The laptop ban story has broken out of its narrow precincts. Articles on the subject used to cover the handful of American law schools with institution-wide bans, or the scattered professors in a variety of fields who independently ban them from their classrooms. But now the story has hit the big time. The Google News page for 'banning laptops' lists lots of national and international articles, all of them tracking events as, in the words of the Telegraph, "professors rebel."

The enlarged coverage rehearses the now-familiar claims and counterclaims about this technology:

Classrooms prepare you for the real world, and in the real world everyone's using a laptop.

Laptops make note-taking easier.

Laptops allow you to look up things in class.

Even if laptops represent a total waste of a student's classroom time, the student is an autonomous adult who has the right to choose to waste her time. Besides, her behavior harms no one.

*********************************************

Universities are not the real world; they are supposed to separate you from the real world so that you can clear your head, slow down, and do serious thinking. The distracted state of constant access kills serious thought. (The real world, for that matter, is also getting sick of laptops, banning them from business and government gatherings, etc.)

Studies suggest that most laptop users take down every word the professor says, which makes these students not note-takers, but stenographers.

Lectures and discussions are not designed to have you look up things while the lectures and discussions go on, as if you're in the library. They're designed to have you listen with full attention to a professor's comments, and to interact socially and verbally in the immediate physical setting of the classroom.

The student is indeed an adult, but unless she's financially autonomous, her tuition is paid by some combination of the university, her parents, and the American taxpayer. She's wasting a good deal more than her own chance at an education -- she's thumbing her nose at the generosity of well-meaning people. And her behavior harms more than her financial sponsors. Her indifference to the professor and her fellow students, and the public nature of her screen images, add up to something distracting, demoralizing, and angering for other people.

*************************************

Lots of students have written opinion pieces in campus newspapers about how angry their fellow students' laptop use in the classroom makes them (they reserve special rage for porn films sitting next to them), but UD thinks it's also worthwhile to consider how multiple open laptops in front of them while they conduct a class must make professors feel.

Since UD's never allowed laptops in her classrooms, this will be a thought experiment.

*****************************************

You know that pathetic famous passage from Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman?

I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

Attention must be paid. That's the phrase everyone remembers from the play because it's so... pathetic. It's not too far from Barney singing You are special, you're the only one, you're the only one like you... Which is to say that everyone feels the need to be acknowledged, the simple need to have their presence noted, their words heard. Total silence and obscurity are very sad to contemplate. One might as well be dead. Wee willie low man is pretty much dead.

Miller spins this terrible outcome, this ending up a nowhere man, tragically; but you can play it for laughs. A stock character in slackster films and other forms of comedy is the friend everyone totally ignores. He's there in the scene, and he's saying things, but no one notices he's there. He's shushed when he tries to talk. He's out of his element.

Professors standing up and talking about things that matter to them in front of a roomful of people openly watching movies are nowhere people. Somehow they've let the universal human impulse to be present and accounted for by the world slip. Don't mind me. Attention need not be paid.

Under this unaccountable willingness to conspire in one's own invisibility has got to be, as with Willie Loman, rage. Just as your serious, non-laptop-using students may be enraged, so you too may be enraged at flagrant indifference, and at the feeling you get, class after class, of grinding pedagogical futility.

You're like a raisin in the sun -- if UD may conclude this post with the title of another play. What happens to a raisin in the sun?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Automated Touchless Dispenser it says on the paper towel machine in the bathroom near my university office, and I sometimes think, as the mere nearness of me excites the machine's red light and white sheet, that its noli mi tangere message carries over pretty well to what's happening between professors and students these days. Teaching's becoming a germ-free, high-tech, extrusion of data. You can see students trying to acclimate to the chill.

For instance, a Georgetown University student writes:

My loudest complaint is the impersonality of the online model. There’s something reassuring and intimate about a hand-corrected paper. To print a paper is to finalize it, making change all but impossible. Printing a paper brings the writer’s ideas and craft into the physical world. In a realm as tenuous and self-conscious as academia, tangibility provides a reassuring degree of legitimacy. A professor’s handwritten corrections are a sign that, even if the grade is poor, the student’s effort received individualized attention. Inserting feedback via track changes, or any online form, is chillingly anonymous and curt.

… [R]eplacing short essays turned in for feedback with essays copied-and-pasted into a three-inch Blackboard window actually weakens students’ grip on the fundamentals of structured writing. And if I wanted significant portions of my interaction with professors and classmates to take place online, I could have pursued admittance to the University of Phoenix.

This is a small thing, maybe, and after all only one of many of examples of the mechanization and depersonalization of university life. PowerPoint, laptops,and clickers in use in semi-empty classrooms (many students download the lecture in their dorm room rather than attend class) are much more significant elements of the automated academy. And yet there's a pathos to this particular complaint, this complaint about the disappearance of the professor's handwriting on the student's physical paper.

To begin to get at the student's complaint, you have to keep in mind that it indeed takes place in the context of a more and more technified education. This student is responding not merely to a particular instance of impersonality and anonymity; the end of professors' penmanship on physical papers represents one pedagogical obsolescence among many, one more lost opportunity for intimacy, individuality, and reassurance (the student uses the word reassuring twice).

This isn't some random drive-by annoyance, in other words; it's part of a world.

******************************************

Now let's look more intimately at intimacy. There's something "intimate about a hand-corrected paper."

