EMUtalk.org

Man about town Steve Pierce sent me two unrelated emu (as in the bird) stories in one say. What are the odds?

First, the bad news: From the Fraser Coast Chronicle (I think this is near Brisbane, in Australia) comes this rather disturbing headline: Mary the emu hacked up by hungry homeless.

A homeless man who cut a sleeping emu’s throat at a zoo and hacked off its legs allegedly told police he slaughtered the bird because he was hungry.

Patrick James Andrews scaled the fence of Bundaberg’s Alexandra Park and Zoo on the night of December 23 before stabbing 30-year-old Mary the emu to death and mutilating the animal.

Horrified zoo staff discovered her bloodied body on Christmas Eve.

Yikes!

But in good emu news: from many sources, including the AP, “Emer the errant emu found safe after a month trip.”

Emer the errant emu is home after roaming free across northern Rhode Island for a month. The fugitive was profiled on television broadcasts. Authorities, area residents and owner Pamela Hood had tried to capture him. Yet he managed to outlast tranquilizer darts, traffic, freezing temperatures and hunger.

Finally on Saturday a Burrillville woman spotted Emer sauntering up her driveway. She walked the 6-foot-tall, 130-pound bird into a horse stall. Four-year-old Emer was 16 miles away from home.

Yet another reason to make the emu the EMU mascot: apparently, they have a bit of a wilderness survivalist streak in them. Sort of reminds me of the first Rambo movie….

An interesting little piece in Inside Higher Ed: Proving the benefits of peer instruction. Basically, a biology professor, Tin Tin Su, at the University of Colorado at Boulder started using “clicker” technology in her lecture hall classes to survey students throughout the lecture.

Her own use of the devices confirmed the conclusions of studies she’d read showing that students who answered in-class questions using clickers were more likely to answer a question correctly after they’d had a chance to discuss it among themselves and then revote. But those studies left her with a nagging doubt: “Is the percentage of correct answers going up because they’re really learning from each other, or because a neighbor says, ‘Oh, B’s the right answer,’ and they’re adopting that student’s answer?”

The short and watered-down answer is “yes,” students do actually learn from each other.

This is a conclusion that folks in fields like mine have assumed for a long time, but it is interesting that this has been “proved” in some fashion with a scientific study.

I’ve been at EMU for 10 years now, and I am expecting Monday morning to be one of the confusing and controversial starts to the winter term. Generally, we would start back on the Wednesday after the holiday break– say January 7– and the campus would be open on the Monday before. This would give students and faculty alike a couple days to get their stuff together– registering for classes and dealing with last minute financial aid and/or other crises for students, preparing for classes, photocopying stuff, and dealing with last minute administrative and/or other crises for faculty.

Well, Monday January 5 is going to be “GO” without the “ready-set.” As I understand it, graduate students who have not yet registered for any classes will have to pay a pretty hefty late fee. There may be a similar problem for undergrads. I’m sure there will be all kinds of other little petty problems with things like parking, students moving back into the dorms, etc. If you are a student in an 8 or 9 am class, don’t be surprised if you don’t get a syllabus or some other handout the first day of class, and if the department photocopiers break down under the heavy first-day usage (and this happens in the English department on the first day all the time), don’t be surprised if the same is true for your afternoon or evening classes.

I know there is some kind of university committee that gets together to plan the academic calendar several years in advance, and I also know there are always problems with making these things work. Still, I’m sort of curious about the thinking behind this scheduling move. Given that we are going to end up finishing the term rather early (the last day of classes this winter term is April 18!), I don’t quite get why we couldn’t have started Wednesday.

Oh well. Brace yourselves for Monday and a good winter term for all!

More or less in this chronological order, here are some of my favorite posts of 2008 (after the “Read More” break). I have to say that I think that my favorite headline for last year was Does the EMU student center smell like poo? But feel free to take a look through these and the archives and nominate some favs of your own.
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The Modern Language Association convention is going on right now. This is the largest conference/meeting/whatever of faculty-types in English departments, though for complicated reasons I’m not going to go into right now, I do not think it is a conference that accurately reflects the interests of many faculty in English departments, and it is a conference I personally loathe.

Most of the convention is too field-specific for the news that comes out of it to really qualify as “news,” though the Chronicle of Higher Education blog has posted a number of MLA stories nonetheless. I thought what might be interesting for the more “general audience with a higher ed emphasis” crowd here was this post, “MLA 2008: David Horowitz Meets His Critics.” The two most common questions I get from my non-academic relatives about life as a professor over the holidays are a) what is this “academic freedom thing,” and b) what do you mean you have tenure and can’t get fired. Those topics are related of course, and both appear to be issues discussed during this panel.

