The Most Awesome Paragraph Ever (including The Most Awesome Sentence Ever)

Writing that “…the assault is the more overwhelming as the nature [of the female sex] they attack is the weaker,” Heloise portrays herself as less capable of piety than her former husband Abelard (Letters 133). Perhaps this submissive, anti-feminist approach is a result of her all-encompassing desire to humble herself before him, honoring Abelard as though he is God. Likewise, the Wife of Bath is similarly anti-feminist in order to be forgiving of male misdeeds in her tale: the rape victim is never named and is presumably shamed out of court by the impurity forced upon her by her male oppressor; the old hag becomes both a beautiful and faithful wife after her new husband has presumably learned his lesson about sovereignty, though his decision to let her choose her appearance seems to be based more in frustration over the perceived hopelessness of his situation than in acquired wisdom; and most basically, the entire tale (like the Wife of Bath’s life) is framed around the man’s desires, as he is exonerated for an unatoned-for rape and essentially rewarded for the very crime he committed through the acquisition of the perfect wife, whose good traits, beauty and faithfulness, are really only important in relation to him. The Wife of Bath, based on the self-focused commentary of her prologue, would seem to be a proponent of a confident, decisive womanhood but is rather subconsciously submissive to the men in her life, as is evidenced by the female characters’ relationships to the male characters in her tale. Heloise is clearly more aware of her submissiveness to and dependence upon her husband, while the Wife of Bath seems to think she possesses sovereignty over the other sex, while she actually prostrates femininity in the face of male power.

Facebook friendships reveal sexual orientation

The column was originally published in the Sept. 23 issue of the Beacon, and can be viewed online here.

Anyone familiar with Facebook stalking knows a number of things can be inferred from one’s profile, without such information being explicitly included.

For example, when someone purports to love The Nation (which describes itself as “the flagship of the left”) but does not list their political preference, it’s a pretty safe bet to infer a liberal political leaning. Likewise, someone who lists Thomas Paine in their favorite quotations (or attests to their love of Ron Paul) is likely a Libertarian (or maybe not. Oh the flaws of Facebook stalking). And anyone who mentions Ann Coulter (without a clause of hate attached) is likely a Conservative or a liberal-hater at the least.

For homosexual men, it now seems that a listing of sex (”male”) and intentionally ambiguously blank “interested in” section is not the only indication of gayness on Facebook. Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology students developed a program called “Gaydar” which predicts whether or not a man is homosexual by evaluating his friends’ gender and sexuality: “Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: Just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay,” according to a Sept. 20 Boston Globe article.

The students’ findings have not yet been published. And no, the program is not available, as of yet at least, for those of you interested in outing your Facebook friends of ambiguous sexuality. (The program also fails to identify lesbians and bisexuals; it can only detect homosexual men.)

This nifty, insightful new program, however, is not the reason behind writing this column. As Behram Mistree, one of the creators of “Gaydar,” commented in a Sept. 22 ABCNews.com article, the importance of this discovery lies in the privacy issues that result from the fact that such inferences can be made: “We thought that our work demonstrated a new threat to privacy that we wanted individuals to be aware of.”

Of course, sexuality is not the only private information that might be inferred by such a program or even by a particularly insightful Facebook stalker.

“Who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are: If all your friends are over 45, you’re probably not a teenager; if they all belong to a particular religion, it’s a decent bet that you do, too,” the Boston Globe article warned. “The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks but also a possible pitfall. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell and things we don’t.”

Does this mean we should un-friend anyone who would seem to discredit the image of ourselves that we hope to convey to the rest of our social networking community? Certainly not. (It might be a good idea to un-friend anyone (for example, Osama bin Laden) with whom your association might reveal your secret identity (as a terrorist) or otherwise covert plans.)

It is good to be aware of the privacy we lose by putting our personal information, whether explicitly or implicitly, into the swirling vortex of information that is the Internet.