Good students are curious about professors; students watch professors in front of the class as they lecture and as they sort of disclose things about themselves (I don't have in mind professors who are PowerPoint devotees. These rarely look up, let alone disclose anything about themselves). Good students learn from the personality of their professors, not just from their professors' content. These students are intuiting and indeed perhaps internalizing the values of a reflective, intellectually serious life from their in-class intuitions about various professors' backgrounds and characters and motivations. The students are coming to understand, in other words, the complex interaction between character and idea, an interaction the professor actively models through lecture and discussion.

Handwriting conveys, to the curious student, yet more of the professor's intriguing and perhaps inspiring personality. It's one more clue they hunger after, the signature mark of an intellectual. And of course it's reassuring because it confirms the authenticity and immediacy of the professor's presence in their lives; only the professor wrote these words in the margin and at the end of the paper. This professor and no other person and no other software did the student the honor of reading, thinking about, and writing directly to the student, in the professor's own ink, in the professor's personal scrawl, on the student's own paper.

*****************************************

"To print a paper is to finalize it." That three-inch Blackboard window represents analysis interminable. You do your futzing, I do mine, you do more of your futzing, I do more of mine, lalalalalalala.... It's a Kabuki dance, a chatterbox chachacha, a movable type minuet... That's why the student rightly says that text shifting "weakens students’ grip on the fundamentals of structured writing." Ain't no grip when ain't nothing to hold onto.

The physical paper with the professor's hand upon it is a presence. It is a shared human object in the real world which expresses the student's "ideas and craft" and the professor's reactions to those ideas and that craft. You both hold it. You both reckon with it. It is an emblem of mutual and embodied humanity.

Why do we wait in line at book signings? Couldn't the author print out a facsimile of the book's first page with her computer-generated signature and give that to you? Wouldn't that satisfy you?

******************************************

And as to curt ("Inserting feedback via track changes, or any online form, is chillingly anonymous and curt."). It takes much less time to do track changes. Longhand writing is slow. But the fact of that extra effort, that personal investment of time, is what the student very much wants.

Indeed, even the scrawled over and rewritten messiness of inked comments is much-desired; it conveys to the student your real-time grappling with her words as you revise a thought here, correct a phrase there. It is a trace, a palimpsest if you like, of yourself, your being, your having been there with that student, with that paper.

In giving the paper this considered form of seriousness, this textured, real-time effort, you do honor to the student. In transferring prefab phrases to a screen, you automatically, touchlessly, dispense a series of formal corrections.

****************************************

Given the recession of the professoriate from our students, can we be surprised that they in turn have withdrawn from us? Here's something from another university student. It appears in the blog Deadspin.

As a ... college sophomore who is currently typing this
e-mail in my Latin American Culture and Politics class, which takes
place from 4:15-7 every Monday afternoon, I've noticed that a laptop on
the desk is a clear indication of a student who is doing absolutely jack
squat in class. As I type this, three other students are, like me,
sitting in the back row on their laptops. As a matter of fact, as I
glanced over, a fellow laptop user gave me a nod as if we were passing
truckers on a freeway...

Passing truckers on a freeway. Over there! Hi! Fellow member of the Society of I'm not really here, and there's not really a professor in the front of the room...

As they've given up trying to connect to a professor who has given up trying to connect to them, students have begun to form their own classroom cultures, entirely autonomous of their instructors. As they nod to one another across the lecture hall, these students acknowledge their shared loyalty to lapland, home of the intellectually disconnected.

Why [do] people who [know] Dr. Bishop only through reading about her crime make excuses for her?

Jonathan D. Moreno, a professor of medical ethics and the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks reactions have to do with a long tradition that goes back to Plato. The idea, he said, is that someone who is very intelligent is assumed to be “morally wise.” And that makes it hard to reconcile the actions of Amy Bishop, with her Harvard Ph.D., her mantle of scientific brilliance.

“There’s a common-folk psychology," Dr. Moreno said. “If you are that smart, you know the difference between right and wrong.”

“That is what’s going on,” Dr. Moreno said. “In cases like hers that contradict the framework, we look for excuses.”

A blogger at the New York Times tries to understand the striking tendency of many people to make excuses for -- to rationalize, really -- Amy Bishop's systematic, cold-blooded slaughter of her colleagues.

This is a woman who planned. She got a gun. She went to shooting ranges and practiced. She committed the murders with calm precision. Moments after ditching the gun, she called her husband, and, in an even tone that made him suspect nothing, she told him she was ready for their dinner date.

The New York Times blogger notes some of the excuses for this behavior that she's heard from readers: "[G]enius is close to madness ... women cannot get ahead in science ...tenure systems in universities are brutalizing..."

Moreno explains that because Bishop as a human type falls impossibly far outside the criminal paradigm (she's a woman, a professor, a wife and mother, a Harvard PhD), we don't actually believe she's a criminal. A priestess of intellect, an adept in the cathedral of higher learning, Bishop must have been driven mad by the brutality of tenure denial...

**************************************

But let's go back to that suggestion that really smart people must know the difference between right and wrong.

Yes. They do. That doesn't mean that they will, as a result of knowing the difference, show a preference for right. Bernie Madoff, Ezra Merkin, the Goldman Sachs guys, the hordes of Wharton-educated hedgies going to prison this week -- they're all real smart, plus real aware of the right v. wrong thing. They're as aware of it as the raft of Jersey rabbis arrested for extortion a couple of months ago.