Here’s the opening paragraphs of the CHE article:

David Horowitz is no stranger to the MLA. His campaign for an “academic bill of rights” and his criticism of what he says is classroom indoctrination have earned him the enmity of many scholars — not just in literary studies, a frequent target of his barbs, but other disciplines as well. But to hear him tell it, the extreme attacks on him have blocked any real discussion. In fact, Mr. Horowitz’s appearance at the MLA here today, he said, is the first time that a scholarly group has ever asked him to appear to defend his views.

And that was either cause for dismay, as some here viewed it, or a step forward for the MLA. Mr. Horowitz appeared on a panel called “Academic Freedom?” along with Mark Bauerlein, Norma V. Cantú, and Cary Nelson. It was a tightly formatted event: The speakers were given 12 minutes to make their comments, and audience members 30 seconds afterward to raise questions — limits that were actually enforced, even if it meant audience members shouting out “your time is up!” to Mr. Horowitz when he went over a bit.

Also, here’s a link to Horwitz’s remarks, “Teach the Controversy, Don’t Preach It,” from his blog.

This just in from the AANews: “Student says Charles Ramsey violently choked him; Eastern Michigan coach says he was concerned for his own safety.” The opening paragraphs:

Eastern Michigan University officials concluded that basketball coach Charles Ramsey grabbed a student and used profanity in November, and that led to a three-day suspension earlier this month.

Whether more than that took place and what precipitated the Nov. 22 incident with Shawn Quinn, an EMU senior and roommate of basketball player Zane Gay, remains unclear.

EMU athletic director Derrick Gragg informed Ramsey in a Dec. 8 letter that he was suspended without pay because of the altercation following the Eagles’ loss to the University of Detroit-Mercy at Calihan Hall in Detroit. Ramsey missed his team’s Dec. 8 game against Wayne State. Ramsey’s base salary is $169,269.

That letter from Gragg, along with accounts of the incident, were made available Monday by university officials through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The story as reported here is a sort of “Quinn vs. Ramsey” tale, with both of them telling very different accounts of the event. Regardless, it doesn’t exactly make Ramsey look good. This behavior and the team’s record might mean that he and Genyk can get together and reflect on old times at EMU next year.

Not that I was ever that “gone,” since my internet access was better than I thought it might be. But now I have returned to the EMUTalk.org world headquarters, where I am sure to spend much of the next few days a) being cold and damp, and b) working to get ready for the winter 2009 term teaching I’ll have to do as part of my day-job.

But at the risk of disclosing the location of my in-laws’ home, I thought I would post a link here to a post I wrote on my own blog about a topic of Ypsi-Arbor interest. My wife and son and I took a little tour of Ave Maria, the town and university founded in Ypsi-Arbor and (in the process of being) moved down to the middle of the swamp in southwest Florida, a place where you will rarely see the words “zoning laws” in the same sentence. It was, um, strange.

Here’s a link to my blog entry.

I know nothing about the source of this, but the information/detail on this entry about recent EMU honoree George “The Iceman” Gervin is too hard for me to pass up:

A well-known thug who lives in San Antonio was arrested in 1989 for drunk driving and an assortment of petty crimes. Naturally, he jumped bail but was forgiven when he finally showed up. 36 years ago, while a sophomore at the illustrious “institution of higher learning” called Eastern Michigan University, he caused a riot during a basketball game and was thrown out, but not before he broke the jaw of one of his opponents. Because George was not backed up by the school for his behavior, he immediately dropped out. Some years later, while visiting friends at EMU, he took pop shots with his BB gun at passers-by from a window in a dormitory. The incident was laughed off by school authorities with a “That’s George for you” attitude. After retiring from his career as a professional basketball player, George was named as one of the 50 greatest basketball players of all time and inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame. Today, George receives the adulation and adoration of all citizens of San Antonio and has a school named for him. In fitting tribute to his virtues, last week EMU awarded him an honorary Bachelors degree. If you are so out of the loop as not to know his last name, let’s keep it that way. Why sully your brain cells?

Hmm. If it’s true, it makes me wonder about our honorary degree program….

While here at the undisclosed locale of my in-law’s, I have been surprised to enjoy better than expected internet access. It is still dicey; right now, I am sitting outside (it’s in the upper 50s/lower 60s here) and I am pirating borrowing a wifi signal from a neighbor who has not locked down their network with a password. Yet.

In any event, while sorting through my email, I came across one from Howard Bunsis I thought I’d post here in its entirety for a couple of reasons. First, Howard raises a lot of good and interesting questions regarding budget cuts, the badly explained cuts in faculty hires, and the very expensive hiring of a new football coach. Second, this is Howard’s last post as president since Susan Moeller is taking over, I believe starting in the winter 2009 term. Thanks to Howard for doing an overall bang-up job, and good luck to Susan.

Here’s his email:
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Just a brief interruption from my blogging break here: according to this at the Detroit News, Ron English, who is a former U of M defensive coordinator, is going to be the head football coach at EMU.