Scathing Online Schoolmarm starts her day with this letter to the Chicago Tribune from one of Clout U’s trustees.

As always her comments appear in parenthesis, in blue.

This is in response to your series “Tribune watchdog: Clout goes to college.” [Terrific opening. Real human interest there. Can’t you just feel the warm pulsing humanity of the writer?]

To correct at least some misconceptions, I write to share factual observations. [The Trib didn’t write a novel. Why not correct all of its mistakes? Too busy, I guess. Too important.] I am the senior (longest-serving) trustee of the University of Illinois. All who know me recognize that I take this role very seriously. As a trustee, just as if we were legislators, we are “agents” of the citizens of Illinois (trustees are appointed by the governor and approved by the Senate). [Parentheses and quotation marks already mucking up the works. Drop the pompous all who know me crap. Putting agents in scare quotes makes being a trustee sound underhanded.]

Many times I have been asked: “Can you get my son /daughter into the University of Illinois?”

The answer is always the same: “No, but I would be happy to check on the status of the admission.”

I believe that offer to make an inquiry is one of the duties of the position, again similar to what a legislator would do for his or her constituent. Those inquiries are sent to the appropriate chancellor — not with advice or with any request, other than checking the status of the admission.

The answer, good or bad, is given back to the requesting individual. That advice can range from “yes”; “perhaps, depending on acceptances of offers already made”; “no”; to “would you like a counseling interview?”

And there the role of a trustee stops. [Well, obviously not, or there wouldn’t be a national story raging and a legislative investigation pending into preferential admissions practices among trustees and others at the university. The letter writer thinks you’re stupid.]

Quite frankly, I have never heard of a “Category I” list.

Allow me to also state that I have never spoken with or made a written request to an admissions officer. My offers to check admissions status have been extended to anyone who has asked — not just the politically connected, or the donor, or to someone with whom I have a business or professional relationship.

The Tribune chose to publish an e-mail communication from me totally out of context — referencing the situation as “epidemic.” As the economy slowed, more and more students were switching from private to public university admissions requests. The applicant pool swelled in both numbers and quality. More and more families were concerned, and sought information.

This was the epidemic, not some “list.”

As I recall, at the time I may have had information requests in for three students. That e-mail, coupled with the picture from central casting (a most nefarious character shot), was nothing less than irresponsible sensationalism. [Harrumph! (Brushes mustaches nervously.)]

I welcome responsible journalistic inquiry; I abhor the adornment of the inquiry with supermarket check-out line trappings.  [I am a lofty person. Mark ye my lofty words and mark them well!   Welcome. Abhor. Inquiry. Trapping. There are others where those come from, and I will happily write you another letter in which I use some of them. ]

… and there’s Nothing.  There’s writing that’s absolutely nothing.   Here’s an example. 

True nullity of expression demands that the writer pay heed to style as much as content.  Nothing style should be without human markings, the work of a word-generator.  It should aim to be dead on the page at the moment it hits the page, like nail polish that dries the instant you roll it out. 

Classic Nothing takes a significant social problem, a current issue of substance, and then, in an attitude of hearty, can-do concern, taps it lightly here and there with rhetorical questions and reassuring answers.   It’s like the fairy godmother in Cinderella transforming actual things like pumpkins into pretend things like coaches.  What is this problem?  Can we solve it?  Time will tell!  Let’s work together!  Let’s admit we have a problem! 

 Put style and content together in this way and what do you get?  Bippity boppity boo.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has long talked on this blog about Guy Style, an argumentative approach she likes very much.  Some readers may find it boring and unemotional, but, au contraire, SOS finds its cool, terse, deep-feelings-withheld effect stirringly masculine, like Clint Eastwood.

Here’s a good example of Guy Style.

Now that the intoxicating frenzy of the Michigan State basketball season has subsided, perhaps a sober reminder of the intent in establishing the university is in order. [Classic Guy Style opening:  There’s the world of sloppy drunks and there’s the world of coldly observing Guys.  Who would you rather read?]

The main objectives were set forth in Section 11 of Article 13 of the state constitution: “The promotion of intellectual, scientific and agricultural improvement, and stressed “instruction in agriculture and natural sciences.”  [He’s missing a quotation mark in there, so we’re not clear where the excerpt from the constitution ends.  Not the end of the world, though.  Clever move to go back to scripture.]

No mention was made of funding any sport program, much less spending money to scout the world for basketball players.

Is Tom Izzo’s position as coach of the men’s basketball team as important as that of MSU President Lou Anna Simon, MSU’s provost, 12 of MSU’s top professors, or that of President Obama’s?

If one were to equate importance with salaries received, Izzo’s position would top all the others – combined.  [I don’t claim Guy Style sizzles on the level of word choice; rather, I claim that GS goes to the heart of things quickly, and gets them said efficiently.  This argument already has power, and the guy’s only a few lines in.]

One might ask how such an aberration from MSU’s core functions came about.  [Certainly by this point you see Clint’s sneer… You see the sneer that hides just behind the elaborate courtesy and restraint…]

Taxpayers were obliged to pay, in one form or another, $45 million for the construction of the Jack Breslin Center in 1989, with men’s basketball games intended as the main attraction. Major funding was obtained through the sale of bonds, toward which a liability of $22,722,000 remained on June 30, 2008.  [The highly emotionally controlled language skirts bureaucratic dullness.  But it’s kept from that fate by carefully selected details and a hint of Clint.]

Any attempt to compute the net monetary profit engendered by the team would be an exercise in futility.  [Sure, engendered is too formal.  Exercise in futility is a cliché.  Again, I’m not claiming verbal originality for Guy Style.  I’m merely claiming that, despite its weaknesses, it succeeds.  We’re paying attention; we’re getting the point.]

A Freedom of Information Act inquiry of the bonds’ interest rate and payment schedule drew the response of “No records exist on the data you seek because the debt you describe is contained within the university’s overall general fund commingled debt.”  [Drop of.  And don’t I always tell you to avoid the passive voice — a form of writing all over this piece?  I do.  Yet Guy Style may be the one place where the approach can be deployed – sparingly – to some effect.  The emotional content of that passivity does have to do with futility; it’s as if this guy’s style implicitly conveys the almost Beckettian absurdity of the university athletic system.]

No IRS-respecting private business would ever think of commingling funds from unrelated sources requiring separate accountability.  [Excellent point, strongly expressed.  For elaboration, read anything written by Andrew Zimbalist.]

Should the university take another look at its $796,000 bill to give 3,089 students choice season tickets at discounted prices to pay homage to gladiators on the court while dressed in “Izzone” T-shirts?

