit the website for the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools website. I think of Middle States and its regional counterparts as accreditation agencies, though I have always understood that accreditation is not a neutral procedure.

I clicked on History.

They began as a group of college presidents organizing to protest the taxation of college property! The connection between lobbying government for tax benefits and assuring the government that association members are providing standardized education began early. From their history:

The genesis of the Association can be traced to a meeting of activist college presidents in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in February 1887. The meeting was held to protest a proposed tax on college properties and concluded with the consensus that education from early age through the university was in chaos. The presidents chartered themselves as the College Association of Pennsylvania, soon thereafter renamed the Association of the Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Middle States and Maryland.

. . .

The initial objectives of the Association were to standardize the qualifications required for admission to college, to determine the desired characteristics for college preparatory schools, to recommend courses of study for both colleges and schools, to foster school and college relationships to each other and to the government, and to study and recommend best practices of organization and governance.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:49 PM | Comments (0)

Busted!

Someone just knocked on my library study door! Ack!

Luckily it was a student who knew I was up here on the XXX [redacted] floor. He's doing honors and just picked up the key to a space he shares with some other honors folk and saw my light on.

Still, my illusion of refuge just vanished!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:40 PM | Comments (0)

Tending Your Academic Garden in the Autumn

Prof. Tim Burke has a thought-provoking essay on what may be the end of a long period of growth for higher education, especially at selective institutions. It goes well what I blogged about yesterday - faculty retirement (or the slowing thereof).

Read it here - Planned Contraction or Chaotic Retreat?.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:40 AM

September 18, 2008

Here's a silly question about the current economic news - "Will Professors Delay Retirements?"

The answer, Of course! And there is no big rush to hire more tenure track professors to replace them.

I'm not saying that anyone lied to me (especially in the early 21st Century, where "being wrong on the basis of partial information" is the same as "telling deliberate lies"), but I first heard the 'coming great wave of retirement' line in the Fall of 1983 when certain entirely well-meaning professors told me and my compatriots that maybe graduate school was finally not such a bad idea after all. There would be retirements! And jobs!

I haven't seen it yet.

Of our retirees last year, one was accelerated by a medical condition and one by a spouse's work-related move. A third was pretty much planned. This in a faculty of something like 180, and from 3 professors with 113 years of combined service. Not that they aren't all fabulous people, professors who I would have been delighted to take courses from myself, and colleagues I regularly pushed advisees toward, but 113 years of combined service and only 1 unforced retirement.

There are and will be, for the foreseeable future, very few jobs. Those of us who get them or have them are lucky - lots of other very qualified people could have filled the same positions.

I figure the biggest shift in the academic market - and this is just a guess - are new positions reflecting new curricular areas. I'm sure those new position creations will at some institutions come at the cost of traditional lines.

Further - see this from Tim Burke - Planned Contraction or Chaotic Retreat?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2008

"...largest investment in the nation's aesthetic- industrial complex"

The Big Poem.

via Prof. Soltan.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2008

Think the American Professoriate has it bad?

This is an interesting (but brief) account at Inside Higher Ed of how tenure / untenuredness works in Europe and Argentina. Argentina sounds wacky: Defend your position against all comers!

That sounds a little like this element of Harvard's system:

While other universities simply ask for [outside] evaluations [of scholarship], Harvard sends a 'blind letter', a list of potential candidates that includes the tenure candidate and other leading scholars in the field.

Outside scholars are not told which of the listed professors is the internal Harvard candidate.

Commenters provide some other horrific examples.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:26 PM | Comments (1)

September 15, 2008

Ugh - big power outages

I'm glad not be teaching this morning - I have a feeling a number of students will be using the "my alarm clock was dead" excuse today! Geneva had big storms and a big power outage last night. Something's up with my cable box; if it's blown out that'll make 2 since July 4th! I'm hoping there's something up with cable in town more generally. By the time I drifted over to campus (I was in no hurry - I needed to put something in the mail and the post office doesn't open until 9 anyway) there still wasn't any coffee in the café. They only got power back at 8 or so!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:29 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2008

Hurricane Shut-down

My alma mater is battening down the hatches.

We dodged hurricanes during my four years (1980-1984). There was one pretty serious blow that happened just before orientation week one year; when we got back the live oaks were missing many of their leaves, but I think I remember that only one tree went down on campus. There was a legacy of masking tape on all the windows for months!

Sometime during my first year someone explained to me that the map of the Gulf on the big brown shopping bags at Weingarten's were actually printed there so that you could cut one up, stick it to the refrigerator with a magnet, and track the incoming tropical storms.

Here's praying William Rice's Marsh doesn't fill up this time!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)

September 9, 2008

Seneca Lake

This isn't what Geneva looks like today - it's kind of breezy and cooler - but this picture from last week makes me happy; looking at Seneca Lake every day is one of the things that makes life in Geneva pleasant, even in the depth of winter.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:06 PM | Comments (0)

September 8, 2008

How much are professors worth?

Prof. Bainbridge hears a rumor of a law professor with a $600,000 salary offer. Somehow I have a feeling that no one in the humanities is making that much. Medicine, yeah.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:07 AM | Comments (1)

There's Stolen Art and there's LOST Art

A day after reports surfaced that Wellesley College's Davis Museum may have unintentionally thrown out a prized 1921 painting by French cubist Fernand Leger, President H. Kim Bottomly promised that new controls will be in place by October to better protect the museum's art.

. . .

The Leger had been loaned to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art for an exhibit that ended in April 2007. The work was then sent back to Wellesley, where it sat in a crate for months before the museum checked and found it was missing.

It is unclear what happened to the oil painting, which measures 25 by 21 inches, but museum officials have speculated that it may not have been removed from the crate before that crate was discarded.

One supposes that "new controls" may include "a new director" and "a new conservator." Read it all.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:36 AM | Comments (0)

September 3, 2008

100s of Unique Images. *Sigh*

This is the poster for the poster sale I mentioned yesterday.

I really hate this colloquial usage of unique. I hate it slightly more than my utter incapability to make this picture do right.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:08 PM | Comments (1)

September 2, 2008

Poster Sales Days

They set up folding tables across the front of the Scandling Center and sell posters the first days of the semester. I found this article about most popular posters amusing. Sadly, Dali's Persistence of Memory didn't make the list.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:09 PM | Comments (1)

September 1, 2008

Britticisms about Latin. Latin translations of Britticisms? Hmm.

My pleasure reading in my library study this week (for those moments when translating Hrotswit's Dulcitius makes me tired) is Nicholas Ostler's Ad Infinitum, a biography of Latin. It's a quickish read and very entertaining. Luckily for my workflow I already know Latin, so I'm suffering few of the temptations to go a-whoring* with Akkadian or some such, which his Empires of the Word: a Language History of the World inspired.

Ostler is just now (p. 191) talking about litterae humaniores, the educational side of good grammatica. He says: "The Frankish chronicler Gregory of Tours, his Latin famously ropy, might well remark (around 575), 'The rhetorician philosophizing is understood by few, but the plain man speaking by many.'

Ropy?

Hmm. I popped open the OED website (my complete hardback is in the office) and found these meanings for "ropy."

1. a. Forming or developing viscid, glutinous, or slimy threads; sticky and stringy.
b. transf. of the air.
c. fig. Bad, unsatisfactory, unreliable, unwell. slang and colloq.
d. Of a cow: producing ropy milk.
2. Having the form or tenacity of a rope; suggestive of a rope.

I think Ostler means 1. c. But I'm not certain. One could argue that Gregory of Tours' syntax is somewhat viscid.

-----
*about a-whoring. More fun Latin! So, last week I was reading the Life of Christina of Markyate. Please see this photograph for the result of all this leisure reading! I was using the C.H. Talbot translation in the handy Latin-on-the-left-page edition from Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching; zipping right along, I saw this sentence:

For lo, they that are far from thee shall perish: Thou hast destroyed all them that go a-whoring from Thee. [emphasis mine; capitalization of 2nd person pronouns, sic]

Of course I check the left page to see what on earth Talbot could have construed as "a-whoring" and find:

Quia ecce qui elongant se a te peribunt: perdidisti omnes qui fornicantur abs te.

The earliest usage of "go a whoring" in the OED is from Coverdale's translation of Exodus in 1535. Fornico doesn't show up in classical Latin - or at least it doesn't show up in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, whose citations specifically exclude Christian authors. Lewis and Short give us Tertullian as the first usage. Nobody gives us enough usage to justify that abs te except understanding fornicare as a verb of motion - "to go a-whoring." I wonder on the basis of that bit of Latin if the slang predated the written English by a LONG shot! Parts of the Life of Christina of Markyate probably date to the 12th Century, her own time.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:56 PM | Comments (3)

A Man on Sabbatical

And don't I look relaxed?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:47 PM | Comments (2)

August 31, 2008

Last Day of Summer

Hobart & William Smith Colleges start classes on Labor Day - so this is the last fully free day of summer; students down at the Boathouse were taking advantage of the amazing weather.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:47 PM | Comments (1)

August 29, 2008

Renovated Library Goodness!

Just inside the front door - today's papers! With seating! No more reading off bamboo rods . . . .

From little touches like this to big ideas about fostering student group work and individual research - this renovated first floor has them all.

The occupancy certificate came through yesterday morning, so the new first year students get to see the new Information Commons (I know, ick) in operation their first day!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2008

Hobartiana!

My friend Greg Avery (Hobart '94) bought this commemorative saucer recently on eBay - it shows the Hobart Quad from the south. Because it shows Coxe Hall and Medberry Hall but NOT Williams it must be from 1900-1907 or so. The inscription on the back is barely legible, but he's doing some research.

Click on the image to go to my Flickr stream, where there's a detail.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:59 AM | Comments (2)

August 27, 2008

What everyone is wearing this summer

We gutted and renovated the ground floor of our Library this summer. Today is the inspection for the certificate of occupancy. The inspector keeps setting off the fire alarms. Luckily, when they were testing the alarm systems a week or so ago someone handed me a set of these. Otherwise I might be distracted or something.

- - - - -

Update: I hear the building passed! The circ desk will move back downstairs after lunch!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:45 AM | Comments (1)

August 25, 2008

You'd think school had started or something - but no!

We're getting there. There was a new faculty orientation event this afternoon - and I offered a little walking tour of South Main Street to provide a little transition from some useful panel discussion to happy hour at the Red Dove. Looks like a nice crew - certainly all the folks I got the opportunity to talk to are very pleasant. And to make it feel just like September, the evening ended with a 2.5 hour Human Rights Commission committee meeting.

As I headed home I noticed - and politely averted my eyes from - a number of porch parties on Pulteney Street, epicenter of off-campus student dwellings. The school year is gearing up.

It's going to be very strange to NOT be teaching - the 2nd autumn that's happened since my 3rd year of graduate school?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2008

Why We Blog

The other day I posted a picture on my flickr stream of my new home away from my home away from home. One of my regular readers happens to be the just-now-formerly-acting-head-librarian (I'm not sure how else to describe Sara other than, say, Library Goddess, but those two will have to do).

She noticed a particularly horrible chair with green padding in the first photo. She brought me a new one - much more comfortable for sitting with my feet up and reading purposes.

I'm an even happier camper now!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:02 AM | Comments (1)

August 19, 2008

Sense on College Drinking - lower the drinking age to 18

College presidents from more than 100 schools across the country are calling on lawmakers to do something about binge drinking: Consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18.

"Twenty-one is not working," says the group's statement, signed by presidents from prominent colleges such as Dartmouth, Duke and Syracuse. "A culture of dangerous, clandestine 'binge drinking' - often conducted off-campus - has developed."

I agree entirely. The current binge drinking culture was created by the 21 year drinking age. Lower the drinking age, reopen serious campus pubs, strictly enforce public drunkenness laws on campus - that's my prescription. But then I'm just a professor.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:37 AM | Comments (8)

August 16, 2008

The calm before the storm

The Quad, studentless, Friday afternoon.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:26 PM | Comments (1)

August 15, 2008

Beer goggles

This is the kind of finding that gives research science funding a bad name - people who are drinking find others more attractive than those who don't. Woo hoo. And, news flash: As well as changing perceptions of attractiveness, alcohol also encourages us to engage in behaviour we would otherwise avoid.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:24 PM | Comments (2)

August 13, 2008

The ultimate university "the situation is under investigation" statement. Really.

"We're sure that there's probably some facts and information that's just not available. I mean, you see a lot on the video, but we need to make sure everything is revealed before we take any action," said Fort Hays provost Larry Gould.

That's in response to this:

FORT HAYS, Kan. -- A professor at a Kansas university who dropped his pants and mooned a room full of students and teachers is under investigation after video of the incident was posted on YouTube, school officials said.

Bill Shanahan, a professor at Fort Hays State University, was at a debate with the Fort Hays State debate team last March when the incident occurred.

School officials said they believe things got out of control when the team got low scores from two of the judges.

Shanahan is seen on the video jumping up and down, ranting and then mooning the crowd in the room.

You'd think checking the video would clear things up for Provost Gould.

Here's the YouTube link - the language is as bad as the mooning.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:55 PM | Comments (3)

August 8, 2008

I guess school starts soon?

Walk away for a week and they make some real progress around here! The ground floor of our library was gutted this summer to turn it into a Learning Commons. When I left last week they were messing with wiring - now there's furniture being dragged in and there are carpets down over most of it!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:25 PM | Comments (0)

August 3, 2008

Technology and the Life of the Mind. Sorta.

Prof. Burke posted an interesting set of questions late in July about how he might change his note taking (etc., etc.) habits by using software. The comments have been very interesting - mainly recommending EndNote and Zotero. I have Zotero, a Firefox plugin, but have never really switched over to it. I tried Tinderbox twice, but I never felt like I came anywhere close to seeing its potential.

I'm posting this entry here to remind myself (see how disorganized I am?) to keep reviewing the comments over at Easily Distracted to see if I get struck by lightning. I, too, am thinking that now (before September or October, say) would be a good time to revamp my work-style for a couple of new projects before they get too far along.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

July 31, 2008

Old School Tieism

Mutual fund managers had significantly better returns on investments made in companies led by their former classmates than they did in companies where no such connections existed, according to a recent study. Indeed, investments in so-called “connected” stocks outperformed non-connected stocks by more than 8 percent, the study found.

From Inside Higher Ed.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:59 PM

July 28, 2008

Rutgers' new stadium

Prof. Soltan offers us a dismantling of the dream-land of Big U stadium building.

Skeezy Football Coach + Unbuildable Stadium = today’s Rutgers University.

It’s easy to do the math. I mean, it’s easy for us. At Rutgers, they’re still struggling to understand.

The most conspicuous thing about Rutgers and their football dreaminess is that they're one of those come-from-nowhere schools. I mean 20 years ago who cared about Rutgers football? Syracuse was doing its best to be New York's College Football Team (though that always sounds like a reach to me for NYC, but whatever). Rutgers has that enormous advantage of being in the middle of a massive population of rich folk suffering from a severe skybox deficit - how could they NOT build an enormous stadium on the banks of the Raritan?

Of course, they could build more college classrooms around the state to take up some of the unserved high school graduates, but skyboxes are more fun than classrooms.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:41 AM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2008

Opening the Hadrian Show in London

There's a big Hadrian show at the British Museum - and here's a description of the opening from Bloomberg Muse:

For the first time in many years, the ruler of London addressed the assembled populus in Latin. Boris Johnson, mayor of the U.K. capital, climbed onto the podium at the opening of the British Museum's Hadrian exhibition and began spouting classical prose.

After awhile, he paused to ask the audience, ``How much more of this do you want? There's yards of it.'' The July 23 audience didn't demur, and perhaps some of them understood what he was saying since there were several professors of classical studies present.

So the mayor plunged on. He is himself, as Neil McGregor, director of the museum, pointed out, the ruler of a vast empire, namely the London government machine.

It was an impressive performance. Tony Blair is able to speak in passable French; President John F. Kennedy famously declared "Ich bin ein Berliner'' in German. But most British officials nowadays probably no longer have a working knowledge of Latin.

It may be that this was the best Latin speech made by a British politician since the Romans departed in the fifth century. Mayor Johnson studied Greats -- a four-year program in classics -- at Oxford, and is evidently a master of the Latin language. MacGregor, thanking the Italian ambassador for his help, described him as "the representative of the former colonial power.''

Here's a review of the show, as opposed to a love letter to Boris Johnson, from the 24 Hour Museum. It's getting great reviews; maybe because I'm just back from Rome I'm not all that thrilled - but they'll have things on show from all over the place. Still, they can't bring the Pantheon - and all the portrait busts in the world can't make up for that.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:01 AM

July 24, 2008

Summer winds down . . .

. . . and the work on renovations accelerates. The library is all atwitter about August 18th as a date to move back downstairs to the renovated 1st floor. The Scandling Center has proceeded so far that yesterday lots of interestingly shaped boxes (LOTS - had to be 75 or 100) arrived.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:57 PM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2008

Getting ready for those incoming students?

That little lecture to your first year advisees on why they shouldn't post compromising pictures online?

Read this. Two years in prison.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 19, 2008

Whew!

We had a cookout last night to welcome the new folks to the Houghton House community - a new professor of studio art, a new professor of architectural studies, and a new adjunct architectural studies professor. It was sweltering on my balcony, but fun - I guess there were 19 or 20 adults and a couple of children. Everyone brought stuff - I bought the meat and bread and did the grilling. It was peculiarly breezeless last night, so that meant that I stood in a haze of smoke much of the time - and my glasses sure showed it this morning - grimy!

If I'd had a camera handy I would've caught two of my colleagues rehanging art; when I came downstairs with a load of stuff at the end Ted and Bonnie were adjusting two prints by Ted's wife that hang side by side. They're hanging much straighter now than they have since last fall. I swear the building settled or something since I hung them last May, because I've never been able to get them straight again.

That's a department-as-community - invite people to a party and they bring ice, beer, salad, and picture-hanging expertise.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

July 17, 2008

Those damned capitalists!

They’re accusing Apple of concocting the whole thing as some sort of profit-making scheme.

That's John Gruber on the Free Software Foundation on the iPhone.

Me, I just hope that TIAA-CREF owns a LOT of stock.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:58 PM

July 1, 2008

Ehem.

As of this morning this is The Cranky Associate Professor.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:43 AM | Comments (13)

June 25, 2008

Prof. Soltan on Ms. Winehouse

Prof. Soltan says:

Winehouse’s music gathers grief and pity. It may be a pleasure - an aesthetic pleasure - to hear her music, but the pleasure has to do with letting go of the natural noise of good for the sake of a free-fall into the perverse and malign. Along with Charles Baudelaire, Malcolm Lowry, and many others, Winehouse is part of the expeditionary team to hell. (my emphasis)

Well put.

Listen here - Back to Black. Baudelaire, but with a beat you can dance to?

Rehab (a live version from the Jules Holland show - actually an interesting contrast to the video issue version). Me, I like the skirt. So arch it's Huysmanian?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:17 PM | Comments (1)

Political Tightropes

This is a (n in)famous neocon.

This is a really, really sharp Swarthmore professor who is a specialist in modern Africa. (click and read more of his stuff).

Compare and contrast. I keep doing it without any resolution. Luckily, I'm a medievalist - no one wants to know what I think.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Vote for me for Fascist Dictator . . .

. . . and I will set you free from competing style guides! What IS it with journals with their own house styles?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:47 PM

June 17, 2008

How they get away with it

Inside Higher Ed has a first person thing from a person who, after 20 years as an adjunct, has just been offered a tenure track position.

Some have asked why I continued to teach as a part-timer if things were so tough, and to be honest, every spring I begin asking myself that same question. In fact, I have left teaching twice. The first time I was offered a position as a business manager for a corporation that owns travel stops throughout the Southwest. The money was good, the hours were close to what I would put in as a part-time instructor (counting prep time and time grading papers), and I had benefits.

I hated it.

There is something about teaching that keeps pulling me in. I love writing, and I love sharing my passion for it with my students. I love feeling that I might be making a positive difference in people’s lives. I love feeling like I’m contributing something to my community.

I guess that's how administrators get away with it - they can find people who really, really like the classroom. Despite the grading. Despite the insecurity.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:26 AM

June 13, 2008

Talking about . . . religion, education, professors, a core curriculum, Darwin

Go read this interview with a Univ of Chicago professor. All of it. I can't find the heart to comment, but I'll pull out some quotations to tempt you:

And so I specialized in religions that are dead, which has the great advantage that nobody talks back. No one says, “That’s not what I heard last Sunday!” Everybody’s dead. And I like that. Now, I sometimes have to deal with religions that keep going. And they’re more problematic because then you deal with people who believe things. They also find their own beliefs puzzling or challenging or interesting—they’re almost synonyms. So they have not only their beliefs, but their interpretations of those beliefs. And I have my interpretations of their beliefs. Sometimes we can sit like this and negotiate it. Other times it’s in a book or transcript. And then in a third sense you have to run back and forth. You have to represent both sides of the conversation as you try to figure out what it’s all about. You get good at doing that with dead people because you’ll never hear from them because you have to do it all the time. And that’s what a historian does. They run back and forth to make both sides of a conversation happen.

And most people who teach religion have a clear relationship with the religions. I cannot. Obviously, most of them are dead, I would get in trouble with the ASPCA [American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] if I sacrificed a bull ox to Zeus. I have a friend who recently died, but he actually decided to show kids what a sacrifice looks like, so he sacrificed a lamb at Easter time. “We talk about it so much—here’s what it looks like!” Half the class puked, half the class had angry letters from mommy and daddy. But he did demonstrate that it’s not just a metaphor. It’s a messy and not altogether pleasant process. Since [then] we’ve converted it entirely into an economic question. I ask students the meaning of sacrifice, and they always start talking about “mommy and daddy sacrificing so I could go to college.” We’ve been at war for four years, and I haven’t heard one person yet say some soldier sacrificed themselves. That language is gone. It’s entirely economic.

I was told [curtailing the Core] was done to increase electivity, and I think electivity is a good idea. I also think being told what you should do is also a good idea, as long as there are options. But it turns out that’s not actually how it’s been used. It’s been used to carve out spaces for double majors, to which I am unalterably opposed. One major is bad enough. I would like to abolish majors altogether. So two is unbelievable. And then you find out one is for mommy and daddy and one is for you, so then I thought let’s take this issue head-on and stop this crap. It seems to me that majors ought to be flexible enough that if you were in history and then suddenly said my real interest is in biology, they might say, “Well, why don’t you look into the history of biology”—I mean we’ve got a whole fucking library called the Crerar Library of the History of Science. I mean, they ought to be able to find some way to fit you in.

Now, the thing about a Core is it really has to represent a hard-won faculty consensus. I mean, it can’t be “we’ll put this one in for that group, and we’ll put this one in for that group.” It has to be that of all the books we could possibly inflict on you—only in 10 weeks, and you waste the first week, you waste the last week, so you’ve got eight weeks. If they’re not crazy, they’re going to take two weeks to read a book. So you’re down to four books. Now what that Core really ought to be doing is saying that if there were only these four books in the world—or the other way around, out of all the books in the world, these are the four books you should read. If they’re not prepared to say that, they should shut up shop. That’s my first comment. I find too much politics, too much accommodation. “We can’t get the so-and-sos to join us unless we read this.” And they don’t care what it is, it’s got to be a little bit of this, or the economists won’t join the social science core, or something.

via Prof. Soltan.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:11 AM

June 10, 2008

Historical Context - Colleges Construction

This Saturday I give my second architecture-on-campus talk of the month -- last Saturday was Reunion and a talk on the Chapel (built for Hobart College, named after Bishop John Henry Hobart, the man on the left in the purple stockings). This week is a talk for the Geneva Historical Society about many of the 20th Century buildings on campus and their reasonably consistent use of Jacobean gables -- like Smith Hall, named for William Smith in the green stockings on the right.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:06 PM

May 28, 2008

One step closer to putting that whole Rome episode behind me...

Today the receipts all went in. Yay!

.....Further - they all came back on Friday. Booh! After some work, I think I can turn them all in again. Yay!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:26 PM | Comments (2)

May 19, 2008

At least it didn't snow

The one hundred and eighty-third commencement of Hobart College and the nininety-seventh commencement of William Smith College.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:56 AM

May 16, 2008

College Presidents

The boom boom crack boom of fireworks in the distance - part of Senior Week. The president of these Colleges likes fireworks - we have them at all sorts of events. I approve, myself!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:09 PM

May 14, 2008

Back . . .

. . . here, and in time for graduation!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:04 PM

May 9, 2008

Death of an Ecclesial Community

I've been following the end of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary with some interest - it's always luridly interesting for someone like me to see how a board of trustees can fire an entire tenured faculty by declaring financial exigency. Hobart and William Smith has a long relationship with Seabury-Western - our previous chaplain, indeed, left these Colleges for a chair at Seabury-Western. I also have been an irregular reader of AKMA's Random Thoughts, a blog from a Seabury faculty member for a few years.

Here's the board's own position on the closure. Note the wishful thinking in the last paragraph about keeping a doctoral program open. How do you do that without a faculty?

Captain Yips points out a lo-how-the-mighty-are-fallen moment in the affair:

Considering Seabury-Western's collapse, it's worth noting that the Seabury Board thinks that they need $18.7 million, and that this goal "significantly exceeded Seabury’s fundraising capabilities."

It's not a small amount, to be sure, but in the fundraising and nonprofit worlds $18.7 mil is relative chicken feed. There was a time that a more confident and assertive Episcopal Church could have raised that money (in 1890 dollars) over lunch at the millionaire's table at the Chicago Club, from some guys named Field, Armour, Pullman, Shedd, Higginbotham, and Swift - and for this purpose, the older version of TEC would have had a seat at that table. Some of the millionaires were, to be sure, scoundrels, but they were civic minded scoundrels, and the amount needed would have barely dented their resources. Northwestern University's top student charity fundraiser, Dance Marathon, pulls in $700,000 every year. That Seabury doesn't even consider the effort is an interesting marker on the road to collapse.

Really. They didn't try to raise a little less than $20 million to save an institution in Chicago? Admittedly, the alumni/ae of seminaries are seldom sources of large contributions, but whatever happened to all those rich Episcopalians?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:48 AM

May 5, 2008

Suing Alma Mater

About Priya Venkatesan at Dartmouth (I've mainly been following Prof Soltan's coverage) I noted something that I'm not seeing many folks point out. Venkatesan has her own BA from Dartmouth. She knew what she was getting into!

Any idea that mean Ivy League patriarchalists ambushed a nice woman who didn't know the setting is off.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:29 PM

May 1, 2008

The Dissolution of the Universities

Massachusetts proposes taxing endowments over $1 billion.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:14 PM

April 26, 2008

Writing History

Prof. Burke offers a quick guide:

I tell my students that all good research projects and analytical writing have to provide an answer to the question, “So what?”, a justification for the project or the essay. One student asked me if history as a discipline had any stock or standard answers to that question.

I started to list a few that I could think of, and then a few more. I thought I’d try out the results here, to see if readers could knock a few down or add some more.

Go read his list.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:26 PM | Comments (2)

April 24, 2008

College Licenseing Weirdness

I thought that I had seen a few more sweatshirts in Rome this winter with the Franklin & Marshall seal than was really probable, especially since F&M has no program of their own in Italy, but I had no idea there was a whole company doing it until I saw this shop in Milan! Wikpedia to the rescue - the last section of the F&M entry notes suppressed (9:34 a.m., 4/24/08):

In 1999, after seeing an official Franklin & Marshall sweatshirt, a company based in Verona, Italy began producing clothing in a vintage 1950's collegiate-style with the words "Franklin and Marshall" on them. F&M alumni began to report seeing F&M merchandise for sale in Europe, which puzzled the college.

