Fun read on the rectitude-look.
UD has always believed that if men could work out their differences verbally, rather than physically, the world would be a better place. Make speech acts, not war, is the rallying cry. Utterance; not ordinance. Phatics; not automatics.
You may recall the principle from the more homely Use your words, not your fists that you heard growing up.
UD envisions military institutes in this country staffed by people like Bannon and you know who, training generations of young men to think linguistically.
[Johnny] Manziel … won the Heisman in 2012… Other recent Heisman winners with questionable off-field problems include Auburn’s Cam Newton, who was in the middle of an NCAA eligibility investigation when he won the 2010 trophy.
In 2013, Florida State’s Jameis Winston was being investigated for a rape accusation in the middle of his Heisman run. There are more than 900 Heisman voters, and Winston was left off 115 ballots entirely. He still won the award with the fifth-largest margin ever, and he was never convicted in the investigation.
Other Heisman winners include O.J. Simpson, who was charged in an infamous murder case and later convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping in a separate 2007 case. Then there’s LSU’s Billy Canon, the 1959 Heisman winner who later in life spent more than two years in federal prison as a result of a massive counterfeiting scheme.
But the only player ever to have to vacate a trophy was USC running back Reggie Bush, who was found guilty in an NCAA investigation of taking improper benefits from an agent while at USC.
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[Last February, University of Oklahoma Heisman candidate Baker Mayfield was arrested for public intoxication.] In a dash cam video that went viral, Mayfield was seen shouting and cursing at police officers. When confronted, he attempted to run, only to be tackled into a wall. The video also showed him on the brink of crying in the back of a police car.
… Mayfield grabbed his crotch and shouted expletives in OU’s game against Kansas. Combined with the arrest and Mayfield’s flag-plant at Ohio State that caused a stir, Mayfield was forced to deliver his third public apology in less than a year.
Back in November 2014, in The Independent, Michael Calvin noted Sepp Blatter’s honorary degree from De Montfort University. The award’s citation reads in part: “He is forthright, visionary, ethical …”
And before you smirk – here are some other honorary degree recipients:
Blatter, sitting in an upright position, opens the envelope. What dexterity. It’s Blatter again, walking into a meeting, left foot first, then the right, knotting his necktie as he goes. A cool customer, this Blatter. Now sipping his drink, now negotiating with Horst Dassler of Adidas, back and forth and …
GOOOOOL!!!
Andrew Wolfson, The Courier-Journal:
Under her watch, …university employees have stole[n], misspent or mishandled at least $7.6 million in schemes at the health science campus, the law school, the business school and the athletic department’s ticket office.
[Provost Shirley] Willihnganz also was criticized for approving about $1 million in buyouts for former high-ranking employees, some of which included agreements not to disparage the university or its leaders.
She also was forced to apologize to faculty in 2008 for failing to act against [Robert] Felner, the education dean, despite more than 30 grievances and complaints that he had intimidated, harassed, humiliated and retaliated against faculty, staff, students and alumni.
Willihnganz said at the time that she tended to dismiss the early complaints against Felner — including a no-confidence vote by faculty — because he was a “high performer” and because the complaints came from professors and staff “entrenched in their ways and resistant to change.”
She later told faculty at a meeting that she was sorry. “Mostly what I think I want to say is people have been hurt and something very bad happened, and as provost I feel like I am ultimately responsible for that,” she said.
Felner was sentenced in 2010 to 63 months in federal prison for taking $2.3 million from U of L and the University of Rhode Island.
Ave atque vale!
O MAGNUM MYSTERIUM
That thou shouldst attend no class
Yet score naught but A’s!
Alleluia.
“I want to let every parent know, every parent know, that this probation will not affect the university, it will not affect our academic offerings and it will not affect the value of the degree,” said [South Carolina State University] President Thomas Elzey.
… when barbarians attacked, America’s own university Don is fast-becoming martyr to the protection and dissemination of knowledge: He must now fight on two fronts.
A former student of his asks a question.
I was lucky enough to be at a dinner for [Bellah] after a talk he gave at Yale, and a former student of his asked him about his experience of graduate school. “I really enjoyed it,” he said. What about being a junior professor? “I enjoyed that too!” he said, smiling. The former student asked him, “Was there ever a period of life you didn’t enjoy?” He smiled and paused thoughtfully. “Well, my wife died recently, and that was simply a fact I had to endure. But, basically, I enjoy life.”
I wanna be like these long-lived Episcopalian guys – like Bellah, and like Richard Wilbur, who’s 92 and still at it.
“I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy,” [Wilbur] explained in an interview with Peter Stitt in the Paris Review, “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.”
You don’t have to be Episcopalian.
Then he ended with a question to the Dalai Lama: “Your Holiness, can you tell us what was the happiest moment of your life? “ A silence full of expectation fell in the room, composed of a dozen scientists, some Buddhist scholars and meditators, and a hundred guests. The Dalai Lama paused for a while, looked up in space, as if seeking an answer deep within himself, then suddenly, he leaned forward and said to the Japanese scholar in a resounding voice, “I think …. Now !”
Maybe you don’t even have to be religious.
Beethoven said a thing as rash and noble as the best of his work. By my memory, he said: ‘He who understands my music can never know unhappiness again.’
Professional grieving process is a new one on UD, but you can’t deny the beauty and pathos of the phrase. I wonder if it’s in the latest DSM…
If you are still processing professional grief two months after someone’s been fired, consult your mental health professional…
You don’t want to make a practice of inviting financial criminals among your graduates to give commencement speeches on their way to jail.
For some schools – Wharton comes to mind – this would guarantee nothing but criminals for graduation speakers into the foreseeable future.
New York University, grasping the problem, said no to its own Charles Wilk, just convicted of “conspiracy to defraud the government and aiding in the filing of a false tax return.”
Or rather NYU said no to Wilk’s judge, who made the speech part of his sentence.
Wilk’s comrade in crime, Jeffrey Greenstein, did indeed address his alma mater, the University of Washington, on the joys and sorrows of massive tax evasion schemes.