Proselytism? No whats popular is vilifying University Football Programs
Let me combine two university-related subjects I’ve been promising to write about — online courses, which I’ve called the poor white trash of pedagogy, and student/professor affairs.
These subjects, seemingly unrelated, might be considered together under the heading Live Souls, the working title of a book I hope to write this year during my sabbatical: Greedy Souls: Selling to the sports devil.
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What’s striking about the contemporary American university isn’t this or that flashy scandal — drugs at San Diego State(Frank Cuenca and others) , professional basketball players at USC, Reggie Bush at USC. It’s that many American campuses look like death warmed over.
Put your ear to the American campus. Listen. The pulse of the cellphone, the click of the laptop. The drone of the headset.
The quiet of a cathedral full of monks..
In class all heads stay bowed, the professor over her PowerPoint, the student over her Mac. The room flickers with illuminated screens in whose thin light a soul scopes out its trivia: Facebook, Minesweeper, Solitaire.
Students take meals together hunched over their plates while television screens mounted on the wall across from them tell of Britney.
“What if death is nothing but sound?” one character asks another in Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
“You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.”.”
“Uniform, white.”
The white noise of the American university is the sound of souls subdued throughout the day by a succession of screens. The screen is in the classroom and in the diningroom. It is the dorm room and on the quad. Its pacifying effect deepens with iPods, cell phones, and Blackberries.
Of course it’s not just university students. We all look down, messing with our stuff on the metro, in church, in bed.
But it’s sad to see it among university students. Among their professors.
There are forms of vitality university campuses share with sports arenas and bars, but the distinctive nature of the university is that it offers intellectual vitality, that it offers a faculty which includes people who adore the play of the mind as it takes up this and that element of the world.
Also with emotional energy, to be sure. Erotic material exists inside the relationship.
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A friend and fellow blogger puts it like this:
Studying is exciting. Eros is part of that excitement. Feeling your mind expand is exciting. You can do it fitfully, with LSD, or you can do it in a more disciplined way. Feeling a respected professor’s interest in you - even admiration for you - as you receive, absorb, and respond to important ideas is heady stuff.
Be assured that the professor is also excited — excited to have connected with a student about things that matter enormously to the professor.
Heart and body and mind — all are engaged in this intensity. William Deresiewicz writes:
Love is a flame, and the good teacher raises in students a burning desire for his or her approval and attention, his or her voice and presence, that is erotic in its urgency and intensity. The professor ignites these feelings just by standing in front of a classroom talking about Shakespeare or anthropology or physics, but the fruits of the mind are that sweet, and intellect has the power to call forth new forces in the soul. Students will sometimes mistake this earthquake for sexual attraction, and the foolish or inexperienced or cynical instructor will exploit that confusion for his or her own gratification. But the great majority of professors understand that the art of teaching consists not only of arousing desire but of redirecting it toward its proper object, from the teacher to the thing taught.
Actually, occasionally, this intensity will express itself physically, and an affair will ensue. Much more than an affair sometimes. How many professors are married to former students?
Our lives are more and more online, silent, self-absorbed, and, in our preference for customized websites, provincial. The university should be a counterforce to dulling, lulling screenlife, a place that arouses our passion for lightning bolts.
Stuart Fuster who uses psuedo names and writes for Inside Higher Ed, Blog U, San Diego Daily Aztec, Reality Check, The Drake Group and Keywords from a Librarian. His Alma Mater is San Diego State and UC Berkley and he is on a mission to stop athletics from destroying the souls of students and is appalled by the abuse of the Weber Triangle, Frank Cuenca. the Duke Strippers and Chuck Neinas’ . The recent conduct of Chuck Neinas’ , San Diego State and Frank Cuenca. has exploded his writing. When Neinas bilked SDSU out of $30,000 for his contribution in the hiring of Chuck Long as football coach, and then when Chuck Long was hired he and Frank Cuenca. then hired Neinas’ son, then the writing starts
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