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Schupf collection at the Picker Art Gallery
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Ketcham, Martha
Hour CNY - WCNY-TV
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| Picker Art Gallery Director Elizabeth ("Lizzie") Barker was interviewed in an lengthy segmnet on this live, noontime television program about an exhibition of works belonging to Paul Schupf '58. |
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The lost prodigies
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Laurie, Victoria
The Australian magazine
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More than 50 years ago, Aboriginal children in WA produced art that stunned the world. Now the Carrolup paintings are back on show, writes Victoria Laurie.
The abandoned schoolroom at Carrolup Native Settlement is a scene of quiet desolation: an upturned desk, an upholstered chair that mice are nesting in and a few childish drawings scribbled on the walls. There's a distant banging from a door off its hinge, a gentle moan as the wind blows through rotting floorboards.
Yet friends Athol Farmer and Ezzard Flowers stand in that empty room and hear the voices of busy children, chairs scraping as they rise to show their teacher a new drawing. They can visualise the prodigious and beautiful art that, for a brief moment in the late 1940s and early 1950s, earned these children fame in other parts of the world. At its peak, Carrolup attracted more international interest in living Aboriginal artists than the emerging work of a contemporary adult landscape painter, Albert Namatjira. Then the native settlement closed, the artworks largely disappeared into private collections and the Carrolup children were all but forgotten.
More than half a century later, the story of Carrolup is being brought back to life and its "lost" artworks reassembled for public viewing. Next month, Western Australian premier Geoff Gallop will open an exhibition in Katanning, 250km southeast of Perth and the nearest town to Carrolup's bush location. It will be the highlight event of the 2006 Perth International Arts Festival, and the fulfilment of Farmer and Flowers' dream to restore Carrolup to public prominence.
Both men were born after Carrolup's closure, but their childhoods were spent in the company of its ghosts. Farmer is a painter who grew up in the district, learnt his vivid landscape style from a Carrolup artist and now runs an Aborig-inal art gallery in Katanning. Flowers is a mental health counsellor who, from the age of six, was sent to live and work on an Aboriginal boys' training farm that had occupied Carrolup's derelict buildings.
For Flowers, reclaiming threads of the Carrolup story has been a healing process. For the quietly spoken Farmer, who is among a handful of Carrolup-inspired artists now selling work in Asia and Europe, it has been important to put the historical pieces together. "People want to know why it's so different from other Aboriginal art."
Carrolup started out little different from dozens of Aboriginal native welfare settlements in Western Australia set up to remove Aborigines from the public eye and herd them into camps. From the 1900s on, while tribes in the remote north could still escape white contact, Nyoongar Aborigines from the southwest were routinely forced off fertile farming land and out of town fringe camps. "Nyoongar people are the forgotten people," says Farmer. "They were rounded up and put in missions because white people wanted their land."
The difference at Carrolup was that, in May 1946, an altruistic teacher, Noel White, and his family drove into the shabby settlement to set up its first school. White had always been drawn to underprivileged pupils, whether in Salvation Army homes and bush schools, and his wife, Lily, and three children were used to hardship posts. But Carrolup was still a shock.
Recalls daughter Noeline: "As we drove into the settlement, the first impression was scores of kids clamouring round all smiling, with green runny noses because it could get very cold down there. These poor kids were filthy dirty, they had nits in their hair. They were unbathed and they had no decent clothes."
Now in her seventies, Noeline White remembers as a young teenager watching her parents struggle to bathe, feed and clothe the neglected children; then began the real job of educating 60 children or more - aged between eight and 14 - who filed into the classroom each day. They were illiterate, shy and, in some cases, traumatised by being forcibly removed from family. For six months, White's attempts to teach them utterly failed. "He'd talk and there'd be no response, absolutely nought," says his daughter. "They wouldn't even look him in the eye. Dad tried all his wiles to bring these children out, and nothing happened until one day he tried something else.
"He said, 'We're going for a walk in the bush, and when you come back I want you to write or draw what you've seen.'" That was the trigger. They came back into the classroom and to his amazement they started drawing with this marvellous perspective. They weren't like little kids' drawings - they would draw sunset scenes, because the sunsets down there are magnificent. And away it went."
