… this blog claims that Teresa Sullivan, expunged president, has filed suit. I have no idea whether it’s true, but if it is, lots of new documents will come to light.
… this blog claims that Teresa Sullivan, expunged president, has filed suit. I have no idea whether it’s true, but if it is, lots of new documents will come to light.
UD‘s friend Jack sends her this breaking news from the campus of the University of Alberta: Three security guards were shot to death a few hours ago in an attempted robbery of an armored car in front of a bank machine. The location was a combined shopping mall and residence hall. A student who lives in the residence hall is quoted in my headline.
A few quick points about this developing story.
Don’t forget that Canada has a high level of private gun ownership.
Should universities not build shopping mall/residence hall combinations? This isn’t much of a solution. All urban (and many suburban) campuses have banks and bank machines, or are adjacent to these things. In the lobby of the campus building housing UD‘s office, there’s a Bank of America ATM. Whenever she sees uniformed men working on it, she thinks about how vulnerable they are (she is). But universities like George Washington University (four blocks from the White House) are so vulnerable in so many ways it’s not even funny. No one talks about dismantling these campuses.
There’s a real issue here having to do with notification of students, faculty, and staff. Woo claims she wasn’t notified:
On twitter, the university said that those within ‘close proximity’ were notified. i live in hub and i witnessed many of these events. i, along with many other students, did not get any sort of emergency notification. i am extremely disappointed in the lack of concern the university places on student safety.
Look at the Pope over there in Vatican City taking a star turn in What the Butler Saw as his city state fails to “shed its reputation as a scandal plagued tax haven.”
Look at the big happy family of University of Texas scientists who just went ahead and gave the family a huge state grant, without bothering to check with the provost or anything.
And look at another huge bureaucracy, the place UD‘s father spent his entire scientific career: the National Institutes of Health. The NIH just went ahead and gave America’s own tête d’affiche pour conflit d’intérêts (Charles Nemeroff has been called poster boy for conflict of interest so many times, I thought I’d jazz it up by putting it in French) another big grant, since you want to encourage his sort of behavior… or whatever…
I mean, it’s about bureaucracies, isn’t it? In all three cases? You’ve got cronies and histories of you do me and I do you and all… Everybody’s in everybody else’s pocket…
But eventually, as in all three of these cases, things get so brazen that the media notices; and then, if the money involved comes from taxpayers, politicians get all het up about it. As in this what the fuck? letter from Senator Charles Grassley to NIH. Grassley sends a copy to the notorious Donna Shalala.
*********************************
More coverage of the nettlesome Nemeroff.
*********************************
The latest University of Miami scandal jumps to the Miami Herald. Shalala and Nemeroff are trying out the no comment option, but I don’t think it’s going to work.
… essay? Opinion piece? Indictment? Not sure what to call it.
It appears in ESPN, of all places, and expresses a strange emotion – hopelessness, I guess. There’s something religious, something sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God about it. It recalls some of the most disgusting scandals in college football in the last few months, missing quite a few of them but touching on enough to make the tired point about the stinking corruption of the enterprise.
But this is a routine rhetorical strategy, beginning your article about the vileness of all aspects of university football by reviewing five or six of the most recent you-could-pukes. Usually the next step is to point out that even by those standards the Miami story startles; or people are getting upset but really the latest Chapel Hill vomit isn’t chunky enough to count… (Here’s a good example. Typical sentence: “After the last 12 months, which were filled with scandal and cover-ups and lies and payouts and allegations of child molestation and motorcycles and mistresses, The Ohio State recently reported something like four dozen secondary violations and we didn’t bat an eye.”)
Instead of this, the author goes all Ballad of Reading Gaol:
We make a monster of what we love, and to make a point about what our society honestly values, a writer might post here a comparison of the state-by-state salaries of head football coaches and governors… In the end we remain helpless against ourselves.