All of these people, just like Amy Bishop, believe they're better than everybody else, and that moral rules don't apply to them. They don't go as far as Amy and actually kill people who threaten their sense of superiority, but they ruin hundreds and hundreds of lives because they believe they have the right to rob people who don't count, and to undermine economic systems if the systems frustrate their goals, and to amass hundreds of millions of criminally-generated dollars in personal wealth.

They know that by conventional standards this behavior is wrong. Those standards do not apply to them, because they are above them, as they are above other human beings.

Leopold and Loeb's understanding of moral philosophy was profound. So was their conviction that morality didn't apply to higher beings.

***************************************

How then did Amy Bishop's particular evil play out? Maybe it was something like this:

She knew, from murdering her brother and then terrorizing several people on the street of Braintree, that holding and shooting guns can generate an intensely pleasurable sense of power. With a gun in her hand pointed at terrified human beings, Dr. Amy Bishop, world-historical genius, is exactly where she should be relative to the world -- not inferior to anyone, but vastly, awesomely superior. With a gun in her hand, God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

In killing people who make the mistake of making Amy Bishop feel inferior, Amy Bishop sets things right again.

She's a lot like the guys Truman Capote wrote about in In Cold Blood. They celebrated for hours after systematically, cold-bloodedly killling four people. They said they killed them because at some point Herbert Clutter made them feel small, made them feel he thought he was better than they were. In killing him they put things back where they were supposed to be, and that made them euphoric. They showed him but good.

*****************************************

Bishop taught a class that day, before she started shooting. One of her students told an interviewer that Bishop had "a lazy left eye... But in the class just hours before the shooting, it no longer seemed lazy. It seemed fixed." As she shot, reported a survivor of the massacre, Bishop had "intense eyes, a set jaw.”

All the depletion of godlike being Bishop had suffered since her colleagues disrespected her, all the enervation of charisma and brilliancy and focus, had finally come to an end now, in this triumphant fulfillment.

Amy Bishop, a Harvard PhD, a wife and mother, a successful biology researcher, a University of Alabama professor whose students seem to admire her, took out a gun during a biology department meeting on the Huntsville campus yesterday, and shot everyone in sight.

She killed three of her colleagues, including the department chair, and left three people (two professors, one administrator) in critical condition.

Police arrived within seconds and took her into custody within minutes. Within hours, her apparent motive emerged: Denial of tenure.

*************************************

There are, unfortunately, quite a few workplace rage murders in America every year. When they take place where they usually take place -- business offices, semi-industrial settings -- they get a couple of days attention. When they take place on university campuses, and when the shooter is a woman and a professor killing other professors, it gets far more attention. Why?

It's incredibly rare for shooters in these sorts of incidents to be women, for starters. And it's virtually unprecedented for professors to murder their colleagues. Professors who murder almost always murder in domestic contexts -- George Zinkhan, Rafael Robb, and quite a few others in the last decade or so, kill their wives.

Indeed, just last year, at the very university where Amy Bishop taught, a jury convicted a physics professor, Andrew Pakhomov, of killing his wife.

On a deeper level, this is a big and shocking story because most cultures regard university campuses as places distinguished by their pursuit of reason in a context of civility. Professors may be ridiculed (Sarah Palin, on the speaking trail, is currently getting a lot of mileage out of merely calling Barack Obama a professor), but for many people professors continue to embody intellectual dispassion, a judicious consideration of the world. The eruption of rage and slaughter among professors -- the emergence of a mass killer from the professoriate -- is indeed absolutely shocking.

*******************************************

But to go back to Bishop's motive. Predictably, articles are already being written about publish or perish, the brutal world of tenure, and how it... How it what? Turns nice ladies with doctorates into bullet-blasting madwomen?

Let's consider one silly example of this breed of article, in the Christian Science Monitor.

... Whatever Prof. Bishop’s motives, experts say that academic pressures are increasing as the recession and other dynamics takes their toll on tenured positions. Politics can be rife in the Ivory Tower, as well. Witness the James Sherley case at MIT. Prof. Sherley, who is black, went on a hunger strike after declaring he had been turned down for tenure because of his race.

This fails to mention any of the details of the Sherley case, which very much complicate any straightforward publish or perish reading of it.

Tenure and tenure-track positions declined from more than 50 percent of all teaching positions to less than 40 percent between 1997 and 2007, according to the American Federation of Teachers. In the 1960s, 75 percent of college teachers were tenured.

“You are expected to produce, and produce more quickly, and the road [to tenure] has gotten steeper and steeper,” North Carolina State University professor Richard Felder told Prism Magazine in 2007. “It’s a killer environment. I’d imagine the stress levels are through the roof.”

The class divide between tenured and non-tenured can be pernicious, as well.

“While many adjuncts are talented teachers with the same degrees as tenured professors, they’re treated as second-class citizens on most campuses, and that affects students,” Samantha Stainburn wrote recently in a New York Times piece titled “The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor.”

This moves matters from silly to irresponsible. Bishop was not an adjunct being treated as a second-class citizen. She had a tenure-track position.

And as for stress levels -- Bishop was a highly regarded and productive scientist, as far as I can tell. Her Rate My Professors page is okay. She probably should have gotten tenure at Huntsville, and it will certainly be worth finding out why she was turned down. But if she had stress levels so high that she was driven to spray bullets about the conference room, that was about her, and not about the tenure track. Unlike humanities professors, Bishop might well have been able to move reasonably easily to a job in the private sector if it came to that.

So it's irresponsible, in this murderous context, for the CSM to quote someone calling the tenure-track environment "a killer." In the context of the article, the statement comes close to suggesting that under these appalling conditions, anyone might freak out and murder people.

