I’ll tell you one of the reasons I love to blog.

When I analyze a poem by W.D. Snodgrass, his widow writes to tell me I got it right.

When I discuss an essay by Richard Poirier, the publisher of the book at Harvard University Press – a friend of Poirier’s – writes to tell me I got it right.

Man. How often does that happen?

More than you’d think, if you blog.

… for my other blog, over at Inside Higher Education.

Title: RICHARD POIRIER, VAGUELY

Link to the post: HERE.

He is Peter Conti-Brown of Stanford law school, and he’s being quoted in my headline by Felix Salmon, who has a blog at Reuters.

Conti-Brown provides the hard numbers:

From 2003 through 2008, Harvard’s annual budget grew an average of 7% per year, starting at $2.43 billion in 2003 and ending at $3.46 billion. Including an estimated 30% loss to the endowment in 2008, the endowment grew an average of 10.15%, from $16.24 billion to $25.59 billion. In absolute terms, while the budget grew annually at an average of $206 million, the endowment grew an annual average of $1.56 billion. More strikingly, Harvard’s payout rates during this period remained a steady 4.4%, an average of more than 5.5% less than endowment growth. Far from spending like “drunken sailors,” universities were, if anything, not spending enough.

You already know all of this if you read University Diaries from ’03 to ’08. You also know that Harvard did spend like a drunken sailor on one thing: hedge fund employee compensation. (It didn’t need to spend like a drunken sailor on President Lawrence Summers’ salary because, at the same time he was running Harvard, he was a hedge fund manager. As Frank Rich at the New York Times puts it, he was “moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.”)

Salmon concludes, as does Conti-Brown that

If these institutions aren’t going to spend the money in their [ultra-bloated] endowments on providing educational services, they should pay tax on it.

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UD is particularly intrigued by Conti-Brown’s suggestion that the awesome, anally hoarded university endowment has finally transmogrified and hardened into a physical object, like a fantastic yacht, or Ezra Merkin’s Rothko room…. A commenter on the Salmon thread (all of the comments are worth a read) gets at something like this when he or she writes:

I see top universities with their massive endowments, tax free status, and generally state of the art and connected financial planning as becoming the new Church.

From the dark ages, to the middle ages and somewhat beyond the Church became an ever increasing landholder.

Yale in 2007 bought the nearby 137 acre Bayer Labs Complex which now makes it similar in size to the Vatican City.

Over the next hundred years, I see rich universities hoarding and growing their endowments and then splurging occasionally to buy up properties.

Are there any countervailing forces that will prevent Yale from owning one quarter of Connecticut 100 years from now?

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What if there were a car, the ultimate luxury car, called The Harvard Endowment? What would it look like?

Like this, I guess.

They took that Veyron and rammed it right into a wall.

If our top universities are going to become the new church, they’re going to have to manage their endowments better.

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But hey. Speaking of what you’ve got and how you should spend it… Allow UD, on this her birthday, a moment of payout.

The lesson of the crashed roadster is more than clear to me: Appreciate your assets, and be wise with them.

I’ve got a blog that a lot of smart, witty, and humane people read. It’s the most liquid asset in the world this thing, allowing me immense purchase on pleasure and understanding.

It even, amazingly, lets me do, in a small way, what I said from the start, in my blog’s tagline, I wanted to do: change things.

For this, I thank you.

… Anthony Grafton described this blog as a “long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it,” UD, madly flattered as she’s been, has brooded a bit over focused.

In fact, long before Tony mentioned focus, UD had given thought to this feature of her blog, a blog titled, after all, University Diaries. How bound to the campus must it be?

As University Diaries has gained a good readership, UD finds herself sometimes talking about things that have little to do with universities — odd stories she finds funny and thinks her readers might also enjoy; and, more significantly, details of her life qua humanoid.

Of course you could say that any data you receive about UD — and her husband, also a professor! and her daughter, a university student! — is, stretching things a bit, university-related. But how much of a critique of the university as we know it is a photograph of UD‘s kid singing backup for Bruce Springsteen?