Each man kills the thing he loves, it turns out. As in the endlessly anthologized poem by James Wright about the beginning of football season in American towns:
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
********************************
We who are about to die for you losers salute you. Our mothers lie abed wondering why instead of fucking them our fathers want to watch us concuss.
Has another year of scandal and revelation and condemnation finally undone the sport? Are Petrino, Tressel, Paterno, Miami or Montana the beginning of the end?
C’mon. Does any casual fan, any casual reader, any casual viewer, any reasonable person anywhere at the beginning of the 21st century think of “big football schools” as anything other than big football schools?
As it was in 1905, it was another tough year for fans. How do you root for what’s on the helmet without worrying about what’s in it?
Yet we remain helpless against not merely our indifference to what’s in it but indeed to what’s on it. What fan really gives a shit whether it’s Auburn or Alabama? What you’re after is gladiatorial gore good enough to get you going.
I Dreamed That in a City Dark as Paris
I dreamed that in a city dark as Paris
I stood alone in a deserted square.
The night was trembling with a violet
Expectancy. At the far edge it moved
And rumbled; on that flickering horizon
The guns were pumping color in the sky.
There was the Front. But I was lonely here,
Left behind, abandoned by the army.
The empty city and the empty square
Was my inhabitation, my unrest.
The helmet with its vestige of a crest,
The rifle in my hands, long out of date,
The belt I wore, the trailing overcoat
And hobnail boots, were those of a poilu.
I was the man, as awkward as a bear.
Over the rooftops where cathedrals loomed
In speaking majesty, two aeroplanes
Forlorn as birds, appeared. Then growing large,
The German Taube and the Nieuport Scout,
They chased each other tumbling through the sky,
Till one streamed down on fire to the earth.
These wars have been so great, they are forgotten
Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere
In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed
To wander through my brain four decades later
As I have wandered in a dream through yours?
The violence of waking life disrupts
The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,
For dreams are licensed as they never were.
****************************************
Many poems and songs recount dreams – I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls, I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill, I Dreamed that I Was Old – and this poem about remembering and forgetting wars also casts itself as a dream. How else really to reach the war dead? If you are, like the poet, a war veteran, you will make contact with those dead in subconscious, flickering, tumbling, wandering moments…
I mean, UD has always loved Siegfried Sassoon’s Prelude: The Troops – especially its last verse, which pretty reliably makes her cry:
O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.
Yet this is direct, formal address, wide-awake sorrow and homage. Simpson’s night visitation feels more likely to be the way actual people make contact with the war dead, which is to say by being haunted by them.
Both poets use blank verse, with Simpson occasionally using end rhyme (unrest/crest; occur/were) but mainly featuring unrhymed lines (all of Sassoon’s lines are unrhymed); both poems derive from this form a stately hesitant gait, a queer little funeral march. The absolutely strict measure of Sassoon’s final two lines is at spectacular odds with the explosive rage and despair behind them, and this is what we typically expect in a poem, the poet asserting at least linguistic control over emotional and intellectual chaos, over outcomes too grotesque and vast really to be comprehended, much less assimilated.
Simpson’s poem is all subliminal, all, as he says, a strange dream, its strangeness extreme, but somehow licensed by the beyond-strange atrocities of our century (his poem’s speaker is – assuming he’s Simpson – a Second World War veteran communing with a soldier of the First World War). And as dream, it is free to invert and invent…
So its first line seems immediately all wrong. Isn’t Paris the city of light? A city dark as Paris… Paris during the war? War blasting even the city of enlightenment back to violet (the word one letter short of violent) night… Well, and it’s a dream after all with all the shifty inchoate imagery of the sleeping mind. Rumbling guns pump color – you hear the assonance, the repeated uh a vague menacing sound. And things are vague because the poet stands alone and a distance from them; there is the Front, and the poet is in the back, in the shadows, left behind. All he can see are the edges of war; and this is his mind struggling to get to the Front, to apprehend that reality directly. Restless, he stands alone in a Paris square, and finds himself – bizarrely – to be a poilu, a French World War One infantryman, an ordinary sort from the countryside.
