That was just a few months ago; and now Rita Levi Montalcini has died, age 103.

She won a 1986 Nobel for her work in nerve growth factor; a few years later, she started a foundation for the scientific education of African women. Well into her hundreds, she spent part of each day at the lab, and part at the foundation.

An atheist, she said the reason she lived so long was selflessness – she never cared or thought much about herself, but spent her energy on scientific and social problems that engrossed her. Pesky obstacles like a sexist father, fascism, anti-semitism, and a whole lot more sexism, were ignored, or somehow gotten around.

… for having understood what Columbia University’s Sudhir Venkatesh was long before the New York Times got wind of it. Her post about Columbia’s adorably rogue sociologist appeared way back in April 2009, and her attack on his book about living in a Chicago housing project tells you a lot about the power of the singular, agile, independent blogger to get out ahead of issues (look how long – with a few exceptions – it took everyone else), and about the power of a true education in the methods and ethics of particular scholarly fields.

Of course TR couldn’t know, when she wrote, that Venkatesh’s financial ethics are apparently as shaky as his scholarly; she couldn’t have read these 2010 accounts of his teaching (missing many classes; making highly-selected, immense-tuition-paying Columbia students watch YouTubes when he was too busy to show up); but no one reading her devastating review of his book can miss the larger picture of this man as another in the lengthening line of Jonah Lehrers, Marc Hausers, and Johan Haris.

All of these men, when cornered, said a version of what Venkatesh has said:

I was overwhelmed, I was working both at Columbia and at the FBI, and I struggled to keep up.

In all of these cases, we’re supposed to sympathize with people making up research (Hauser) and quotations (Lehrer, Hari), misusing funds (Venkatesh), and lying to pretty much everyone — because they’re so destructively ambitious that they’ve taken on more than they can handle.

When Tenured Radical went after Sudhir Venkatesh in 2009, several of her readers, in the comment thread, accused her of envy. One of his friends, quoted in the New York Times story, accuses his detractors of envy.

Envy’s a beaut. UD‘s all-time favorite use of it has to be Greg Mankiw’s and Eric Cantor’s, as they labor away against new tax policies. People who aren’t rich envy rich people and want to hurt them — that’s what changes in taxation are about.

Envy’s a real human emotion, to be sure. A biggie. But just because everyone’s susceptible to it, and just because it’s so low, cynical argumentative opponents realize it can be a hell of a good button to push. Instantly it distracts people from the intrinsic legitimacy of your arguments; it makes it all about you, and your grubbiest motivations. It is the quintessence of ad hominem technique.

Bravo to TR, then, not merely for having seen Venkatesh before others saw him, but for standing up to the you’re envious folk.

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

A statistics professor at Columbia recalls:

When Sudhir was in charge of Iserp, he told us that they were out of money and would not be able to honor existing commitments. Or, to be more precise, that things that I considered commitments were not actually so because they had only been transmitted orally, and that more generally Iserp was broke and could not support research in the way that we had expected. I was pretty angry about that, but when Sudhir informed me that he was suddenly stepping down as head of Iserp to work on a project with the Justice department, I assumed that he was better suited to be a researcher than an administrator and I offered him statistical help with his DOJ project if he ever needed it. I figured he was back on the research track and that this was better for all concerned. I don’t think I’d be a very good administrator myself, so I just figured Sudhir had been over his head. I’ve only seen him once since, it was a year or so ago at a sociology seminar, but we were sitting in different areas of the room and I had to leave early, so we did not get a chance to speak.

When I later heard that hundreds of thousands of dollars were missing, that put a different spin on the story. I had heard rumors of an investigation but I’d never known that there was an official document, dated Aug 4, 2011 (nearly a year and a half ago!) detailing $240,000 of questionable expenses including $50,000 for fabricated business purposes. If, as Sudhir is quoted as saying in the news article, he’s only paid pack $13,000 of this, I assume more will happen. It’s not clear why the university would pay a salary to someone who still owes them over $200,000.

If IKEA doesn’t want embarrassing protests like these in its stores, it should think twice before erasing all images of women from its catalogs.

Background here.

University of Georgia student newspaper Editor in Chief Polina Marinova — who walked out to protest the paper’s takeover by a board with the same sure-footed sense of how universities work that the University of Virginia trustees recently showed — now returns to the editorial office triumphant, vindicated.

She walked out by herself (background here), but was followed soon after by the rest of the staff. Non-stop international media coverage of the scandal ensued, just as it did in the case of the University of Virginia trustees’ effort to toss out the university’s president.

Now the fools who tried to turn The Red & Black into an arm of the university’s public relations office have apologized; one of them has resigned; and the students will apparently be reinstated.

Polina, Polina.
Gal, you’re on my mind.

… has died.

Among many other things, she was a physics professor at UC San Diego.

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

Charming memories of time spent in libraries.

