ZAUM

New approach views students as customers of higher ed

By JEANNIE KEVER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Running higher education like a business has gotten a lot of buzz lately, and some members of the University of Houston’s governing board indicated Tuesday that they are ready to give it a try.

“It puts the emphasis back on the student as the customer,” Mica Mosbacher said as she and other regents discussed seven proposals Gov. Rick Perry has pitched to reform the state’s public universities.

The ideas include paying bonuses to professors who score highly on student surveys and linking tenure to teaching skills. Another proposal would require universities to tell new students how many students with similar SAT scores actually graduate, along with average starting salaries for their proposed field of study.

Tuition seen as ’symptom’
Jeff Sandefer, founder of Sandefer Capital Partners and co-founder of a private business and entrepreneurship program in Austin, summarized the proposals, first pitched at a summit Perry convened in late May.

“Everyone’s focused on tuition,” Sandefer said. “That’s a symptom, not the problem.”

Most of the proposals deal with teaching skills, which fits with a statewide push to increase the number of college graduates in Texas. But it also splits the traditional university melding of teaching and research at a time when UH is trying to boost its research programs.

“We’re talking about a change in the culture of higher education,” said regent Dennis Golden, a UH graduate and an optometrist in Carthage. “It’s going to take a lot of fortitude to change.”

Regents didn’t make any decisions Tuesday, although they did direct Chancellor Renu Khator to pursue the ideas.

Sandefer, who served as moderator at Perry’s summit, predicted “pushback” from faculty if regents try to implement the changes. He cited national figures showing the average full professor spends just 4.1 hours per week in the classroom and 21 percent of his or her time teaching or advising students.

But he cautioned that tenured professors aren’t the problem. Many are excellent teachers, he said.

Teaching/research divide
Many also spend more time teaching than that, said Wynne Chin, a professor in the Bauer College of Business at UH and president of the faculty senate.

He said he spends about half his time teaching, including preparation and working individually with students, with the other half devoted to research.

He also suggested that judging a professor’s teaching skills based solely on student surveys may be short-sighted. Students often don’t realize how much they’ve learned and how it meets their needs until they leave school, he said.

“Is it the customer model, or a hybrid of the customer-client model?” he asked, noting that he and his colleagues in the business school understand business models.

“We also know how higher ed works,” he said. “It’s not one-size-fits-all.”

jeannie.kever@chron.com

Jun 17 2008 12:00A
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In this Feb. 8, 1964 file photo, President Lyndon B. Johnson pauses near the door of his office for a brief conference with his close aide, Jack Valenti in Washington. The University of Houston is naming its school of communication in honor of Valenti, who along with being an aide to President Johnson, also led the Motion Picture Association of America and instituted the modern movie ratings system. (AP Photo/File)

By (AP)
Published: 2008-06-04 10:20:03
Location: HOUSTON

The University of Houston is naming its school of communication in honor of LBJ adviser and film industry lobbyist Jack Valenti, who instituted the modern movie ratings system.

Valenti, a World War II aviator and 1946 UH graduate, died last year. He was 85.

He was an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson before going on to lead the Motion Picture Association of America.

The UH commemoration of Valenti, who was from Houston, was announced Tuesday.

The Jack J. Valenti School of Communication salutes the man whose 2007 memoir is titled: “This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood.”

by Michael McDonald
Times Literary Supplement

“In the works of every writer with any body of work to show for his effort”, Alberto Moravia once told the Paris Review, “you will find recurrent themes. I view the novel, a single novel, as well as a writer’s entire corpus, as a musical composition in which the characters are themes, from variation to variation completing an entire parabola; similarly for the themes themselves.” The notion that a novelist has but a few central insights that he frames and explores in slightly different ways from one book to another may not be true of “every writer”, but it was certainly true of Moravia. The latest confirmation comes in the form of the posthumous publication of I due amici, an abandoned story that, if completed, would have constituted the nineteenth official novel of the Roman writer’s body of work.