Noeline's younger brother Ross, who attended school with the Aborig-inal children, says: "I remember seeing them taking their crayons and smudging the different colours so they'd blend in. And then the next thing you know, the walls were just covered in these paintings. They'd draw on the backs of school books, anything, because paper was in short supply."
Noel White was ecstatic; he couldn't draw or paint, but he needed only to encourage the children. They had a natural grasp of perspective and an ability to render on paper the unique southwest landscape, with its distinctive tree shapes and blood-red sunsets. Hundreds of drawings poured out - kangaroos grazing in silver moonlight, pink glowing hills at dusk, corroboree dancers silhouetted against a flickering fire. "To even us kids, the art was stunningly beautiful," says Noeline.
Her father proudly entered the drawings in agricultural shows and city art exhibitions. Several older boys who excelled in drawing were sent along to demonstrate their skill. "They set the boys to work at desks and they produced beautiful work before people's eyes," says Noeline. "Before they were even finished, people were wanting to buy them." It was more than just the novelty value of "primitive" Aboriginal children showing skill, she adds: "People loved them."
That year, Noeline and Ross observed a "posh-looking" visitor, Englishwoman Florence Rutter, arriving at Carrolup and declaring she wanted to meet what she called the "little black fingers" (the child artists who left sooty hand marks from candles on their drawings). Rutter was a wealthy philanthropist touring Australia to set up Soroptimist Clubs for professional women, but her detour to the struggling native settlement was life-changing for her and for its residents.
"The visitor stood entranced before this array of pictures on the schoolroom walls," notes writer Mary Durack in her 1952 book Child Artists of the Australian Bush, which she wrote with Rutter. "Painted on odd scraps of paper, the landscapes glowed with colour and life. Here was none of the approved crudity and distortion of accepted 'child art'."
Back in England, Rutter organised numerous exhibitions throughout Britain and the Netherlands, wrote letters and a pamphlet about Carrolup's art. The Times Educational Supplement, The Daily Express and Illustrated London News were among dozens of newspapers that seized on the Carrolup story.
There was huge international interest in the artists of Carrolup. "The stuff was highly sought after, no less than Albert Namatjira's work at the time," says anthropologist and art curator John Stanton, from the Berndt Museum at the University of Western Australia. "There was a flood of correspondence from collectors wanting to buy the art, not just one but in sets of eight or ten. That's presumably how some of the art eventually got to America."
"It just took off," recalls Noeline. "I can remember very clearly Dad getting all these letters piled on his desk with money gifts in the envelopes, people asking: 'Can you do me a moonlight scene and send it to me?'"
No records were kept of the artworks' destination, and Rutter and White were so keen to raise funds to equip the children with art supplies that drawings were dispersed widely. A few found their way into the British Museum and royal art collections in Britain and The Netherlands; others disappeared into private collections overseas, while only those that remained in Australia were more traceable.
Carrolup's fame grew; bureaucrats and educators arrived at the settlement to see what miracles White had wrought. Yet native welfare officials strongly disapproved. How dare White divert the children from their more realistic destiny as farm labourers and domestic helpers?
One 13-year-old child artist named Parnell Dempster - who was one of White's best young artists, along with his mate Reynold Hart - wrote letters to his beloved patron Rutter, and described how obstacles were increasingly being put in their way. "One day Reynold and I got keys off Mr White to go in the school to do some drawing for you. Just then one of the attendants pushed us out, told us [we were] loading a truck filled with gravel. All our natives are very glad with the kind work you are doing for us," wrote Dempster.
"When they decided to close the settlement in 1951 it broke Mum and Dad's hearts," says Ross White, shaking his head sadly. "It was lost, all lost. All the boys did was go back to the camps - there was no future for them at all, no work, nothing."
Noel White continued teaching until his retirement. In 1964, he walked through the grim iron gates of Fremantle Prison to run courses for prisoners and came face to face with the dashed adult hopes of the Carrolup children.
Many of White's star pupils, including Dempster, Hart and Revel Cooper - the most precociously talented artist of all - had ended up in jail ("although Dad never thought any less of them for it," says Ross). "Cooper had a very violent life and spent a lot of his time in jail, where he became a prolific watercolourist," says Stanton. Only one Carrolup child artist, Milton Jackson, is still alive. "He is not in good health now but he painted right through to the'80s."