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

Schmaltzy, but why not.

The board just voted unanimously to reinstate her.

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

This is not a surprising outcome. Students and faculty deserve, on this beautiful summer day, to celebrate, and I’m sure they will. They responded strongly and immediately to what really does seem to have been an attempted coup.

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

I actually think this story was au fond about human rather than university values.

Remember the famous letter that guy who quit Goldman Sachs wrote? (“[I]f you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.”) That thing was everywhere — New York Times and everywhere. Remember? Everyone was talking about it. Why?

Because nobody really wants to become a vampire squid. Some people want to become rich and powerful, but few – beyond a scattering of psychopaths – like the idea of reviewing their lives at the end of days and realizing that all that time they were Lloyd Blankfein. We live in a capitalist economy and a competitive culture, and we all deal with that in various ways; but it’s terribly important to us that there be locations in our country where exclusively market-driven values do not dominate.

Teresa Sullivan is a typical, traditional university president in that she is always trying to balance bottom line exigencies with the university’s higher calling, its status as one of the rare places in the United States where serious people gather to do something other than engage in commercial trade. She lives in the world of humane studies. Humane. Humanistic. Having to do with human beings, and bringing to human beings moral as well as intellectual seriousness. Evolving a sense of the diversity, complexity and vulnerability of human beings — think of all those literature courses — and ultimately perhaps evolving a way of dealing with other human beings that reflects an understanding of diversity, complexity, and vulnerability.

The moguls on the board of visitors at U Va were – to put it very simply – cruel. They gave no thought to the vulnerability of Teresa Sullivan; they simply summoned her and bullied her out of a job. They humiliated her. It is not enough to succeed; others must fail, says La Rochefoucauld. That is the world outside — and, sadly, to some extent, inside — the university. When it reveals itself with such clarity as it just did at one of our greatest public universities, our anxieties over what we’re turning into at the highest financial levels of our culture — amoral acquisitive people who positively enjoy hurting others — we respond with great vehemence, as the Goldman Sachs guy who couldn’t take it anymore did.

I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding.

We all know it’s eroding; and we all know that it continues to be the case that the people who are the most eroded get the biggest rewards. Most of us want in some instinctive way to protect our universities from that process of erosion. When messengers from that world emerge into sunlight, we pounce. It’s the only thing to do.

Tunisia’s Manouba University is a major site of resistance to Salafist activity in that country.

Students, faculty, and administration are fighting back strongly, and the government, after first remaining silent about the Salafists blocking classes there until women can attend in full veil, has now condemned them.

Coverage here from the university’s website (in French).

If Tunisia’s not careful, it’s going to start looking like Israel.

One of our fellow guests asked Christa, our innkeeper, this as we all ate breakfast this morning.

Well, there was one time… I knew it would be bad, so I told my guests – a young couple – they should leave one day early, before the big snow hit. “No,” they said; “we have an SUV. We’ll be fine.” So down came the snow and that SUV wasn’t going anywhere… I knew we’d be in for a few rough days, but I had some food in my freezer and I was able to cook simple meals.

We spent a lot of time chatting at the fireplace, and one evening I mentioned that I was going to miss an opera in Charlottesville and the young man says “You like opera?” And I said “I love opera.” And he said, “Well, we can sing for our supper.”

And his girlfriend turned out to be an opera singer! Her name is Hyunah Yu, and … well I’ll put on one of her cds.

So now there’s this strong melancholy soprano wafting a Bach cantata through the mountain house, and Christa tells us her story. “She was going to be a doctor…”

You can read the harrowing story here.

Here’s a YouTube that features her singing Amazing Grace.

Quite a life she’s had. And she’s still punching – hard – in her eighties.

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

Final exchange from an interview she gave fourteen years ago.

CP: In closing, what kind of advice would you give to young people today?

AH: None. When I was young I hated it when old people gave me advice.

… has died.

Libera Me, from Verdi’s Requiem, 1967, with Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic.

From Anthony Tommasini’s obituary:

Ms. Sutherland was a plain-spoken and ordinary person, who enjoyed needlepoint and playing with her grandchildren. Though she knew who she was, she was quick to poke fun at her prima donna persona.

“I love all those demented old dames of the old operas,” she said in a 1961 Times profile. “All right, so they’re loony. The music’s wonderful.”

Tried to find a YouTube of her singing some Purcell, but expected nothing and found nothing. Not really her thing. Here’s something vaguely Purcellian, three baroque arias.

Mr UD read this New York Times article to UD yesterday, over breakfast. One of UD‘s readers, David, also sent it to her. As if its content weren’t moving enough, there’s the photo.

UD instantly thought of the David Hare play, Plenty.

Inside Higher Education interviews Eva von Dassow about her recent powerful statement to the University of Minnesota’s clueless, condescending regents.

