I thought I had gotten to a point of not having much reaction to this sort of thing, but this one really struck me. I think it was the use of the word "diversity." Does she mean moral diversity? How far does it extend? It's such nonsense, and such underhanded nonsense.

By most accounts, all but about a dozen 'Catholic' institutions are junk heaps. Follow Bp. Sheen's advice and stick with the state universities.

I beg to differ. Private institutions can be distinguished by cachet, rigor, or particularity. If it lacks all of these, what's there but the added expense?

To put it somewhat crassly, we benefit from transparency in the market for higher education. That means Catholic colleges and non-Catholic colleges, not Colleges with fragments of patronage for miscellaneous religious orders or colleges who use the 'Catholic' label to placate alumni and scam donors. The closest you come to a school with a defensible intermediate position might be St. Bonaventure, which last I checked was a private college with some Catholic redoubts. What does a 'Catholic' institution look like?

1. Presupposing the school offers conventional baccalaureate degrees, no distribution requirements, but a core curriculum. This is the core:

a. Metaphysics
b. Logic
c. Epistemology
d. Aesthetics
e. Ethics
f. Philosophy of Science
g. Calculus I
h. Calculus II
i. Calculus III
j. Research Methods and Applied Statistics (7-8 credits)
k. Survey of Civilizations (14 credits)
--Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean
--The Jews
--Greece and Rome
--Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
--High Middle Ages
--Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance
--Early Modern Europe &c.
--The Long 18th century (1648-1789)
--The Long 19th century (1789-1914)
--Now (1914- )
--Parallel: Byzantium
--Parallel: Islam
--Parallel: India
--Parallel: China
l. Doctrinal Theology
m. Moral Theology
n. Church history and ecclesiology
o. Apologetics

2. The core courses are taught as follows: three lectures a week with hundreds of students present; one seminar a week with about twenty students a piece. Ergo, the course has a lecturer and a board of seminar leaders. The seminars have male students or female students. Never both.
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3. The dormitories have male residents or have female residents, never both at the same time; shared water closets, but tiny private cells with washbasins and a window for each student; housemasters on staff, preferably vigorous (Catholic) elderly; a curfew. Permissible fraternities and sororities have no houses and do not have an institutional ethos in conflict with Catholic life.

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4. The student medical center does not sell or prescribe contraceptives.

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5. The psychiatrist on staff runs a spare operation, mainly to do screenings and evaluations.

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6. The Dean of Students in concerned with disciplinary matters and academic standing, and that is it.

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7. Study abroad programs are sparing and carefully screened. You are only dispatched to foreign institutions which have you study a year's worth of a single subject.

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8. No humbug programs are tolerated either for students studying domestically or for those studying abroad. If you cannot get an accreditation without humbug courses, drop the program and pension off the faculty. (So much for your teacher training program). N.B. interdisciplinary programs are humbug.

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9. The trustees are elected by the alumni in a postal ballot, appointed by the bishop, or appointed by the religious superior. Lay trustees require a reference from their parish priest before they can stand as candidates.

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10. Contract renewals for faculty are derived from recommendations offered by departments, recommendations by the provost, recommendations by the college president, and recommendations by an elected faculty committee. However, the decision is the trustees'.

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11. There is no tenure. Lecturers and instructors are on renewable contracts ranging from one semester to 6 semesters in duration. Professors are on renewable six year contracts. Professors are expected to turn emeritus at age 66 or after 33 years on the faculty, whichever arrives later (depending on participation in TIAA CREF).

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12. The college president, the provost, any faculty serving on the general review committee, any faculty teaching core courses, the dean of students, and the college psychiatrist are all Catholics.

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13. Despisers of religion are not hired, and if hired, are dismissed. Marxists are debarred as well. Advocates of sexual anarchy are not welcome either. Neither are social revanchists, whether their shtick be girrrl power, black power, or La Raza.

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14. Institutional employees who fornicate with students are fired. Employees who stop short of fornication are disciplined and perhaps fired. Employees who make a public point of their homosexuality are fired (with some dispensations if this be involuntary). Employees who engage in unorthodox sexual practices are fired. Employees who are the party to a divorce action are subject to investigation by the provost.

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15. Crisis pregnancy centers operate on campus or near campus.