Moravia specialized in composing requiems for the death of traditional humanism, his central themes being the reduction of man to the status of a commodity, one “thing” among many, and the psychological suffering that occurs as a result. In a word, alienation: external and internal, all-pervading and inescapable, conveyed in the stark titles of his novels: Gli indifferenti, La disubbidienza, Il conformista, Il disprezzo, La noia. His work consists of a series of variations on the myriad ways in which modern men dehumanize themselves and others, as articulated in different, but essentially analogous emotional registers: indifference, refusal, conformity, contempt, boredom. The notion of friendship strikes a distinctly discordant note in the midst of such threnodies. But the title I due amici was chosen by its editor, Simone Casini – the one false note in an otherwise superb job of restoring, revising and presenting this important work – and it is impossible to imagine Moravia distilling the essence of this dark tale into a title bearing overtones, no matter how ironic, of solidarity and sociability.

As with most novels by Moravia, I due amici is set in Rome, on this occasion in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and its main character is a man struggling to overcome the sfasatura (bewilderment) that he experiences both within himself and in relation to Italian society at large. Also as usual, the plot centres on the corruption of love and sex by money and politics as filtered through that peculiar mixture of Freudianism and Marxism that Moravia made all his own. Twenty-seven-year-old Sergio Maltese is a communist intellectual who works as a low-paid journalist. He meets and becomes sexually involved with Nella (who, depending on the draft, may go by the name Lalla), a lower-class woman three years his junior. Their love is spontaneous and pure and yet such happiness as it provides is continually undermined by the stultifying nature of their poverty and by Sergio’s constant dissatisfaction with his life.

The classic Moravian anti-hero, Sergio is burdened by a sense of his own inferiority and by the continual intellectualization of his failures. As the story begins, he is obsessed by his fledgling membership in the Communist Party, which he had hoped would end his anguished condition. Instead he finds that nothing has changed and that he remains just as incapable of justifying his actions as before. Worse still, his embrace of the political is causing a growing feeling of contempt to seep into his relationship with Nella, who is intellectually incapable of understanding, let alone sharing, his vision of a classless society and who lives only for sensual pleasure. Into this unstable situation, Moravia introduces a third character, Maurizio, an old (or recent, depending on the textual variation) bourgeois friend of Sergio’s. Tall and handsome, rich and self-assured, he is also a political reactionary who, although disillusioned about the fall of Fascism and Italy’s defeat in the war, is nevertheless capable of describing to Sergio, without the least trace of embarrassment, how much he loved not simply Mussolini, but Hitler as well. Being his exact antithesis, it is only natural that Sergio should find Maurizio odious, the very embodiment of the decadent political class that led Italy to ruin and stands in the way of the Communists assuming power. And yet Sergio is simultaneously attracted to Maurizio for reasons that remain obscure.

All of which leads to the novel’s decisive moment when Sergio hatches a plan to convert Maurizio to Communism. If only he can make his will triumph over that of his adversary’s, and thereby secure Maurizio’s “soul” for the Party, perhaps this will be the life-transforming act that will validate his existence. But while Maurizio professes to acknowledge the force of Sergio’s Marxist dialectics, as well as the bankruptcy of his own class values, he refuses to convert on rational grounds alone; he demands something more: that Sergio allow him to sleep with Nella.

Far from being repelled by the idea, Sergio ponders it at length. Indeed, he becomes so drunk with an inner feeling of power – now that he has finally discovered “the winning argument” that will enable him to triumph over Maurizio – that he fails to consider why Sergio, what with all of the other beautiful women at his disposal, should be so anxious to sleep with Nella.

But embracing the idea of sacrificing Nella to Maurizio and acting upon it are two different matters, especially for a passive self-doubter such as Sergio. The days pass and nothing changes. Still, just as before, Sergio and Nella continue to have a hard time making ends meet. Life together in their drab furnished flat becomes increasingly argumentative and restless. As a result, Sergio feels compelled to borrow money in secret from Maurizio, an action that not only humiliates him in front of his old adversary but also makes him blame and despise Nella all the more. When Sergio returns home, Maurizio’s money in hand, only to find that Nella has sneaked off to a party, he becomes enraged and resolves to force the “puttana” out of his life and into Maurizio’s bed.