If you haven’t already, it might be a good idea to re-evaluate your Facebook privacy settings at the very least. (Check out this link for a guide to some privacy settings whose existence you may have never even imagined.)

Virtual college would deprive future students

Published in the Sept. 16 issue of the Daily Beacon, and found online here.

Just last week, I finally acquired the long-sought reasoning to justify my pursuit of a career in humanities education.

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world ... The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own,” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his “Defence of Poetry.” Through the imaginative exercise of reading poetry, or literature more generally, one may learn to empathize with others, to imagine another’s condition.

In other words, literature professors are responsible for the “moral education of humankind,” my professor exclaimed. What greater good might I aspire to than this?

At last, justification for my eternal studenthood.

Ah, but this euphoria and (seemingly) finally attained purpose for my career aspirations did not last long.

That very night, I came across a Sept. 8 article titled “The Web will dismember universities, just like newspapers,” written by Zephyr Teachout on http://www.thebigmoney.com, a member of the Slate (magazine) Group. The article predicts the demise of the traditional college experience due to the economic unsustainability of the education business and the cheapness of online classes in comparison to traditional ones.

I’m obviously holding onto my newspapers by the teeth, and I will hold onto my traditional education system just as ardently.

The article claims that the fields of education and journalism have survived because they have traditionally provided a commodity: hard-to-come-by information. With the advent of the Information Age and with obscure information readily available on the Internet, the article claims that universities are no longer the sole source of such information.

At the most basic level, I disagree that the college experience consists of a simple accumulation of facts. Education is about much more than simple memorization. The college experience ignites a period of self-discovery and self-definition, based upon interactions with peers and new ideas.

A Web-based college experience will not be a college experience at all. It would further the social disconnection and virtual “relationships” propogated by social networking Web sites. It would also destroy curiosity and creativity, instead demanding memorization of facts and figures and thus denying free thinking and exposure to conflicting viewpoints.

This prediction scares me on multiple levels, my most obvious and palpable concern being the availability of employment opportunities for myself, an aspiring academic. But more deeply, I am concerned for the intellectual development of future generations whose only college education might be virtual. Such a transition will mark the devolution of intellectuality. It’s already uncool to read books — what will this mean for future generations? Will their minds be completely filled with bits of facts, disconnected from any coherent semblance of general knowledge?

Will this next generation be even more self-deluded than our own, with their only postulations being Twitter-esque declarations about themselves? How will they define themselves as human beings, if they don’t have an opportunity to distance themselves from their upbringings and to define their ideologies independently if they are not allowed the opportunity to contextualize their existences within a larger universe of ideas and social connections?

Maybe I’m being idealistic about the yields of the traditional education system, but I certainly wouldn’t want my potential children, or anyone in the next generation for that matter, to be denied the college experience I have had.

There Will Be Chub

Damn misogynists!

I was reading about the "original" version of the Bible in my New Testament textbook Monday night. Of course, there is no "original" version, but only older and more reliable manuscripts. There are an unimaginable amount of variations among the thousands of versions of the New Testament. This happened because scribes simply made errors when copying the texts; or because scribes thought there was an error in the manuscript from which they were copying and thus wrongly "corrected" their new version; or because scribes changed the texts to suit their own theological or personal purposes.

One example of this occurs in the portrayal of women in some of these manuscripts. Scholars have discovered (by comparing older copies to more recent copies) that scribes sometimes switched the order of a woman's and a man's name to give prominence to the man, completely omitted a woman's name when mentioned with a man's, or changed the wording of the text to indicate that the woman had less authority, contradicting the message conveyed by the original text.

In Chapter 30 of the book I was reading, Bart Ehrman gives several examples of particular biblical verses that were altered in these ways. As a result, we see that Paul didn't actually contradict himself by encouraging female participation in the church in one place and instructing women to be silent and submissive in another. All of this was edited and added by later scribes. Damn misogynists!