And why does MSU pay 13 talented basketball players the equivalent of $1,372,000 in tuition, room, board and books over a four-year period, and not pay anything to the thousands of astute students who are academically talented and may be our future Einsteins and Marie Curies? [The Einstein/Curie thing’s pretty hokey, but the rest of the sentence has power.]

Should taxpayer-funded universities with coaches on multimillion-dollar contracts be placed under salary caps, such as President Obama has ordered for executives of corporations that request bailouts with taxpayer money?

Some may offer that Izzo might seek a position elsewhere if his salary is reduced.  [Again, an awkward, bass-ackward sort of sentence, but, as with Clint, there’s something in the combination here of strong emotion strongly withheld — a tension that comes out as oddly formal speech — that’s riveting.]

There are those who thought MSU’s women’s basketball program would collapse after the departure of Coach Joanne P. McCallie.

Its success under Suzy Merchant has proven otherwise, and delighted many when it sent “Coach P” back to North Carolina on a blue note after beating the devil out of her highly touted team in March.  [When a Guy Style writer does allow himself a little emotion — beating the devil out of — it has a strong impact, given the background of emotional restraint.]

This is not meant to belittle Izzo’s coaching ability, but to question whether a well-meaning administration has been led astray from its fiduciary responsibility to help as many prospective students get a college education as possible – and not discriminate in favor of a small number of special interest students.  [End of argument.  Note that Guy Style writers get right to it, say it, and then stop.  They’re not about sculpting shapely polemics, so they’re not going to give you a texte de jouissance. You want heavy breathing, read the post just below this one — The Problem With Rants.]

Taking off from the University of Illinois admissions clout scandal, a writer for the Huffington Post shows you why SOS is always telling you to control your emotions if you want to argue something. Let’s take a peek.

… [In a recent] issue of the [Chicago] Tribune, the venerable sportswriter Bob Verdi refers to the NCAA and college sports as “our intercollegiate sewer system.” [Nice use of a strong quotation. So far so good.]

Yes, the Clout University scandal is shady, shabby, ridiculous, pathetic, disgusting, despicable, etc. But what irritates and baffles me is the public’s indifference to our wasteful, unconscionable, unfair, unreasonable practice of giving, not dozens, but tens of thousands of tickets of admission into our universities to young people many of whom would have no chance of being accepted into a higher-ranking university, or any university at all, strictly on their intellectual merits. [The first ridiculously long list is fine; the writer seeks to summarize what everyone’s saying, and he’s doing it in an exasperated, amusing way. But the rest of the paragraph’s also over-written, and here it’s not strategic; instead, it’s angry and uncontrolled.]

Of course I’m talking about the so-called “student-athletes.” [Two sins in one sentence: The juvenile so-called, and the quotation marks. Just as he’s packing too many words into his sentences, so he’s overloading his point about the inauthenticity of students selected for their athletic skill. Once you’ve said so-called, you don’t need the quotation marks; or, if you go with quotation marks, you don’t need the so-called. Though if you ask SOS you don’t really need either of them. Just use the term student-athlete and be assured that your reader will understand, from the prose around the phrase, that you disbelieve in the concept.] Our Illinois politicians, dastardly sneaks as they undoubtedly are, were not the first, nor the most culpable, offenders against intellect. We all decided long ago that many qualities were more important than mind in deciding who goes to college.

For example, community service. And extra-curricular activities. And exotic hobbies. And “a wide range of interests.” And being closely related to a previous graduate of the college. And, most important by far, performance in organized high school sports. [Why the quotation marks around wide range of interests?]

The truth is that none of these activities and qualities should enter into a decision about who gets into college. That’s right, none. [The writer makes it easy to reject his argument by taking so extreme a position.]

To deny the validity of what I’ve just said and to tacitly endorse a “system” [Note that he can’t stop with the quotation marks, which continue to add a juvenile element to his anger.] which awards seats in an institution of teaching and scholarship to the stupid, the indifferent, the anti-intellectual, and the duffers is to take a low revenge on Intellect, cultivate mediocrity, and degrade and prostitute the Alma Mater we say we cherish. [Way over-written. There’s a weird nineteenth century elaborateness to his style, complete with capitalization and grandiloquence.]

As indefensible as the custom of letting politicians decide who goes to school and who gets scholarship money may be, it does far less harm to higher education than our worship of sports and athletes.

“Beer and circus.” That’s what Murray Sperber, Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Indiana University, called the sports-spectacle atmosphere of college athletics two decades ago. That’s what we’ve turned our colleges and universities into. [The argument never gets going, does it? Reason: He settles for bombast and bitchery rather than substance.]

College presidents and faculties aren’t running higher education. (How many letters to the editor decrying the politicians’ influence on admissions have you read from faculty members at the University of Illinois?)

Young, male, beer-sodden dolts and screeching ESPN announcers give the predominant tone to our universities….

SOS should love this piece, shouldn’t she? But it doesn’t do her side any good. The writer merely exhibits his self-righteousness.

SOS has said it before on this blog: If, as a writer, you’re bringing bad news, you might want to use humor. Here’s an earlier example of what I have in mind – a University of Wisconsin Madison graduate student telling readers of the school’s newspaper that the campus lake is full of shit.

SOS‘s sister, the Morrissey fanatic (just back from a bunch of Morrissey concerts in England), sends her this charming example of the form, from the Baltimore Sun.

When Gregory Glass and his colleagues set out to trap rats in Baltimore neighborhoods for a recent study, they were welcomed by two-legged residents who were more than happy for the scurrying rodents to be taken away to a lab. They had just one concern. [Note two good qualities of intro paragraphs, newspaper-journalism-style: A rich, complex sentence, and a conclusion to the paragraph that makes you want more. What concern?]

“You’re not bringing them back here when you’re done, are you?” they asked.

No, after their DNA was extracted, all 277 rats collected in 11 alleys were killed, [Note how the writer smuggles in research project details without making them dry.] which is a good thing, given that what Glass learned was that death is among the few things that will get a Baltimore rat to leave the place it calls home. [Adorable. Note the intentional writerly awkwardness that makes this funny: what Glass learned was that death is represents pretty pedestrian prose on its own, but in this context it feels as though the writer’s amusingly easing us into this icky subject. She’ll get, we know, more explicit with each paragraph.]

In fact, the Baltimore rat is so wedded to its home turf, typically an alley a few hundred feet long, that at the molecular level, an East Baltimore rat is distinct from a West Baltimore rat. [The writer has intrinsic interest going for her too. Who knew this?]