In 2001, Tim McGraw posed for publicity photos wearing a "Franklin Marshall Wrestling" t-shirt, one of which was included in the CD booklet for his album Set This Circus Down. When the college became flooded with inquires about its (nonexistent) connection to the singer, they began to investigate further and discovered that the Franklin Marshall Clothing company was using its name without permission.

In 2003, after lengthy discussions, the college decided not to sue and instead agreed to accept a licensing fee from the company so that they could continue to produce their products, which had begun to gain popularity with youth, especially in the United Kingdom. The company also rewrote their history slightly, claiming that it was founded in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, rather than in Italy.

Today, the line is sold in upscale stores, such as Bloomingdales and, as part of the agreement with the college, at the Franklin and Marshall College bookstore. However, many of the designs omit Franklin & Marshall's ampersand and instead reads simply "Franklin Marshall." As of December 2007, a green shirt with the "F&M" logo was spotted on a female tee shirt in Mirabello Sannitico, Italy.

Love that classic Wikipedia concluding sentence - semi-relevant personal observation couched in the passive voice. Still, my questions, "what on earth is that?" and "I wonder if they're getting a cut?" are answered.

Milan photoset.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:36 AM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2008

My Life in Res Ed

Yesterday we spent all afternoon visiting the 4 apartments with their landlords. There were remarkably few problems, I suppose, though there will be a little billing for damages. The young will tape things to walls with invisibile tape - or with lo scotch, as they say in Italian. My knee held up pretty well - it was getting in and our of taxis that hurt the most. Maybe I'll actually risk a little museumery today after more grading. Grading. Grading.

Yes, I know, as my baroquista friend says, everything is better in Rome, but grading is still grading.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:53 AM | Comments (1)

April 9, 2008

Grading

Sorry for the low interest blogging - but the price I pay for having my semester end now is having my end of semester grading madness now. And we get quasi-dean roles thrown in, too - Nick and I have an appointment to visit all the student apartments this afternoon in company with someone from the rental agency to survey damages.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:55 AM | Comments (0)

April 7, 2008

Book list for Layers of Rome

A commenter asked for the book list - and I realized that I hadn't put one up! I thought I had done so back in December when we were packing to come to Rome. Here it is below.

Next time I'll bit the bullet and use Krautheimer for the second half - it's back in print and it's not expensive. It's a fun book, but not really organized in a way that I find useful. The reproductions are not very well-produced, either. Claridge is a great thing for my class - readable, filled with information but not too full, and lots of good drawings instead of bad photos. The maps could use some work.

Claridge, Amanda. Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide Oxford University Press, USA, 1998. [great book!]

Any textbook of Roman Art:
Wheeler, Mortimer. Roman Art and Architecture. Thames & Hudson, 1985. [most of them bought this - very inexpensive]

Ramage & Ramage, Roman Art

Kleiner, Fred, A History of Roman Art [I had used this recently as the textbook for a course - one student had taken the course and had this book - very useful but quite expensive.]

- - - - - -

Mathews, Thomas F. The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art. Princeton University Press; Rev edition, 1999.

ANY edition or translation of the Bible

Lots of duplicated readings, to be distributed in Rome. [I made less use of these than in the 2003 version of the course - this was almost all primary source excerpts printed off the Internet Medieval Sourcebook and its ancient sourcebook sibling.

STRONGLY RECOMMENDED
Krautheimer, Richard. Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308. Princeton Univ Press, 2000 [Next time I'll try to use this as a textbook.]

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:40 AM | Comments (0)

April 6, 2008

And they're finished!

The last presentation in the last group - Diana had already presented Tiber Island - Kelsey was showing us the facade of Sta Cecilia in Trastevere.

I'm very sad that the last 11 students had to present in my living room, but I'm very happy that my leg is not going to fall off - and I'm afraid it would have if I'd walked all over Rome for two more presentation sessions. Here's a list of everything I've heard about this week.

My colleague thought of this solution - thanks, Nick!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:08 PM | Comments (1)

April 4, 2008

Big Ol' Whine

How could a 4-day period with 23 half hour site presentations get any harder? With your leg bandaged so that your knee cap is immobilized, perhaps?

Yes, I have injured myself. I don't remember any knee cap trauma. Maybe I stepped badly off a bus and did invisible damage? Whatever happened, I woke up sore on Thursday morning and still did 4 presentation tours. The hobbling got worse. I stopped around noon and bought a pre-made knee bandage jobby at a pharmacy (20% off!). Today I did 4 before lunch (and church closing time) and 4 afterwards - I'm halfway home but if getting there depends on walking, that last half will take 8 times as long. And student presentations premised on site visits mean walking. Maybe I shouldn't have slogged up the ramp at Castel San Angelo? Maybe I should've gone to the emergency room earlier?

Well, the ER doctor assured me that the knee cap is not broken and that I didn't scream enough when he rotated the leg for him to believe any tendons to be torn - though his written recommendations include that I consider making an appointment with an orthopedist. Meanwhile, my left leg is almost immobilized, iced, and elevated. I've canceled tomorrow's 5 appointments and warned the Sunday folk that they may be next.

However, the group flight leaves Wednesday morning - if I want to stick to my plan I don't have a lot of leeway. Remember, I'm the kind of professor who thinks of giving students back the colds they give to me is better than missing class, so my immediate reaction is "why don't I just hobble along and make them feel guilty for every class they've skipped because they were hung over?" Then I realize that (a) some of them were occasionally really sick and (b) that they're 20 and they don't really notice when the middle-aged are in pain.

Oh - and I'm beginning to think that the injection he claimed was a pain killer was really sugar water.

Fun medievalist facts to know and tell: my closest hospital is Santo Spirito, which was founded in the eighth century by Saint King Ine of Wessex! Well, sort of - Ine retired to Rome after a tumultuous career and founded a hostel for Saxon pilgrims to Rome. That institution is the direct ancestor of the parish of Santo Spirito in Sassia - but I'm reasonably sure the hospital is an outgrowth of the pilgrim's hostel (and this article would suggest so, but it's the old Catholic Encyclopedia and the reference is an article from 1870 - possible). So it's vaguely appropriate for me to go there for Pronto Soccorso.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:49 PM | Comments (4)

They've begun!

Final presentations began yesterday (Thursday) - and late this afternoon I'll be half-way through them!

I've divided the students into groups of 4 or 5 based on easy itinteraries (sometime that means a metro ride, but hey, we all have passes). Yesterday's group did (1) the Imperial fora and Mussolini's creation of a propaganda-rich, if archaeologically-problematic avenue across them; (2) the Piazza Venezia from its initiation through the Victor Emmanuel intervention and the fascist era, complete with Mussolini's balcony; (3) San Marco, from early Christian to 18th century changes; and the Markets and Forum of Trajan.

Everyone did quite a creditable job - we're off to a good start!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:27 AM | Comments (0)

April 2, 2008

Moving the targets for tenure

Eeek!

At Baylor the administration applied new and un-publicized standards for granting (or denying, more's the point) tenure - in quite a few cases reversing recommendations from departments and the university-wide committee.

We're not just talking about changing the standards after someone has already been hired - we're talking about after the candidate's part of the process is complete.

While Cordon said he believes Baylor is a wonderful university, he said he is worried that junior faculty members won’t want to come to a place where they may be completely in the dark about how they will be judged. “It’s not just a moving target, it’s a moving target after you think you’re done,” he said.

You'd better believe it. I wouldn't be surprised if a few of their searches fail this year.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:42 AM | Comments (3)

April 1, 2008

The B-52s know my pain

I ain't no student
of ancient culture
before I talk
I should read a book!
But there's one thing
that I do know
There's a lot of ruins
in Meso-Po-Tamia!

Would that everyone read the book before they talked! And/or, that they all dressed like Fred did in the 80s. That would help my mood.

Please note that I am posting this BEFORE final presentations start, so none of my immediate students are individually implicated - yet.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:46 PM | Comments (1)

Endgame

Students have final assignments in all classes now Their final photo assignment is due tomorrow; my oral exams are Thursday - Sunday; the final drawing critique is Monday; final exams in Italian are Thursday and Monday. Add our students to your prayer lists - this is earlier than a semester has ever ended for them before!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:32 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2008

Class prep + Holy Week = Credit towards Heaven?

Bring on the Doctrine of Works - I'm having a good week!

So I'm previewing my favorite mosaics on the Quirinal Hill this afternoon for class tomorrow - I run by Santa Pudenziana, check on Santa Prassede, and hit Santa Maria Maggiore last - and just in time for the Wednesday after Palm Sunday Stational Mass with Penitential Procession. The presiding bishop was a little frighteningly doddery - I saw him holding his chest at one point while the procession was coming back up the aisle, and I'm not sure he was clutching his pectoral cross. The music was splendid - the kind of thing that having a college of canons can do for you! I made use of one of the Dominicans in the college of confessors, too, while I was at it. Is there a plenary indulgence on offer here? Readers?

I've told my students that unless they really want the vast sea of devotion thing they should evade St. Peter's this week and go to the other great basilicas - especially for the Easter Vigil. For the Easter Vigil myself I'm torn between going to Sta Prassede, as I did in 2003 (when, to be sure, it was within easy walking distance of my apartment) and going next door to Chiesa Nuova. I'm really not much of a church hopper when it comes to mass - I tend to go to the same place over and over anyway. Living next door to Chiesa Nuova has been very nice!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:54 PM

Advising from abroad

One of the trickier things about terms abroad is getting students advised and registered. We've got to help everyone, but they really need to email their departmental advisors at home (if they're not majors in our department) to be sure. Making things harder already - and I can't imagine it won't continue to make things worse - we're in the midst of a campus-wide transition to PeopleSoft. I've lost track of the number of times our departmental secretary has emailed this semester to say she would be at a training. Enterprise software. Ugh.

Worst of all, for the sophomores on the trip, they're supposed to be registering the day they fly back to America. NOT fun.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:21 PM | Comments (1)

March 18, 2008

How do you give a final exam in Rome? Let them do the talking!

Here's the assignment for the final exam:

Choose a well-layered site - a single building or a area of the city - no more than 10 minutes of walking time. You should not choose a site or building we have visited together in any detail - hence the major monuments we have discussed and everything from the midterm is off limits. You don't have to avoid the same themes, however. All sites must be approved by me.

Prepare a 25-30 minute presentation for me and a group of your colleagues. You are not, unlike the midterm, just talking to me! Part of your grade will be determined by how well you communicate your site to people who haven't studied it. When we head out for presentations, your engagement in others' talks also counts. Do you pay attention? Do you ask meaningful questions of your colleagues?

Your site should show layers from at least 2 of the 4 broad period divisions below and should have at least one more - if the ancient layer is now invisible because of being built over, you might show us drawings or diagrams. Holding up the textbook is BARELY sufficient, but will not be penalized. That is to say, if your site shows 4 layers, GREAT! But if your site shows only layers from 2 periods but had others which you can convey to us, fine.

*ancient
------------------------------
*medieval - before 1000
*medieval - after 1000
------------------------------
*renaissance - eh, 1350-1600
*baroque/rococo - 1600-1800
------------------------------
*Unification - 1800-1920
*Fascist - 1920-1944
*Contemporary - 1945-now

You will deliver these presentations in groups of 4 or 5. We will begin Thursday, April 3, during the regular Layers time slot. I have no idea yet how long it will take or exactly how many groups we will have - I am leaving that decision until you have chosen sites.

Here's the list of sites they've chosen* - there is some duplication; because we will be going out in groups of 4 or 5 that won't be a problem.

Piazza Navona
Piazza del Popolo
Piazza Venezia

Santa Cecilia
Ss Cosmas and Damian
San Giovanni a Laterano (basilica)
San Lorenzo in Damaso
San Marco, Piazza Venezia
Sta Maria degli Angeli, esp as architecture
Sta Maria degli Angeli, esp as remodeled Baths
Santa Maria Sopra Minerva

Theater of Marcellus, esp Fascist phase of the neighborhood
Forum of Trajan
Horti Sallustiani (Quirinal Hill)
Palatine / Augustus
Trajan's Market

Castel Sant'Angelo
Bridges
Obelisks
Porta Pia
Protestant Cemetary (Pyramid, too??)
Tiber Island

*well, most of them chose. At the end there I had to pass out assignments to four or six people. But now they have two full weeks to prepare!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:05 PM

What a great song! Jamiroquai, Mussolini, and pedagogy

What can I say - I'm thinking about the Fool in Western literature tonight. On average, we need more of them.

All this comes from preparing to teach Mussolini tomorrow. I'm not sure if he had a sense of the tragic - but I really wonder if he had a sense of the Fool. Fascism is hard to teach - starting from the contemporary evacuation of any meaning from the term other than "what American leftists think is bad" to the general idea that Fascism is nothing but Nazis-south.

The origin of words is always hard to teach - the idea that something wasn't there before someone said it confuses students to no end. There was no totalitarianism before Mussolini invented the word, if you believe the world works that way. Me, I think Lenin was well on his way to pulling it off without the vocabulary to explain himself, but then I'm an anti-Communist.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:40 AM

March 17, 2008

Final projects

GOSH it's hard to get 23 people to choose a final project topic in enough time to do the work well. When they've all chosen (or I give up and assign topics) I'll post about it.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:00 PM

March 15, 2008

Hitler's Berlin, Mussolini's Rome

Hitler made much less progress toward his version of Berlin than Mussolini made toward recasting Rome. There's a show up in Berlin now which includes a giant model of Hitler's plan, including the vast dome - story and photo here.

Because we're explicitly teaching about Mussolini's remaking of Rome in the BiDisciplinary course I'm doing some more reading - and once again being surprised that things I thought were eternal about the Eternal City are really 1920s and 30s. Borden Painter's Mussolini's Rome is almost usable as a guide book - and has helpful lists in the back of street and piazza names changed from their fascist to anti-fascist forms. I find it interesting that the Republic didn't change the names of any of the bridges or streets (so far as I know) that were named after members of the deposed royal family, even when those had been built under Mussolini. There are also a surprising number of inscriptions that have never gone away - the visual de-fascisization of Rome was piecemeal.

Here's an interesting bit about a surviving fragment of Hitler's Berlin:

Isolated remnants of Nazi architecture include Hermann Goering's Luftfahrtministerium, now the German Finance Ministry; Tempelhof airport, whose runways are set to close and whose future is hotly debated; the Olympic Stadium; and one of the city's more obscure architectural oddities: the Schwerbelastungskoerper, or heavy-load tester.

Speer built this mammoth concrete cylinder in the south of the city to test how much weight Berlin's swampy land could bear before work started on the triumphal arch. Until recently, the Schwerbelastungskoerper was hidden behind dense foliage and scaffolding, surrounded by fences and signs forbidding entry.

About the size of a four-story block and 15 tons in weight, it is made of solid steel-reinforced concrete. It was placed under heritage protection in 1995. The local authority is renovating it at a cost of 722,000 euros ($1.13 million), aiming to complete it by the end of the year and open it to the public after that.

Inside, measuring equipment shows that Speer's engineers found the Schwerbelastungskoerper to have sunk 19 centimeters -- not quite deep enough to have made the arch unfeasible.

On Tuesday we're back to the Ara Pacis and the Mausoleum of Augustus - but to look at them in their setting in Mussolini's setting. Should be fun!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:16 AM

March 14, 2008

Yikes! 3 full weeks left!

Yikes - doing a little grading today I happened to glance at a full month calendar (my daily glance is at a weekly) and I realized JUST HOW LITTLE TIME I HAVE LEFT TO TELL THEM EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT ROME.

Those of you who know my style know that I'm a tad serious. Please stop me if I start talking too fast.

On the other hand, having been useful before 9:30 I had today more or less off. I had to pay a call at the Scuola to turn in the change from yesterday's petty cash (paying for the guided tour) but other than that I had nothing I had to do today. So I drew some, walked a lot, and resolved to go to the Sebastiano del Piombo show at the Palazzo Venezia. Did you know that there's a perpetual adoration chapel in the Palazzo Venezia? Very 1990s, but in a nice way. Somehow I lost momentum and ended up back here for lunch and didn't get back over that way again. Oh, well - the High Renaissance can wait.

The other two things I would like to do this weekend is get into the House of Augustus (it's not clear to me from all the websites if individuals need reservations or not) and go back to Sant'Agnese f.l.m. for some pictures. The best thing about digital is knowing without having to go through expensive processing if your pictures came out. The bad thing is that you know damn well that you should go back and reshoot some of them. So, back out the Via Nomentana for me, tomorrow!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:00 PM

March 13, 2008

Sabina - the best day-trip ever!

We had splendid weather today for a trip to Sabina - after a week of showers and dicey grey skies we met a bus at Termini and headed north.

By happenstance (sheer small worldism) my colleague Nick Ruth met Nicole Franchini, an alumna of William Smith College (the female half of the Hobart and William Smith coordinate system). Nicole has lived in Italy for more than 20 years, most recently in Rome. She and her family also have a house in the Sabine Hills.

Nicole arranged our trip today - and maybe even the weather!

We started at Farfa, one of the great imperial abbeys of medieval Italy - think of the abbey in The Name of the Rose but a little further south in the peninsula. One of the two Carolingian towers survives with a a bit of the Westwork beside it (and a chunk of painted wall - go look at the pictures on Flickr!). The body of the current church is later and perpendicular to the Carolingian building.

We had a good tour of Farfa and then headed on to Casperia, an incredibly beautiful hill town. There were other incredibly beautiful hill towns within sight, as was Mount Soracte, beloved of Horace, who seems to have had a view of it from his Sabine Farm.

Nicole had arranged a buffet luncheon on a terrace / piazza, then dessert and coffee at the house of the restaurant owners afterwards. We wandered around town for a little while, then back to Rome. The students seemed happy in a stunned-by-the-beauty kind of way. I certainly enjoyed myself!

We have to turn our story in to the Pulteney Street Survey, these Colleges' alumnae/i magazine!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:17 PM

Historic Photos on Flickr

Notre Dame's Architecture Library has (or maybe 'is in the process of'?) uploading scans of its lantern slides - and they're all under a Creative Commons license!

This one shows the Pons Fabricius, the foot bridge to Tiber Island, with an INCREDIBLE load of silt - perhaps in the aftermath of the 1870 flood? I'm not sure. Here's my photo from this spring of the same bridge - taken from a slightly different point of view.

Amazing photos! Over 600 for Italy alone! Lantern slides were amazingly high quality black and white medium format glass slides, and nothing is much better for showing architecture. Given the collection there are few scenes of everyday life except those in the foreground of buildings and there's an obvious western European bias, but this is a real resource - 2,714 reasonably high quality photos in the public domain of the world before World War I. Thank you, Notre Dame!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:59 AM

March 12, 2008

Ho hum...

Every other year, data released by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics provide a snapshot of the growth of part-time positions in the professoriate. This year — an off-year for that data — the federal statistics provide evidence for another shift, in which the majority of full-time professional employees in higher education are in administrative rather than faculty jobs.

In the fall of 2004, 50.6 of professional full-time employees in higher education (excluding medical schools) were faculty members. In the fall of 2006, for which data were released Tuesday, 48.6 percent of professional, full-time jobs in higher education were held by faculty members.

No news here - move along, move along.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:23 PM

The Saddest Site/Sight in Rome this Week

Just this week the Forum Romanum went on the list of ticketed attractions (thanks, TF, for reminding me!). The people to the left are checking the price list on the gate. There are a two more pictures of the entryway on Flickr.

*€ 9 for EU adults and non-EU citizens
*€ 4.50 reduced price for EU citizens 18-24 and their instructors
*free for EU citizens under 18 and over 65
*and surcharges (no reduction available) for special shows in restricted spaces or to enter buildings like Sta. Maria Antiqua.

I've been four times - twice with classes - this semester. That won't happen any more, I fear. The entrance does combine with the Palatine and the Colosseum, and offers visits over a 3 day period - and I didn't notice, but I don't believe the Forum will close for Mondays.

All in all, we do pretty well. We're not EU citizens, but because the students take Italian at a language school licensed by the Department of Education (or some such) we carry letters with lists of names and a detailed statement to that effect - and seals. You can't forget stamps and seals in Italy.

This always leads to negotiations at the Biglietteria. Sometimes we've gotten nothing but a sneer and the full price (the Museo della Civiltà Romana, which is City owned), sometimes we get the EU student-age price break, sometimes we've gotten in for free after some conversation and then talk among the staff (Palazzo Massimo alle Terme). We can never tell and always go prepared with enough cash to pay the admission. This year I'd say we've gotten in for free more often than not, and gotten reductions to EU citizen levels sometimes.

In a classic example of why the rules don't always work, I just looked up the Soprintendenza's own web page for the Forum. Here's the price list:

Intero € 11,00 ridotto € 6,50: consente l'accesso alle aree archeologiche del Palatino e Foro Romano, al Colosseo ed alla mostra "Trionfi romani".

The sign at the gate says €9 and €4.50 - I swear!

Teaching abroad is often like this - a matter of negotiation, politeness, and being grateful to people who don't interpret their own rules too literally.

Still, the thought that the average 30 year old Roman who just wants to cut through the Forum on a sunny afternoon is now faced with a €9 charge is a little sad.

(prices revised per ADM's comment, complete with cute little € sign, which I couldn't find earlier)

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:45 PM

March 11, 2008

San Vitale, Ravenna

Gosh I love Ravenna - even in bad weather.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:16 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2008

Serendipity, Exegetical style

Just as I sit down to grade the Bible exercises for my layers class Google News turns up a book review for me Isaiah: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators, edited and translated by Robert Louis Wilken. The somewhat hostile review notes:

The production of these works [this new series] is essentially a historical exercise, perhaps with the editors operating according to the conviction that biblical interpretation is too important to be left to exegetes, especially critical and postcritical exegetes. The offer of an early Christian reading of the book of Isaiah is especially to the point of the new series, for Isaiah—more than any other Old Testament book—lends itself to a christological reading, so much so that the early church referred to it as the "fifth Gospel." The assumption of the series, surely correct, is that the church has much to learn from the history of interpretation in the early period before church interpretation engaged historical criticism, which exhibited the problems in the text and began to distance the text from the claims of the gospel. My emphases.

In my case, it's not that interpretation is too important to be left to the exegetes, but that critical and postcritical readings of the Bible are pretty much useless for understanding art that draws on the Bible. In contrast, while we were at San Vitale in Ravenna this weekend, my students all understood not only WHICH scene showed the Sacrifice of Isaac but also understood WHY it is adjacent to the altar. That is to say, why Christians saw the sacrifice of Isaac as a foreshadowing, a type, of the crucifixion of Jesus, even in the episodes that weren't depicted!

In case you haven't read Genesis lately, let me remind you that Abraham and Isaac and the servant journey for 3 days to the mountain. Isaac carries the wood for burning the sacrifice on his own shoulders - those are two elements that are never, or almost never, depicted, though they bring the parallel into sharper focus than just saying Abraham:Isaac::God:Jesus. Earlier viewers, of course, knew the whole story.

One of my difficulties is selecting passages that like this one are brief enough to read quickly, obvious enough that students can work out the parallels the Early Christians saw without having to do a lot of following up cross references, and (most important for my purpose) have important visual traditions. As an example of something I can't do much with you can think about the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes; while they're vital for understanding all sorts of stuff about Christianity they have very little importance in the visual tradition. Talking doesn't make a great picture.

Here's an entry from a good while back on the same subject.

Pitiful to say, I'm blogging with someone else's picture of the Sacrifice of Isaac - my interiors at San Vitale were not very good.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:52 AM

March 9, 2008

Bologna in the Rain

Just back from a weekend trip to Emilia Romagna with the class - Bologna and Ravenna. It rained a lot until this morning, but things were still productive. I think the next time I teach here we'll have to spend a whole weekend in Bologna!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:11 PM

March 7, 2008

Field Trip

Not just the daily on-the-hoof teaching, but off to Bologna and Ravenna for the weekend with the troops!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM

March 6, 2008

Meet the blogger...

I also met a blogger today - something that I, who usually live in scenic Geneva, NY, seldom do.

Zadok the Roman invited me to meet him outside the Cancelleria, where he had a class this afternoon. We got caffé, then he showed me the Sala Riario (named after the cardinal who built the palazzo) and the Sala dei Cento Giorni, painted by Giorgio Vasari.

I had never been further than the Bramante courtyard. Here's the best picture I can find on the web of the Sala dei Cento Giorni, which is as good an answer in paint to the question "What is Mannerism?" as the Villa Giulia is for architecture. The name of the room comes from the funniest anecdote in Renaissance art history (a field of striking solemnity and self-importance, I usually find). Vasari, now better known as a biographer than a painter, showed the room to his old master MIchelangelo and bragged that he had completed the work in 100 days. Michelangelo said, "It shows." I rather liked it, but then I have decadent tendencies. Paul III surveying New St Peter's dressed as the Jewish High Priest really made me happy! There was a scene of the distribution of cardinals hats to semi-nude men in advanced states of ascetical skinniness that made no sense at all - that's Mannerism for you!

I enjoyed meeting Zadok. He had to stay for a lecture in the glorious Sala Riario on the Internal Forum from James, Cardinal Stafford. Sad to say, even princes of the Church use PowerPoint. I skedaddled.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:38 PM

The Crypta Balbi and a new Mithraeum!

I had a number of firsts today - I'll talk about one here and one in the next post. "Layers of Rome" went to the Crypta Balbi this morning - one of my favorite museums in Rome, one of the few which covers the early Middle Ages unapologetically. What's more, it's a very new museum and full of delightful conceits of post modern museology - like this grand space in which we see a wire frame reminder of the architecture of the porticus with a few fragments of decorative stucco which would have been applied originally over brick cores (and click to go to the Flickr photo stream to see a view from the rar of this reconstruction). Beyond the wire and stucco facade of the portico is the heavy travertine and tufa rear wall - all this sheltered under a very high tech steel and glass roof. We went to the lowest level, to the top, and out to the exedra - where we saw a recently excavated mithraeum!

This is the second mithraeum the class has seen (we've also been to San Clemente). This one is in almost as good a shape - and they pulled some interesting bits out, of which I didn't get any decent pictures. I hate shooting things in vitrines. One fun thing here is the pit between the couch area, which the archaeologists are reconstructing as a drain for the bull blood from the taurobolium, the bull sacrifice.

The Electronic Journal of Mithraic Studies says it was excavated in 2000, which is still pretty recent. Their photograph shows the pit still covered with a round drain cover (?). They also have a photograph (taken through the vitrine!) of the marble fragments found there - a tiny taurobolium relief is on the right.

Here's a reconstruction of a ceremony in the space which may help you make more sense of my photo.

The next time I teach the course here I might have to do a whole week on Mithraea per se.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:08 PM

March 4, 2008

On being a beginner, or Lucy Clink and the drawing class, without me.

I was taking the picture. Click to see two of the things we drew yesterday on the flickr photostream.

One of the things I have enjoyed about both semesters in Rome (2003 and now) is taking a class - professors owe it to themselves to be bad at something once in awhile; that helps us keep our 100-level classes more honest. You know, there was a time, now very far away, when I knew very little about art history - and it pays to be reminded of what it feels like to be a beginner.