I've gotten pretty riled up about sexism lately.

Here are two incidences of sexism from my recent experiences:

(1)
*country music playing non-stop in the newsroom*
Me: Country music is about desperate women hoping men will rescue them.
(Admittedly, that was a generalization.)
Coworker: *turns up Brad Paisley* Shut up, a man is speaking.
This is followed by general shock in the newsroom.

(2)
A columnist submits a satirical column about the university's budget issues. One of the suggestions is as follows: "I propose cutting such useless money sinkholes as the Student Health Center, university scholarships, women's sports and the College of Business."

At first, I consider adding a note to indicate that the column is meant to be satire, but then, as I ponder the issue, I become increasingly offended. With the exception of women's sports, the other three suggested cuts affect the general student body. Honestly, would the columnist have deemed it admissible to suggest the elimination of minority scholarships or LGBT organizations? No, because that's discrimination. It seems that it's OK to show prejudice toward women simply because it's ingrained in our cultural mindset.

The issue was ultimately resolved with an alternative wording. Was I overreacting to get so upset about something that was meant to be funny?

And why must "feminism" have such negative connotations? It's really about human rights/equal rights for everyone.

Larger classes & the quality of education

Here's another editorial I wrote for the Daily Beacon. It was published in the Tuesday, Sept. 1 issue, and can be found online here.

In the Monday, Aug. 24, Daily Beacon article titled “UT scheduling provides more seats with fewer class sections,” the Beacon reported that this semester UT offers fewer course sections but has nearly the same number of seats available for students as it did during the fall 2008 semester. As a result, some class sections have been enlarged.

We appreciate efforts to offer the courses students need to graduate in a timely manner, even if this means enlarging section sizes. But how does this increased seat capacity affect students’ educational experience?

“Perhaps the most surprising (and well documented) result in the literature on class size in higher education is that class size seems to have little or no impact on the acquisition and even the retention of basic course material by students,” according to a summary of class size studies, written by Richard C. Schiming and available at http://www.mnsu.edu/cetl/teachingresources/articles/classsize.html.

Perhaps larger classes do yield the same result grade-wise, but are grades the ultimate indication of learning?

In larger classes, professors do not get to know their students. This isn’t the fault of the professor; it’s nearly impossible to learn the names of 200 students, let alone personally interact with all of them about their individual educational goals in a single semester. You think, 200 — that seems like too many. Well, if a professor teaches four classes with 50 students in each class, that’s still the same amount of students to keep up with.

The best classes, the ones that are most beneficial to students, are the ones in which students get to know their professors and take the time to talk with their professors one-on-one about the student’s particular interests. Without this sort of interaction, a class can become a chore, just another requirement on the graduation to-do list.

In larger classes, students may absorb the same amount of information, but mere fact retention is not the sole indicator of intellectual growth. It is important to gain academic knowledge, but often, compelling class discussions (which are many times impossible in large classes) can be more intellectually beneficial than memorizing facts for a test. One or two meaningful conversations are often more enlightening than a semester’s-worth of academic memorization.

Schiming’s article supports this idea, as he writes, “When it comes to the attainment of higher-order academic skills such as problem solving, written expression and critical thinking, students in smaller classes do acquire more of these skills than do students in larger classes. Thus, while the literature demonstrates that large classes prove no obstacle to the acquisition of specific, course-related, factual knowledge, students in larger classes are at some disadvantage in developing an ability to think better by using skills beyond the basic acquisition of information.”

So, while we at the Beacon appreciate UT’s efforts to keep our graduation schedules on-track, we think it is important to consider the ramifications larger class sizes have on the quality of education at UT.

In the end, though, it is up to the student to take the initiative to improve her own academic experience. Unfortunately, all classes will not be conducive to student learning. Therefore it is vital for you, UT student, to initiate your personal, educational growth by making the effort to engage in intellectually stimulating discussions with your professors and peers both inside and outside the classroom.