The perfect occasion arises several days later. But will Nella allow herself to be used in this way? And is Maurizio genuinely serious about wanting to bed her in the first place? Or could he have his own ulterior motives for placing Sergio and his much-vaunted communist convictions in such a sordid predicament?

Moravia began I due amici at the end of 1950, immediately following the completion of Il conformista, and it would appear he intended the story of Sergio Maltese to serve as the political counterpart to that of Marcello Clerici (“Il conformista”). In that novel, Moravia had attempted a philosophical demonstration of the sexual origins of right-wing political commitment, “the Fascist temperament”, as R. W. B. Lewis pithily put it, “as rooted in homosexual trauma”. In I due amici, Moravia demonstrates the philosophical origins of left-wing political commitment, the communist temperament as rooted in feelings of inferiority, a willingness to use others as a means to larger ends, and, possibly, by its own latent homosexuality. (What, otherwise, is one to make of Sergio’s “obscure” attraction to Maurizio?) Moravia is at his best as a novelist when he keeps his theoretical assumptions firmly in check and deploys his considerable narrative skills. Such, alas, was not the case either with respect to Il conformista or with this story.

To be sure, Moravia’s prose is as clean and precise as always. He is able to bring Sergio, Nella and Maurizio to life with a few deft strokes. He also succeeds in creating one memorable, Felliniesque scene when Sergio and Nella attend a party at Maurizio’s home. Farcical, grotesque and psychologically disturbing, it demonstrates the truth of Nicola Chiaromonte’s observation that there is no one equal to Moravia “in seizing the moments in which reality, piercing through the mist of velleity and pretense, begins to ‘exist’ and to take on the meaning of its own overwhelming existence”. But apart from this scene, one is left mostly with essay-like ruminations and schematic political dialogues, the relentlessness of which begins to drain away what little weight and density the characters possess.

Potential buyers of I due amici need to be aware that what Casini has packaged and presented to the reading public as a posthumous Moravia novel is not a single, albeit incomplete, manuscript, but rather three successive renderings of the same story, each roughly a hundred pages long. But therein lies part of the book’s particular attraction. In the Paris Review interview, Moravia switched metaphors from music to painting when he discussed his compositional method: “Each book is worked over several times [as with] painters centuries ago, proceeding, as it were, from layer to layer. The first draft is quite crude . . . although even then, even at that point . . . the form is visible. After that I rewrite it as many times – apply as many ‘layers’ – as I feel to be necessary”. Moravia methodically destroyed the drafts leading up to each of his completed novels. But here, owing to the fact that he moved house, and that he, or someone, ended up packing the drafts in suitcases that were left in storage and only recently discovered, we are able to see Moravia at work, applying the successive layers of paint to his canvas.

In the first draft – “Redazione A” – we find the beginnings of a fragmentary prologue in which Sergio Maltese’s background assumes many of the biographical details of Moravia’s own life. “Redazione B” is a more rounded and nearly completed novella told in the third person. Then comes the final version, “Redazione C”, in which Moravia undertakes a profound stylistic shift from the third to the first person – an expedient that was to characterize nearly all of his fiction from that point onwards.

Il conformista was savaged by the critics when it appeared in 1951, and Moravia must have recognized that the Communist-dominated Italian literary world would be even more unforgiving of I due amici. As he later admitted to his good friend Enzo Siciliano, the disastrous reception afforded Il conformista had shaken his confidence in his ability to write political novels dealing with concrete historical circumstances; this undoubtedly led him, eventually, to put the work aside. Henceforth, Moravia would devote his considerable talent to portraying the very personal and individual stories of Italians whose inner lives would, in his eyes, be disfigured by the neocapitalism of Italy’s boom years.

Alberto Moravia
I DUE AMICI
Edited by Simone Casini
414pp. Milan: Bompiani. Paperback, ¤19.
978 88 452 5964 7

Michael McDonald is working on a biography of Curzio Malaparte.

