Entries associated with the tag "University Of Chicago":

"What did I learn at Harvard Law School or at my practice in Ohio or in the federal government that qualifies me to determine whether there ought to be — and therefore is — a right to abortion or to homosexual sodomy or a right to suicide?" Scalia said. "I don't know any more about that than Joe Six-pack."

--Antonin Scalia, Union League Club, 9/16/2008

PS: The idea that the U of C law school "has lost its edge and gone liberal" is bonkers. "Lost its edge and gone cuckoo for infusing law with economic theory," we can talk.

A little bird sent me this memo announcing the U. of C. law school's ban on wireless Internet in classrooms. It's an entertaining experiment in regulation, and I'm in favor of it, because it will force students to be creative about their end-runs (IR connections to phones, computer-to-computer networking), and maybe the truly decadent will learn something about computers. But what of their 21st century education? After all, while Jenner & Block is de-equitizing partners, their new media practice is growing, and how will future legal minds defend Viacom from the digital hordes if they don't fully understand the extent of the damage to society?

"Dear Students and Faculty Colleagues,

"I write to announce and explain a new Law School policy. It is presently experimental, and will make its way into our Handbook after some experience and opportunity for feedback. I am tempted to begin with news aimed at those of you who miss the Law School while on Spring Break. We have, after all, hired some terrific new faculty, and the crews are busy in our front yard. But I do not wish to avoid my subject, which is Internet usage in our classrooms.

"A great many conversations and classroom visits have generated the perception, and I think reality, that we have a growing problem in the form of the distractions presented by Internet surfing in the classroom. You know better than I that for many students class has come to consist of some listening but also plenty of e-mailing, shopping, news browsing, and gossip-site visiting. Many students say that the visual images on classmates’ screens are diverting, and they too eventually go off track and check e-mail, sometimes to return to the class discussion and sometimes barely so. Our faculty (and I, as well as many of your classmates with whom I have spoken) believe strongly that we need to do everything we can to make Chicago’s classroom experiences all they can be. I therefore ask, respectfully but emphatically, that you use computers in class only for class-related purposes. Games and Internet usage in class should be like cell-phone usage or the ostentatious reading of newspapers – inappropriate, a breach of etiquette, and an insult to teacher, classmate, and self.

"If it had proved impossible to turn off Internet access in our classrooms, I was prepared to write this letter to you and assert our new classroom norm. (This is a step that some law schools have taken, though I do not know enough about enforcement or effectiveness.) In our case, the wireless and wired connections in our classroom wing can, and have been, disabled. The shutdown will be imperfect. There will be leakage; some computers are radio-cellular enabled; and in one classroom we will leave the wired connections alive to facilitate occasional computer training. But it should now be considered a breach of our norms to plug in, or to use available wireless, during class time. Some law schools or professors have banned computers from class. A school-wide ban strikes me as a last resort because many students convincingly assert that their educational experiences are enhanced by note-taking on their computers. Other schools have invested in software that disables one’s ability to log in when that person has a scheduled class. I like to think that such steps will be unnecessary here. If we are serious about our classrooms as places where we try to teach and learn, and if we take our professional responsibilities seriously, then surely we know that class time is not for shopping and e-mailing.

"There will be modest costs. On occasion it is nice to download from Chalk or other sites to get class or case materials. These will need to be accessed before class. We will also be unable to e-mail completed exams and course evaluations from the classrooms. I hope that something resembling on-off switches can be developed before we get to the end of the quarter but, if not, we will simply need to adjust. At quarter’s end, we will reassess the technology as well as our experiences, and we will survey faculty and students before deciding on a policy for the next academic year.

"Few things should be as important to our community as regaining and establishing our common sense that the classroom should be a place for learning and interaction. Visitors to classes, as well as many of our students, report that the rate of distracting Internet usage during class is astounding. Remarkably, usage appears to be contagious, if not epidemic. Several observers have reported that one student will visit a gossip site or shop for shoes, and within twenty minutes an entire row is shoe shopping. Half the time a student is called on, the question needs to be repeated. I confess that as I have researched this subject, I have been made aware how offensive it often is when phone calls are taken in public and when Blackberry and other e-mail devices are consulted during meetings. I have promised myself that I will no longer check my Blackberry under the table at University meetings. Opportunities for human interaction and for classroom learning will soon become rarer in your lives, and I hope that you too can make the most of the opportunities that you have here."