I was the man…
reminds us of Walt Whitman’s line:
I am the man, I suffered, I was there.
Whitman celebrates here his powerful capacity to empathize, to feel exactly what are others – especially suffering others – are feeling; and Simpson is after something similar, his dreaming persona literally taking on the identity of “my confrere.” Yet as to really remembering: The wars are too great (there’s an echo here of course of The Great War), too vast, once again, for us to grasp; they become historical abstractions, like the ancient and vast Egyptian dynasties:
These wars have been so great, they are forgotten
Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere
In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed
To wander through my brain four decades later
As I have wandered in a dream through yours?
I thought of you, that’s all; I didn’t really commemorate you, as Sassoon commemorates, or feel with you, as Whitman feels with you; it’s just that you, poilu, wandered through my brain at some point while I was awake; and then that wandering presence inhabited, solidified, stood stock still, in my dreaming mind — ghosts inhabit a house; this ghost inhabits the speaker’s mind.
The violence of waking life disrupts
The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,
For dreams are licensed as they never were.
Things are out of joint; our war-torn world upends everything, makes everything weird, so that my (dead; dreaming) life propels itself backwards to your still-living, still-dreaming being in the darkness of the eternal war zone. The new global world of conflict – a world in which any behavior is “licensed” – is so grotesque that it infects our dreams in unprecedented ways. We are losing orderly ways of commemoration; we risk flattening our wars into abstraction. Yet we remain open to inhabitation.
UD reads these so you don’t have to.
UD reads the mainly indignant but occasionally explanatory (see this post’s headline) comments from University of Kentucky fans in response to an article that notes a faculty group’s objection to Kentucky’s basketball schedule. The notorious John Calipari’s insistence on “neutral sites” for games means “a geographic separation of entities which already can have a tenuous coexistence: athletic programs and the student body/campus community.”
In short, who gives a shit whether his team’s games have anything to do with whatever sports factory gives them a home? These are NBA men, not wussy college boys. As for that faculty group…
…who gives a rats opposite end orafice…They can say what they want…and make all the accusations they want…
I think he means Orafix.
Maybe what they ought to do…is have no college sports at all…maybe that would thrill the no life, calculus formula discussing intellects of the ever so popular and important entity as the faculty coalition….
Calculus formula discussing is nifty.
Most students take five years to move from academia to their chosen profession. We should celebrate those that are gifted enough to do it in one.
But they can do it in zero! We should celebrate that by shutting down Kentucky basketball.
UD‘s friend Dave Ridpath dreams the impossible dream by going to Colorado State University (site of some recent national sports news) and pointing out that building a new on-campus stadium when they already have an off-campus one is stupid.
Ridpath tonight is set to speak at a forum organized by opponents of an on-campus stadium. Skeptics argue CSU already has a perfectly decent facility in the 32,500-seat Hughes Stadium west of the city.
Ridpath said he was “dum[b]founded” when he heard CSU was considering building a new stadium. He said athletic success and student engagement aren’t linked directly to facilities, and he predicted that even if a new stadium is privately financed, costs for students will inevitably rise.
They’ll build it, of course; but Dave is in there trying.
Despite (because of?) my having recently called an excerpt from his book “tepid,” Andrew Delbanco has directed Princeton University Press to send me a copy (it’s here on my desk, sixth floor, Academic Center, George Washington University, Foggy Bottom, Washington DC) of said not-yet-released book, College, What it Was, Is, and Should Be (tepid title).
UD is pleased to have gotten the book, which she will now read and blog about.
*******************************
Ok, UD, so what’s your idea of a hotter title for a book of thoughts about college?
Lots of them. Here’s one:
College: Ooooooooh why is it I spend the day, wake up and end the day, thinking of yoooooooooo…..