‘We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,’ came the demand - and the divisionist movement of painters took up the challenge. But did their depictions of community and harmony succeed in building the national culture to which they aspired, asks Tim Parks

Tim Parks
Saturday June 7, 2008

Guardian

While the French were painting pretty landscapes, says the teacher, “our Italian artists were documenting the plight of the poor”.
The canvas she’s pointing to shows a drab interior where line upon line of unkempt elderly men, all dressed in black, sit despondent on wooden benches. A class of sniggering adolescents is crowding round. “Who painted it, maestra? When exactly?” She’s not sure. (It’s by Angelo Morbelli.)

“And what’s this? What’s this?”

Along the wall to the left is a large dark canvas, two metres by three, whose varnished surface reflecting daylight from the window opposite makes it impossible to see anything but glossy darkness. The teacher goes to the room’s list of works by the door. “Of course,” she announces: “Giovanni Sottocornola. The Worker’s Dawn. 1897.” And she adds vaguely, “Divisionismo.”

When they’ve gone, I find that this sombre panorama, soon to be removed to the National Gallery in London for the exhibition Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910, will disclose its content if you stand to the side and look from an acute angle: under brightly blurred street lamps a gloomy crowd, heads bowed against the rain, hurries over wet asphalt and gleaming tramlines. Close up, you can see that the diffuse tension between light and dark is achieved by laying threads of pure colour side by side, rather as if Seurat had preferred dashes to dots.

Further to the left is another Morbelli painting made in the Milan old people’s home known as Pio Albergo Trivulzio. The year was 1903. Here the darkness is even more impenetrable, the bowed heads of two women in black headscarves distinguished from the shadow behind only by the modelling of the brushstrokes. Again you have to move around for an angle that will release the image from the window’s reflection. The reference to religious iconography, as if these decrepit women were the ghosts of antique saints, is clear enough.

The first rooms of Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna exhibit the kind of sculptures and paintings in vogue when the place was built in the 1790s, soapy statues of nymphs and goddesses, canvases of such dull erudition - mythical scenes, meetings of learned societies - so flat and unremarkable in their handling of light and colour, that you can appreciate how, by the mid-1800s, any self-respecting young artist would have been desperate to sweep the whole worn-out tradition aside.

A corridor on the first floor displays the response of the so-called scapigliati, or “dishevelled ones”, the first wave of innovators. From the 1850s on, the scapigliati tried to inject new feeling into their work by breaking up outline and contour in a swirl of soft-focus sentiment. Their sculptures, often with a wax surface to facilitate a melting effect, are impressive but grotesque; the heads of old men appear to disintegrate in decay; children’s faces push out from the material as if not quite free from the womb.

The movement’s painters tried harder to please with pretty women dissolving in pastel colours and a general emotional blur between subject and background. Though the content of their work hardly suggests it, the scapigliati also established the precedent that opposition to the art world’s academic status quo would go hand in hand with political radicalism: various members of the group were among Garibaldi’s 1860 expedition to Sicily that eventually led to the unification of Italy under the Piedmontese crown. Hopes that the country’s cultural life would be reinvigorated were high.

“And this is the Segantini room,” announces a more sprightly and better-informed teacher, taking a door off the corridor. She gathers her pupils under The Angel of Life, another large, London-bound canvas, and explains that Giovanni Segantini was one of half a dozen serious exponents of divisionismo, a movement that came on to the scene in the late 1880s, influenced by both the scapigliati and the French pointillists.

At first glance, Segantini’s painting has nothing in common with the works of Morbelli and Sottocornola. In a soft glow of pale blue, a highly idealised mother and child sit airily robed in the crook of a gnarled tree whose gothic branches blacken as they reach into the sky above an alpine backdrop complete with silvery lake.

“This is simbolista,” the teacher declares, “a religious image secularised for a modern context” - the date is 1894 - and she explains how, following the publication of new theories about light and colour, rather than mixing their paints, the divisionists divided them up, juxtaposing fine lines of pure pigment to increase the luminosity of their work.

The painting has a sickly, pre-Raphaelite quality. And looking at Segantini’s other works on display here - another life-size study of mother and baby (this time realistically seated, in peasant dress on a milking stool in a lantern-lit barn beside a cow and its newborn calf), a plunging horse, a mountain plateau, a cow at a drinking trough - you immediately run up against the conundrum that divisionism poses for every viewer: what is the relationship between this peculiar technique and its subject matter? The logic of impressionism’s move into the open air for the wind in the trees and the bustle of the Parisian crowd is immediately evident: method and material call to each other, asserting the fleeting subjectivity of moment-by-moment experience. But what makes divisionism, with its claims to greater scientific know-how, simultaneously suitable for images of social protest, meditative landscapes and this rather embarrassing recycling of Christian icons?

