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There’s a lot of chatter this morning about Groupon’s latest deal in the Chicago area: A 60% discount on university tuition at National-Louis University.
Sounds amazing, but the full story isn’t quite as impressive.
The offer is for one graduate-level course. Not one course as in “any one course,” but one course as in “one particular course.” A course that was concocted specifically for the Groupon promotion. It does apply toward a master’s in teaching, but only if, after completing it, you apply for, are accepted to, and enroll in NLU. (Given the nature of the class, it’s hard to imagine it being accepted as transfer credit at any other school.) All in all, this “deal” is clearly more a marketing initiative than an educational innovation.
And that shouldn’t come as a surprise, given National-Louis University’s past…
Until 1990, NLU was known as the National College of Education. It changed its name to National-Louis University to honor to its largest donor, Michael W. Louis, who had made a $30 million pledge to the college the previous year. In 1982 Louis had given NCE three million dollars to create a college of arts and sciences, which the school had also named for him. In 1983 they granted him an honorary doctorate as well.
So. Yeah.
One year ago today a student protest action took place in Canada that was, as I put it at the time, “unlike anything I’d ever heard of before.” Here’s how I described it then:
Student activists and others at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, a Canadian university some seventy miles northwest of Seattle, held a teach-out on “food democracy” and sustainability issues. There was music, a slate of speakers, pamphlets to read, and tea. At the end of the event the group planted a garden.
On the lawn.
In front of the library.
They ripped up the sod, built some raised beds, and planted a variety of vegetables and other native plants. They planted, they mulched, they designed rock borders. They put up fences to keep rabbits out.
On the lawn of the quad, in front of the library.
There’s a symposium about that action — which was hugely controversial in the campus community — being held on the U Vic campus tomorrow. And though organizers have been circumspect about the details, there’s apparently some sort of follow-up action happening today.
More as I get it.
A tongue-in-cheek call for a campus club to “advocate for men in the same manner that female groups advocate for women” has resulted in the formation of a men’s advocacy organization at the University of Chicago.
Back in March, UC junior Steve Saltarelli wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Maroon announcing the creation of Men in Power, a new student group founded “to spread awareness and promote understanding of issues and challenges facing men today.” Proposing “a tutorial on barbecuing” and “fishing, hunting, and flag-football retreats” as club activities, Saltarelli soon started receiving emails from men looking to join.
So he set it up. MiP applied for official campus recognition and funding, and held its first meeting in mid-May.
The Chicago Tribune had no trouble finding men’s rights activists to cheer the group’s creation and feminists to deplore it, but it remains unclear just how serious Saltarelli is. His Maroon op-ed was an obvious spoof — “many don’t realize that men are in power all around us,” he noted, pointing out that “the last 44 presidents have been men.” But if the club itself is a hoax, it’s a subtle one, as interviews like this one make clear.
That said, the club is clearly uncomfortable with the charges of misogyny (and douchebaggery) that are directed its way. Its Facebook group and website each include a prominent notice that those “looking for a (white) male champion group that seeks to advance men at the expense of women and/or a clique to isolate yourselves … are in the wrong place.”
Links posted at the group’s Twitter feed make clear that it’s garnering quite a bit of media attention, but its first meeting drew fewer than twenty attendees. If it exists as a functioning campus group a year from now, I’ll be more than a little surprised.
Update: Okay, here’s my hunch. Saltarelli wrote the original Maroon piece as a not-feminist-but-not-antifeminist-either goof. He wasn’t serious about creating the group. But then he started getting attention, and he liked the attention, so he decided to go for it. And then he started getting a lot of attention, and a lot of questions he’d never really contemplated, and he had to start figuring out how to answer them. And now he, and the rest of the group, are trying to come up with a serious rationale for a project that didn’t start out serious, and negotiating some heavy gender politics that they don’t have a lot of tools to address.
(There are a lot of parallels here to the Veterans of Future Wars craze of 1936. I should really get some of the stuff I’ve written about those folks up online.)
The Chronicle is reporting on the fake Twitter accounts of two university presidents. (Both universities have asked Twitter to suspend the accounts, so check them out now if you’re interested.)
@JackDeGioia is supposedly the Twitter feed of Georgetown’s chief. It consists largely of topical jokes on campus events that also involve sloppy joes. But there are some pokes at how the university is run…
Had to give an honorary degree to my son today so he would take a bath. Really embarrassing. Had to do it in front of the whole faculty. 1:50 AM May 12th
Student asked me today to take action on the chicken madness. Nope. As soon as you take a student suggestion, the university’s about them. 8:15 PM May 13th
…as well as moments of more random humor:
So much human contact. So much. Thousands of beautiful hands touching mine. But now I have to wait a whole year again. 1:40 PM May 17th
In Rome. When in Rome, do what they tell you to do. The Romans, that is, or anybody who ever tells you to do something. about 3 hours ago
The @WilliamPowersJr account, which pretends to be that of the president of the University of Texas, relies heavily on puns on Powers’ last name. There are also, as on DeGioia’s account, occasional gentle jokes about him being a doofus:
I’m hosting Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi the AT&T Executive Center at 7 tonight. Hoping they don’t make me give a speech. 11:25 AM Apr 27th
Dreading going into work tomorrow, but those diplomas aren’t going to sign themselves… 1:45 PM May 17th
We really need a toaster in this office…or a microwave…whatever makes hot pockets, because I’m famished. 12:41 PM May 18th
The fake DeGioia is Jack Stuef, a Georgetown undergraduate who edits a campus humor magazine. The fake Powers is so far anonymous.
Friday update: Powers account has been suspended. The DeGioia is still up.
An Entertainment Weekly blog claimed last week that a New York crowd “staged a ’60s-style sit-in at a Manhattan KFC” after the restaurant ran out of the grilled chicken that Oprah Winfrey had given away free coupons for online. The story has been repeated over and over again since.
But the sit-in never happened.
The EW story was based on a Gothamist post, and Gothamist got it from an anonymous emailer who’d written to say that customers at a midtown Manhattan KFC were “currently holding a sit-in and refusing to leave until they get their free chicken.” But that email was an obvious, crude, and not particularly funny joke — it went on to claim that the store’s “manager ran from [a] screaming horde” who were “spew[ing] racial epithets” and threatening other patrons with “a beatdown.”
If there had been an actual sit-in the New York tabloids and television news would have been all over it, but a Google news search for KFC protest Oprah “New York” brings up not a single hit from local media. It gets plenty of hits, but they’re all to stories that were based on the Gothamist’s joke.
Were people at that KFC upset about missing out on the promotion? Some of them probably were. Any time a business promises a free giveaway and fails to deliver there are going to be some pissed off customers, particularly if they’ve been waiting in line for a while.
But the crucial element of the Gothamist/EW story is the sit-in angle, and it’s obvious why. Claiming that there was a sit-in brings all the racially coded elements of the story — Oprah, fast food, New York, fried chicken — together, and turns a story about corporate bungling into a story about race. Gothamist cast the story as a story about angry, violent blacks, while EW went for a more sardonic approach, but both made the incident into a morality play with blackness taking center stage.
And so it was inevitable that white racist idiots would pounce on the story, just as it was inevitable that blacks would recoil in embarrassment. But there’s no reason for anyone to be smirking, and there’s no reason for anyone to be cringing.
The sit-in never happened.
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