Professor Fendrich is away — again. This time she went off to meet with a consortium of Hummer dealers, casino owners, nuclear power-plant heads, and CEOs of fast-food chains, to try to get funding to retrofit all of Fendrich University’s buildings with solar panels. I was left, of course, to clear up all her unfinished committee work, such as checking the 117 new verbs on the “The student will…” column mandated by the Outcomes Assessment requirements of the accreditation gurus. (Does anybody know if “ascertainerize” and “esticalculatatize” are real verbs?) This time, however, she left me no notes, no voicemails, no nothing about answering readers’ comments on her blog. She’s probably starting to lose it, what with all her Outcomes Assessment work and trying to start up a new university and all. But why wait for her? After all, I read all her posts and I even poke around on the other “Brainstorm” blogs. It’s an egalitarian age. Frankly, I can do very well on my own, without her butting in. Any money she doesn’t even notice I’ve gone and posted this.
All My Children
This was a good post, yet it got only one measly comment. I’m going to tell Professor Fendrich that I don’t think she should ever blog about art — or at least contemporary art — again. Most academics think Jasper Johns was a character on Mayberry, RFD and that the Venice Biennale is some kind of Italian food sold from a cart. That’s the way they are, what with their antique prints (well, reproductions of them) and film-noir posters hanging on their dining-room walls. Don’t bother trying to expand their horizons, I’ll tell her.
How Many Courses Per Semester?
WOLFOBY: My goal for the end of college is to hopefully take at least one class in every department offered at my school. . . . As a student, I’d advocate for the hybrid system because while there are certainly subjects that I’m better in that I focus on more (such as English).
Even I know that, generally, you shouldn’t split an infinitive, especially with the misused-as-usual word, “hopefully.” (My high school English teacher would make anybody who used “hopefully” in the sense of “it is to be hoped,” say out loud ten times: “The dog stared HOPEFULLY at his dish.”) And, my goodness, this from somebody who’s allegedly “better” in English than other subjects.
Fendrich University, part un et part deux
(Can you tell I’ve been taking beginning French? They let staff take classes for free here. I love it, even if it does cost me a few lunch hours.)
R.J. O’HARA: If it is to be a world leader, Fendrich U. should be composed of four residential colleges of 400 each.
JOE: Pre-calculus in mathematics? What kind of fluency with the modern world does that achieve? Particularly when pretty much any college prep high school will achieve pre-calculus in math as an absolute bare minimum competency for graduating high school.
JOE: Two quibbles. First, any review of Shakespeare really ought to include at least one history and one comedy, though perhaps this could be addressed by supplementing the film program with (mandatory) live performances. (Maybe I just never really liked The Tempest.) Second, a senior level seminar on WW2 really ought to cover WW1 and the inter-war period as well.
As this humble secretary is not quite as touchy and full of attitude as Professor Fendrich all too frequently can be, I say in answer to the above suggestions: Very good. Points taken. I’ll pass them on to Professor Fendrich when she returns with her solar-panel funding.
SARAH: For all of its semiotics, underwater basket-weaving, and navel gazing, Brown too shuns the dreaded “B-minus.” It’s either whole grades or Pass/Fail baby! What does your snarky secretary have to say about that?
O.K., this humble secretary can be snarky when the occasion — such as this one — demands. The fact (I’ll take your word for it) that Brown deals in whole grades and pass/fail (which, in my opinion, should be used only for Phys. Ed. and Women’s Studies) hardly makes up for “semiotics, underwater basket-weaving, and navel-gazing.” We had a former professor here who did a visiting semester at Le Brun and found out that there was no such thing as an “art major.” Rather, the student was a “visual arts concentrator” — an educational advantage of five syllables! That is, if the student didn’t choose the alternative concentration, “Art and Semiotics,” or, as the students called it, “art ‘n’ semmio.”
TM: One two-hour evening workshop offering marijuana and cigarette smoking at the beginning and end of each semester. So, they’re only allowed to smoke cigarettes twice a year? And you’ll allow them to smoke marijuana in amnesty from the law twice a year too? Wow. You are paradoxically liberally conservative!
I know that Professor Fendrich would have been flattered by the label, “liberally conservative” (although she’d probably prefer “conservatively liberal”). She’s weird in her political outlook. Anyway, since I am not she, I must coldly point out that had you, TM, taken Fendrich University’s logic course, you would know that you cannot conclude from smoking being permitted in the two-hour workshops that it is not permitted at other times. The marijuana thing, though, is something Professor Fendrich will have to work out with the authorities — and those casino owners who end up underwriting the university.
TM: This is what I did in my [public] high school.
Well, everything, I gather, except the logic course. Also, while I’m at it, I don’t believe you about your high school. I, too, have a high-school diploma and I never watched an animal get slaughtered, or took a vegetarian cooking class, or read any Aristotle or Machiavelli. And the way we studied Shakespeare left me befuddled. Then again, I think I was a bit too young to understand Lear when I was 16.
Anti-hypocrisy advocate
I can’t pick out one particular comment from “AHA” (as some of the other commentators say), since there are so many of them. He (somehow, AHA comes across as a dude) appears on everybody’s blog, sometimes in multiple posts, sometimes in consecutive posts. Sometimes (albeit not often) he agrees with Professor Fendrich. Most of the time, however, he’s got a bone or two to pick, and much of that time, it’s with other commentators. He seems to me to be a very bitter person who thinks that full-time faculty are lazy con artists and that administrators are self-serving conspirators. (I can’t say that he’s 100 percent wrong on that, come to think of it.) He also seems to have buckets of bile on his hands. But that’s what makes the First Amendment so great, isn’t it?
I do, however, find myself getting, oh, peeved at his screen name itself. “Advocate” is such a weak, weenie word. While you might be a “Bicycle Safety Advocate” or a “Tetanus Vaccination Advocate,” shouldn’t you be an “Anti-hypocrisy Crusader”? Or “Anti-hypocrisy Ninja”? Or maybe an “Extreme Anti-hypocrisy Ultimate Warrior”? Then again, even “Anti-hypocrisy advocate” exudes the kind of self-congratulation about which my ex-husband used to say: “You’re going to break your arm trying to pat yourself on the back.” Take it from me, neutral-sounding screen names such as “TM” or “Joe” or even the coded “Luther Blissett” lend more credibility to comments. A suggestion? How about “The Commentator Formerly Known as Anti-hypocrisy Advocate”?
I’ve got to run now. Le French class commence en cinq minutes. Good thing we’re still on the old three-credit, five-course system here, or the class wouldn’t fit into my lunch hour.