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16. Extracurricular activities, including invitations to outside speakers, are subject to vetting by the chaplain or by committees of the faculty to exclude vulgarity and fraud. No 'gay weekends', no speeches by Bilge Clinton, no speeches by P.Z. Myers, no speeches by Patricia Ireland, no performances of the music of Marty Haugen.

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17. No honorary degrees are offered to anyone. There are no commencement speakers. The college president has 11 minutes to chuffer before they hand out the diplomas. The center of graduation ceremonies is a Mass held earlier that day.

18. There is a Catholic chapel on campus and perhaps side chapels for the eastern rites. Student organizations with their own funding can provide for Kosher dining and prayer services in club facilities proximate to campus. Strongly recommended: anyone who suggests the spewage of Oregon Catholic Press be used on campus will be pilloried or birched.

19. There is no student council. Student groups register with the chaplain or some conciliar body and raise their own funds.

20. Academic and vocational guidance is provided by a dedicated staff with consultation with faculty. Students are awarded an associates after completing the core and then subject to screening assessments to recommend a program going forward. Such a program may be on campus, abroad, or require transfer to another school. Students are encouraged to experiment some to allay uncertainties, but to spend as much time with their chosen program once a decision has been made. Placement services are offered.

21. Augustine and Aquinas are a must in the core curriculum.

22. Literature faculties are chartered and the charter carries rude language reminding them that the study of literature is not an excuse to undertake thrift shop sociology.

23. The history faculty will be chartered and the charter will remind the those therein that social revanchists are not welcome.

24. All required courses within a particular academic or vocational program must be offered every year with gateway courses offered every semester.

25. Academic departments and arts faculties with fewer than a dozen f/t instructors offer no graduate degrees.

26. Vocational faculties with fewer than a dozen f/t instructors offer no graduate degrees unless such is necessary for occupational certifications.

27. Parking on campus is metered. Employees get an increment they can cash out. Shuttle services are offered to various points o'er town.

28. There are no athletic scholarships. Sports are intramural, as a rule.

29. Medical benefits offered do not include reimbursement for contraception, abortion, fertility treatments, or cosmetic surgery. They certainly do not include sex reassignment surgery or hormonal treatments. They do not include psychotherapy; consultations for people with a discrete range of problems are it.

Quite a manifesto you've got there. I'd be surprised if there's a school that meets all your specs.

No, we have nothing like it.

My guess would be that Christendom College meets most specs. What's depressing about it is that most of the specs are commonsensical.

The point is to substitute the inane distribution requirements with a serious core curriculum, not liberal education in and of itself. The baccalaureate degree (a suboptimal practice) is assumed. The upper division students might follow a academic program, an arts program, or a vocational program. (Where I am from, and I imagine elsewhere, programs in business, teacher training, and nursing would be the standard fare, supplemented (and on occasion supplanted) with a couple of local options).

Actually, I doubt if they were given the option the bulk of college students would select contemporary practice. Again, the distribution requirements are an expensive and time-consuming nuisance and programs of study are unnecessarily elongated because crucial courses are offered too infrequently. Campuses are often absurdly overbuilt. Academic advising is a joke. They accept it because they fancy they need that credential and that's the Brussels sprouts on the plate. While we are at it, I do not think there is much of a student constituency for most of the trumpery of academic life today. The faculty and administration do those things to please themselves (with the excuse that public policy requires it).

The things on the list which would truly discourage students would be spartan housing and the ordering of student housing and amenities to minimize ill-thought out sexual encounters and heavy drinking. You are building a niche service. Your clientele does not want those things to begin with.

The school I know best requires students devote 30% of their time to distribution requirements. That includes 12.5% devoted to synthetic courses and 6% to a foreign language selected, and 12.5% to courses outside the division of your major. The synthetic courses are designed by faculty as a function of their avocational interests. Some of them are a scandal. The best example was a course on 'The Atomic Bomb' taught by a geology professor (whose research speciality was volcanology). No aspect of the manufacture and deployment of atomic weapons has anything to do with vocanology bar that atomic and thermonuclear weapons release a great deal of energy and volcanos do as well.

In short, the core program there is designed for the convenience of the faculty and people who write promotional brochures, who can incorporate phrases like 'critically-acclaimed core curriculum' or 'rigorous core curriculum'. It is a waste of students' time.

