Uncle Media Studies Wants You

Suspect? Suspect, My A**!

Image by Okinawa Soba via Flickr

What I emailed my reporting students:

I'm sorry. The 'suspect' didn't do it. If the suspect did it, then the suspect isn't a suspect. They don't even *have* a suspect!!!! See, the problem is one of sourcing. The cops don't want to keep saying, "The person who said he was robbed said...." They also don't want to say "the robber," which would suggest they believe the person who reported the robbery. So "suspect" becomes shorthand for "the person who did the robbery if in fact what the person who reported the alleged crime told us is actually true." It's shorthand. But *it's still a stupid use of language*

-----Original Message-----
From: USFconnect Message [mailto:pleasedonotreply@usfca.edu]
Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2009 8:40 AM

To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: Public Safety Bulletin

On Monday, 11/16/09, at approximately 1 pm, a USF student was walking westbound on the north side of Turk St., near the School of Education, when she was approached from behind by an unknown suspect. The suspect pressed an object into her back and demanded the student's money. The student gave him a $20 bill and the suspect fled. The suspect told the victim not to turn around so there is no description of the suspect.

The incident has been reported to the SFPD. USF Public Safety will increase patrol in the area of this incident.

Individuals are reminded to always be aware of their surroundings. Wearing headphones to listen to music and texting or talking on cell phones in public places can be a major distraction. These activities limit a person's ability to remain alert.

Bullet Points

My word. I calculate it's been months -- nay, years -- since I went six days without posting. Certainly many a week I've filled the air with many a "faux" post -- a link, a jape, a picture of a cat -- but like the shark I *have* kept moving, and thus the blog kept breathing. (It's alive. It's alive.) So I have let you down, Friends of the Blog.

I rather think my lack of posts means the world has been too much with me, so my silence is symptom. (Say that three times fast.) Let's reverse engineer this puppy: I'll post as if all were well, and the semblance may become the thing.

A bulleted week:

* Big doin's at the U. The administration has announced that our habitual Monday-Wednesday/Tuesday-Thursday teaching sked will now become TR/MWF. The idea is eliminating underuse of classrooms on Friday. I don't think the new scheduling works for a lot of reasons, and we don't like it for a lot of reasons -- though the two sets of reasons are not necessarily the same. More to come, dear reader.

* I have a cold. Like Frank Sinatra.

* E. misses her mom.

* I went biking by the bay (try to say that... oh never mind) with Big Pat Daugherty on a brisk fine day, weather crisp enough to fool you into thinking the next day would be crisper still and the next crisper still, until: winter cold. But that's not what happens here. Just a whisper of winter but, like Godot, it never comes.

* I had a nice visit with Eric Mar's legislative analyst Cassandra Costello (a former student) and Daniel Homsey, who works for SF getting neighborhoods tanned, fit and ready to solve their own problems. He had some great ideas about getting USF journalism students out in the neighborhoods around us. A light bulb flashes in my head: hyperlocal news.

* And why don't you welcome me back as a potent poster by watching the episode of Lou Grant I've linked to below. I've asked the journalism ethics class to watch it as prep for Monday discussion of Ethical Dilemmas!!

Existence Before Essence: A Teacher's Motto

Image via Wikipedia

There is no such thing as a bad semester -- I mean, if no one slashes your tires or eggs your house and especially if you don't get a certified letter from the dean or arrive to find the locks changed on your office door.

No, of course, a semester could go wrong in some operatic way suitable for description in recitative. But I've never had one go bad in any of those ways. USF students are many things and one of them is: nice.

I'm talking about a very pleasant place to teach. Here at USF, typically, you come to the conclusion you've done a decent job. You have your notion -- your inner checklist -- of what good work is, and most semesters enough of the kids do enough right for you to conclude there's no disconnect between your goals and your methods.

Also, you've had enough satisfied classes, as measured by the multiple-choice tests the university mandates at semester's end (and pretty much ignores once you're tenured and promoted) to recognize the superficial signs of satisfaction that predict a good score on the "money" question: Overall, do you consider this instructor a good teacher? (rate 1-5)

But here's the good part. Sometimes, you conclude that the kids didn't learn what you wanted them to learn and/or, moreover, they understood what they didn't understand and resented you for their failure. Either or both. Either they and you are dissatisfied, or just you. And that's okay -- as long as it doesn't happen semester after semester. Your *baseline* must be success, most of the time.

