And he ain’t even gotten to sports yet!

***************

Thomas Frank’s hit piece on the American university is swell (I’m still reading it), but Scathing Online Schoolmarm would caution against sentences like this one:

When the board forced the president to resign last June, they cloaked the putsch in a stinky fog of management bullshit.

Mixed metaphors are bad enough (cloaking your putsch in a fog?) but when you bring in bullshit… When you make the fog’s composition the shit of a bull… No.

Note that the sentence in my headline also mixes metaphors.

****************

Pointless money-drains like a vast administration, a preening president, and a quasi-professional football team should all be plugged up.

Finally he gets to football.

****************

Ours is the generation that stood by gawking while a handful of parasites and billionaires smashed [the American university] for their own benefit.

The problem with Frank’s cri de coeur resides in sentences like this one. Too much cri, too much coeur. Not enough compelling, rational analysis. Phrases like a handful of parasites and billionaires are a major target of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell rightly notes that in our time “political writing is bad writing.” And bad writing fails to persuade.

Flaunting? The writer flouts all standards of good writing by flaunting his ignorance.

And doesn’t the Washington Post have editors?

But Forbes should be much more ashamed for having published the mindless POS the principal plagiarized.

******************

Scathing Online Schoolmarm is impressed with one wrinkle here. The plagiarizing principal personalized the stolen material:

[The original author] wrote in the Forbes column about Lori Garver’s rise to deputy administrator of NASA,: “Like so many other successful people, Lori has always been driven more by what inspires her than what scares her. She’s always been willing to challenge assumptions, and push the boundaries of possibility.”

[The plagiarist] switched the focus to herself, writing: “Like so many others, I have always been driven more by what inspires me than what scares me. I have always been willing to challenge assumptions and push the boundaries of possibility.”

SOS suggests that for her next plagiarism (as you know if you read this blog, plagiarists almost never stop at one), the principal aim higher. Make Edward Kennedy’s famous eulogy for Robert Kennedy your own!

I saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Aim even higher!

I am a woman, take me for all in all. You shall not look upon my like again.

Higher!!

For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.

… a West Virginia newspaper.

It begins with a July 6 letter from good ol’ Wade Gilley, president of Marshall University (background on Marshall here) in the ‘nineties. Wade went on to head the University of Tennessee but had to leave onaccounta he did a few things that seem like they didn’t sit well with other people there. Yeah, ol’ Wade had to scoot.

Now Wade’s letter is a model of its type. What you got here is the good ol’ boy reminiscing bout the good ol’ days when men was men and Marshall was a beautiful paradise of football, football, and football.

I … remember being invited to a national meeting of 20 university presidents and 20 Fortune 500 corporate CEOS in the late 1990s and hearing many positive remarks about Marshall. In fact, Father Malloy, the president of Notre Dame at that time, approached me at a reception and said, “Wade, some of us were just talking about the success of your football program and we were wondering just how it happened.”

And that’s just one story about rich important people flocking around me wanting to know my secret of success!

After sharing more stories about how fantastic football is for universities, Wade concludes:

And there is no doubt that football, which is largely self-supporting, has been and will be a positive factor in promoting Marshall’s national image.

A little nay-saying (“Self-supporting? Hardly.”) does pop up among the commenters, but a July 13 opinion piece from a Marshall finance professor really puts the kibosh on the thing. Dallas Brozik is a hard-nosed guy and he ain’t having any of it.

Despite the fact that one of his students, on Rate My Professors, says Dallas doesn’t like English majors, Dallas writes really well. Let’s see how he does it, step by step. Scathing Online Schoolmarm will interrupt his piece with comments in parenthesis.

*****************************

Wade Gilley’s recent letter concerning the ongoing discussion about the Marshall University budget was quite interesting. [Now usually SOS complains about the profoundly uninteresting word interesting. But Dallas here’s going to use it slyly, in the manner of Oscar Wilde…] Just as a magician uses sleight of hand to mislead the audience, those who wish to keep the university budget a black hole keep spreading misinformation.

I have no doubt [Brozik will repeat the formulation I have no doubt throughout his piece.]   that Dr. Gilley met with folks at all levels who commented on our football team, which at the time had a winning record. Sports always makes good small talk. I have no doubt that we had the best athletes and coaches despite the legal and criminal records of some of these individuals.  [Note how slyly Brozik has already gotten two points across:  Gilley’s a maundering fool; and the teams he’s teary-eyed about were pretty smelly.]

