DKL

Bugs on Drugs

University of Virginia Biology Prof Jay Hirsch and doctoral candidate Colleen McClung recently did an experiment, showing the effects of crack cocaine on fruit flies. Since flies and humans use similar biochemical pathways, the researchers hoped that videotaping the flies’ reaction to increasing dose levels might help other scientists unravel the molecular basis of cocaine addiction in humans.

Both researchers believe that the flies’ reaction to even small drug doses, i.e., "excessive scratching, grooming and extension of their mouth parts," could parallel the behavior of human addicts. However, doctoral candidate McClung said in an interview with the campus paper, the Daily Cavalier, that no similar experiments had been conducted with human specimens, a situation that could pose ethical problems, not to mention complications of the partially-understood human genetic code.

The year-long fruit fly study was sponsored by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Said McClung: "It took us three-and-a-half months of paperwork to get crack from the government."

Going by the Book

When school superintendent Jerome Clark learned that one-quarter of the schools in his jurisdiction of Prince George’s County, Maryland faced a "critical" textbook shortage, his first reaction was a shocker.

Students can learn just as easily from computers, photocopies and study kits, maintained Mr. Clark, who told the Washington Post that he wished to "re-educate...the public why textbooks in every subject for every kid has not been something we’ve been pushing over the last several years."

Although poor performance on state tests by many county schools has raised the specter of state intervention, the superintendent’s latest budget had earmarked only $1 million—or $8 per student—to improve this situation.

Amid the dustup over Mr. Clark’s views, one Prince George’s County teacher distributed a handout called, "How History Textbooks Distort History," which blamed "mainstream capitalist education" for perpetuating "the lie that those on the top got there fair and square while Native American Indians, Hispanics and black people deserve their oppressed condition."

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Clark produced an eight-point program to solve the textbook shortage.

Internet for Dummies

Neil Postman, who chairs the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University, noted in a recent column that despite billions of dollars spent by school boards to provide classroom access to the Internet, children aren't getting any brighter.

When he began teaching at NYU, Postman said that "faculty and students could talk, read and write....Conversations were almost always about ideas, not the technologies used to communicate."

Nowadays, students’ writing is worse, and if you ask them "in what year was American independence proclaimed, most do not know; and not many can tell which planet is the third from the sun."

What Postman finds remarkable is that so many of his NYU colleagues seem to prefer that "money be spent on technology instead of on salary increases."

Why is this so? One possibility, says Postman, is that "the profs who have either run out of ideas or never had any to begin with, like to spend time talking about how their computers work, because they can get by without their deficiencies being noticed."

Guilt Trip

Some Detroit-area school children commemorated this year’s Martin Luther King Day with an exercise to increase their learning curve about racism. Facilitator Randi Douglas and guitar-playing cohort Josh White, Jr. transformed a group of elementary and high school students into students from Fisk University in 1960, the height of the lunch counter incidents.

Using role-playing techniques, the students were led through the initiation rites of a Southern school and suddenly found themselves, "locking arms, sitting at a false lunch counter. The group was eventually hauled away to prison where participants had to call home to their parents and explain their situation."

Said Douglas: "I think it’s particularly important for the white students to walk in other people’s shoes."

You Get What You Pay For

While some of us fret over the cost of higher education, Harvard has taken the bold step of upgrading the quality of toilet paper in all its undergraduate residence halls.

The upgrade, from single-ply to double-ply, was ordered in response to student complaints, according to College Dean Harry R. Lewis ’68, who noticed an editorial in the Harvard Crimson about the subject a few months ago. Since that time, Dean Lewis said in an e-mail that "a high-level committee called the Harvard College Toilet Paper Commission, consisting of the Administrative Board, the Faculty Council, the Committee on House Life, the Committee on College Life and the Masters of the Houses meeting in joint session, met weekly all fall to consider this important issue."

Although the paper’s higher price was a hurdle in the decision-making process, Harvard maintenance supervisor Robert Wolfreys hailed the two-ply move, saying it was a "quality of life issue" for students.

Many underclassmen agreed, including C. Ted Wright, class of ‘01, who applauded the decision, saying that "for $30,000 a year, I expect the school to be providing quality toilet paper."

He's Baaaack!

A portrait of former President Richard Nixon, placed in storage after Watergate, will soon re-emerge for temporary display at an alma mater of Nixon’s, the Duke University Law School.

After that, it will be loaned to the U.S. Capitol, where, according to a spokesman for House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the portrait will hang in one of the Speaker’s conference rooms, alongside those of GOP Presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush.

Despite the decision by a faculty/student law school committee to bring the portrait back from obscurity, some current law school students have expressed strong objections, saying that "Nixon disgraced...the court and the office of the presidency."

Law School Dean Pamela Gann noted that while there were compelling issues on both sides of the Nixon argument, "the fact is that as a graduate of Duke and a U.S. President, he is part of the history of this university."

The controversy may be included in a 60 Minutes piece that airs later this year.

Girls Have More Fun

A study by U. of South Florida Professor Spencer Cahill revealed that note-passing in class, a habit enjoyed by generations of females, actually has benefits and should be encouraged.

Cahill’s study, based on 164 notes "passed by middle and junior high students in the late 1980s," found that exchanging classroom notes not only created social bonds among girls, but helped to solidify relationships during the budding boy-girl romance years. Cahill released his findings in a preliminary paper called "Writing Relations and Romance: Relationship and Gender Work in Early Adolescents’ Notes."

The study found that in early adolescence, most female students write notes to defy authority, and much of the content focuses on not getting caught. They also write about boys, notes Cahill, who says that boys are actually the "tools for female relationships; they bring girls together."

Who's Cheating Who?

Fordham U. Prof Jere Crook knew it was too good to be true when a struggling student in one of his English composition classes turned in a paper worthy of publication in the New Yorker. He tagged it as plagiarism, but when he confronted her, she complained to higher-ups and "suddenly the professor became the accused." According to the Washington Times, several Fordham administrators "took the side of the student, removed her from his class and did not renew Prof. Crook’s contract for the spring semester."

"I know she plagiarized; she knows she plagiarized, and the administration allowed her to make me the issue," Mr. Crook said. "They never asked for any show of her earlier grades. It was a deliberate scam."

Examples of this situation prompted the formation of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, a consortium of colleges and universities promoting academic honesty.

Organization founder and Rutgers Professor Donald McCabe said that although he does not dispute the presumption of innocence unless proven guilty, "it is important that institutions back up a faculty member who confronts academic dishonesty." His first experience with this problem was in 1992 when a survey of 800 faculty members nationwide revealed that most of them preferred not to confront students with evidence of cheating for fear of lawsuits from their families.

National Association of Scholars spokesman Glenn Ricketts said that many faculty members and administrators "are less inclined to do something about cheating because it’s difficult to prove and...when enrollments are low, the administration doesn’t want to alienate people."

The advent of the Internet has made plagiarism a whole lot easier, since many students develop the attitude that anything on the Web is in the public domain.