Newspapers should not write bland articles quoting presidents of schools like Texas Southern University (graduation rate virtually non-existent; one corruption scandal after another) saying that the campus “is in the midst of a renaissance.” Newspapers should not affix bland headlines like NEW PLANS TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AT TSU to these articles. Is this Pravda? Izvestia? Is it the job of the nation’s press to jolly taxpayers into continuing to subsidize a disgrace? Why is TSU accredited? That’s the sort of question journalists should ask. Instead, the New York Times publishes some guy talking about how they just planted a bunch of trees.
Here’s the deal, from a much better article about TSU and schools like it:
… Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny.
… [D]ismal institutions like Chicago State … prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing.
… Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation.
… As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”
… [We have] to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.
… No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair.
Three Saudi doctors have filed a blockbuster lawsuit against the University of Ottawa, seeking more than $150 million in damages for alleged discrimination, defamation and malfeasance in public office, among other things.
I mean, what the hell did the University of Ottawa do? The med school will presumably have to shut down if they end up paying more than $150 million to these guys. Does that seem commensurate? I asked Mr UD what he made of it.
He laughed and said: “Well, I tell you one thing. If I were the University of Ottawa medical school, I would decide never, from this point on, to admit any Saudi students.”
… made a whirling world around our house this afternoon; and if the sky stays this clear, UD might be able to see an excellent meteor shower around three AM.
Longtime readers know that UD goes to her upstate New York house every August hoping to lie on the front field and see the perseid shower. She has seen a few of these, but sometimes the moon’s too full, the sky’s too cloudy, whatever.
Now here’s another shower – the Quads – due to appear in ‘thesda, and UD will be ready.
*****************************
Meteors tend to do what you’d think they’d do in poetry: They represent short bursts of brilliant life (as in, say, an elegy for Keats), or, more consolingly, they suggest a living universe of which we are somehow eternally a part. Even in way slangy pomo poetry – the contemporary form derived from modern poets like Frank O’Hara, the form UD calls the meta-maunder – you see the same symbolic value the Romantics gave the meteor.
Here, for instance, is a pomo maunder.
*****************************
Death, Is All
by Ana Božičević [Click on this link to read the poem uninterrupted by UD‘s commentary.]
I woke up real early to write about death (the lake through the trees) from
the angle of the angel. There’s the kind of angel that when I say
Someone please push me out of the way
Of this bad poem like it was a bus.—well, it comes running &
tackles me and oh, it’s divine football—Or
in the dream when the transparent buses
came barreling towards us:—it was there.
[Loose, drifty, stream of pedestrian consciousness… This is Rilke brought down from the Chateau de Muzot to talk about angels in the argot of the American everyday. Angels protect us from truly destructive collisions with the too-blunt — too transparent — truths of our lives and deaths.]
Half of all Americans say
they believe in angels. And why shouldn’t they.
If someone swoops in to tell them how death’s a fuzzy star that’s
full of bugles, well it’s a hell of a lot better
than what they see on TV: the surf much too warm for December, and rollercoasters
full of the wounded and the subconscious
that keep pulling in—
[Taken too far, though, this angel-thing can get a little silly — can become a way of denying even the fact of our deaths, fuzzying things up until it’s all about vague comforting lies.]
Who wants to believe
death’s just another life inside a box, tale-pale or more vivid?
Not me. Like in Gladiator, when they showed the cypresses
flanking the end-road—O set
Your sandal, your tandem bike, into the land of shadows—of course
I cried. Show me a cypress and I’ll just go off, but
I don’t want that to be it.
[I haven’t the slightest idea what death is, but I’m not going to fall for myths and fables of an afterworld, a tale more pale or more vivid than the one I’m living, but still a tale, still a series of events happening to a being who continues to be me. I mean, I’m perfectly capable of falling emotionally for the kitsch of some imagined human sequel, but rationally I know better.]
Or
some kind of poem you can never find your way out of! And sometimes
I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train
I see a house in the morning sun
and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry
and I think “Crisp inquiry”
& go on to work, perfumed of it—that’s the kind of death
I’m talking about.