I have no doubt that Dr. Gilley met a person whose daughter had chosen to go to law school at a certain university, supposedly because of the school’s athletic program. I also have no doubt that I would not want this person to represent me in a court of law unless it is about sports law.  [Brozik’s calm, reiterated I have no doubt is wonderful.  It signals a kind of elaborate emotional self-control, a determination to be gentlemanly and long-suffering about Gilley.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been an important factor in the increase in enrollment at Marshall. Dr. Stephen Kopp became president on July 1, 2005. For the academic year 2005-2006, the official enrollment of the university was 13,920. The official enrollment for 2012-2013 was 13,708. This implies that the football program, or whatever, created negative enrollment growth.  [Oh, don’t confuse me with numbers!  And that or whatever is wonderful too  – another sly polite little suggestion that Wade is somewhat whacked out.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been a very positive economic growth factor for Huntington. Since Dr. Gilley’s time, the population of Huntington has decreased and many businesses have closed. The 2012 State of Well-Being Report from Gallup-Healthways ranks Huntington as 188 out of 189. Check the want ads section of today’s paper to see how many job openings exist and at what levels. There has been no economic miracle in Huntington over the last several decades, football or not. [You can see ol’ Wade putting a hand over each ear at this point and saying LALALALALA I can’t hear you I can’t hear you…]

Wade Gilley left Marshall under his own cloud [We won’t even go into his University of Tennessee cloud.]; why he wants to get involved in this discussion is strange. He has no dog in this fight. He is old news. He admits he has little insight into the current budget situation, but he has no doubt that a football program which is not self-supporting promotes Marshall’s national image. Dr. Gilley is entitled to his opinion, but opinions are like bellybuttons; everybody has one but very few should be aired in public.  [SOS would drop the way down-home belly button thing.  Brozik doesn’t need it; and it breaks his terrific tone of restrained contempt.]

Dr. Kopp promised “transparency” in April.  [Only in his last paragraph does Brozik turn to Marshall’s current football-concussed president.  Nice move.  It puts MU’s latest loser squarely in the company of Gilley.]  He still has not opened the books for review, even though state law requires him to do so. The current problem is one of accountability for state funds and the tuition and fees paid by students. Those who try to frame this as an anti-sports question are either misled or trying to be misleading. The budget for Marshall University is important to the entire community, and that budget should be examined. The time for opinions is over. It is time for action. It is time for Dr. Kopp to live up to his promise of transparency and open the books.

When you get a wild and crazy sentence like this, a truly mad mix of metaphors, you perceive the intriguing connection between lazy cliche and hyperactive metaphor. Let’s first look at this remarkable sentence more closely. I’ll highlight its images.

Though skyrocketing tuitions and a growing anti-government tide are seemingly swimming against traditional university education, the true educational bubble forming is in the online space.

We set out here with skyrockets in flight. The rockets are up in the air with a tide. Together the rocket and the tide appear to be swimming. The actual mixed water and air action, however, is a space bubble.

Are you trying to picture this? To make the picture make sense? That tends to be how we read – we’re not only reading for an argument; we’re enriching our sense of the emotional and intellectual meaning of the writer’s claims by assimilating his various figures into our reactions, by allowing his images to ground and dramatize what might otherwise be mere abstract statement. But excess and confused figures – coupled here with modifier-madness (skyrocketing, growing, seemingly, traditional, true, online – no noun is left unaccosted) – just produce a confused mess. They make thinking harder, not simpler. And they tend to happen when your argument is little more than a string of cliches. Here are some, from this Forbes piece.

… [C]ollege students tune out during their four years on campus; that, or they memorize what’s needed to get As on the tests… [T]eens go to college with an eye on a fun four years, after which they hope the school they attend will open doors for a good job… [W]hat’s learned in college is irrelevant to what’s done in the real world. … [C]ollege is not about learning much as we might wish it were… [W]hen parents spend a fortune on their children’s schooling they’re not buying education; rather they’re buying the ‘right’ friends for them, the right contacts for the future, access to the right husbands and wives, not to mention buying their own (“Our son goes to Williams College”) status. …Parents and kids … aren’t buying education despite their protests to the contrary. Going to college is a status thing, not a learning thing. Kids go to college for the experience, not for what’s taught.