Where I went to school many years ago, you were required to take six credits outside your division. They increased that to 12 credits in 1982. The virtue of that system is that it impinged on students relatively little. Still, the definition of a degree as comprising 120 credits while allowing one to declare a major with as few as 42 credits (many years later reduced to 27 credits) is indicative of the amount of padding that is incorporated into the baccalaureate degree. In British universities, a degree is three years in one subject with few electives with blindly marked examinations to pass a course.

So "distribution requirements" are a sort of helter-skelter stand-in for a common core, in the sense that it's stuff they think everybody should study, regardless of major? What is a "synthetic course"?

I only have experience with one school, but the people I know who do the kind of research you're talking about--what sells a campus--are pretty sharp. As for higher ed being fad-driven, that's certainly an influential factor, as is witnessed by the reverent attention given to "diversity." If you want an example of something that the average student really doesn't care about but seems right up there with paying the bills for educators, there's a good candidate.

I suspect that kind of over-building may be more often found in state schools and the larger and wealthier private ones, where empire-builders have scope for their efforts. The smaller ones of the type I'm acquainted with don't do this. I think the range of most heavily used start times for classes here is more like 9 till 3, but it is true that many classrooms are empty for a big part of what would be considered the work day in other environments. Our faculty would certainly be outraged by the claim that the school is run for their convenience. Which wouldn't mean it isn't true, of course, but I don't think it is.

You're describing a very different world from mine. Is this a public or private school? In any case, the contrast illuminates the situation that a lot of small private colleges face: the facilities and amenities arms race. Just to pick an instance of immediate concern to me: fifteen-plus years ago, with the web becoming a major part of life, colleges that could afford to do so raced to provide free (make that "free") high-speed internet in the dorms. Trade journals were abuzz with talk of the competitive advantage that this was giving those who did it. In due course I heard that from an administrator. I said that big and/or rich schools would always be the only ones to benefit from such advantages, because they could afford to stay ahead, whereas for schools like ours it would simply become one more necessary part of doing business. It was a very expensive undertaking, and we could get no competitive advantage. We could only prevent ourselves from being put at a significant disadvantage. So it has proven. Now it's not enough to be wired, not enough to be high-speed, but students expect wireless access everywhere. We can't not do it, but it contributes to the rise of tuition, because we don't have very deep pockets.

I believe you're describing the syndrome known as "more money than sense." Not a problem here.

I don't know that there is a single prestige school. Emory's pretty big, Vanderbilt, Sewanee. The two Jesuit schools, Spring Hill and Loyola New Orleans, are reasonably well regarded though not as prestigious as Sewanee, which is comparable in size and also religiously (albeit Episcopal), affiliated. We don't have the profusion of small Catholic colleges that the northeast and midwest seem to. But then we don't have the profusion of Catholics, either.

I believe you're describing the syndrome known as "more money than sense." Not a problem here.

Oh yeah. But the whole industry has some of that problem due to the postwar subsidy regime and the wretched padding of degree programs.

Pres. MomJeans would like 'college for everyone' - which is just wild given current conditions.

Sewanee and Vanderbilt both being within a couple hours' drive from my home, and in a culturally identical zone, I count them as Deep South.

Hmmm.

Mapquest has it that Mobile to Nashville approaches 7 hours and Mobile to Sewanee 6.5 hours. That's not nearby.

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Tennessee is still Upper South.

I was speaking of my original home, which is about 25 miles south of the Tennessee-Alabama line, more or less due south of Nashville. Sewanee and Nashville are both about 100 miles away. I realize people mark out regions like "Deep South" and "Upper South" by state borders, but they're arbitrary constructs that don't necessarily reflect cultural realities, so I consider the terms to be more loosely defined. A more accurate demarcation between "upper" and "deep" would be roughly the latitude of Birmingham. You can make a plausible argument that north Alabama is in the Upper South, but not that it has more in common with southern Alabama than with much of Tennessee.

I give my permission for anyone who wants to use "Deep South" to refer to political boundaries, thus putting Elkmont, Alabama, and Pulaski, Tennessee, in different regions, to do so. I'll use "deep South" to refer to the cultural region.

Huntsville has been somewhat anomalous since the end of WWII, when the army began doing missile research there. That eventually turned into one of NASA's major installations. In addition to northerners, there were some prominent German scientists whose past was probably not something anyone wanted to examine very closely.

Yeah, I meant anyone local. The space program was a huge source of pride, not to mention the thing that, along with the military installation, more or less created the city that existed by 1960 or so. Wehrner Von Braun was a highly regarded member of the community. Nobody wanted to think of him as a Nazi. I had a blog post about that a while back...let's see...here.

