A number of commenters from my post on James Piereson’s article on the left university suggested that Piereson was not accurately reflecting the situation on campus. Here’s an email from Galley Friend D.D., who’s an undergrad right now:

As far as your commentary on Piereson’s article, remind me to tell you sometime about the utterly worthless undergraduate degree I’m getting right now. Heck, I even had the joy of having a sociology professor (self-described as “ethnic” to avoid the stigma of being Caucasian) tell the class on the eve of the war in Iraq that if the American people were real patriots we’d “overthrow the corporate junta now ruling Washington” and set up a “real democratic society.” Of course, the individual in question also told us after the last election that the US was “doomed” and that the American people were “caught in the thrall of their Semitic war god.”

To be fair, the students ignore 99% of this crap . . .

For the first time we now have pictures of a live giant squid.

But wait, there’s more!

Watch the interactive CNN video linked to the story and you’ll see video of the squid and catch a revelation left out of the print version of the story: While struggling to free itself from the bait, the Architeuthis in question left behind a six-meter long tentacle. And when they pulled the line up, the tentacle and its suckers were still alive and functioning.

Go ahead, read that last part again.

David Grann: The world needs you.

James Piereson’s long piece on the left university is gratifying for all sorts of reasons, the most personally gratifying is the revelation that Johns Hopkins is source of the original sin which has corrupted our system of higher education:

The model of the German research university spread rapidly in the United States in the decades after the Civil War, inaugurated by the founding of Johns Hopkins University in 1876 as our first institution organized around graduate research studies. The late scholar Edward Shils referred to this as “the most decisive single event in the history of learning in the Western hemisphere.” This innovation, as Shils pointed out, put pressure on other institutions to establish their own programs of research and graduate study. Harvard soon created its own Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in order to keep pace with Johns Hopkins. Stanford University was established in 1891 along similar lines, which induced the University of California to follow suit. The University of Chicago, underwritten by John D. Rockefeller, was established in 1892 with research as the basis for faculty appointment and promotion. Other institutions in the Midwest, especially Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, were then in the process of embracing the research model. Here, then, in the wake of the Hopkins innovation, occurred the first important competition among universities for rank and reputation; and here, through this competition, the modern American university was born.

Shils was certainly correct to emphasize the far-reaching consequences that followed in the United States from the adoption of the German university model. In the United States, as in Germany, the research model transformed the status of the professor from a teacher to an independent scholar and researcher. Professors would no longer pass along established truths and traditional moral ideals, but would subject these truths and ideals to scrutiny in the search for new knowledge. The faculty, as the new priesthood of the research enterprise, would shortly claim authority to decide all matters dealing with curriculum, new faculty appointments, and promotions. The modern doctrine of academic freedom, which gives professors wide latitude to teach and conduct research as they wish, also followed in due course as a consequence of these premises. Much as Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the law is what the judges say it is, the reformed university would henceforth be whatever the faculty decides it is.

As the modern university took shape, faculties began to organize themselves into specialized departments, or disciplines, with their own formal rules for study, research, and publication. It was in this period that the various academic associations were formed, including the American Historical Association (1884), the American Economic Association (1885), the American Physical Society (1899), the American Political Science Association (1903), and the American Sociological Association (1905). These were national membership associations that held annual conventions and published their own journals containing research studies representing authoritative work in the respective disciplines. These associations were, in a way, national communities that reoriented the attention of professors away from students at their own college and toward colleagues working in the same discipline at other institutions across the country. The status of professors in their various disciplines was based on their published research, which established in turn a new basis upon which to rank departments and entire institutions.

At the risk of burdening you with too many personal details, Johns Hopkins is the establishment from which I purchased my thoroughly useless undergraduate degree. It is a place of insidious evil. If the American collegiate landscape is DisneyWorld for adolescents–think of Harvard as Cinderella’s Castle, the Florida schools as Space Mountain, and MIT as the Carousel of Progress–Hopkins would be Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. What starts out as childish adventure soon becomes a descent into Hell and eventually every student is made to feel as though they’ve been hit by an oncoming train.

