#and them being normal about our little in-campus student-led market

[supercool-here]

I was thinking about this classmate of mine who´s abroad for this semester and I wondered how different things must be in Europe, specifically when it comes to the support we receive here; many students have a job in order to pay tuition, and what most of them do is craft and sell stuff on their own, for example crochet, oil paintings, stationery, clothes, picture frames, jewelry, pins, stickers, and so much food. The university campus became a hot spot for these commercial activities and the authorities decided to contain the problem by setting up a huge tent and tables for the students to sell/buy comfortably, while keeping a register of it. I want to know:

You don´t have to be a Uni student to answer!

[rilenerocks]

You never know what small thing will set off a cascade of memories. I was driving along, running an errand, when  I went right by this construction site. The first thing I noticed was that the external rigid insulation wrap on the framing was green instead of pink. It’s the type of thing it would be normal for me to notice, as I spent over thirty years as an assessment official, specializing in commercial properties. I measured and examined them, ultimately determining their market value for the purpose of property taxes. Where I live, those values are critical for generating revenue for local taxing districts like schools, parks and municipalities. This particular location touched a nerve with me. The building that used to be there was once the home of the Prairie Dispatch, an alternative community newspaper I worked on with Michael and some other friends in the early 1970’s. We were legit. We had real press passes. This is how it’s listed in the University of Illinois Library System.

Title: Prairie Dispatch (Urbana, Ill. : 1973)

Alternate Title: City: Champaign-Urbana, Illinois  Country: United States ThFrequency: Bi-Weekly Language: English Subject/Audience: Alternative

Here are some photos of Michael and me in the office with another friend. We did everything, wrote columns, took and developed photos, designed and ran ads, and did layout. We even covered Richard Nixon in Pekin, Illinois. I wrote articles and shot and developed photos. Only one year into our relationship in 1973, Michael and I had many a frolic in the darkroom on the second floor. We all ate so many doughnuts from the Mr. Donut across the street. We kept long work hours, this volunteer newspaper being a sideline activity, not our day jobs. Sugar rushes and coffee kept everyone going. This was almost 50 years ago. Soon no one will associate these memories with that street corner.

Here’s another new building going up in another part of town. Like muscle memory, my brain still notices them, along with other building changes that are going on in our community.  The countless hours I spent driving through every nook and cranny of my hometown streets was referred to by assessment officials as viewing. I spent most of my time viewing either by myself or more frequently with Joanne.

Joanne and I have quite a story. My apartment in 1970 when I was a junior in college was in the house on the right side of this photo. Joanne rented a house located directly behind me. We were living in the midst of the alternative community, active in the anti-war movement, and trying to live outside “the establishment.” When we met, we became instant friends. She was a year ahead of me in school. She was also a much better student than me. I was always flying by the seat of my pants – Joanne, the fastest typist I knew besides my friend Fern, would invite me to her kitchen where I’d dictate papers straight out of my head and she’d tap away until they were finished. A lifesaver. She told me she just liked hanging out with me. How lovely. In those days,  Joanne was, and actually still is, a wonderful cook and baker. In her spare time back then, she prepared food for a hundred or so at Metamorphosis, the community restaurant where we ate soup, rice and vegetables, lentils and the like. I can still see Joanne coming out of the kitchen, with a steaming bowl of something that was tasty and cheap.

In the summer of 1971, I met Michael. What I didn’t know at the time was that Joanne and Michael had attended the same high school in a suburb of Chicago.  Although just friendly acquaintances, they got along well. She told me that he was so skinny back then that if he was standing sideways the only way you knew a person there was because he had a nose that marked his spot. She remembered that he played tennis, swam and was generally a really nice person. This little bit of history added a new layer to my friendship with Joanne. Nice. The following April, when Michael and I transitioned from friends to partners, she was one of the people who really believed we were going to be successful together, unlike some others who thought we were a mismatch, a disaster waiting to happen. Around then, Joanne introduced me to her friend Janet, a journalism student who was taking a photography class at the time. It was Janet who took these wonderful black and white photos which thankfully, still hang in my home 47 years later.  

  In the fall of 1972, Michael and I moved but we always stayed in touch with Joanne. In a matter of a few years, she had a job working for our local county government, while I went from working at a bank to managing several hundred campus apartments for a family firm. We were smart women who didn’t have a specific career path. We had jobs. Her work led her into understanding that our local assessor’s office was badly in need of reform. I was detesting my job, working for people who were sorely lacking a moral compass as they took advantage of their captive university student tenants, by building shoddy apartments with steep rents. In the spring of 1977, Joanne ran for township/city assessor and won. She called me and said she knew absolutely nothing about commercial property. I said I only knew about apartment buildings and she said that was good enough for her. On January 1st, 1978, she took office and immediately appointed me auditor/appraiser which eventually became chief deputy assessor. I hurriedly took 60 hours of classes, several exams and by mid-year, attained my professional designation as  certified state assessment official. For all the decades we held office, we took classes every year to increase our knowledge and further the professionalism we felt the positions required. We had two other staff members, a deputy assessor and a secretary/receptionist. The four of us were to bring our township office into the modern world, eliminating backroom deals for taxes and establishing real fairness in the burden of taxation throughout our city. We administered a program for tax relief for senior citizens and made it our business to find them all and take care of them. Our aim was to become the model government unit in our field, in our state. And we did.

It was a heady business. We computerized all our records and updated every piece of property in town. We went “viewing” which meant driving around, measuring buildings old and new to make sure we had correct records. We learned our city street by street, alley by alley. We went from the office to the car to the office. We’d both gotten married. But basically, we spent more time with each other than anyone else in our lives, including our husbands and ultimately our kids.

This was our little office building. We used one half of it while the other was used by the township supervisor whose primary task was to minister to those people who came upon hard economic times, and who didn’t qualify for other social services. We started out in a small space and eventually built an addition. All four of us shared one room with a side office for Joanne. Later, she moved into the addition and I got her space with a door for privacy.

Joanne was a few years older than me as I’d skipped a year of school early in my life and she, like Michael, had graduated a year ahead of me. In a way, transitioning from a friendship to the additional roles of being coworkers, was similar to what Michael and I had done with our relationship. Again, I was so lucky because the change was basically effortless. We worked really hard in our first few years and we got along well. But we were also getting into our 30’s and tit felt like it was getting to be the time to think about babies, not just work. 

We two revolutionary young women were moving along into the next stages of life. Joanne had the first kid. I was with her at the hospital and at her house the day after her son was born. She and I were so different. I knew I’d want a private space around me when my turn came but she had a different attitude and that was fine. Thinking back, it’s remarkable how we approached life in such different ways. She was very relaxed and not one who was constantly plunging around in emotional spaces while I was intense and fiercely probing all the time. Once when we’d taken a number of our continuing education classes together, she told me she couldn’t sit next to me on test day because my vibes were too palpable and distracting. Hah! Our work goals were similar as were our intellects, but we had crazy-different styles. I think it’s magical how we worked together. I handled a lot of the confrontations that work required and almost all the letter-writing. She was the statistician and planner for tackling  the mathematical issues. Numbers were never my strong suit although I improved over the years. We complemented each other without knowing that was how things would work before we started. 

When I got pregnant, Joanne threw us our baby shower. I think the only real conflict we ever had was that she was eager for me to return to work faster after my baby was born, while I wanted to hunker down and be absorbed by my new little universe. We got past that. Eventually I returned to the office and the viewing and the sharing of our life together.

The years passed quickly. We had more kids. We attended their birthday parties. When she had her kids, I came to the hospital or watched the older ones until she came home. As we drove along, doing our job, we talked about politics, our families and our personal issues. We went through our parents’ aging, failing and eventually dying. The year after my father died, I took my mom and my kids on a trip to Williamsburg, Virginia which had been a lifelong dream of my mother’s. We were also going to see some Civil War sites, which was my dream as I’d spent years reading and studying about what was to me, an unfathomable moment in history. We did the Williamsburg part and then it was on to Richmond. We’d no sooner arrived when my mom attempted the impossible, a walk up three flights of stairs on a bad knee. By the time she descended, she was so crippled she couldn’t walk. I was devastated. The next day, we piled into the car and headed home.

Joanne felt awful for me. The next year she offered to take a Civil War road trip  with me. She said I could be in charge of all the planning and that she’d be happy to go along and listen to me talk. Oh, and that she’d pay for all the accommodations and food while I could pick up incidentals and gas. Who does that kind of thing? Joanne does. We took our trip and had a fantastic time. We threw in Monticello and she ate George Washington’s peanut soup recipe at a Williamsburg inn where we stopped for more history. I think that trip was the most selfless thing anyone outside my family has ever done for me. A mere thirty years ago.

We were getting older. Our different styles were beneficial in our personal lives. I was good at the emotional stuff. If her kid was driving her crazy and she was at the end of her rope, I could step in and help by taking on some of those conversations. When my sister had an accident out of state, and was coming home temporarily disabled, Joanne, a better money manager than me, had her house cleaned from top to bottom. When Joanne and her husband needed a getaway, her five year old daughter came to live with me. When my washing machine broke, she bought me a new one. Joanne hosted multiple fundraisers for political candidates. I always made my special and popular chicken liver pate as a contribution for the buffet. I remember bringing my daughter to one of those where we met Barack Obama when he was running for the Senate. I made him a plate of food after he spoke. Joanne always sent me home with a fair share of leftovers. We traded recipes. Her family liked my sausage-potato-broccoli bake with cheese. Mine was partial to her blueberry spice cake. I also remember a wild New Year’s Eve when Michael and I stopped by her house before heading to Chicago. I tasted her fabulous chicken drumettes in plum sauce which were unforgettably delicious. Decades later, I prepared them for my daughter’s law school graduation party. And by the way, you haven’t lived until you’ve tasted a slice of her cheesecake. 

Joanne’s had more surgeries than me and I’ve been with her through all of them. After back surgery, she called me way too quickly from the recovery room. I dashed to her hospital room to join her and asked how she felt. She replied, “ I’m just sitting here being totally catatonic.” We both roared. After a particularly rough knee surgery she was hooked to a machine that promoted circulation in the wounded leg. It was driving her crazy and she was in significant discomfort. I sat there, pushing her pain button for the morphine drip every ten minutes because she just couldn’t do it.

Our kids were growing up. When my daughter got married, Joanne was there, as she’d always been from the beginning. When my kid was laid up by knee surgery and Michael’s cancer required me to be with him, Joanne helped out by driving my girl around town. Her generosity to my family was unending. Here’s a lovely photo of the two of them at my daughter’s wedding. And of course there’s one of us as well.

I attended her son’s wedding, too.  We loved giving each other’s kids presents. Eventually they started having their own babies. Because her house was bigger, Joanne hosted my daughter’s baby shower. When her grandchildren were born, I sent them gifts as if they were mine. The truth is, all of our kids and their partners and their children belong to both of us. Sounds strange but it feels that way – an emotional investment that extends to all of them.

Somehow or other, over thirty years went by. Because I was a few years younger than everyone else in the office, I had a longer time to go before I could finish up. What a traumatic experience when everyone’s retirement time arrived. We’d spent a lifetime together. So much had happened between us, especially between Joanne and me. The final day came, we had the requisite party and cake and then I went back to work.