… [W]hile cuts are being ordered, she said [in her filmed presentation to the university’s leadership] that the new frugality “leaves undiminished the numbers of vice presidents not to mention the salaries of coaches. No, these highly paid positions are not to be reduced. Rather, the university must shed faculty,” she said.

Von Dassow is part of a new organization at the university – Faculty for the Renewal of Public Education. These people have figured out the contents of the strategic initiative.

1. Put the kiddies online.
2. Invest most of our money in sports.
3. Support only vocational, money-making programs.

University of Minnesota.

Thanks for the link, Bill.

… a new novel by Diane Meier, is a mix of university novel and chick lit. Unlike much contemporary academic fiction, it doesn’t take up some grand theme (sexual harassment, political correctness, free speech, student unrest), but instead focuses throughout on the emotional awakening of a repressed professor, Joy Harkness.

In her book Faculty Towers, Elaine Showalter notes that “While earlier academic novels had been idyllic, satiric, ironic, or even embittered,” more recent instances of the genre, by writers like Philip Roth and Francine Prose, tend to be “cosmic, mythic, and vengeful.”

Meier’s novel is none of these things. It is more like Jane Eyre, a first-person account of a withdrawn and emotionally wounded woman’s emergence out of self-protective self-control. Like Jane, Harkness, an English professor, substitutes the world of literature for a personal reckoning:

We humans are, after all, lying in wait for the next great story. I know. Literature is my game. I hand the playing cards to the next generations: Emma Bovary and Jay Gatsby, Hester Prynne and Othello, Medea, Newland Archer and Daily Miller – their stories are what carry me back into the classroom each day; they are the reasons I get out of bed. The thing I might not really wish to look at is that their stories may have been so compelling, they allowed me to put off creating my own.

The reflections on literature Meier places throughout the narrative, though, aren’t particularly illuminating, since the writers Harkness admires most – in particular, Henry James – feature themes at odds with the comic and even utopian themes at the core of chick-lit. The attainability of radical self-transformation toward moral perfection and domestic bliss is the fundamental conviction of chick-lit, and this conviction animates The Season of Second Chances. Consider, on the other hand, the fate of the characters Harkness just listed: Bovary, Miller, Gatsby, Othello, Medea…

So there’s a curious knottedness at the center of this novel. It must convince us of Joy’s initial dark Jamesian convolutions; it must then make her breakthrough into the light plausible and sympathetic. But – in accordance with its genre – this is a relentlessly plot-driven novel. It has no time for the dense flows of interiority James gives us for people like Isabel Archer.

Novels like the Bridget Jones series also, like Season, offer self-consciously literary narrators, but in their purely comic way these narrators are aware of the vast gulf between the realities of their ridiculous lives and the grand romantic contrivances of their favorite heroines’ lives. Season of Second Chances lacks this comic lightness; it’s morally didactic in a pretty straightforward way.

I liked the novel, actually — it was easy to keep reading. But Season locates itself in an ultimately less than satisfying fictional netherworld — it’s neither a modernist Jamesian novel affording us the pleasure of insight into the ambiguities and entrapments of moral consciousness, nor a postmodern confection like the Bridget Jones novels, affording us the weightless pleasure of satirical self-recognition. I guess I’m saying that for me, an English professor happy to encounter English professors in the pages of novels, Joy’s being an English professor – being in a university setting at all – seemed incidental.

From ABC News:

Colleagues are touting a University of Alabama biochemistry professor with heroically saving lives during last week’s campus shooting rampage.

… [Debra] Moriarity, 55, is a professor whose lab was next door to Bishop’s lab. She was also believed to be Bishop’s closest friend in the department.

… The shooting erupted about an hour into the meeting at a moment when Moriarity was looking at some papers. When she looked up, the chairman of the department Gopi K. Podila had been shot in the head and Bishop was firing a second round at the person sitting next to Podila, Adriel D. Johnson Sr., Moriarity said.

Bishop was going down the line, shooting each person in the head, although the sixth person was shot in the chest, she told the magazine.

Moriarity said she immediately dove under the table and scrambled over to Bishop. “I was thinking ‘Oh, my God, this has to stop,” she said.

The professor said she pulled and then pushed on Bishop’s leg, yelling, “I have helped you before, I can help you again!”

Bishop pulled her leg away from Moriarity’s grip and kept shooting, she said. Moriarity crawled past Bishop and into the hallway when she said Bishop turned towards her friend, the gun gripped with both hands and a look of fury on her face.

“Intense eyes, a set jaw,” Moriarity told the Chronicle. As Moriarity, still on her hands and knees, looked up at her one-time friend helplessly, Bishop pulled the trigger. Click. She fired again. Click.

As Bishop stopped to reload, Moriarity said she scrambled back inside the room and with the help of survivors, quickly barricaded the door with a table so Bishop couldn’t reenter the room and resume shooting…