“Give me a rat,” Glass brags, “and I can tell you which side of town it’s from.” [It’s another bit of luck that the study’s author is funny and warm.]

And it goes even beyond east is east, west is west, never the twain shall meet – the study, published recently in the journal Molecular Ecology, found that most rats apparently spend the bulk of their lives in the space of about a tenth of a mile. [Again, note how she seeds the piece with specific details. The details don’t get crammed, rat-like, into one paragraph.]

“Most rats are like people in Baltimore,” said Glass, who after 25 years in the city has had occasion to observe both. “They marry someone next door or down the block at most, and are happy to live in the neighborhood they grew up in.”

It’s that quality – our rats, ourselves – that makes the paper such great reading, both as science and local culture. It is the well-observed local quirk, the Baltimore homing instinct, rendered in charts, graphs, Euclidean distances and, of course, adjacent-allele heterozygotes. [Our rats, ourselves is very nice. Parts of the article are a bit hokey as the author pushes for humor, but basically what she does succeeds wonderfully.]   [I love the way she writes of course before the well-known adjacent-allele heterozygotes.]

The upshot: Nearly all the rats – more than 95 percent of them – exhibited what the researchers call “site fidelity;” they were bred and born in the alley in which they were trapped. (It made me feel a little sorry for one very lost rat that ended up in one of the traps, a veritable stranger in town whose DNA revealed it was unlikely to be from any of the alleys studied.)

“Most rat movements were limited within individual city blocks,” the paper concludes.

Here I’d always thought I was just a very grounded person; now, after reading the paper, I realized I am almost as site-faithful as the local rodent population. My first apartment here [Drop this here. Or the one at the beginning of the sentence.] was a couple blocks from the hospital where my elder sister was born. (My family moved to Harford County shortly afterward, which is where I was born, but then we moved away.)

My second apartment in Baltimore was two blocks away from the first one. Then in a fit of uncharacteristic wanderlust, I bought a house that was two whole miles away. I lived there until moving three blocks to my current house. [Drop uncharacteristic.]

Hopefully, that’s where the rat in me ends. [Drop hopefully.] Glass, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, tells me a rat burrow basically has a pair, an alpha male and an alpha female, that goes about breeding the next generation. Given what the paper calls “high fecundity and generation overlap in Baltimore rats,” the alley ends up as a community that is [Drop that is.] something like that song about a family filled with so many intermarriages that, as the narrator sings, “I’m My Own Grandpa.” [Drop as the narrator sings.]

More grossly interesting, or interestingly gross, [Charming. And notice she’s going to some trouble not merely to organize this through the use of transitional phrases, but to make those phrases witty.] facts about rat life: There’s only room for one alpha pair per burrow, so eventually some rats leave home and create their own communities. They’ll fight, “blood and skin,” Glass says, over territories. But they generally stay close to their ancestral home – there can be four or five burrows in a single alley, he said. The study found that rats within an 11-block area were part of one extended family. [Drop eventually and generally.]

The Jones Falls serves as a natural barrier dividing east- and west-side rats. The differences between them are at the DNA level, but after years of studying them, Glass has noted that there are [Drop that there are.] rats with black coats “and a beautiful white star on the chest” in one east-side neighborhood, around Jefferson Street above Orleans Street. “You go a couple blocks away, and they look normal again,” he said, “mostly yucky-brown.”

No doubt most urban rats behave like our own, but it is the Baltimore rodent that oddly enough is one of the most studied populations. [Note that she has a to be verb problem. Rewrite: but Baltimore’s rodent’s the most studied.] Glass and others in the field frequently cite 1940s research on Baltimore rats that probably were the ancestors of our current vermin. [no doubt ancestors of our current vermin. See how, in rewriting, I’m looking for ways to eliminate forms of to be?]

Rat scientists likely were drawn to Baltimore for the same reason Willie Sutton was drawn to robbing banks – it’s where the rats are. As a result, our rats have developed a certain je ne sais quoi among rat researchers. [I love her choice of je ne sais quoi. Like her choice later of Boswell, it’s the Oscar Wilde technique of yoking the lowest of subjects to the highest. Try it.]

“People from New York are always asking me to send pieces of Baltimore rats to them,” Glass said. “I think, ‘You’re in New York, you have your own rats.’ ”

Glass has a wry sense of humor, but it is unclear whether that is the cause or the effect of his choice of research subject. If you’re interested in studying biodiversity within animal populations, he said, “one way to do it would be to go to the Serengeti and look at lions.” He’s pretty much to the opposite side of the spectrum, and as a result, Baltimore rats got their very own Boswell.

The study details how researchers picked Baltimore alleys – mostly older neighborhoods known from previous studies to harbor rats in ample supply. Or, as the paper describes them in the kind of language that would make a real estate agent faint: “Areas characterized by row houses with small backyards comprised of concrete parking pads and small garden areas often occupied by rat burrow systems.” The lucky areas had what the researchers estimated was, on the average, a density of about 50 rats per alley.

Glass’s interest in rats comes from a public health rather than a cultural standpoint. While the rest of us view rats as horrid creatures that basically spread revulsion, he studies them for how they spread viruses and bacteria. Although most rats don’t stray much, enough do – they’re known as the “super spreaders” – that they remain potential carriers of various diseases.

Still, I have to ask Glass: Why does the rat, unlike the chicken, generally not cross the road?

Blame it on the two-legged creatures and their generosity, putting trash in plastic bags.

“Rats will move a long distance to get food,” Glass said. “But if they can get food, get a drink where they live, they won’t.”

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My favorite part of this very nice piece of writing appears after the article:

RELATED TOPICS: Population, Biotechnology Industry, Ecosystems, Genes and Chromosomes, Conservation, Human Body, Real Estate Agents

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… this is one shitty letter to the editor.

I mean, yes.  Do damage control.  Do damage control until the cows come home.  SOS has no trouble with damage control.

But don’t do damage control so badly you end up doing more damage.

Here’s the problem:  The University of Toledo currently has the most corrupt sports program in the country, with all the national news coverage that implies.

A faculty member seeks to control damage.  Let us see how she does it.

Let us first notice the very end of her letter, when she provides some identification for herself:

Alice Skeens

Associate professor
University of Toledo

Fine, a concerned Associate professor…

And now let’s look at an editorial note below her name, provided by the newspaper that published her letter:

Editor’s note: The writer is UT faculty athletic representative to the NCAA.

Oh whoops yeah forgot to mention I’m faculty athletic representative to the NCAA!  (It’s possible the writer provided this information to the paper, which chose to present things this way.  If so, a mistake.)