It was awful. I lasted 10 months. My daughter was pregnant and I offered to provide day care if they could pay my health insurance. They agreed and I took early retirement. That was a decade ago. In the ensuing years, Joanne and I have seen less of each other. How could it be otherwise as we’d gone from essentially being together for 40 hours a week to now being in our own spaces? Still, we were viewing  in a different way. I’d do my driving and she’d do hers, but we’d call each other to compare notes on anything interesting that we’d noticed. We remain fast friends. Seeing each other or not doesn’t matter. She’s still thoughtful and generous, dropping off treats from her trips to Chicago that remind of the tastes and smells of my childhood. There’s some inexplicable, ropey, psychic connection between us that’s hard to describe. It’s unbreakable  intimacy which is steady and reliable whether I see her or not. When I start feeling her or hearing her in my head I reach out and invariably she’s feeling me too. Neither one of us is religious but it is a powerful force. I think it’ll last forever. One of life’s gifts to me.

Viewing with Joanne You never know what small thing will set off a cascade of memories. I was driving along, running an errand, when  I went right by this construction site.

[katieeatstheworld]

a short trip to Bristol

My trip to Bristol was definitely not like the movies. No sunshine, no fancy dinners, and so much rain. But I did still manage to have a good time, even if I was only there for two nights. So, this is how I did Bristol, and how you can make the most of your trip there.

Coming from Stuttgart meant that the cheapest flights were through Amsterdam with KLM. I wasn’t complaining. Even though KLM is a little more expensive than, say, easyJet, the service is far better. Plus, you get a snack on the plane.

A two-hour layover in Amsterdam and one airport snack later, I was boarding my flight to Bristol. The whole six hours in transit meant that I arrived in Bristol at around 10 pm. My wonderful boyfriend, who was the whole reason I came to Bristol in the first place, came to pick me up from the airport and from there, we caught the Bristol Airport Flyer to his student accommodation. (Amazing tip btw, if you know anyone from your destination, even just vaguely, don’t be afraid to ask for a couch to crash on - it could save you hundreds).

Saturday was my one full day in Bristol, and of course, it was raining. That didn’t stop us from trying to see the sights (all 5 of them). We bundled up and braved the freezing cold and the rain, starting first at the Christmas street steps. This little alleyway is in the heart of Bristol and is one of the top things to do there. Dotted with tiny cafes and specialty shops, it’s very easy to spend a few hours and a few pounds there. Unfortunately for us, it was just a passing glance as we continued towards the University of Bristol.

UofB is one of the red brick universities of the UK, the second generation of universities after Cambridge and Oxford. It’s fine buildings and extensive campus runs all throughout Bristol, with its crown jewel being the Wills Memorial Building, where the Law School is housed.

Up the road and up a hill from there, you can find Cabot Tower. This is the highest point in the city and the place where you can get the best view of the city. Climb it’s narrow and slippery stairs and you’ll be treated to a panoramic view of Bristol. It was raining when we went through, so our view was a bit foggier and wetter than normal. 

Faced with the thought of walking for another hour to get to the Bristol Suspension Bridge, we elected to find a cafe for a hot chocolate instead and to try and thaw our frozen extremities. We walked down the Main Street, passing by multiple cafes, and one particularly delicious smelling pizzeria, before stumbling across Cowbee, a small cafe with a sunny attitude and ice cream and waffles all year round. My boyfriend got himself an ice cream cone (in the freezing cold???) and I warmed up with a hot chocolate.

Our sightseeing wasn’t over yet. After we left the café, we wandered over to the town hall. Built in the 1930s, it stands next to the local library and the Bristol cathedral. This cathedral was absolutely gorgeous; if you’re a fan of churches or just of brilliant architecture then I recommend you give it a visit. 

It was at this point that hunger started to overtake my thoughts, and I insisted we find food and find it fast. On the walk back to my boyfriend’s accommodation, we passed through a small food market in the city centre. They had pizza and dumplings and potato fritters and, well, how could I resist? I opted for potato fritters with a spicy chicken stew on top, which was absolutely the right choice. The stew warmed me up from the inside and managed to also unclog my cold ridden sinuses with the chilli. Win win win I say.

Fast forward through to about dinner time (because truth be told we didn’t do much after we had lunch, just went home). I was on dinner choice duty. After scrolling through TripAdvisor and Instagram, I eventually decided that our best bet would be to return to the delicious smelling pizzeria on Main Street. 

They did not disappoint. Pizzarova specialises in sourdough pizza with simple and fresh toppings. We ordered ours to go but the hole in the wall pizzeria has some seating in the back, making a romantic pizza date also possible. The pizzas took less than 10 minutes from ordering to when they placed them in our hungry hands. And once we arrived back, we were taken aback by how good it actually was. The base was by far the best part of the pizza; it was tangy, dense, and chewy, but also crispy and had great char throughout the bottom. 

Of course, the pizza complimented our chosen entertainment for the night, a rewatch of Hamish and Andy’s Asian Gap Year. 

The next morning, I had made a booking for breakfast at the diner across the street, because I was craving a proper fry up (One of the biggest things I’ve missed since coming to Stuttgart is a proper Australian cafe breakfast – an English fry up is the next best thing). I’d made the booking for 8:30 am on their online booking system, but when we arrived at the diner, we found that it didn’t actually open until 10. 

Devastated and desperate for any sort of breakfast before I left, my very understanding boyfriend led me through the nearby mall until we found a Greggs (a British bakery chain). For the very reasonable price of around ��5 each, we both end up with a breakfast sandwich and a hot chocolate. I also ordered a sausage roll because I hadn’t had one since I’d left Australia almost three months ago. 

Something that both my boyfriend and I had forgotten, was that that particular Sunday was Remembrance Day, meaning that most of the main streets would be closed off for the services and parade. This threw a spanner in the works, as our plan was to go back to his room to chill before I caught the Bristol Flyer back to the airport from the stop across the road, but thanks to the road closures, we ended up having to walk a good ten minutes to the next stop where the road wasn’t closed. 

Somehow, though we managed to miss the stop. After another five minutes of walking, we eventually realised our mistake and turned around. By the time we reached the bus stop though, the bus had just arrived, making our goodbye rushed and jarring. Teary-eyed I boarded the bus and headed back to the airport, ready to make my journey home. 

Although this was an incredibly short trip, I don’t regret a second of it. Being in a long-distance relationship can be tough, but its trips like this that tide us over. Bristol, even in the rain, is a lovely city, and I would’ve loved to stay a few more days to really get to know the city my boyfriend chose for his exchange. I suppose it just means I’ll have to go back 😊

[samanthasroberts]

I Teach At A For-Profit College: 5 Ridiculous Realities

For-profit colleges, aka colleges that operate for a profit, aka the only schools that buy pop-up ads, are a $30 billion industry, with millions of students nationwide. But much like that guy in high school with the bitchin’ mullet and radical IROC, just because they’re popular doesn’t mean they have the best reputation. We wanted to know how accurate that rep really is, so we sat down with “Stephen,” a former professor at one such college in Ohio. He told us …

5

There Is Zero Teaching Experience Required To Be A “Professor”

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Most teachers come equipped with a boxful of degrees, permits, certifications, and other fancy framed papers to confirm they’re trained educators and not, say, urine-soaked knife-wielding hobos. Not so with Steve’s school: “At my campus, I’d say that nine out of every ten professors don’t have an educational background.”

AndreyPopov/iStock/Getty Images “Hey Dave, drop what you’re doing. We need someone for Marketing 401.”

He was sure to point out that sometimes this led to great teachers, like the former hotel manager who became a professor of Hospitality Management: “He was honest about complaints, nipping lice infestations in the bud, and tons of other terrible things normal HM classes barely cover.” But that’s not a universal truth.

“Like, they may be an accountant during the day, but they moonlight teaching that at schools like mine … those teachers could be really good … But most had no idea how to teach. I sat in on a class going through economics, and … the ‘professor’s’ laptop gave the blue screen of death. He was a nice guy in his late 20s, and he immediately panicked.” Since the students were paying dearly for that professor’s time, they kept right on asking questions, like “What’s the difference between macro and micro economics?” Steve recalled, “He had a deer in the headlights look and he froze for 15 seconds. Finally, he said ‘Macro is big economies and Micro is individual economies. Like Bill Gates’ economy.’”

kasto80/iStock/Getty Images “Hold on, Wikipedia’s gone down.”

Those of you who know a little bit about economics might recognize that as complete fucking gibberish. Eventually, Steve and another teacher listening in had to call him out on his bullshit and give the class some proper answers, but, “When we gave the right definitions and answers to everything, he defended his answers as being correct. He was fired the next day.”

Jonathan Ross/Hemera/Getty Images Those who teach, can’t.

Once he’d started telling shitty teacher stories, Steve couldn’t stop. He told us about an accounting teacher in his 70s who told students “any math you couldn’t do by hand wasn’t worth teaching.” Another particularly enterprising educator gave out a two-week assignment to “have his students do his and his family’s taxes, giving bonus points to the ones who had found the way to have them owe the least.” Steve added, “He lasted three semesters.”

4

They Target Poor Minority Students And Con Them Into Taking Loans

Jacob Ammentorp Lund/iStock/Getty Images

For-profit colleges promise students who didn’t do well in high school a chance at a real college degree for far less than fancy university prices. And since everyone gets in, your past doesn’t matter. ITT Tech will take any breathing human being who applies. It’s like the Little League of higher education, minus the Capri Sun at the end of every session.

These colleges sell themselves as a “way out” of poverty and desperation to people who are poor and directionless. Ninety-six percent of ALL for-profit students take out loans, compared to 57 percent of those at normal public college. And while the average college student only has an 8 percent chance of defaulting on their loan in the first few years, for-profit students have a 25 percent chance.

It should come as no surprise that investigations have shown that many for-profits do in fact target low-income people who can’t pay. These people are often minorities. One investigation turned up the training manual for recruiters at the for-profit college Vatterott, including a list of ideal types of people to recruit:

Leadership Conference on Human Rights – Has To Use Library’s Internet To Fill Out Application – Thought They Saw A Ghost One Time – Can’t Find Phoenix On A Map

Steve noticed the same thing at his school: “Most of my students made minimum wage, and over half were black. Every one of my students had a loan, and it’s all they ever talked about. Some felt strong-armed into them, but some wanted them. They lived off of them. They wanted the loans as another source of income because they couldn’t make ends meet with their regular jobs. They took a few classes to keep up appearances, but I would always know why they were really there. Every college has these students, but at my college, I had several in every class I taught. I never knew what happened to them after the semester and they were 20 or 40 grand in debt. Many struggled to make ends meet, and the college offered an easy way to get loans. What did you think was going to happen?”

AndreyPopov/iStock/Getty Images “Thanks for the mortgage payment.”

For-profit universities vastly prefer loans — and the long-term, interest-bearing income they generate — to straight cash payments. So much so that they often don’t take cash: “One student in particular told me that she had $20,000 from an inheritance in cash, but ran into roadblocks everywhere. My college wouldn’t accept cash, so she tried a check. They told her they couldn’t, since they had too many issues with bounced checks. She then tried paying online in full, but she was told she shouldn’t because ‘What if you decide to drop a class? Would you still want to pay for it?’ She then tried monthly payments, but she was informed she was too late to sign up. She could only take a loan.”