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UD‘s commitment to focus sometimes means she obviously, desperately, attempts to draw a university connection to a story that really has none (Bernie Madoff went to Hofstra!); but more often she’s simply interested in writing about a story or a scene from her life that involves I guess you’d say culture, broadly conceived.

Since a serious liberal arts education understands itself to be producing cultured people — people familiar with world history, philosophy, political theory, art, science; people able to argue almost anything intelligently; even people who regard themselves as artisans of culture (musical performers, creative writers) — it has, over the years, seemed to UD that details of her life and the life of some of the people she knows that may reflect the rewards, as she sees them, of having been liberally educated, wouldn’t be out of place.

I mean, there are connections between doing something well and knowing things… Which seems an obvious thing to say, but in an anti-intellectual culture it can annoy people when you suggest, for instance, that ignorant histrionic poetry is a bore, educated controlled poetry often very exciting, etc. As T.S. Eliot wrote:

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are what we know.

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Anyway. Here are two absolutely non-university stories that for whatever reason UD feels like sharing.

Well, maybe in a rather twisted way there is a university connection.

Seamus Heaney recalls a recent Letterkenny hospital stay while recuperating from a stroke:

“[Bill] Clinton was here for the Ryder Cup. He’d been up with the Taoiseach [Bertie Ahern] and had heard about my ‘episode’. The next thing, he put a call to the hospital, and said he was on his way. He strode into the ward like a kind of god. My fellow sufferers, four or five men much more stricken than I was, were amazed. But he shook their hands and introduced himself. It was marvellous, really. He went round all the wards and gave the whole hospital a terrific boost. We had about 25 minutes with him, and talked about Ulysses Grant’s memoirs, which he was reading.”

Like a kind of god!

I dunno. This, plus a moment from Hillary’s trip to India, in which after a long day of travel and diplomacy she charmed hundreds of university students with tales of her love of Indian food, got me thinking.

These stories remind me that I’ve always been staggered by the genial hyper-energetic hyper-sociability of the Clintons. I’m grateful there are people like these in the world, shooting from the Ryder Cup to Ahern to the entire ward of a hospital in one afternoon; flying to India with a still-sore elbow and charming hundreds with tales of your love of their cuisine… But while I’m no Richard Rorty (Watch this clip from an interview with him and tell me professors, even big famous ones, aren’t pathetic.), I’m (Did you watch it? Did you find yourself torn between laughing out loud and crying?) pretty (Doesn’t it read like a satire of a psychoanalytic session?) introspective (Directed by Woody Allen?). (Am I cruel, that I laugh more than cry when I watch this?) (Doesn’t the funny language on the screen deepen the satirical feel?).

… is an attractive — nay, adorable — blog with a great title and great graphics, written by a thoughtful twenty-something who thinks UD‘s hot shit.

What more could you want?

Quite a bit of spam in Comments today, and while deleting it, I seem to have deleted some legitimate comments. If you find your comment has been deleted, it was accidental. Apologies. Feel free to post it again.

… Tenured Radical and Carlat Psychiatry,  two spectacular blogs.   Well-written, socially committed, human, humane.  All that a blog should be.

Now that you’re here, feel free to look around at other UD posts.

It says Comments are closed on that last post, but they’re not. I mean, as always, I welcome comments. If you’ve been trying to comment, I apologize. I’m working on fixing it.

Comments don’t seem to be closed on this post. Feel free to put your comment here.

UO MATTERS is a new blog written by anonymous faculty members at the University of Oregon, a school that’s gotten more than its share of negative attention on University Diaries.

The pun in the blog’s title points to matters of importance on campus (an overpaid president, too many administrators, a sports obsession, a budget crisis, anti-intellectualism, etc.) and the basic attitude of concern among the blog’s authors — their university matters, and its betrayal of fundamental academic principles is so severe that these people have gone public.