Note how a weak argument full of overstatement relies on a repeated pounding of the reader by means of cliche. It should not surprise us when a robotic redundancy insisting that American university education represents status obsessives and their bad seed eventually produces nutty sentences like this one.

Nice ambiguity there, huh? To what does “they,” in Joe Nocera’s sentence refer? The teams or the universities?

I guess he means it to refer to the teams; but, if so, should he not at least have reversed the order – between the universities and the teams, and stop pretending they have any ‘educational’ value (and why put educational in quotation marks?)? Nocera presumably believes some universities have either educational or ‘educational’ value…

Consider too the content of his claim. Nocera’s one of many writers who, faced with the superscummy world big-time athletics has brought to America’s universities, urges that we “create some real separation” between athletics and universities.

Easy to say, Joe. What the fuck, pray tell, might you mean? When two people who can’t stand each other but find themselves married decide to really deal with that, they separate. Real separation means you live in different places and have little to nothing to do with one another. But I doubt Joe has in mind this clean a break.

I mean, plenty of people are calling for universities whose campuses are routinely trashed — literally and figuratively — by their sports programs to spin them off, to have a merely symbolic association with a local professional team that continues to carry the name of the university. That’s one way to go. But there are many more people, like Nocera, who seem to think that universities and big-time sports can be separated and yet reconciled, can have broken up and still live together under the same roof.

There are many reasons why this is impossible, prominent among them the simple dynamism of the phenomenon itself: Every year, unstoppably, scandals get more lurid, more expensive, more absolutely disgusting. Every year, coaches and players get more out of control, gain more power. Every year, the shreds of academic integrity these schools have managed to maintain shred yet more. Every year, more and more classes are cancelled to make way for games and for the dictates of the media conglomerates that now run the university show. Etc. Nocera’s column happens to be about university presidents destroyed by their athletic programs, but that’s only one of countless corruptions intrinsic to the decision to import professional sports — whose even more repulsive scandals (the latest being baseball boys and their steroids) Americans really seem to get off on — to universities. So you can put the smell over there, as it were, but it’s always going to work its way deep into your nostrils.

And I’m afraid absolute separation won’t fly either. I mean the idea of spinning off the teams, professionalizing them, but keeping University of Georgia in their name. Let me explain why.

Think of alum fandom as a delicate and nuanced perfume. It has a note of nostalgia, a bouquet of beer, a hint of hazing… studded about with the scent of sorority and the fragrance of frat. Alum fans are connected to their team through memories of sadistic initiation rituals, drunken stumbles into lakes, and other cherished keepsakes. Pack up the team and send it across town and you rip those memories from their moorings. Won’t work.

… whenever a university sports scandal gets truly nationally and internationally bad, we’re always treated to the semi-literate self-important pointless maundering of the Designated Faculty Hitter.

The DFH teaches sports management or something; he’s a team booster whose job it is to cover the sports shit on campus with academic roses — to make the crime and abuse and cheating and sleaze look as though they’re activities that can be understood as part of the daily life of an organization recognizable as a university, rather than a syndicate or a gang or whatever.

The DFH for the country’s latest scandal-plagued darling, Rutgers, has just done his thing, and it’s time for SOS to take a good long look at it.

********************

Dear Rutgers University, [He’s written it in the form of a letter to Rutgers.]

“It is no coincidence that we all bleed scarlet”.

That familiar saying among those that call themselves “Rutgers Men” is also the very ethos of my being.

[Strange opening line. To whom – among the readers of Forbes magazine – is that line familiar? And Rutgers Men? SOS had no idea Rutgers was a single-sex school. But she can certainly confirm that already in the writer’s first sentence he has dismissed any female readers his letter might have had. And – the very ethos of my being. Wow. If a team motto is the very ethos of your being, I’m being not very interested in what you have to say about anything. The very ethos of my being is laughing at you.]

As a Rutgers College and Law School alumus, a former student-athlete and current faculty member of the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University has been a major part of my life for over a decade. [Why? Since Rutgers didn’t even teach you about dangling modifiers, so now you’ve embarrassed yourself again, right after that ethos thing?] My blood is forever scarlet, and I am proud of it.