The steady and often premature demise of Carrolup's former inmates prompted Stanton to launch a Carrolup research project and, in 1993, tour nationally those works owned by the Berndt Museum. But the mystery of hundreds of missing drawings remained unsolved, even after Stanton sent out letters to 30 institutions in the United States imploring them to look out for a large body of works that Rutter had apparently sold to a New York dealer.
Then fate intervened in April 2004, when a Canberra colleague of Stanton's visited a small New York state institution, Colgate University, and was given access to its gallery archive. Australian National University professor Howard Morphy noticed a black box marked "Australian Children's Art" and lifted the lid. Inside were 65 Carrolup drawings, pastels and watercolours that had been donated - and promptly forgotten about - in 1966 by an American collector. (Another 45 works were later unearthed in the university's archive.)
Morphy got straight on the phone to Perth, a call Stanton remembers well. "He said, 'I'm ringing from New York and I've just discovered ... ' and I said, 'You've found them!' And he said, 'Yes.'" The news made headlines in The New York Times, which ran a feature story about the art movement in a remote Australian native settlement that was lost, and now found.
The timing could not have been better. Farmer and Flowers could hardly believe the coincidence of the discovery, since they and other Nyoongar representatives had already agreed to a request from the Perth International Arts Festival to hold an exhibition of Carrolup art as part of the 2006 festival's focus on Nyoongar culture.
Last April, Stanton, Farmer and Flowers boarded a flight to New York. "I was nervous," says Flowers, "it was my first flight out of Australia and seeing the pictures was very emotional. They took the cover off right before our eyes, and the colours were awesome. They were in the same condition as when they left here, all ready for exhibit, wrapped up in plastic and taped around the edges."
Next month, a selection of Colgate drawings will arrive back in Western Australia, to be proudly (and temporarily) displayed at Katanning Shire Gallery, 20 minutes' drive from Carrolup. In Perth, at The Western Australian Museum, Stanton will hang a larger, complementary exhibition of Australian-owned works.
Stanton hopes the shows will inspire a new appreciation of the child artists. "If Carrolup hadn't closed it could have become a national school of art. It would have redefined what we know of as Aboriginal art." He points out that it was another two decades before the emergence of Central Australia's Papunya dot painting tradition, often cited as the starting point for a contemporary Aboriginal art industry.
Farmer admits that putting the pieces together on behalf of many Carrolup descendents has been a heavy responsibility. "Even going over on the plane, I was thinking 'should it be us looking at these paintings? Am I doing the right thing?' Looking back at what's coming out of it, I think we went the right way about it." |
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Karen Harpp, Colgate
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Alvarado, Nadia
Post-Standard, The
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Between traveling to and from Ecuador, geology associate professor Karen Harpp stopped by Colgate University Jan. 13. Harpp is making her ninth trip to the Galapagos Islands for a conference, where one of her students will present. Then Harpp, who is on sabbatical from Colgate, will host an eight-day trip around the islands and volcanoes.
"One of the most exciting aspects (of this trip) is getting to show people this amazing place, in terms of the way (it) works with the Earth and with biology," she said.
Harpp left campus in October to join other researchers in South America gathering data from the Sierra Negra volcano. She'll return to teaching in the fall, after a trip to study volcanoes in Iceland this summer. |
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Cornell, Colgate land millions
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Two upstate universities have landed millions of dollars in gifts.
The MacArthur Foundation has given Cornell University $1.86 million for the school's Peace Studies program.
The money will support the study of security issues including missile defense, space weapons and biological weapons. The goal is to train scientists and experts who can give objective analysis of international security issues.
Meanwhile, an alumnus has given Colgate University $6 million to establish a new science and math institute.
Harvey Picker graduated from Colgate in 1936.
Part of the money will go to the campus art gallery, which is named after Picker's mother. |
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Colgate receives $6M gift from alumnus, trustee
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Colgate University received a $6 million gift from trustee emeritus Harvey Picker, Class of 1936, to support two projects:
• $4.5 million will endow the Harvey Picker Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Sciences and Mathematics. Advertisement
• $1.5 million will improve the Picker Art Gallery's exhibition and storage facilities and provide new funds for the acquisition of art.