There's a lot of time left before November but I think this is already the bottom of the barrel from either side:

"Hillary's aides point to Obama's extremely progressive record as a community organizer, state senator and candidate for Congress, his alliances with "left-wing" intellectuals in Chicago's Hyde Park community, and his liberal voting record on criminal defendants' rights as subjects for examination."

That would be the University of Chicago, that notorious hotbed of crazy extremist liberalism that's done so much to undermine conservative values. Maybe Obama got coffee with Thomas Frank or something.

Don't let Kanye tell you that higher education doesn't matter. From Fermi to the Chicago Boys to John Ashcroft to Ahmed Chalabi to Allan Bloom to David Brooks, the University of Chicago has been hell-bent on world destruction for over a century, and my alma mater has done a fair amount of damage.

So forget When Harry Met Sally. Chain Reaction (starring Nicholas Rudall), the craptactular "thriller" that presumptuously features Keanu Reeves as a U. of C. student who damn near blows up Chicago with his science project, is a much more accurate look at the Maroon mind.

Former U. of C. prof Dr. Ted Fujita, one of the most innovative meteorologists of the past century, is most famous for the Fujita Scale, which gives tornadoes the F0-F5 ratings you're probably familiar with. But perhaps his most innovative discovery was the discovery of microbursts, small, fast-moving columns of air that are notorious for bringing down planes and trees.

In 1945, Fujita, still in his native Japan, did aerial surveys of the damage left by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, where he observed the starburst pattern left by such a violent, downward force that he would later correlate with microbursts. The Nagasaki bomb, incidentally, was originally intended for Kokura Terminal, three miles from where Fujita was living at the time, but it was redirected to Nagasaki because of weather.

One of my favorite undeservedly obscure cultural heroes is the Baptist minister Vernon Johns, a University of Chicago divinity grad who preceded Martin Luther King at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. (You may have caught the 1994 TV movie about him, starring James Earl Jones, on the tube recently.)

What Johns lacked in fame and influence he made up for by being incredibly awesome:

* He was in rural eastern Virginia to illiterate small farmers who didn't have the money to send him to school, so he read while farming, retaining almost everything he read thanks to a photographic memory, and developing an impressively extensive canonical education (heavy in the Romantic poets, it seems) behind a plow.

* Attended the Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, was kicked out for rebelliousness.

* Talked his way into Oberlin's seminary by meeting the dean's challenge to read books in Latin, German, and Greek.

* Was accused of cheating by the future president of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, after he replaced Hutchins as the academic star of the seminary, because how could a hick from the middle of nowhere with such a checkered educational history actually be smarter than everyone else?

* Punched Robert Hutchins in the face.

* Became lifelong friends with Hutchins, was further educated at the U. of C. (after a stint at Lynchburg's Court Street Baptist Church) when Hutchins was president. 

* Would walk out of Dexter Ave. when its extremely conservative organist refused to play the spirituals he requested.

* Had a famously prickly relationship with the middle-class congregation of the church, because he was a Booker T. Washington fan who would pester the academics and professionals in the pews about their lack of involvement in industry and labor, and then would sell vegetables and meat from his farm outside the church immediately after services to emphasize his point.

* Resigned multiple times from the church, sometimes in the middle of services. Eventually his resignation was accepted, and he was succeeded by the more politically adept Martin Luther King, Jr.

As Taylor Branch put it in the first volume of his history of King, Parting the Waters, where I first learned about Johns: he represented "both the highest and the lowest, the most learned and most common, the most glorious reflection of their intellectual tastes and the most obnoxious challenge to their dignity" (p. 19). Just endlessely fascinating.

His sermon "Transfigured Moments" was the first by a black preacher in the annual "Best Sermons" series. Unfortunately, it seems not many other examples of his writing are available--as you might expect of someone with a photographic memory whose primary medium was public speech. But historian Ralph Luker is apparently working on a critical edition of his writings.