Oh - yes, I've taken drawing before - but somehow it always gets dropped when things get busy.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:49 PM

March 3, 2008

The only thing worse than grading . . .

. . . is a LOT of grading!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:12 PM

February 29, 2008

Ibuprofen and a Ritter Sport for lunch

Want to know what kind of day I'm having? I just had 3 Ibuprofen (yes, I brought my own big ol' American bottle, none of this 12 euro-pills in a blister pack thing for me) and a Ritter Sport hazelnut bar for lunch. It's one of those days.

I started not by oversleeping or anything like that - instead, I checked the wrong appointment list for midterms. I thought the first appointment was at 10.30. Then, as I'm drinking caffé and looking at my appointment book for the day at about 9.29 I realize that the first appointment was at 9.00. I was looking at the wrong day!

So I run out the door leaving everything behind but a notebook and pen and start making calls and sending text messages. I reach everyone and they're all remarkably forgiving. I make it to the Velabro by 10.15 and get started. I get home after 7 appointments (one of them agreed to wait until Monday, since she wanted to catch a train to Florence at noon) and took my first Ibuprofen of the day. You see, my affliction is flaring up this week and I should have taken a does before I left the house. I may even try some of the prescription anti-inflammatory if it's not better by tomorrow - I have a few more appointments tomorrow morning.

The Ritter Sport helped. Chocolate always does.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:45 PM

February 27, 2008

Midterms

I'm with a cup of tea and my feet up - I gave 5 midterms this morning and have 3 this afternoon. I chose the Velabro because of this pedagogically annoying scaffolding. So far two students have chosen to talk about the Temple of Portunus, scaffolding and all, which has been encouraging.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:19 PM

February 26, 2008

via Cenami, Lucca, Italy

So I'm walking around Lucca and I hit the via Cenami a few times and I keep asking myself why the name is so familiar and then I think AHAH! Giovanna Cenami! Which probably doesn't ring a bell for very many of my regular viewers. Do you know Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding? Of course you do! That's Giovanna on the right. Big Lucchese banking family, though the poor girl may never have seen the incredibly beautiful city of Lucca - she lived in Paris. Which in the 1430s was a little less thrilling than it is today. Giovanni Arnolfini was a Florentine. So teaching Northern Renaissance at Agnes Scott paid off, and in Tuscany!

Lucca photo set.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:00 PM

February 22, 2008

Off for a weekend alone!

I'm off to Pisa and Lucca for a couple of days on my own!

This idea of traveling on the weekends was something I never pulled off when I taught here in 2003. I was too tired at the end of each week and too stressed about the possibility of needing to be handy in case something happened. The two worst things that happened all term - at least that anyone ever called me about on an emergency, Saturday basis - were: someone got locked out of his apartment and didn't have his landlord's number on his cell phone; some students got back to Rome from an excursion after the busses switched from the regular to the night schedule and couldn't afford a taxi back to their relatively inaccessible apartment, so I had to run over to the station and loan them some cash. Nevertheless, I was ready at all times to do my best to avert a Midnight Express scenario. I guess I have an overly-active imagination, especially for someone without children of his own.

So I never got out of town that year except on group trips. Not that I really minded - Rome is a city for exploration, and I'm still far from having seen everything I know I want to see, let alone all the things I run across by happy serendipity. And having Rome to myself on weekends was as good as going away.

This year, though, I have a colleague to share the worries - yay, Nick! He's on duty this weekend.

And, we've recently had a pep talk about travel in Italy from a William Smith Alum - Nicole Franchini, WS '81 - who has lived in Italy for over 20 years and writes travel books.

So, with those two encouragements, I decided to at least get out of town and go somewhere (1) that I teach a lot and (2) have never been. Pisa and Lucca won! I still would like to go to Milan, where I've never seen Sant'Ambrogio. I've been to Venice, but there's a huge exhibition of Roman and Barbarian stuff - I'd link to the page but it's egregious flash and takes over your screen - here's a review.

Oh well - I'll have some pictures on Sunday!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:58 AM

February 21, 2008

The midterm is posted

I'm giving oral midterm and final in Layers. The final exam asks them to do what I do, act as a kind of hyper-informed and reasonably organized tour guide.* That performance will be on a subject/site of the student's choice for a group of me and at least 4 or 5 other students. The midterm will be one on one, and for a set neighborhood. Here's the assignment:

Midterm:

1. Take a small area in Rome.
2. Prepare yourself by visiting and reading to have a 30 minute conversation with me about its layered nature.
3. Be ready to give detailed information about at least 3 of the buildings or sites in the area - though you need to be able to talk in general about all of them and about the area as a meaningful unit.

This region of Rome was called the Velabro or the Forum Boarium. A creek came down from the hills and ran into the Tiber - in historical times (by the 5th century) it was drained and became the main cattle market - Forum Boarium - of the City.

This region stands on the left bank downstream from Tiber Island, roughly between the Tiber, the Capitoline, The Palatine, and the Aventine. It is bounded buy the Lungotevere, via S. Maria in Cosmedin, via D. Greca, Ara Massima di Ercole, via S. Teodoro, Via D. Fienili, vicolo Jugario, and Via Foro Olitorio. Among the buildings you may want to consider are the Round Temple, the Temple of Portunus, the Arch of Janus, the Arch of the Argentarii (silversmiths), S. Maria in Cosmedin, San Grigorio al Velabro, and the House of the Crescenzii. There are a number of Fascist era buildings on via Petroselli. The Theater of Marcellus is NOT available for this assignment - it's too far upstream. The Circus Maximus is out, too.

Claridge considers this area between 247-263. To do well you will need to do more than reading Claridge! Draw on the techniques you have learned in class, on other readings, and on your own careful observations. Drawing sketch plans is an excellent way to learn the names of buildings!

Here's the map:

View Larger Map

*back in 2003, if I hadn't gotten a tenure track offer to go back to Hobart & William Smith I think I would have stayed in Rome and tried to go pro.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:00 PM

February 18, 2008

The Bones of St Peter

We had another amazing-layers-of-Rome day today - the excavations under St Peter's, also known as the least pleasant place to try to arrange a tour in Rome that actually purports to be open to the public. Yes, you have to pay in advance. No, you can't necessarily choose the day you want to go. Oh, well. Luckily 1 of my 2 groups had an English speaking tour guide (a PNAC student). I haven't heard how group 1 went, but they had an Italian speaker (though she soundly vaguely Hispanophone to me while she was handing out the tickets).

I think my folks were pretty prepared. I'll put it this way, they had very few questions other than "where is John Paul II buried." That part made me feel cheerful about the semester so far.

Still and all, the tomb of St Peter is pretty amazing for students in a course like this. Folks are welcome to believe that Christ is not God and that these aren't actually the bones of St Peter, but there's just no arguing that there was considerable pilgrimage to this tomb at the traditional site of the burial by the end of the 1st century, within 30-40 years of Peter's death. And the only reason not to be sure it was earlier is that what we have left is the first remodeling of the original tomb. Talk about the hermeneutic of continuity! I still would have preferred to do this before San Clemente, but that's the Office of the Excavations for you.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:50 PM

February 14, 2008

The unexcavated level at Pompeii - a way to get students excited about learning?

I figure that some students think I'm a little over the top about it, but when I think about Pompeii I get excited about how much more there is to learn - how much work there is still to be done! Whenever I teach the city, let alone visit, I always stress how much unexcavated territory there is - and remote sensing can do only so much!

Here at the Villa of Mysteries you can see the house on the higher ground, which represents the level of the soil before excavation started. There are still big chunks inside the walls that are untouched - not that they don't have enough to do re-digging in a more scientific fashion lots of areas that were kind of garbled in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Still, academic life sometimes seems to me a series of mood swings - everything has been said (and usually in German); nothing has been done. I'm sure the middle ground is more accurate, but looking at a wall like this makes me think telling students the second to get them excited about the life of the mind is not such a bad plan.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:42 PM

February 12, 2008

MKB for scale

Mary Kate studied the Ara Pacis with me before and insisted that we need an image in the HWS Visual Resources Collection with someone in it to show scale because she had gotten no idea of how big the figures in the reliefs are from studying it on screen - so here she is standing in front of the Italia/Tellus/Rhea Silvia relief (take your pick for the identification of the central female). Talk about embodiment! Now she'll be a virtual presence in Art 101 and Roman Art!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:47 PM

Back from Break and Ready for more Roman Art

We had a longish walk down south down the Via del Corso from the Flaminian Gate to the Piazza della Colonna (Column of Marcus Aurelius) and then a windy path to see the obelisk in front of Palazzo Montecitorio (formerly part of the the Augustan Sundial). My pedagogical goal with the long walk - after all, we passed within a couple of blocks of the Ara Pacis on our way south - goes to the difference between teaching with slides in a darkened classroom and teaching on site: in Rome we can embody the past, use our bodies to stimulate our imaginations. We don't look at pictures, we look at real things and we have real experiences of distance and time and topography. One of the great problems of studying ancient Rome is imagining away the intervening centuries, but I hope that task is easier for the crew after today.

Because there's nothing more easily exhausted than a 20 year old, we took a cappucino break before heading in to the new Richard Meier pavilion to see the Altar of Augustan Peace. (Alright, I'm being cranky - I was ready for a little something warm myself.)

This was my second time inside the Meier building and my 3rd visit to the area - I have decided that I like the Meier building a good bit - though it looks too big from the north - probably entirely because of the auditorium the client added to the project. I'll go back and take more pictures with the Nikon.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:36 PM

January 31, 2008

The semester has fully begun...

The semester is fully underway and students have lots of assignments! They had an exam for the intensive portion (5 days a week, longer hours) of their Italian language and culture classes yesterday and today. The ones in digital photography are taking pictures of St. Peter's, the ones in my class are writing about portraiture, and everyone's reading Marshall McLuhan - and three museums this week!

Monday we went to the Vatican Museums - utter overload, of course. I concentrated on the huge sarcophagus set-up in the Pio-Gregoriano collection, trying to prepare them for the Mathews book. The advantage of a big load of real things is that it sometimes helps students to understand two important things. First, that ancient art was not all one-off pieces of creative sculpture, but was often semi-industrial production customers bought off the shelf - in other words, if you see 27 Jonah sarcophagi (and I only exaggerate slightly) you begin to believe what your medievalist professor keeps hammering on, that art is not always about self-expression. Of course, if they actually went to a Cezanne blockbuster and saw dozens of paintings of exactly the same thing they might understand that they've been lied to by the world about the Romantic Artist as Genius of Expression. You don't paint a dozen haystacks and mean anything particularly expressive by them. Second, they come to understand the art historical study of iconography a bit more clearly. Very often when our students see only the tiny selection of images in a textbook they learn to parrot our idea of iconography, but they don't really understand how the profession worked out the patterns. A BIG dose of realia helps there.

Tuesday we went to the Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo Massimo al Therme (you can click on Flickr and see my pictures from my preview visit last week). Again, we ran through the traditional narrative of Roman sculpture - verism, naturalism, idealism, and back. I was especially pleased with the sudden introduction of the carved iris and pupil in the galleries of the 150s - they saw that novelty clearly! So then I set them free to choose two busts to analyze in terms of patronal intentions. We'll see how that turns out. We also got to run through the Rosso Pompeiano show. They liked the garden room - and then we elevatored it up to the top floor for Livia's garden room! It's hard to do comparison on the hoof, but these two are physically close enough to pull it off, I think.

Wednesday, Nick took the photo class to the Museum of Rome, the Palazzo Braschi, where there is a great exhibition of photos of St. Peter's from 1850 to the present. There are splendid photos - everything from very early work to stereo cards (three set up with viewers!) to things taken last year. More than that, though, the photos make a great starting point for a course whose secondary concentration is how photography is used to construct a sense of identity and a sense of place. I tagged along just to look!

Today, we're using the tickets from the Pal. Massimo to get into the Palazzo Altemps. The tickets are good for 3 days for a couple of buildings in the city, and since we already have them I added an optional come-along-if-you-want-to session. I know I have 3 takers already!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:32 AM

January 28, 2008

Everything's better in Rome . . .

When, during the fall of 2006 I was deciding about whether or not to apply to co-direct the Rome program this year one of my concerns was that right about now I feared I would be losing my mind because of - um - anticipating certain news. My colleague the baroquista convinced me to go ahead by reminding me that, after all, everything's better in Rome, even waiting to hear the final tenure decision.

She is right.

And I survived the final hurdle - the Board of Trustees decided not to reject various and sundry recommendations and the decision of the president of these Colleges.

I would like very much to thank everyone who helped me and pushed me and prayed for me and such.

Oh - and I got to kiss the arm-bone of St. Thomas Aquinas this evening, too! It's his memorial and I made it through solemn vespers and mass at Sta Maria sopra Minerva without coughing too much and got to venerate the relic - everything's better in Rome!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:27 PM

January 27, 2008

The most amazing thing I saw on Saturday

I went to the Palazzo Massimo building of the Museo Nazionale Romano to preview for class next week. Gosh it's going to be a mess. I already know the permanent collection well enough to walk through with them, but it's somewhat disarranged for a travelling show from Naples, Rosso Pompeiano. They've hauled a bunch of paintings up from Naples.

The most splendid thing is what my horrid photograph shows - the garden room from the House of the Golden Bracelet at Pompeii. I had never seen it live. I had no idea. Here are some clearer photos, but no context. Here's some context, but the paintings have already been removed. The room is amazing and amazingly intact. I'm in love with the herms carrying pictures on their heads - one of them is on the right of my photo. The composition of elements is wonderfully complicated - what a neat room! It was worth the price of admission by itself.

Pal. Massimo doesn't have any space set aside for changing exhibitions, so they just scooted things around and jammed the Pompeian things in. It doesn't work all that well, but it's probably about the best solution to the problem.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:43 PM

January 25, 2008

The best analysis of Italian politics I've read all week

ME: There's no government?

Barman: Right.

ME: So what are we going to do?

Barman: God willing it'll last until January and we won't pay taxes...

I only wish I'd read this before lunch, when one of my students asked me the same question in a worried tone of voice. My explanation was much wordier, but not all that different.

Reading the following almost made me wish I'd stayed home this afternoon to watch the coverage. All in all I preferred Sta. Pudenziana - pictures to come tomorrow.

The fiery session later included one senator being spat on, fainting and being carried out on a stretcher, The Associated Press reported.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:03 PM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2008

Fascist city planning is - um - big

It was a LONG walk from the Metro Station to the museum. It didn't help that I missed the turn - but the main problem is that E.U.R. was designed for cars instead of people - and that's an incredible contrast to the city center. I think everyone got that point!

The Museo della Civiltà Romana is south and east of the city - towards the airport - in EUR, Esposizione Universale Roma, a region of development planned to host a world's fair in 1942 in conjunction with the 1942 Olympics Mussolini didn't get to host because of that World War! I believe he opened EUR anyway to celebrate year XX of the Fascist regime.

The whole zone is a monument to Rationalist City Planning, though the museum itself is in a stripped classical style, and there's no better way to feel the difference in planning scale for people who've been walking around Rome for two weeks than to walk from the Metro station to the museum.

So, the museum is a triumph of oddity - it has almost nothing 'real.' The collection is made up of high quality plaster casts (surely some of the little pottery things are authentic, but I've never slowed down to look) of some of the most important Roman statues and reliefs. They were assembled for two purposes - a 1911 exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the unification of Italy* and a big 1930s exhibition about Augustus. Given that you could see almost all the real things in Rome, about the only reason to go see the casts is that they have the complete Column of Marcus Aurelius frieze arranged at eye-level, which is handy. In general, though, the collection is a fine example of creating national identity with the art of the past, certainly a topic of our BiDisciplinary course this semester. I wonder if that 1911 show travelled around the country?

But then there's the model of Rome! If you took Latin in high school you've seen photos or posters of it - it's omnipresent: Rome c. 300 CE. Click on the picture, go to my Flickr page, and look at the students admiring the model! Whereas their experience of EUR was a piece of embodied analysis, feeling the scale, here they get a bird's eye view of the City they've been trying to piece together for 2 weeks. I think it's the perfect conclusion to the Armature Project, and I heard enough of the right kind of reactions to think it worked again this time, things like "Ohhhh! That's where that is! Ah! There's the Servian Wall!"

*The defeat of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies by the Garibaldini and its absorption by the Savoys, at least - they didn't get Rome until 1870.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:51 PM | Comments (1)

January 19, 2008

Whew!

Whew - one of the messiest jobs of the season is out of the way - the students are moved into their apartments.

You see, we put them in a hotel in the Centro for 10 days or so every year for orientation and to build group ties. Then we break them up - this year into 4 apartments scattered around the city (though two of the apartments of William Smith students are in the same building, which will be convenient). Unfortunately, given the logistics we ended up making 4 trips from the hotel, one for each apartment-full. The van was packed each time! Nick rode with two of them and got them settled, then I went with the last two. So, we met landlords, got pointers about how to run the washers, stern talks about no noise after 22:00 (pray for me!), and keys for everyone.

Everyone was remarkably pleased on walk-through, and no one has called to complain yet. Pray for me some more!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:23 PM | Comments (0)

Ponte Fabricius, the inscription

Since both days included the bridges to Tiber Island, I thought I'd sum up the assignment with this view of the bridge - several more to see on Flickr -- click and view!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2008

The Mad dash.

Yesterday we started with Bridge I at Tiber Island, walked through the Ghetto to Largo di Torre Argentina, took a bus to Termini to the piece of surviving chunk of Servian Wall for Walls I to talk. Then we metroed to Spagna and the Spanish Steps where we looked down the via Condotti with the Streets group (see below). Then we walked to the Trevi Fountain for Aqueducts I.

Today we started again with Bridges (II) at Isola Tiberina (different link), cut through the Ghetto again to get a bus - this time we got off at PIazza Repubblica to hear from Aqueducts II, since it's a piece of the Baths of Diocletian, after all. Then it was on foot for Roads II to tell us about via XX Settembre, one of those places a long, straight Roman road (the via Nomentana) comes into town. Then by metro and bus we trecked off to the Porta San Sebastiano, where Walls II showed us the Aurelian Wall.

I'm a little tired. But in a good way.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:07 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2008

4 Present to 11 . . . and I photograph

The Streets Group (day one) chose to present about the Via Condotti at the Spanish Steps (not exactly an ancient street, but the name at least comes from the ancient water conduits - it worked). I

It POURED until just before the first presentation started, and then it started to clear. By the time we got to the Trevi Fountain (an outlet for the Aqua Virgo) the sun came out and all was white and gold and beautiful.

So, all in all a good start to the students' academic work!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:35 PM | Comments (1)

Always the security excuse

So I'm having trouble with flickr uploader again. I hate having to go to an internet cafe just to upload pictures, but there it is.

Oh, well - you'll just have to wait.

In the meantime, day one of presentations down - all in all good.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:03 PM

January 16, 2008

Like pulling teeth

Well, it's not that bad . . . but suddenly 3 of the 8 groups are up in the air about their selections, including one group supposed to present tomorrow. It's a little difficult to do logistics for running all over town that way. They need to choose! *NOT getting cranky. Not getting cranky.*

Speaking of 'running all over town,' Nick and I ran around some of town this morning with the rental agent for the apartments the students move into on Saturday. All looks acceptable - even good. Living situations are always a bit of a problem, but nowadays, unlike the program in 2003, we use apartments without resident landlords. That system was too complictated and generated far too much friction. This may work better - we'll see.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:05 PM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2008

Hard at work on their first assignment!

I'm blogging from GustoLab, watching a table of four getting to work on the streets of Rome

Here's the assignment in full:

If we look closely at a city we can perceive the armature or structural system supporting the daily activities of inhabitants. This armature in Rome is millennia old - some elements have been in continual use since 500 BCE. This project is designed to orient you to the City by becoming active observers of its parts and to orient you to the course by becoming active presenters of your findings to each other.

We will divide you into a number of groups of 3 or 4 students and ask you to work together to study an element of the armature of Rome from its classical origin to its present function. Learn as much as you can about the element, choose (in consultation with us!) one thought-provoking example to presentation to the rest of the us, digest the information as well as possible, and parcel out responsibilities for the presentation. EVERYONE in each group must present, and everyone should be ready to ask questions at other groups' presentations. Participation carries a lot of weight in all of our courses this term! Half of the groups will present on Thursday 1/17/08 (Giovedì 17/1/08) and the other half on Friday 1/18/08 (Venerdì 18/1/08).

The order of the elements here is intentional - we start with the bounds of the city, both real and symbolic. Then we think about lines which cross the map and which in 4 dimensional reality allow citizens to cross the City. Finally, we consider a set of linear elements which citizens never walked along, but without which life itself would have stopped - and almost did in the early Middle Ages.

WALLS and GATEWAYS
STREETS and ROADS
BRIDGES
AQUEDUCTS

While studying your element, think about being able to explain in the presentation:

1. When was the first one built, where and by whom?
2. the last one?
3. Why was it built? What were the political, economic, and social circumstances?
4. What is notable about the structure in terms of technical innovation, aesthetic design, quality of construction (materials used, permanence).
5. Who actually did the work?
6. How exactly did it function then, how does it function now?
7. What has happened to the structure since it was built? Is there any political/economic/social significance to this history?

Evaluation:
An acceptable presentation will present a digested view of what you've figured out from books and an internet search.

A good presentation will integrate the material, draw on your immediate observation, relate the site you show us to other sites we may or may not have seen already, and provide an idea of sources used to gather information. The audience will understand that the group members have discussed the contents of the presentation and how each contributor's portion works with the whole.

An excellent presentation will do all of the above and with style, showing care in both thought and preparation for the actual presentation, extending beyond the assigned questions to consider new territory.

I did a demonstration by taking them around the corner from the Campo dei fiori to look at what modern Rome has made of the foundations of the Theater of Pompey. Click and enlarge at point A on the map - look at the semicircles of streets and blocks . . . those rise up on the form of the theater, a semicircle of concentric and radial lines of masonry. There is almost nothing left of the building (unless you go in a few restaurants and certainly some cellars), but the ghost of the building still shows. The straight streets to the right (east) of the semicircle represents the side walls of the very large courtyard attached to the theater - which allowed patrons to stroll in gardens between acts or between plays. Pompey built the first permanent theater in Rome in 60 BCE - something which always surprises me. Plautus (died 185 BCE) and Terence (died 158) would have played only in temporary theaters, or on one of the flat spaces at the Forum Romanum! Pompey's innovation was to introduce a permanent building on the Greek model (sort of) to the City, which at least shows Roman assimilation of Greek institutions and almost certainly should be understood as Roman triumphalism, especially when combined with the decorative statuary Pompey certainly imported as well. Oh, and Julius Caesar was assassinated here, which allowed me a second link to the Forum tour last week.

View Larger Map

So, the group across GustoLab is hard at work deciding what to say and where to say it! I'm looking forward to the end of the week.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:15 AM

January 13, 2008

NOW I'm a happy professor

I typed sono molto contento the other day, but this morning is better. It's Sunday in Rome. It's chilly. I have a cough. I'm footsore from walking too far in wet shoes yesterday. I was not in the mood for the Porta Portese market this morning. However, I was out of bed and ready to go at an appropriate hour. I texted the group for whom I have telephone numbers so far.* Moments later I get a call saying that they organized themselves last night and are standing on the platform for the number 8 tram on their way to the flea market.

On their own!

Self-reliance!

Yay!

That's a good sign. I raise a 2nd cappucino to a less stressful day.

*Grrrrr...though they now all have cellular service a few of them haven't given us their numbers! Nick's latest group email on the subject used all caps - readers who know him can interpret that!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2008

Almost all of us

The group, without Nick. He was taking the picture. They look pretty chipper for people who have only been in Rome for 2 nights and have just walked around the Forum for over 2 hours!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:53 AM | Comments (2)

January 11, 2008

First Lesson!

Well, flickr is hating me right now, so no pictures of the Forum . . . but we all went to the Forum Romanum this morning - and I have a nice picture of the Arch of Titus through the morning mist. You'll see it soon!

We have a great guide for the morning, Cristina Giannicchi, who will also be with us for the Vatican Museum and the Colosseum area. The Forum is so confusing a site that I get buried in details; it's really worth leaving to a professional, and Cristina did a fine job of picking up the themes of the semester. She stressed the positive nature of reuse and recycling of architecture - that the parts that are preserved more or less intact were those used by the Church later, and the other parts are what fell into utter ruin. My class will find that handy! She also set up the folks working next week on Roman roads and streets really well!

I've earned a weekend of rest! I'll spend some of it visiting the apartments to figure out locations, bus routes, and transit times and I want to preview the Vatican Museum. I feel like a trip to Sta. Prassede, too - especially if the weather's nice. Then there's the flea market in Trastevere, again if the weather's nicer than predicted. We'll see!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:17 PM | Comments (1)

January 10, 2008

Sono MOLTO contento!

I have wireless in the GustoLab! Yay! Mille grazie, Pasquale! Poor guy - he had to configure 29 students' laptops . . . but in the process, he figured out how to get Macs to play nice with their wireless router. Passwords everywhere.

The real problem turned out to be that the Scuola is running a tight ship on the internet. As of 2005, internet cafes, and GustoLab counts as one, have to be able to demonstrate who is using the browsers and where they're going. Terrorism, you know. As though a terrorist who couldn't get a decent fake i.d. should be practicing mass murder, anyway.

Otherwise, what a day! All kinds of paperwork, slightly jet lagged students . . . but caccia e pepe, saltimbocca alla Romana, and cherry pie on the way for dinner! So we have the one student with celiac disease, one freshly-declared vegetarian (I can't TELL you how many times I asked in advance!), and one student who "just doesn't like cheese." No, he's not allergic, or lactose intolerant, but just doesn't like it.

*I hope it hasn't broken my ability to use it at hotspots anywhere else in town, but hey! This is really useful.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:02 PM

They're here!

All 29 of them - even the one who hasn't returned an email since the end of classes; we honestly didn't know if he was coming or not. He had never told anyone about his flight information.

But they're here, and we meet 15 minutes to start Orientation. The first tour - the Forum Romanum - is tomorrow.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)

January 8, 2008

Gorgeous day in Rome

but it's 62 at the Ramada in Geneva . . . oh well, I'm here for more than just the temperature! I'm here for the two meals I had today, for instance. Lunch was an utterly perfect bowl of soup of mixed beans and cereals with a little olive oil across the top. Dinner was a pizza at about my favorite place in Rome - though I like it better when I'm there at 1 p.m. sitting in the sun . . . but after all, I'm here for more than just the temperature!

I believe that the students taking the group flight have left JFK. I've called the bus company - so I've done most of my part to get ready for their physical arrival (other than actually showing up to meet them at Fiumicino). This time tomorrow we'll be having a welcome dinner - and then gelato at Giolitti! (which, despite their webpage, really IS a classic early 20th century gelateria - a little touristic, but excellent gelato)

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:06 PM

January 7, 2008

GustoLab

I'm standing here using a stylin' wall-mounted computer sippin' un caffe and admiring our partner institution, the Scuola Leonardo da Vinci . . . they have recently renovated space in their building (un vero grotto, my friend Raffaella assures me) into an amazing space for learning about food and wine - GustoLab. It also provides a place for students to hang out, something that was sorely needed for the Rome program. Any 2003 alums out there - no more office hours at Cafe Paparazzi!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:36 PM

January 4, 2008

Closer!