Digital Vision./DigitalVision/Getty It’s usually a red flag when a business won’t let you purchase their one product.

Schools like the University of Phoenix depend on student loans to survive. In fact, the latter actively instructs their “Phoenixes” to borrow the max amount. And how could that possibly backfire? For-profit universities are one of the major causes of the current student loan debt crisis. So if you’re a New Yorker who had your daily commute fucked up by Occupy Wall Street, you can blame like half of that on the Participation Trophy of colleges.

3

They Cost More To Attend Than Conventional Universities

moodboard/moodboard/Getty Images

For-profit colleges advertise themselves as much more affordable than traditional universities. According to the ads, a for-profit college is the Costco of higher education: great quality without any unnecessary frills, for the budget-conscious consumer.

“‘Scholarship?’ It’s just a discount.”

Why, you save so much money on these programs that it’d be almost insane to get your degree anywhere else.

“Our scam is cheaper than their scam!”

Surprise! That’s all crap. These schools are filled with more hidden fees than a bank run by ninjas. Here’s Steve: “A close family member was deciding on a cheap starter college. She was looking at my college and Cincinnati State. Honestly, I just started at my school and I didn’t know what the full cost was. I asked and got a quote for $9,000 a semester … When I gave her the written quote, she looked right back up and said, ‘I could get a degree from Cincinnati State for that much.’ I was floored.”

Two years at a community college costs, on average, $8,300. Four years at a state college? $52,000. But at a for-profit, that Associate’s Degree is now $35,000. The Bachelors? $63,000. It’s like deciding to eat out at Olive Garden instead of that fancy French restaurant, only to discover that the bread sticks are the price of a used Toyota.

bhofack2/iStock/Getty Images “Considering they are unlimited, you can’t afford not to.”

Steve explained: “All normal colleges show how much a semester is, or give a price by class. At ours, they made it look cheap by giving price for each credit hour. [Note: They still do.] So many of my students were suckered in this way. They saw the $550 cost per hour … and they assumed that meant $550 per credit.”

Oops! Silly desperate students seeking to better their lives. You assumed “for-profit college” meant something besides “a shell game in which you gamble your paycheck for decades to come.”

Michael Blann/DigitalVision/Getty As least Vegas gives you drink and food comps when you do it.

2

A Degree All But Guarantees You WON’T Get A Job

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All for-profit colleges essentially promise you your dream job, falling just short of issuing IOUs for personal oral sex bots upon graduation. The word of the day, kids, is “bullshit.” It was revealed last year that the $75,000 three-year criminal justice degree offered by Westwood College comes with a 3.8 percent job placement rate. And most of those “jobs” are as some sort of security guard, aka the job literally any breathing human can get.

A school like the recently shut down Heald College, or DeVry, can famously claim 90-percent-plus job placement rates, which sounds super impressive … if you don’t know that the FTC is currently suing them for classifying a business major getting hired as a waiter to be an “in-field” placement. Or counting a job at Taco Bell as successful placement. Steve gave a shit about his students and did his best to prepare them for careers as accountants, “but most didn’t become accountants. We had to go off of curriculum, and while many of us got through that as fast as we could with our students to tell them what they really needed to know, we often didn’t have time.”

Rawpixel Ltd/iStock/Getty Images “Welcome to Money Management 101. Lesson 1: You shouldn’t have taken this class.”

Steve explained how his college practically went out of its way to make their courses useless: “Normal colleges give you a mix of course work, field work, and other assignments, slowly making it more and more real world. Once you get the basics, you learn the programs, you see what employers want, and you expand your knowledge. For-profits are like standardized tests. You get the basics, but almost none of it can be applied once in the real world.”

Pinkypills/iStock/Getty Images “And that about covers the basics of being a barista.”

The evidence shows that graduates from for-profits make less and are less happy about their prospects than those from larger colleges. This jives with Steve’s experiences: “I’ve met several graduates, and nearly all didn’t get the jobs they wanted. A few thought they were going to be teachers in a few years, and I found them working as subs. One student who said he wanted to run a hotel I met by chance at a hotel in Columbus, where he was only a part-time assistant manager at a Microtel [and] taking classes for ANOTHER degree at the University of Phoenix at night.”

BananaStock/BananaStock/Getty Images “Unfortunately, two fake degrees cannot combine like Megazord into one real degree.”

So uh … clearly, that guy doesn’t learn lessons easily.

The conventional logic is that any degree is better than no degree. But that may not be true with for-profit colleges. A Harvard study found that such students are 22 percent less likely to get a callback from a job than an otherwise-identical resume that named a public university. And it’s even worse with an online degree. Even if these students do find work, high school dropouts tend to earn more than for-profit degreers in the same field.

1

For-Profit Colleges Are In Big Trouble

Albert Herring/Wiki Commons

Over the last year or so, the hammer has started coming down on for-profit schools. Steve explained: “Obama had been threatening for years to do something about for-profit colleges, but no one believed he would go through with it. In early 2015, it was apparent he was trying to do something, and we got emails everyday. Most were telling us not to worry, but we also had emails that said ‘We’re as strong as ever!’ I worked there for three years, and the only emails they had sent me was pay stub receipts, password expiration reminders, and the odd departmental email … these emails really showed how worried they were.”

Devonyu/iStock/Getty Images They were a step away from emails asking their employees, “Are you a cop? If we ask, you have to tell us if you are.”

This finally prompted Steve to make a career change of his own. He found another job and gave his resignation to his department head, who “begged me to stay. He didn’t try to flatter me or say how much they needed me or anything you would expect to hear. It was, ‘I know you’re worried about this Obama law (I wasn’t), and we’re worried too, but it will all be OK.’ Everyone was acting like the apocalypse was coming.”

And what terrifying new law change had everybody soiling their chinos? To quote CNN:

“The new set of rules, called the gainful employment regulations, require colleges to track their graduates’ debt and employment to prove that their programs don’t fall short of federal guidelines. Institutions now have to provide information on program costs, how much students earn after they graduate and how much debt they could accumulate.”

Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images “We’re moving forward on a new controversial anti-lying law.”

The new law also set limits on how much the schools could charge for loan payments (no more than 20 percent of a student’s income). Despite how reasonable those restrictions sound, it was essentially the apocalypse for educational conmen. Roughly 1,400 programs serving 840,000 students were estimated to fall below those minimal standards. The University of Phoenix lost half its students. DeVry is currently being sued by the FTC for false advertising.

Steve was not bummed out at all by this. He still feels some guilt for being involved in the whole thing to start with: “One student I had told me that he knew he was being had. I started to say he wasn’t, but he told me to shut up. He told me he went $25,000 into debt for a degree no one took seriously. He had a family, and I got the sense he was doing this for them … He told me to go fuck myself and proceeded to tell a few other professors too. We never saw him again after that. I’m hoping, really hoping, that the new laws will make degrees for people like him from for-profits actually worth it.”

Kondor83/iStock/Getty Images “Congrats on getting hired! Here’s your desk.”

We hope so too, for the students’ sake, but we can’t imagine a future in which a prospective employer looks at your resume and says, “Whoa, University of Phoenix, huh? Don’t you think you might be overqualified?” Well, not with a straight face, anyway.

If you were misled by a for-profit college, please protect other students by letting the authorities know. If you decided to attend a school because of a misleading ad or deceptive recruiting, contact the Federal Trade Commission.

If you took out a private loan (not including federal student loans) to finance your education, you can also complain to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

If you are a veteran or service member who was deceived by a college, and you used the GI Bill or other VA programs to fund your education, please report it to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ new complaint system. The folks at Veterans Education Success would also like to hear from you, and can connect you with pro-bono attorneys, state and federal law enforcement agencies, and generally advocate on your behalf to the VA.

Evan V. Symon is an interviewer, writer, and interview-finder guy for the personal experience team at Cracked. Have an awesome experience/job you would like to share? Hit us up at tips@cracked.com today!

Deep inside us all — behind our political leanings, our moral codes, and our private biases — there is a cause so colossally stupid that we surprise ourselves with how much we care. Whether it’s toilet paper position, fedoras on men, or Oxford commas, we each harbor a preference so powerful we can’t help but proselytize to the world. In this episode of the Cracked podcast, guest host Soren Bowie is joined by Cody Johnston, Michael Swaim, and comedian Annie Lederman to discuss the most trivial things we will argue about until the day we die. Get your tickets here!

For more insider perspectives, check out 6 Realities Of Cooking Illegal Drugs (Not Seen On TV) and 5 Things Breaking Bad Left Out About Having A Drug Lord Dad.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out If Beer Ads Were Forced To Be Honest, and other videos you won’t see on the site!

Also, follow us on Facebook, and we’ll be best buddies forever.

Have a story to share with Cracked? Email us here.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/i-teach-at-a-for-profit-college-5-ridiculous-realities/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/i-teach-at-a-for-profit-college-5-ridiculous-realities/

[adambstingus]

I Teach At A For-Profit College: 5 Ridiculous Realities

For-profit colleges, aka colleges that operate for a profit, aka the only schools that buy pop-up ads, are a $30 billion industry, with millions of students nationwide. But much like that guy in high school with the bitchin’ mullet and radical IROC, just because they’re popular doesn’t mean they have the best reputation. We wanted to know how accurate that rep really is, so we sat down with “Stephen,” a former professor at one such college in Ohio. He told us …

5

There Is Zero Teaching Experience Required To Be A “Professor”

andresrimaging/iStock/Getty Images

Most teachers come equipped with a boxful of degrees, permits, certifications, and other fancy framed papers to confirm they’re trained educators and not, say, urine-soaked knife-wielding hobos. Not so with Steve’s school: “At my campus, I’d say that nine out of every ten professors don’t have an educational background.”

AndreyPopov/iStock/Getty Images “Hey Dave, drop what you’re doing. We need someone for Marketing 401.”

He was sure to point out that sometimes this led to great teachers, like the former hotel manager who became a professor of Hospitality Management: “He was honest about complaints, nipping lice infestations in the bud, and tons of other terrible things normal HM classes barely cover.” But that’s not a universal truth.

“Like, they may be an accountant during the day, but they moonlight teaching that at schools like mine … those teachers could be really good … But most had no idea how to teach. I sat in on a class going through economics, and … the ‘professor’s’ laptop gave the blue screen of death. He was a nice guy in his late 20s, and he immediately panicked.” Since the students were paying dearly for that professor’s time, they kept right on asking questions, like “What’s the difference between macro and micro economics?” Steve recalled, “He had a deer in the headlights look and he froze for 15 seconds. Finally, he said ‘Macro is big economies and Micro is individual economies. Like Bill Gates’ economy.‘”

kasto80/iStock/Getty Images “Hold on, Wikipedia’s gone down.”

Those of you who know a little bit about economics might recognize that as complete fucking gibberish. Eventually, Steve and another teacher listening in had to call him out on his bullshit and give the class some proper answers, but, “When we gave the right definitions and answers to everything, he defended his answers as being correct. He was fired the next day.”

Jonathan Ross/Hemera/Getty Images Those who teach, can’t.

Once he’d started telling shitty teacher stories, Steve couldn’t stop. He told us about an accounting teacher in his 70s who told students “any math you couldn’t do by hand wasn’t worth teaching.” Another particularly enterprising educator gave out a two-week assignment to “have his students do his and his family’s taxes, giving bonus points to the ones who had found the way to have them owe the least.” Steve added, “He lasted three semesters.”