The man who did most to put Italian divisionism on the map and give it an international profile was Vittore Grubicy. Born in 1851, he visited London in his early 20s to scout on behalf of an art collector, set up a gallery with his brother in Milan in 1876, and spent long periods in France and Belgium in the 1880s. It was here that he saw the first works of pointillism and post-impressionism, and on his return to Italy he transmitted his excitement to Segantini and, later, Morbelli and Gaetano Previati, all of whom eventually produced divisionist works for his gallery.

To the amusement of his friends, Grubicy also decided to start painting himself, and 12 of the 54 paintings the National Gallery is bringing to London are in his name. It is a strange choice. The least accomplished of the group, Grubicy painted small landscapes mainly concerned with moody lighting effects, charming and unremarkable. Light, Grubicy claimed, was one with life, and painting it more truthfully and intensely following modern scientific principles could act positively on the moral character of the nation. But in the room where his paintings hang, it is two landscapes by Emilio Longoni that catch the eye: here the divisionist technique is more daringly applied, as wavy parallel lines of red, green and blue merge into intensely meditative visions of an alpine pool, a glacial expanse.

Having signed up to Grubicy’s gallery in 1880, the talented young Longoni left in disgust when Grubicy, in an attempt to get better value for his paintings, signed one of them in Segantini’s name. Later, an interest in Marxism and radical politics led Longoni to take up social issues, and his Orator of the Strike is one of the main features of the London show. Almost life-size, a worker perched on a wall clutches a post to lean out over the crowd he is addressing. It’s a strong dramatic image, but again hard to see why the divisionist technique, which tends to impose precisely the mood of stillness so effective in the alpine landscapes, is appropriate.

This tension between method and intent is even clearer in Morbelli’s For Eighty Cents, which purports to protest at the poor wages paid to workers in northern Italy’s rice paddies. However, the image of a dozen women seen from behind as they stoop in pink, yellow and blue dresses, all luminously reflected in the water they stand in, has an intense beauty that stirs no desire at all for change. Either these artists blindly assumed that a method that was “scientific” must be allied to social progress, or the political posturing was actually an alibi for aestheticising the predicament of the working class.

“We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” the statesman Massimo d’Azeglio announced after Rome was taken from the Pope in 1870. A decade on, it was clear that this task would not be easy. Paradoxically, the Italian government’s tendency to put national pride before economic common sense slowed rather than accelerated the process of nation building. A tariff war with France in the late 1880s pushed grain prices prohibitively high and caused banks to collapse. Attempts to establish colonies in Ethiopia in the 90s led to humiliating defeat. Rapid industrialisation brought large-scale social unrest and emphasised the split between industrial north and agrarian south. The lack of cohesion was not helped by the Pope’s continued refusal to recognise Italy’s possession of Rome and his instruction to Catholics not to take part in Italian elections. In this scenario, Grubicy’s attempt to make divisionism a specifically Italian movement, his bizarre later denials that it had owed anything at all to French post-impressionism, can be seen as part of a general attempt to build a national culture.

The problem went deep. As early as 1826, Giacomo Leopardi had claimed that Italians found it more difficult than their northern neighbours to sustain a positive sense of collective identity. With the collapse of traditional communities and belief systems, England and France, Leopardi believed, had been able to fall back on well-developed, moneyed societies that had gradually substituted a morality based on religion with one that rested on custom and aesthetics, so that a man was “ashamed to do wrong in the same way that he would be ashamed to appear in a conversation with a stain on his clothes”.

Italy, on the other hand, divided as it then was, despotically governed and dominated by a religion that people observed - as Leopardi saw it - mostly out of superstition and subservience, had no such resources. People were more cynical, looking only to their own interests. Public debate was no more than “a school for insults”. What was required in these circumstances, Leopardi felt, was some collective “illusion” that would encourage people to respect themselves and each other. Revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini picked up this idea: Italians must develop a “religious concept of their nation”, he claimed.