The students arrive next Wednesday . . . and the day looms closer and closer! Nick and I had a good meeting this afternoon to discuss some readings; luckily, we agree that more is more. I think we have all the group meals/food events worked out for the semester. Getting there!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:11 PM

December 22, 2007

On my way!

I really ought to create a category called: Rochester Airport free wireless, yay!

Yes, I'm on my way!

Geneva - Rochester - Atlanta - Chattanooga

then in about 10 days

Chattanooga - Atlanta - Frankfurt - ROMA!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:47 AM

December 20, 2007

Trapped in an icy, bureaucratic Hell

I really wanted to be out of here by now, on my way to balmy Tennessee and the bosom of my family. I knew it wouldn't work, so I didn't rush it. It's really not working now.

I am going to vent a bit - please be assured that I apologized several times for the crankiness that I let show to the functionary on the phone.

1. I take a number of maintenance medications for allergy and asthma
2. I leave 1/1/08 for 4 months abroad from Tennessee, having gone to celebrate Christmas with my family without returning to Geneva, NY
3. The last time I taught abroad I took a 4 month supply of my drugs with me, thus saving shipping fees and assuring myself of a wheeze-free spring
4. These Colleges are changing insurance carrier as of 1/1/08
5. I informed (as fully as possible, I thought) the H.R. folk of my needs and plans in October. I have been assured on a number of occasions that everything would be fine
6. I got all my prescriptions rewritten in 4-month form
7. Today, having not received my expedited insurance card yet again, I call H.R. and am told that I can download a temporary card and that it should work
8. I go to the pharmacy. Of course it doesn't work. I call H.R. They tell me now (not an impersonal "they" - I speak to two of 'em) that I should get a month on my old insurance and that somehow after 1/1/08 the rest will be filled and will be shipped to me in Rome (no persons involved, so far as I can tell from their explanation)
9. I get cranky
10. I apologize
11. I point out that whoever is going to do this in January will be paying a hefty copayment + shipping - do they want me to leave cash? No one has an answer
12. I am told to email the H.R. director with the names and dosages of the medications and that she will contact New Carrier and ask
13. I come home cranky to await word

Further - Hell Thaws

The H.R. Director made a great push and things will work out - I wrote a check for the copayment and she will receive my prescription drugs and ship them to me in Rome! Yay! Thanks!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:17 PM

December 19, 2007

Books and travel

I know that I have too many books. But you know, I use these damn things! How many can I take . . . and do I have the budget to ship some of them?

Further: the good thing about digging through all my shelves? I found TWO Christmas present books I'd bought this summer and put away! Yay!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:21 PM

The biannual horror

I finished grading last night at about 9 and went to the Registrar's web tool to input the final grades for the last few folks in my 101 stack only to discover that one of my students is NOT on the roll. That's never happened to me! In fact, I'm not sure how it happened! He's been there all semester, he did all the work, and he got some flavor of B. He was certainly enrolled in the course's Blackboard site - and that happens automatically at the first of the semester, which implies that he WAS registered for the course at some point. I can add students myself, but I usually don't do that until they have officially added the course. I can imagine that I slipped up and put him into the Blackboard version of the course without checking the Registrar's list first, but if so it's a novel mistake for me. Argh!

--Update As best as the Registrar's folks and I can figure it, said student probably presented me with a drop/add sheet - which is usually my precondition for a manual addition to the Blackboard site - and then failed to turn it in. They noted that he had failed another class at the same time slot as mine, evidently for never having attended. Youths. What are you going to do?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:39 AM

December 13, 2007

Oh, the administration of it all!

We have, sad to say, an odd number of female students coming to Rome for the semester. Thus, we have to keep being certain that there are 3-person rooms in hotels, etc. We dodged the even/odd bullet with males; we had 9 coming, but one - um - withdrew from these Colleges somewhat abruptly. Oh - and I'm meeting today with a student who suffers from Celiac disease. Gluten intolerance. Why, I am crankily muttering to myself, would someone with celiac disease choose to study in pasta-land for 4 months? In an amazing small-world incident, I had a friend with celiac disease visit me in Rome in 2003 - so I emailed him and he responded with some links, including these cards to print out and show to waiters.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:42 AM

December 10, 2007

Gothic Revival in the Finger Lakes

This is what my students in the Gothic course have been working on for their final project - Gothic Revival in the Finger Lakes. Take a look! They're not finished (grrrr!), but the project is closer than it looked on Saturday, when I wanted to kill myself.

I'd like to turn this into an ongoing project, adding to it from course to course. I'll try to get the IT folk to move it to a more permanent URL, too.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:09 AM

December 5, 2007

The Horror of Students Abroad

I've been trying hard not to read much about the horrible murder of a British student in Perugia, especially when the police arrested her American roommate. Here's a depressing op-ed piece in the New York Times from a young woman trying to go on being an American student in Italy.

...Amanda is a girl my exact age, 20, from my hometown, Seattle. Because of her story, which has dominated the news in Europe, and not just in the tabloids, life as an American student abroad is not at all what I expected.

I came here imagining I’d have to answer the numerous questions about the war, our unpopular president and our cultural exports that still dominate Italian television. Italians love to argue. And while I have had many late-night discussions about America’s failings, it’s been nothing like the storm of more personal attention that has come with Ms. Knox’s arrest.

. . .

Since this murder, to be a college student from Seattle has become shorthand for something else. Ms. Knox has been called “una bugiarda” (liar), “L’Americana,” or my personal favorite, “La Luciferina.” Even worse, her image-destroying online postings, in which she appears to be inebriated, have become part of this media circus. Italians have gotten all too well acquainted with “la studentessa di Seattle” (thanks again for the great press). Laughing about her constantly changing alibi, they now often refer to her just as “Amanda.”

. . .

American college students already have to live down a stereotype of their own making. Hordes of them drunkenly parade — or literally pub crawl — past Renaissance masterpieces on the streets of Florence at 4 a.m., shouting clichés like “Ciao, bella!” and “La vita è bella!” Add in our often laughable pronunciation of Dante’s beautiful language and our sinfully casual dress — the North Face fleece college uniform sharing the streets with Dolce & Gabbana-strutting Italian babes — and you can see why it’s an uphill struggle.

It’s bad enough that the dollar is at a record low and that President Bush is about as popular here as Chinese food. Not to mention, I’m always trying to explain that “The O.C.” isn’t real life and that’s not how most people in the United States live.

Now throw in the blue-eyed studentessa, a poster girl for college debauchery. To read the articles about Amanda Knox, you would think that all American students are hash-smoking party girls with little memory of their weekends.

When I tell people I'm going to be teaching on a term in Italy or that these Colleges have an annual program in Italy they often (even 'usually') ask "Oh, in Florence?" There are two reasons we have our program in Rome rather than Florence. One is that stuff in Rome is considerably more interesting for every period other than the Renaissance itself, and there's plenty of interesting Renaissance stuff in Rome if that's what one wants to study. The other is that there are far too many American students in Florence at any one time for there to be much hope of contact with Italy and Italians. We have our problems in Rome, but the American bubble is much less pronounced. We hope. I pray.

I've worried about helicopterish parents pulling students out of our program at the last minute because of all this, which hasn't happened so far. We have been very lucky - and blessed with pretty reasonable students - in the 5 or 6 years worth of programs since I've been paying attention, and our biggest problems tend to be internal group dynamics (roommate issues) and health (flu epidemics). Pray for us that those remain our big problems this year!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:39 AM | Comments (3)

December 3, 2007

First Mondays

First Monday: the regular meeting of the Faculty of these Colleges went a tad long. I managed to make it past the quorum call, past the departure of almost everybody, all the way through. I kept reminding myself that if the tenure decision is favorable this is the last meeting I'll have to attend for 3 semesters. If the tenure decision goes against me, it was the last Faculty meeting I'll ever bother to attend here. Either way - I put up with an extra half hour. It's not as though I have anything more exciting to do tonight other than grade papers.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:31 PM

December 2, 2007

Roma Aeterna!

The reality is starting to sink in - a month from now I'll be in Rome. My colleague Nick Ruth and I will lead 29 Hobart & William Smith students on a semester-long adventure. He will teach a digital imaging course, I will teach an art history course, and we'll team teach an experiment: Inventing Rome, Inventing Romans - sort of a mass media course or a visual culture course. We'll find out. Here's a page with rudimentary course descriptions for HWS Rome 2008.

Some of you have been reading my maunderings since the days before my blog fried its database, the year of my first time to take students abroad - HWS Rome 2003. I had an amazing time. I still hear occasionally from a few of the students who let me learn with them that year - and more than occasionally from a few. Drop me a line, any of you who come across this! You're welcome to visit!

However, when I got back I swore that I would never do another semester abroad alone. Being teacher, dean, head of residence life, and chief tour guide was too much for me, even with a group of students who were by and large cooperative and cheerful. By the end of March I got clinically cranky. Having Nick and his amazing wife Nissa and fun children Silas and Sasha there too will help a LOT - at least I won't have to make all the decisions alone.

For reasons administrative, curricular, and psychological this has been one very hard semester. I have resisted blogging about Rome so that I wouldn't get sucked into thinking more about then than about now. Today is the time to start thinking at least as much about then as about what's going on here!

Even sharing the program with Nick I'll still have my moments of stress - after all, no one could construe waiting to hear the tenure decision as fun. My senior colleague the Baroquista reminded me this time last year when I was agonizing about applying to run a program at all, "you know, Michael, everything's better in Rome," even waiting for the phone call. Now, though, I'm looking forward to it all . . . an apartment in the Centro storico, walking students around until they can see the Baths of Diocletian despite the missing parts, Easter vigil mass with mosaics by candlelight, and GELATO.

So - if you're going to be in Rome this spring, leave a comment or drop me a line (please note the new email address to the bottom right). I'd love to see you!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:26 PM

November 29, 2007

The Arabic situation is popping up everywhere

Inside Higher Ed has a piece on some problems in teaching Arabic in America

A report released earlier this month by the Modern Language Association found that the number of students taking Arabic in higher education institutions rose by 126.5 percent from 2002 to 2006 — to a total of 23,974. The number of colleges offering Arabic instruction also nearly doubled, from 264 in 2002 to 466 in 2006. The highest rate of growth in enrollments, meanwhile, has been at the community college level, where enrollments grew 135.8 percent over four years. Leaders in foreign language learning hailed the results as promising news – proof that interest in such a strategically important and yet tricky-to-learn tongue continues to grow.

But beyond the numbers lies a significant problem. “Although there’s a great deal of hoopla about spending money on the teaching of critical languages and this and that, the infrastructure that would really support the development of good, highly-trained, pedagogically-trained university instructors isn’t there,” says Catharine Keatley, associate director of the National Capital Language Resource Center, a joint project of Georgetown and George Washington Universities and the Center for Applied Linguistics.

To put those numbers in perspective, go here for a chart of enrollments for the top 15 languages offered in America. As a classics major I'm pleased to see that there are more people taking Latin than Arabic, and that Arabic is barely outpacing Greek. As someone who worries about language competence in American government and military, this would worry me, except that I know that 4 years of Greek and Latin would be great preparation for pushing on into all kinds of difficult languages - certainly better than one year of bad Arabic.

The Inside Higher Ed piece asks the obvious question about who is teaching Arabic, given the insane rise in demand. Adjuncts, of course.

Inside Higher Ed doesn't ask the question that occurs to me more and more often - what do we mean by Arabic in American education? What if the native speaker adjunct is Moroccan and our textbook series is Egyptian? How close is Iraqi Arabic to Yemeni Arabic? Does anyone really speak Modern Standard Arabic? Read my previous post on the topic and wonder. Follow the links there and you may come to agree with me that the situation is something like teaching Americans Latin before sending them to work in Latin America.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 PM

Visitor tracking and pit of your stomach emotional weirdness

I read something last week that reminded me of the power of visitor tracking - I forget what - and I mentioned it to my collegial non-blogging but regular reader and occasional commenter next door office neighbor. Then I showed her what I get from Sitemeter for free. You can skim down in the right hand column and click on my Sitemeter badge and see some stuff too, I suppose. I hadn't really looked at the hit tracker much lately, but sitting here at home with my foot elevated (grrrr, sez the Gouty Professor) I happened to look again.

Someone googled me - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Michael Tinkler. I click on the little link and discover that said googling was done from these scenic Colleges' own server - by a Windows user. This visitor spent a couple of minutes on my site and then clicked out via one of the dog pictures from last week.

So why am I feeling - um - observed? Because I figure that many people on campus who do read me have me bookmarked or can remember "Crankyprofessor.com." Those who are coming to look for the first time may well be - gulp - people reading my Tenure Box, a process I assume is going on right now. I made no mention of the blog in my tenure case, but one of the outside reviewers did, which might tip the committee off.

I don't think googling candidates for jobs or promotions is an invasion of privacy. I never tried to be particularly anonymous here; perhaps I was naive, but when I started blogging in 2002 (thanks to Amy Welborn and Megan McArdle, the latter of whom actually said something like "why don't you get a blog of your own?") I didn't consider possible professional implications. However, I've always assumed that I'm writing in public, and have consequently done my best to avoid annoying my friends and loved ones any more than I do in person.

Of course, maybe it's just the professor for whom I dog sat, looking at the cute picture of his dog in the snow.

Yeah.

I'll think about it that way.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:40 PM | Comments (1)

November 28, 2007

The Cranky Professor considers changing his name . . .

James Gillray, "The Gout"

Just back from the doctor and the pharmacy, I am considering changing my nom de blog to The Gouty Professor. Remember when I wrote that I was trying to listen more attentively when colleagues tell me to go to the doctor? Lo and behold, there turns out to be a reason I'm still limping for the fifth day in a row. Though the Nurse Practitioner is confirming my uric acid levels with a blood test I'm taking the medication as though the diagnosis is correct. What's more, my diet and genetic predisposition probably pale before iatrogenic reasons - hydrochlorothiazide for blood pressure is probably the main culprit,

Perhaps I shouldn't grade any papers tonight . . . I have far too much fellow-feeling right now with Henry VIII for the grading distribution to be very high.

Holbein, Henry VIII

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:39 PM

November 21, 2007

Not all hires work - presidential level changes at Occidental College

Prof. Soltan recently looked at arguments about why presidents in higher education pull down the big bucks. Among the arguments put forward (by a president, of course) was that presidents don't have the job security of tenure and don't take sabbaticals. Prof. Soltan disagreed. Here's an example of what often happens when a president returns to a faculty appointment, this time at Occidental, a first rate liberal arts college in California:

After only 17 months in the post, Susan Westerberg Prager announced her resignation Monday as president of Occidental College amid reports at the Eagle Rock campus that she had clashed with the school's board of trustees over not being an aggressive-enough leader.

Prager, 64, a former dean of UCLA's law school and the first female president at Occidental, said that she had not been fired from heading the 1,877-student liberal arts college. In an interview Monday, she said she had not developed "a strong compatibility" with the board chairman and senior administrators.

"I've been unable to accomplish that. And because I think so well of the quality of this place and its educational program, I think it's best for me to step aside," said Prager, whose resignation, effective Dec. 31, surprised many on campus. She expects to become a history professor at Occidental in 2009 after spending much of next year completing research at UCLA.

Dennis Collins, the board chairman, said in an interview that no particular event or controversy led to Prager's departure and that she had not been fired. "I think over time it became increasingly apparent to Susan that it wasn't moving in the way she wanted, and it probably made sense to acknowledge that," he said.

It's the old institutional fit argument, but I guess she fits in the history department. I'm sure her new peers are dying to know at what salary. She's never taught history at a college or university. She was a law school professor and dean.

Prager earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in history from Stanford University and her law degree from UCLA, where she was editor of the law review and later served as law dean for 16 years. She became the second woman to serve as president of the Assn. of American Law Schools, the leading professional organization in her field.

In 1999, she left UCLA to become provost of Dartmouth College but returned to UCLA in 2001 as a law professor. Prager's research has focused on California legal history and marital property law.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:17 AM

November 12, 2007

And I'm sure they're worth every dollar!

The Chronicle of Higher Education special on executive compensation (subscription only) is out - here's the New York Times version. Here's probably all you need to know, unless you're interested in who makes what:

But officials at high-pay institutions defend the salaries, saying they result from intense competition to hold onto talented executives necessary to help build institutional wealth and prestige. They say that running a large university is increasingly similar to running a corporation.

Let me point out that I had literally never heard of the institution with the 2nd highest pay - Philadelphia University. Never heard of it. The Times web page doesn't provide a link - you have to google it yourself - which I suppose means Philadelphia University is too low profile to generate a search in the Times archives? Odd. Now I haven't heard of every college and university in America, but still!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:16 AM

November 6, 2007

A New Virgil

These Colleges hosted a world premiere last night - the first reading from a new translation of Virgil's Aeneid, to be published next week. Why another Aeneid? We always need one - and this translation is superb. Fred Ahl, a classics professor at Cornell, spent 14 years getting Virgil into English dactylic hexameter - and it works!

I was a little surprised - I was raised to believe that hexameter isn't good in English; Fred is very convincing. You can't start a line with an unstressed syllable, which can be tricky (no unstressed articles or first person pronouns, for instance), but it works! It was very listenable. VERY. And he has worked very hard to maintain sound effects - the Laocoon passage was brilliantly hissy (preserving anguis and sanguis from Latin). Ahl says that he has stayed within 5% of the syllable count of the original - one of his goals is that students of Latin be able to use his translation as a reference.

Evidently, about 15 years ago Oxford had a couple of proposal on the table for new translations; they made their decision with a blind competition between the samples that had come in. Fred won. I think we win.

Follow the link and you can hear him read, even!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:51 AM

November 5, 2007

Dendrochronology - it's not just tree rings any more!

Serendipity! I explained dendrochronology and even mentioned the lab at Cornell to the students in Medieval Art and Literature: the Vikings on Friday - we were talking about how to date and determine the source of building materials for longboats. Today, via my friend at Mirabilis.ca, I read this helpful article about Cornell's enterprise, the Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology. I think I'll email them each a copy.

Here's a taste:

Trees of the same species from the same geographical area have fairly similar ring patterns, Manning said, because they are exposed to similar climatic conditions. By starting with living trees and then finding samples from slightly older trees used in buildings and still older trees from more ancient sites, archaeologists have been able to overlap tree-ring data to create chronologies that date back thousands of years.

Radiocarbon dating, statistical analysis, researchers' trained eyes and prior knowledge of events in the area are then used to match new samples with tree-ring chronologies from the same area. Manning and his staff in the lab have used such techniques to verify, for example, the likely origins of a Circle of Rembrandt painting (referring to an elite group of students that worked directly with the artist). He showed that the oak board of the painting came from the same tree as the board of another painting, whose origins are known and which hangs in a museum in Krakow, Poland.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:30 AM

November 2, 2007

Web-based Calendaring Bleg

My colleague and I are starting to work quite hard on planning the Rome semester; since there are two of us (and 30 students) we're interested in using some web-based calendaring - either Yahoo or Google. I have both and am now playing with both - any ideas?

It seems (at first fiddle) that Google is working on a "type in the box" method, while Yahoo uses pull-down menus for time slots. Yahoo looks a tad clunkier, but I'd get used to it.

I hate the calendaring functions of our campus webmail, or we might do it that way. These are both more elegant.

How well does iCal (or the new iCal) play with others? My colleague and at least some of the students are Windows folk.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:29 PM

October 20, 2007

Word (mis)choice of the weekend

I'm trudging through a pile of papers (plowing would sound too swift), many of which concern a statue associated with an inscription. So far everyone has referred to the text as "a quote" rather than "a quotation." I'm marking it wrong, but I fear the prescriptivists have lost, if not formally surrendered, another redoubt in quote/quotation.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:42 PM

The Final Bosses are in town

I have drifted off of a committee but got drafted for something - evidently, I'm no longer a faculty observer ('representative' would be much too strong for our role) at the Buildings & Grounds subcommittee of the board. Oh, well - interesting while it lasted. I can get back on that in a couple of years, perhaps. Meanwhile, someone responsible for keeping the spouses occupied noticed the topic I'm scheduled to cover for Parents' Weekend next week and asked if I'd do a version for the Board Spouses. I am always willing to talk about buildings. Is that a weakness? So I did the latest version of my song and dance about the Chapel, and it was fun (other than having to move the digital projection setup around the chapel to find a wireless hotspot so my laptop would work!).

The picture is from a postcard I scanned - postmarked 1907. Hobart and William Smith folks might notice the entire absence of the big tower connecting St. John's Chapel and Demarest.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:27 PM

October 19, 2007

Rainy day in Upstate New York - but at least it's not snow!

We had showers and rain off and on today - students were walking around without umbrellas and just getting wet; it is still quite warm. I said to a number of them that "it least it's not snow."

So I'm home and watching the Weather Channel to see what's up (more rain - more!) and find out that it IS snowing in the Continental U.S.

Oh.

Run!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:04 PM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2007

Now that's a departmental collection worth visiting

Lots of school collections are 'teaching collections,' meaning that we know they're not really all that great, but they've got fun examples to show students.

The School of Oriental and African Studies in London might be an exception - its collection is on show now.

Yes, there's the inevitable not to Edward Said in the article, but blip over it.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:44 AM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2007

If you're really not answering our advertisement, please don't make me read your folder . . .

REALLY good advice on the tenure track job search from Tenured Radical. A snippet: "It isn't a lottery; it only seems like one. The Shirley Jackson kind."

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:30 PM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2007

"Write what you know!" "Learn by doing!"

These mantras of modern education kill another innocent.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)

October 2, 2007

A controversial deaccessioning - Randolph (-Macon Women's) College

You seldom see the word "dastardly" used anymore, but here we go:

“This is just a dastardly thing to do,” he said. “I’m just at a loss of words … this is a terrible, terrible deed done to the students, the townspeople, and everybody who enjoys the collection.”

Randolph College, the Randolph-Macon Women's College until this past July, is spending its endowment too fast for the taste of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and has decided to sell four paintings. They're hoping to pick up $32 million. The publicity might not hurt going coed, either. Change your name, show that you have less commitment to frou frou things like art collecting - that'll bring in the guys. The quotation above is from the local story in the Lynchburg, VA, News & Advance. More personal info than the New York Times version, but the times does have a picture of the George Bellows painting they hope will bring $25 million.

The Bellows, though, has more than monetary value - it has symbolic importance to the collection. All the better to sell it to show the board's new direction. From the local story, here's Ellen Agnew, who resigned as associate director of the museum in August:

She calls “Men of the Docks,” the “cornerstone of the collection.”

It was the first painting purchased under the direction of Louise Jordan Smith, the school’s first art professor, to form the permanent art collection.

“Its significance is beyond measure in what it symbolizes - the vision, the foresight, the dedicated purpose of Louise Jordan Smith and the students and the Lynchburg community.”

Ahah - here's a better version of the picture.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:28 AM

September 22, 2007

A Nice professorial Saturday morning

The Hobart Crew coach had the clever idea of reaching out to faculty by offering a morning of rowing instruction to faculty recommended by members of the crew - so 8 of us rolled out this morning to the scenic Seneca-Cayuga Canal-side Hellstrom Boathouse for rowing! We had some explanation first from the coaches, then spent a quarter of an hour on rowing machines learning a little technique and getting pointers from the rowers.

Then we helped lug a second rowing shell down to the water and put it in. They divided us and (luckily!) 4 experienced rowers rowed with the 4 professors in each boat. The students did all the instruction - and they were quite good at it! We practiced strokes while still at dockside, then eventually pushed off and rowed around a bit, eventually building up some speed!

We got down as far as the Marina, then turned and came back, racing (and crushing!) the other boat on the way).

It was heaps of fun! I spent a little time (6 months or so) rowing single sculls in high school, but this was quite different.

Maybe there will be pictures later.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:02 PM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2007

The Rhetorical Weirdness of "Endangered Languages"

I find the rhetoric of folks talking about "endangered languages" very annoying - almost as annoying as Historical Preservation Fundamentalists (save our collapsing Historic Gas Station!) and always end up wondering about motives. It's the same annoyance as my general distaste for use of the biological model to describe inanimate objects. Art doesn't evolve, folks. Only things that can reproduce evolve. People make art. Art doesn't develop - artists change the things they do.

Here's a splashy article on language extinction, complete with video, from National Geographic News.

O.K. - about the rhetoric. Languages are not living or dead - they're languages. People are living or dead. People die. Species flourish or go extinct.

Members of the Language Preservation Community, or whatever they want to call themselves, have interesting goals - preserving human knowledge that is encoded in particular languages - that seems to ignore what many of us (most of us?) think languages are for - communication per se. You see, knowledge about specific remedies (their marketing point for making us care about vanishing languages) is there, it could be shared in the languages other people speak. If we're just talking about new and linguistically exciting names for things, then there's only interest to people who like many languages.

It seems to me that their suggestion, that with the "extinction" of a language the knowledge is no longer accessible because the nomenclature would no longer be used and shared, isn't much use. Now if the knowledge of natural cures for ancient ills is no longer shared because contemporary children prefer watching Australian television to learning respectfully from their bilingual elders, then the Language Conservationists may be right but they're also completely incapable of offering a solution. I feel the same way about Western Civilization myself, after all, and that has little to do with language.

But then people like me have always been thinking that the world was going to Hell in a hand basket. Surely Sumerian scribes thought so. Dressing up your plaint in fashionable extinction rhetoric doesn't make the position much stronger.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:45 AM | Comments (3)

September 13, 2007

My framework of Rome list

Someone asked in the comments to this post for the list - so here's the assignment.

Everyone gets a street name or group of names.

Take your place name and research it – look it up on Google maps, Mapquest, Google Earth, Wikipedia, or in any number of real reference books. Look at what the street runs into or out of - look what it cuts through or is parallel to. Think about WHY Italians might name a street after this event or person – especially in the newly unified Italy of 1870 and after. Do some of these names or streets go back to ancient Rome? Medieval Rome? Renaissance or Baroque Papal Rome? Be prepared to take us to your site on Google Earth next week and show us what’s what!

Via XIV Maggio
Via del Plebiscito
Via IV Novembre
Piazza Venezia
Via Giovanni Giolitti (Giolitti isn't just a gelateria!
Via Nomentana / Porta Pia / Via XX Settembre
Via Flaminia / Piazza del Popolo / Via del Corso / via di Ripetta / via del Babuino
Viale Gabriele d’Annunzio
Via delle Botteghe Oscure (my favorite street name in Rome)
Piazza Navona
Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II (secondo, not due)
Via Giulia
Via del Governo Vecchio
Via della Conciliazione
Ponte Sant‚Angelo (get the date, see what it connects to)
Ponte Regina Margherita (get the date and look what it connects)
Via del Mare
Via Appia Nuova (and Antica!)
Via Cavour
Viale Luigi Einaudi / Piazza della Repubblica / Via Nazionale
Via Garibaldi - it may look at first as though it's in a marginal part of town for such an important figure, but think about its vistas.
Via Cristoforo Colombo
Via Vittorio Veneto
Via Solferino / Piazza dell’Indipendenza
Via Goito / Via Cernaia / Via Pastrengo / Via XX Settembre – form the four sides of the Ministry of Finance
Via Raffaele Cadorna (not Luigi!!) // Via Belisario
Trastevere and its relationship to the River
Piazza del Risorgimento - what's it close to?
Via dei Gracchi // Via Cola di Rienzo / Piazza del Risorgimento
Roman Ghetto (Via del Portico d’Ottavia / Via del Tempio)

I'm not perfectly happy with the list - I need to build up some more sequences of streets or parallel groups of streets. One of the points of this exercise is to help the students start learning some of the big names and events of modern Italian history, especially some of the characters who have streets and piazze named after them in every city in Italy. Another is to encourage them to begin looking at Rome systematically - they're also being quizzed on the Seven Hills of Rome (ever done the old Latin teacher's Hand Exercise?).

