… note that when the New York Times went in search of a sage, gravitas-rich voice on the absolutely shocking academic fraud at Notre Dame, they could only find Dave Schmidly.
Schmidly! Dave! Dave – comic-book ex-president of the unbelievably corrupt University of New Mexico; a man who tried hiring his son for a high-level university position [scroll down for some Schmidly posts]; a man drummed out of office by faculty… Yes, get Schmidly on the the phone! He’ll have something sage to say!
And he does. He obligingly knits his brow for the New York Times about how, you know, competition to recruit the best football players “increases the likelihood of people cutting corners.”
Dave would know about that! Why interview lots of people for a $90,000 a year UNM job when your kid’s sitting right here?
… Eh. It’s not as though the NYT could find a clean president of a big-time sports university to interview. It’s more a kind of how far down the list do we want to go thing… Donna Shalala? Yikes. No. Hey, there’s Tressel! He even used to be a coach! … Oh yeah. Scratch that…. Next…?
There’s no nothingness like University of Hawaii nothingness. Nothing happens, and Hawaiian students and taxpayers pay through the nose for the privilege.
There’s big nothing – like the Stevie Wonder scam – and there’s small nothing, like the $64 student fee for nothing.
A UH student noticed a big jump in his fees one semester, and he went to the local investigative news reporter (there’s no there there to go to at UH itself). She immediately established that the fee was bogus (outright theft or incompetence, you make the call) and immediately got a hell of a comment from a high-ranking nullity on campus. That’s life, he said. Sometimes in life you pay for stuff you don’t get.
You have to go to Lucky’s speech in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Waiting for Godot (start at 44:30) even to begin to understand the for-profit college situation in the United States. David Halperin does a nice tidy job of reviewing the mad greed and cynicism and indifference that puts our taxes in the pockets of people who exploit innocents. It won’t change until lobbying changes. And lobbying won’t change.
… than an empty, silent, arts center?
Aesthetically eloquent as well.
The beautiful white building, empty and silent.
Written and conceived by Samuel Beckett, this one act for two suits captures its moment in time with the concision and enigma of great art. Scroll down to video.
… writes T.S. Eliot, in The Waste Land.
On the Liffey, however, Samuel Beckett connects Sir John Rogerson’s Quay with North Wall Quay.
Like his mentor, James Joyce, Beckett now has a Dublin bridge named after him:
The Samuel Beckett Bridge, at 120 metres long and 48 metres high, will link Sir John Rogerson’s Quay on the south side of the river Liffey with Guild Street and North Wall Quay on the north side.
Dublin’s newest bridge was designed by Santiago Calatrava, and will be his second bridge in the capital. The James Joyce Bridge, near Heuston Station, opened in 2003.
The new bridge, costing about €60 million, will be capable of rotating through an angle of 90 degrees to facilitate maritime traffic.
It has four traffic lanes, cycle tracks and footpaths.
It arrived on a barge into Dublin Port on Monday morning having charted its way from Rotterdam, across the English Channel and Irish Sea in a week-long journey.
It was constructed for Dublin City Council by an Irish/Dutch joint venture consortium Graham-Hollandia.
The design evokes the image of the Irish harp lying on its side…
What would Beckett say?
“Bridge to nowhere.”
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They put up a bridge for Sam Beckett
And his characters came out to check it.
Vlad and Estragon waited.
And waited and waited.
Then Lucky and Pozzo both wrecked it.