This need to find, or invent, some shared idea of who the Italians were prompted artists and writers to focus on the question of community, or rather the transformation of traditional community into modern society. Giovanni Verga’s marvellous novellas evoke the peasant world of Sicily with a mixture of nostalgia for a rapidly disappearing rural life and horror at the empty hypocrisy of all moral discourse. In so many of these stories, most intensely in Rosso Malpelo, which tells of a brutalised young worker in a Sicilian sulphur mine, it seems that the only way forward will be through an act of violence.

Seen in the light of this yearning for national identity, the heterogeneous works of the divisionists begin to call to each other and make sense. The recovery of Christian symbols in secular settings betrays a desire to connect back to Italy’s devotional tradition, even in the absence of an underpinning theology. The effect is often crudely emphasised by arching the top of the paintings, something typical of votive works. Likewise the images of peasants and workers, always represented as in harmony with the landscape or themselves a force of nature, stress their solidarity and the painter’s desire for solidarity with them. The largest painting at the National’s show, Giuseppe Pellizza’s The Living Torrent, has a huge crowd of farm workers marching down a valley directly towards the viewer. At the head of the group, beside two biblically bearded leaders, a woman holds a baby, reminding us that the mother-child relationship is the basis of all community, or at least all Italian community.

One of the most accomplished divisionists, Pellizza didn’t paint only workers. The Procession, finished just before The Living Torrent, shows a church congregation walking towards us, led by three nuns in white holding a crucifix. The sense of a community moving forward together and the intimate connection of figures and landscape would appear to be more important than the purpose of the march. To add to the ambiguity behind these artists’ work, while the socialism they subscribed to looked to the future, their paintings and the Catholic symbols they drew on suggest a powerful nostalgia. The sentiment is strongest in Morbelli’s poignant depictions of the elderly poor: community is most intensely felt, it seems, where it is almost dead.

As Italy’s economic situation worsened, social unrest intensified to reach a climax in 1898, when the army fired on a crowd in Milan, killing 80. Whether because of police repression or, more probably, because their whole approach was unsuited to the portrayal of conflict, this massacre marked the end of the divisionists’ focus on social protest. Segantini had long withdrawn to his beloved Alps. Morbelli set up his studio in the old people’s home. Pellizza shifted towards symbolism and rural settings. So it was left to a second generation of divisionists, most notably Umberto Boccioni, to transform the movement into something more convincingly engaged with modern life.

Surprisingly, Boccioni’s mentor among the divisionists is the one whose work is hardest to take for the modern viewer. Gaetano Previati was above all a symbolist, creating images that fuse Christian and classical iconography in landscape settings. Luminous Madonnas sit in fields of lilies or chrysanthemums; his Chariot of the Sun turns the myth of Phaeton into an impressive if pompous divisionist study of light. But this rejection of realism allowed Previati to break up perspectives and let some dynamism into his painting; in the very bizarre Maternità, for example, a mother and child, sit in a whirl of angels’ wings and mountaintops. Similarly sized and equally snowy, folding wings and peaks seem interchangeable.

To move from this canvas to Boccioni’s The City Rises is to see the much younger artist applying the same dynamism to the subject of urban development. The scene is a big construction site; in a vortex of activity a red horse, yoked in blue, heaves building materials among frantic workers tugging on ropes. But the viewer no longer watches from a distance. Rather, he is plunged into the action, so that it’s hard at first to make out what is going on, only that it is exciting and important. All the Catholic pathos and picturesque nostalgia of the earlier divisionists is gone. Solidarity with the worker’s plight has been replaced by enthusiasm for the future he is building. And in fact the painting is dated 1910, one year after Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto had declared: “We shall sing the great crowds agitated by labour, pleasure and sedition. We shall sing the multicoloured and polyphonic ebb and flow of the revolutions in modern capitals . . .”