*****************************************

This is a big, shocking story precisely because it doesn't correlate with any of the social stuff the CSM lazily cites. Bishop's motive was not denial of tenure. UD's pretty confident that her trial will show she was driven by a long-simmering insanity which finally found an event to ignite it.

UPDATE: From World Now:

University spokesman Ray Garner said Saturday that the professor had been informed months ago that she would not be granted tenure.

He said the faculty meeting where she is accused of gunning down colleagues was not called to discuss tenure.

At a news conference Saturday, authorities declined to comment on a possible motive. But family members of victims say they understood that the shooting involved Bishop's tenure.

A short story can never be too rich or too thin. J.D. Salinger's A Perfect Day for Bananafish - its three tight-fitted scenes packed with sentiment and suggestion - is the Babe Paley of short stories.

It's effortlessly, agelessly elegant. You pay a visit to Bananafish after being away from it for twenty years, and the way it puts its sweetness, hilarity, and horror together still feels like the latest thing.

Bananafish has a profoundly estranged narrator, the sort of narrator able to get events across but unable to care.

Salinger learned this sort of thing from Ernest Hemingway. He and Hemingway were friends, mutual admirers. He learned that if you move your narrator far enough away emotionally from the story he's telling, but keep his eyes fixed hard and close on character and event, a certain contempt creeps in, a 'twas ever so and so what and so it goes kind of thing. Flaubert did this before these guys did it.

Clarity of description wedded to indifference turns out to be supremely well-suited to the communication of a new sort of sensibility, the sensibility of the doomed main character of Bananafish, Seymour Glass. Seymour, a traumatized soldier recently returned from Europe (the story appeared in 1948) sees more. Like his narrator, he sees and has seen too much. The world - not so much the world at war he just left, but the ordinary domesticated world he's just rejoined - now appears to Seymour Glass as clear as glass. It's painful to see things that clearly.

******************************************

Here are the story's opening lines:

There were ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called """' Sex Is Fun - or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.

The numbers the narrator's scientifically precise eye marks down suggest a world so hyper-rational as to be irrational, so real as to be surreal. Who counted the 97 advertising men? As for the woman whose phone conversation with her mother takes up the first few pages of the story, there's the grotesquely stupid magazine article she reads with care, and the irony of "used the time" when she wastes the time with pointless grooming. Her stupidity expresses itself not merely in the dullard narcissism of her movements, but in the dumb redundancy of the series of sentences devoted to her: She... She... She... The narrator, Jonathan Swift-like, records her behavior with microscopic exactitude, which is all he needs to do for her unpleasantness to emerge.

Her mother's anxious. The woman's husband is having a nervous breakdown and acting oddly -- even, the mother worries, dangerously.

"Did he try any of that funny business with the trees?"

"I said he drove very nicely, Mother. Now, please. I asked him to stay close to the white line, and all, and he knew what I meant, and he did. He was even trying not to look at the trees-you could tell."

He's behaving self-destructively, and he doesn't seem to care that his wife's in the car when he tries to self-destruct.

"Did he keep calling you that awful--"
"No. He has something new now."
"What?"
"Oh, what's the difference, Mother?"
"Muriel, I want to know. Your father--"
"All right, all right. He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948," the girl said, and giggled.

Some sort of acquaintance with depth and purity has occurred, some complex maturation has happened, to this man, compared to which the ordinariness of his wife now looks to him like degeneracy. He's given his wife a book of German poems by let's say Rilke - the narrator doesn't name the poet - but let's say some demanding, sensitive, mystical poet like Rilke. She ignores the book. She has no intention of trying to understand his transformation.

She also ignores his symptoms. Her mother pleads with her to come home and put him back in the hospital, but she says "This is the first vacation I've had in years." She and her husband are in Florida, at a beach resort.

*********************************************

Now the scene shifts to the beach, where Sybil Carpenter, a six-year-old enamored of Seymour, approaches him.

"Are you going in the water, see more glass?" she said.The young man started, his right hand going to the lapels of his terry-cloth robe. He turned over on his stomach, letting a sausaged towel fall away from his eyes, and squinted up at Sybil.

"Hey. Hello, Sybil."

"Are you going in the water?"

"I was waiting for you," said the young man. "What's new?"

"What?" said Sybil.

“What's new? What's on the program?"

Here the narrator's brilliant precision of observation generates sweetness -- the slangy young man and the uncomprehending little girl in charming banter... Yet the banter will edge into an oblique confessional as he allows the extremity of his situation to insinuate itself:

"Where's the lady?" Sybil said.

"The lady?" the young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. "That's hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places. At the hairdresser's. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children, in her room." Lying prone now, he made two fists, set one on top of the other, and rested his chin on the top one. "Ask me something else, Sybil," he said.

The surreality we saw in the first sentence of the story returns - having her hair dyed mink - along with his convoluted, impossibly intense rage at his wife, at the world. Maybe we begin to worry at this point that he could hurt Sybil.

That's a fine bathing suit you have on. If there's one thing I like, it's a blue bathing suit."

Sybil stared at him, then looked down at her protruding stomach. "This is a yellow," she said. "This is a yellow."

"It is? Come a little closer." Sybil took a step forward. "You're absolutely right. What a fool I am."

Now Sybil is pure. Seymour loves her because she's too young to have become corrupted. Tell her a patent falsehood and she doesn't laugh at you and call you a liar. She checks the color and patiently corrects you.