In recognition of a prior gift from Picker's mother, Evelyn, Colgate's fine arts museum is named in her honor. |
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Is the big lie no big deal? Deceit doesn't seem to spark outrage anymore
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Simakis, Andrea
Plain Dealer
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It's official. Fibbing is OK if it serves a higher purpose. Oprah said so.
The queen of all media tossed this ethical grenade Wednesday night when she called CNN's Larry King to defend his guest, James Frey, author of mega-bestseller "A Million Little Pieces." Frey's memoir of addiction and recovery was featured on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" when it was anointed the October selection of the world's most powerful book club.
The champagne went flat Jan. 8 when The Smoking Gun, a Web site devoted to investigative reporting, posted a damning story with the tantalizing tagline, "The Man Who Conned Oprah." What followed was an old-school piece of "gotcha!" journalism that showed how Frey had embellished and, in some cases, fabricated significant events in the vomit-stained account of his life. Frey admitted to King he had taken dramatic license but said he stood by "the essential truth" of his life.
As King was about to sign off, Oprah phoned to say the report outing Frey was "much ado about nothing."
What mattered, Oprah said, was that millions of people struggling with their own monkey-on-the-back habits had read Frey's book and felt better. In a nation addicted to feeling good, swallowing a little pill of deception is a small price to pay.
Oprah's take on lying is not new -- Machiavelli said it first when he wrote "the end justifies the means," the greatest rationalization for bad acts ever -- and it appears plenty of Americans agree.
William Bastone, editor of The Smoking Gun, says that in the avalanche of comments about the Frey expose some 40 percent of people sent "how dare you" messages. They were furious at the reporters, not Frey.
Bastone and staff were stunned. "Where's the outrage?" he says. It's the same question he asked when Americans uttered a collective "Who cares?" after Martha Stewart was jailed for lying to federal prosecutors about whether she received a tip to dump her ImClone stock before it tanked. Once Stewart was freed from prison, she did not go into hiding; she made public appearances wearing her electronic ankle bracelet like a bauble from Cartier.
So when did public lying become a resume booster rather than the end of a career? Many point to Watergate as the moment when the public's confidence in the veracity of its high officials began its downward spiral.
Are we so used to being duped that over time, our outrage muscles have gone all slack and gooey? Harry G. Frankfurt, a retired Princeton University philosophy professor, says that's as good a theory as any. As the author of a little treatise called "On Bull-- ," he's an expert on unmitigated claptrap.
As members of the greatest consumer culture on the planet, we are inundated by less-than-sincere sales pitches goading us to buy everything from penis enhancements to presidents. In short, we're used to being spun.
"We're swimming in a sea of bull-- and lies," Frankfurt says. "There's no way of avoiding it. The culture is built on it."
Softened up by relentless hyperbole and the hot air of advertising, it's easier for us to roll over and play dead when confronted with an actual lie.
There are the grand sweeping scandals -- Bill and Monica. Enron. Weapons of mass destruction. The South Korean cloning con. O.J. swearing to look for the real killers in between golf games. And the more personal ones -- cyber affairs make it possible to cheat on a spouse without coming home with lipstick on the collar.
Whatever the arena, lying has become routine. Everybody's doing it.
"We take it for granted and so it doesn't excite us when we discover that it's happened," Frankfurt says. The country hasn't lost its taste for the truth -- "it just has sort of given up hoping for it."
Smoking Gun's Bastone waxes nostalgic for the period in American history when public figures caught fibbing did more than shrug and launch a reality TV show.
"Nixon was a shunned man. He went into exile. No one goes in exile anymore!" Bastone says. "They're dancing on a tarmac in a nifty poncho. They're cutting television distribution deals. You'd expect a little bit of exile -- a couple of months, a few weeks maybe."
Not only is our tolerance for deceit much greater than it was in the Watergate era, Americans are a forgiving sort. We're suckers for a mea culpa, says Robert Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University.
"If you lie and then confess it, or if you come out and admit something you've done, you can get away with murder in this country."
Or cavorting with an intern. Clinton apologized for the Lewinsky affair and lying about it and is back in the club, forgiven even by Bush I, his new best friend.
"I think he was given a pass in a way that absolutely outraged one side of the culture wars who thought he was going to be strung up and burned in effigy," Thompson says.
Of course, there are nontoxic lies, the social lubricants that keep the world turning.