Reasonably public. The university can be vindictive, so they’ve chosen to remain anonymous.

If you take a look at UO MATTERS, you’ll see that at this point it’s still rather an insider’s document, most of it offering specifics about salaries, cutbacks, distribution of funds, and so forth. UD anticipates that this blog will evolve toward a more public voice, since its issues are the same issues all ill-run universities confront.

UD thanks one of its writers for alerting me to UO MATTERS.

… said my aunt, “became more and more preoccupied with Big Bang-type questions as he got older.  Why is there something?  What is nothing?  A colleague of his at NIH was a religious Jew, and your father respected this man, and they had long conversations about belief…”

For most of his life, I guess my father had, along with his faith in science, what Richard Rorty means by a religion of art.  My father’s two cultures were empirical clarity and aesthetic mystery.

Friedrich von Schelling calls beauty “infinity represented in a finite way.”  I suppose my father’s yearnings toward the infinite were no different from anyone else’s.  They might have been more intense than other people’s.  After all, if he were here he’d probably remind me that the realm of science contains its own soul-enthralling depths.

Given his family background, though, science would always be the great liberation for him, making it impossible for him to invest his yearnings in any creed.

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Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton’s book about religion, and he quotes Eagleton:

What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women? … [Religion’s] subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.

Like Christopher Lasch toward the end of his life, Eagleton represents a man of the left for whom one particular symbolic form — progress, liberal enlightenment — has failed in its promise to encompass human yearnings. What Fish calls “the tragedy and pain of the human condition,” and humanity’s yearning for “a transfigured future” (the phrase is Eagleton’s), is far more compelling to Eagleton at this point than political, as well as scientific, efforts to relieve our pain.

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Update, correction:

A blog is a beautiful thing. I just received an email from a reader in response to my tale of the Czech Torah. The email’s titled They Weren’t Unburied Torahs, and it includes an attachment titled Memorial Scrolls Trust, Westminster Synagogue, Kent House, Rutland Gardens, London.

… Fearful that the deserted synagogues and community buildings would be at the mercy of looters and plunderers, a group of Jews at the Jewish Museum in occupied Prague submitted a plan to the Nazis to save the Jewish ritual and cultural treasures in the vulnerable buildings by bringing them to the museum in Prague so that they could be catalogued and preserved. Why their Nazi overseers accepted the plan is not known. The result was that the Nazi controlled Prague Jewish Community sent out the orders that implemented the plan and permitted the transport companies to carry Jewish goods. With a few exceptions, the Torah Scrolls, other liturgical treasures in gold and silver and ritual textiles were sent to Prague, along with historic archives and thousands of books. The remaining Jews were deported in 1943, 1944 and 1945, and quite a number of these late deportees survived.

… [I]n 1956, the Michle Synagogue, in the suburbs of Prague, became the warehouse at which the hundreds of Torah Scrolls were consolidated from various locations. They had come from the large Prague Jewish community and from the many smaller communities that were scattered across what was left of Bohemia and Moravia, after the Sudetenland had been detached. The Scrolls in the Michle Synagogue did not include Scrolls from Slovakia, which was under a separate administration.

… Eric Estorick, an American art dealer living in London, paid many visits to Prague on business in the early 1960’s and got to know Prague artists, whose work he sold at his Grosvenor Gallery. Being a frequent visitor to Prague, he came to the attention of the authorities, and, on a visit in 1963 he expressed some interest in a catalogue of Hebraica. He was approached by officials from Artia, the state corporation responsible for trade in works of art, and asked if he would be interested in buying some Torah Scrolls.

Unknown to him, the Israelis had been approached previously with a similar offer, but the negotiations had come to nothing. Estorick was taken to the Michle Synagogue were he was faced with wooden racks holding about 1800 Scrolls, in seriously damp conditions. He was asked if he wanted to make an offer. He replied that he knew certain parties in London who might be interested.