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:20 PM | Comments (2)

September 12, 2007

Talking about stained glass

I have a confession to make - I don't really care about stained glass - but it's available in quantity in much of America. So, I've learned to deal.

My Gothic class is part-way through their second assignment - take a window at St Stephen's, Geneva, and explain the iconography. Tonight I heard from 6 folks, covering Ss. Cecilia, Francis de Sales, Boniface, Lawrence, Louis of France, and Margaret of Scotland. This was a random assortment of students based on their availability (the rest will talk on Sunday afternoon), but it went quite well! I got to talk about how to visit churches, gothic architecture up close, hammerbeam construction, and workshops (there are at least 3 and maybe 4 glass workshops represented in the building).

All in all a satisfying evening - they're off to a good start!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:05 PM | Comments (0)

Vikings in the News: re-excavations at Oseberg

The excavation of the Oseberg Ship Burial in 1904 produced one of the memorable Viking ships we still have. It also produced two female skeletons, which are now being re-exhumed. I had no idea, but they were reburied in the 1940s in hopes that one of these days (like now) we'd have better technology to learn from them.

The genetic testing will answer one problem - are the two females Queen and slave or Queen and female relative. The general suggestions are that a slave might have been sacrificed to accompany the early 9th century (and not yet Christian) burial and that a relative might have died of disease at the same time as the main occupant.

Reuters has a good story with a nice slide show of the process!

I'm showing this to my students today. One of my constant themes is how much work there still is for them to do when they grow up and become scholars!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:17 AM

September 11, 2007

Argh! While you're not looking books are hiding themselves!

I can't find a particular book. Yes, I took good notes - but it's full of pictures. I want to look at the pictures! I have the only copy on campus checked out. I want to teach some stuff out of it tomorrow, and now I'm feeling crazed. It wasn't in the office. It isn't in the home office. It isn't beside my bed. It isn't underneath the Wall Street Journals in my newspaper box. Argh!

My mother assures me this problem is genetic.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:46 PM | Comments (3)

If they don't finish this paving soon . . .

I'm going to kill someone.

I did not go to be early last night (one of those restless evenings where I just wasn't sleepy). I'm scheduled to attend a breakfast meeting with Director of the Library Candidate #3 at 8:30, but really was ready enough to teach today that I didn't NEED to get up before about 7:45. The road crew started bulldozing gravel in Washington Street right outside my windows at 6:35.

Oh, well - I'm making the empty hour shine - I'm working on a project to pass out to the Rome-bound group tonight. I'm making a list of street names in Rome which are great moments or persons in Italian history that are generally unknown to Americans. We just don't cover 19th century Italian history, do we? Not that we really cover much European history at all in the shattered remnants of high school, but I bet I could get a correct answer from all of them if I asked "what happened in history on July 4th?" September 20th, probably not. Via XX Settembre is similarly transparent to Italian students - the day Italy captured Papal Rome in 1870. They each get a proper name and get to find it, show it to us (thank you, Google Earth!), and explain the significance. We're also doing some other geographical stuff like Hills of Rome. Should be fun!

(see here for the list)

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:25 AM

September 7, 2007

Two Weeks down

Vikings is going quite well - my colleague was unaccountably delayed today (well, she was talking to a student, but I didn't know that when class started) so I got to lead off with one of my favorite ways to make students do a little comparative mythology - names for the days of the week. I had given a fill-out-your-own-chart assignment on Wednesday and we put some results on the board. I'll use Italian for my Romance example, since it's on my mind. The Germanic is Old Norse.

English / Italian / Old Norse / the 7 planets visible to the naked eye
Sunday / Domenica / Sunnundagr / Sun
Monday / Lunedì / Mánandagr / Moon
Tuesday / Martedì / Tysdagr / Mars
Wednesday / Mercoledì / Óðensdagr / Mercury
Thursday / Giovedì / Þorsdagr / Jupiter
Friday / Venerdì / Friádagr / Venus
Saturday / Sabato / Laugardagr / Saturn

Lots of fun!

So - the Christian Mediterranean languages used Lord's Day for Sun Day and Sabbath for Saturday - the 7th Day. We see the tension in the Greco-Roman Pantheon between Jupiter and Saturn - each included, each gets a day. We begin to see some evidence for the idea that Thor was originally higher than Odin in the comparatio Romana - otherwise why is Odin identified with Mercury while Thor is identified with the day of Jupiter? By the way, isn't it fun that modern German uses Mid-week (Mittwoch) instead of Woden? And what better sign of the late evangelization of the Norse than that rather than observing the Sabbath they're doing laundry (Laugar).

I use this handy and accessible entry to the wonderfully complex world of comparative mythology all the time - and it's always pretty effective.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:57 PM

Meta-academics

Haven't I been here before? Yes, once again, free wifi at the Greater Rochester International Airport keeps me pestering you with my opinions.

I'm off to talk about collaborative digital image issues sponsored by NITLE. I know, I know, but it's right up my alley.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:37 PM | Comments (0)

September 6, 2007

Should Economists rule the world?

Short answer? No. Political scientists, either. Now art historians - has anyone tried that? Not that I'm volunteering for any new assignments this semseter . . . .

via Tyler Cowen.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:35 AM | Comments (0)

September 5, 2007

It's the little things that keep us going . . .

Dr. Virago is having a good week - yay, her!

I, too, had one of those pleasant satisfactions of academic life - a compliment that didn't lead to any more work. A student who has had 2 courses from me (and made some flavor of A on pretty much every assignment) asked about doing an honors project with me this year on something that was (a) reasonably doable and which (b) I could reasonably be expected to direct. He had done a good bit of reading over the summer, even. But I could say a polite 'no' because of my impending Rome term - these things do not work via email. I counteroffered an independent study (not that I have time for that, but I really like him and think it would be interesting). He thought for a few days and decided that he likes his current 4 classes too much to drop any of them, and doesn't want to do an overload. So, there we are - we both think the other would be good to work with, but neither of us actually has to do any more work this semester than is already laid out. Yay, me!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:26 AM | Comments (0)

September 4, 2007

School's In

For those of you slackers who didn't start until today - we had classes yesterday. I'm grading the first round of quizzes already.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:07 AM

September 3, 2007

What this country needs is another doctoral program in history.

That fine headline leads into Ralph Luker's consideration of yet another proposed program for Ph.D.-granting. Go read!

So, there's a population and a geographical rationale for the proposal. Is there a market rationale for it? Don't even ask. If it aims at having a conveniently located program for community college faculty in central Florida to get a terminal credential, maybe. That's one of the things that a strong M.A. program used to be about. [my emphasis]

Then follow his link to his earlier piece, "Wherein I Name a Dozen or More Doctoral Programs in History that Ought to be Shut Down." The credential creep from M.A. to Ph.D. has not been salutary for American education, anymore than the insistence that all students should have a college prep high school diploma. Not everyone should go to college. Not all teachers need a terminal degree.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:29 AM

August 31, 2007

A Committee of One!

I am drunk with power - I AM THE LIBRARY COMMITTEE! Because of a withdrawal and a rotation and someone resigning because he thought he was about to be replaced by a woman for better gender balance I find myself constituting the entire Library Committee. I need to get together with the acting librarian and vote for something.

I think we'll be spending some money on art books.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:36 PM

Trelleborg Ring Forts as Valahlla

Today in BiDis* 291: Medieval Art and Literature - the Vikings we're starting Snorri's Prose Edda
and I'm going to talk about imagining Valhalla. The current cover of the Penguin translation (Jesse Byock) has a detail of Odin on Sleipnir from the stone from Alskog Taengvide. Unfortunately, the cover crops out the woman or Valkyrie greeting him with a drinking horn (well, you can see the horn, but not her). So we'll talk about that stone and a few other ones, but then we'll turn to the Trelleborg ring-forts. Wikipedia has a pretty nice entry on the forts, but I have better photographs. I'm going to try to help them understand how visions of Heaven (or Valhalla) condition human buildings and how human buildings condition later visions of Heaven. This will work pretty well for the Gothic class, too, I have to admit.

*that's a local thing - here at these Colleges we have a class of course called BiDisciplinary - team-taught (almost always) courses which often (though not always) cross the Humanities/Social Sciences/Fine Arts/Sciences boundaries. They are a fossil of a former curriculum, in which students had a First Year Seminar, a sophomore-level BiDisciplinary course (I think it was sophomores!), and a senior capstone seminar in the major. My friend Laurence and I teach these because we like teaching together, and the format still exists; our course is actually BiDepartmental, because we're both humanists, I guess. This is a curricular conversation the faculty needs to have.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:01 AM

August 30, 2007

Early Medieval Archaeologists in the News

Richard Hodges, a really notable British archaeologist of the early Middle Ages, has just taken the post of director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology - neat! He's done lots of interesting things in that controversial area of early medieval towns or urban assemblages. I'm teaching about the whole emporium idea this week in the Vikings course, having read Goodbye to the Vikings? this summer. His material on San Vicenzo al Volturno (much of it with John Mitchell) is really important.

I know nothing about his reputation in the field as a human being (it's not my end of the world), but he's obviously one of those archaeologists who's good at team building - follow the link and look.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:51 AM

August 29, 2007

Smart and good are separate qualities

The conclusion of a review by Dr. Abigail Zuger in the New York Times of David M. Friedman's The Immortalists
Charles Lindhbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever:

But for a demonstration of the bizarrely particulate nature of human intelligence, which allows scientific brilliance and moral idiocy to thrive side by side, forget Jekyll, Hyde and Frankenstein: this is the book to read.

I didn't know about Lindhbergh's work in what we now call biomedical engineering, but it makes a lot of sense. I'd come across Dr. Carrel before in some eugenics context. This sounds like a book I'd like to read - yet another cautionary tale about why letting smart people run things isn't a great idea.

I like "bizarrely particulate nature of human inteligence," too. That's a useful way of thinking of things.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:34 AM

August 28, 2007

Three out of three and a half down.

And what was I thinking last year?

I'm teaching Art 101 (cave painting to however close to the Renaissance I get), as per usual. But I changed the damned textbook. Why, O Lord? Why? Now I'm having to retool all kinds of things - not that the art's changed, but the specific examples chosen are different.

I've already whined about the two new courses - Art 218: The Age of Chivalry and BiDis 291: Medieval Art & Literature - the Vikings. Yeah, one of those two is team-taught, but that means thinking twice as hard so we can both keep up. I'd read almost everything we're teaching before we even started talking about it, but it's been awhile for some of them. But, hey, we showed the dragon-slaying scene from the Fritz Lang Siegfried on Monday - what's not to love? And Laurence and I always have a good time - and the students seem to love it, too. Not to mention the inevitable unintended fashion show - Monday was floral - my tie, her capri pants.

Then there's Chivalry. Or Gothic. Or High Medieval. I reactivated a course already on the books, so that's my excuse for the utterly-un-Cranky title. Tomorrow I get to do Romanesque - Compostela or Toulouse? Those of my readers who remember the late Thomas W. Lyman know my answer to that one. Pietas. Not to mention dedication dates.

Then there's the half course. The Rome 2008 group is doing a half-credit course-to-prepare thing called Italy Now! My punctuation. We're making them do things like eat Italian olives and see Italian movies and learn the 7 Hills of Rome before they go. I don't know that it will make it better than 2003 (truly, I had a great group), but it might make it easier for the students. We won't start meeting until next week, so I haven't finished a full cycle of my classes yet.

All in all, it's going to be busy but fun.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:05 PM

August 26, 2007

Neurosis is its own reward

So here I am at the office, Sunday before classes start. We can now make our image presentations from home using the superb software of Artifact, the Visual Resources Collection of these Colleges. Sadly for you, access to Artifact is restricted to Colleges' users - I'd love to show you the elegant interface.

However, I'm here, because I like to check things. If I ironed shirts I'd always be running back to check on the iron. Luckily, science has solved that problem for me. So I not only am making my presentation for the first meeting of Art 218, Age of Chivalry - Gothic Art & Architecture but I went in to try it out in Houghton House 212, because some remodeling was supposed to be completed by now. At the very least, I wanted to lower the blackout shades before any young folks got near them. I often think we should drop the drinking age in America, but I would be happy to see a requirement of 25-or-older for operating the kind of chain-drive-shades-that-run-in-tracks we have. I don't mean to be condescending, but the young always seem to rush the process and we end up having to call Building & Grounds to disassemble the tracks and get things back in place.

So there I am, trial run of the first version of tomorrow's class. The computer starts up on the first try, which is pleasant. The digital projector, no.

I try several things from the podium that often work. No luck.

I walk over and try to start it manually from its own power button. No luck.

I finally climb up on a chair and look at the damned thing. It is suspended on a pipe from the ceiling. Someone (I'm looking at YOU, A.V.! Feel free to blame the painters or the fire alarm installers, though) has UNPLUGGED the projector and forgotten to plug it back in. Of course, the cord is neatly entwined with other cords around the suspension system, so it wasn't exactly dangling where one could see it from a distance.

But - go back and click on Houghton House - we have high ceilings. Even while standing on a chair I can't reach the ceiling-mounted power outlet. Now because we're the Art Department and we're always fiddling with things hung on the walls and the way we light them, we usually have a ladder standing in a corner of the house. Today? No. I looked everywhere. I even asked a colleague who's here painting, the only member of the studio side of our faculty who didn't move to the new building. He couldn't find it, either.

Well, I'm absolutely certain that AV is way too harried today and tomorrow to get over here to plug something in before my class at 12:20 tomorrow, so I found a sturdy table to stand on and plugged the damned thing in.

Success!

And my images look lovely!

Though, of course, I now see they're not really what I need. There's nothing like seeing things room-sized to realize you need other images to explain them. Back to preparation.

However, now you see why neurosis is sometimes its own reward. I'm the first person scheduled to teach in the room this academic year, and that would have been exactly the kind of way to start a semester that would have killed me.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:13 AM

Hammocks? Who knows!

There are three hammocks hanging on the porches of houses on Pulteney Street where some of our seniors live off campus. Hammocks? Hmmm. I wonder what that's about? Oh - and no hammocks are hung on the porch of the house with the old sailboat in the driveway, so it's not just a nautical-theme decorator scheme!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:23 AM

August 25, 2007

Park Work

Well, Park Place is still a mess of bricks and sand and gravel, but we had a little work day in Pulteney Park anyway.

We're a community-service-oriented liberal arts college of note (that's what we get for hiring a former director of the Peace Corps as our president), so the 2nd day of Orientation starts with breakfast, a rally on the Quad, and then dispersal to sites all over the area to make themselves useful. I got enough work out of them that the flower beds are tidier, at least, and interested at least one of them in my theory that the statue is a monument to isolationism.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:55 AM

August 22, 2007

The Campus is filling back up

This is the first day the campus has seemed to me to hum a little - the new faculty are being oriented, the orientation leaders for the soon-to-arrive first years are being trained, craftsmen are busily finishing summer renovations. We start on Monday!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:21 PM | Comments (1)

August 14, 2007

Travelblogging

I really don't know how frequent business travelers stand it - some very cordial TSA contractors just finished a 15 minute swabbing of all my possessions (yes, I'm doing carry-on luggage this trip - connecting through Washington National sounds like a formula for delays and loss to me; not to mention my neat little Harmannn weekend rolling thing I got for Christmas doesn't need to be checked). Air travel is getting less and less pleasant.

All these are truisms, of course, but I've been home all summer, or at least since Kalamazoo. Now, with a day less than 2 weeks until classes start, I'm off for a too-quick trip home for a gathering of folks more or less my sister's age - one of them is visiting Chattanooga from England with her children for an extended stay, and we're having a party. Or two.

I restricted myself to reading material for one of my two new courses - the other will at least start with setting the stage kind of review stuff, so I'm good there.

My colleague the Anglo-Saxonist and I are teaching one of our occasional "Medieval Art and Literature: Name that Topic" courses - and this year it's The Vikings! So, Njal's Saga, the Volsunger Saga, a Penguin collection of Viking romances - lots to read in bed. I've stolen some time from the tenure case this summer to read up on the Lewis chessmen (one of my favorite cultural fusion examples - walrus ivory, 12th century dating by ecclesiastical costume and proto-heraldry, shield-gnawing warder/berserkers, and a game that originated in India) and to read more about rune stones than I really think I cared about. Luckily, we've got a local stave-church enthusiast and a boat-builder in Ithaca. There will be plenty to keep the students busy.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:59 AM

August 13, 2007

What makes medievalists weep . . .

Another Damned Medievalist is having a hard week, but in a smart way. It's all about prosopography. If you don't know what that is, you should go read. If you do know what that is, you should definitely go read.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:52 AM

Two Swords readings?

Medievalistas . . . does anyone have a suggestion for a good, short treatment suitable for a 200-level course on Two Swords, church and state, whatever you want to call it in the High Middle Ages? Something like those "Problems in Historical Interpretations" books that used to be all the rage of core courses.

My Gothic Art & Architecture class is not going to come to me with a whole lot of background in medieval history - I can just tell by skimming the roll as it appears now online.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:22 AM

Dresden Old Master Gallery appears in Second Life

The Dresden Old Master Gallery has created a virtual version of itself for an online environment. Cologne Cathedral is following suit.

I think I feel an assignment for my Gothic Art and Architecture course coming on!

(Oh, yes, it really is called that - it's the Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. I don't know (it's not my part of the field), but this may be one of the places our English phrase for those old painters comes from. I always thought it was really funny, though, that they really WERE the Alte Meister.)

This is the story in Wired.

Here's their regular website.

Here's the Second Life version.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:07 AM | Comments (1)

August 12, 2007

You know you had an industrious Saturday . . .

. . . when you have to empty your office recycling bin into the big one downstairs by the copying machine in order to have room to maneuver on Sunday.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)

August 7, 2007

How can you tell if you attend an alternative college?

Well, maybe having a college archivist with a single name will clue you in.

A faculty member at the New College of California said he is glad college president Martin Hamilton is leaving the college.

"It's good that the president is leaving," the school's historian and archivist, known as Kush, said. "(This situation presents) an opportunity for a new New College to be born."

According to Kush, Hamilton is formally resigning as of Sept. 15, because "many different complications...have overtaken (Hamilton) and his administration."

Kush said a time of crisis for the school is also "a time of renaissance," adding that in the future he wants the college to work more as a community and less like a hierarchical system.

The New College of California was founded in 1971 and came to the San Francisco's Mission District in 1976, according to Kush. [My emphases]

Have you been following the New College of California accreditation thing? Let's just say that the institution doesn't remind me at ALL of the New College of Florida.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:20 AM

August 6, 2007

Columbia plans to expand its campus

Why would Columbia hire such a talented urbanist as Piano and then allow him to produce something so bland?

That's the concluding sentence in a scathing review of Renzo Piano and SOM's master plan for Columbia University's expansion, its 7 BILLION dollar expansion. It sounds really dull. I look forward to coming across some photographs on the web.

I'm afraid the project reveals more about higher education in America than our aspirational language. Columbia University has no vision of the future, and hiring a big name architect won't give them one. Or, Columbia has a vision of the future, and it is to become the juggernaut it knows it deserves to be. Look at Yale's recent purchase of a big pharma research park. Look at Harvard sprawling across the Charles. The Ivy League has gone way beyond the ivory tower model Piano decries at Columbia to embrace the city - but in the way of the real estate developer and the research park.

I don't know that we can expect much else from self-perpetuating corporate bodies with that much money.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:13 AM

August 4, 2007

Il faut cultiver nôtre jardin

One of my favorite ways to procrastinate things to do this time of year is to order books for the Library, especially now that we do it online rather than on little yellow index cards. There's a lovely 'special instruction' field, too, aimed at the acquisitive faculty member who can justify a purchase by giving the names of other faculty members whose courses might be served by the said book. I blogged about the number I've successfully ordered here.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:28 AM

July 30, 2007

Reference styles

I was talking to my sister last night and mentioned that I was cleaning up footnotes (and trying to figure out how to refer to a manuscript diary from the archives). She pointed out that my experience of reference styles is unusual - I've always been in school, more or less. She has a B.A. and two masters. Each time in school separated by several years. She was annoyed to find out this last time (2005-06, was it?) how reference styles have changed.

I have to admit, it can be annoying. I recently broke down and bought a 15th edition Chicago Manual of Style. My old copy was 12th, and things have changed. You know, like the whole INVENTION of the Web.

The general principle of making-it-possible-for-readers-to-find-your-reference-for-themselves hasn't changed, but the way we go about doing that sure has.

I hate inline citation because I like chatty footnotes. Oh, well.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:39 AM

July 27, 2007

Fun facts to know and tell . . .

While I continue to put together my - um - case, it occurred to me to ask my friend the Acting Librarian how many books I had ordered for the Library. She can with the flick of a key or two answer the question for life since 2002, when we started using the current computerized system - and with Library of Congress headings!

I got to these Colleges (as did my friend the Acting Librarian) in the fall of 1999. Since the 2002/03 fiscal year, this is the breakdown:

B - Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion: 87
C - Auxiliary Sciences of History: 5
D - History: General and Outside the Americas: 40
E - History: United States: 1
G - Geography: 3
H - Social Sciences: 13
J - Political Science: 2
N - Fine Arts: 81
P - Language and Literature: 29
Q - Science: 1
R - Medicine: 1
T - Technology: 1
U - Military Science: 3
-------------------------
Total: 267

Luckily, she attached a list - the one Q book is Bede, The Reckoning of Time, (De temporum ratione) tr. Faith Wallis. Interesting, hunh, that N is not the largest category, despite my appointment in the Art department. After all, my own dissertation got cataloged in the Ds at Emory. Interdisciplinarity, thy name is "Michael C. Tinkler."

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:48 PM

July 26, 2007

It's coming - the Disestablishment of the Universities

Stanford University spends $76 million on undergraduate financial aid, a sum that sounds generous but amounts to a mere 0.5 percent of the value of its endowment. The university spends just 4 percent of its $14 billion endowment toward operating expenses. If the 5 percent payout rule required Stanford to spend another 1 percent of its endowment, and that money was directed toward financial aid, students would enjoy $211 million in additional support. That is precisely the cost of letting all 6,600 Stanford undergraduates attend tuition-free.

The University of Texas’ nine campuses enroll 147,576 undergraduates who each pay on average $5,903 in tuition. All of U.T.’s undergraduates could attend school tuition-free if the system spent half the amount the university’s endowment grew just last year.

That's Lynn Munson at Inside Higher Ed.

It's a good article. I didn't know that we were exempt from the 5% rule! That explains a lot. Click and read.

via Prof. Soltan, who, being a critic of 20th century literature, reaches for Freud. Me, my favorite analogy is the disestablishment of the monasteries and its analogues on the continent. Imperfect, but suggestive.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:21 AM

July 25, 2007

Archive Bloggery and resizing photos

Something that I do not do particularly well is resize photos to fit on web pages. For some reason I have to resort to pencil and paper and hard thought about proportions every time - I guess I should do it more often.

This morning I was busy posting (and thinking of how to resize) a couple of photographs on the Abner Jackson Journal blog, a blog the Hobart & William Smith Colleges Archivist Linda Benedict and I are working on. I've mentioned it here before, but it's on my mind at the moment (and MUCH more amusing than Chicago-style referencing, which I could also be doing - but hey! This was Faculty Research Grant-funded Scholarship and it counts, too!).

Jackson was president of Hobart College from 1858 to 1867 and kept a daily journal. Some students and I transcribed it (that's where the funding came in) and Linda and I are now uploading it. We're also putting up pictures, though until the blog comes onto the campus server we're not making a lot of internal links from entries to the photos; we know about broken links.

This is what I put up today - a pair of pictures of Linden Hall. Through the second half of the 19th century (from at least 1858 until 1892) Linden Hall was an entertainment space in downtown Geneva which the College and college groups (such as the sophomore class on at least one occasion that springs to mind) rented for events. The Washington's Birthday celebrations were usually there, for instance, and at least part of the graduation celebrations (either the exercises or the dinner) were held there.

We didn't have any photos of Linden Hall in our own archives, but my neighbor and friend Karen Osburn, archivist at the Geneva Historical Society, found and scanned these two for me. Thanks, Karen!

One of the interesting things about treating the journal as a blog is the utility of categories (one of the things I do is categorize entries - Linda's uploaded most of them so far). Unlike a book index, categories are live links - so if you go to the blog and click on Discipline or Clubs, Societies, and Fraternities, or Campus Planning or Fundraising you may see how little life for a college administrator has changed in 150 years. I think that folks who are interested in 19th Century America might find this interesting. As a Southerner living here now I find the relative lack of trouble caused by or interest in the Civil War fascinating - though we ARE missing 1865 from the journals.

Here's Linda's own blog, Alone in the Archives, in case you've never clicked on it from the blogroll, where you'll find it filed under the HWS blogs.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:59 AM

July 17, 2007

Antioch for Franco!

During the campus convulsions of the late 1960s, when rebellion against any authority was considered obedience to every virtue, the film "To Die in Madrid," a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, was shown at a small liberal arts college famous for, and vain about, its dedication to all things progressive. When the film's narrator intoned, "The rebels advanced on Madrid," the students, who adored rebels and were innocent of information, cheered. Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, had been so busy turning undergraduates into vessels of liberalism and apostles of social improvement that it had not found time for the tiresome task of teaching them tedious facts, such as that the rebels in Spain were Franco's fascists.

George Will on why he won't miss Antioch.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:39 PM

Why we blog - and badges!

I apologize for the slow posting lately - I'm in a frenzy of deadlineness. I'm trying to get several things finished before the tenure box goes in - and then there's actually writing the tenure case. I have a teaching philosophy, but I'd rather enact it than write about it (and isn't that just the kind of sentence I need to use?).

And I've had a house guest this week who comes up periodically from Atlanta to read things at the Cornell Library (mainly in the rare book room) that he can't get elsewhere. He stays with me and drives down to Ithaca every morning. Having a human being (sorry Argyle) to talk with reduces some of the blog-urge. Oh - he blogs occasionally at Reformation Professor. Ah - grad school friends. You forget sometimes how much you miss them.

And then there's the Hand List of Words for Talking about Medieval Badges.

I did most of the reading in dictionaries for this year before last and left the text file sitting on my hard drive. I was looking up some words again and realized that I had those already and might as well post them somewhere I can get at them. Take a look. I'm up to cockle-shelled, an adjectival derivative of a cockleshell shaped badge. The example the OED gave was of a St. Michael badge (Mont St Michel also used the cockleshell, being sea-girt and all).

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:02 AM

July 16, 2007

Gordon Gee - The Million Dollar Man

That's the headline from the Toledo Blade story about the Vanderbilt-to-Ohio-State move. Here's the best paragraph (though there are many other interesting ones).

His new contract runs seven years, and his annual salary is $775,000. Plus he reportedly will receive an extra $225,000 a year as a bonus if he stays five years, along with a yet-to-be-disclosed benefits package. The deal would amount to a pay cut. At Vanderbilt, a private school, Mr. Gee has been the highest-paid university president in the nation, and Ohio taxpayers would be justified in worrying about what else OSU might be about to offer him.