The truth is hard to hear and nobody wants to have a drink with the office literalist who tells you you've packed on the pounds over the holidays.
"It would be easy to say that lying is always bad and truth telling is always good but that wouldn't be the truth either," says Caroline Keating, professor of psychology at Colgate University. "We protect ourselves and we protect our social relationships by disguising the truth." Although we hardly even realize it, we lie to ourselves and each other daily, Keating points out.
"We ask our friend how she is and she says 'fine,' even when she isn't. That relieves us of our responsibility of solving her problem," she says.
We get riled when we don't expect to be lied to and believe the deception costs us something -- say when we learn a trusted mechanic has bilked us out of $600 for an unnecessary brake job. It's harder to work up a fire in the belly for the bigger lies -- from corporate heads and elected officials -- because we don't always readily see the personal price of that deception.
And there's another, more subtle psychology at play. As long as we aren't the victims, we can't help but admire a good grifter.
Much of our leisure time of late is spent watching artful dodgers at work or working an angle ourselves.
Celebrity poker matches are all the rage and online games are emptying the pockets of college students from coast to coast.
"All of poker is based on how good your deception skills are," Keating says. "If you can convince us you have cards you don't have, we'll pay you big money."
Reality TV is a liar's paradise where snakes in the grass regularly trump the true of heart and ratings soar.
Want to keep from getting voted off the island? Just say your grandmother died, as one "Survivor" contestant did, despite the fact that the old gal was alive and kicking.
While we hungrily consume operatic lying and dissembling from the likes of Richard Hatch, we still won't tolerate it from our flesh and blood political candidates, says Thompson -- unless we aren't really sure whether they're lying or not.
Did George W. Bush know Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs when he ordered American troops into Iraq or was he duped by bad intelligence? Polls say half of us think he lied and the rest believe the president was acting on the only information he had at the time.
It's up to the press to tell us when our leaders aren't being straight with us, something journalists don't do often enough, says Paul Waldman, a senior fellow with Media Matters for America, a progressive Web-based watchdog group.
"There's a real reluctance to get too tough with people in power," he says. Reporters often shy away from coming right out and saying a politician has lied.
"That's why people don't get angrier than they do," he says.
Still, there's plenty of in-depth, aggressive reporting out there, Waldman avers, but busy lives keep people from taking it all in.
Even when stories of obvious corruption break and are impossible to ignore, there is rarely a collective outcry and consequences seem slow to follow. Or never materialize at all.
So what do we do? It's hard enough to pay the mortgage and medical bills, much less take to the streets and demand a comeuppance. Maybe it's like Jack Nicholson's Col. Jessup said in "A Few Good Men" -- we can't handle the truth. Maybe we would rather be told a million little lies.
"We as a society do not value the truth," says Atlanta divorce attorney John Mayoue, who represented Jane Fonda and Mrs. Newt Gingrich. "Relationships in this country are the ultimate lie."
Statistically, about half of the promises of fidelity made at the altar are bunk. He points the finger at the Me generation, beleaguered Boomers who enshrined the self to the exclusion of all others.
"Selfishness justifies not telling the truth," he says.
People lie to avoid conflict and pain because the truth can be embarrassing and costly. Lawyers, he says, are guilty too. They use spin inside the courtroom to distort the truth to win a case.
Mayoue hopes everyone will tire of the culture of deceit and punish rather than reward liars -- slap them with perjury charges, vote them out of office.
And refuse to buy their books. |
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Shared art; Picker exhibits private collection of Hamilton resident Paul Schupf
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Rushworth, Katherine
Post-Standard, The
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We all know Central New York is home to scores of great artists, but not as widely known are the many great collectors of art who also call the region their home. These collectors may not be as visible as the artists, but occasionally they tip their hands and invite the community to take a peek at what they have the great privilege to call their own.
One such collector is Hamilton resident Paul Schupf, who recently offered the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University the opportunity to exhibit a group of works from his extensive private collection. The result is a small (18 works of art), but impressive assortment of works by the contemporary American artists Chuck Close, Alex Katz and Richard Serra. There are also two pieces from the Peter Norton Christmas Project, but more on that later.
If you visit the show, expect to see monumental minimalism in prints by Serra, pixelated portraits by Close and flat, tightly cropped silkscreens, paintings and cutouts by Katz. It's rare to see works by these artists outside of the major Upstate New York or Manhattan galleries; so having them in our own backyard is a treat.