[So we can’t really know, but we sense that there are fake deaths (mythic deaths, mythic tv deaths) and truer deaths, deaths we intuit by being alive to what around us is fragile and perishing and somehow trying to transmit truths. Amid morning sunlight, a contrasting ground-shadow reminds us – in a non-painful way, a way having nothing to do with buses barreling into you – that darkness underlies light.
We catch death’s perfume in moments like these.]
An angle of light. Believe in it. I believe in the light and disorder of the word
repeated until quote Meaning unquote leeches out of it.
[She’s a poet, a writer. She may not have the faith of a Christian in angels, but she has the faith of the writer in the way intense receptivity to the world’s angles, combined with patient efforts to get the better of words, may generate meaning – even transcendent meaning.]
And that’s
what I wanted to do with dame Death, for you:
repeat it until you’re all, What? D-E-A-T-H? ‘Cause Amy
that’s all it is, a word, material in the way the lake through the trees
is material, that is: insofar, not at all.
Because we haven’t yet swam in it. See what I mean?
I see death, I smell death, it moves the hair on my face but
I don’t know where it blows from.
[Perfumed of it, she explains to her friend, who I guess has asked her to tell her about death. I smell it, I sense it – in a visceral way – all around me in the world, but since I haven’t experienced it – haven’t swam in it – I can’t say anything more about it.]
And in its sources is my power.
I’m incredibly powerful in my ignorance. I’m incredible, like some kind of fuzzy star.
The nonsense of me is the nonsense of death,
[Death is the mother of beauty, says Wallace Stevens; our felt sense of the brevity and value of our lives, our own nonsensical forms of fuzzy-star imagining — these are the sources of individual creative power.]
and
Oh look! Light through the trees on the lake:
the lake has the kind of calmness
my pupils’ surface believes…and this is just the thing
that the boxed land of shades at the end of the remote
doesn’t program for:
[Isn’t it more plausible to think of death as an ineffable calm final beauty, a beauty the world sometimes gently forecasts for us in dark-and-light moments, rather than a packaged, fully pre-imagined plot?]
the lake is so kind to me, Amy,
and I’ll be so kind to you, Amy, and so we’ll never die:
there’ll be plenty of us around to
keep casting our inquiry
against the crisp light.
[Love’s the ticket – above all, we cherish our sense of a fundamentally well-intentioned world. Richard Wilbur puts it this way:
“I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that’s my attitude.”
Comely and good, we take care of one another and we take care of the world, generation after generation.]
Light is all like,
what’s up, I’m here I’m an angel! & we’re
all: no you’re not, that doesn’t exist. We all laugh and laugh…
Or cry and cry. The point is, it’s words, and so’s
death. Even in that silence
there’s bird calls or meteors or something hurtling
through space: there’s matter and light. I’ve seen it
through the theater of the trees and it was beautiful
It cut my eyes and I didn’t even care
I already had the seeing taken care of. Even in the months I didn’t have
a single poem in me, I had this death and this love, and how’s
that not enough? I even have a quote:
Love is the angel
Which leads us into the shadow, di Prima.
… the Threshold is UD‘s title for the massive, ever more massive, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, with its infinitely embellished mental debility stories, in one of which you’re sure to find your sad, anxious, confused, discontented self.
By the simple expedient of having lowered the threshold for clinical disorders to include pretty much anything you’re experiencing right now, the editors of the upcoming DSM have broadened their market share to Everybody. Somewhere inside the Thousand and One Nights of the American Psychiatric Association lies a take-this-pill tale tailored to you, and to all of your children.
With this latest DSM, there’s absolutely no reason for you to put off spending the rest of your life taking psychotropic drugs.
… and other university sports apologists had their way, Sandusky would have been a Penn State professor.
… says the New Republic about “over-rated thinker” Frank Rich.
UD likes clicker-intellectual, and hopes it catches on. Here (scroll down) are UD‘s many posts about clickers in university classrooms.