The article talks about the salary and compensation of his predecessor, so the Toledo Blade knows what to watch for.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:49 AM

July 9, 2007

Lions, tigers, and BLACK BEAR ON CAMPUS, oh my!

Gosh am I glad I'm working from home today!

Campus listserve at 10:56 -

The Geneva Police Department is currently tracking a bear. It was most recently spotted at Glenwood Cemetery heading north. Houghton House grounds are adjacent to the Cemetery. Please be cautious and remain indoors until the situation has resolved. I’ll send another e-mail when we have more information.

Ummm. My office is is at Houghton House - the big building just south of the arrow.

at 12:21 -

The bear is still being tracked. At this point, we can confirm that there is a North American Black Bear cub weighing about 125 pounds in the woods behind the pole barn on St. Clair (behind the first-year parking lot). The Department of Environmental Conservation is working in concert with the Geneva Police Department to safely cage it. There have been reports of a second bear sighting although this information has not been confirmed. The Colleges community is urged to exercise caution, be aware of your surroundings, and to preferably stay indoors. As soon as we have more information, I’ll send another e-mail.

at 1:51 -
The Geneva Police Department reports that the bear cub is no longer on the Colleges’ campus. GPD and the DEC will continue to track it and will follow up on reports of a possible adult. At this point, it’s unlikely that anyone will encounter a bear on campus. Continue to use caution and report any bear sightings to Security at extension 3000. Unless we have another on-campus interloper, further news about the bear(s) will be posted on the Daily Update. Thanks for your patience!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:36 PM

July 5, 2007

How the Other Half Lives. Well, not half. The Superrich of the University Set

Bayer HealthCare, a subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer A.G., announced its decision to leave the New Haven area in November and put the site up for auction. Mark C. Bennett, a Bayer spokesman, said there were 17 bidders. Both he and Dr. Levin declined to say how much Yale was paying for the property, but a Yale official confirmed an Associated Press report that the price would be about $100 million. Dr. Levin said that money was not a problem and that Yale would pay cash.

Cash. $100 million in cash.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:22 PM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2007

A little lunchtime blog maintainance

I've just added a new flickr badge - it's way down there in the right column - pulling random pictures from the Gothic Revival flickr group. If you have fun Gothic Revival pictures come join us and contribute!

I meant to do a little more archival research on my own Gothic Revival article today but got diverted - so until tomorrow I'll stick to thinks in print. I'm rereading something on style in architecture by J. Mordaunt Crook. Isn't that the greatest name in scholarship? The book is pretty wonderful, too. That helps.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:54 PM

June 26, 2007

The Carnival of Bad History

Jonathan Dresner brings you this week's Carnival of Bad History!

I've added a link in the right column to the History Carnival Aggregator, too.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:40 AM

June 25, 2007

Archaeolgist Stuff-lust

Fascinating story about an Old Persian cuneiform tablet with a sudden archaeologist GRAB paragraph.

"This shows how important it is to keep the Persepolis Fortification texts together, to keep the Archive intact,” Stein said. “Unexpected discoveries are still being made, and the meaning and reliability of every piece depend on its connections with the whole information system of the entire Fortification Archive.”

Um.

Right.

Because technologies for sharing images of objects are SO unsatisfactory in the 21st century.

Archaeologists come in several flavors; one of those flavors is The Collector, who truly, truly believes that every single fragment of the past must be preserved intact in HIS (or her) museum. I don't believe it's true. Sorry. You could send the clay back to Iran and still move forward. Start by explaining why it's been in Chicago since 1933 and you're just getting around to talking about it in public lately . . . ?

Those of us who depend on the publication speed of archaeologists can think of a few answers to that one - none of them pretty.

via Mirabilis.ca

Further:
Check the comment! Very interesting - I'm sorry I didn't publish it immediately, but it ended up in the junk folder because of the inclusion of multiple urls. Luckily I don't empty the junk folder without checking! Here's a bit: Indeed the Oriental Institute had already unilaterally begun the return of the tablets to the Iranian authorities. On the other hand, The University of Chicago does dispute the right of claimants with a judgement against the government of Iran to sieze this kind of material and sell it to satisfy the claim.

I appreciate hearing the defense that the U of C doesn't want people with claims against the Iranian government seizing and selling the materials - breaking up the collection. That's reasonable. And if Iran really doesn't want them back, that's fine.

However, the paragraph I quoted in my original posting isn't about the legal situation - a scholar made a claim about the necessity for maintaining the archive intact for study. I understand how important it is to study each piece in the mental context of the complete archive, to know that what you're reading came from a certain place, but I wonder about the necessary to keep them all in the same room in order to study them.

Why would it be useful to keep it all in one room? Well, it's possible there are serendipitous discoveries made when scholars glance across the room and see tablets they hadn't previously thought to connect. I guess I unconsciously envy people who study discrete objects which can be held in one room! My primary interest in buildings means that I've always known that I can't have the things I love. Well, at least since the days of the Rockefellers and the Cloisters it has become less possible to buy buildings, disassemble them, and rebuild them for our convenience. However, that impossibility may have set me free from stuff-lust.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:36 PM

What is "Arabic" and how do you go about teaching it?

Mark Liberman at Language Log has a great post with lots of updates about the state of Arabic mastery among State Department personnel in Baghdad and then expanding out to the question of what kind of Arabic to learn and what is Arabic anyway. I apologize that the link seems to take you into the middle of the post - click and scoll up to start reading, because the whol thing is very interesting! Among other things, he links to a fascinating article (link is to a pdf) about the problems of diglossia for Arabs and Arabic literacy; it's a long paper, and Liberman chooses several anecdotes and excerpts (tempting enough that I read the whole thing - I keep asking people who know Arabic how far apart the dialects really are; the simple answer, "pretty far").

So why is this of more than casual interest for medievalists? Read Liberman's next to last paragraph:

This situation makes the task of foreign learners more difficult, since they need to learn to deal appropriately with a very broad range of mixtures of "high" and "low" languages. This is true to some extent in any language, but the range of diglossia in "Arabic" appears to be significantly greater than in most other modern situations. You need to imagine a situation in which "Latin" is used to refer not only to classical and patristic Latin, but also to the spoken versions French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (with none of them having any standard written form).

I don't need to imagine a situation like that - I read about it all the time. It's called "the 8th and 9th centuries in Western Europe." Roger Wright, a student of early Spanish, pushed a lot of medievalists to start thinking about what Latin was before and after Alcuin and De litteris colendis, the Carolingian edict on how Latin was to be taught and pronounced when read aloud. To simplify, Wright says (and the field has come around a long way to him) that before Alcuin, written Latin was an elaborate spelling convention for proto-Romance. The whole question of when proto-Romance ceased to be one thing and became proto-Spanish, proto-French, proto-Italian and such and the degree to which these things were separable from Late Latin is wildly controversial, but it's exactly what Liberman is asking us to think about while thinking about diglossia and dialect problems in Arabic.

The situation of Latin/Romance diglossia in the West in the 8th and 9th centuries is important to me because early on in the dissertation my historian advisor asked something along the lines of his famous "but did the hand that guided the plow understand Augustine's sermon?" Did anyone other than clergymen understand the monumental inscriptions I was looking at? Did I need to posit a tour guide to translate them for lay visitors to buildings? How seriously could we take the idea of programmatic intention if no one could read them? Funny - I blogged about this in late June last year, too.

So, back to Arabic. What do we Americans think we're doing when we teach Modern Standard Arabic on the college level? After reading the Maamouri piece I'm beginning to wonder if we're teaching Latin and then sending our students out to deal with a lot of speakers of Spanish, Italian, and French.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM

June 24, 2007

Antioch and Higher Education Institutional Failure

Colleges are self perpetuating institutions in at least three ways:

We have self-perpetuating boards. Boards of trustees replicate and pay for many of our little habits. Most boards, like the boards of most non-profits, are expected to pony up monetary contributions regularly. If board members can't recruit future members who will help they're not doing their job.

We have self-perpetuating faculties - we (I speak personally here) usually do all the work of hiring our replacements, and in theory we ought to send a few folks to grad school to replace us or people like us someday (I don't think that's responsible in the current world, but in theory we might). If we can't convince people to come work with us and can't manage to retain a certain proportion of the annual intake, we're not doing that part of our job.

We recruit students. Without students neither boards nor the faculty they employ have a real function, unless they can afford to dispense with students and become think tanks. While Harvard could, if it liked, realign its budget to stop charging tuition at all, most of us have some more serious reliance on the annual income from tuition.

Antioch failed on at least the third criterion and probably on the first. It would be vaguely conceivable that an utterly committed board could support the quixotic mission of a college with an enrollment of 130 (the latest Princeton Review figure). They didn't. They will close. There are odd little schools here and there which survive with a tiny enrollment. The people at Antioch who can make the decision are tired of trying, I guess.

Several of the most interesting colleges in America are teensy weensy - but hey! They know it and work it. And they weren't formerly 2,000 people with the physical plant to match. I would never take a job at a college so small. I can't afford it - I have no spousal income to fall back on should it close down. TIAA-CREF will only take you so far at my age. But if you're curious, here's a quick list.
Magdalen College - wacky Catholic with a Vatican II Laity emphasis.
St. John's College, Annapolis - wacky secular college, the oldest surviving Great Books program.
Thomas Aquinas College - wacky Great Books college, Catholic edition. I like their reading list. I'd rather die than live in Ojai, CA. Well, not die, but you know. SoCal? Me?
New College of the University of South Florida - there's even a public version of the experimental college. I'd take a job there, because the funding will never quite go away and because one of the smartest people I have ever known went there and flourished.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:22 PM | Comments (1)

June 15, 2007

Sometimes I think I'm in the wrong line of work

I've already brokered the first sale for tomorrow's yard sale. I asked our local baker to put up a sign in his window. He asked what kind of stuff was going to be on sale. I mentioned a neighbor's rolling dishwasher. He said to his wife (a colleague of mine, who happened to be hanging out in the shop yesterday) that their upstairs tenant had asked about a dishwasher. I mentioned it to my friend. She stopped by the bakery to buy a cookie and to offer him the dishwasher - $75, deal done. Should I ask for a commission?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:10 PM

June 12, 2007

Moving and Loss

I'm not thinking about the existential misery of moving and leaving things behind, the immediate horror of having moved and not being able to find stuff!

Another Damned Medievalist was asking recently about note taking - most recently about EndNote and how to keep track of stuff.

I change systems periodically, which is what I'm cussing now. I know that I had a certain book (J.D. Beazley's The Pan Painter. Marburg, 1974) in hand sometime last year, took notes on it, and put them somewhere. I am morally certain they're on paper in a manila folder. Where is it!?! I only moved across the hall.

Just goes to show I should have stuck with keeping things in .doc files (though I've been gradually shifting to .txt files) and searching.

The upside? I've just consolidated a bunch of stuff - tossed piles, made a pile that MUST go to school, made a pile that MUST be used this summer, and filed a bunch of stuff. There's still stuff in boxes, but all the boxes are smaller. So, progress of a sort. I've also re-requested the Beazley from Inter library loan (yay for online ILL requesting!).

Sad to say - the only thing I really need from it is to know what the shepherd boy is carrying in the Pan side of Boston Museum of Fine Arts 10.185 (click and scroll for a detail). It's some kind of little whip or flail, but what's it called in Greek? Beazley told me. I wrote it down. I swear.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:16 PM

June 6, 2007

Eyewash for Islamic Studies

This is the most minor initiative with the most unrealistic goal I've almost ever seen:

Prime Minister Tony Blair announced Monday $2 million in funding to back Islamic studies at British universities as he urged the public to listen to the religion's moderate scholars rather than to its radicals.

Blair's government hopes the funding will lead to a major shift of the focus of Islamic studies from an Arab and Middle Eastern perspective to that of the plural society in Britain.

Two million dollars? That won't get you an endowed professorship, a decent lecture series, graduate fellowships, or even a serious infusion of books into the libraries. And Blair hopes it will lead to a shift, let alone a 'major shift,' in the academic field? Puh-leeze.

Here's the Washington Post story.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:22 AM

June 3, 2007

Rainless Reunion!

This year the rain held off until Sunday afternoon - we've just had a drenching thunderstorm (and much appreciated, too). The weather was great for the Reunion, neither hot nor oppressive.

No one from the class of 2002 who had many classes from me came back! Oh, well. I still enjoyed the food, the drink, the band, the fireworks!

If you enlarge the photo I think you can see the wing-shaped tent attached to the academic building pretty well - it's a great piece of the tentmaker's craft and comes out for all big academic occasions - convocations, graduations, and reunions.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:35 PM

June 2, 2007

Why do we put up with this? Oh, that's right. June, July, August.

Oso Raro on academic personnel politics - sudden departures, protests, job searches, compromise candidates. Read the whole thing - the conclusion is well-worth laminating.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:49 AM

One of my own schools steps up . . . Emory Advantage

A frequent commenter pointed out below that Emory, too, has a program - and I find that Coca Cola stock is indeed the gift that keeps on giving.

Emory Advantage is Emory University's financial aid initiative to help students from families with annual assessed incomes of $100,000 or less who demonstrate a need for financial aid. The program reduces the amount of money borrowed to pay for an undergraduate Emory degree. The goal is to make an Emory education attainable for any qualified student, regardless of income.

Of course one has to read the details - but it seems that families with an income under $50,000 get a full grant and $50=100,000 get loan cap of $15,000, after which grants replace any needed funds.

Emory Advantage program

previously noted on the same economic diversity front: University of Chicago program.

Harvard spending endowment to get more economic diversity into the application pool.

Hamilton College eliminates merit scholarships.

Davidson changes loan balance in aid packages.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:35 AM | Comments (0)

June 1, 2007

University of Chicago and Economic Diversity

The University of Chicago just got a $100 million gift to offer full and partial tuition scholarships to more of its students. The donor remains anonymous, but they've said that he is an alum from the 80s (yikes - I'm from that era! I think I gave $100 to Rice this year!) and "really enjoyed classes like Greek literature, which were part of the university's core curriculum."

Economic diversity is something that elite higher education seems to be starting to address.

But like many Ivy League schools, economic diversity remains elusive at U. of C., as just 12.2 percent of students come from low-income families who qualify for Pell grants, far lower than the national average. Nearly half the student body comes from the top-fifth of income earners.

"It's very hard to break through the assumption of unaffordability,'' said college enrollment dean Michael Behnke, who sees the scholarships as a powerful recruiting tool.

previously noted on the same economic diversity front:
Harvard spending endowment to get more economic diversity into the application pool.

Hamilton College eliminates merit scholarships.

Davidson changes loan balance in aid packages.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:14 AM | Comments (1)

May 28, 2007

Paper Journals

Derek Lowe has a very interesting observation about science journals:

What I've noticed is that the most widely read ones remain in paper as well as digital subscriptions. It's becoming a clear sign of respect for a journal's influence. That means Science, Nature and the like are always still to be had physically. Chemistry libraries always seem to have JACS, Angewandte Chemie and, interestingly, Organic Letters in hard copy, which is probably a good sign for the latter.

I'm on our Colleges' library committee and hear the librarians' side of the horror that isd journal subscription at least twice a year. We do our best, but we're poor. We live on the digital thing. This is an helpful little item to forward to our collections development librarian (a woman for whom I have great respect! If she had the money she'd buy everything we want.).

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:45 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2007

More environmentally conscious? Hmmm.

When folks say that young people are more environmentally conscious than they were at that age I think of things like this. Young people today.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2007

$100 Million in Art for Colby?

Colby College, the second-oldest liberal arts college in Maine, received a private art collection valued at $100 million that includes the work of American artists Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, and others.

. . .

The collection consists of 500 prints, paintings, and sculptures that will be housed at the college's Museum of Art in Waterville. More than 80 works from the gift are currently on display at the museum, which is being expanded to accommodate the entire collection.

Oh my - that's a big donation of art to a college museum. Here's the museum's site. Here's a page of works from the donation.

I saw the announcement of a new museum building at some liberal arts college up that way, but I'm not turning it up (the expansion mentioned in this story isn't what I was thinking of, I don't believe). It's not Bowdoin, either, I don't think. Hmmm.*

via Cronaca.

*It is Bowdoin - read here. $20 million museum renovation and expansion - the link thanks to a commenter.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:40 AM | Comments (1)

May 16, 2007

Balcony time!

This is the slightly less cranky version of me - grades in, summer weather (at least yesterday!), time for a glass of white wine on the balcony. This is the first day in I don't know when that I haven't had something SCHEDULED - a meeting, an interview, an exam, grading, writing under a 2-week deadline. Today I can start thinking about slightly longer projects. Just slightly, but every little bit counts. And maybe I'll hang a picture?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:46 AM | Comments (2)

May 15, 2007

La la la!

Just finished grading!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2007

Me and the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek Airport

I survived another Medieval Congress - what a week. However, as per usual, I'm in airport hell. Last year Delta cancelled my flight - on a weekend when there are 3,000 extra academics in Kalamazoo, all of whom need to leave on Sunday, Delta canceled a flight. This year I got bumped (of course they're all overbooked - see the above # of academics) and am now waiting until 1:30 or so to leave. Wireless helps - and I'll be here long enough to finish my grading.

We were session #236 out of 632:

Medieval Humor: Laughter in and Laughter about the Middle Ages
Organizer: me
Presider: Simon Trafford, Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Playing the Fool on Misericords - Paul Hardwick, Trinity and All Saints, Univ. of Leeds
Laughter: Breaking the Silence - Darren Trongeau, DePaul University
Objects of Adornment? Detached Body Part Pins and Pilgrimage Badges - me.

The session went very well - there were more than 30 people in the room, they all stayed, they clapped enthusiastically, and they asked lots of questions! All 3 papers were quite good - Oz Hardwick talked about foolishness and the Fool on misericords in England. He had great slides. Darren Trongeau talked about Merlin's bizarre laughter in Silence - a 13th century romance. Merlin wouldn't tell anyone why he was laughing and it drove everyone around the bend. I talked about the anthropomorphized body part badges again; I've figured out what I think about them now - it's no longer an exploration. In the q&a after the talks someone asked if I knew of any British examples of parodic version of the Vigin Mary and I said that I didn't. Luckily I own my copy of Brian Spencer's Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges, so I didn't feel nervous about saying "to the best of my knowledge...." Afterwards a curator from the British Museum came up, gave me his card, and told me that they're currently preparing a catalog of their several thousand badges, that they do have one, that the metal tests make it conclusively English, that it's never been published (so I wouldn't have known), and that he'll email me an image!

That's one of the best reasons to go to conferences - the things you learn from people who you'd never meet otherwise.

I was also part of a roundtable discussion of blogging - Weblogs and the Academy: Pedagogy, Professionalism, and Technical Practices. I enjoyed seeing and talking about blogs with some of the folks on my link list! Lisa Spangenberg had some great advice (the link in the right column goes to the top page, I think - I'm linking here to her IT site given what we were talking about). There was a pseudonymous blogger on the panel who lives with a particularly strict IT department and campus human experimentation protocol; she couldn't have shown us her class blogs even if she wanted to without redacting names, which is way more trouble than it's worth! Scott Nokes convinced me that I need to set up a parallel all-medieval-all-the-time blog (see my Flickr Gothic Revival group for an attempt to do some medievalist outreach)). Here's his take on the panel - I agree it was poorly attended compared to the breakfast, and compared to last year. Maybe blogging isn't hot any more? There were two non-blogging-but-high-technology-course folks from Western Michigan University, Kim Laing and James Ryan Gregory. I've always wanted to try an online course - Kim had some interesting speculations about who persists in them (the non-technophobic, to put it simply).

Thanks to Elisabeth Carnell and Shana Worthen and for organizing.

I heard lots of great papers, saw some amazing images, drank some spectacularly cheap wine at the expense of publishers, and danced the night away in a carnivalesque dissolving of barriers (I hope folks post some of those cameraphone shots of the break dancing Cornell grad student). Medievalists may be stodgy, but we're not stuffy!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:10 AM

May 10, 2007

Leavin'

Laptop hard drive backed up - check
Paper printed in duplicate - check
Dog walked - check
Ticket in pocket - check
Bye! Back Sunday - if not before.

later . . .
Oh, who am I foolin'? Free wireless at the Rochester Airport! Yay! So...

Business cards - DAMN! I knew I'd forget something.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:46 AM | Comments (1)

May 9, 2007

Processional Statues and Carnival Badges

It's amazing what you can find on Flickr if you search! I've spent the early morning coffee time being frustrated in what I haven't found in the world of high art - I've been looking for some paintings or prints of later Medieval or early Renaissance processions with a crowned Virgin Mary. I'm sure they're out there and I'm just being obtuse. I began with our Visual Resources Collection and moved out through a pile of image collections - and then I searched Flickr for similar things under a Creative Commons license and found a procession in Hoboken - JUST what I need. Feel free to come see what I do with it on Friday morning at Kalamazoo!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:28 AM

May 8, 2007

Danke Schoen, Herr Professor!

“Danke Schoen, darling Danke Schoen,” I sang in a smooth baritone, “Thank you for all the joy and pain.”

You ARE keeping up with all the episodes of Herr Professor Doktor Boethius P. von Korncrake in Kalamazoo, aren't you? I leave for the shark tank day after tomorrow, myself, if the self-recognition in his story doesn't kill me.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:21 PM

May 7, 2007

Ah, Spring!

My colleague Stan Mathews went into the wood lot with a chainsaw and rescued this stand of cherry trees from the scrub before construction began on the new studio art building - and see the pay off? Sometimes even academic projects respond to a little direct action.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 AM

May 4, 2007

"What can I do with a major in art history?"

Here's a new answer to an old question - "You can grow up to own a major league baseball team."

MIAMI — It might not seem obvious, but Florida Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria says there are some connections between his job and his college major — art history.

Loria, who graduated from Yale in 1962, says a baseball team is built the same way as an art collection.

“The baseball team is about quality. The works of art that I have been involved with, that I have both owned personally and have gifted around the country, are works of great quality. And I think that’s where the two cross,” Loria said Thursday at the Miami Art Museum.

The story gets the name of the artist whose work Loria is donating wrong - it's Fernand Leger, not L Deger (there's something weird going on in the online typesetting, and it happens more than once - I'm supposing there's a diacritical mark gone bad). Still, this is an alternate career path for art history majors.

I had no idea. Loria made all his money as an art dealer.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:22 AM

Weirdest Diversity Statement Lately

"Reflecting the global diversity of Duke's Fuqua School of Business, the students involved come from multiple countries on four different continents," wrote Dean Breeden in an e-mail update sent to students and faculty May 2.

So is that a good thing or a bad thing? Or is the Dean trying to make lemonade out of lemons from globally diverse sources? Here's an article about a cheating scandal at Duke's business school. The second page considers some of the ethical problems of business school group work.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:00 AM

May 1, 2007

What is College For? And why don't we want frauds running the Admissions Office?

Prof Soltan says, "I actually agree with Ehrenreich that too many Americans feel compelled to go to college. But I think she's got the reasons all wrong." I agree with Professor Soltan on both counts. I agree with her about all sorts of things (click and read the parts in red especially carefully).

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:03 PM

April 25, 2007

Yale Shoots Itself in the Foot

The stupidest response to the recent shootings at Virginia Tech has been rescinded in a reversal for dim deans everywhere. The new, more nuanced policy reveals that the willing suspension of disbelief is taken very seriously in New Haven.

Stage weapons will again be allowed in University theatrical productions, in a reversal of last week's ban, Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Tuesday morning.

Administrators decided Monday afternoon to require that audiences instead be informed of the use of stage weapons before the start of every performance, she said. In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, which left 33 students dead last Monday, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg had told students that they would be required to substitute obviously fake props for realistic stage weapons in theatrical productions.

Can you imagine the stupid prologues announcing that no real weapons will be in use on stage and that no actors will really be in danger during the production? I can. I can imagine that a committee of deans is drafting sample language now.

Look, if you're scared by even seeing "real life weapons," as the Dean of Students Affairs suggests, you probably shouldn't be exposing yourself to the moral dangers of representation on the stage.

I have so seldom been grateful that when I was setting up my blog categories I used scare quotes (a lamentable practice, I know) on the Higher in 'Higher' Education.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:35 AM | Comments (3)

April 21, 2007

Looking for Inspirational Books for the Rome 2008 Group

We're choosing books for the students to read next fall in preparation for Rome!

I need some help finding an elegiac and inspiring general introduction to the wonder that is Rome.

I've given my co-director* Judith Testa's Rome is Love Spelled Backwards, but he thinks it's a little to tour-guidey. The book is, I agree, itinerary driven.

Here's an Amazon Listmania list I constructed back in 2002 - and have occasionally edited - Things to Read and Watch before you go to Rome.

I'm sure they'll read a history of Italy (probably the illustrated Oxford history). Luigi Barzini's The Italians is a fine book, though it's got to be pretty old now. I'd have them read something by Paul Ginsborg, but they're really very modern in focus and dense in prose - though he's really helpful for understanding Italy.

I'd really like to figure something out that captures the layering of Rome - civilizations, culture, religion - but without being organized as a guide book. Any suggestions?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:09 AM | Comments (5)

April 20, 2007

What a difference a week makes - Monday and Friday

Monday, April 16th - almost to Houghton House and class - I wanted to slit my wrists and be done with it.
And today, Friday - it's Spring! Argyle has collapsed on the Hobart WWI memorial overlooking the Quad-full of students. I counted 7 kinds of sporting goods - baseball, bocce, frisbee, football, lacrosse, soccer, and whiffle ball.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:34 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2007

Pantheon Tales

I'm teaching the Pantheon today in Roman Art & Politics. It is the greatest building in the world.

I haven't seen Hagia Sophia yet, and it might be as great, but that's the only contender I can think of.

The Pantheon is a triumph of simplicity and complexity - and my job today is to get them to see both while understanding the fundamental mystery of the building - we don't really know what it was. For such an amazing building there are precious few references to it in surviving Roman writing. Its name doesn't tell us much, because it replaced a previous building called The Pantheon - hence the inscription naming Agrippa as the builder, even though the building we see was built by Hadrian. That's a stumper.

Oh - and I'll address the second thing out of every student's mouth when walking into the building - "I've heard that when it rains the rain doesn't fall through the hole in the roof."

Nope. There's even a drain in the middle of the floor. Sorry.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:57 AM

April 18, 2007

The Run up to the end

Some semesters wrap up neatly and others just stop. I can't tell yet about this one, but it's getting crazy. Three courses (one of which has turned into constant email correspondence about image selection for their final presentations), an honors committee, a conference paper, a community board meeting (which I think conflicts with the honors thing), judging a physics competition (really! Me! Second year in a row!) , faculty parliamentary queries, admissions office open house, and MOVING. Am I forgetting anything? Lots. Pray for me or wish me luck, as your taste runs.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:31 AM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2007

The Growth of Wealth

From CNNMoney.com:

Richest households pass 1 million mark

Report finds households with net worth of at least $5 million grew 23 percent to 1.14 million in 2006.

I wonder how many of those are TIAA-CREF households? Time, compound interest, and sound management . . . .

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2007

Saving Brutalism - Paul Rudolph building at Yale

Yale is renovating the Paul Rudolph Art and Architecture building (1963). Funny, but the editorial from the Boston Globe manages to ramble on about the thing and never use the words Brutalist or Brutalism. I don't know how much Rudolph embraced the term, but he was certainly part of the movement and this is a key building for illustrating the approach to - um - dealing with the user. Here's the building. Let's just say that this is not a building that inspires much alumni sentimentality - here's an article on the building from the Yale alum magazine. No pictures there. I'm really having trouble turning up any good exterior views to post.