Schupf, a 1958 graduate of Colgate, is a longtime patron of the arts. He's made significant donations to Colgate, Colby College and Cazenovia College. You may remember seeing a set of Serra prints a few years ago at Cazenovia College as part of Cazenovia Counterpoint, another short-term loan Schupf made.
The main idea linking the three artists in this show is "monumentality" of form and figure. Everything is super-sized. Serra's dramatic black prints play with the psychology of weight ("Clara," 1985, paintstick on screenprint), toy with the conventions of equilibrium ("Ernie's Mark," 1985, paintstick on screenprint) and set things in motion ("Line Heat," 2000, etching).
You'll see references to his towering Cor-Ten steel sculptures in several pieces and their gritty, textured surfaces in others. These images may seem like direct statements absorbed in a glance, but the more you look, the more you'll see.
In contrast to Serra, Close and Katz work in more representational styles. A group of four moderately sized self- portraits spanning 24 years, and another portrait, titled "Chris," from 1974, comprise Close's contingent of work. Observe the typical neck up format of the portraits and the artist's signature technique of gridded abstraction.
The showstopper is the "Self-Portrait" from 2002 a 43-color hand- painted woodcut, which gallery personnel tell me Schupf acquired within the past month or so.
Katz's towering screenprints ("Samantha," 1987, and "The Red Coat," 1981) reach out and wrap themselves around you with their intensity of color and in-your-face attitudes. They are large (58 by 29 inches), and their flat colors and social commentary make them a part of the "new realism."
Also notable is the subtly sarcastic cutout titled "Helen and Blackie" from the late 1950s.
Finally, two pieces from the Peter Norton Christmas Project warrant a mention. Each year, since 1988, Norton (as in anti-virus software) has commissioned an artist to create works of art he gives to up to 5,000 of his closest friends in lieu of a card. Schupf is on the list, and examples from 2004 (glass piece by Korean artist Do- Ho Suh) and 2005 (music box by American artist Christian Marclay) are on view. I'd love to see the entire set as a show in itself; but more importantly, I wonder how you get on that list?
Katherine Rushworth, of Cazenovia, is a former director of the Michael C. Rockefeller Arts Center (State University College at Fredonia) and of the Central New York Institute for the Arts in Education.
The details
What: "Close, Katz, Serra," works from the private collection of Paul J. Schupf.
When: Through Jan. 31.
What to expect: Sixteen prints, paintings and drawings and two cutouts by contemporary American artists Chuck Close, Alex Katz and Richard Serra on short-term loan to the gallery by private collector Paul J. Schupf.
Where: Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University.
Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, except major holidays.
Admission: Free.
Information: 228-7634.
While you're there: Take in the small show, "De Kooning in Company." A charcoal over graphite drawing by Willem de Kooning forms the focal point of this interesting exhibition. The drawing "Untitled (Two Figures)," is circa 1970 and is classic de Kooning. |
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Rate Your Students
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Epstein, David
Inside Higher Ed
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For some professors who have had to cringe at scathing personal attacks posted by students on RateMyProfessors.com, a new blog — Rate Your Students — is providing a bit of catharsis.
RateMyProfessors.com, launched in 1999, has come to be the bane of some professors’ semesters. The public site allows students to anonymously rate instructors on categories like clarity, helpfulness, ease and even some qualities that arguably aren’t critical to learning, such as hotness.
“We love our jobs,” said “The Professor,” an associate professor at a small college in the South who started Rate Your Students anonymously in November. “But we are reacting to something we see as unfair,” he said in an interview. The Professor makes sure that neither people who submit a post to the blog nor the students they rail against are identifiable.
Several students pointed out that, ostensibly, RateMyProfessors.com, which lists over 700,000 professors, has a function: to provide information for students trying to choose courses, whereas Rate Your Students does not. The Professor, however, sees utility. “When we have the occasional moment of frustration,” he said, “to vent — that makes me a better teacher.” Judging from the posts, plenty of professors need a cyber ear to bend. The Professor said he was getting in the vicinity of 100 hits a day at first, but since a mention in a recent Village Voice article, that number has been around 3,000. The Professor said he can’t get through all the rants that are being submitted anymore, but he still hopes to get the cream of the crop on the site.