4

They Target Poor Minority Students And Con Them Into Taking Loans

Jacob Ammentorp Lund/iStock/Getty Images

For-profit colleges promise students who didn’t do well in high school a chance at a real college degree for far less than fancy university prices. And since everyone gets in, your past doesn’t matter. ITT Tech will take any breathing human being who applies. It’s like the Little League of higher education, minus the Capri Sun at the end of every session.

These colleges sell themselves as a “way out” of poverty and desperation to people who are poor and directionless. Ninety-six percent of ALL for-profit students take out loans, compared to 57 percent of those at normal public college. And while the average college student only has an 8 percent chance of defaulting on their loan in the first few years, for-profit students have a 25 percent chance.

It should come as no surprise that investigations have shown that many for-profits do in fact target low-income people who can’t pay. These people are often minorities. One investigation turned up the training manual for recruiters at the for-profit college Vatterott, including a list of ideal types of people to recruit:

Leadership Conference on Human Rights – Has To Use Library’s Internet To Fill Out Application – Thought They Saw A Ghost One Time – Can’t Find Phoenix On A Map

Steve noticed the same thing at his school: “Most of my students made minimum wage, and over half were black. Every one of my students had a loan, and it’s all they ever talked about. Some felt strong-armed into them, but some wanted them. They lived off of them. They wanted the loans as another source of income because they couldn’t make ends meet with their regular jobs. They took a few classes to keep up appearances, but I would always know why they were really there. Every college has these students, but at my college, I had several in every class I taught. I never knew what happened to them after the semester and they were 20 or 40 grand in debt. Many struggled to make ends meet, and the college offered an easy way to get loans. What did you think was going to happen?”

AndreyPopov/iStock/Getty Images “Thanks for the mortgage payment.”

For-profit universities vastly prefer loans — and the long-term, interest-bearing income they generate — to straight cash payments. So much so that they often don’t take cash: “One student in particular told me that she had $20,000 from an inheritance in cash, but ran into roadblocks everywhere. My college wouldn’t accept cash, so she tried a check. They told her they couldn’t, since they had too many issues with bounced checks. She then tried paying online in full, but she was told she shouldn’t because ‘What if you decide to drop a class? Would you still want to pay for it?’ She then tried monthly payments, but she was informed she was too late to sign up. She could only take a loan.”

Digital Vision./DigitalVision/Getty It’s usually a red flag when a business won’t let you purchase their one product.

Schools like the University of Phoenix depend on student loans to survive. In fact, the latter actively instructs their “Phoenixes” to borrow the max amount. And how could that possibly backfire? For-profit universities are one of the major causes of the current student loan debt crisis. So if you’re a New Yorker who had your daily commute fucked up by Occupy Wall Street, you can blame like half of that on the Participation Trophy of colleges.

3

They Cost More To Attend Than Conventional Universities

moodboard/moodboard/Getty Images

For-profit colleges advertise themselves as much more affordable than traditional universities. According to the ads, a for-profit college is the Costco of higher education: great quality without any unnecessary frills, for the budget-conscious consumer.

“‘Scholarship?’ It’s just a discount.”

Why, you save so much money on these programs that it’d be almost insane to get your degree anywhere else.

“Our scam is cheaper than their scam!”

Surprise! That’s all crap. These schools are filled with more hidden fees than a bank run by ninjas. Here’s Steve: “A close family member was deciding on a cheap starter college. She was looking at my college and Cincinnati State. Honestly, I just started at my school and I didn’t know what the full cost was. I asked and got a quote for $9,000 a semester … When I gave her the written quote, she looked right back up and said, ‘I could get a degree from Cincinnati State for that much.’ I was floored.”

Two years at a community college costs, on average, $8,300. Four years at a state college? $52,000. But at a for-profit, that Associate’s Degree is now $35,000. The Bachelors? $63,000. It’s like deciding to eat out at Olive Garden instead of that fancy French restaurant, only to discover that the bread sticks are the price of a used Toyota.

bhofack2/iStock/Getty Images “Considering they are unlimited, you can’t afford not to.”

Steve explained: “All normal colleges show how much a semester is, or give a price by class. At ours, they made it look cheap by giving price for each credit hour. [Note: They still do.] So many of my students were suckered in this way. They saw the $550 cost per hour … and they assumed that meant $550 per credit.”

Oops! Silly desperate students seeking to better their lives. You assumed “for-profit college” meant something besides “a shell game in which you gamble your paycheck for decades to come.”

Michael Blann/DigitalVision/Getty As least Vegas gives you drink and food comps when you do it.

2

A Degree All But Guarantees You WON’T Get A Job

rilueda/iStock/Getty Images

All for-profit colleges essentially promise you your dream job, falling just short of issuing IOUs for personal oral sex bots upon graduation. The word of the day, kids, is “bullshit.” It was revealed last year that the $75,000 three-year criminal justice degree offered by Westwood College comes with a 3.8 percent job placement rate. And most of those “jobs” are as some sort of security guard, aka the job literally any breathing human can get.

A school like the recently shut down Heald College, or DeVry, can famously claim 90-percent-plus job placement rates, which sounds super impressive … if you don’t know that the FTC is currently suing them for classifying a business major getting hired as a waiter to be an “in-field” placement. Or counting a job at Taco Bell as successful placement. Steve gave a shit about his students and did his best to prepare them for careers as accountants, “but most didn’t become accountants. We had to go off of curriculum, and while many of us got through that as fast as we could with our students to tell them what they really needed to know, we often didn’t have time.”

Rawpixel Ltd/iStock/Getty Images “Welcome to Money Management 101. Lesson 1: You shouldn’t have taken this class.”

Steve explained how his college practically went out of its way to make their courses useless: “Normal colleges give you a mix of course work, field work, and other assignments, slowly making it more and more real world. Once you get the basics, you learn the programs, you see what employers want, and you expand your knowledge. For-profits are like standardized tests. You get the basics, but almost none of it can be applied once in the real world.”

Pinkypills/iStock/Getty Images “And that about covers the basics of being a barista.”

The evidence shows that graduates from for-profits make less and are less happy about their prospects than those from larger colleges. This jives with Steve’s experiences: “I’ve met several graduates, and nearly all didn’t get the jobs they wanted. A few thought they were going to be teachers in a few years, and I found them working as subs. One student who said he wanted to run a hotel I met by chance at a hotel in Columbus, where he was only a part-time assistant manager at a Microtel [and] taking classes for ANOTHER degree at the University of Phoenix at night.”

BananaStock/BananaStock/Getty Images “Unfortunately, two fake degrees cannot combine like Megazord into one real degree.”

So uh … clearly, that guy doesn’t learn lessons easily.

The conventional logic is that any degree is better than no degree. But that may not be true with for-profit colleges. A Harvard study found that such students are 22 percent less likely to get a callback from a job than an otherwise-identical resume that named a public university. And it’s even worse with an online degree. Even if these students do find work, high school dropouts tend to earn more than for-profit degreers in the same field.

1

For-Profit Colleges Are In Big Trouble

Albert Herring/Wiki Commons

Over the last year or so, the hammer has started coming down on for-profit schools. Steve explained: “Obama had been threatening for years to do something about for-profit colleges, but no one believed he would go through with it. In early 2015, it was apparent he was trying to do something, and we got emails everyday. Most were telling us not to worry, but we also had emails that said ‘We’re as strong as ever!’ I worked there for three years, and the only emails they had sent me was pay stub receipts, password expiration reminders, and the odd departmental email … these emails really showed how worried they were.”

Devonyu/iStock/Getty Images They were a step away from emails asking their employees, “Are you a cop? If we ask, you have to tell us if you are.”

This finally prompted Steve to make a career change of his own. He found another job and gave his resignation to his department head, who “begged me to stay. He didn’t try to flatter me or say how much they needed me or anything you would expect to hear. It was, ‘I know you’re worried about this Obama law (I wasn’t), and we’re worried too, but it will all be OK.’ Everyone was acting like the apocalypse was coming.”

And what terrifying new law change had everybody soiling their chinos? To quote CNN:

“The new set of rules, called the gainful employment regulations, require colleges to track their graduates’ debt and employment to prove that their programs don’t fall short of federal guidelines. Institutions now have to provide information on program costs, how much students earn after they graduate and how much debt they could accumulate.”

Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images “We’re moving forward on a new controversial anti-lying law.”

The new law also set limits on how much the schools could charge for loan payments (no more than 20 percent of a student’s income). Despite how reasonable those restrictions sound, it was essentially the apocalypse for educational conmen. Roughly 1,400 programs serving 840,000 students were estimated to fall below those minimal standards. The University of Phoenix lost half its students. DeVry is currently being sued by the FTC for false advertising.

Steve was not bummed out at all by this. He still feels some guilt for being involved in the whole thing to start with: “One student I had told me that he knew he was being had. I started to say he wasn’t, but he told me to shut up. He told me he went $25,000 into debt for a degree no one took seriously. He had a family, and I got the sense he was doing this for them … He told me to go fuck myself and proceeded to tell a few other professors too. We never saw him again after that. I’m hoping, really hoping, that the new laws will make degrees for people like him from for-profits actually worth it.”

Kondor83/iStock/Getty Images “Congrats on getting hired! Here’s your desk.”

We hope so too, for the students’ sake, but we can’t imagine a future in which a prospective employer looks at your resume and says, “Whoa, University of Phoenix, huh? Don’t you think you might be overqualified?” Well, not with a straight face, anyway.

If you were misled by a for-profit college, please protect other students by letting the authorities know. If you decided to attend a school because of a misleading ad or deceptive recruiting, contact the Federal Trade Commission.

If you took out a private loan (not including federal student loans) to finance your education, you can also complain to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

If you are a veteran or service member who was deceived by a college, and you used the GI Bill or other VA programs to fund your education, please report it to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ new complaint system. The folks at Veterans Education Success would also like to hear from you, and can connect you with pro-bono attorneys, state and federal law enforcement agencies, and generally advocate on your behalf to the VA.

Evan V. Symon is an interviewer, writer, and interview-finder guy for the personal experience team at Cracked. Have an awesome experience/job you would like to share? Hit us up at tips@cracked.com today!

Deep inside us all — behind our political leanings, our moral codes, and our private biases — there is a cause so colossally stupid that we surprise ourselves with how much we care. Whether it’s toilet paper position, fedoras on men, or Oxford commas, we each harbor a preference so powerful we can’t help but proselytize to the world. In this episode of the Cracked podcast, guest host Soren Bowie is joined by Cody Johnston, Michael Swaim, and comedian Annie Lederman to discuss the most trivial things we will argue about until the day we die. Get your tickets here!

For more insider perspectives, check out 6 Realities Of Cooking Illegal Drugs (Not Seen On TV) and 5 Things Breaking Bad Left Out About Having A Drug Lord Dad.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out If Beer Ads Were Forced To Be Honest, and other videos you won’t see on the site!

Also, follow us on Facebook, and we’ll be best buddies forever.