During my time on the banks of the Raritan, I have had the opportunity to observe the exceptional growth and evolution of our university from a number of perspectives. While we have made tremendous strides [Did Rutgers tell you about cliches?] over the last decade, we have also managed to inhibit our own success due to an alarming string of organizational failures. While the majority of the media and public [You could have written most observers, but that wouldn’t have been as pretentious.] have been quick to point fingers of blame at our leadership for much of the turmoil, they too easily neglect that leaders of great organizations do not make decisions in a vacuum. Between students, faculty and staff, [That should be among.] the Rutgers community is made up of more than 70,000 individuals, [Again, you could have said people, but individuals is far more pretentious, with more syllables.] all of which [whom] play some role in the direction of the university. Large organizations, whether they are state universities or multinational conglomerates, operate in such a way that blaming any one individual for the failures of the entire entity is simply naive and unfair. [Totally untrue statement. It’s often the case that one person is significantly responsible for a large institution’s failure. That’s why the president of Rutgers will be resigning soon.]

Our President Robert Barchi is a brilliant neuroscientist. [Irrelevant.] Our former athletic director Tim Pernetti is a tremendously successful entrepreneur [So? We know that athletic directors and their agents are capable of negotiating obscene, institution-destroying contracts, but this isn’t really why they are at the university.] and his successor, Julie Hermann, is a accomplished athletic administrator. [Who says? Isn’t it rather naive of you simply to assert this?] While each of them has shown great stewardship throughout their careers, there is no such thing as a perfect leader. [SOS says: This sort of condescending, statement-of-the-obvious, pat-the-reader-on-the-head phrase — no such thing as a perfect leader, I’ll have you know! — is a real winner when it comes to regaining all those readers your writing has already alienated.] That is why every organization creates levels of redundancy within their decision making structures to prevent any one individual from having to [too] much influence. While this might lead to red tape and bureaucracy, it also insures that [the] healthy functioning of the corporate ecosystem. [As at Rutgers?]

… The controversy that has struck our great university over the last few months is not due to the shortcomings of our leadership, but rather a result of a culture in which accountability and communication are misaligned. In any large organization, particularly one as complex as a major state university, there are so many moving parts, competing interests and differences of opinion that unless there is a concerted effort to have total transparency and debate, bad decisions are are all but guaranteed to be made. [Note the jargon and passive voice and general tone of haughty lecturing to the unwashed masses who don’t know anything about the complex mysterious intricacies of organizations. This is what UD calls going cosmic. The disaster – not controversy – at Rutgers is not about the all too familiar corruption of universities by mindless boosterism and greed. No, no, it’s some case study in organizational blahblah.]

At Rutgers, there has long been a movement by many faculty and alumni against big time athletics. While their voice might be that of the minority, those that believe that academic and athletic progress are not mutually inclusive have succeeded at creating a juxtaposition that has become endemic to the culture of our university. [Do you have any idea what the fuck he’s saying? This reads like a letter from Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Vacuous. Comically pretentious.] As both a professor who values academic progress and an entrepreneur who makes a living off of college athletics, I am equally guilty of helping promote these conflicting ideals. [What conflicting ideals? What’s the juxtaposition? What is he talking about?]

Instead of creating an environment based on accountability, where critical issues are brought out into the open and decision makers are held responsible for their actions, the university community has seemingly refused to learn from its past mistakes and has become seemingly forever mired in the morass of its own self-sabotage. [Morass and self-sabotage… weird mixed metaphor.  Deadly repetition of mousy seemingly.  And what is he talking about? He seems to want to attack critics of crushingly expensive and corrupt sports at Rutgers – it’s the fault of the critics; they’re not on board with everyone else, etc. That’s fine. Go after the nay-sayers. But go after them cleanly and directly.] Great organizations have culture, and culture only comes from a set of shared attitudes, goals, and values that every individual within that organization believes in. [Huh? This unanimity is certainly true of great cultures like North Korea. In the United States, especially in our universities, it’s just the opposite.] If those of us who owe so much to Rutgers cannot agree to bring our goals into sync, than how can we expect our University to do the same?