A post from an English instructor in Wisconsin satirized RateMyProfessors.com by rating anonymous students in a few choice categories.
“Density: Uranium,” the post reads. “Your opinion of your abilities: 3 (to write a novel, you should first read one).” As is a major theme among the posts, the Wisconsin professor chafes at students’ lack of interest in learning, and then just does some good old fashioned steam blowing. “I truly doubt that you could read this,” the teacher writes to a student. “In fact, I truly doubt that you have opposable thumbs.”
Other posts respond directly to RateMyProfessors.com critiques. One tenured business professor from Arizona describes himself as “a big man, over 300 lbs. Not especially fit. I get a big red face after walking up the stairs to class.” He refers to being called “Fatty” in RateMyProfessors.com comments. One student wrote “He loves him some big fat lady too I bet.” Observed the business prof: “Nothing about whether I stay after class or not. Nothing about me helping them with their projects.... Why on earth do you think I come to Rate Your Students for a little proxy thrill.”
The Professor said he think that teacher evaluations are useful, just not the sort on RateMyProfessors.com, “that are unmonitored” and do not verify whether a commentator even attended the college in question. In the interest of fostering teacher/student Web-dialogue, The Professor posts some student reactions as well.
“Listen, THE PROFESSOR,” wrote a junior from New Jersey, “if you really want to understand what it’s like to have professors like you grade us, rate us, poke us and prod us every day, take a walk in my shoes.” The student relates a chilling account of her daily experience, populated by a bulimic roommate, a “stinking drunk” adviser, and a professor who looks up her skirt. “I’m glad I’ll never have to see him again. But I bet there’s another one like him waiting for me next semester.”
For himself, the Professor said he once formulated a letter in his head after a student bashed him to his face. “The experience of mentally writing that letter made me feel 10 years younger,” he said. The Professor said that his ratings on RateMyProfessors.com are generally good, but that he thinks some of his colleagues have been unfairly maligned on the site.
Kevin Carlsmith, an assistant professor of psychology at Colgate University, studies the effect of vengeance on the psyche. “People anticipating feeling quite good from retribution,” he said, “but they actually feel worse.” Carlsmith said he finds Rate Your Students to be useless, because professors can’t choose students, and he feels no need to vent. Then again, he got glowing marks on RateMy Professors.com, in addition to what many consider that site’s top honor: the chili pepper, signifying a hot prof.
Some professors agree that revenge should not drive faculty members to vent online. “It seems to me professor ought to be mature enough not to need revenge,” said Mary Clark, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.
Patrick Nagle, chief operating officer of RateMyProfessors.com, characterized Rate Your Students as “an outlet for disgruntled professors. It really does seem like it’s more of a flame site, as opposed to Rate My Professor, which is an outlet for students to improve their college experience,” he said. Of course, he conceded that the hotness rating was not quite created with learning in mind.
Thankfully for many professors, some students don’t put much stock in anonymous ratings. Brandi Brown, a senior at Williams College, said that she doesn’t mind professors venting as long as it’s totally anonymous, and, as for RateMyProfessors.com, “it’s just better to ask around than to rely on anonymous input.” Brown also said she does sometimes use Factrak, an internal professor rating system that verifies all users are actually Williams students.
But even detractors of RateMyProfessors.com can find comments on the site hard to shake. The Professor recalled Googling someone who was applying for a job at his institution. Up came the RateMyProfessors.com comments, and several noted that the person in question would bring her cat to class. “I have no way to know if this is true,” The Professor said. “But once it was in there, I couldn’t get it out of my brain. That’s stupid! I know better.” At least if any such gossip costs professors new jobs, they now have a place to turn. |
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College blogs click ... as a marketing tool
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Levine, Leslie
Chicago Tribune
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'I've decided that the only way to get through these next two weeks, the stress and the work and the FREEZING COLD WEATHER is to hibernate.
Yup, don't expect to see me out of my room. I've stocked up on food, I've tied up loose ends ... now watch as I curl up on my bed. What a way to live! I'm loving this plan!'
--posted by Marguerite Burkham, Colgate University, Dec. 6
Marguerite Burkham is a blogger, a freshman at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., invited to post her thoughts on the college's official Web site.