Have a story to share with Cracked? Email us here.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/i-teach-at-a-for-profit-college-5-ridiculous-realities/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/170963692147

[joannaarobinson]

Day in the Life | Tyese Knight

Welcome to our “Day in the Life” series! We feature wedding and event planners from around the world with many different levels of experience. If you would like to be featured, download our questionnaire here and email your responses and photos to info@plannerslounge.com. We are excited to feature Maryland wedding planner Tyese Knight today!

Name: Tyese Knight

Business Name & Location: Marigold Rose Events, Baltimore, Maryland

Years Working in the Event Industry: 13 years

Years Owning Your Event Planning Business: 3 years

Website: www.marigoldroseevents.com Facebook: Marigold Rose Events 

YouTube Channel: Marigold Rose Events

What is your typical day like?

My day starts off at 5:30 am when my infant daughter wakes up. I feed her, put her back to sleep, then I start checking emails and social media. I have a home office which is the most awesome commute ever! I like to spend time early in the day commenting and sharing on Instagram and Facebook and also responding to any comments made on my YouTube videos. I think it is important to complete tasks like emails and social media in blocks of time instead of constantly checking it all day. It reduces the amount of distractions.

Once I get emails and social media out of the way, I review my 3 main priorities for the day and plan what I am going to do. Usually, my checklist is a little longer than just three items, but I try to focus on completing my 3 main priorities first. I take a break for breakfast and get my 9-year-old son ready for school or camp and send him on his way. Then back to the priorities for the day. Since I gave birth to my baby girl, the day has become a little more hectic and unpredictable. So I try to squeeze in the day’s tasks whenever she is sleeping. I wear her in a little baby sling around the house and use my Bluetooth for calls which is super helpful! I have a baby sitter who comes a few hours a week so I can have some uninterrupted work time.

When my son and husband come home, I stop what I am doing to talk to them and we have dinner together. After dinner, I make  time for myself to watch TV or relax before getting the children ready for bed. If I am in hustle mode, I may get a few more business tasks done before I hit the sack but usually I am in bed by 11pm.

So my day is a little segmented since I have to split my time between being a business owner and a mother. This is truly a one woman show! Sure, a normal day where I get everything done between 9am and 5pm would be ideal, but this way works for me. I would not be able to do it without block scheduling.

For my block scheduling, I have certain tasks that I complete on certain days of the week to stay organized. For example:

Mondays are usually days where I catch up on housework and work on blogging.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays are usually for client work and vendor appointments.

Thursdays are for working on special projects that I need to catch up on.

Fridays I am usually preparing for the weekend’s wedding if I have one.

Block scheduling or batch tasks really helps me stay focused instead of having several different types of tasks all day long.

How did you get started in the industry?

I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management. I became interested in event planning in college. My college had a hotel on campus with a ballroom and we produced large events all the time. Students in my major had the opportunity to be in charge of running the events and I was frequently selected as a lead. I also held a position as the National Planning Director for a student run hospitality organization, National Society of Minorities in Hospitality. We were responsible for planning board meetings throughout the year, regional conferences, and our national conference. It was a big responsibility for someone in college but it was a great experience.

After college, I held different positions within the hospitality industry in sales, catering, and event coordinating. Working for major hotel companies such as Hyatt and Marriott, gave me an opportunity to be exposed to different types of events such as weddings, annual galas, fundraisers, conventions, and business meetings. After 10 years working in the industry, it seemed so robotic. I started to feel like an event planning machine, just churning out event after event. That is when I considered starting an event planning business of my own.

Ash Grove Images

What inspires you?

This might sound cheesy but I am inspired by love. I love a good love story and I enjoy helping my couples celebrate their love by planning a unique wedding. I welcome the opportunity to break wedding traditions and plan something fun that really represents the couples’ style. My favorite wedding blog is Offbeat Bride. I hope to one day have a wedding that is featured on their blog.

I am a big fan of flowers and I do floral design for fun. Flowers make me so happy! I have not actually created flowers for a client yet but I hope to someday be skilled enough to provide that service. I am really into the meaning of flowers which is why I named my business Marigold Rose Events. Marigold represents passion and creativity and Roses represent love! Passion, creativity, and love are always at the center of what I do.

Entrepreneurship is challenging but I love it. The wedding industry is full of small business owners and I am so inspired by people I meet in this field who have dedicated their lives to following their passion. I enjoy having the freedom to determine my own destiny and to live life unhinged. I hope to inspire others to pursue their dreams through entrepreneurship.

What are your favorite online resources for your business?

I love the Event Planners Forum, which is a Facebook group led by prominent event planner Simone Benson. She is a shrewd business woman and she gives straightforward advice about event planning and running a business.

I also love Evolve Your Wedding Business by Heidi Thompson. I have had the opportunity to work directly with Heidi as a member of her Wedding Business Collective and she is the best when it comes to marketing strategy.

Trello! Trello is heaven sent. It keeps me so organized in my business. I love being able to have different boards to keep information for workflows, editorial calendar and financial tasks.

Aside from wedding and event planning, how do you spend your time?

Spending time with my family is my number one way to relax. Both my husband and I have large families and most of them are local so we get together a lot. On weekends that I don’t have a wedding, there is usually some type of gathering planned at someone’s home. There is always a lot of food, music, dancing, and laughter.

My husband and I also love to travel and our son has caught the travel bug as well. We prefer to travel by car so every summer we take a long road trip and try to explore different landmarks and attractions around the country. My son has set a goal to visit all 50 states by the time he is 18 so we are helping him accomplish that!

I don’t have much time for it lately, but I do enjoy making crafts. Especially home décor crafts such as wreaths and centerpieces.

Tyese, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and a day in your life. If you are an event planner and would like to be featured, download our questionnaire today and email it to us along with a photo. If you aren’t sure about being featured, take a few minutes to read how it can help your business.

SaveSave

from Event Planning Essentials http://plannerslounge.com/day-in-the-life-tyese-knight/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[d33-alex]

Why Freud Survives?!

He’s been debunked again and again—and yet we still can’t give him up!

Sigmund Freud almost didn’t make it out of Vienna in 1938. He left on June 4th, on the Orient Express, three months after the German Army entered the city. Even though the persecution of Viennese Jews had begun immediately—Edward R. Murrow, in Vienna for CBS radio when the Germans arrived, was an eyewitness to the ransacking of Jewish homes—Freud had resisted pleas from friends that he flee. He changed his mind after his daughter Anna was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. He was able to get some of his family out, but he left four sisters behind. All of them died in the camps, one, of starvation, at Theresienstadt; the others, probably by gas, at Auschwitz and Treblinka.

London was Freud’s refuge, and friends set him up in Hampstead, in a big house that is now the Freud Museum. On January 28, 1939, Virginia and Leonard Woolf came for tea. The Woolfs, the founders and owners of the Hogarth Press, had been Freud’s British publishers since 1924; Hogarth later published the twenty-four-volume translation of Freud’s works, under the editorship of Anna Freud and James Strachey, that is known as the Standard Edition. This was the Woolfs’ only meeting with Freud.

English was one of Freud’s many languages. (After he settled in Hampstead, the BBC taped him speaking, the only such recording in existence.) But he was eighty-two and suffering from cancer of the jaw, and conversation with the Woolfs was awkward. He “was sitting in a great library with little statues at a large scrupulously tidy shiny table,” Virginia wrote in her diary. “A screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, paralyzed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert.” He was formal and courteous in an old-fashioned way, and presented her with a narcissus. The stage had been carefully set.

The Woolfs were not easily impressed by celebrity, and certainly not by stage setting. They understood the transactional nature of the tea. “All refugees are like gulls with their beaks out for possible crumbs,” Virginia coolly noted in the diary. But many years later, in his autobiography, Leonard remembered that Freud had given him a feeling that, he said, “only a very few people whom I have met gave me, a feeling of great gentleness, but behind the gentleness, great strength. . . . A formidable man.” Freud died in that house on September 23, 1939, three weeks after the start of the Second World War.

Hitler and Stalin, between them, drove psychoanalysis out of Europe, but the movement reconstituted itself in two places where its practitioners were welcomed, London and New York. A product of Mitteleuropa, once centered in cities like Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, and Moscow, psychoanalysis was thus improbably transformed into a largely Anglo-American medical and cultural phenomenon. During the twelve years that Hitler was in power, only about fifty Freudian analysts immigrated to the United States (a country Freud had visited only once, and held in contempt). They were some of the biggest names in the field, though, and they took over American psychiatry. After the war, Freudians occupied university chairs; they dictated medical-school curricula; they wrote the first two editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM). Psychoanalytic theory guided the treatment of hospital patients, and, by the mid-nineteen-fifties, half of all hospital patients in the United States were diagnosed with mental disorders.

Most important, psychoanalysis helped move the treatment of mental illness from the asylum and the hospital to the office. Psychoanalysis is a talk therapy, which meant that people who were otherwise functioning normally could avail themselves of treatment. The greater the number of people who wanted that kind of therapy, the greater the demand for therapists, and the postwar decades were a boom time for psychiatry. In 1940, two-thirds of American psychiatrists worked in hospitals; in 1956, seventeen per cent did. Twelve and a half per cent of American medical students chose psychiatry as a profession in 1954, an all-time high. A large percentage of them received at least some psychoanalytic training, and by 1966 three-quarters reported that they used the “dynamic approach” when treating patients.

The dynamic approach is based on the cardinal Freudian principle that the sources of our feelings are hidden from us, that what we say about them when we walk into the therapist’s office cannot be what is really going on. What is really going on are things that we are denying or repressing or sublimating or projecting onto the therapist by the mechanism of transference, and the goal of therapy is to bring those things to light.

Amazingly, Americans, a people stereotypically allergic to abstract systems, found this model of the mind irresistible. Many scholars have tried to explain why, and there are, no doubt, multiple reasons, but the explanation offered by the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann is simple: alternative theories were worse. “Freud’s theories were like a flashlight in a candle factory,” as she puts it. Freudian concepts were taken up by intellectuals, who wrote about cathexes, screen memories, and reaction formations, and they were absorbed into popular discourse. People who had never read a word of Freud talked confidently about the superego, the Oedipus complex, and penis envy.

Freud was recruited to the anti-utopian politics of the nineteen-fifties. Intellectuals like Lionel Trilling, in “Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture,” and Philip Rieff, in “Freud: The Mind of the Moralist,” maintained that Freud taught us about the limits on human perfectibility. Popular magazines equated Freud with Copernicus and Darwin. Claims were large. “Will the Twentieth Century go down in history as the Freudian Century?” asked the editor of a volume called “Freud and the Twentieth Century,” in 1957. “May not the new forms of awareness growing out of Freud’s work come to serve as a more authentic symbol of our consciousness and the quality of our deepest experience than the uncertain fruits of the fission of the atom and the new charting of the cosmos?”

Professors in English departments naturally wondered how they might get in on the action. They did not have much trouble finding a way. For it is not a stretch to treat literary texts in the same way that an analyst treats what a patient is saying. Although teachers dislike the term “hidden meanings,” decoding a subtext or exposing an implicit meaning or ideology is what a lot of academic literary criticism does. Academic critics are therefore always in the market for a theoretical apparatus that can give coherence and consistency to this enterprise, and Freudianism was ideally suited for the task. Decoding and exposing are what psychoanalysis is all about.

