“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.
With the latest resignation — they keep going up the food chain at North Carolina State; today it’s the chancellor — in the Mary Easley scandal, UD finds herself modifying her position vis-a-vis Mary, who, despite non-stop begging and bullying from a bunch of guys at NCSU desperate to get her out of her politically rigged, massively overpaid, totally corrupt job on campus, has refused to leave. (Today we also discover, via just-released emails, that her husband — at the time the governor — got the job for her.)
UD now thinks Mary should stay. Whenever a bunch of guys beat up on a woman it pisses me off. Screw them. They did all they could to get the little lady a big money do nothing gig at Patronage Acres and now they’re losing their jobs because they wrote emails to each other about what they were doing. Mary did everything right according to the Corrupt Southern University System Handbook. She kept her head down. She didn’t write any emails.
She gets to stay.
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Update: Mary just got canned.
Tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
Floor strewn with dead bodies, up to and
including Gertrude.
The University of Idaho is paying a Minnesota consultant who spends less than two weeks a month on the Moscow campus $112,500 to serve as its “chief inspiration officer,” according to public records.
This one takes UD‘s breath away. Read the whole thing.
The only precedent she can find is from her favorite university, Southern Illinois Carbondale. Remember?
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Update: Chronicle of Wasted Time. And Money. DO NOT READ if you are currently on any form of depression medication.
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Update: Google Image, Chief Inspiration Officer.
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