******************************

There’s more, but – to quote Mr Bennet on one of the letters he receives from Mr Collins – I won’t sport with your intelligence further. A painstaking analysis of this writer’s appalling prose does seem to reveal an attack on those pesky dissenters whose efforts to keep sports from destroying Rutgers turn out to be responsible for this catastrophe. If only Rutgers had been as united as the folks in Paterno’s Happy Valley, the outcome would have been so much better.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm hopes not. Whatever they are pouring over the cache is likely to degrade the value of their evidence against a guy who “[f]or close to 30 years, he has been a community safety officer supervisor at UC Santa Cruz.”

SOS thinks the Santa Cruz police department means pore.

The culture clash in this story about a man who has apparently been stashing an arsenal of guns and ammo in the walls of his mobile home as he prepares for some massive theft is noteworthy. For thirty years Mr Assault Rifle has been hiding out among the peace-loving hippies of UC Santa Cruz. Good cover.

… This is what comes of not knowing the difference between principle and principal. The mistake follows you around, finally ending up on your US Foreign Policy syllabus:

The aim of this course is to examine the formation of U.S. foreign policy. The principle questions include…

Your uncertainty about this and other conundrums gnaws at you until late one night you turn on all the lights, get out one of your many guns, and shoot at the ceiling of your university-owned house forty times.

Lesson: Learn your homophone pairs.

In an article about soccer Saudi-style (“Protest against performance and royal interference has had the most far-reaching effect in Saudi Arabia where princes are known to phone during a match to order the change of a player.”), a writer falls into the impregnable/impregnate trap.

Football is defeating efforts by wealthy Gulf States to impregnate themselves against the wave of protests that have swept the Middle East and North Africa in the past two years and sparked a brutal civil war in Syria.

*********************

Explanation of problem:

The two words have very different etymologies.

Impregnate comes from Latin impraegnare, which means ‘to be imbued or saturated with’.

Impregnable comes from Middle French imprenable, itself derived from Latin prehendere, which means ‘to take, grasp’.

That they have come to look so similar in English today is just coincidence.

**********************

SOS never merely curses the darkness. She always lights a candle. So: The writer might instead use:

fortify
defend
protect

UD is a major fan of Robert Zaretsky, a history professor at the University of Houston. She found his remarks on Christopher Hitchens, religion, and death to be among the most thoughtful his illness inspired.

Zaretsky’s recent remarks on France’s disgraced chief rabbi are similarly thoughtful; they are the only ones I’ve come across which put this farcically hypocritical man in a larger French perspective.

There’s one paragraph, though, whose prose I’d futz with a bit.

There is no good time to steal other people’s words and thoughts, of course, but now is an especially bad time to do so. The political scene in France has grown toxic, thanks in part to a series of corruption scandals on both the right, involving former president Nicolas Sarkozy and the illicit funding of his party, and the left, with the former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac trapped in a series of lies about Swiss bank accounts. President Francois Hollande’s floundering government, contested in the streets by conservative and reactionary movements, has been unable to reverse either the withering of the economy or the burgeoning of unemployment, much less halt the European Union’s politics of austerity.

On one level, these are great sentences, the kind of packed-with-detail sentences we try to get our students to write. So there’s no Scathing Online Schoolmarm here, none of my complaining about bad writing…

On the other hand, there’s room for improvement, no? I’d first take out some filler, some unnecessary words that weaken the punch of the sentence:

‘There is no good time to steal other people’s words and thoughts, of course, but now is an especially bad time to do so. The political scene in France has grown toxic, thanks in part to a series of corruption scandals on both the right, involving former president Nicolas Sarkozy[‘s] and the illicit funding of his party, and the left, with the former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac trapped in a series of [note redundant use of this word] lies about Swiss bank accounts. President Francois Hollande’s floundering government, contested in the streets by conservative and reactionary movements, has been unable to reverse either the withering of the economy or the burgeoning of unemployment, much less halt the European Union’s politics of austerity.’