One professor excited about the possibilities was Frederick Crews. Crews received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1958 with a dissertation on E. M. Forster. The dissertation explained what Forster thought by looking at what Forster wrote. It was plain-vanilla history-of-ideas criticism, and Crews found it boring. As an undergraduate, at Yale, he had fallen in love with Nietzsche, and Nietzsche had led him to Freud. By the time the Forster book came out, in 1962, he was a professor at Berkeley, and his second book, “The Sins of the Fathers,” was a psychoanalytic study of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It came out in 1966, and, along with Norman Holland’s “Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare,” published the same year, was one of the pioneering works in psychoanalytic literary criticism. Crews began teaching a popular graduate seminar on the subject.

He also got involved in the antiwar movement on campus, serving as a co-chair of the Faculty Peace Committee. Like many people at Berkeley in those days, he became radicalized, and he considered his interest in Freud to be part of his radicalism. He thought that Freud, as he later put it, “licensed a spirit of dogmatically rebellious interpretation.” In fact, Freud was dismissive of radical politics. He thought that the belief that social change could make people healthier or happier was deluded; that is the point of “Civilization and Its Discontents.” But Crews’s idea that Freudianism was somehow liberatory was widely shared in the sixties (although it usually required some tweaks to the theory, as administered, for example, by writers like Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown).

In 1970, Crews published an anthology of essays promoting psychoanalytic criticism, “Psychoanalysis and Literary Process.” But he had started to get cold feet. He had soured on radical politics, too—by the early seventies, “Berkeley” had pretty much reverted to being “Cal,” a politically quiescent campus—and his experience with his graduate seminar had begun to make him think that there was something too easy about psychoanalytic criticism. Students would propose contradictory psychoanalytic readings, and they all sounded good, but it was just an ingenuity contest. There was no way to prove that one interpretation was truer than another. From this, it followed that what was going on in the analyst’s office might also be nothing more than a kind of interpretive freelancing. Psychoanalysis was beginning to look like a circular and self-justifying methodology.

Crews registered his growing disillusionment in a collection of essays that came out in 1975, “Out of My System.” He still believed that there were redeemable aspects to Freud’s thought, but he was on his way out, as a second essay collection, “Skeptical Engagements,” in 1986, made clear. In 1993, with the publication of a piece in The New York Review of Books called “The Unknown Freud,” he emerged as a full-blown critic of Freudianism and a leader in a group of revisionist scholars known as the Freud-bashers.

The article was a review of several books by revisionists. Psychoanalysis had already been discredited as a medical science, Crews wrote; what researchers were now revealing was that Freud himself was possibly a charlatan—an opportunistic self-dramatizer who deliberately misrepresented the scientific bona fides of his theories. He followed up with another article in the Review, on recovered-memory cases—cases in which adults had been charged with sexual abuse on the basis of supposedly repressed memories elicited from children—which he blamed on Freud’s theory of the unconscious.

Crews’s articles triggered one of the most rancorous highbrow free-for-alls ever run in a paper that has published its share of them. Letters of supreme huffiness poured into the Review, the writers lamenting that considerations of space prevented them from pointing out more than a handful of Crews’s errors and misrepresentations, and then proceeding to take up many column inches enumerating them.

People who send aggrieved letters to the Review often seem to have missed the fact that the Review always gives its writers the last word, and Crews availed himself of the privilege with relish and at length. He gave, on balance, better than he got. In 1995, he published his Review pieces as “The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute.” Three years later, he edited “Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend,” an anthology of writings by Freud’s critics. Crews had retired from teaching in 1994, and is now an emeritus professor at Berkeley.

The arc of Freud’s American reputation tracks the arc of Crews’s career. Psychoanalytic theory reached the peak of its impact in the late fifties, when Crews was switching from history-of-ideas criticism to psychoanalytic criticism, and it began to fade in the late sixties, when Crews was starting to notice a certain circularity in his graduate students’ papers. Part of the decline had to do with social change. Freudianism was a big target for writers associated with the women’s movement; it was attacked as sexist (justifiably) by Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique” and by Kate Millett in “Sexual Politics,” as it had been, more than a decade earlier, by Simone de Beauvoir in “The Second Sex.”

Psychoanalysis was also taking a hit within the medical community. Studies suggesting that psychoanalysis had a low cure rate had been around for a while. But the realization that depression and anxiety can be regulated by medication made a mode of therapy whose treatment times reached into the hundreds of billable hours seem, at a minimum, inefficient, and, at worst, a scam.

Managed-care companies and the insurance industry certainly drew that conclusion, and the third edition of the DSM, in 1980, scrubbed out almost every trace of Freudianism. The third edition was put together by a group of psychiatrists at Washington University, where, it is said, a framed picture of Freud was mounted above a urinal in the men’s room. In 1999, a study published in American Psychologist reported that “psychoanalytic research has been virtually ignored by mainstream scientific psychology over the past several decades.”

Meanwhile, the image of Freud as a lonely pioneer began to erode as well. That image had been carefully curated by Freud’s disciples, especially by Freud’s first biographer, the Welsh analyst Ernest Jones, who was a close associate. (He had flown to Vienna after the Nazis arrived to urge Freud to flee.) Jones’s three-volume life came out in the nineteen-fifties. But the image originated with, and was cultivated by, Freud himself. Even his little speech for the BBC, in 1938, is about the heavy price he has paid for his findings (he calls them “facts”) and his struggle against continued resistance to them.

In the nineteen-seventies, historians like Henri Ellenberger and Frank Sulloway pointed out that most of Freud’s ideas about the unconscious were not original, and that his theories relied on outmoded concepts from nineteenth-century biology, like the belief in the inheritability of acquired characteristics (Lamarckianism). In 1975, the Nobel Prize-winning medical biologist Peter Medawar called psychoanalytic theory “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century.”

One corner of Anglo-American intellectual life where Freudianism had always been regarded with suspicion was the philosophy department. A few philosophers, like Stanley Cavell, who had an interest in literature and Continental thinkers took Freud up. But to philosophers of science the knowledge claims of psychoanalysis were always dubious. In 1985, one of them, Adolf Grünbaum, at the University of Pittsburgh, published “The Foundations of Psychoanalysis,” a dauntingly thorough exposition designed to show that, whatever the foundations of psychoanalysis were, they were not scientific.

Revisionist attention also turned to Freud’s biography. The lead bloodhound on this trail was Peter Swales, a man who once called himself “the punk historian of psychoanalysis.” Swales never finished high school; in the nineteen-sixties, he worked as a personal assistant to the Rolling Stones. That would seem a hard gig to bail on, but he did, and, around 1972, he got interested in Freud and decided to devote himself to unearthing anything and everything associated with Freud’s life. (Swales is one of the two figures—the other is Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson—profiled in Janet Malcolm’s smart and entertaining report on the Freud revisionists, “In the Freud Archives,” published in 1984.)

Swales’s most spectacular claim was that Freud impregnated his sister-in-law, Minna, arranged for her to have an abortion, and then encoded the whole affair in a fictitious case history—a Sherlockian story that was almost too good to check (though some corroborating evidence was later dug up). Swales and other researchers were also able to show that Freud consistently misrepresented the outcomes of the treatments he based his theories on. In the case of one of the only patients whose treatment notes Freud did not destroy, Ernst Lanzer—the Rat Man—it is clear that he misrepresented the facts as well. In a study of the forty-three treatments about which some information survives, it turned out that Freud had broken his own rules for how to conduct an analysis, usually egregiously, in all forty-three.

In 1983, a British researcher, E. M. Thornton, published “Freud and Cocaine,” in which she argued that Freud, who early in his career was a champion of the medical uses of cocaine (then a legal and popular drug), was effectively addicted to it in the years before he wrote “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Freud treated a friend, Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, with cocaine to cure a morphine habit, with the result that Fleischl became addicted to both drugs and died at the age of forty-five. Thornton suggested that Freud was often high on cocaine when he wrote his early scientific articles, which accounts for their sloppiness with the data and the recklessness of their claims.

By 1995, enough evidence of the doubtfulness of psychoanalysis’s scientific credentials and enough questions about Freud’s character had accumulated to enable the revisionists to force the postponement of a major exhibition devoted to Freud at the Library of Congress, on the ground that the show presented psychoanalysis in too favorable a light. Crews called it an effort “to polish up the tarnished image of a business that’s heading into Chapter 11.” The exhibition had to be redesigned, and it did not open until 1998.

That year, in an interview with a Canadian philosophy professor, Todd Dufresne, Crews was asked whether he was ready to call it a day with Freud. “Absolutely,” he said. “After almost twenty years of explaining and illustrating the same basic critique, I will just refer interested parties to ‘Skeptical Engagements,’ ‘The Memory Wars,’ and ‘Unauthorized Freud.’ Anyone who is unmoved by my reasoning there isn’t going to be touched by anything further I might say.” He spoke too soon.

Crews seems to have grown worried that although Freud and Freudianism may look dead, we cannot be completely, utterly, a hundred per cent sure. Freud might be like the Commendatore in “Don Giovanni”: he gets killed in the first act and then shows up for dinner at the end, the Stone Guest. So Crews spent eleven years writing “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” (Metropolitan), just out—a six-hundred-and-sixty-page stake driven into its subject’s cold, cold heart.

The new book synthesizes fifty years of revisionist scholarship, repeating and amplifying the findings of other researchers (fully acknowledged), and tacking on a few additional charges. Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania. He evidently regards “balance” as a pass given to chicanery, and even readers sympathetic to the argument may find it hard to get all the way through the book. It ought to come with a bulb of garlic.

The place where people interested in Freud’s thought usually begin is “The Interpretation of Dreams,” which came out in 1899, when Freud was forty-three. Crews doesn’t get to that book until page 533. The only subsequent work he discusses in depth is the so-called Dora case, which was based on an (aborted) treatment that Freud conducted in 1900 with a woman named Ida Bauer, and which he published in 1905, as “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” Crews touches briefly on the other famous case histories Freud brought out before the First World War—the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, Little Hans, the analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber, and the book on Leonardo da Vinci. The hugely influential works of social psychology that Freud went on to write—“Totem and Taboo,” “The Future of an Illusion,” “Civilization and Its Discontents”—are largely ignored.

The “illusion” in Crews’s subtitle isn’t Freudianism, though. It’s Freud. For many years, Freud was written about as an intrepid scientist who dared to descend into the foul rag-and-bone shop of the mind, and who emerged as the embodiment of a tragic wisdom—a man who could face up to the terrible fact that a narcissus is never just a narcissus, that underneath the mind’s trapdoor is a snake pit of desire and aggression, and, knowing all this, was still able to take tea with his guests. In Yeats’s line, those ancient, glittering eyes were gay. This is, obviously, the reputation the Woolfs carried with them when they went to meet Freud in 1939.

As Crews is right to believe, this Freud has long outlived psychoanalysis. For many years, even as writers were discarding the more patently absurd elements of his theory—penis envy, or the death drive—they continued to pay homage to Freud’s unblinking insight into the human condition. That persona helped Freud to evolve, in the popular imagination, from a scientist into a kind of poet of the mind. And the thing about poets is that they cannot be refuted. No one asks of “Paradise Lost”: But is it true? Freud and his concepts, now converted into metaphors, joined the legion of the undead.