What I found on Flickr - what you see here - is an interior view. Yes, Brutalism is the style that brought you the exposed, battered concrete wall with which we are all now so very familiar.

The Cannon Chapel at Emory (here's a page of pictures - go look, they enlarge!) is an example of how good poured concrete can get - and it's by Paul Rudolph. The ridging, especially in contrast to the interior at Yale, is sensitive - hardly brutal at all.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:33 AM | Comments (1)

April 14, 2007

Prof. Dr. von Korncrake at the Zoo

Between trips across the hall to see if the carpet has been laid in my new apartment (I've told the students who I'm offering to pay to carry my belongings that it will be more like rearranging the furniture than it is like moving) I'm fiddling with the beginnings of my paper for Kalamazoo.

Then I click over to Herr Professor Doktor von Korncrake and read his story.

Simultaneity.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:10 PM

April 11, 2007

Your Research Pounds at Work - the Perfect Bacon Sandwich

Now this is useful science - none of that silly ol' theory stuff.

Researchers at Leeds University spent more than 1,000 hours testing 700 variants on the traditional bacon sandwich, which many Britons refer to as a bacon butty (eschewing the term sandwich, said to have been coined to honor the fourth Earl of Sandwich’s habit of eating meat between slices of bread around 1762).

For the answer to the question of what is the perfect bacon sandwich, click here. With pics.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:08 AM

April 9, 2007

The Consolation of Blogging

Have you visited Korncrake - the website of Herr Prof. Dr. Boethius P. von Korncrake? I recommend his work.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:23 PM | Comments (0)

Teaching the Specialty - Charlemagne and me

This week I get to luxuriate in 9th century architecture and art. I decided - entirely selfishly - to spend a day or two in my first-half-medieval-200-level-course with Charlemagne's palace complex at Aachen as the hinge. My students have gotten used to the idea that we jump from coin inscriptions to monumental inscriptions - denarius to apse mosaic - and this will be no exception. The 806 denarius from Frankfurt with KAROLVS IMP AUG (Charles Emperor Augustus) on one side and XPISTIANA RELIGIO (Christian Religion) on the other is a big one for me - and it gets compared in my classes to the dedicatory inscription that ran around the inside of the palatine chapel, where Charlemagne is called princeps rather than emperor. Fun fun fun!

Click to see! This image is taken from Georg Dehio/Gustav von Bezold: Kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes. Stuttgart: Verlag der Cotta'schen Buchhandlung 1887-1901, Plate No. 40. I found it at the Wikimedia Commons, which has some of the strangest stuff. This plan was first published in 1887 and has to be use with caution. Historians and engravers had a bad habit of regularizing angles that offended them!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:23 AM

April 6, 2007

Two in one week - Lydian Etruscans and Human-sacrificing Central Americans!

Yep - trust the text, distrust the 20th century sceptics.

Herodotus might have been right about the Etruscans.

The Spaniards might have been right about human sacrifice among the Aztec, et al.

Me, I find Homer pretty convincing, too . . . but color me naive humanist until the data comes in. That doesn't mean I'm not subtle, but I'm finding systematic distrust unproductive and wearing.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:04 PM

April 2, 2007

Let's run our educational system like a business..."reviewed by senior managers"

Read and tremble, professors:

A spokesman for Bournemouth University said that a formal investigation looked into this case and that its recommendations are being put in place to ensure that all students have been assessed fairly.

He said: "The university is absolutely committed to achieving and maintaining high academic standards throughout the education process from entry requirements through to the standards set and monitored internally and externally for the award of our degrees.

"We remain confident that we are able to continue to provide the standard of education expected of us.

"In fact, we have achieved the highest possible outcome in relation to the quality of our provision from the most recent Quality Assurance Agency Audit."

This is where the newfound national obsession with outcome assessment over all leads.

The most terrifying passage:

Archaeology professor Paul Buckland, who has 25 years' teaching experience, decided that 13 second year students re-sitting exams in his Reconstruction of Environment and Economy course deserved to have failed.

A second marker ratified his decision.

However, the marks were later reviewed by senior managers and 10 of the students were told that they had passed. [my emphasis]

REVIEWED BY SENIOR MANAGERS. Not by senior professors, deans, whatever . . . managers! Managers! Oh, well. The mask is off. The University in the West is over.

Remember, the assessment movement comes from panic that if we can't prove that we're providing value added educational experiences or some such that people won't pay tuition any more. The process has gone further in Britain because pretty much all higher education is government funded. The camel is in the tent and stomping around.

There's no good way to explain to outsiders - students we want to recruit, parents who we want to pay for the process, legislators we want to give us more money - what it is we're going to DO because we aren't sure ourselves. So, instead, we've fallen back on the idea that we'll assess whatever we ARE doing and show you how well we do that thing, whatever it is. I've read a lot of assessment statements in the last few years, and that's what they boil down once I subtract the buzz words and managementese. The underlying assumption that what we are currently doing is the right thing seldom gets much attention.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:34 AM | Comments (6)

March 30, 2007

The Rotunda and the Lawn

When I was blogging about UVa the other day I remembered that not everyone has a good visual memory ('visual learners' my foot). Google images didn't turn up what I wanted, but a flickr search did. This is from Steve Cholewiak, who kindly agreed to let me upload it to the blog. Click and see his other photos, especially his amazing high definition range photos of a clock tower at Purdue! Ain't the internet great?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:22 PM | Comments (0)

Harvard Spends some endowment on financial aid and gets applications

Harvard's shift in aid policy seems to be paying off - though I'd really like to see a breakdown on that 26% -- how many are eligible to attend free of charge? Recruiting a really sizable percentage of your class from families that make less than $60,000 per year would be a more radical move at Harvard than race-based affirmative action. Clearly the percentage is less than 26% - some percentage of families make between 60-80K. Another interesting thing to see will be the yield - the percentage of students who decide to show up in the fall. Will that shift?

March 29 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard College rejected 91 percent of applicants for the coming academic year, the highest rate in the school's history, after an expansion of financial aid encouraged more students to seek admission.

A record 22,955 students applied to be part of the incoming freshman class at the college, the part of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university focusing on undergraduate education. The school sent out 2,058 acceptance notices in December and today, according to a statement posted on its Web site.

Harvard, which has the largest endowment in the U.S. at $29.2 billion, increased financial aid for the school year starting in September to allow students from families earning less than $60,000 to attend free of charge. Undergraduate tuition, room and board and other mandatory fees will rise to $45,620 for the year.

"The new Harvard financial aid initiative continues to send a clear and unambiguous message that Harvard welcomes students of excellence regardless of their financial need,'' said William Fitzsimmons, dean of admission and financial aid.

About 26 percent of the incoming class is eligible to attend free of charge or at a reduced cost offered to students whose families earn $60,000 to $80,000 annually. Harvard increased its financial aid pool to $103 million for the year, the most in the school's history.

See my posts on Hamilton (no merit awards) and Davidson (no loans in aid packages).

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:51 AM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2007

Attack of the Fundraisers - on Jefferson's Lawn?

Now this is a sign of the long-term change in the University in the West from self-perpetuating educational institution to self-perpetuating fund-raising instrument if nothing else is. One of the Lawn Pavilions at the University of Virginia is about to open up and a non-academic administrator wants it.

A controversy has erupted at the University of Virginia over whether UVa’s top fundraising officer will be allowed to live in one of the Lawn Pavilions, prestigious residences typically reserved for UVa’s best and brightest professors.

“The Lawn is not supposed to be a sales gimmick,” said fourth-year student Allison Murphy, who lives in one of the rooms along the Lawn. “It’s supposed to represent the educational foundation of the university community.”

The controversy stems from the desire of Robert D. Sweeney, UVa’s senior vice president for development and public affairs, to live on the Lawn when Pavilion VI opens up this summer. Because of a little-noticed policy change instituted by UVa’s Board of Visitors last month, President John T. Casteen III has the power to nominate any UVa vice president for a Pavilion slot.

“I think Mr. Sweeney is a good person. But I just don’t see him being around at all to interact with the Lawn community,” Murphy said. “And even if he was, I’m not sure the students would really gain much from that interaction.”

One Pavilion is already filled by a UVa vice president. Patricia Lampkin, vice president and chief student affairs officer, lives in Pavilion III. Murphy said she found that acceptable because Lampkin has a strong link to the student body.

Mike Slaven, another student living on the Lawn, said he thought it would be “inappropriate” for Sweeney to move into a Pavilion.

“I think it’s not just the fact that he’s never taught classes, but the fact that he’s a fundraiser that’s upsetting people,” Slaven said. “As the university relies more heavily on private gifts, some people are uncomfortable with the extent to which the university relies on fundraising and the compromises it is making to get there.”

Of course, it would help the case of the anti-fund-raisers if the occupants really were "UVa’s best and brightest professors" rather than (mainly - see the list at the end of the article) deans of schools, but still - I understand the point.

Here's a nice photo tour of UVA with pleasant pics of the Lawn.

Here's a more interesting panoramic photo.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:32 AM

March 26, 2007

Joy of joys - advisement week!

The biannual month of joy begins - advisement for sophomores and juniors (seniors are graduating - they don't need any more advice - yay!) this week, first years next week, registration next week and the following week.

Here's the note I sent my advisees:

Hey, folks -
Here's my schedule for the week. I am giving you precedence over the first year advisees (they can deal with me next week).

Choose a time and email me back. First come, first serve.

Handy hints:
1. Look at the description of your major and minor (gosh I hope you have one!) in the catalog - what are you missing?
2. Are you going to do a term abroad? How does that change your pacing for major/minor and goals? Is there something you haven't addressed yet, and do you need to take care of it BEFORE you go abroad?
3. Are you going to do a term abroad? What are the prerequisites and when should you take them? If there is a language pre-req or a specific course for a term abroad spots are usually held for those accepted for the program, but you do have to register for them.
4. Are you doing a term abroad in the Fall? You DO have to register for those courses to be taken abroad!
5. Make a list of 6-8 possible courses with their section number and meeting times. The best way to do this is the trial schedule on the back of the paper version of the Schedule of Courses. PLEASE don't come to see me without a list of courses. Don't make our time together a frustrating scramble to find 4 open courses.

I always give them something like a real schedule so they can see that much as I love them they are not the only items on my agenda. For instance, this week I have lunch with 2 job candidates and then 2 consequent job talks to attend. I have classes. I have dog walking to manage. I have a faculty lunch to attend. I have a board meeting. Next week I'll be reminding the first years that I have a faculty lunch talk to give and that they can't expect to find me in my office early that afternoon.

Oh, well - let's pray they all pay attention to my point 5.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:12 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2007

Creative Misunderstanding

Working on the paper for this weekend clarified something for me - I think. I think what's going on in the literary tradition of some French farce death-bed scenes is a creative misunderstanding of a long-established iconography (I hate saying 'visual iconography,' but that's what I mean - the art stuff).

My paper was more or less descriptive - a 'hey, look at this as an example of The World Turned Upside Down' kind of job. As I got closer to finished with the paper as it stood I realized that the upside down part was a misunderstanding of the visual material, maybe deliberate maybe not, by the poets.

Now I've got to plow back through my Harold Bloom to remember everything I've forgotten about the anxiety of influence. Not to mention misreading. I started this life as a comp lit guy - and Bloom really is right (well, as close as humanists get to 'right') about this stuff. His taxonomy of misready (see the first link) is very helpful - and art historians have never made as much of it as we should have. Bloom had the misfortune to do all this work shortly before the great tidal wave of French post-Heideggerianism (or late fascist theory - I have a very low tolerance for de Man's apologists) swept everything before it. I teach a seminar on historiography and have wondered about this overlooktion in some detail.

What I've got is a concrete image - a death-bed scene involving a bulging sack - with one clear meaning in high and late medieval iconography and a very different interpretation in the farces. The sack in the pictures is, so far as I can tell, invariably involved with the death-bed of misers and represents their ill-saved gains. The poets play a different game - devils come to capture the soul on its escape from the body in a leather sack - thus taking the presence of demons and sacks and misreading. Rereading.

This is not an uncommon process - it is a very neat example of it. And funny. What more can I want?

Here's the visual tradition - the death of the miser from Moissac, France - c. 1120. Now I think the demon is holding the money bag because he's taking the gold to Hell to melt and give to the miser to drink (i.e., punishment fits the crime). That's mere intuition.

This painting is almost contemporary with the 1496 farce I talked about - Bosch's Death of the Miser of 1485. Be sure to choose the link for details.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:33 PM | Comments (1)

March 23, 2007

One scholarly appearance down...

One paper down, 2 to go between now and graduation. Went well. I'm tired.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:55 PM | Comments (2)

March 22, 2007

Let's run this college like a business!

Here's what happens when you run a start-up college like a start up business - Tom Monaghan's pet board fires Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J., from Ave Maria University - and asks him to clear his desk and leave campus the same day. Don't these people understand the 'not in front of the children' principle? Traumatic personnel decisions (as opposed to firing embezzlers) are best left for June, July, and August. Instead, they do it during the month between sending out admissions offers and the due date for deposits for the fall. And if they don't believe that parents notice this kind of thing? With a current enrollment around 100 I don't expect Ave Maria to have a bulging 1st year class of 2011.

The law school furore was not a good sign. I like this entirely non-Catholic-blogsphere coverage.

*Amy Welborn's
entry with lots of comments
*Whispers in the Loggia part 1, with press release. Part 2, with comments from Fr. Fessio
*For semi-insider coverage (well, this is someone who stayed in Michigan), Fumare.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:58 AM

March 20, 2007

CPUSA Trove to NYU

The Communist Party USA has donated a huge collection of material to NYU - lots of fascinating stuff to sort through and eventually study.

I'm a little bemused the New York Times files it in the ARTS section. I guess they're thinking that it's like a museumy-kinda-thing?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:12 AM

March 19, 2007

And Speaking of Colleges and Need - Hamilton Eliminates Merit Scholarships

Davidson drops loans from its aid-packages for those who can demonstrate need (see my post about that), and Hamilton College (which is in Clinton, NY, while Colgate University is in Hamilton, NY - welcome to the Wonderful Geography of Upstate NY Colleges and Universities) has decided to eliminate merit scholarships.

Here's their press release:

HAMILTON, N.Y., March 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Hamilton College will no longer offer merit scholarships, beginning with the first-year class that enrolls in the fall of 2008.

"We are discontinuing our merit scholarship program so that we can provide more need-based aid," said Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Monica Inzer. "We believe we are the first college or university in the U.S. to abandon its merit scholarship program."

Approximately 5 percent of Hamilton's $21 million financial aid budget is spent on merit aid, according to Inzer. The new policy will reallocate about $1 million each year for additional need-based aid.

Inzer said demographers predict a college student population with greater financial need in the coming decade, and colleges and universities must prepare for that reality.

"We have been and plan to continue being a college that meets the full demonstrated need of each student we accept," Inzer said. "Our intent is to grow our financial aid resources over time, and this is another step toward accomplishing that objective."

Hamilton has awarded a limited number of merit scholarships since 1997. On average, 15-20 students out of a first-year class of 470 have received merit scholarships of up to half tuition.

Inzer said Hamilton is in a strong position to make the change in policy now. She cited the college's record numbers of applications and the increasingly stronger academic credentials of entering students. The college recently announced that it had received 16 percent more applications than a year ago and 8 percent more than its record total in 2001. The average SAT scores for entering students is approaching 1350, and nearly three-quarters graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school
class.

"Hamilton has a reputation for being a school of opportunity," Inzer said. "A larger percentage of Hamilton students receive need-based aid than nearly all of our peer colleges. This change in policy will help us sustain that legacy."

More than half of all Hamilton students receive need-based financial aid. The average financial aid package (grant, work-study, loan) for those students exceeds $26,000. The College's current capital campaign seeks to raise $35 million for additional student scholarship endowment.

Students currently receiving merit aid and those members of the Class of 2011 who receive merit scholarships will have those commitments honored for the duration of their undergraduate career at Hamilton. My emphases

Note that while Davidson has about 33% of its students demonstrating need Hamilton has more than half.

Hamilton's total estimated cost:
Undergraduate Fees (2006-2007)
Tuition and Fees: $34,980
Room and Board: $8,910

Davidson and Hamilton each have about 1,700 students.
Davidson - about $420 million in endowment.
Hamilton - about $658 million.

And the facts here at These Colleges - about 1,900 students (and headed to 2,000 if we have our way), merit based scholarships, and loan packages.
Costs 2006-2007: tuition $33,730
room and board $8,828
fees $958
total of $43,516
Endowment - about $156 million. Huge sigh. Wanna kick us some change? We have a capital campaign on.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:25 PM

Davidson Eliminates Student Loans

This is an interesting press release! Davidson College is eliminating loans from student aid packages -- all 'need' will be met with grants and student employment. Need is a tricky thing (and Davidson, specifically, drove my mother crazy about aid in the spring of 1980 . . . she would've killed me if I'd wanted to go there after the correspondence she had with the admissions/financial aid folks), but this is certainly one way to make college more affordable for some people - some folks will graduate debt-free.

Read carefully, though. The offer isn't as generous as it sounds at first.

Here's part of the press release:

DAVIDSON, N.C., March 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In an effort to make a Davidson education affordable for all students, Davidson College (http://www.Davidson.edu) and its Board of Trustees announced today a new financial aid policy that will eliminate loans at the institution. As a result, all Davidson students will have their demonstrated financial need funded entirely through grants and student employment.

"We believe this new policy is the necessary response to the financial situation facing many applicants and their families, and know it is consistent with a core value of the college," said Davidson College President Robert F. Vagt. "A Davidson education should be affordable for all students, regardless of means. This is an historic change for Davidson and for liberal arts institutions across the nation. With the support of
the entire college family, from students to faculty, trustees to alumni, we are confident this bold reform will prove to make a significant difference for our students, our institution, and our community."

Taking effect in August 2007, this new policy makes Davidson the first national liberal arts college in the country to adopt such a policy, eliminating student debt for its graduates. Davidson will meet 100 percent of the demonstrated need with grants and student employment, but families retain the option to take out education loans as part of personal financing.

Davidson will maintain its strict commitment to practicing need-blind admissions, meaning the family's ability to pay for a Davidson education has no bearing on whether or not the student is admitted.

Currently, 33 percent of Davidson students receive need-based financial aid, with packages inclusive of grant, loan and campus employment. Nationally, college students borrow $53.8 billion per year to cover college costs. My emphasis.

I note that 67 percent of students can't show need. I bet a bunch of them ARE taking loans. Because Davidson is only talking about "demonstrated need" a bunch of people will still graduate with a pile of debt.

Like me. I was offered some kind of named scholarship at Davidson and received a separate, polite letter telling me that because I could not demonstrate need the scholarship would pay $100 per semester (or year, I forget). Even in those far off days $100 wouldn't cover books for a semester. My mother inquired. The tactful admissions officer pointed out that should my father die suddenly I would certainly be able to demonstrate need and the scholarship would kick in. Hence, I was strongly encouraged to go elsewhere or face Mother's wrath. Which is something to behold.

Oh - bear in mind that this is what Davidson thinks 67% of their students can afford without any help (demonstrated need):

The fees for the 2006-2007 academic year are as follows:
* Required student charges (tuition, student activity fee) $30,194
* Room (double) $4,536
* Meals (full board) $4,054
* TOTAL: $38,784

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:13 AM

March 16, 2007

"Because really, bitchery doesn't seem so petty when it's poetry."

You all read Big Arm Woman, don't you? Go read aboutHaiku Friday.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:38 PM

Where do we go when we die?

Argh!

Help!

Anyone have a nice medieval or patristic theological reference to the soul escaping through the MOUTH?

You see, Heaven and Hell are irrelevant at this point - I'm dealing with the exit strategy and I thought it would be more clear cut. I'm an art historian (waaah!) and hate finding proof-texts in theology, but that's what I'm looking for.

You see, I'm writing a paper. It wasn't really my idea - but a friend of mine wanted to go to a conference and she didn't want to go alone, so she persuaded me to submit an abstract to a conference on Humor & Laughter in Literature and Film being sponsored by the Binghamton University department of Romance Languages. So here I about to talk in public again about something so late medieval that half the books I looked at to write it have "Renaissance" in their titles.

Still and all, it's fun. The low-hanging fruit in humor is the World Turned Upside Down (which has the advantage of being the keynote speaker's topic, so he might come to our session). I messed with literary devils this summer and fall so I pulled out another one - death bed scenes. André de La Vigne wrote a massive play on the life of St. Martin of Tours for production in 1496 (oh my gosh - they knew where America was already. What am I doing?). It had a cast of 200 and took 3 days. Along with the solemn business of the life of Martin de La Vigne wrote a farce (which I'm talking about) and a morality play - the farce served as an entr'acte and the morality was played at the end. I'll mention it in passing.

So there's a death bed scene in which monks say sad things about Martin and Martin says uplifting things about Heaven. Then there's an expiration scene - Martin's soul, in the shape of a dove, flies up to Heaven. Between the two is the farce!

The farce shows how the devils carry the soul of a wicked miller down to hell. It is an inversion (upside down time) of the saint's deathbed. Now what I'm messing with is this - a trainee demon, who has never attended a deathbed, shyly asks Lucifer from what orifice the soul proceeds at death. Lucifer replies "from the backside." So what we see when the death scene takes place is an angel above the bed waiting for the soul and the trainee demon underneath the bed - it is the canonical deathbed scene distorted (turned upside down).

Take a look at Bosch's 1490 version of the Death of the Miser. There's an angel behind the Miser and a variety of demons - but they're lying in wait especially above the canopy.

Or at Moissac in the 12th century - here's a view of the porch.

Here's a detail of the death of the Miser (Dives) scene - go to the center right and see the bed, the miser dying, the weeping wife, and demons above the bed grabbing the little baby, the soul, coming from his mouth.

See my point?

Yes, it's belabored. Welcome to academe. Can I make it last 20 minutes? Damn straight. I don't really have time to drag in literary sources.

So what the Burgundian folk of Seurre, the town that hired André de La Vigne, saw was Martin dying a bona mors, an entr'acte about a BAD death featuring a demon under the bed (oooh - childhood fears?), then St. Martin's good death and a dove flying up to Heaven.

You'd think I could've found what I was looking for in the works of Caroline Walker Bynum, but no. I'm dim. Call it the end of a week off and help a guy out.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:10 PM

March 15, 2007

When Humanists equationize

Perishing field + perv dept chair = problems.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:07 PM

February 28, 2007

Do you have signed permission to ask that question?

The New York Times has a fascinating article about Institutional Review Boards and the humanities and social sciences.

Institutional Review Boards began as a federal mandate to control human experimentation - but the definition of 'experimentation' has broadened. A lot.

Bernadette McCauley, a historian at Hunter College, said she ran into trouble a couple of years ago when she tried to help students working with the Museum of the City of New York on an exhibition about Washington Heights. She asked if a few nuns who had grown up in that neighborhood and whom she knew from her research would talk to the students. And that, Ms. McCauley said, was “when things went haywire.”

The review board discovered the request and lambasted Ms. McCauley for failing to consult with it, she said. The board also demanded proof that previous research for a completed book did not use any archival material involving living people and banned her from doing any research.

Don't you love that audit of her previous book? The possibility for abuse without appeal is enormous. For instance:

Debbie S. Dougherty and Michael W. Kramer, two former members of a review board at the University of Missouri, Columbia, who wanted to study review boards, had to first get their own board’s O.K. Although they thought their project was exempt from board approval, the only entity authorized to make that decision is the board itself, and the only appeal if the researchers had rejected the ruling is also the board.

An unintended consequence of this? Well, more historians might actually work on, you know, dead people. That part I could get behind.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:17 AM

February 27, 2007

Where I Work

Houghton House in the snow - I'm here 5 or 6 or 7 days a week this semester, since my classes are all here rather than what we art-folk call On Campus. Here's a little potted history of Houghton House from the departmental website.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2007

Higher Education in Independent Palestine

Is it a civil war when the two universities in Palestine are like this?

Islamic University is closely identified with one of the main Palestinian factions — Hamas — while Al Azhar is a stronghold for its main rival, Fatah. For three days this month, from Feb. 1 to 3, the side-by-side campuses became a battleground for gunmen from the two factions while the universities were on winter break and largely deserted.

Though the New York Times headline, "Palestinian Universities Dragged into Factional Clashes" [my emphasis], seems inaccurate when one reads this part:

The Islamic University, founded in 1978, has nearly 20,000 students, a majority of them women, and caters to those who seek a religion-based education. All the women wear black abayas, or long robes, as well as head scarves, and some wear full veils.

Many Hamas leaders in Gaza have some link to the university, among them Prime Minister Ismail Haniya.

At Al Azhar, established in 1990, there are more than 12,000 students, and most offices feature a large photo of Yasir Arafat, the longtime Palestinian leader and Fatah chief who died in 2004.

As competition between Hamas and Fatah has increased, students from the two universities have waged occasional stone-throwing clashes, as happened last spring.

A large photo of Arafat sounds like the al Azhar university entered into factionalism. Let's not be disingenuous - if I.U. was already tied to Hamas, can't we wonder whether Fatah FOUNDED al Azhar?

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:11 AM | Comments (1)

February 1, 2007

Rome 2008!

Tonight I went to an information session run by our Center for Global Education aimed at students interested in studying abroad during the Spring semester of 2008. That's because I'm headed back to Rome next winter!

Some of my readers have been following this blog since that wonderful semester in 2003 - 21 students and me in Italy (sad to say all those archives died in the great db crash of a couple of years ago). This time there will be about 35 students, me, and Nick Ruth (and his lovely family) - yay! a co-director!

Here's the official web page for our program. I'll post more interesting versions of the course descriptions here soon.

This is my first blog announcement of the program. There were lots of minor complications in our program application and official word of approval was annoyingly delayed at the committee level (I still haven't quite figured that one out). Almost everything is clear now (well, except actually setting up the program!), so I suppose it's time to publicize!

We had about 25 students this evening. The provost's ideal number for 2 professors is 35, so I guess we'll find more. I know we'll find more - the Rome program is always oversubscribed.

L'anno prossimo a Roma!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2007

The Campus Visit and Academic Hiring

This morning a new variable occurred to me in the story that is understanding academic hiring.

Could any candidate see past the situation that confronts her or him in Geneva lately? Here are the Weather Channel's predicted highs and lows for the next 10 days as of this morning, Monday, January 29, 2006:
17/13 - Mon, 1/29
21/15 - Tues, 1/30
22/17 - Wed, 1/31
28/21 - Thur, 2/1
32/18 - Fri, 2/2
19/13 - Sat, 2/3
17/14 - Sun, 2/4
20/14 - Mon, 2/5
22/14 - Tues, 2/6
26/17 - Wed, 2/7
What I'm wondering is not from our side but from the candidates' position. Let's take 3 departments - Political Science, Anthropology, and Art. All three have tenure track searches this year. Because of the variability of national conference timings, Political Science brought its candidates to campus between Thanksgiving and exams; Anthropology/Sociology has candidates on campus about now (they had folks here last week and may have more this week - I'm not really keeping up with that search). Studio Art won't even have conference interviews until lateish February and we may still have candidates coming in March.

In many job searches some candidates do have other options. Do departments who regularly have campus visits in January have a harder time attracting their first choices? Since the timing pattern is national (but weather is regional) one could look at a much larger pool than our tiny employment situation by checking Cornell and Syracuse University.