With our background information about Seymour, all of his exchanges with Sybil become fraught:

Sybil prodded the rubber float that the young man sometimes used as a head-rest. "It needs air," she said.
"You're right. It needs more air than I'm willing to admit."

Seymour needs more air - more space, more freedom, more sanity - than he's willing to admit. When Sybil jealously mentions another little girl at the resort to whom Seymour has paid some attention, he says

"Ah, Sharon Lipschutz... How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire."

This is funny in the way of The Waste Land itself, juxtaposing a dully ordinary girl named Lipschutz to the sweeping profundity of memory and desire.

Now they go to the water.

He folded the robe, first lengthwise, then in thirds. He unrolled the towel he had used over his eyes, spread it out on the sand, and then laid the folded robe on top of it. He bent over, picked up the float, and secured it under his right arm. Then, with his left hand, he took Sybil's hand.

Notice again the mad, wary precision, the effort of someone losing his rationality to impose order on the small things at least -- towels, robes. Seymour asks her where she lives. Whirly Wood, Connecticut, she says.

"Whirly Wood, Connecticut," said the young man. "Is that anywhere near Whirly Wood, Connecticut, by any chance?"

Sybil looked at him. "That's where I live," she said impatiently. "I live in Whirly Wood, Connecticut."

Note first the insane name of the town which captures the mental world where Seymour lives -- a whirly wood. And note again - as with the color yellow or blue - Seymour's heavy-handed absurdity, its provocation of Sybil's immovable, reassuring (to Seymour) level-headedness.

Things get more hilarious as the little girl and the young man enter into a serious, disjointed exchange.

"Do you like wax?" Sybil asked.

"Do I like what?" asked the young man. "Wax."

"Very much. Don't you?"

Sybil nodded. "Do you like olives?" she asked.

"Olives--yes. Olives and wax. I never go anyplace without 'em."

"Do you like Sharon Lipschutz?" Sybil asked.

"Yes. Yes, I do," said the young man. "What I like particularly about her is that she never does anything mean to little dogs in the lobby of the hotel. That little toy bull that belongs to that lady from Canada, for instance. You probably won't believe this, but some little girls like to poke that little dog with balloon sticks. Sharon doesn't. She's never mean or unkind. That's why I like her so much."

Sybil was silent.

"I like to chew candles," she said finally.

"Who doesn't?" said the young man, getting his feet wet.

The rapport between these two, it becomes clear, is based on their occupying a similar mental terrain -- the innocent absurdity of a six-year-old meets the cynical and desperate absurdity of an adult in a terrible existential crisis.

Seymour asks Sybil to look for bananafish in the water:

"Their habits are very peculiar." He kept pushing the float. The water was not quite up to his chest. "They lead a very tragic life," he said. "You know what they do, Sybil?"

She shook her head.

"Well, they swim into a hole where there's a lot of bananas. They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I've known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas." He edged the float and its passenger a foot closer to the horizon.

"Naturally, after that they're so fat they can't get out of the hole again. Can't fit through the door."

"Not too far out," Sybil said. "What happens to them?"

"What happens to who?"

"The bananafish."

"Oh, you mean after they eat so many bananas they can't get out of the banana hole?"

"Yes," said Sybil.

"Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die."

Seymour needs more air than he's willing to admit. Stuck in a hole of his own making, he can only play out his peculiar and tragic story. When, a moment later, Sybil announces she's just seen a bananafish, Seymour suddenly kisses her.

The young man suddenly picked up one of Sybil's wet feet, which were drooping over the end of the float, and kissed the arch.

Throughout the story he's seen things that aren't there and Sybil has been patient and kind and correcting. Now she enters his imaginative world; she accepts, with her kind and generous child's imagination, his bananafish world. Unlike his wife, who won't even read a poem in an attempt to understand him, Sybil, with her free, trusting disposition, accepts Seymour's vision. He loves her for it; he's deeply grateful. She is his last and best connection to a world he might have wanted to live in. It's a kiss of gratitude, and a kiss goodbye.

Seymour Glass returns to his hotel room.

He got off at the fifth floor, walked down the hall, and let himself into 507. The room smelled of new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover.

He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.

With three sadistic university coaches fired in the last six weeks, and with outrage at their having been fired the dominant response among students and alumni, it's time to come to grips with the kinkiness of the American university.

I won't take up here the subject of sadistic players, like Elizabeth Lambert, whose YouTube fame has made her the Susan Boyle of university students. Nor do I want to waste time, in this New Year's University Diaries column, asking why the highest paid, most visible, most powerful, and most admired person on many of our campuses may also be physically and mentally abusive to the students on those campuses. Vicious coaches, from Bobby Knight on down, win games.

Instead I want to mark the beginning of 2010 by noting how powerfully a masochistic attraction to its own abuse has taken hold of the American university.
Texas Tech, home of Knight, Mike Leach, and for good, non-sports-related measure, Alberto Gonzales, might well be renamed The Story of O. Tech's response to years of on and off the field humiliation at the hands of Leach, and, now that he's been fired, years of anticipated litigation from him, seems to be hit me again. Take my endowment, my student fees, my dignity.

Tech is not the only bondage-loving school. South Florida, Kansas, the University of New Mexico and several others hire and adore doms who are into the very strictest forms of discipline.
As these schools hand their money and their reputations over to their masters, is there anything that can be done to halt their downward spiral?