If a class goes bad, in a weird way it can be exhilarating because perpetual success is boring and stultifying. (And possibly delusional. I know I may sound somewhat boastful and self-serving here. A former student reads this and replies: What? It's a wonder I didn't kill you with my bare hands, old man.)

I've had some long and interesting conversations this semester with Nick the Student, who would really like to see tenure abolished because he says too many of his teachers are in a kind of comfort zone because their lives are devoid of pressure.

I tell him good teachers create their own discomfort zone. Sometimes you conclude you tried something new, or perhaps hung onto something stale too long. And it just didn't work. Suddenly your next semester becomes much more dramatic, your next class an arena in which you have something to prove. You become the hero of your own epic, reading new books, planning new activities, doing that most daring of all pedagogical acts: drastically revising your syllabus.

It never gets boring. When I first came here nearly 20 years ago, I taught the media management class. I did the classic thing. I found two pretty good books on the topic and assigned the lesser and taught from the better. One of the suggested exercises to illustrate how one should manage was to give a student a waste basket and a bunch of paper wads and tell the student her/his task was to make a game of tossing the wads into the waste basket.

The idea was that the student would begin either by dropping the wads into the basket or by going to the other side of the room and playing long toss, but that finally she/he would settle on a midpoint where she/he was successful most of the time but not all of the time.

And when I did the exercise in class, that's how it played out. Constant success was boring. Too much failure was distressing. That's how to design tasks for subordinates, the text said.

I think that's why I enjoy teaching. It's how I choose to frame the task. Call me Dr. Goldilocks. The porridge is neither too hot nor too cold. It's just right.

USF Makes the Bottom of a Weekly Standard Article Fretting about Obama's Honorary Degree From Notre Dame

An essay worth thinking about.

My not being Catholic shouldn't mean I just stand by and smile when these controversies arise. Most of the time, I'm proud of how USF deals with the contradictions in its philosophy/theology, noting that such contradiction is inherent in all the religious systems I am familiar with. But, as I said, I'm not Catholic.

The conclusion of Joseph Bottum's essay, which first appeared in the Weekly Standard.

Any Catholic with an ounce of awareness knew this fight was coming. The ordinary Catholic Church and the Catholic colleges were bound to clash, and it's a little unfortunate that it actually spilled into public view with a visit of the president of the United States to the campus of Notre Dame. A better place to make all this public might have been the Sacred Heart University dinner this spring, which honored the pro-abortion activist Kerry Kennedy. Or the Xavier University commencement, which is honoring the pro-abortion political strategist Donna Brazile. Or the University of San Francisco graduation, which is honoring the pro-abortion district attorney (and prominent Proposition 8 opponent) Kamala Harris.

- snip -

There are reasons, however, that the struggle over Catholic culture broke into open battle over a visit of Barack Obama to Notre Dame. In part, it's simply because Obama is the president and a whole lot more prominent than Kerry Kennedy or Donna Brazile or Kamala Harris. But in greater part, it's because Notre Dame is, well, Notre Dame: home of the gold dome, the basilica, the grotto, and Touchdown Jesus. If Georgetown doesn't appear Catholic to ordinary Catholics, that's just Georgetown.

But if Notre Dame is shaky--if the most identifiably Catholic place in America doesn't seem Catholic--then the old connection between Catholic culture and Catholic institutions and the Catholic Church really is broken beyond repair. And where will Catholics send their children to school then?

Apparently USF Can *Just Say No*

My wife pointed me toward recent Supreme Court decisions and that search led me to recent California Supreme Court court decisions and that led to a link this recent story in California Catholic Daily.


Religious employers in California and elsewhere have followed with keen interest developments in law with regard to mandated benefits. That is because many of them in good conscience do not want to provide certain types of coverage and do not currently provide certain types of coverage.


Insurance providers tailor-fit health plans, within the bounds of local law, to the needs of clients. These needs may be financial or moral. Some employers provide levels of coverage higher or lower than others and some exclude various types of coverage for various reasons.


The Archdiocese of San Francisco, dioceses across the United States and other Catholic institutions do not provide abortion coverage for obvious reasons. Insurance administrators accommodate this.

Depriving Faculty of Abortion Coverage

I have a Google Alert for "University of San Francisco," and one of the stories that kept popping up over the last month involved what would *seem* to have been the university's inadvertent inclusion of abortion coverage in its health coverage for students.