Is there anything new to say about this person? One of the occasions for Crews’s book is the fairly recent emergence of Freud’s correspondence with his fiancée, Martha Bernays. Freud got engaged in 1882, when he was twenty-six, and the engagement lasted four years. He and Martha spent most of that time in different cities, and Freud wrote to her virtually every day. Some fifteen hundred letters survive. Crews makes a great deal of the correspondence, and he finds much to disapprove of.

Who would want to be judged by letters sent to a lover? What the excerpts that Crews quotes seem to show us is an immature and unguarded young man who is ambitious and insecure, boastful and needy, ardent and impatient—all the ways people tend to come across in love letters. Freud makes remarks like “I intend to exploit science instead of allowing myself to be exploited by it.” Crews takes this to expose Freud’s mercenary attitude toward his vocation. But young people want to make a living. That’s why they have vocations. The reason for the prolonged engagement was that Freud couldn’t afford to marry. It’s not surprising that he would have wanted to assure his fiancée that his eyes were ever on the prize.

Freud mentions cocaine often in the letters. He used it to get through stressful social situations, but he also appreciated its benefits as an aphrodisiac, and Crews quotes from several letters in which he teases Martha about its effects. “Woe to you, little princess, when I come,” he writes in one. “I will kiss you quite red and feed you quite plump. And if you are naughty you will see who is stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat or a big wild man with cocaine in his body.” Crews’s gloss: Freud “conceived of his chemically eroticized self not as the affectionate companion of a dear person but as a powerful mate who would have his way, luxuriating in the crushing of maidenly reluctance.” (Freud, incidentally, was a small man, five feet seven inches. He was taller than Martha, but not by much. The “big wild man” was a joke.)

Freud would be the last person to have grounds for objecting to a biographer’s interest in his sex life, but Crews’s claims in this area are often speculation. During his engagement, for example, Freud spent four months studying in Paris, where he sometimes suffered from anxiety. “It is easy to picture how Freud’s agitation must have been heightened by the daily parade of saucy faces and swaying hips that he witnessed during his strolls,” Crews observes. Crews is confident that Freud, during his separation from Martha, masturbated regularly, “making himself sick with guilt over it” (something he says Freud’s biographers covered up). He also suspects that Freud had sex with a prostitute, and was therefore not a virgin when, at the age of thirty, he finally got married. Noting (as others have) the homoerotic tone in Freud’s letters to and about men he was close to—Fleischl and, later, Wilhelm Fliess—Crews suggests that Freud “wrestled with homosexual impulses.”

Let’s assume that Freud used cocaine as an anxiolytic and aphrodisiac. That he had an eye for sexy women. That he masturbated, solicited a prostitute, shared he-man fantasies with his girlfriend, and got crushes on male friends. Who cares? Human beings do these things. Even if Freud had sex with Minna Bernays—so what? The standard revisionist hypothesis is that the sex took place on trips that the two took together without Martha, of which, as Crews points out, there were a surprising number. But Crews imagines assignations in the family home in Vienna as well. He notes that Minna’s bedroom was in a far corner of the house, meaning that “the nocturnal Sigmund could have visited it with impunity in predawn hours.” Could he have? Apparently. Should he have? Probably not. Did he, in fact? No one knows. So why fantasize about it? A Freudian would suspect that there is something going on here.

One thing that’s going on is straightforward enough: this is internecine business in the Freud wars. Some Freud scholar floated the suggestion that since Minna’s bedroom was next to Freud and Martha’s, there would have been few opportunities for hanky-panky. Consistent with his policy of giving scoundrels no quarter, Crews is determined to blow that suggestion out of the water. He is on a crusade to debunk what he calls “Freudolatry,” the cult of Freud constructed and maintained by the “home-team historians.” These include the “house biographer” Ernest Jones, the “gullible” Peter Gay, and the “loyalists” George Makari and Élisabeth Roudinesco. (The English translation of Roudinesco’s “Freud: In His Time and Ours” was published by Harvard last fall.)

In Crews’s view, these people have created a Photoshopped image of superhuman scientific probity and moral rectitude, and it’s important to take their hero down to human size—or maybe, in compensation for all the years of hype, a size or two smaller. Their Freud, fully cognizant of his illicit desires, stops at his sister-in-law’s bedroom door, for he knows that sublimation of the erotic drives is the price men pay for civilization. Crews’s Freud just walks right in. (In either account, civilization somehow survives.)

For readers with less skin in the Freud wars, the question is: What is at stake? And the answer has to be Freudianism—the theory itself and its post-clinical afterlife. Although Freud renounced his early work on cocaine, Crews examines it carefully, and he shows that, from the beginning, Freud was a lousy scientist. He fudged data; he made unsubstantiated claims; he took credit for other people’s ideas. Sometimes he lied. A lot of people in the late nineteenth century believed that cocaine might be a miracle drug, and Crews may be a little unfair when he tries to pin much of the blame for the later epidemic of cocaine abuse on Freud. Still, even starting out, Freud showed himself to be a man who did not have much in the way of professional scruples. The fundamental claim of the revisionists is that Freud never changed. It was bogus science all the way. And the central issue for most of them is what is known as the seduction theory.

The principal reason psychoanalysis triumphed over alternative theories and was taken up in fields outside medicine, like literary criticism, is that it presented its findings as inductive. Freudian theory was not a magic-lantern show, an imaginative projection that provided us with powerful metaphors for understanding the human condition. It was not “Paradise Lost”; it was science, a conceptual system wholly derived from clinical experience.

For Freudians and anti-Freudians alike, the key to this claim is the fate of the seduction theory. According to the official narrative, when Freud began working with women diagnosed with hysteria, in the eighteen-nineties, his patients reported being sexually molested as children, usually by their fathers and usually when they were under the age of four. In 1896, Freud delivered a paper announcing that, having completed eighteen treatments, he had concluded that sexual abuse in infancy was the source of hysterical symptoms. This became known as the seduction theory.

The paper was greeted with derision. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the leading sexologist of the day, called it “a scientific fairy tale.” Freud was discouraged. But, in 1897, he had a revelation, which he reported in a letter to Fliess that became canonical. Patients were not remembering actual molestation, he realized; they were remembering their own sexual fantasies. The reason was the Oedipus complex. From infancy, all children have aggressive and erotic feelings about their parents, but they repress those feelings out of fear of punishment. For boys, the fear is of castration; girls, as they are traumatized eventually to discover, are already castrated. (“Castration” in Freud means amputation.)

In Freud’s hydraulic model of the mind, these forbidden wishes and desires are psychic energies seeking an outlet. Since they cannot be expressed or acted upon directly—we cannot kill or have sex with our parents—they emerge in highly censored and distorted forms as images in dreams, slips of the tongue, and neurotic symptoms. Freud claimed his clinical experience taught him that, by the method of free association, patients could uncover what they had repressed and achieve some relief. And so psychoanalysis was born.

This narrative was challenged by Jeffrey Masson, whose battle with the Freud establishment is the main subject of Janet Malcolm’s book. In “The Assault on Truth,” in 1984, Masson argued that, panicked by the reaction to his hysteria paper, Freud came up with the theory of infantile sexuality as a way of covering up his patients’ sexual abuse.

But there turned out to be two problems with the official narrative about the seduction theory, and Masson’s was not one of them. The first problem is that the chronology is a retrospective reconstruction. Freud did not abandon the seduction theory after 1897, he did not insist on the centrality of the Oedipus complex until 1908, and so on. Various emendations had to be discreetly made in the Standard Edition, and in the edition of Freud’s correspondence with Fliess, for the record to become consistent with the preferred chronology.

That is the minor problem. The major problem, according to the revisionists, is that there were no cases. Contrary to what Freud claimed and what Masson assumed, none of Freud’s subsequent patients spontaneously told him that they had been molested—those eighteen cases did not exist—and no patients subsequently reported having Oedipal wishes. Knowing of his reputation as sex-obsessed, some of Freud’s patients produced the kind of material they knew he wanted to hear, and a few appear to have been deliberately gaming him. In other cases, Freud badgered patients into accepting his interpretations, and they either gave in, like the Rat Man, or left treatment, like Dora. If your analyst tells you that you are in denial about wanting to sleep with your father, what are you going to do? Deny it?

Ever since he stopped teaching his Berkeley seminar, Crews has complained about the suggestibility of the psychoanalytic method of free association. It replaced hypnosis as a way of treating hysterical patients, but it wasn’t much better. That is why Crews wrote about the recovered-memory cases, in which investigators seem to have fed children the memories they eventually “recovered.” How effective a therapist Freud was is disputed—many people travelled to Vienna to be analyzed by him. But Crews believes that Freud never had “a single ex-patient who could attest to the capacity of the psychoanalytic method to yield the specific effects that he claimed for it.”

One response to the assault on psychoanalysis is that even if Freud mostly made it up, and even if he was a poor therapist himself, psychoanalysis does work for some patients. But so does placebo. Many people suffering from mood disorders benefit from talk therapy and other interpersonal forms of treatment because they respond to the perception that they are being cared for. It may not matter very much what they talk about; someone is listening.

People also find appealing the idea that they have motives and desires they are unaware of. That kind of “depth” psychology was popularized by Freudianism, and it isn’t likely to go away. It can be useful to be made to realize that your feelings about people you love are actually ambivalent, or that you were being aggressive when you thought you were only being extremely polite. Of course, you shouldn’t have to work your way through your castration anxiety to get there.

Still, assuming that psychoanalysis was a dead end, did it set psychiatry back several generations? Crews has said so. “If much of the twentieth century has indeed belonged to Freud,” he told Todd Dufresne, in 1998, “then we lost about seventy years worth of potential gains in knowledge while befuddling ourselves with an essentially medieval conception of the ‘possessed’ mind.” The comment reflects an attitude present in a lot of criticism of psychoanalysis, Crews’s especially: an idealization of science.

Since the third edition of the DSM, the emphasis has been on biological explanations for mental disorders, and this makes psychoanalysis look like a detour, or, as the historian of psychiatry Edward Shorter called it, a “hiatus.” But it wasn’t as though psychiatry was on solid medical ground when Freud came along. Nineteenth-century science of the mind was a Wild West show. Treatments included hypnosis, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, full-body massage, painkillers like morphine, rest cures, “fat” cures (excessive feeding), seclusion, “female castration,” and, of course, institutionalization. There was also serious interest in the paranormal. The most prevalent nineteenth-century psychiatric diagnoses, hysteria and neurasthenia, are not even recognized today. That wasn’t “bad” science. It was science. Some of it works; a lot of it does not. Psychoanalysis was not the first talk therapy, but it was the bridge from hypnosis to the kind of talk therapy we have today. It did not abuse the patient’s body, and if it was a quack treatment it was not much worse, and was arguably more humane, than a lot of what was being practiced.

Nor did psychoanalysis put a halt to somatic psychiatry. During the first half of the twentieth century, all kinds of medical interventions for mental disorders were devised and put into practice. These included the administration of sedatives, notably chloral, which is addictive, and which was prescribed for Virginia Woolf, who suffered from major depression; insulin-induced comas; electroshock treatments; and lobotomies. Despite its frightful reputation, electroconvulsive therapy is an effective treatment for severe depression, but most of the other treatments in use before the age of psychopharmaceuticals were dead ends. Even today, in many cases, we are basically throwing chemicals at the brain and hoping for the best. Hit or miss is how a lot of progress is made. You can call it science or not.