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The submissives among our universities are obviously going to be unreceptive to intellectuals who've given thought to their problems. You won't see trustees, confused and humiliated by their willingness to give a five million dollar contract to yet another bully, reading Michel Discipline and Punish Foucault. Efforts to point out, much less deconstruct, the combination of all-American athleticism and cringing self-abuse on various campuses will only alienate people. Mainly, what we can do is what I'm trying to do here -- point out, in a clear, non-judgmental way, what seems to be going on.

"You're excited," said my husband to me as I entered the car last night after my second Messiah rehearsal at the Landon School here in Bethesda. I'd only said a sentence or two, nothing special. He was responding to my tone of voice, my body language.

"Well, we ended with the Hallulejah chorus," I said, "and that's insanely exciting. Plus the director said it'd been a very good rehearsal, and it had. I mean, to my ear the whole thing sounded crisp and strong and amazing, but you never know what it's like from the front of the room. ... Plus I finally got close to singing the opening Yoke is Easy run correctly. I'll never really get it, but I'm not bad..."

At one point, toward the middle of the rehearsal, the director told us to sit back and relax for a few minutes. "This piece is so intense. Sometimes you need to calm down to get through it."

For me the excitement wasn't just the mix of beauty, complexity, and energy in the piece itself; it was the fact of successfully singing along with an experienced chorus. I wasn't screwing up! I was hitting the entrances and nailing the exits. I was sitting next to a far superior soprano, letting her do all the really high notes, but otherwise doing my part.

A lot of the choral Messiah is excited shouting under control, if you know what I mean. Aesthetic excitement. Formal excitement. Synchronized excitement. But still true excitement. Very close to lack of control.
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An hour before the rehearsal, I was on the metro reading a student paper -- final papers were due a few days ago.

One particular paper riveted me, not only because it was angry and well-written, but because it reminded me of papers I wrote when I was an undergraduate.

The student, in my Novels of Don DeLillo class, had grown to dislike DeLillo intensely, and his paper was an extended complaint, a denunciation. He attacked DeLillo for failing to excite him in the way Messiah had excited me:

... I want to come to love characters, relate to them, fantasize about them. And then I want to see them suffer; left broken, stabbed, and beaten. I want to see their friends, their world, come crumbling down, their secret perversions revealed. I want to watch like Descartes' demon as they stumble through a sick gauntlet of clubs and makeshift knives. I want to watch them fall in love, the head-over-heels kind, the plummeting-stomach kind that keeps you up nights and dreaming days. I want to watch two lovers laugh, drink, and fuck because the reader is the ultimate voyeur.

DeLillo denies everything I want to see. ... Words that are dangerous and disturbing and sometimes beautiful are wasted on superficial reflections of materialism and [on] privileged nitwits. [DeLillo] doesn't probe into motivations or emotions. And there's so much potential for the language, to see characters struggle through it and fight it, to see them just as lost and confused and jolted as the reader. But instead it's just a satire, not a survival story.... DeLillo is clearly intrigued by death. All of his characters are obsessed with the idea; it's the only thing that can break them out of their small little worlds. But death never gets any kind of humane treatment. Characters don't care when other characters die. And worse, you don't care when characters die.

DeLillo's idea of a writer alone in a dark room is right. But it's because [writers have] got too much humanity and it pours out in their writing, all this booze-soaked sadness. Like every word was chiseled out of their body and every page is a miraculous testament to human will. Those are the writers alone in the dark with letters of the lovers that crush them, [writers who] drink too much and [who smoke] all the cigarettes down to the filters, burning their lips....


I remember reading James Agee -- the ultimate sad, booze-soaked writer -- for the first time, and writing about him exactly like this in a paper for an English class at Northwestern. I cited these two pages from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pages about Agee's response to Beethoven, and I agreed vociferously with his intensity of response. This was art, both a powerful conviction from an artist which goes to the ground of human and transcendent reality, and a powerful response from a listener or reader, who recognizes the conviction and the reality. "He who understands my music can never know unhappiness again." Agee quotes Beethoven writing this, and it's clear enough to me that what I've been calling "excitement" and "intensity" throughout this post is indeed some sort of deep-lying, imperishable happiness.

In any case, my Northwestern University professor threw quite a lot of cold water on my excitement and intensity; my language was inappropriate for a formal paper, yadda yadda.

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I hated that response then, and I hate it now. Long ago I resolved never to do that to a student. Respond to the intensity in a student's writing, sure, but respect it.

As I read this student's paper, I was torn between delight at his strong aesthetic sensibility and an impulse to defend DeLillo - and, by extension, all writers who for various reasons fail to conform to the artist-ideal at the heart of the student's philosophy.

I take it my student agrees with Jim Morrison, who wrote: "I believe in a long, prolonged derangement of the senses to attain the unknown. Our pale reasoning hides the infinite from us.” My defense of writers like DeLillo who proceed differently would have at its heart the subtle and important theme of the balance between intensity of feeling and the necessity of containing and formalizing that feeling within some recognizable genre so that it can become a work of art. Does DeLillo, above all a novelist of ideas, throw cold water on the roiling human emotions that underlie abstractions? Or does he, as I think, create an excitingly unsteady balance between an underworld of yearning feeling, and a cultural landscape that in various ways blocks that feeling?

What exactly did Agee get so excited about in Beethoven? Doesn't Dmitri Tymoczko, a music theorist, get at some of it here?