I did not delve too deeply into these stories because I assumed the university could draw back from such coverage in its role in loco parentis. Students check many "rights" at the door. I could easily imagine that this was one instance when "rights" -- carefully and non-judgementally placed in quotes, you will note -- collided with church dogma.

But today Google unearthed the following, which suggests the university wants to withdraw such abortion coverage from staff and faculty.

I think it would be wrong to do so, a limiting of health rights, of individual choice regarding the physical and mental well being of the insured. But I have no idea if it is, in fact, illegal for an employer to say that certain standard medical procedures need not be a part of basic health insurance.

The law is what the law is. I know that. Perhaps employers if they offer health insurance can shape it as they will: no surgery on the left side of the body; no shirt no socks no treatment. Before I begin to huff and puff with too much indignation, I'm going to find out what the law actually is. But here's the story from lifenews.com.



University of San Francisco Trying to Dump Abortion Coverage for Staff, Too

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 16, 2008

Add to My Yahoo! Email RSS Printer

San Francisco, CA (LifeNews.com) -- The University of San Francisco, a Jesuit university that came under fire for including abortion coverage in its student health care plan, now says it is working to remove coverage for staff and employees, too. The Catholic college says the initial abortion coverage for students was a mistake.

After strong protests from the pro-life Catholic community led University of San Francisco (USF) officials to issue an explanation about the new student health plan it adopted, Gary McDonald, the director of Communications and Public Affairs, released a statement to LifeNews.com saying, "It was not the University's intention to offer this coverage."

McDonald also promised that, "USF supports the Catholic Church's views on the sanctity of life, at all stages, and we will remove this provision from our student health plan."

Now, USF officials are going further after complaints that its health care plan for employees already covered abortions.

Our Sunday Visitor contributing editor Valerie Schmalz pressed the university on that issue and also on its health center referring students to abortion businesses.

McDonald told OSV that, "In light of recent inquiries, we are now aware that our protocol needs improvement. We are taking immediate steps to remedy this, and are in the process of developing a protocol to ensure that counseling and pro-life options are always provided at the USF clinic."

He also told the Catholic publication that the college is working on removing the provision in one of the two employee health plans that covers abortions.

"USF offers two options for employee health insurance, Blue Cross and Kaiser Permanente. Our Blue Cross claims procedure excludes coverage for surgical abortion," he explained.

"When USF negotiated its contract with Kaiser, we were unable to opt out of the plan's provision for termination of pregnancy," he added. "USF is in the process of working with Kaiser to see if the contract can be renegotiated and the provision eliminated."

ACTION: Contact USF and thank them for removing the pro-abortion student health care plan and urge them to continue eliminating abortion from its employee plans. Contact the school at University of San Francisco, Office of the President, 2130 Fulton St., San Francisco, CA 94117, call (415) 422-6762, or email president@usfca.edu. Find more contacts at http://www.usfca.edu/president/contact.html.

First Day of School

No classes, but I came in to advise transfer students and early-bird continuing students. My advice for transfers is the same as my advice for freshmen: Don't take courses in what you think will be your major your first semester. Take core courses, those courses required by the university for graduation. Tap the gossip aquifer. Be the outsider asking the insiders to justify their choices. See who's together and who's falling apart and pick the brains of the former.

Take two or three majors off the rack and walk them outside and see how they look in the daylight.

The Next Voice You Hear with be That of the USF Media Studies Department

Brother David Silver has done it. He has established a blog on which Media Studies faculty will converse about things that matter to it.

(Hmmm. Interesting grammatical point. I use "it" as the relative pronoun to suggest unity among faculty. Brave pronoun!)

This could be useful. One of the glories of working at an urban school like USF is the city and the greater Bay Area. One of the disadvantages is that the faculty are (oops; things are looking plural) scattered from one end of the Bay Area to the other. Also, there is no faculty club or even an informal meeting place for faculty. So we do not engage in much casual conversation. Meetings are taken up with large and urgent issues. Neither place nor structure exists to encourage the ebb and flow, the ramble, of talk about how we teach, who our students are, what things in common out in the big world towards which we might all turn our attention and the attention of our classes.

In short, if such a blog does nothing more than build a safe BS space into our lives, it serves its purpose. Let it be a space to wander and wonder, not to proclaim!