What I find funny is that though Hopkins began the trend which has created the left university, today (or at least a few years ago when I was there) it is largely untouched by the political climate it created. Neither the students nor the faculty nor the administration care about multiculturalism or political correctness or radical politics or anything of the sort. The students care only for their GPA’s, the faculty care only for their research, and the administrators–the good guys on campus–care about building the endowment and trying to keep the students from killing themselves (and each other).

But enough about me; the Piereson article is great stuff.

…that Agent 86 is no longer with us? Don Adams, who played Maxwell Smart in the hit series Get Smart, past away Sunday night at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center, having suffered a lung infection. He was 82. Thanks to syndication, many of us who grew up after the show’s cancellation were still able to enjoy his antics, along with his fellow Agent 99, played by Barbara Feldman. Created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, Get Smart also featured the likes of Bernie Kopell, as archvillain Siegfried who, despite the show taking place during the height of the Cold War, sported a German accent. (Kopell later went on to become the sex-obsessed “Doc” on The Love Boat.)

Besides doing commercials and the voiceover for the animated series Inspector Gadget, Adams (born Donald Yarmy) served in the Marines and contracted “blackwater fever” while on Guadalcanal. He then became a drill instructor. (It boggles the mind that this drill instructor would one day star in a movie called The Nude Bomb.) He will be missed.

P.S. For the superstitious, this marks the second death of a 60s sitcom star in the span of a few short weeks. First was Bob Denver. Now Adams. Who’s next? Ernest Borgnine?

The Wershovenist Pig comes up with his own valuation model (which I nominate we call the Pork Number). Warning to humanities types: Math is involved.

Because neither you nor I can get enough of Jon Klein.

A gigantic, wide-ranging 9,500 word interview with Joss Whedon. Covers all sorts of interesting stuff, including thoughts about screenwriting, lighting, and scoring (in the Williams, not Bay, sense of the word).

In response to my fit of techno-evangelism about Skype, two people who, unlike me, sound like they actually know about computers write in with fairly convincing arguments against it.

From Galley Reader P.G.:

. . . don’t use Skype yet. It’s a security problem waiting to happen. We’ve banned it here at [redacted] because it opens various network vulnerabilities (Unicode bufferoverflow, DoS attacks) that while not as serious as any of the IE vulnerabilities, are still dangerous. If you want to stick it to Verizon (the DEVIL!!!!!!!), go out and get Vonage or some other established VoIP connection. Before you do so, make sure you’ve a battery backup in your home and a cell phone provider that you can get a signal from inside your house. The battery backup gives you internet connectivity when the power goes out for a few hours, and the cell phone so you can set your VoIP to forward to the cell phone when the ISP connection is down.

Some of the technical nitty-gritty is available here.

Yikes. Then there’s this comment from The Smoking Room‘s Greg:

Since you’ve been getting flak from readers who don’t like your Old Media defenses, let me express my surprise that you’re such a huge fan of Skype. “Going to destroy the already-maimed traditional telecom companies”? I’m no defender of the legacy telcos, but this is beyond the blog boosterism of Jarvis and Reynolds. VoIM (voice over instant messenger) is indeed a cool technology and kudos to Skype for extending it past the IP network to traditional and mobile phones. Maybe Skype would have been a good purchase for Verizon, but its asking price was pretty far beyond what it had proved. It has tens of millions of downloads but no one’s sure how many people are actually using it. As we’ve seen with Google Talk, which was preceded by PC-to-PC offerings from Yahoo and MSN, this is a field that’s going to get crowded and Skype may not have the best long-term plans for monetizing it. And as we’re seeing with the FCC kerfuffle, VoIP carries with it a host of complicated and expensive regulatory issues associated with the social obligations of the telcos. Verizon, News Corp. and other likely buyers might have been worried the added regulation would have outweighed their ability to profit from it. As a complementary voice service – not intended to replace an existing service – eBay might be able to actually increase its volume of business with little additional outlay. It’s likely the telcos will move to an all IP backbone, as BT is doing now, but acquiring the standalone IP telephony providers may not be their cheapest route.

I’m reasonably convinced, unless others want to chime in. . .