She is part of a movement in which colleges use the blogging trend as a marketing tool.
"We are advocates of blogs," said Tim O'Keeffe, director of Web content at Colgate. "We see them as a way to build connections with prospective students and as a way to reaffirm connections with alumni."
Sometimes those connections stretch across continents. In response to her blog, Burkham received an e-mail from a student in India who wrote: "I realize this is more than a little odd, but I am very interested in applying to Colgate and I was hoping you might be able to help me out a bit."
Burkham answered a variety of questions and encouraged the girl to apply. She did.
Students usually are approached by the administration to become bloggers. Hannah Dinnen, a freshman at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., was contacted a week before orientation by a representative from the admission office. "Based on her application, Hannah seemed really excited about college," said Jenni Lister, admission counselor. "We had a good sense of what she would contribute to and take away from her experience."
Some bloggers are paid for posting their observations. At Wofford, for instance, student bloggers receive $25 per week. Allison Kretz, a sophomore at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio, earns $500 per semester for being an online scribe. Colgate's Burnham, on the other hand, received no compensation.
Until the university approached her, Kretz had never considered becoming a blogger. "I had applied for a tour guide position, but I didn't get the job," she said. "But they had my references from professors." The recommendations, and her desire to share her college experiences with family and friends, made her an ideal blogger. "I've really fallen in love with the university, and it's a good way to let people at home know how I'm doing," Kretz said.
No written rules
Bloggers don't rely on a set of rules or a handbook to guide them on the content of their posts. Instead, the universities rely on the students' good judgment. "As for the rules, we don't have formal written guidelines," said Colgate's O'Keeffe. "But I sit down with the students and have a good discussion about the university's expectations and goals. I let the students know we're not interested in posts about parties or trips to the local taverns."
It is not surprising, then, that O'Keeffe has never had to censor the blogs. "I've never had to kill a post in the two years we've been doing this," he said. "Sometimes the content doesn't exactly thrill us--a post about procrastinating and playing video games instead of doing papers, for instance--but they do reflect what students are experiencing here, and that's valuable."
The administration at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill., is particularly sensitive about altering student blogs. In fact, the college intentionally avoided running blogs on its official Web site. According to Kirby Winn, brand manager at Augustana, the college relies on its students to post messages on their own blogs that are accurate whether they are positive or negative.
"I don't think it's a good idea to ever censor such communication," Winn said. "I believe the best we can do for ourselves is to make certain the experience we promise on our Web site and any other marketing communication is the same as the experience we provide. As long as what's being told in recruiting reflects the experience, then we have credibility. If the institutional story is different from the story students are telling, then there's a disconnect and you're busted."
Colleges select carefully
Still, most blog administrators, those ultimately responsible for the content, agree that a careful selection process minimizes the need for censorship. "We want the blogs to be realistic," said Marcus Robinson, director of Internet development and Web strategy at the University of Dayton. "We have no pre-set rules. Instead, we tell them that the purpose of the blog is to help high school students make a decision to come to the University of Dayton. Beyond that, we want them to write about their experiences. We're optimistic and confident about their efforts, and they like helping students."
At Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., Web content coordinator Nancy Prater maintains a lookout for any inappropriate postings. "I monitor the blogs," she said. "But that isn't to say I'm editing them; I'm simply reading them after they're posted and keeping my eye on them."
Some colleges have created the blogs so readers can post messages. As with any open online forum, the appearance of inappropriate postings--obscenities, spam, or anything off-topic--is a real risk.
At Ball State, readers' postings are carefully reviewed before they are shared with the public. "The first point of monitoring is the bloggers themselves," Prater said. "Comments aren't posted automatically, but the bloggers themselves get e-mails notifying them that a comment is ready for them to review. If it's legitimate, they `make it live.'"
In addition to text, students at Ball State can post photos, video and audio.
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Check these out
Take a look at what some college bloggers are writing:
http://wofford.typepad.com/hannah
http://wofford.typepad.com/wes
http://www.colgate.blogs.com/gatelife
http://mylife.udayton.edu/page/allison
http://mylife.udayton.edu/page/emily
http://mylife.udayton.edu/page/andrew
www.bsu.edu/blogcaster/(tilde)jason/
www.bsu.edu/blogcaster/(tilde)saydah/ |
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