Wednesday, November 28, 2018

That Special Mother-Daughter Bond

Since Liz's adolescence, when viewing television commercials that celebrated the ostensibly unconditional love of mothers for their children, or on spotting merchandise in stores that honored this unique bond with poems or effusive declarations—picture frames, magnets, oven mitts—she had felt liek a foreign exchange student observing the customs of another country.
Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 155

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Young Worker Generalizes from One Job Experience: Everyone's Crooked

I learned that in the mainstream, everybody is dishonest everywhere. The clients we dealt with, the industry we were in, the business that we sustained . . . all crooked. Every day was a combination of deceptions, little white lies, misrepresentations, slight bendings of the facts, and dramatic distortions of reality. And this was in a business that had no reason, conceptually speaking, to behave unethically.
Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 6 (ellipsis in original).

Friday, October 26, 2018

Mr. Bennet's Job (Modern Version)

In her youth, Liz had understood her father to be an important businessman, an investor . . . and it was only with the passage of time that Liz realized that the investments he oversaw were solely those belonging to his immediate family and that, further, their oversight accounted for the entirety of his job. This realization had been so gradual that it was not until her junior year of college, when a friend of Liz's said of the wealthy older guy the friend was dating, "He pretends to work, but I think he's one of those men who push around piles of his family's money," that Liz felt an unwelcome sense of recognition. A decade earlier, when her father had "retired," Liz had wished she did not have the cruel though From what?
Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 65

Friday, September 28, 2018

College Prepared This Grad for . . . College Papers (and He Learned from Them)

As it turned out, helping students cheat on papers was the only available job for which my college had prepared me. More than that, I was suddenly receiving an education. My god, the thought hadn't even occurred to me until right then. I had taken this job because it had found me. It had been the one job in my field that had responded to my habitual claim: "I can write anything. Just give me a chance."
This job had taken me up on my offer, embraced my talents, and found more outlets for them than a normal occupation could possibly have dreamed up. I was learning more stuff in a week than I'd learned in four expensive years of college. It was like kindergarten all over again. Suddenly, I was learning without the hassle of grades, the dictates of dickhole professors, or the looming pressure to declare myself a major and imagine a career therefrom. 
I had no obligation to a course of study, no registrar's office to tell me a class was full, no admissions process to navigate. I was interdisciplinary, unregistered, and unadmitted. And without all the artifices, impositions, and expenses, all the things that made me hate school . . ., I rediscovered a love for learning that really only travel and psychedelics had satisfied for quite some time.
Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 64

Monday, September 17, 2018

The Informal Hospital Experience

"Fred!" the nurse said, though they had never met. "How are we today?"
Reading the nurse's name tag, Mr. Bennet replied with fake enthusiasm, "Bernard! We're mourning the death of manners and the rise of overly familiar discourse. How are you?"

Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 61

One Student Finds a Big State University Something of a Let-Down

All of my classes graded for attendance. All of my classes were so big that the professors had to speak using microphones. All of my classes used multiple-choice tests with Scantron forms so that grading could be done by machine. All of my professors gave lectures with content lifted directly from the text. All of my courses seemed extraneous, unnecessary, and uninteresting. When I was counting down the last days of high school, I never imagined that freedom would be so mediocre.
Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 6.

Thursday, August 9, 2018

Cincinnati and the End of the World

When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times.
Attributed to Mark Twain in epigraph to Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible (2016)

But it probably wasn't his clever line.

In 2012 Quote Investigator found an Atlantic Monthly article in 1886 attributing a similar quip to King Ludwig II, describing Bavaria. And other people mocked Dresden, the Netherlands, Mecklenburg, and Ireland. People credited Heinrich Heine, Otto von Bismarck, Mark Twain, and George Bernard Shaw. Seems like another one of the many good lines we can credit to Anonymous.