... Especially in his late pieces, Beethoven frequently wrote music that was difficult, if not impossible, to play: for example, the very high vocal passages in the Missa Solemnis and Ninth Symphony, or certain near-impossible leaps in the Hammerklavier Sonata, op. 106. In these passages, the musical score seems to be in conflict with the human beings who are trying to perform it. What is unusual, even unique, about the Tempest is the way the music seems to portray its own limitations. Instead of a conflict between the music and its performers, or between the desire of the composer and the abilities of the players, the Tempest is a piece of music that is in conflict with itself. While we can at least imagine a flawless performance of the Ninth Symphony or the Hammerklavier, the Tempest intrinsically contains a symbol of its own unrealized goals. ... It is as if Beethoven were suggesting that, while no amount of effort on his part would enable him to leap beyond the limits of his piano, his music demands that he try – as if the world of sticks and wires, the ordinary physical realm in which pianos exist, cannot be reconciled with the world of Beethoven’s aspiration...

Aren't we all - my student, Beethoven, Agee, Tymoczko - playing variations on the fact that, as Tymoczko concludes, "we can have tremendous, Beethovenian passions without losing all sense of our own limitation"? The most exciting art, in this way of thinking, would at once express the truth of our imperfection, of each ego's inability to get over personal and cultural blockage, and our occasional capacity to be sufficiently "deranged" to break through to William Blake's human infinite.

I sense, and respond to, precisely this tension in DeLillo; my student does not.

Yet this particular difference between us doesn't really matter. What matters is what we have in common.

The exciting truth of the classroom is that occasionally it generates, for a professor, an entire underworld of affinity.

Today it's the University of Minnesota.

Each new revelation that some school of education in this country continues to force its students to undergo disposition and cultural competency scrutiny is a kind of pedagogical bimbo eruption -- a moment when embarrassing people lurking on task forces and subcommittees break free and strut their stuff on the national stage.

Heirs of the zealots who forcibly evaluated "teachers' mental hygiene and personality" in the mid-twentieth century (Laurie Moses Hines elaborates on the generational continuity), the new crop of scrutinizers has the same unseemly interest in the "emotional life of the teacher," which becomes, in place of knowledge and its transmission, "the focus of teacher preparation." Contemporary mental hygienists consider themselves entitled to palpate and subject to testing, writes William Damon, "virtually all of a candidate's thoughts and actions."

Hines points out that everything other than the intimate mental life of ed school students is already appropriately reviewed elsewhere:

If the purpose is to ensure that access to children is denied to those who are truly deviant (sexual predators) or those who could harm children (drug dealers, felony offenders, child abusers), then it seems the assessment is best made by the government, which has the resources and responsibility to identify these people. If the purpose is to ensure that potential teachers have basic characteristics like honesty or fairness, existing standards such as university honor codes in higher education should suffice. If the purpose is to see how a teacher acts in a certain environment (be it an urban, suburban, or rural school, with a diverse or homogeneous student body), then perhaps those in that environment can best perform that assessment, taking into account the standards, mores, and preferences of the community. The ultimate employers of teachers, local school districts, can and do screen for the characteristics they want in their employees.

If, on the other hand, what you really want to do is "evaluat[e] students on the basis of their political views," writes Hines, then the endless teasing-out interviews, multiple choice personality tests, and group gropes of disposition scrutiny are just the thing.

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Of course, as Frederick Hess notes, no scientific evidence supports the belief that enforcing certain attitudes toward race, class, and gender improves teaching. Rather, he says, "Screening on 'dispositions' serves primarily to cloak academia's biases in the garb of professional necessity."

One thing screening doesn't cloak is love of power. The real precursor model for the disposition enthusiasts in the academy is the deadest whitest malest form of hierarchical life imaginable: The traditional German university professor. Totally powerful, he regarded his students as sheep eager to imitate him in all things. Their job was to scrutinize him in order to figure out exactly who he wanted them to be; his job was to keep an imperial eye on them for signs of deviation.

Thus, Paul Tarc opposes disposition assessment because it makes it very likely that "students will comply and perform the desired dispositions to get a good grade."

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Actually, that's reason number three why Tarc objects.

Number One: Litmus tests expose schools of education to "allegations of political indoctrination."

Number Two: They result in "downplaying of knowledge to sentiments." Which is what I meant up there by group gropes: Let's not bother reading and discussing arguments about justice and equality. Tell me how you feel. Tell all of us how you feel.

Heather MacDonald dubs the prevailing reality of many ed schools "Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)—self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity—but the one thing they are not about is knowledge."

Desperate for places where education students can think rather than feel, where they can be left alone to study and then apprentice in classrooms, rather than be mussed up day and night by ideologues, New York State, reports the New York Times, "will consider letting alternative teacher training programs certify teachers, expanding the role that for decades has been exclusively performed by education schools."

With every bimbo eruption, schools of education move closer to their own obsolescence.

Two recent instances of professorial plagiarism - New Zealand novelist Witi Ihimaera and, allegedly, Ohio State University mathematician Azita Manouchehri - have UD thinking once more about this odd and endless practice of stealing other people's words and work.

Students, professors, journalists, scientists -- everyone, it sometimes seems, who puts pinkie to keyboard, feels tempted to block and highlight and copy and paste. You read something you like, something you can use, and you find it hard to resist sweeping it up and dropping it down into your manuscript or mission statement.

Serious plagiarists have been at it forever; it's a way of life. No one should have been surprised when a writer whom Ihimaera plagiarized years ago came forward in light of the latest revelation to complain that Ihimaera hasn't learned a thing since he apologized to him for stealing from a history he wrote.

