Thermostat or Calendar?

My Dad had always said that one must use the right tool for the right job.  He did not like it when, for example, I got a wood-burning set for my birthday, and used the wood-burning tool to melt solder (even though it was constructed like, and operated on the same principle as, a soldering iron).  And with Dad, you didn't even think of using any heavy implement other than a hammer to drive in a nail.

Seems that the folks at the college where I teach are using the wrong tool for the job of climate control.  In the New York City metropolitan area, including my own hamlet on Long Island, we have a freeze watch up, with ambient air temperatures considerably below the norm.  But at the College, they cannot turn on the heat because it is already past first day of April, when the heating system is shut down, but before the air conditioning system is fully up and running.

This wouldn't be so bad, except that in one of the buildings where I happened to have had classes two semesters ago, the internal climate control system (term used very questionably) was actually pumping cold air into the classrooms.  This, of course, elicited complaints from students and faculty alike.

But one of the faculty members whose English classes were so affected happens to be a flaming global warmist, and (at least heretofore) is very quick to inject it heavily into her lectures and assignments.

I only hope that at least a few of her students have not surrendered their thinking and reasoning functions (which seems to be more and more the norm at America's institutions of higher learning), and have the courage to question her when she starts again with this global warming pap.

As for me, I have not yet shut down the pilot to my furnace, so, if need be, I can flick the switch and have my heating operational almost instantaneously.

 

Student to the Rescue

I have many gripes about America's educational system, but they all tie, indirectly if not directly, into the fact that students are now being taught WHAT to think instead of HOW to think. It has gotten to the point where students, for example, will ask me which topic I want them to write about for their term papers. I tell them, both orally in class and in writing on the course syllabus handed out the first day of class, that part of the term paper grade is based upon how well THE STUDENT selects a topic of interest in the news and ties it into a textbook chapter covered in the syllabus. This, quite intentionally, requires the students to use and develop their thinking skills. Asking me what I want them to write is tantamount to asking to be told what to think.

Fortunately, there are still plenty of students who can come up with their own ideas and thereby produce some interesting term papers for me to read. But the "please tell me what I should think" crowd is slowly growing in number. What is so scary about this is the knowledge that a society that craves being told WHAT to think is far more susceptible to a repressive takeover than a society of individuals who think for themselves.

The college where I teach is quite culturally diverse. Note that I use the term "culturally diverse" and not "multicultural." "Culturally diverse" is a situation where an organization or a society has participants from different backgrounds who have different perspectives and who think differently and who interact with one another. "Multicultural" is a political agenda that uses cultural diversity as a pretext for impinging upon individual rights. Because multiculturalism is so centered upon group rights as opposed to individual rights and responsibilities, it does not foster individual thinking.

On my college campus one can regularly see students and faculty from many different backgrounds, hear many languages spoken, see many styles of clothing and accessories being worn, and eat from a variety of cuisine styles (some of which are actually quality meals). As a professor, I strive to maintain a classroom atmosphere where students can feel free to contribute to the class discussion. This means that I go to great lengths to not embarrass students, or single out students on account of their exotic names, clothing, accents, et cetera. I try to be accepting of individual opinions, even as I express my own.

But sometimes it is necessary to give a student a figurative kick in the toochas. Like the young lady who came to class wearing a tee shirt with a picture of Che Guevara on it. I knew that I had to say something to her, but was not quite sure how.

But the lecture was about corporations. Corporations can be classified in several ways. One way is the distinction between domestic corporations (incorporated in the same state) and foreign corporations (incorporated in a different state) and alien corporations (incorporated abroad). I mentioned that multinational corporations frequently operate through subsidiaries incorporated in the foreign country where they operate, which are alien corporations. I explained that one advantage of such a strategy is that the foreign government is limited in the assets it can attach.

I realized that this was my entrée to Che Guevara. I gave the example of the various American corporations whose assets in Cuba were expropriated when Castro came to power, and then put in a word about the repressiveness of the Castro regime. That got me right in there to point to the young lady's tee shirt with the picture of Che Guevara emblazoned on it.

