When people support your academic institution solely because of its football program, look out.

Karimov’s Kommandments.

Schiano and his football program have pretty much cost Rutgers its intellectual reputation. Now that he’s gone, Rutgers will have to strain even more to pay for its pathetic fixation on games.

***************
UD thanks Dave.

…curates the current show at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Six Artists From Cairo.

Elliot Hirshman, UD‘s erstwhile, young-man-in-a-hurry, colleague – whose negotiation of a massive raise over his predecessor’s salary at a Cal State campus really pissed people off – is back in the news.

Hirshman left DC for the $400,000 a year presidency of San Diego State (whose condition at the moment UD would characterize as sports-corpse):

It was that $400,000 salary – awarded in July to the new president of San Diego State on the same day the trustees raised tuition by 12 percent – that lit a match under the already heated topic of executive pay.

California has cut about $1 billion from CSU’s budget in recent years, tuition and fees have doubled since 2007, and hundreds of instructors and courses have vanished.

Meanwhile, San Diego’s new president, Elliot Hirshman, accepted a salary that was $100,000 higher than the outgoing president, a raise of 34 percent.

Indeed, ever since July Elliot hasn’t been able to preside much over the school, his remarkable dedication to the bottom line having alienated pretty much everyone before he was able to draw one presidential breath. No fewer than three state legislators have introduced bills capping the system’s executive compensation this way and that way.

Elliot and the generous Cal State trustees have tried sitting all of this out, hoping the controversy would go away, but no such luck. The pressure has built, threatening to unseat the chair of the trustees himself, so the trustees have finally folded.

California State University trustees voted today to limit salaries for new campus presidents, and to consider economic realities before making salary offers.

The new plan, approved unanimously by the trustees in Long Beach, caps a president’s base pay at 10 percent of what the prior president earned, but allows it to be supplemented with private money.

You want that private money thing in there so that you can guarantee corporate interests an opportunity to exploit the school.

Elliot must be dreading the next round of negotiations on his salary. Surely the school doesn’t expect him to be satisfied with $400,000 next year.

… the-drunk-coach-in-the-Mercedes, should-we-have-luxury-boxes-in-the-new-stadium type stuff… But when your university lies in the very heart of what Newt Gingrich calls elitist America, you get to go big-time all the time. Did your president really sign off on Lloyd Blankfein’s sixty-eight million dollar bonus? (Yes!) And is one of your highest-profile trustees being buzzed by the SEC because so many people who worked for him have been arrested for insider trading? (Yes again!) Are there skits being performed even as we speak in which his eventual residence in a jail cell is anticipated? (Yes yes yes yes yes!.)

————-

UD thanks Roy.

… fixation.

… dreadful legal market will surely involve suing university researchers who allow their names to be used on articles ghostwritten by pharma. When people are harmed by the drugs falsely represented in these articles, and when the government pays for the falsely represented drugs, there should be legal recourse. More and more scholars are elaborating on what those forms of recourse could be.

We might well see, for instance, law professors at a university teaching their students how to sue medical school professors at the same university. The law professors would explain that while it’s immoral to allow other people to do your research and your writing for you, and then to take credit for it, it’s illegal to be involved in forms of misrepresentation that harm people. It’s called fraud.

… it’s anti-psychotic time!

[I]n April 2010, Romney gave a speech at Claremont McKenna College, one of America’s great undergraduate institutions. [The speech was titled No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.] The only item of interest is that Romney accepted payment from them: an $11,475 honorarium. There’s nothing wrong with Romney accepting such payment from a non-profit institution, and it was clearly a bargain rate when compared with some of his other gigs. But it makes you wonder why he didn’t do it for free. He also accepted payment from the non-profit Quest Educational Foundation. Quest provides tutoring and mentoring to high-school students in Florida and Romney spoke at their annual fundraiser (Gingrich was a speaker at the 1999 event) for a $35,771 fee.

Romney, this Weekly Standard writer points out, is worth $250 million. The writer clearly has in mind the suggestion that extremely rich people might want to support worthy non-profit causes rather than drain them of scarce funds – might want to support them not merely by accepting invitations to give speeches, and by bringing star power to their fund raising events, but by waiving any fee.

Can we make the case for accepting a fee under these circumstances?

Well, plenty of people will make the none of your effing business argument. It’s a private transaction, our economic system is called capitalism, the guy’s free to accumulate capital. Blow it out your ass.

There’s also the nothing is valued unless it costs something argument. Placebos cost almost nothing to make and for millions of people probably relieve their depression as effectively as expensive anti-depressant pills. But if you knew you were taking a free pill for your depression, that would depress you more! Free means worthless! Or it means you’re not really clinically depressed, which is also depressing.

For many commodities, the magic seems to reside in their price.

******************************

Or, you know, in their pain. Why would you want to join a university marching band if you weren’t first beaten almost to death before you were allowed to join? The pain of hazing confers value on the group. In a similar way, the problem with placebos is that they have no side effects. If weird unpleasant shit isn’t happening to you, you can’t be treating your depression.

