Sanity Pills

UMass plans to reopen its Graduate lounge.

The Graduate Lounge is reopening on a trial basis this semester.
We need your help to come out and support this operation.

WTF?

Trial basis?

I have an idea, they put a sign up that says, “BEER. On campus, starting at 11am,” the place will be swarming. Too bad the graduate students want a quiet place to study (I remember the glares as my table’s conversation got a little loud after a couple Paper City Dam Ales). If they want a quiet place to study, that’s what they’ll get, as students will have to hang out in the library after the Graduate lounge fails again.

Oh well, good thing I’m not there anymore.

In the ever-growing push to turn all of our nation’s universities into over-priced trade schools, the University of Massachusetts is doing its part by going national with its online-homework system. The Online Web-based Learning tool, or OWL as it is affectionately known, will now be offered to students across the country as part of textbook packages.

“It’s a labor-saving device for faculty and it’s a more effective way to learn,” says David Hart, director of the center and one of OWL’s creators. OWL was designed to encourage what educators call mastery learning, says Hart. Students work as long as they need to master each concept and must be able to demonstrate that they have a handle on it before moving onto the next unit. The exercises encourage critical thinking and analytical skills.

That’s the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard.

OWL is the least inspired and most poorly executed educational tools I’ve ever come across. The only thing(s) students will master by using OWL is looking up answers directly from textbooks and/or finding creative ways to outsmart the system.

Professors claim it’s popular with UMass students. Of course it is, the system promotes laziness and easy A’s; your average UMass student is going to love it as much as they love getting puked on at Barsie’s (which, surprisingly, is a lot).

As a warning to students across the country—-stay away from any software product created at UMass.

Wow. That is just terrible. I remember U-Amherst being around 50 something about 5 years ago when we started. This latest ranking puts it behind UCONN, UNH, WPI and at the same ranking as the University of Alabama!!! No offense to any alums of these schools but my degree is becoming more and more worthless these days.

UMass has entered a partnership with a pharmaceutical firm to develop a vaccine for an affliction befitting of UMass-Amherst’s talents, Chlamydia.

According to the press release:

Each year there are approximately 90 million new cases of sexually transmitted Chlamydia worldwide.

I imagine that close to 10,000 of those cases can be found in Amherst.

Seriously though, if UMass scientists are already very close to a vaccine, why the hell are they willing to give patent rights to BioVeris? I understand that BioVeris has the technical knowhow to produce the vaccine, but the UMass scientists should be making a licensing agreement, not selling patent rights. UMass gets $600,000, BioVeris stands to make hundreds of millions, seems like a fair trade (cough). I guess we need to know more about this “option agreement.”

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Assembly approved a ban on the so-called morning-after pill on state college campuses, a restriction that would be the first in the nation if approved.

Blah.

Today’s Times has a superficial article on young conservatives interning at the Heritage Foundation.
The story could be interesting, but the Times’ coverage only scratches the surface and doesn’t delve into what these ass clown kids are all about. These aren’t just a bunch of normal college kids hanging out in DC for a summer, these are ideological freaks gaining the tools to do some real damage to this country and the planet. The story should’ve been saved for a longer piece in the Sunday magazine, or, better yet, for a much better publication like Atlantic Monthly or Harpers.

And, is it just me, or do all of these people look like complete jackasses?

No matter how much I think about it, I still can’t get my head around the connection between loving free markets and hating homosexuals. Must’ve missed that chapter in Introductory Microeconomics.

Here are another 1,150 names I need to add to my shit list……….I keep it in an Excel file.

What’s the big deal with Larry Summers?

It’s not like he discounted social and institutional impediments that lead to women’s level of unsuccess in the sciences. When an academic raises questions, however unseemly, he/she is doing his or her job. Men and women are different in so many ways, maybe scientific aptitude is just another example. Just look at racial differences (i.e. black men vs. white men as far as penis size and basketball skills or white men vs. asian men in regards to penis size and table tennis skills), if those aren’t innate differences, I don’t know what are.

I hate Summers for a host of other reasons, including his adherence to Neoliberal economic policies and his nonhuman consumption Diet Coke, but his recent gaffe is just plain boring.

I hope people keep complaining about leaders at Harvard. Maybe if they keep forcing people out for ridiculous and overblown reasons (asking questions, making too much money for the endowment), Harvard will lose its undeserved prestige as the be-all and end-all of American Academia.

Good riddance; I fucking hate Harvard.

From the March 14th Time Magazine article on legislative attempts to regulate free speech:

“If the system were fair, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be tenured professors somewhere.” -Larry Mumper (Ohio State Senator)

This is unbelievable!

You would think that conservatives, lovers of the free market that they are, would not be in favor of affirmative action for conservative professors. But apparently they only have a problem with diversity when brown people benefit. I think it’s pretty clear that conservatives don’t want to be professors because there just isn’t any money in it.

Note: There’s a joke to be made here about Hannity and Limbaugh as professors, but I can’t make it since I just threw up in my mouth.