This young lady was quite clueless about just who the mass murderer Che Guevara was. And, quite fortuitously, another student in the classroom is the granddaughter of refugees who fled the Castro regime and came to America about 1960. And she, with all of her knowledge and opinions on the matter, saved me the trouble of having to give a history lesson lecture to the young lady in the Che Guevara t-shirt.

And so, to La Cubana, I say, "Muchas Gracias!"

A Matter of Degree

I've got to run and make final preparations for the Festival of Sukkot tonight. My wife has just e-mailed me some more items for the shopping list. We are having guests.

And so, I wish everyone Chag Sameach Sukkot!

But before signing off, I feel inspired to post my thoughts on a recent legal development:

Ayal Rosenthal, a CPA with PriceWaterhouse Coopers (for the uninitiated, PwC is a major accounting firm), copped a guilty plea on some insider trading charges, and got a 60-day sentence. Rosenthal was enrolled in New York University's MBA program at the time, and had even worked there as a Teaching Assistant in a Professional Responsibility course.

NYU decided that Rosenthal was unworthy of an MBA degree, so Rosenthal sued. And Judge Lewis Kaplan, sitting on the bench of the Federal District Court of the Southern District of New York, upheld NYU.

I am no great fan of NYU. They do get quite snotty from time to time (and I have been professionally involved in a case in which questionable ethics on the part of certain key players in the upper reaches of the NYU hierarchy played a role). NYU, then, does not have the firmest standing to deliver the morality lecture.

But Rosenthal is no better than NYU. He, too, has a nefarious arrogance about him, and he needs humility more than he needs an MBA degree.

In my book, Rosenthal and NYU are in pari delicto (Latin for equally at fault). And where parties are in pari delicto, the courts tend to leave the parties as they stand. The pari delicto theory did not play any role in Judge Kaplan's rationale, but the result is the same.

NYU's denial of Rosenthal's MBA has, in a broad sense, ever so slightly prevented my own MBA (not from NYU) from cheapening in value.

Inspiration or Plagiarism?

Because the courses I teach are designated as "Writing-Intensive," the Term Paper requirement is unavoidable, for both student and professor.

So, having assigned the Term Papers, I now have about a week remaining to grade them before the grade submissions deadline arrives. [Actually, it is less than a week because our great holiday of Shavuot, commemorating our receipt of G-d's Torah at Mount Sinai, will soon be upon us.]. This, therefore, will be my project for today and tomorrow (and possibly Wednesday).

The premise of Western Civilization is that we are part of a great continuum, whereby all we have is derived from those who preceded us, and, likewise, what we do will be the basis of those who will follow us. For this reason, proper scholarship dictates that the intellectual ideas and precedents we apply be acknowledged and cited. Indeed, the law review article of mine that was published a few weeks ago cites sources going back to King Hammurabi.

It is a bit of a stretch to expect law review level scholarship from undergraduate level students. Nevertheless, I do require my students to give proper citation in their Term Papers, and citational errors are viewed with greater concern than some misapplications of the spelling and grammar conventions which greatly alarmed the battleaxes who were my junior and senior high school English teachers.

Of course, I take a very strident attitude to the outright plagiarism involved in purchased term papers. These are the ones where a sentence placed in the Google search engine hits some verbatim documents. I had graded all of four Term Papers and found yet another Internet term paper vendor (whose name will not be noted in this posting, lest the site be given free advertising).

Sometimes you just know when a Term Paper is not kosher. A few years ago, I read a sentence which used the word "bulwark." The word did not strike me as one typical of the vocabulary of today's undergraduate students in America, so I googled just a 4-word fragment from the sentence and immediately found verbatim term papers on 3 different Internet sites.

Approximately one-third of my students do not speak English as their first language. It has come to the point where spelling and grammatical errors are encouraging signs because such butchering of the English language indicates that the work is the students' own. A perfectly-written Term Paper by one who was not drilled with the English spelling and grammar in the manner typical for my Baby Boomer generation in America is a waving red flag.

