MetaFilter posts tagged with university

The Academy Produces More PhDs than the Academy Needs, and That's Just the Way the Academy Likes It

jefficator — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:10:10 -0800

Average time to an MBA: 2 years. Time to a law degree: 3 years. To an MD: 4 years. Average time to a humanities PhD? 11.3 years. Then there's only a 50% chance you'll get a job somewhat related to your field--and odds drop to a 25% chance that you'll ever become a tenured professor. The life of the Academy and its myriad institutional problems, from Harvard magazine.

"The Muslim Georgetown"

escabeche — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:01:04 -0800

Zaytuna College in Berkeley, CA will accept its first students in the fall of 2010 or 2011. Founded by Sheik Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir, it will be the first accredited Islamic college in the United States, open to men and women of all religions.

Ce soir sera une bonne soirée!

Rhaomi — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:56:54 -0800

On September 10th, to celebrate their initiation week, 172 communications students at the University of Quebec at Montreal decided to put on a show. After weeks of preparation, the costumed and prop-wielding crowd enacted an exuberant, complex, and flawlessly-choreographed performance of the Black Eyed Peas song "I Gotta Feeling" that sprawled through the campus's multi-story Judith Jasmin Pavilion... and they did it all in one continuous take (on their second try). The feat is just the most recent example of "lipdubbing" -- a video phenomenon where a single camera moves through a crowd of highly coordinated lip-syncers in a single seamless take, with the original recording dubbed over the finished product. Though the basic concept was pioneered by viral videos like the Numa Numa Dance and OK Go's "Here It Goes Again", the current model for lipdubbing was conceived by Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick, who coined the term after dubbing a recording of himself singing "Endless Dream" by Apes & Androids. According to technical writer and blogger Tom Johnson's analysis of the video, the best lipdubs appear "spontaneous, authentic, participatory, and fun." Lodwick's video was followed up by a Vimeo business partner's staff doing their rendition of Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" (previously). The technique soon exploded in popularity -- everything from web magazines to TV studios to hospitals got into the act. But perhaps no group took to lipdubbing better than universities. Following the lead of The University Lipdub Project (original video), colleges from multiple nations adopted lipdubbing as a way to showcase their campus life and school spirit:

School, Nation - Video info - Song Institut Universitaire de Technologie de Rouen, France - 140 people - "Thriller" by Michael Jackson HEC Paris, France - 120 people - "Lollipop" by Mika l'Université de Poitiers, France - 56 people - "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" by the Scissor Sisters Mines de Saint Etienne, France - "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" by the Scissor Sisters IUT Belfort/Montbéliard, France - 353 people (a world record) - "La Confession de Monsieur Connard" by Les Tock'art HEC Montréal, Canada - 150 people - "Mamma Mia" by Abba Institut Notre Dame de la Providence, France - "Toi + Moi" by Grégoire Ecole Polytechnique, France - "Love Is All" by Roger Glover Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany - "LMU" (original song) IHECS, Belgium - 100+ people - "Banana Split" HEC Montréal, Canada - 172 people - "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams European Business School, Germany - "Tell It to My Heart" by Dyane Taylor, "I Get Around" by the Beach Boys ESC Dijon, France - 95 people - "Working Together" by Gonzales Essec Business School, France - 200 people - "Let's Get It Started" by the Black Eyed Peas Emlyon Business School, France - 300 people - "Pop the Music" by Triim, "Video Killed the Radio Star" by Buggles ENSIC, France - 85 people - "Hot N Cold" by Kate Perry Campo Limpo Paulista College, Brazil - 56 people - "Ultramen" by Santo Forte

Bonus one-shot goodness:

Children of Men's climactic 6-minute one-shot scene (spoilers) Honda's "The Cog" (previ-ously) The Way Things Go (previously) Bike Hero (previously) Slydini's Newspaper (previously)

Back to self-school

escabeche — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:30:24 -0800

The autodidact course catalog. Twenty-two professors at Johns Hopkins propose reading lists for courses of self-study, from "Society Can Be Dangerous To Your Health" to "Higher Mathematics in Nouns and Verbs" to "Biochemistry and Human Evolution (with Rather a Lot about Mitochondria.)" If you're not going back to school this week, why not take on one of these syllabi instead?

“Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.”

Toekneesan — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:41:40 -0800

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, offers a radical proposal in The New York Times for the restructuring of the American university system. Two key components of the proposal entail ending tenure and shuttering academic departments—replacing disciplines with problems, and then tackling them with a cooperative and multidisciplinary approach, e.g. The Department of the Future of Water made up of geologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and ethicists. Should we End the University as We Know It?