People write biographies because they hope that lives have lessons. That’s what Crews has done. He believes that the story of Freud’s early life has something to tell us about Freudianism, and although he insists on playing the part of a hanging judge, much of what he has to say about the slipperiness of Freud’s character and the factitiousness of his science is persuasive. He is, after all, building on top of a mountain of research on those topics.

Crews does bring what appears to be a novel charge (at least these days) against psychoanalysis. He argues that it is anti-Christian. By promulgating a doctrine that makes “sexual gratification triumphant over virtuous sacrifice for heaven,” he says, Freud “meant to overthrow the whole Christian order, earning payback for all of the bigoted popes, the sadists of the Inquisition, the modern promulgators of ‘blood libel’ slander, and the Catholic bureaucrats who had held his professorship hostage.” Freud set out to “pull down the temple of Pauline law.”

Crews suggests that this is why the affair with Minna was significant. If it did happen, it was right before Freud wrote “The Interpretation of Dreams,” the real start of Freudianism. Forbidden sex could have given him the confidence he needed to take the extreme step into mind reading. “To possess Minna,” Crews says, “could have meant, first, to commit symbolic incest with the mother of God; second, to ‘kill’ the father God by means of this ultimate sacrilege; and third, to nullify the authority both of Austria’s established church and of its Vatican parent—thereby, in Freud’s internal drama, freeing his people from two millennia of religious persecution.” Then I guess he didn’t just walk right in.

It all sounds pretty Freudian! Where is it coming from? This idol-smashing Freud is radically different from the Freud of writers like Trilling and Rieff, who saw him as the enduring reminder of the futility of imagining that improving the world can make human beings happier. And it is certainly not how Freud presented himself. “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet,” he wrote at the end of “Civilization and Its Discontents,” “and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation: for at bottom, that is what they are all demanding—the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most virtuous believers.”

Crews’s idea that Freud’s target was Christianity appears to be a late fruit of his old undergraduate fascination with Nietzsche. Crews apparently once saw Freud as a Nietzschean critic of life-denying moralism, a heroic Antichrist dedicated to liberating human beings from subservience to idols they themselves created. Is his current renunciation a renunciation of his own radical youth? Is his castigation of Freud really a form of self-castigation? We don’t need to go there. But since humanity is not liberated from its illusions yet, if that’s what Freud was really all about, he is still undead.

By Louis Menand | August 28, 2017 issue of The New Yorker

https://goo.gl/qT6ieT

[junker-town]

Grand Canyon, college basketball's best party, is emerging as a mid-major power

Deep in the desert lies one of the NCAA’s most controversial schools – a university that might soon boast one of college basketball’s top mid-major programs.

PHOENIX — This doesn't feel normal.

There are still 15 minutes to go before tip-off, but the place is already packed for a game between the host Grand Canyon Antelopes and a nondescript, .500 Seattle Redhawks team.

"It's a dance party and a family reunion put together," says freshman Israel Barrera, who is standing in the first row after waiting in line for three hours. "It's the best environment in the country."

The "Purple Pre-Game Party" is now in full swing, a 4,000-person student section waving their arms and fist-pumping in concert as Lil Jon yells over a Steve Aoki beat.

The beat drops, streamers fly into the air, and for a minute you forget a college basketball game is about to be played.

Welcome to Grand Canyon University Arena, home to what could very well be college basketball's next elite mid-major.

The @GCUHavocs are already in full form tonight. http://pic.twitter.com/XgdzufAeIy

— Connor Pelton (@ConnorPelton28) January 22, 2017

* * *

Walk around Grand Canyon for 10 minutes and you can already tell that this school is different from others. Every building looks brand new, so much so that I'm almost afraid to touch anything.

Every student has a smile on their face, and each lawn is perfectly manicured. Think Augusta National meets Disneyland, but with 19,000 college students and a Chick-fil-A.

The college spent $150 million on renovations to its campus back in 2006, and started work on a $60 million campus expansion project in 2009. That included the building of GCU Arena, which was renovated just three years after opening in 2011 in order to expand from 5,000 to 7,000 seats.

It's not a secret that this place has money, and it's not a secret where that money comes from.

Grand Canyon is a for-profit university, owned by Grand Canyon Education, Inc. Its administration is controlled by shareholders, and its stock, (NASDAQ: LOPE), is publicly traded. The university's current stock market value is about $2.7 billion.

The Antelopes are the first, and only, for-profit to participate at the NCAA's Division I level, and the reception hasn't always been kind.

Shortly after announcing that it would be moving up to Division I, Pac-12 institutions — in an effort led by Arizona State president Michael Crow — pledged that they would stop scheduling athletic contests against Grand Canyon while the university was still a for-profit institution.

But as the years have passed, acceptance of the Antelopes at the NCAA's highest level has grown.

The Pac-12's stance has softened. Sean Miller's Arizona team hosted them back in December, where they held their own for 40 minutes in a 10-point loss.

Think Augusta National meets Disneyland, but with 19,000 college students and a Chick-fil-A.

The neighboring Sun Devils (located just 15 miles away in Tempe), however, are standing by their president's position, this despite playing a successful charity and community-based exhibition game between Arizona State and Grand Canyon to open GCU Arena back when the team was still at the Division II level.

"ASU won't play us now, but we don't care about that," Grand Canyon head coach Dan Majerle says. "I don't have a problem with them though. We'll play the Sun Devils whenever they want to play us."

That likely won't happen until the university gets out of the for-profit game, which will be very tough to accomplish. With the amount of profit being turned, the investors are not likely to sell their shares anytime soon.

The school has become a good investment due to the perfect storm of being accredited with the ability to market itself as a faith-based institute. That's resulted in a large enrollment (there are roughly 19,000 students on campus, compared to over 60,000 online students). The more students, the more money, the better the investment.

And just as they don't shy away from their for-profit status or marketing of their online classes, religion (and the ability to promote themselves to faith-based organizations) is at the center of everything the school does.

No contest starts without a pregame prayer, where everyone in the arena bows their head in silence. There's a vault of Bibles buried at center court, and a cross standing in the shadow of a cactus on the school's seal.

Even the rowdy students play the part, censoring themselves when rapping along to every line of Jay Z's verse on "Paris" prior to the start of the second half.

"We act just like anybody else," says Majerle when asked about the differences between Grand Canyon and other schools. "But actually, I think it's better. We do things that are amazing for the west side (of Phoenix) and the community around here. If you spend any time on this campus, you'll know it's special."

(via Grand Canyon University)

While the Antelopes might make plenty of headlines outside of sports, the on-court product is quickly becoming a spectacle in itself.

Even on this night against Seattle, when Cameron Dollar's Redhawks seemed to confuse Grand Canyon with a couple of different zone looks, this is still an incredibly fun team to watch.

A total of seven points have been scored more than seven minutes into the game, but the combination of a raucous crowd, high pace, and multiple hustle plays make for a brand of watchable basketball that is often hard to come by at any level of Division I hoops.

A large part of this can be attributed to Majerle, the team's intense and passionate head coach. Majerle was drafted out of college by the Phoenix Suns and has remained a large personality in the Valley ever since, eventually joining the Suns coaching staff for six years after two separate stints there as a player.

He was then hired by the university prior to the 2013-14 season, his first year coinciding with the team's initial Division I season. Majerle replaced former Arizona State and Arizona assistant Russ Pennell, who had gone 72-44 as head coach of the Antelopes. The move was questioned by some, but makes more sense when you consider one of the school's primary benefactors, former Suns owner Jerry Colangelo, is a longtime friend of Majerle.

No one is questioning the decision now.

The on-court product is quickly becoming a spectacle in itself.

Majerle has guided Grand Canyon to a record of 73-45 throughout his tenure, the best record of the four schools currently making the transition to become full Division I members. That transition will be complete after this season, allowing the team to be selected to both the NCAA and NIT tournaments starting with the 2017-18 campaign.

The ultra-competitive head coach has already had plenty of success on the recruiting trail despite the fact the team can't compete in the NCAA tournament yet. Senior point guard DeWayne Russell, who currently ranks seventh in the country in points per game at 23.1, landed in Phoenix after deciding to transfer from Northern Arizona because of the quick relationship he formed with Majerle.

"He called me up after I got my release from NAU," Russell says. "He kind of acted as a father figure for me so it was an easy process. We've just been building on our relationship ever since then."

While Russell may be finding success, it seems a little sad that he will be gone before the program is even eligible to make the NCAA tournament.

He doesn't see it that way. When asked about the future of the team, Russell's face lights up.

"It's going to be amazing, man. I can see a top-25 program, and that's what coach Majerle always preaches. Once we start getting more of those big recruits coming in to see what we've got, people are going to jump at the chance to come."

Thanks to some aggressive scheduling by the Antelopes, the team is already starting to get on the radar of top prospects before they even see the sun-soaked campus and shiny new arena.

Name one of this sport's blue bloods, and there is a strong chance Grand Canyon has faced them in the past few years.

The team has played road games against Duke, Kentucky, Indiana, Arizona, and Penn State in just the last three seasons, while securing away-home-away deals with Louisville and San Diego State in addition.

They have also taken advantage of one of the three postseason tournaments not controlled by the NCAA, accepting an invitation to the CIT in each of their first three seasons under Majerle.

"Since we haven't been able to go to the NCAA tournament, we try to schedule the best competition possible for recruiting purposes," Majerle says. "Going on the road is fun, and then getting Louisville and San Diego State in our own gym is pretty special. The guys really enjoy playing the best, so it's been a great strategy for us."

In the very near future, those challenging non-conference games won't be the team's only chance to play in the national spotlight. After four years, full Division I membership will finally vest next season. The question is: Are the Antelopes ready for their closeup?

(via Grand Canyon University)

The answer to that question is complex, and won't be fully answered for a while. But if one thing is for certain, it's that the pieces are in place for Grand Canyon to become the next elite mid-major in college basketball.

Becoming a Gonzaga or Wichita State doesn't happen overnight. You need multiple recruiting classes to pan out, and those players to stay healthy, and those players to stay for multiple seasons, and then some more luck on top of that.

But you also need a coach that's committed to the program. A rabid fan base. A university dedicated to athletic success.

An attractive locale doesn't hurt either.

The Antelopes can boast all of those attributes, which makes this such an intriguing program in the current national landscape.

"I've got no plans on leaving," says Majerle when asked if he sees himself with Grand Canyon long term. "Mr. Colangelo has been a mentor to me for a long time. President (Brian) Mueller is great. This place took a chance on me, and there's really not a better job in the country."

Majerle knows his ultimate goal of making Grand Canyon a mainstay in the top 25 is a ways off, but he is confident that the program is well on its way there.

"I'm not saying that happens next year, but we're on our way," he says. "Next year we really want to go to the WAC tournament, win it, and move on to the NCAA tournament."

It's not a tough scene to envision.

The Antelopes will go to that conference tournament. Busloads of students will make the trip to Las Vegas.

They will march through the bracket, dog pile on the floor at Orleans Arena, and hear Greg Gumbel read their name on Selection Sunday. The money made from the trip to the Big Dance will go to the pockets of the school's shareholders, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Indeed, the rise from little-known Division II program to a household name may seem like a fairy tale. But for Grand Canyon, that dream could become a reality in the very near future.