And, of course, I spot-check the actual citations. Some of them are ill-written, but at least I can find them. Some of the citations cite secondary and tertiary sources when they should be citing primary sources (e.g., the cited article from the New York Times discusses IRS Notice 2008-83, when the student should go to the IRS website and access Notice 2008-83 directly).

Some of the students just string together direct quotations from their sources. I can't gig them for plagiarism because they cite the sources from which the quotes were derived. It isn't very creative writing, but at least it is honest writing.


Query: Just where is that fuzzy demarcation of where inspiration ends and plagiarism begins? Does stringing together a bunch of quotes constitute a creative inspiration? Does changing a few words here and there in the quotation constitute a new work?

Along such lines, listen to the popular Neapolitan song "O Sole Mio" and compare it with Elvis Presley's "It's Now or Never."

Was "O Sole Mio" inspiration for Elvis, or did Elvis plagiarize the melody?

Need Some Sleep

Nothing earth-shattering to blog about.

Most of this past week I have been sleep-deficient, due in no small part to that virus bug I picked up. I believe that I have mostly shaken it, but it seems that my wife is now coming down with something. In any event, I woke up tired at about 10:45 this morning, but was able, for the first time in more than a week, to get in a good workout run.

Yesterday, I did get in a relatively good Shabbat nap. I fell asleep on the couch, and my wife said that I was really, really out of it. Maybe I won't be so sleep-deficient this coming week.

The sleep deficiency and virus wouldn't have been so bad, except that it was the first week of the semester, so I had to go in and teach. Whatever voice I may have brought into the classroom with me was totally shot by the time I got out. Fortunately, my assistant department chair gave me a ride, so I didn't have to drive.

As with any semester, I have already spotted some students who are on the ball, and some students who are totally clueless. So many have no conception of what it means to write a term paper -- those students had better get a clue real quickly or they will take a nosedive in the courses I teach! This is college-level work! In my day, I had a real battleaxe of a junior high school English teacher who taught all of us how to write term papers. Has our elementary and secondary educational system been dumbed down THAT much? [Apparently it has.].

Fortunately, there seem to be students who are well-postured and directed towards success. One of them happens to have an on-campus job as a student assistant in my own department. She approached me as I came in the second day of my classes, so I explained a few things to her. She is a transfer from one of the 2-year community colleges, where the courseload for Business Law is not as intense. She'll have to work hard, but I think that she will give it a go.

I am not a big Stupor Bowl fan. Understand that I have nothing against athletics per se (and in fact pulled a varsity letter while in high school). But the Super Bowl is not about athletic performance; it is about keeping the masses entertained and occupied, and about softening their brains so that they can be controlled by Big Brother! The teams are subsidized with lots of taxpayer money. The best thing that I can do is just not watch it! So I didn't!

The best football game I ever watched was two junior high school squads in an unofficial non-league scrimmage game. Their hearts were really into it, there was no TV audience to please (with the accompanying commercial advertisers), and they all accomplished something. Many of the players from that game have now gone onward to achievement in their respective life fields; they are role models, unlike the vast majority of the big league professional athletes of today. But I digress.

During the Stupor Bowl, I was not sitting in front of the big lobotomy screen. What I did was to begin to get my paperwork in order to do my income tax returns. I am now missing two receipts from charitable donees, so the appropriate reminder faxes and e-mails were sent, and need a few more pieces of documentation. But I knocked off lots of the organizing of papers. I am looking to get my tax returns finished sometime during February or early March.

I hope to get some good quality sleep tonight, because I have some interesting lectures and demonstrations planned for my classes this week.

The Senator's Husband

This really, really felt good!

One of the Department secretaries where I teach informed me that ex-President Clinton would be coming to campus at about 8 PM this evening, and requested that I inform my students of that fact.

I told her that my classes were more important than our Senator's husband!

The midterm exam is next week, so I reviewed for it in class. I ended my last class on the early side, and promptly departed campus, just as the traffic was beginning to build up.

Surely I'll read about it in the campus newspaper next week. Which is better than having to go and see him in person!

And I never did get around to announcing the Senator's husband's appearance on campus to my classes.