*******************************

In the second sentence, the problem is excessive and sort of clashing ings: floundering, withering, burgeoning… And I don’t know about you, but often when I see floudering I waste time pondering whether it shouldn’t be foundering … Which isn’t a criticism. Everyone gets to use the English language. And in fact assuming you believe Hollande will be able to keep his government up and running, floudering is right and foundering is wrong…

On withering and burgeoning, I actually think the simple use of fall and rise would be better, even though this seems counter-intuitive, since we’re always supposed to be looking for interesting, dramatic, fresh ways to say things. Yet simplicity in cases like this one is arguably better, since rise and fall keep me focused on the content of the statement, while withering and burgeoning are giving me mixed metaphor palpitations (they’re not really a case of mixed metaphor, but I’m still getting the palpitations).

I suspect the proximity of all these theatrical words (withering floundering burgeoning) is playing into my palpitations…

Nor does it help that after these perhaps too physical words we end with a very abstract phrase: politics of austerity.

So – In no way a bad paragraph, but I guess a bit jumbled between abstract and concrete words.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: I wouldn’t talk to an underage investigator either.

And one fewer professor teaching grammar.

… avoid mixed metaphors.

Southern Cal has always struggled to gain a competitive foothold in the world of college basketball while playing second fiddle to its crosstown arch-rival UCLA, coming close on several occasions only to have it torn away by scandal or impatience.

They create confusion. And note the connection between mixed metaphors and cliches (playing second fiddle). They often appear together. Avoid cliches.

Things get worse in a later paragraph:

The institutional decline of Southern Cal, as business consultant and educator Jim Collins would put it, came like a staged disease; an initially unknown cancer that ate away silently at USC fed by its own gluttony for success. At first, it was almost impossible to detect but easily correctable. If the powers that be could have saw the writing on the wall and slowed the bleeding, the program might have been saved. Yet USC sunk deeper and deeper into the quicksand of its own arrogance, until it realized that all it had accomplished had only come about because of broken rules and scorched earth.

Let’s unpack.

The institutional decline of Southern Cal, as business consultant and educator Jim Collins would put it, [Would put what? What in the first words of this sentence does the “it” here refer to?] came like a staged disease; an initially unknown cancer that ate away silently at USC [The reader feels a sense of dread as this overused analogy gets going.] fed by its own gluttony for success. At first, it was almost impossible to detect but easily correctable. If the powers that be could have saw [Wow. Forbes, we have a problem.] the writing on the wall and slowed the bleeding, [Again, note the combination of cliche – writing on the wall, stop the bleeding – and mixed metaphor.] the program might have been saved. Yet USC sunk deeper and deeper into the quicksand of its own arrogance, [The final stage of this staged disease is quicksand.] until it realized that all it had accomplished had only come about because of broken rules and scorched earth. [Can’t resist throwing yet another image – scorched earth – onto his pile of words.]

… feature endemic cheating. Big deal. If someone says of Brown University’s highest-profile trustee that “you have to wonder whether his returns have been generated not only through his trading brilliance but also through a culture of cutting corners and pushing employees to the point where they break the law,” you’re not exactly going to pee your pants.

If someone says of his investors that

There is a point where willful blindness turns to complicity. Investors profit from any added juice that SAC might gain, whatever its source. And if Mr. Cohen were to face charges, they would pay no price.

Major banks and investors around the world shoveled money to Bernard L. Madoff despite doubts about his purity. Some thought that Mr. Madoff was using his brokerage firm to front-run. In other words, they thought he was cheating on their behalf, not ripping them off. And that was an enticement.

you’re not going to get all amazed that the writer cites Bernard Madoff – a Yeshiva University trustee – right after talking about Brown University’s highest-profile trustee.

Still – Brown itself, especially given this background and this background, might want to start reviewing its relationship with Steven Cohen. So far, the university won’t even comment to the Brown Daily Herald about the situation. Most unwise.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm realizes how difficult it is to fashion a statement under these circumstances. Cohen is in a position to give the university not millions, but billions. OTOH, some people and institutions are beginning to pull their money out of SAC Capital Advisors, because there’s too much noise in the press about insider trading, and the possibility of the SEC actually collaring Cohen. What to do?

Brown could of course ask Cohen to leave the board of trustees. No one in the money world cares about this sort of thing, so it wouldn’t hurt SAC. Or Brown could issue something like this:

We are aware of the insider trading allegations against some SAC employees. We also believe that SAC continues to have among the highest standards for compliance in the industry. Steven Cohen remains a great asset to Brown.