Friday, June 29, 2018

The Layers of Social Justice Conferences

Academic or organizational conferences centered on social justice form a two-sided ecosystem, like the ocean on either side of an equatorial thermocline: the well-lit layer where professionals bask and sport about the dim reach of the slow-moving clients—or constituents or stakeholders, members or customers, special interest group or community, depending on the agency and the year. What never changed was the dynamic. The conference was organized around those at the top of the food chain, who made their living from those below. If you ran a nonprofit, or wrote papers about those who needed the services of a nonprofit, you floated in the warmth of power and influence. You were approached by corporate reps and interviewed for jobs, you hung out in the bar in good clothes and laughed with the journalist who had just sucked dry an angry, badly dressed member of the latest social justice struggle then tossed the husk back into the cold, oxygen-starved depths.
Nicola Griffith, So Lucky (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux: 2018), p. 85

Friday, June 8, 2018

Why Would Students Choose Cheating over Learning?

What are his thoughts on the fact that two hundred cheaters in his class of six hundred presumably felt that they could benefit more by passing the class than by learning from it? It seems fair to assert that Quinn and his university sowed the seeds for this type of blatant disregard for the honor system by failing to create a "community devoted to learning." When at least one-third of all students are proven offenders, it is the environment and not the individual that must explain itself.
Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 81.

Sunday, June 3, 2018

University Excels at . . . Parking Enforcement

No department was as well organized as Parking and Transportation. The school couldn't issue a schedule without two overlapping classes. It couldn't approve your financial aid without losing your paperwork. It couldn't print your transcript without accidentally faxing your medical records to the student listserv. But if your meter had expired twenty seconds ago, you could be damn sure that a parking attendant was already writing your ticket out nineteen seconds ago. Such graceful efficiency.
Dave Tomar, The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 22

Monday, May 14, 2018

MacKinnon, asked to summarize something really, really complex

Interviewer (James R. Hackney, Jr.): The other theoretical approach that is discussed in the two Signs articles is the liberal theory and the deficiencies of liberal feminist theory, which is the dominant paradigm, at least in the United States. What do you find to be the deficiencies in liberal theory vis-à-vis feminist theory, and the general shortcomings of the liberal theoretical approach?
Catharine A. MacKinnon: You know, it is kind of wild to be asked to recapitulate work that it took years and volumes to properly articulate. If it could be explained right in a few sentences, I would have done that in the first place. Anyway, one basic problem is liberal theory's individualized, rather than group-based, approach to issues. And also in law its "let's pretend" methodology, as if we can get where we are going by pretending we are already there and making rules accordingly. A lot of the problems can be traced to Aristotle. Social change was not on his agenda.
James R. Hackney, Jr., Legal Intellectuals in Conversation: Reflections on the Construction of Contemporary American Legal Theory (New York: N.Y.U. Press, 2012), p. 134

Thursday, May 10, 2018

MLK on the Importance (and Limits) of Law

Let us never succumb to the temptation of believing that legislation and judicial decrees play only minor roles in solving this problem ["an evil monster called segregation and its inseparable twin called discrimination"]. Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make an employer love an employee, but it can prevent him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin. The habits, if not the hearts of people, have been and are being altered everyday by legislative acts, judicial decisions, and executive orders. Let us not be misled by those who argue that segregation cannot be ended by force of law.
But acknowledging this, we must admit that the ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable. Court orders and federal enforcement agencies are of inestimable value in achieving desegregation, but desegregation is only a partial, though necessary, step toward the final goal which we seek to realize, genuine inter-group and interpersonal living.

Martin Luther King, Jr.,  On Being a Good Neighbor (sermon), p. 10

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

MLK on Philanthropy & the Big Picture

Philanthropy is marvelous, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the need for working to remove the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
Martin Luther King, Jr.,  On Being a Good Neighbor (sermon), p. 5

Thursday, April 5, 2018

MLK Describes "True Altruism"

True altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to sympathize. Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul. Pity may arise from interest in an abstraction called humanity, but sympathy grows out of a concern for "a certain man," a particular needy human being who lies at life's roadside. Sympathy is feeling with the person in need—his pain, agony and burdens.
Martin Luther King, Jr.,  On Being a Good Neighbor (sermon), pp. 7-8