Technological change has made it pretty easy for plagiarists - especially serial plagiarists, like Ihimaera - to be discovered today. The woman (a book reviewer and editor) who discovered Ihimaera's latest plagiarism sensed something wrong with the writing in his just-released novel. She scored her first plagiarism find merely by Googling the book's obscure subject matter. She then began feeding phrases from the novel into Google Books.

Of course you need a sensitive reader, like this woman, to notice something's wrong; without that initial discomfort, the phrases wouldn't get sent through. But assuming a reader with an eye for scrambled styles, a plagiarist today stands a good chance of detection.

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Plagiarism of the sort Ihimaera commits has always been a pretty high-risk activity. When you spend years weaving a large and varied theft-garment, holes get noticed.

The legitimate author may still be alive, and if she happens to find her stitching pulled out and patched into someone else's page, she's going to be pissed. Even if the author's dead (plagiarists of course prefer the dead), and even if the author's obscure (plagiarists prefer the obscure), some fan in Oxford Mississippi or Beaver Oregon may recognize her favorite writer's patterns.

And there's the common reader. Much magazine and newspaper plagiarism gets pegged by subscribers who inform clueless editors that they've been publishing pre-owned prose.

Plagiarism is no respecter of genre. Speeches, letters, novels, poems, plays, short stories, histories, grant proposals, dissertations, newspaper and magazine articles -- all get taken. UD's covered plagiarism stories involving each of these writing forms.

But plagiarism does fall into two broad categories: haughty and pathetic.

Harvard Law School professors commit haughty plagiarism; Harvard Overseers like Doris Kearns Goodwin do too. Haughties plagiarize because they rarely write their own books anymore. They're too busy. Ateliers of students and ghostwriters do the work, and the haughties might not even lower themselves to check it. Their job is to stamp a bankable name on the book's cover and take credit for what's in it. Which includes - sucks for them - taking credit when what's in it was plagiarized by one of their employees.

Ihimaera's is the more common form of plagiarism, the form whose pathos lies in its motives. The pathetic plagiarist seethes with self-doubt. She's not lazy and arrogant like the haughties; she's afraid. Never very sure of her capacities, she gets shakier and shakier with each success. Her plagiarism is a desperate, dead of night stab at her betters.

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The institutional response to plagiarism is one of many odd things about this odd practice. Universities, publishing houses - they almost always stonewall, deny, prevaricate, and generally fuss about for months before accepting the inevitable. No one likes pulping a book; no one likes admitting that the people on campus who wrote the anti-plagiarism codes for students are plagiarists.

In keeping with their high status, plagiarizing haughties are rarely punished. They blame the theft on the servants and soldier on.

Pathetics tend to get it right in the kisser.

Their midnight mischief dragged to the light of day, they can only stand there and apologize. Ihimaera says he's going to buy back the entire first run of the book. His university and publishing house are still, as of this writing, in the fuss and prevaricate mode. But nothing can stop what's been set in motion - the revelation of Ihimaera as a career plagiarist. His reputation has been trashed, along with the reputation of the university that continues to defend him.

Especially in high-tech surveillance times, pathetic plagiarism calls not merely for condemnation but for compassion. When, knowing how easily you can be caught, you still plagiarize, something's wrong with you. When you know someone like the historian you plagiarized years ago is still out there, and you still plagiarize, something's wrong.

Do pathetic plagiarists want to be caught? Are they playing a high-risk, borderline psychotic game in which they dare the world to catch them out and destroy them?

Male hysteria, currently on view here and here, is a strange thing. It's easy to find, among men, examples of writers like those I've just linked you to -- Ron Rosenbaum and Carlin Romano. It's harder to find them among women, though in her heyday Naomi Wolf was like this.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm always tells you to moderate your emotions in your writing, because if you don't, the writing turns out to be about your narcissistic self-display rather than about your ostensible subject. Beyond making you look unpalatable as a human being, narcissistic self-display makes your reader wonder whether you're being self-promoting, attention-seeking, needy, rather than engaging a subject that transcends your particular experience.

Rosenbaum and Romano want Heidegger's philosophical works labeled hate speech and suppressed; they write in praise of a forthcoming book by a French philosopher which argues for the criminalization of Heidegger's writings on the grounds that his fascist philosophy actively recruits new generations of fascists in Europe, America, and around the world.

One-upmanship being at the core of narcissistic writing, Rosenbaum sees Romano and raises him one. My post's title is Rosenbaum's approving quotation of a writer who sees Hannah Arendt, once Heidegger's lover, as one of the loyalists.

John C. Halasz, a commenter at the blog Crooked Timber, seems to UD to sum up the long controversy over Heidegger's politics and views well:

Whether Heidegger’s thought is “fascist through and through”, as Adorno claimed, is not a question that can be readily and easily decided. Certainly Heidegger was always an arch-conservative thinker veering toward the rechts-radikal, and there is a deep strain of a reactionary, irrationalistic, elitist cult of sacrifice built into his thought. And the recurrent trope of the dispensation of being amounting to a fated commandment,- (“a voice which no face commands”),- has an utterly authoritarian ring to it... [W]hatever one thinks of the man and his work, he did raise in a new way fundamental questions, which are centrally important to the modern consideration of the philosophical tradition, regardless of whether one rejects his exact formulation of the problematic or his answers.

Though he reviled it, Adorno engaged Heidegger's thinking with care throughout his intellectual life; he did not call for its criminalization.

An encounter with Heidegger - and with writers influenced by him - is an important component of a serious liberal arts education.

Among other things, this sort of education prepares you for the emergence of hysterics who want you to stop thinking.