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

March 29, 2007, was a difficult day for the University of Toledo. That was the day federal investigators filed a criminal complaint against a former football player alleging that he had been a part of a point-shaving scheme.

This dark cloud follows UT athletics to this day, yet the investigation has always focused on the past.  [Dark cloud ushers us into a world of clichés.  It’s hard to get a whole world of clichés into a letter to the editor, but this writer has done it.]  [The investigation focuses on the past because the crime, like all past crimes now under investigation, occurred in the past.  If you catch my drift.  There are two reasons its darkness insists on pursuing UT:  One, it involved organized crime and betting on university games, which is REALLY REALLY dirty stuff, even by the dirty standards of bigtime university sports.  Two, the president of UT refuses to deal with it in an honest and forthright way.   Like this writer, he’s trying to, er, sweep this event under the scrapheap of history.]
Indictments filed last week appear to be the beginning of the end, focusing on a 13-month period from Nov. 19, 2005, to Dec. 19, 2006.  [The past, the beginning of the end… Like UT’s president, to whom this writer toadies, the idea is to convince you that something profoundly, lastingly, corrupt is ancient history.]

I have spent a majority of [Pompous, wordy.  Say most.] my 47-year career working with UT’s student athletes and I couldn’t agree more with [President Lloyd] Jacobs’ assessment that this period is truly behind us.  [Toady.] [And a very nice example of what SOS has said many times on this blog about the desperate use of intensifiers to make what you want to be true the truth.  It’s truly truly behind us, I tell you…]

In a June, 2007, editorial, The Blade described intercollegiate athletics as “a monster – like the mythical multiheaded serpent Hydra – that is nearly impossible to subdue.” It then went on to applaud President Jacobs for being “determined to try.” Accolades were earned by “implementing aggressive new procedures to tighten up athletics administration.”  [Passive voice — were earned by.]

Shakespeare aptly observed, “What’s past is prologue,” as history sets the stage for future actions.  [Well done, Bill! Shakespeare certainly gets an A in this professor’s class… To quote Shakespeare at all in this tawdry context is laughable, and to use the tight-ass aptly observed is … oh well.  I suppose the writer attempts to lend some tragic gravitas to this unfortunate, long-forgotten incident.  She accomplishes exactly the opposite.]  Responding to the events two years ago, the university implemented its new procedures, including “a comprehensive educational program for all student-athletes in areas such as gambling …” as reported in the Blade on June 14, 2007.

One can argue that the success of these programs is evidenced by the continued retrospective nature of the probe.  [Deadly writing:  One can argue.  Is evidenced by.  As SOS noted above, the retrospective nature of the probe — again, note the pomposity — has to do with the retrospective nature of the events.  To be more precise, they already happened.]

On May 10, The Blade called upon the administration to successfully address the situation, noting, “To countenance cheating creates a culture of corruption that not only hurts [the athletes] as players, teammates, and representatives of the university but also damages UT’s reputation and that of its sports programs.”

I could not agree more.  [Repeats this phrase; she said it a few paragraphs above.  A stiff inhuman writing style coupled with robotic repetitions of phrases – it just ain’t gonna get you there, honey.  Now, what you should have done is start like this:  I’m the faculty athletics representative, and I’ve always… And then whatever.  Say whatever the hell you want to say.  Tell a story.  Tell it from the heart.  But make it honest and human.  Don’t make it a press release from the president’s office.] That is why swift actions were taken two years ago and the university can say it has truly turned the page.   [The intensifier truly again.  Writing by machine.]  Our best years are yet to come.  [Ends with a flourish — her biggest cliché  yet.]

SOS thanks a reader for sending her this.

Especially a negative restaurant review. How many really negative restaurant reviews have you read?

Here’s one. Let’s see how he does it.   We’re in Toronto, by the way.

“Walk of shame” usually refers to showing up at work in last night’s clothing. It means you got lucky. It also alludes to bed head, missing buttons and incriminating clothing stains.

Basically, looking and feeling like crap.

It also describes the strip of Bloor [Street] between Bathurst and Spadina.

The Annex is no stranger to bad restaurants. The neighbourhood nearly owns a patent on the concept.

Cheap sushi joints line the street, each as barely adequate as the last. The ‘hood’s most popular sushi restaurant was closed down in March for three days by health inspectors. This month, an investigative report by the Star found it was selling tilapia as snapper. [Nice, very precise details.  Sort of amusing.]

Pubs and coffee shops sit in the shadow of the Brunswick House, where a fist fight can be had for the price of a pint. All of it is fuelled by a steady supply of undergrads from University of Toronto’s student ghetto.

T cafe, a new tea and tapas spot, is unlikely to improve the neighbourhood’s reputation.  [SOS likes the way the writer sketches the restaurant’s low-life setting before reviewing the restaurant itself.  Gives the reader a sense of the larger reality in which the place sits.]

The site – the corner of Bloor and Borden – was the home of Dooney’s for more than 20 years. In the mid-’90s, the cafe scored a victory over coffee giant Starbucks. Locals and regulars rallied their support when the property’s owner leased it to the coffee giant. After a lot of bad press, Starbucks leased the property back to Dooney’s and quietly opened up shop down the block.  [Again, a little history is good — though SOS had some trouble understanding the sequence of events as written.]

Perhaps the food at T cafe would be better if it were a Starbucks. I would rather eat one of its prepackaged ham sandwiches than another meal here.

On each visit, it’s difficult to pass the intoxicating perfume of cumin wafting from Ghazale, a wonderful Middle Eastern place across the road.

There are a few pleasing bites at T Cafe. [It’s always a good idea to start an attack with whatever positive you can think of to say.  Makes you look less nasty, more fair.]  Onions, fried with a green-tea speckled batter, are not without their charm ($4.25). Rosti are freshly fried, topped with bits of goat cheese and green-tea smoked salmon ($6).

But that’s just an attempt to say something nice.  [Refreshing directness.] Most of the food has the sprightliness of leftover wedding hors d’oeuvres.

There are cold goops of roasted zucchini and peppers ($4.25) and overcooked lamb chops ($9.25) with mate tea honey mustard. Frico (thin, baked crisps of cheese) are served as “Asiago chips” ($6). Except they are nothing like a chip. They are thick and gummy like a tougher, cheese version of a fruit roll-up.  [Goops.  Gummy.  Excellent icky words.]

The “creamy salsa verde” with won ton chips ($5.25) is yogurt with chopped peppers. Sliders with pancetta ($7.50) are straight out of a caterer’s page #1 selection. That’s the page you flip back to after you see the page #3 prices and say, “People like mini-hamburgers. I guess sliders are good enough for our guests.”

