This too I know–and wise it were
If each could know the same–
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.
With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!
___
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.
The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed and cries to Time.
___
But though lean Hunger and green Thirst
Like asp with adder fight,
We have little care of prison fare,
For what chills and kills outright
Is that every stone one lifts by day
Becomes one’s heart by night.
With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.
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Who knows if this brave prisoner’s plea will meet with justice?
I fear not!
Uri Simonsohn fails to get the postmodern simulacrum memo.
Why is science fraud such a problem in China?
It is the result of interactions between totalitarianism, the lack of freedom of speech, press and academic research, extreme capitalism that tries to commercialise everything including science and education, traditional culture, the lack of scientific spirit, the culture of saving face and so on. It’s also because there is not a credible official channel to report, investigate and punish academic misconduct. The cheaters don’t have to worry they will someday be caught and punished.
Shi-min Fang, a high-profile fighter against academic fraud in China, is interviewed. The cost of his struggle is high.
I have been sued more than 10 times. Because the Chinese legal system is very corrupt and a ruling is not always made according to the evidence, it is not surprising that I have lost some libel cases even though I did nothing wrong. In one of these, a local court at Wuhan ordered me to pay 40,000 yuan in compensation and transferred the money from my wife’s account. I have also narrowly escaped from an attack with pepper spray and a hammer.
… to discern the figure in the carpet. …It was invaluable training,” said Ryan Crocker in a recent interview at his college,” in how to think about complex foreign societies.”
But that Henry James short story, which Crocker “analyzed for my senior oral,” concludes with no figure found, its enigma intact.
We interpret stories; we tell stories. We chase down meanings and patterns and plots all our life -in some sense, this is our life – but we never solve the mystery, discern the figure. Tzvetan Todorov puts our rather brutally simple situation this way: “Narrative equals life, absence of narrative, death.”
Crocker’s storied, harrowing diplomatic career has ended, and, as some sort of result, he seems to have fallen apart, having been arrested for DUI and hit and run. Although named as dean of Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, he has not been much in that role. He left to take an ambassadorship, and, for next year, he’ll be a teaching fellow at Yale.
The life Crocker lived for decades pitched him forward from one byzantine, bloody narrative to another – an existence nightmarish, but engrossing and heroic. Now there’s the business of being an ordinary man with nightmares.
Today is George Orwell’s birthday.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who has died after a long life of lieder, captures, especially in this song’s final verse, the pathos that for many of us accompanies days of the sort UD is currently enjoying –
Spring, with magic words,
breathing sweet pleasure…
Breathing sweet pleasure, yet
What makes the breeze so tangy and refreshing
comes from anguish.
Listen to this final verse:
Die Kelche sinken nieder,
Sie schauen erdenwärts:
O Mutter, nimm uns wieder,
Das Leben gibt nur Schmerz.
The flower-chalices wilt
and gaze toward earth:
O Mother, take us back:
life gives us only pain.
Listen to his voice just barely rise on sinken and schauen, carrying – just barely – wilting life. That soft slight turn up the scale. How eerie it is to me.
Tunisia’s Manouba University is a major site of resistance to Salafist activity in that country.
Students, faculty, and administration are fighting back strongly, and the government, after first remaining silent about the Salafists blocking classes there until women can attend in full veil, has now condemned them.
Coverage here from the university’s website (in French).
If Tunisia’s not careful, it’s going to start looking like Israel.
Vaclav Havel has died.
“His essays, lectures, and prison letters from the last quarter century are, taken altogether, among the most vivid, sustained, and searching explorations of the moral and political responsibility of the intellectual produced anywhere in Europe,” wrote Timothy Garton Ash, the foremost chronicler of revolutionary Central Europe, in his 1999 collection History of the Present. “Indeed, it is difficult to think of any figure in the contemporary world who has more cumulative authority to speak on this issue than Vaclav Havel.”
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[Havel] took from rock-influenced ’60s culture “a temperament, a nonconformist state of the spirit, an anti-establishment orientation, an aversion to philistines, and an interest in the wretched and humiliated…”
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Havel is a short and rumpled man, even in a sharp presidential suit. He’s a disaster at press conferences, wiggling his tube-socked feet under the table and making chewing sounds into the microphone before each response. He nearly died three times in the last eight years from various illnesses, and he reportedly headed to Portugal for a long cure soon after stepping down as president. He describes himself as perpetually nervous, afraid someone’s going to wake him from the dream and put him back in jail, where he probably belongs. He may have been the life of the party a time or two, but overall the impression he gives is that of an unspectacular man who probably would rather be drunk.
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Matt Welch, in reason, wrote an excellent 2003 essay about Havel from which the excerpts above are taken.