With the arrival of this convincing fusion of technique and subject matter, this emphatically positive vision, or “illusion”, of an Italy in the making, divisionism was all at once a thing of the past. It was in this new, euphoric spirit that Boccioni along with other futurists would volunteer for the first world war. And it would be precisely this idea of a national unity forged through heroic collective effort that Mussolini would exploit in his creation of fascism.

· Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910 is at the National Gallery, London WC2, from June 18 to September 7. For details, call 020 7747 2885 or go to nationalgallery.org.uk

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

By Gary Fennelly

Former World Chess Champion and Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov has been attacked by radio-controlled penis during a meeting of opposition activists.

Around 700 opponents of the Kremlin were attending Kasparov’s address in Moscow at the weekend.

Pro-Kremlin demonstrators decided to interrupt Kasparov’s address, designed to unite opposition political forces, by launching a rotor-assisted plastic phallus towards Mr Kasparov.

The unconventional chopper managed to stay up for at least 20 seconds before stunned security guards swiped it out of the air.

The prank was staged by “a couple of pro-Kremlin Young Russia activists” reports the Moscow Times. Mr Kasparov was unharmed.

Kasparov laughed off the incident remarking that it was “below the belt” .

“I think we have to be thankful for the opposition’s demonstration of the level of discourse we need to anticipate,” he said.

An onlooker said the incident was a “genital reminder about who is in charge”.

Kasparov became the youngest ever World Chess Champion in 1985 but is widely known for being the first world chess champion to lose a match to a computer, when he lost to Deep Blue in 1997.

He announced his retirement from professional chess in 2005 to devote time to politics. He later formed the United Civil Front movement, and became a member of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration of Vladimir Putin.

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

From its founding in 1927, the University of Houston has delivered quality college instruction to successive generations of working students at a reasonable cost. Philanthropist Hugh Roy Cullen endowed the fledgling institution with family millions for the stated mission of giving the city’s working-class young people access to higher education.

In fact, thousands of out-of-state students have trekked to Texas over the years to take advantage of one of the best university bargains in the country, even at nonresident tuition rates.

In its drive to achieve state flagship status as a top research institution, UH’s regents and academic leaders seem to have lost sight of the immense value that low tuition costs have played in UH’s success as it has grown into a four-campus system. The board of regents voted last week to raise tuition and fees by 6 percent a year, with higher increases for parking and student housing. That will raise an additional $17 million to improve programs and faculty.

As a result, a student at the main campus will pay $3,329 for 12 credit hours. Although the university will cover the tuition and fees for freshmen from families making less than $30,000 a year, many students’ parents make much more than that but cannot substantially contribute to their educational support.

In announcing the boost in tuition, regents Chairman Welcome Wilson Sr. indicated his priorities for UH. “I sincerely feel,” Wilson told the Chronicle, “we cannot be that low-cost alternative when it comes to education.” Regents recruited new Chancellor and President Renu Khator last year based largely on her success in expanding the research base of the University of South Florida while serving as its provost. While Khator has said that top research capability can go hand in hand with a mass enrollment, higher tuition will inevitably discourage the latter.

The only regent to vote against the hike was Lynden Rose, a former captain of the Cougar basketball team who earned undergraduate and law degrees from the school. “Our students, a lot of them are not going to have the ability to pay more without borrowing money, and borrowing money is becoming more difficult,” Rose said. He questioned why UH was raising its tuition when the Texas Tech System is holding the line on costs.

UH’s most influential alumnus in the legislature, state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, seconds Rose’s view. “With gas prices at historical levels, I find it insensitive that the regents would vote to increase tuition at a mostly commuter school,” Whitmire said. He blamed an ill-considered deregulation of state college tuition in 2003 for opening the door to escalating costs. Whitmire says he wholeheartedly supports UH’s efforts to achieve Tier 1 status, “but not on the backs of students many of whom come from working-class families and are often not as fortunate as some of the students who attend UT and Texas A&M.”

In the end, the only way UH can become a major research campus and maintain its role as the educator of tens of thousands of middle-class students is for the Legislature to support it at the same level it supports the University of Texas and A&M systems. The state’s most populous region needs a university that can perform the research industry needs to be competitive and educate the highly skilled work force upon which this region’s prosperity depends.