This place even manages to FUBAR something as simple as a bowl of cold soba ($4.99).  [Hold on.  Gotta look up FUBAR.  Fuck Up…?  Ah.  Fuck Up Beyond All Repair. Who knew.]  I can’t imagine how it is even possible to get soba to the consistency of licorice. I’d rather not know.  [Instead of the windy I can’t imagine how it is even possible… maybe something more direct instead:  How do you get soba to the consistency of licorice?]

Nearly all the food has tea in it. Yet nothing tastes of tea. Except for the tea, which is quite nice ($4.50).

But if I were coming here just for tea, it would infuriate me that all the teapots drip.

It’s shocking because good restaurateurs put a lot of care into these things. [Shocking overstates things and risks making the writer sound like a snot.]  A friend who owns a coffee shop has gone through three milk jugs and three sugar bowls in search of the perfect paraphernalia.

When I visit, most guests are drinking tea – couples on laptops; a boy with a stack of textbooks; a woman reading a magazine article titled “Decluttering Your Sewing Room.” A teapot and its drips clutter every table.

The only menus are placed at ceiling level over the counter, in tiny type. A server brings our food, but not cutlery or napkins. “It’s over there,” she says, motioning with her head.  [Excellent bit here.  It’s the details that do the trick.]

Despite the window sign promising a “unique tapas menu,” this is no restaurant.

No one inquires about our half-eaten food. We have leftovers wrapped up to feed someone on the street. But the container leaks red oil on my pants and the stain does not come out (thanks a lot, Shout Triple-Action).

A restaurant is a business – a big investment. It’s hard to fathom the bank employee that would approve a loan for a restaurant, in any neighbourhood, serving tea-infused tapas dishes.

The Annex doesn’t needs [typo] this, period. There is already a tea shop across the street, All Things Tea. There is no shortage of options for chicken wings. A merging of the two (chai chicken wings with peach green tea plum sauce $8) is far less than the sum of its parts.

Despite being in possession of Dooney’s’ liquor licence, there is no alcohol. Maybe this is for people who love wings but hate beer.

I might feel guilty picking on T cafe, but there are plenty of people around town working their bums off to make the best food they can. There is no excuse for this.

Popcorn at the Bloor theatre is a better meal.

… who lived in the house behind mine (and across from Nils Lofgren’s) in Garrett Park. Don’t recall how old I was — maybe thirteen? Dino’s father (here’s his obituary) owned a hair salon, House of Alexis, which Dino now manages.

I’d picked a book at random from a shelf in the Alexis living room, and it turned out to be softcore porn — not that I had that category in my head at the time. Harold Robbins kind of thing. The scene I opened to had a woman expressing her enjoyment of some mildly sadistic nipple play. “Aiee!!” she said. “Aiee!!”

This was a formative moment for little Scathing Online Schoolmarm, because it was her first encounter with the double exclamation mark. From that day forward, she gave a good deal of thought to when and how one should employ the exclamation.

Stuart Jeffries has a charming and thoughtful piece on the subject in the latest Guardian.

In general, SOS sides with those who counsel sparing use of this heavy breather; she believes that in almost all cases your prose, not funny little marks at the end of various sentences, should convey your sentiments, including exclamatory feelings like excitement, delight, surprise, rage, and love. Writing is a discipline; it’s about control. Excess exclamation marks suggest lack of control, as Jeffries notes in quoting some authors about them:

Elmore Leonard wrote of exclamation marks: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” Which means, on average, an exclamation mark every book and a half. In the ninth book of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Eric, one of the characters, insists that “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.” … Fowler’s Modern English Usage [says]: “Except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.”

Jeffries goes on to note that in the age of email the exclamation mark is much-used. People say email’s a particularly cold and unemotional medium, and that the exclamation allows them to add warmth. Great to see you! Instead of Great to see you. Looking forward to seeing you! Rather than Looking forward to seeing you. We’re anxious for people to know we care, and the exclamation mark does the trick.

SOS notices that she only uses the exclamation mark in two ways in her emails. When a student she hasn’t heard from in a while writes to her — with simple greetings, or asking for advice, or asking for a recommendation — she in fact often opens her reply with an exclamation mark at the end of her first sentence: It’s wonderful to hear from you! She knows that students worry they’re bothering professors, or that professors don’t remember them, or whatever, so she wants to underline her happiness at having heard from them.

She also uses the mark ironically. Or sarcastically. Jeffries takes note of this use as well:

There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness. In this post-literal time, exclamation marks become signs of sarcasm as witty correspondents rebel against their overuse. Hence: “I loved your last email! OMG did I LOVE it!!!!!!” The point is they didn’t. They were being IRONIC.

An undergraduate woman at the University of Minnesota writes a column in the campus newspaper.

… [W]e were supposed to be working on a group project, but instead, we decided to get drunk. Inevitably, drunk classmate girl talk leads to the question of whether we find our professor hot. Prudence’s response was something along the lines of, “Well, I find MY professor to be hot.” When we asked her exactly what she meant with that kind of emphasis on ownership, she proceeded to unveil every girl’s college fantasy:

“I’ve known him, my professor boyfriend, since I started working in his department about two years ago. I never took a class under him, but he always flirted with me…I blew him off mostly, but a couple of months ago he asked me out to dinner. We have had many, many discussions about whether or not it’s okay to pursue this, but so far it’s working out well enough. We just have to be discreet about it.” Before I could even get the question out of my mouth, Prudence added, “And yes, I call him ‘professor’ in bed.”

My classmates and I were awestruck by her academic prowess, but it did cross our minds that he could just be a hairy old man. A couple of Facebook clicks later, however, and Prudence proved us wrong. He is, in fact, a gorgeous specimen – perhaps heightened by the fact that he is not opposed to scandalous romance. (As a side note: the fact that we now have the ability to friend our professors on Facebook to learn more about their personal lives, sift through their photos, etc. makes this dating scene even more hot to handle.)

“It is highly likely that us professors are attracted to our students,” Prudence’s professor said when asked for comment….

There it is. US professors????

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

UD thanks Bill for the link.

… but another solid contribution to UD‘s library of student laments about worthless wired classrooms.

Why aren’t professors and administrators reading the same material, and doing something about it? UD, for instance, would love to read a professor’s description of what it’s like to teach hundreds of people totally ignoring you.