“Last night,” said UD to Mr UD as he drove her to the Grosvenor Metro stop this morning, “I dreamt that a man and his family asked me for help. I was walking home and they stopped me and asked me for some sort of assistance.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So I said to the man What do you do for a living? And he said I’m a CIA agent. And I said If you’re a CIA agent you can survive anything and then I kept walking.”

“Was that the whole dream?”

“Well, here’s something else. In my arms, I was carrying home meat. Wrapped supermarket meat of all kinds. No bag. Just carrying all these wrapped meats.”

Les UDs gazed at the gorgeous morning fog along Wisconsin Avenue. It made everything moody.

“I don’t know what it means,” said UD, “but I think I know some of the influences. This ex-CIA agent, a GW grad, is in trouble for leaking information. I read about him before I went to sleep. Plus I spent the weekend with my sister, a vegetarian.”

“Fine. That explains it.”

“It doesn’t really.”

“Does anyone take the interpretation of dreams seriously anymore? Dreams are so weird. How can such weird stuff tell us anything?”

“Art is weird. It’s often completely absurd. Do we say that – I don’t know – Mrozek’s The Elephant tells us nothing because it’s absurd?”

Mr UD smiled broadly.

“One of my happiest memories is when Mrozek visited us in Cambridge when I was a little kid. I made him laugh! I said something that made Mrozek laugh.”

Among them, many Muslims.

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is the object of a big-time lawsuit charging that a bunch of their doctors performed a bunch of unnecessary (in one case fatal as well as unnecessary) heart procedures.

Plus, it’s alleged, a kickback scheme selected surgery-mad surgeons and gave them mucho money each year to keep up the good work.

A discussion.

***************

UD thanks Dirk.

“What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness, consciousness of many extraordinary kinds,” [William Gass] writes in “The Literary Miracle.” But this is “not that of the artists themselves, for theirs are often much the same as any other person’s. . . . It is not the writer’s awareness I am speaking of but the awareness he or she makes. For that is what fine writing does: it creates a unique verbal consciousness.”

Or think of it this way: Dull confessional poetry is dull because it records the consciousness of the artists themselves – I feel this, I feel that, this scene makes me feel this way, that scene makes me feel that way… As Gass says, the artist’s consciousness is liable to be just like ours, so there’s no art, no surprise, nothing new, when she simply discloses it.

Poetry lifts us from propositional statements about what it’s like to have a particular human consciousness to a unique, fashioned, verbal, consciousness. This consciousness is not the poet’s – it’s not anybody’s. It’s the product of the poet’s transcendence of her measly consciousness via the act of writing the poem. If she’s a good writer, the words will push past the ego and its restless self-monitoring to a stately capture of broader truths. The poet will make an awareness, a verbal awareness.

And you want that from the poem, because you know damn well your measly consciousness traps you in triviality and anxiety. You want the doors of perception cleansed.

So Iris Murdoch says:

The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one. . . . This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals.

Great poems are cleansed perceptions wordified. Somehow the discipline of ordering words in a certain way is the cleansing, an act of self-transcendence and true-world-invocation. For us, reading the poem, activating its verbal awareness once again is the discipline.

Meaning if you want to feel the truth of consciousness – not be informed about a particular state of consciousness being experienced at a particular time by a particular person – you could do worse than this sort of thing:

A Clear Day and No Memories

Today the air is clear of everything.
It has no knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
This invisible activity, this sense.

******************************************

Well, this Wallace Stevens poem is consciousness of – as Gass says – an extraordinary kind. Yet everyone has shared some aspect of it; everyone knows the truth here conveyed. It’s like – UD‘s here at the beach, at Rehoboth, and the water’s dark gray and the sky is gray and the sand just sits there.

Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day
Riddled by wind…

This is Philip Larkin, finding sure verbal footing in a shoreless world, creating a verbal awareness of there being nothing underfoot. As when, on a vacant cold beach day, the mind clears of everything, the air carries no implication, no mood, no memory. “The mind is not part of the weather.” Somehow the atmosphere overwhelms the mind’s effort to establish itself in the world, to interpret the world, to make the world human. We now have the conviction of our non-existence; the air “flows over us without meanings” because we are not there to lend meaning to the air, to arrest and shape its flow. In the recession of consciousness, the world becomes a “shallow spectacle,” mere sense without significance. It carries on its invisible life with with no heed of us.

Is this a horrible thing? Does the poem express misery, anxiety? No. It’s not even told from a first-person point of view — it’s about “us.” The mood is calm, accepting. We can’t reanimate the dead with our loving memories – so be it. We’ve faded to nothing; the world has won. Okay. This is pure awareness, no strings attached. And there is something euphoric, exhilarating about this purity; it makes a great poem. It infuses the delight of clarity into our consciousness as we read the poem. It is a peculiar sort of victory, after all, that one of us has found the words that capture a wordless feeling of nothingness.