Oh, the variables are too complicated to say anything important - people decide to take one job over another for all sorts of good, bad, and purely personal reasons - but I have to wonder. And I feel sorry for any candidate trying to make a fair assessment of what it's like to live in Geneva year round on the basis of this month - oh, and for any department trying to convince candidates that it isn't always like this.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:28 AM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2007

Do you want to know when I dislike living here?

I hate living in Upstate New York when I have to go back out to evening meetings night after night in sub-freezing weather. Weather.com lists one day with a temp above freezing (and that at 33 degrees) in the 10 day forecast. I have a meeting tonight (Human Rights Commission), tomorrow (faculty mini retreat about an ongoing review of Reviews - you know, "what is it we do to review faculty for tenure and is it working?"), and Thursday (information session for 2008 terms abroad).*

I'd rather come home, eat supper, and read. Perhaps weeks like this wouldn't be any better in a more temperate clime, but I wouldn't have to wear so many layers every time I walk outside.

Friday? No break - I leave 12:30ish on a Library Committee Field Trip to SUNY Geneseo. What is it that I'm supposed to be doing with my time in order to get tenure? I forget. Maybe they'll explain on Wednesday.

*o.k., o.k., I should be quite so cranky. I realized later that the info session for 2008 isn't until Thursday the 1st of February.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:10 PM

January 19, 2007

First Weekism - Roman Art

I think my Roman Art & Power class is off to a good start - I have a bumper crop of Latinists and Grecians who seem very interested. Only one of them has any art history background, so far as I can tell, so I'm getting to build some vocabulary and art historical method into the early days. Yesterday we did a good bit of naturalism vs. idealization, which is especially fun with Roman portraits. It's very easy to think that faces like this one are warts-and-all veristic, the closest thing to a photograph in the Ancient World, but I find it more useful to remember that one can overemphasize wrinkles and warts to emphasize the subject's maturity and wisdom - two personal characteristics the Romans valued very highly.

All in all it never pays to assume that vision is telling a simple truth. It's not that it can't tell the truth, but that truths worth telling are seldom simple.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:55 AM

January 18, 2007

Building Community in a Collegium

The pitiful state of American higher education got me an invitation to quite a nice cocktail party tonight (with cheese leftovers for Miss Argyle).

Yes, we have something like 160 faculty members (let's not argue about the numbers -- can there be anything more depressing that FTE arguments? I've always wanted to demand a show of hands for the faculty who came to these Colleges as a tenure track hire. I sure didn't, and I've been Presiding Officer of the Faculty [Meeting] already).

So, the Committee on the Faculty* (CoFac, the de jure voice of us when talking to the Other, be it the On Campus Other** or the Trustees) decided that what we need are more social events. I flatter myself that the humble efforts of the untenured folks to hold regular Happy Hours influenced the decision. So, there we were, drinking free beer and wine and eating some cheese and crackers. Argyle thanks you very much that you didn't eat all the cheese. Cheddar floats her boat. I had many lovely conversations, shook the hands of cute babies, and generally whooped it up.

So what made me cranky?

Well, I counted three non-City of Geneva-residents: a resident of the county seat who is also a member of CoFac and didn't have an entirely free choice; an Ithacan who is currently seeing a Genevan; an Ithacan who explained to me when I saw him at the Colleges'-Christmas-bash-for-everyone-in-town that he was turning over a new leaf.

In other words, the usual suspects were there. I was very pleased to see the effort and the result - 50 souls isn't a bad turnout at all - but I am disappointed to have been the only person from my department, whatever the excellence of the reasons of those who weren't there. Maybe the Faculty Lunch Junior/Senior Speed-Dating concept will help.

*Ooooh - the chair of CoFac blogs here.

**I do not favor the frequently-heard locution The Dark Side to refer to Them. It is not a sign of inherent evil that their priorities are different from ours (and often wrong-headed and wrong) but only a sign that they are not Us.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:36 PM

January 15, 2007

Best Course Evaluation Comment EVER!

In response to the question 'evaluate the class sessions' --

Long and dark.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:57 PM

Worst First Day of the Semester EVER!

So - the day started with an ice storm. And then a power failure that lasted from about 9:20 until shortly after noon - neatly making it impossible for me to show slides or digital images in either of today's classes (luckily I had LOTS of handouts to go over!).

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:55 PM

January 12, 2007

Ah, one of those twice-a-year horrors...

Syllabus making! Hurrah! The only thing worse is textbook adoption.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:02 PM | Comments (0)

January 2, 2007

Rewrites

School doesn't start here until the 15th, so I'm trying to get some work done not related to classes. I'm finding myself wishing that I talked more like the way most academics write - my conference papers do not convert easily to sonorous academic prose. I write and talk pretty much the way I write here - too breezily. My learning, whatever weight it may have on its own, lies light on the page - or hangs out in the footnotes. I just wish there was a living to be made in adult ed.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

January 1, 2007

Start the new year the way you want to continue . . .

Coffee - Check
Email - Check
NetNewsWire - Check
Chatting - Check
a little something looked up on the library catalog - Check - so I'm already working! Yay!

Country ham (thanks, John Sims!) and black eyed peas to come at lunch time, and the New Year will be well under way. The dog - luckily she hasn't woken up yet. She's started her new year the way she will continue; she got up, said good morning, changed spots, and went back to sleep.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:38 AM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2006

Presidential History

I'm about willing to hear historians speculate on the Gerald Ford legacy or Gerald Ford as a president now - after all, it's actually a legacy rather than current events once someone is dead. How could one evaluate Jimmy Carter without his most recent publication, for instance? If there's not some distinction between history and journalism I don't want any part of the former.

Though from my point of view most American history is current events, and talk of presidential i.q. and presidential rankings are the intellectual equivalent of squabbling in the departmental mail room. That's a medievalist for you, though.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:32 AM

December 19, 2006

The price professors pay for progress

I submitted grades electronically yesterday. This process that saves many steps - I don't have to go by the Registrar's office in person, the Registrar's folks don't have to key in the grades, students can check their grades online rather than waiting for reports in the mail. The price? The first query came at 5:04 p.m.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:12 AM

December 15, 2006

The Cobbler's Elves fail me again

I left a bowl of candies out on the counter with the blue books, but alas, no elves took me up on my offer last night. I guess it's their busy season, too.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:34 AM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2006

Why we grade . . .

This is the funniest web page I've read for a while - cover letters from Hell from Killian Advertising. Next semester I will show it to my students to help explain why I care about their writing - and why they should, too.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2006

Hard December

Sorry for the slow posting, but this is a fairly bad endgame as semesters go. The only best thing that's happened to me this month is the airfare for my family trip - it's only going to run me $240 round trip from Rochester to Chattanooga. I don't think I've ever done that well!

I shouldn't whine so much - my department had a wonderful and sweet surprise farewell party at my house for a colleague who is leaving us (kinda, sorta, for a year's leave of absence and then probable final resignation). We managed, despite some email bumbling on my part, to keep it a surprise. That was a good thing and happened this month.

Alright, alright - I'll go home and light a scented candle or something and grade.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:37 PM | Comments (0)

December 4, 2006

Advent as a Penitential Season

I have no problem keeping Advent as a season of penance - I'd better get credit off of time in Purgatory for grading. December has started badly for me - bronchitis on top of a pile of papers. At least the exhibition project for the first year seminar seems to be in good shape. Some of them were up until 3 last night posting, but the overall exhibition looks good. Now we have to prod them to revise things. It's a pity my colleague and I feel cautious about copyright issues, or we could show you the results - but we're still in the problematic days of a new technology.

My colleague told me on Thursday (I think it was) that the Victoria & Albert in London is no longer charging for academic and non-profit printing of its images - at least its digital ones. Read the report at Cronaca.

Onward through the pile of 101 papers!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:38 AM

December 1, 2006

The end of the apostrophe

Arnold Kling mentions the problem of preposition usage in Wizard of Oz Diplomas. I can sympathize.

I have come very close this semester to putting in writing on the assignment sheets what I have so far only suggested in jest: students could cut their losses by deleting all apostrophes.

You see, I don't allow contractions. College papers are formal writing and contractions are inappropriate. That leaves the apostrophe to form the possessive, which can be easily (if slightly wordily) avoided.

What it would also wipe out is the abomination formerly restricted to sign painters of inserting an extraneous apostrophe before plural S (go here for a Flickr search full of examples). Wouldn't it be nice never to read one of those again? My method of banishing the error would be mechanical rather than leading to any greater understanding of the underlying grammar - but hey. It's December. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:11 AM | Comments (0)

'Higher' Education - What is it worth? Not much if you don't bring much to it.

End-of-semester depression? Perhaps.

Read Arnold Kling on Wizard of Oz Diplomas. I, too, wish my students, almost entirely native speakers of English, could use prepositions idiomatically. Non-prescriptivists will say, of course, that their usage is their usage. You know, the same people who disagree with me when I mark a noun/pronoun number disagreement for "artist...their."

Read the New York Times on the difficulties facing people who attend and graduate from 2nd and 3rd rate colleges in India - A College Education with out Job Prospects.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:43 AM | Comments (0)

November 30, 2006

Class blogging rewards the fiddlers

I have two classes going at Movable Type to create online exhibitions right now (which I will not advertise for copyright reasons - if we keep it private maybe we're covered by fair use). This year I've added an oral instruction in both classes which seems to have paid off a little: web work rewards fiddlers.

I encouraged groups to choose a single person to be the enterer-of-information and to try to choose that person on the basis of a willingness to tinker. I think I see that happening in one group (of 8) in the First Year Seminar and 2 groups (of 7) in Art 101. This year in Art 101 when I asked how many people have ever had a LiveJournal or MySpace page account about a third raised their hands - I told them that if they've done that they can do this. We'll see!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:09 AM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2006

On Language learning, particularly Latin

I commented a few times on Rich Leonardi's post on learning Latin - he was asking for suggestions for what text to use next and stepped into the direct method (sometimes called "natural") vs. traditional method vs. modern linguistic method trap.

Me, I firmly believe in the direct method to be used by native or highly competent non-native speakers who are instructing little children (what? You don't want to hire someone as a live in tutor?), the traditional method of grammar and extensive memorization for anyone past puberty, and the modern linguistic method for someone working in a classroom with a modern linguist. Resources for all three types exist for learning Latin, though some are more available than others.

Rich Leonardi was wondering about the decision between the workhorse traditional Wheelock's Latin, Collins Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin, and Hans Orberg's Lingua Latina. I own the first two and was criticized for criticizing the third without having seen it (I swear I criticized the method, not the book or its otherwise unknown-to-me author). I do, however, own a different direct method course from a group called The Family of St. Jerome which denounces the 'traditonal' grammars in the same terms in which the advocate for Orberg's series denouced Wheelock. Let's see what the two have to say:

Rich's commenter Scott said about the non-direct method:

If you want to learn to _puzzle_ through syntax, and _decode_ Latin (rather than understand it as a language), pick up Wheelock's or Collin's.

The Family of St. Jerome says about the direct method over others:

...you learn from the very beginning to think in Latin and to avoid the usual method of "deciphering and decoding" by grammatical analysis and by constructing "translations".

Do you see a pattern here? You should. This is a pedagogical position that attacks other methods. That makes me feel better about attacking their approach (not them, their approach).

The direct method is indeed the way babies learn languages. Adults have great powers to puzzle through problems and decode - it's part of what separates us from the pre-pubertal.

That's why the "direct method" is not how adults learn languages best, even in a total immersion environment - and that's not an environment that most of us can pull off for home instruction. I tried it for Italian in 2002-03, including a 5 month stay in Rome. I had a 30 day immersion course and then during the five month stay 4 lessons a week - all with extremely well-prepared native speakers. Yes, I learned to speak Italian, but I'm still not sure if I did it as well as I did French at 19 - and I know my Italian vocabulary will never be as large as my French vocabulary. One of the serious problems of teaching languages for speaking rather than reading is that the repetition rate has to be much higher for aural (ear-aimed) learning; therefore there's just less vocabulary and fewer syntactic patterns presented in an oral/aural course than in a paper-based course. Here's an earlier posting of mine on spoken Latin in the modern world.

I learned Latin the unfair way - I went to a reasonably old-fashioned school that offered 5 years of Latin (8th-12th) and I took it all. I learned using Jenney - and not the new fangled edition with color pictures! Then I went to a college where the requirement for getting AP credit, if I remember correctly, was taking a course at level placed -- and I continued with Latin. We used to joke that the only requirement for majoring in classics was 4 or more years of high school Latin, and that rings reasonably true (though one of the two classicists here at these Colleges didn't take a classical language until college, but she's smart as a whip and had 4 years of German and at least some French in high school).

Have you ever heard the old saw "What's the best Bible version?" "The one you READ!" I feel much the way about the following. Anything you do and do consistently will work, but . . . here's a list of my suggestions for those learning Latin divided by the kind of learner.

First of all - decide on your target!
This is essential. Every professional language text author has made a selection of vocabulary to teach and has repeated the most important words frequently in example sentences to drill your memory. What's the goal? To read Caesar in 2nd year Latin? To let you read the Aeneid in 4th year Latin? To participate in the Mass? To pray the Breviary in Latin? Those are very different vocabulary lists! If you bought an old edition of Jenney and then tried to follow the Mass you'd be lost. If you memorize Scanlon & Scanlon perfectly you'll find Caesar very, very hard going - let alone Virgil.

Are you an adult who wants to read Cicero?
Why on earth? Oh - pardon me - I don't wish to question your motives! Latin is wonderful, whyever you want it.
1. Sign up for formal courses with someone who knows Latin.
2. Buy Wheelock and hire a tutor (I tutored someone through Wheelock once myself).
3. Buy Wheelock and join a self-study group - here's an online one called Atrium which I found through Rich Leonardi's follow up posting.
In at least the first two cases there's money involved - that is a fine mechanism to motivate an already interested adult to keep up with assignments. Adults need puzzles and interesting sentences to read. Some of us do better at memorizing verb conjugations than others, but an adult learner can see the pattern and extend the pattern much more readily than a 12 year old.
4. Don't buy Wheelock and do it all by yourself. It's way, way, way too complicated. So is Latin grammar in general - you need a guide.

Are you an adult who wants to understand the Mass?
1. Buy Scanlon and Scanlon's Latin Grammar and Second Latin - especially if you are a devotee of the 1962 Missal. They were designed, as far as I can tell, for previously unlucky (pre-1968) religious and laity who hadn't been tracked into Latin in high school. They're the two dullest books in the world physically, but they have a controlled and graduated vocabulary list based on the Mass and the Psalter. If you memorized every word in the Grammar you'll do o.k. with the missal and breviary. 2nd Latin is aimed at the same audience who now want to read philosophy, theology, and canon law.
2. Buy Collins's Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin, which is much the same thing. I've never used it to teach or studied its vocabulary lists, but it seems less complete to me. It's a one-volume version of Scanlon & Scanlon and mixes and matches its order. S&S has the virtue of restricting the vocab and syntax in vol. I. Back in September when I was contributing to Rich Leonardi's question post I spotted an online study community for Collins, though, so that would help.
3. Buy one of the direct methods sets for the sake of hearing it. The Family of St. Jerome (see above) not only offers a course, but has lots of recorded books of the Bible. Father Suitbert H. Siedl, of St. John of the Cross, O.C.D., has a German accent that drives me NUTS, but you may not react that way. Don't think you're going to learn Latin by listening to tapes anymore than folks learn Spanish in the car on the way to work who aren't massively linguistically talented already - but hearing won't hurt, especially if you stick to the Psalter while using the Scanlons' book. Oh - and the "direct method" in its pure practice depends on native or near-native speakers and frequent contact; that's why it just won't happen on your own. Sorry.

So you're an adult with long-ago Latin who wants to expose your children to the language?
This is the hardest category. You're going to have to recommit to learning some Latin. The target is also messy - do you want ecclesiastical (complete with Italianate pronunciation) or classical (with the modern reconstructed classical pronunciation one tends to learn in high school and college in America)? How old are they?

One resource I'd recommend is a phrase book, like the Family of St. Jerome's Quomodo Dicitur (How is it said?) - that kind of thing is fun and handy for answering questions. Children always want to know things no one can answer without reference books. Bolchazy-Carducci sells a computer based version called Words of Wisdom from the Ancients which looks very interesting - but they admit it's aimed at high school and college students.

For the ecclesiastically-inclined I'd recommend getting the texts of the standard daily prayers in Latin and starting there (there are any number of books or places on the web to find Latin prayers). You already know what they mean - but finding a decent word-by-word break down of the syntax is trickier. I think the best system is to teach children to parrot the prayers (but to separate the words carefully) and then move on to analysis. I managed to explain the dative better to a bunch of home school children using the Lord's prayer (give TO US our daily bread) and the Rosary (pray FOR us) than with anything else. Of course, the home schooled tended already to know English grammar. The prayers are a limited vocabulary to start with, but kind of an eccentric one. I mean, is it really useful for any reason other than praying the Rosary to learn the Latin word for belly/womb and no other body parts? Cotidianum is not a word I have run across often in Latin other than in the Lord's Prayer.

Buy a Cassell's dictionary - it has Latin/English AND English/Latin - it helps.

While googling I found this great bibliography of Latin for Kids - you have to scroll for the language resources - but just look at all the great books about the classical world! They have some neat things - the one which I'd like to try out is Minimus: Starting out in Latin, aimed at the 7-11 year old set, which comes from the British Joint Association of Classical Teachers. There are lots of resources in that JACT constellation, too. The JACT upper level books are a little 'direct' for my taste, but they're still sound.

No list of classical resources for home or school would be complete without a plug for and link to the Bolchazy Carducci folks! They publish masses of interesting stuff - including Artes Latinae, the mid-20th century linguistics-driven direct method system, which I understand is very popular with home schoolers. Again, I think the promotional literature overstates wildly the accessibility of this material to people without good guides (whether full-time teachers or occasional tutors). The current version includes options for "classical" and ecclesiastical pronunciations, which is an enormous concession on their part to the market. Bolchazy has grammars and readers and workbooks of all sorts.

The best thing about teaching the small is that you get to use games. Even when I taught high school I used chocolate kisses to teach the indirect object (Da MIHI basia mille!) but it can go a lot further. Use post-it notes to label everyday objects Door = porta or janua, floor = solum, chair = sedes or sella. When you get to hinge = cardo you'll realize that eventually you need to start teaching the oblique cases, because you can't get cardinal without cardinis, but hey - it's a process. This, by the way, is how I learned the names for Italian household objects - that and a picture Duden!

Animal noises! All language learning should include animal noises! Here's Dr. Weevil's quiz.

Omigosh! I forgot English Grammar for Students of Latin! This is a great series - buy it for every language anyone in your house is trying to learn. I, again, had an unfair advantage. Captain Tate, my 7th grade English teacher, believed in teaching the English subjunctive (after all, weren't we all going to be begin learning foreign languages that had a lot more of it left?) and diagramming sentences. In 8th grade Latin I Mr. Humphreys seldom had to explain the difference between noun and verb, subject and object. Imagine the luxury!

Thanks to TVG from Atlanta for asking me for more detail. I hope this helps!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:25 PM

November 13, 2006

The Best Thing I Learned on the Field Trip . . .

. . . and it wasn't that our students now consider Austin Powers an OLD movie (as in "I love watching these old movies and seeing the previews for other movies I've seen!").

There is a fullsize reproduction of Moses' Tabernacle in Lancaster, PA!

Who knew?

And if you knew and hadn't told me, shame on you!

The Fullsize reproduction of Moses' Tabernacle as found in the book of Exodus is at the Mennonite Information Center - and I may have to order one of the Tabernacle Model Kits. I'm certainly going to bring the website up next semester when we talk about the Codex Amiatinus, which has a lovely full-page diagram of the Tabernacle.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:13 AM | Comments (1)

November 12, 2006

Return

Gosh am I tired. I suppose they are, too, after the bus rides we've had. Today was much better than Friday, but . . . .

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:27 PM

November 11, 2006

DC Trip

Let's just say that the bus ride was a 10 hour bonding experience.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:53 AM

November 10, 2006

Arnaldo Momigliano and me

I'm trying to make all my reading right now do double duty - and since I'm teach 3 chronologically neighboring courses next semester that's not difficult. I just packed a book of Arnaldo Momigliano reprints for the trip down to DC - On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (1987 - most of these are articles from the last 15 years of his life). He was always good on history and historiography - and what he has to say about Judaism in the Roman Empire is useful to me for both the Roman Art & Power course and early Christian (which I call First Christian Millennium - up to but not emphasizing Romanesque). The articles on "The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State" and "Some Preliminary Remarks on the 'Religious Opposition' to the Roman Empire" are both essential.

If I have time on the way back I'll read more of Ittai Gradel's Emperor Worship and Roman Religion, which is looking very interesting (after about 20 pages).

Both of these authors are interested in what really goes on in Roman religion - and if we can even use the word religion usefully about Romans. Gradel is pretty clear that it's a word with an inherently christianizing meaning - which doesn't mean that it's useless or wrong, but that it must be handled carefully.

Two of the big topics of Roman Art & Power are Augustus's Altar of Peace and the emperor cult. One of the things I'm going to have everyone do this time through is write a short paper about a coin (shades of T.S.Burns, for those of you who've known me too long) and imperial cultus. Last time I didn't require the exercise, but one of the best things I got all semester was a short paper on a coin showing Augustus's wife (or widow, and that was the point - was she the wife or mother of the emperor at the time of the striking?) Livia as SALUS AUGUSTA, which means something like "Imperial Welfare."

This also helps me teach First Christian Millennium by reminding me in considerable detail what it is Christians are refusing to do in sacrificing to the emperor.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:33 AM

On the road!

Wish me luck - I'm off this noon-time to DC with 150 students (or so!), 25 of them my immediate responsibility. My folks will be hitting the Freer and Sackler Galleries and the National Galleries. The weather is supposed to be wonderful -- should be fun!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:41 AM | Comments (0)

November 9, 2006

Not ready for prime time, but take a look at some local history

I'm a medievalist. I live in Upstate New York. There's no medieval architecture. However, there's lots of Gothic Revival - and revival styles interest me.

I've been working on our chapel off and on for the last couple of years. One part of that project is the journal kept by Abner Jackson, president of Hobart College from 1858-1867. I'm very interested to see how much I can say about the intentions behind the building than I can ever say securely about Medieval buildings.

I had a little grant last year to have students transcribe the whole thing (we're missing 1865, damn it, but we got the rest of it) and now the archivist and I are mounting it as a blog.

Take a look!

We're posting photos and realia from the archives to enrich the document - and it's already starting to be fun. I'd like to publish it, eventually, but an online version may satisfy that. The illustrations would certainly be richer this way!

Oh - when I say "not ready for prime time" I mean that we've got it on the Wordpress free server right now, but there will eventually be a stable, campus URL for the site. Feel free to look and link, but the link will be broken sooner rather than later.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:25 PM | Comments (1)

Preregistration

Ah, the joys of advisement time, that happy, happy season of appointment after appointment!

Our stranglehold to force students to see their assigned advisor is to distribute the PIN numbers needed for online registration to the advisors. I have only two PIN numbers left on my desk. Two miscreants have never responded to my emails offering appointment time sign-up lists. Both of them are sophomores, and I expect them to contact me today. You see, sophomores may begin registering tomorrow morning. Last semester's PIN number won't work.

Sadly for them, my dog has a vet appointment this afternoon. I will not be available for appointments. This has been announced on the emails. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth during this learning experience.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:26 AM | Comments (4)

November 6, 2006

What I did on Saturday

Yay! We dedicated the new studio building and the renovated Carriage House this weekend!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:22 AM | Comments (0)

November 5, 2006

Pedagogy Questions

I'm participating in a mass-field trip to Washington, DC, next weekend (I think 50 of us are going). My colleague and I are taking our First Year Seminar to the Freer, Sackler, and National Galleries for form and content.

Content is obvious - there's great stuff to see, and it's better to see real art than to look at photographs.

Form may not be so obvious. Our students are mounting virtual exhibitions for their term projects. We would like them to pay attention to the way real exhibitions work. To further that ambition I'm preparing a handout (of course!). Here's what I have so far:

1. Pay attention to the relative length and relative detail of different kinds of explanatory material on the walls. Do the authors provide references on the wall? Why or why not? Be sure to look at a catalog in the museum store and see how the presentation of the same information is handled differently.
2. Consider the introductory wall text as an outline for the exhibition. What does the author do to set up later rooms? What kind of information is and is not included in the introductory text? Does the introductory text mention individual works of art?
3. Can you figure out an organizing principle for each room? Chronological? Thematic? Based on genre? Based on size? How does the exhibition designer help you? Is there a preferred route for you to take through the room, and if so how does the designer guide you?
4. What kind of details does the curator provide on labels for individual works of art? What is left out?
5. Does the exhibition have a conclusion or does it just stop with the last work?

Does anything else spring to mind? Remember, my goal is to help 18-19 year old students visit galleries more thoughtfully.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:36 PM

November 2, 2006

Apple Country

One of the delights of living in Upstate New York this time of year is apple-munching. I counted 10 varieties of loose apples at Wegman's today - all locally grown and most locally developed. Geneva is home to the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station and they do apples. Lots of 'em. I think my favorite variety developed in Geneva is the Macoun.

The Experiment Station is here for the same reason William Smith College is part of Hobart -- William Smith was a rich nurseryman who wanted to support his industry and support women's education. Though their own history page doesn't mention it, I have read that Smith sold them the property (which was adjacent or very close to his own nurseries) for a nominal sum. Subsequently, Smith tried to found a Spiritualist university (this is the Burnt Over District, after all), but failing that about a hundred years ago he came to an agreement with Hobart College to found a Women's Department, which became William Smith College. The link above (at 'William Smith') makes interesting reading.

So, about apples -- today I bought Honeycrisps, a variety developed at the University of Minnesota but still good. They have their own website. Honest. And trademarked advertising taglines. Nevertheless, they're tasty apples.

I'm nobody's baker (luckily I'm in the same department with frequent reader and occasional commenter Ms. Procrastination, so I don't have to be) - I eat them raw. The most I dress apples up is to slice them over a salad with bleu cheese and pecans (a touch which I shouldn't underestimate - it makes a beautiful salad).

Finger Lakes wines and great apples - I guess they're some consolation for the snowflakes I saw on this afternoon's dog walk.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:18 PM

November 1, 2006

All Saints Day - cutting the head off a Zombie Error.

Someone offered me a platform and I'm gonna say something!

The Colleges' organist runs a monthly event at the Chapel called "Music, Meditation and Munchies." She usually plays a selection of seasonally appropriate organ music (occasionally there are other musicians), someone (usually a faculty member) offers a brief reflection, and there are treats. Today is All Saints Day and here's what she's playing (subject to last minute timing revisions):

Jean Langlais--Prelude for a Saints Day
Clarence Dickinson--Joy of the Redeemed (based on O Quanta Qualia)
John Weaver--Sine Nomine (which intertwines the hymn For all the Saints with "When the Saints Go Marching In")

I'm giving the meditation. Mainly I'm showing resurrection, judgment, and entry into Heaven scenes from the tympanum sculpture at Autun, France, and the van der Weyden's Beaune Altarpiece.

However - since someone asked me to say something about All Saints I'm not going to resist explaining that Halloween is not in its origins a pagan festival. Yes, I'm goin