In lecture a few weeks ago, I observed a guy sitting in the row in front of me watching three-fourths of the movie [I’d drop ‘three-fourths of the movie’] “Twilight.” Two seats down from him, two people were going through Google images of Beyoncé. I turned to note this to my neighbor, who nodded while scrolling through her BlackBerry.  [Nice touch – Even the neighbor’s wired.]

These people weren’t anomalies. Though the lecture, delivered by a professor ranked 4.3 in the CUE Guide, was a fairly interesting one, a good portion of the class looked up from their various screens only when a phrase was prefaced with the warning, “This might be on the midterm.”  [Nice conclusion to sentence, but drop the many modifiers: fairly, good, various.]   It looked like in this class, at least in this lecture, intellectualism was dead. [Just make the sentence ‘Intellectualism was dead.’  See how, as is often the case, SOS is largely making your writing snappier by editing out verbiage?]  But I don’t blame the people—I blame the technology.

The introduction of laptops and wireless Internet into the classroom environment has allowed us to prioritize our time in a highly pragmatic way.  [Fuck prioritize.  Ugly bogus word.  Corporate jargon.  Save it for your career as a motivational speaker.  And drop ‘highly.‘]

No longer are the choices in class between doodling in a notebook and paying attention; now we have an entire workstation at our fingertips. We can e-mail, organize, and update away while a professor is explaining easy or boring material that presumably doesn’t warrant full attention. [This responds to cynical laptop-defending professors who insist that using a laptop during class is just another form of doodling.  No it ain’t.]

The problem is that while many initiate these side tasks with the intention of only drifting away from class for a short period of time, we often don’t have that self-control. [Drop often and only.] More and more of our attention is taken up by reading blogs or clicking through Wikipedia, until we’ve de-prioritized listening to everything but the most essential concepts. [De-prioritized!  I’m pukingized.]

This approach may allow for the best economization of time  [Oy.  What are we, a business major?  This is basically a nice, conversational essay, but the writer needs to deal with her ize problem.]—it’s probably possible to fill in gaps in the syllabus during reading period, and those emails need to be sent for tomorrow. However, taking on this cost-benefit view of class time both diminishes enjoyment of the course and contributes to a cycle of indifference under which class quality suffers.

When a successful class is defined by acquiring the minimum amount of necessary information in the minimum amount of time, then something is off. Lectures should be interesting, not just useful for the midterm, and when we budget our class time we give up on this basic intellectual ideal. The nuances that get cut with an economic approach to class time are what make the Harvard academic experience more than four years of test prep. When we drop them, we drop learning for its own sake, that clichéed goal that we laud but clearly do not internalize as we fail the simple laptop-lecture attention test.  [Again, this writing could use some sex appeal, but it’s okay.]

Furthermore, class quality on the whole suffers from individual indifference. After all, if we don’t pay attention to anything but vital concepts, why should professors attempt to engage us anymore?   [Crucial point.  Well said.]  Why should they add details or throw in a joke when we’re not looking to be interested? [The whole throw in a joke thing is important too.  Since the laptops, er, dehumanize the classroom, the professor will understandably decide that there’s no point in bothering to have a personality for the purpose of teaching.  If students want her to be another screen, fine.]  Surely, the prospect of lecturing to 200 metallic screens is a discomfiting one, and even more so when they know that an awkward non-response to a question in lecture means that 200 people are logged onto gchat. [I love the phrase ‘lecturing to 200 metallic screens’.  The word metallic is wonderful.]

The best antidote to the rise of viral activity during class time would be to pull the plug on wireless internet in classes in which it is not academically necessary. [Instead of that lame final phrase, just write ‘pull the plug on most wireless internet in class’.] This would inevitably upset many students. However, such a reaction [Students would be upset, but this would only...]  would only prove the degree to which zoning out in class thanks to technology is ingrained in the way we spend our class time  [Drop ‘in the way we spend our class time’.]. Such paternalism may not be the answer, but certainly something has to change. After all, the lecture hall is beginning to resemble Lamont Cafe, without the lattes.  [Drop ‘After all’.]

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

Bonus extra: The old days at Harvard. James Agee describes one of his English professors:

It’s perfectly impossible for me to define anything about him or about what he taught but it was a matter of getting frequent and infinite vistas of perfection in beauty, strength, symmetry, greatness—and the reasons for them, in poetry and in living….That sounds extravagant—well, his power over people was extravagant, and almost unlimited. Everyone who knew him was left in a clear, tingling daze, at the beginning of the summer.

… quotes this sentence from an English professor’s book about the history of creative writing programs:

Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

McGrath comments:

[Writing like this] may explain why creative writing is so popular. If stuff like this is what you get to read in regular English class, then no wonder students would rather write texts of their own.

What was that sentence again?

Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

Let me pull on my ontological prosthesis and see what I can make of this.

[Deep breath.]

[Expulsion of breath.]

[Overwhelming sense of futility.]

[Reminder that you have clicked on University Diaries because you’re in desperate need of something beyond the ’emptiness’ of pure formality.]

Okay. The sentence appears to want to help us understand what an artistic movement, technomodernism, is. We cannot help but note, however, that the sentence does not help us. It hurts us. It hurts our understanding, and it hurts our sense of beauty. Unlike Susan Boyle who is not pretty but can sing, this sentence is not pretty and cannot sing.

Problems start almost immediately. What can it mean to say that an artistic movement identifies with something? People identify with things; things do not identify with things.

And yes. My prosthesis edges
toward the author’s upcoming
quotation marks like a ouija
pointer loaded for bear.

Emptiness, pure, and formality all mean pretty much the same thing in this sentence, but only emptiness gets the mysterious quotation marks. Why? Our sense of confusion deepens. Is pure formality — the simple functional working of this or that machine, let’s assume he means — not empty? Why not?

Have you ever seen the word systemacity before? I ain’t. I’ve seen systematicity, though I’m not proud of it. I’m not proud I hang out on street corners where people use words like systematicity, but systematicity is in fact a word. You can look it up.

You will not find systemacity in the dictionary.

Not that you won’t find it used! Google it and discover that it’s a very specialized word, used mainly by mathematicians and linguists. Why would a writer, in an effort to help people understand something, use a word like systemacity?

… drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

The repetition of “itself” only deepens our sense that instead of getting out of a confusing and circular world, we are entering it more and more surely. And what can it mean to draw a machine to itself? The word draw is clearly the problem here. What sort of an act is this? Artists draw, and the subject is art, so our mind goes perhaps to the visual arts and reads draw literally. But this can’t be what the author intends. Who or what is doing the drawing, and what sort of drawing is this? Dunno.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the idea behind ontological prosthesis is that the technomodernist attempts to lend life (ontology — being) to lifeless empty machines by infusing a kind of aesthetic vibrancy, a presentness, into the technological object. This infusion is an artificial construction, as all art is, and therefore it’s …prosthetic.