On his return to London, he contacted a fellow American, Rabbi Harold Reinhart, of the Westminster Synagogue, one of whose congregants, Ralph Yablon, offered to put up the money to buy the Scrolls. First, Chimen Abramsky, who was to become Professor of Hebrew Studies at the University of London, was asked to go to Prague for twelve days in November 1963 to examine the Scrolls and to report on their authenticity and condition. On his return to London, it was decided that Estorick should go to Prague and negotiate a deal, which he did. Two trucks laden with 1564 Scrolls arrived at the Westminster Synagogue in February and March 1964.

After months of sorting, examining and cataloguing each Scroll, the task of distributing them began, with the aim of getting the Scrolls back into the life of Jewish congregations across the world. The Memorial Scrolls Trust was established to carry out this task.

UD‘s enormously grateful to her reader for this information.

I’ve just sent off a post to my blog at Inside Higher Education about Malcolm Lowry and James Agee, both of whom have centenaries this year. The post should be up pretty soon.

UD will be giving a paper at this year’s Malcolm Lowry Conference at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. It’ll be as much about Richard Rorty as about Malcolm Lowry.

… features University Diaries.

… by the write-up she got today in The Tenants of Colson Hall (great name) — the blog of the English department at West Virginia University. She thanks the Tenants, and welcomes their readers.

The scrappy, much-maligned firm has gone straight for the heart of evil by taking on the great and powerful goldmansachs666.com, a blog unfriendly to GS.

Here we are in the midst of the worst credit crisis in memory and the bank was forced to take bailout money from the government shortly after it was forced to change its structure from an investment bank to a bank holding company.

Really, Lloyd? Fighting Goldmansachs666.com is where you want to put your money right now?

… How long Morgan will last in this legal battle with Goldman Sachs will likely depend on the generosity and effectiveness of his lawyers. But how long Goldman will last may well depend on the level of populist rage that fueled the very existence of Morgan’s site in the first place.

First, make that our money.

And second, UD finds this populist rage thing very interesting. Evidence accumulates that many Americans have had enough of the massive greed of our recent markets and marketeers.

But what can do we do? They’ve got the government as sewed up as they’ve got the banks. As Ben Stein reminds us in today’s New York Times, “Wall Street knows how to get its hooks into government. This is how the world works. Money talks.”

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Thanks for the tip, RJO.

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Update: When GS decides to go after satire too, they should keep an eye on this author’s projected book:

The Takeover: Goldman Sachs and the Leveraged Buyout of America

No single company has ever had the prolonged hold on the American political establishment that has been achieved by Goldman Sachs. Of the last four Goldman CEOs, two have been chief economic advisor to the president (Rubin and Friedman), two have been Treasury Secretary (Rubin and Paulson), and one has been a governor and a senator (Corzine). But the firm’s unparalleled influence has extended for decades from former Deputy Treasury John Whitehead thru Bush 43 White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolton to current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s chief of staff plus the guy who runs the TARP program plus there are rumors that new White House public liaison official Kal Penn’s movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was actually backed with Goldman money. During this period in which Goldman rode the government like a pony, U.S. policy has not only thrown off the regulatory shackles that freed them to make money by the boatload, the USG has intervened directly and regularly to the benefit of Goldman from the Tequila Crisis “bail-in” to the AIG “bail out.” How can this have happened? Why has the media rolled over and let Goldman scratch them on the belly throughout? … Why is the government still full of them and others from even less reputable financial institutions (which, to Goldman’s credit, is virtually all others)? Why are we still drinking the Kool Aid that somehow these people have special powers after all we have been through? This book will provide answers. (Unless Goldman pays the author more to shut up. In which case, this one, I volunteer to write…well, to be lucratively co-opted out of writing.)

… a (really well-written) scandal-sheet. Or it might be exactly the sort of clearinghouse for developing stories, and public commentary on them, that strong journalistic blogs are meant to be.

Its target, Clemson University, is already experiencing terrible publicity because of its Animal Farm-based management structure. FITS suggests that there’s more wrong with Clemson than that.

We’ll see.