Let me show you a world of bats and bees, ants and trees, morning glories and a few beached whales

filthy light thief — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:49:39 -0800

The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, casually referred to as Sōkendai (a contraction of Sōgō kenkyū daigakuin daigaku), was founded in 1988 as the 96th national university in Japan. Amongst other things, it is home to the Soken Taxa Web Server which in turn hosts the first online Japanese Ant Color Image Database that currently lists 273 species of ant, the Illustrated Guide of Marine Mammals and the Marine Mammals Stranding DataBase, the Mammalian Crania Photographic Archive that currently includes 704 specimens, the Morning Glories Database that covers the many mutants of Ipomoea nil, closely related species and interspecific hybrids, the Makino Herbarium Database, which is named after the pioneering Japanese botanist, Tomitaro Makino, and the Japanese Bees Image Database.

if only college were more like the movies

needled — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:59:35 -0800

20 movies which make you wish you'd gone to college from UK flim critic Jo Berry. While Berry is based in the UK, 15 of the 20 films take place in U.S. colleges, and of the remaining five one is A Yank at Oxford. (Berry is a former reviews editor at Empire magazine, who has written about film for publications such as The Guardian, as well as writing The Essential Guide to TV on DVD: Over 700 Of The Best, Worst And Weirdest Shows and Chick Flicks: A Girl's Guide to the Movies: A Girl's Guide to the Movies Women Love.)

It's Commencement Season; Controversy Ensues

etaoin — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 09:55:52 -0800

To Degree or Not to Degree? President Obama will get an honorary degree from Notre Dame but not Arizona State University during commencement ceremonies this year. ASU finds the first black American president's "body of work" insufficient. The East Valley Tribune disagrees. And some enterprising ASU students have found a way to profit from Obama's appearance at their commencement. Of course, lots of celebrities have been given honorary degrees over the years, some more worthy than others.

The worst face of intellectualism: the bluestocking

MuffinMan — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:44:39 -0800

On British TV last night, Gail Trimble, a Classics scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, singlehandedly trounced the opposing team in University Challenge. To some a smug, bluestocking know-it-all, to others a role model. Cue the fightback and lots of questions about whether we, as a society, actually like really clever people and specifically, clever women?.

Jimmy Smith Park

xorry — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:26:05 -0800

Jimmy Smith Park. Breadcrumbs so you can find your way back: Jimmy Smith Park -> About -> Rivers Park -> Dreams about Drunks -> The evolution of previously.

Thomas Pynchon is 71 years old.

Joe Beese — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:43:42 -0800

"To make off with hubby's fortune, yea, I think I heard of that happenin' once or twice around L.A. And… you want me to do what exactly?" He found the paper bag he'd brought his supper home in and got busy pretending to scribble notes on it, because straight-chick uniform, makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever, here came that old well-known hard-on Shasta was always good for sooner or later. Does it ever end, he wondered. Of course it does. It did. Thomas Pynchon's next novel, the 416-page Inherent Vice, is described by Penguin Press as "part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon — private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog." While we wait for its August 4 publication, we can read an essay on the dystopian musical he co-wrote at Cornell or watch a clip of that movie they made of Gravity's Rainbow. related posts here and here

Videos of university courses

Kattullus — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:59:36 -0800

Academic Earth collects lectures on a wide variety of subjects from UC Berkely, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale that the universities have released under Creative Commons. The site is still in beta so it doesn't quite have the thousands of lectures its frontpage promises. It has many full courses, for example Benjamin Polak teaching game theory, Amy Hungerford on the American novel since 1945, Charles Bailyn's introduction to astrophysics, John Merriman on the history of France since 1871, Shelly Kagan on death and Oussama Khatib's introduction to robotics.

Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs

SeizeTheDay — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:07:25 -0800

The Delta Project recently released a new report on Trends in College Spending. The NYTimes summarizes.

pay to play

plexi — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:19:02 -0800

Sadly, colleges are on track to become unaffordable for most Americans.

Workplace Mobbing

parudox — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:03:22 -0800

Sometimes, especially in winter, Kenneth Westhues can hear a flock of crows tormenting a great horned owl outside his study in Waterloo, Ontario. It is a fitting soundtrack for his work. Mr. Westhues has made a career out of the study of mobbing. Since the late 1990s, he has written or edited five volumes on the topic. However, the mobbers that most captivate him are not sparrows, fieldfares, or jackdaws. They are modern-day college professors. Mobbing can be understood as the stressor to beat all stressors. It is an impassioned, collective campaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a targeted worker. Initiated most often by a person in a position of power or influence, mobbing is a desperate urge to crush and eliminate the target. The urge travels through the workplace like a virus, infecting one person after another. The target comes to be viewed as absolutely abhorrent, with no redeeming qualities, outside the circle of acceptance and respectability, deserving only of contempt. As the campaign proceeds, a steadily larger range of hostile ploys and communications comes to be seen as legitimate. Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace Mobbing and the Virginia Tech Massacre Thirty-two academic mobbing cases since 2005. See also the transcript of the chat that went along with that Chronicle article. "Third and probably most important, stand with mobbing targets. In most healthy, productive, well-functioning departments and faculties, one can identify individuals who do not let colleagues get mobbed. Such individuals have the guts to say at crucial moments, 'Cut it out.' They are what researchers call 'guardians' of prospective targets. They are willing to be seen with a mobbing target and to speak up for him or her when that is a risky, unpopular thing to do." And, in case you were wondering: Westhues has indeed been mobbed himself.