Have I made myself clear?

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

Update, correction: A reader who has looked at the book writes in this post’s comment thread:

[T]he Times seems to have misquoted the sentence from the book, which uses the word “systematicity,” not “systemacity.”

… but their content stinks. Here’s an example, from an opinion piece in today’s Boston Globe.

The title tells us The Way to Fight a Recession. The way to fight a recession is for businesses to keep going, expand, never say die, beat back their fear, etc. There’s a coffee shop chain that’s doing just that, and the writer commends them. But there’s another business, a developer named Harvard, that isn’t doing that, and the writer berates them.

… I’m standing along Western Avenue in Allston, construction site of Harvard University’s much trumpeted science center. The new complex is just the first part of what has been promised to be an epic transformation of the area. Or at least, that was the hope. The tall red construction cranes are still busy clearing the area, but Drew Faust, Harvard’s president, has just announced that the university is putting on the brakes. For the moment, work proceeds, but at the end of the year the school will reassess. This has come as a shock to many, especially Allston residents, who now fear they may be stuck indefinitely with what some call the Harvard Hole. And the rest of the projects? No one is saying, but things don’t look good.

Both of these are recession stories, tales of two significant organizations (Harvard, America’s oldest college, and Nespresso, a unit of Swiss food giant Nestle) with two different approaches to the economic crisis. One bulls forward. The other quails. [Yeah, what’s Harvard afraid of? Ain’t it a for-profit corporation just like Nestle? Isn’t it all about the bottom line, just like Nestle?]

… A reported 30 percent drop in the value of its endowment seems to have thrown the university into a tizzy. [A few hundred million off their bottom line and look what the weenies do! A tizzy! Don’t they know they’re a money-generating multinational that has to keep going in order to do what they’ve been created to do — generate money?]

… Economies are strange things. Sophisticated computer modeling, Nobel Prizes, and great thinkers notwithstanding, no one can really explain how to make them grow or why they shrink. Presented with an illness, a group of doctors would pretty quickly figure out how to assess, diagnose, and treat. That’s because medicine really is a science. Economics, pretensions otherwise, is not. Put 100 economists in a room, and the only sure thing you’d get would be 100 different theories. One can see this in today’s throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to economic policy making or in the profession’s slippery language: consumer “confidence,” “virtuous” circles, “giddy” (or “panicked”) investors. There’s an almost self-fulfilling, touchy-feely quality to this: If we believe things are going to be good, then they will be. If we believe otherwise, then they won’t be. [Put aside the fact that medicine — especially that queen of twisted research and conflict of interest, psychiatry — is a notoriously inexact science. Concentrate only on the nonchalance with which this writer dismisses the many economists who warned money managers like those at Harvard that their risky investments would implode.]

So when a company such as Nespresso spends money and makes plans, it sends a message — the bad times will end, growth will resume. If enough companies behaved the same way, then indeed, the economy would turn. Harvard, too, is sending a message. “If Harvard can’t build, who can?” worried one construction industry publication. Perhaps, many will conclude, no one can, and, as a consequence, no one will. [Yes, the American construction giant Harvard needs to set an example, so that other construction companies around the country — Yale, Princeton — and other more specialized builders — for instance, sport franchise/construction ventures like the University of Georgia and the University of Minnesota, can be emboldened by Harvard’s business plan and keep growing.] …

… Fatiguée, as Nigella Lawson notes, is what the French call greens that have lost their crispness, from sitting around too long, or from too much dressing.

Writing can be wilted in the same ways – from sitting around too long, or from being drizzled with too many words.

The problem of tired writing compounds when your subject is itself superannuated.

Yet most subjects are old.  Not much crisp under the sun.  The point of being a good writer is taking something new to the plate.  Plumping things up so people see some aspect of the world fresh.

Consider, for instance, a seasonal problem.

Everyone knows big time university basketball is a rank enseamèd dish, stew’d in corruption.  Every March sports writers get up on little ladders and scrounge in their pantries for the canned indignation.

But why?  Why do that?  Limp writing makes nothing happen.  It’s mere ritual.  It’s filing a story because you’ve got space to fill by Tuesday.  Jim Calhoun has a job to do, and so do you.

But if you had the scruples whose lack you attack in Calhoun, you wouldn’t inflict this sort of futility on your readers.

… From showcase summer camps, to AAU tournaments, to street agents, to runners from professional agents, this is the landscape schools live in. This is the basketball culture, and for all of the NCAA’s attempts to control it, it always seems to get worse, a cesspool of inherent corruption. To the point where the NCAA recently ruled that a seventh-grader is now regarded as a “recruitable” athlete.

Think about that for a second.

Which is not to say that all schools break the rules.

It is to say, though, that this is the basketball world all schools operate in, to the point where virtually all big-time programs are fragile, a deck of cards that has the potential to crumble at any minute, whether it’s off-campus problems, allegations of recruiting violations, rumors of being carried academically, or other supposed atrocities that highlight the fact that players often are not like the other students on campus, regardless of the hype to try to convince people that there are.

Suffice it to say there are no virgins here.

Let’s scathe through that, shall we?

“From showcase summer camps, to AAU tournaments, to street agents, to runners from professional agents, this is the landscape schools live in. [The list’s okay, though all the tos are a bit awkward. Ending on in is weak; remember that you always want to end your sentence on a strong word.   And keep an eye on that landscape metaphor.] This is the basketball culture, [This is. This is. Repetition can be effective, but in this case it feels weak, in part because the language is so blah. We begin to doubt the writer’s conviction.]  and for all of the NCAA’s attempts to control it, it always seems to get worse, a cesspool of inherent corruption.  [It gets worse because the NCAA doesn’t attempt to control it, so here the writer signals his refusal to take on the heavy labor of actual critique. Things get more tired by the minute.   And a cesspool of inherent corruption tells you everything you need to know about l’écriture fatiguée.  Forget the quick transmutation of a landscape into a cesspool, and think instead about the lazy effort to lend a lifeless salad some life by suddenly spicing it way up.  Cesspool is a big ol’ word, way out there. You want to reserve it for something really big, like your suicide note (“Dear World,” wrote George Sanders, “I am leaving because I am bored.  I feel I have lived long enough.  I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool.  Good luck.”), or for a piece of your best writing, in which you demonstrate conviction.]

To the point where the NCAA recently ruled that a seventh-grader is now regarded as a “recruitable” athlete.  [Dump the quotation marks.]