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“[We are] anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man’s understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such.
… This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respects for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well.”
A hero at the University of South Florida.
Background here.
They will lose this round. UK’s destiny is way Adzillatron. But the faculty is fighting. If they’re in it for the long haul, they will eventually win.
In keeping with Jeffersonian tradition, a hedge fund manager tears down a recently built 44 million dollar house to build a bigger house.
His architect explains:
Architect Jaquelin Robertson of Cooper Robertson Architects told the Sagaponack architectural and historic review board that the new home would be a cedar-shingled two-story Georgian Colonial-style house and compared the mahogany window trim to renovations at President Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, according to minutes from the board’s March meeting.
I for one refuse to worry about the future of a country whose founding values are so scrupulously maintained.
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Update: A role model for America’s future business elite.
In recent years, York University in Toronto and Florida State University have had to fight off efforts to establish chiropractic programs in their medical schools. (Here’s an excellent review of these failed efforts, especially the Jeb Bush-approved effort at FSU.)
At Mr UD‘s university, the University of Maryland, no such campaign has occurred, but something more insidious is happening, about which Steven Salzburg, a computer science professor there, has written in Forbes. Salzburg’s attacks on creeping anti-intellectualism at UMD are indispensable elements of the permanent watch professors everywhere must keep over the university’s integrity. You can’t count on presidents and trustees to keep watch. These particular proposed programs, for example, always come with huge gifts from in-search-of-legitimacy chiropractors, and administrators tend not to be able to see past the money. Only professors have the combination of empiricism and disinterestedness – and tenure – that can hold back the pseuds.
So Salzburg’s going after his reputable university’s housing of disreputable ideas and methods in its Integrative Medicine center, which features, among other absurdities, homeopathic approaches:
[H]omeopathic treatments are just water. Or rather, water dropped onto a sugar pill, and sold at stores such as Whole Foods, which has a section devoted to homeopathic remedies.
(A spectacular new Whole Foods just opened up down the street from UD‘s house, and she and Mr UD have joined the appreciative ‘thesdan crowds there. UD always avoids what she calls the Medieval Aisle. Too depressing.)
Salzburg concludes:
By providing a respectable home for these pseudoscientific practices, UM Medicine is undermining its own scientific and educational missions. But when the money is coming in, the administration seems quite happy to support it.
… has long been something like the following: Our eminent, money-generating professors will occasionally behave dishonorably – even in ways that have significant legal, not merely moral, repercussions.
We will deal with these events with Ivy gentility — we will say little or nothing, at least publicly. If we punish, we will not say publicly what that punishment was. We will never issue a public statement admitting that something bad happened on our faculty.
So, whether the event was Andrei Shleifer and Russia, or Lawrence Summers and Andrei Shleifer, or three law professors, plus a Harvard Overseer, and plagiarism, Harvard will deal with it quietly, admitting nothing, doing little (at least little that one can measure) by way of punishment.
If, as is the nature of Faustian bargains, Harvard loses a little of its soul with each of these events, well… The main thing is that Harvard can expect its faculty to be still about these things, to keep quiet, to be discreet.
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It isn’t always. It was really pissed at Summers and his, er, implausible remarks about his knowledge of his protegé Shleifer’s activities, for instance.
And now, in the notorious case of the Harvard-packed Monitor Group and its relationship to the Gaddafi regime, one Harvard faculty member has decided to say something. Directly to Drew Faust, Harvard’s president. Her reported response to him is telling.
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“[A] tyrant wanted a crimson-tinged report that he was running a democracy, and for a price, a Harvard expert obliged in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary,” said Harry Lewis, current Harvard professor and former dean, to the university’s president at a faculty meeting. “Shouldn’t Harvard acknowledge its embarrassment, and might you remind us that when we parlay our status as Harvard professors for personal profit, we can hurt both the university and all of its members? … We can’t keep having these economists go off to foreign countries and fill their pockets and create these huge embarrassments for the university.”
Here, on his blog, is his full statement.
Faust replied that for her to say anything about this would make her “scold in chief.”
That’s a sweet put-down, no? It implies, first, that Lewis is nothing more than a scold, and that no one, including Drew Faust, would want to join him in being a scold. A scold. Uncool. A finger pointer. A finger shaker. Some sort of uptight hyper-moralist. Because I mean there’s no clear wrongdoing here, moral ambiguity and geopolitical complexity being what it is… Remember what Benjamin Barber said: Everyone gets paid.
And after all, if the only thing you can do is scold, what’s the point? Harvard is only one small weak voice in the wilderness; it has no leverage in the larger world; it’s just a teeny overlooked little thing… When it speaks, no one listens.