Oxford Podcasts

Rykey — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:53:18 -0800

Forget again to enroll at Oxford? Some of what you've been missing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the plurality of clients was business administration majors

Afroblanco — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:45:02 -0800

Remember Laura K. Pahl, the girl who was famously humiliated for trying to buy a term paper over the internet? Perhaps she should have gone to a professional.

Il Diabolico Vendicatore!

Smart Dalek — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:50:26 -0800

In the wake of The Scarlet Pimpernel, countless figures have flamboyantly stalked the night. Among them were the scofflaw Arsene Lupin and his more violent contemporary, Fantomas. So influential was the latter that imitators soon arose, plying their merciless wiles on others. Among them were Fu Manchu, the nefarious Dr. Mabuse, the hooded Diabolik, and Matt Wagoner's Grendel. Not even Donald Duck was immune from the seductive lure of crime. In the late 1960s, Italian comic creators Elisa Penna, Guido Martina, and Giovan Battista Carpi were commissioned by the Walt Disney Company to produce overseas versions of Mickey Mouse's adventures. In seeking ideas for new storylines, the trio conceived of an ode to the Fantomas legend; in their tale, the bumbling, short-tempered Donald Duck was transformed into the sinister, cooly-scheming Paperinik. From his secret lair, Donald's twisted alter ego sowed the seeds of distrust upon his Uncle $crooge and cousin Gladstone, as a humiliating punishment for perceived slights. The comic quickly developed a cult following, as PK (or Phantom Duck), displayed a more anarchic side to the more progressively staid actions of the Disney menagerie. Alas, in a fate which similarly affected Diabolik, Paperinik was considered too anti-social a character, and was subsequently softened. Instead of using others as pawns for their disposal, both figures instead were recast as protectors of the innocent. It was in this incarnation that Donald would be remembered as a webbed parody of Batman. With Disney's success in licensing the duck as a mascot for the University of Oregon, as well as a brand of orange juice, the last thing the corporate giant wanted was for their windfall to be associated with roughhousing, or even cold-blooded murder.

If I ran the zoo, I would not be able to link to it here.

prefpara — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:18:11 -0800

The National Association of Scholars has been publishing a series of articles called "If I Ran the Zoo" (inspired by Seuss) in which various contributors describe what they would do if they were in charge of higher education. (via) Installments: 1 (Adam Kissel, Herb London, Thomas Reeves), 2 (Mike Adams), 3 (George Leef), 4 (Todd Zywicki), 5 (Anne Neal), 6 (Sylvia Wasson), 7 (Mark Bauerlein), 8 (Michael Kellman), 9 (John Leo), 10 (Roger Kimball) Adam Kissel, John Leo, and George Leef submitted their thoughts in rhyme. Anne Neal's article is part prose, part poem.

Degree 2.0 mash-ups not advisable for computer games careers

Artw — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:11:45 -0800

95% of degree courses in video gaming at British universities leave graduates unfit to work in the industry, according to Games Up?, an organisation set up to address the UKs video games skills shortage. Maths skills are a particular weakness.

Floating university moored

divabat — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 21:07:37 -0800

The Scholar Ship , an international floating university stewarded by top universities in Morocco, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Mexico, USA, and Ghana, have temporarily suspended all voyages due to lack of funds - mainly caused by the withdrawal of main sponsor and initiator Royal Caribbean International. The program ran two voyages in 2007 and 2008 before shutdown. Alumni and prospective students on Facebook and Ning are busily sourcing options to revive the organization, while Semester at Sea is offering spaces to students who were accepted for the now-cancelled voyages. This is reminiscent of 2000, when global education non-profit Up with People were also forced to shut down due to lack of funds. Efforts from UWP alumni and supporters allowed for its reform as the WorldSmart Leadership Program in 2003, before returning to its original performance-based roots in 2006. Will the alumni of The Scholar Ship be as successful in bringing back their beloved experiences? How does this reflect on the finances of international education programs in general, when the pullout of a major backer can spell life or death for the organization?

We are weird. And somewhat echoey.

divabat — Mon, 26 May 2008 15:01:21 -0800

KnowHow2Go wants you to take on the tough classes - such as Biology, Foreign Languages, and Algebra II - to prepare yourself for college.

Hospital Radio! We still love you!

parmanparman — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:17:52 -0800

What's one of the best ways to break into UK radio? Hospital Radio of course! There are over 408 radio stations in the UK that originate from hospitals. Fully staffed and loaded with volunteers, they are a lifeline to patients and produce modern, original programming. Who got their start on hospital radio? Hundreds of legends in the UK radio industry! Including Chris Moyles, Scott Mills, Jacqui Oatley, and Heena Tailor.

Bovine terrorism is a bomb in a bull.

Afroblanco — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 12:02:29 -0800

Slate asks, "What's behind the boom in homeland-security and emergency-management majors?"

iPhones at ACU

Pater Aletheias — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 10:31:42 -0800

Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas becomes the first university in the US to give out iPhones to incoming freshmen. Concept videos describing how they will be used here (social), here (academic) and here (overview).