Think about that for a second.

Which is not to say that all schools break the rules.

It is to say, though, that this is the basketball world all schools operate in, [Note the clumsy wordiness, the overuse of the to be verb, the ineffective repetition.]  to the point where virtually all big-time programs are fragile, a deck of cards  [Dead metaphor.]  that has the potential to crumble at any minute, whether it’s off-campus problems, allegations of recruiting violations, rumors of being carried academically, or other supposed atrocities [Tone problem.  What does he mean by calling these things supposed atrocities?  I don’t get it.] that highlight the fact that players often are not like the other students on campus, regardless of the hype to try to convince people that there are.  [There instead of they.  Mistakes will occur when you’re doing automatic writing.]

Suffice it to say there are no virgins here.  [Off we go to another dead metaphor.]”

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

Update:  UD is grateful to James, a reader, for pointing out that both of her fatiguées take an extra e.

No, James.  You are not a pest.

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

Another Update:  This is more like it.  The guy actually cares.

SOS is always screaming that at you. Your writing is you. It is extremely revelatory.

Good writers realize this and learn how to control the effect they make. Whatever sort of SOB you may in reality be, you have to learn how to control your prose so as to come across as the sort of person your reader will — let’s say you’re writing a polemical piece — agree with.

Poor writers, like the sap below, cannot help revealing themselves in ways damaging to their argument. Let’s see how they do this.

A former trustee at the University of Connecticut wishes to come to the defense of the university’s basketball coach, the highest-paid public employee in the state, and a motherfucker.

How to do this?

Well, not this way.

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

“I have read and heard with irritation [Lordy, lordy. Just how many times has ol’ SOS told you that emotion is the enemy of argumentation? First sentence! I’m irritated! And who talks like this? What’s the tone? From the very, very start, what’s the tone? Queen Victoria, that’s the tone. Pompous. Vaguely bullying. Way to step up to the plate.] the attacks on the University of Connecticut’s men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun and his reaction to quizzing about his income, his university-approved outside income opportunities, and a suggestion that he take a cut in salary to aid the university in its current financial crisis.

I would like to provide my perspective on Jim Calhoun and his relationship and importance to the university. [Drop this sentence. Totally unnecessary, and somehow adds to the sense of irritable self-importance.]

During the 1990s, Jim Calhoun was one of the five most valuable individuals in bringing interest to the university and in raising awareness of the value of the university to the state’s economy. [Cruel of the newspaper to run this without edits. Individual is a deadly word, labored and impersonal. And note the vagueness of the repeated word value, and the empty word interest. This is inhuman prose. This is a stiff bureaucrat.] In particular, the successes Coach Calhoun directed on the court have played a pivotal role in the state’s providing $2 billion support to rebuild the University of Connecticut, both physically and academically.

Jim Calhoun is also in the first tier of individuals I’ve known during the past 20 years who have given the most significant portion of their time and resources, including their money, back to UConn. [Individuals again. And it doesn’t matter how much money you give back. It matters how much money you’re overpaid. This is the Massa Saban approach to university life: Give obscene compensation to coaches and then, when the shit hits the fan and they give a little back to save their ass, praise the coach as a great benefactor.] While facing repeated health issues of his own, there has never been a “no” in Jim Calhoun’s vocabulary [Never been a “no.” Writing like this gives everyone health issues. And note the Queen for a Day form of defense here: You bastards are going after a sick man! Yet Calhoun looked mighty strong the other day, when he said no with very little effort to a reporter. No, I won’t return a penny of my compensation to the state. No No. No. Said no a whole lot. Definitely has the word in his vocabulary.] concerning his support of the health center, the cardiology center, the fight against cancer and the battle to overcome autism. [Note the absolutely dead trite language. Battle to overcome autism. Of course, this is about clueless self-importance, too. The writer actually thinks you’re stupid enough to take out your hankie at this point and demand a salary increase for Calhoun.]

I do not curse; so from time to time, I too blanch when Jim expresses his competitiveness and passion in his interaction with his players. [Things are going from worse to worser. We might be able to consider the writer a human being like ourselves, despite his robotic prose, if he cursed. But he doesn’t. Or he feels it’s a clever move to tell us he doesn’t. Interaction goes beautifully with individual in this man’s utterly unreal and unfeeling world.] I have many friends, but I dare say that their friendship and loyalty to me does not exceed the loyalty, friendship, respect and love that is evident from the players who have experienced Jim’s rants as well as his genuine caring. [Just because the Connecticut team is composed of masochists doesn’t mean I should admire their sadist.] From Clifford Robinson to Donyell Marshall to Kevin Ollie to Ray Allen to Rip Hamilton to Caron Butler to Emeka Okafor and all the rest of Huskies from the Calhoun era: Each of their lives and careers have benefited from the contact and mentoring from their coach.

During my tenure as chairman of the board of trustees at UConn, it was vividly clear to me that, from a straight dollar vantage point, Jim Calhoun more than meets the test of value given for dollars received, apart from his giving of his time and money. The investment in Jim Calhoun by the university has been repaid to UConn, and the entire state, many times over.

In 1986, no one believed that Connecticut could become one of the truly elite college basketball programs in the country. The pride that an entire state now possesses because of UConn’s basketball success is priceless. And the entertainment value provided by the Huskies is priceless. [To be sure, every citizen swells with pride because one of its university teams wins games. Also because the team’s coach has been reprimanded by the governor and is the object of hostile legislation from state representatives.]

The national spotlight that basketball success has been able to shine on the words Connecticut and UConn is also priceless. [Well, I suspect Calhoun’s cost will be able to be reckoned. Let’s see what the legislature has to say about it.]

The UConn Athletic Department recently signed important, budget-assisting 10-year agreements with outside contractors in the apparel/footwear (Nike) and corporate partner programs (IMG). Does anyone doubt that the presence of Jim Calhoun as our Hall of Fame, two-time national championship coach played a pivotal role in the desire of those companies to align themselves with UConn athletics? [We can take pride in these commercial arrangements!]

Jim Calhoun has given back and will continue to give back to the University of Connecticut, always providing that “giving” in his own private style. [Quotation marks around “giving” just right, as Calhoun gives the state the finger in his own private style.]”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm hates quotation marks. But she knows there are times when you’ve simply got to use them.

Here’s a perfect example, from an article in Forbes giving advice about philanthropy.

Inquire about whether or not there is a conflict of interest policy in place. Is the investment manager on the board of the organization (i.e., Bernard Madoff was on the board of Yeshiva University and “managed” their investments)?