As to their personal responsibility...I don't know. Might be a tough call, even if one had all the facts, which we probably don't. There's a link at that blog post to von Braun's Wikipedia bio which discusses his case.

You know, you have to wonder how the distinction between the Upper South and the Deep South came about.

1. You look at a map of biomes, and there is no such distinction. The distinction is one between the coast and the Mississippi Valley and the inland and Upland areas.

2. That dialect map distinguishes the South from the 'inland South' (west Texas, the north half of Arkansas, East and West Tennessee (but not Middle Tennessee), northerly Alabama, and some (not all) upland areas in the other states.

3. The nasty metric, lynchings per man-year, would suggest that the Deepest of the Deep South is...Florida. It also suggests that the fuzzy boundary between the Deep South and the Upper South runs through South Carolina and Tennessee, follows the Arkansas-Missouri border, then the Oklahoma-Kansas border, then turns south and runs through Texas.

I'm having trouble getting a good view of that dialect map, so am not studying it closely, but one thing that immediately strikes me is that my native region stretches up into southern Indiana. I have direct experience of that, in the form of a co-worker who had grown up on a farm there. I would never have been able to distinguish her accent and vocabulary and just general culture from that of the people I grew up with in rural north Alabama. I heard little figures of speech from her that I hadn't heard since I was in high school. (I'm trying unsuccessfully right now to retrieve some examples.)

Your suggested fuzzy Deep-Upper boundary conforms to my impressions. though I don't know those areas very well.

Another surprise, though as it's a movie I can't be sure it's accurate, was the people in Winter's Bone. They're very upper-south-redneck in my perception, but the movie is set in Missouri.

Winter's Bone was set in the Ozarks, so presumably that strip along the border that you're talking about.

I'm a little surprised at that Florida number, too. I would have guessed 1920, perhaps even as early as 1910, as the point where its population really began to grow. Apart from the coast and a couple of cities, I think northern Florida is still not very densely populated. It certainly doesn't appear to be when you drive through it.

"Deep South" as a political classification drawn on state boundaries makes some sense. However, I think you're mistaken in saying that "negro disenfranchisement was not much of a problem" in Tennessee. I think segregation was as much of an institution there as in the Deep South, but I can think of two reasons why there was less violence: one, that much of Tennessee had not been as dependent on the slave economy as more southern regions of the more southern states, and had a correspondingly lower black population, and so less opportunity for friction, and less sense by whites of being outnumbered and potentially threatened. And two, Tennesseeans were not as stupid and/or unfortunate in their leaders as Alabama and Mississippi. If Alabama ever lives down George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Selma, it will take another century or so.

My own high school, btw, was integrated without fanfare or trouble in 1966, albeit with only a handful of black students initially.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4-n7Sfzt-M

Southerners took a certain amount of malicious pleasure in the troubles about busing up north, since they had been treated as the only evil people in the country.

Did they understand the significance of these conflicts, of how bad a man Arthur Garrity really was? You had the haut bourgeois - power drunk judges and members of the public interest bar - who were insulated by geography and tuition payments from the consequences of the decisions they were making. You had the petty bourgeois - teachers and school administrators - who were terribly twisted into knots by their own social ideology (masked as 'professional standards') and constrained by the regulatory injunctions of the haut bourgeois; they could not and would not maintain academic or behavioral standards in the institutions they ran. Then you had working people, half black and half white. The blacks did not gain much of value, just more opportunities for socially sanctioned aggression; the whites lose out all over the place. Then you have another group of bourgeois, the newspapers, who write it all up to avoid blaming the two parties most responsible for the whole debacle - the lawyers and the hoodlums.

"Did they understand the significance of these conflicts...?"

Their main interest and pleasure was in the public revelation that the region which had been so sanctimonious about southern racism had its own problems in that vein. To the extent that they had any interest in the details, they might have asked Boston if it would be willing to admit that race relations were a rather more complicated situation than the simple good vs. evil picture cherished by those contemplating it from a comfortable distance.

Alas, your picture of the progress of desegregation is broadly applicable all over the place.

That video is hilarious.

Also unfortunately, the word merchant sector was our only source of data as to what the rest of the country, especially the northeast, thought of us.

Not entirely sure I understand your second paragraph. The "set of issued that could be dealt with in isolation" is the legal infrastructure of segregation?