… a college and – allegedly – uses his knowledge of its financial systems to steal from it.
While he was acting president of Southern Vermont College, James Beckwith apparently withdrew large sums from it and placed them in his personal account to pay down mortgages.
Beckwith has committed suicide.
Just some amusing stuff in here.
… Cecilia Chang, the former dean at St. John’s University who has been on trial in New York (background here), has hanged herself.
The judge who questioned her yesterday calls her death “a Shakespearean tragedy.”
For UD, who thinks here of the very similar suicide of Karen Pletz, Shakespearean is not quite right. These two suicides are the type UD calls boxed-in. People have gotten themselves into a tighter and tighter place, and it now looks very clear indeed that they’re not going to get out. That they’re headed for just two boxes – a cell and a coffin – and that’s the end of the story. To decide to check out at this point seems not surprising.
Bernie Madoff and his wife reportedly tried to kill themselves before he went to prison.
These would be Shakespearean tragedies if these people had tried to lead good lives and been undone by unbidden catastrophe. If, tormented by those catastrophes, they had, to the last, struggled to go on leading valuable lives.
It is sad, but not tragic, when a criminal, outwitted, must reckon with terrible humiliation and punishment. You could say, in the case of Chang, that someone should have noticed that she was out of control (UD called her out of control in the last post she wrote about her) and put her on suicide watch. But you cannot, I think, say that her death was tragic.
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You should really always try to speak directly. Especially in cases like this one.
“Mrs. Chang is no longer with us,” [the trial judge] announced to jurors, according to panelists.
For several seconds, jurors said they had no idea what Johnson was trying to tell them, before he went into the grim details.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm suggests doing it this way in order not to look ridiculous, and not to confuse people:
Jurors, I’m deeply sorry to announce that this morning police found Cecilia Chang dead by her own hand.
An audit of South Carolina State University, labeled incomplete by its auditor, was approved Monday afternoon by the board of trustees’ executive committee.
The vote on the audit came almost a month after it was due in the S.C. Comptroller General’s office.
Only three of the five committee members participated in Monday’s teleconference about the audit.
Dr. Walt L. Tobin, one of two people calling themselves chair of the board…
Eh. Forget it.
… at the University of Southern California, a well-heeled school near some dangerous neighborhoods.
In April alone two students were murdered not far from campus, and a few days after that, a campus security guard shot and wounded a man who’d just robbed two students.
Last night, at an on-campus Halloween party hosted by a USC student organization, two men (neither a student) got into a fight, and four people were shot, one critically.
As the story develops, we’ll want to know about security at the party. Did students need to show identification cards? Were campus police around?
The story has – hours after the shootings – already received big national and international coverage.
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UPDATE: These details can’t yet be confirmed, but a campus blogger describes the party as free for USC students and open to non-students for a fee. If so, given recent events, that was a really stupid decision on someone’s part.
The scene was apparently one of mayhem, with panicked crowds running from gunshots.
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From an interview moments after the shootings, with a student who witnessed the events:
I still don’t believe it happened. I definitely don’t believe it happened. It did not in the least occur to me that it was real. Why would it be real?
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Tweets. “I need a bullet-proof vest for school.”
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How Not to Do Damage Control:
1. Call it an “isolated incident” when everyone can see that it’s more of a culminating incident, with crime getting closer and closer to campus over the last few months.
2. Assure people that “campus security was monitoring the party, witnessed the shooting and was able to quickly apprehend the suspects.” What a comfort. They were standing around and watching.
According to reports, the crowd had grown dangerously large. Was campus security simply monitoring this? Why did they let the crowd get so large?
3. Don’t say “This incident reminds us that we must look out for ourselves and be particularly vigilant about the personal safety of friends and guests at our social events. … We all play an important role in ensuring a safe campus.” The words for this statement are insipid and smug. The spokesperson should have begun by noting how frightening this event was, and how totally unacceptable. He should then have announced a change in USC’s idiotic policy:
[C]ampus policy requires that student parties be open only to guests with student IDs from USC or another university.
Huh? Anyone, given recent events, could have seen that neighborhood violence was encroaching on campus. To have so open a policy is asking for trouble.
The president of the university needs to hold a news conference and announce new security policies.
… attended, and among university observers generally, there’s a good deal of comment about the American university bubble. About how MOOCs and outrageous tuition and clouded job prospects are going to shut down or seriously shrink brick and mortar academic institutions…
At Harvard, Bill Kristol said the bubble thing after UD pointed out – in response to a lot of doom and gloom talk among her fellow attendees – that just outside the venue of our conference masses of people from around the world were using battering rams to gain admission to Harvard, a school whose almost forty billion dollar endowment looked to her like one hell of a tough bubble. And people said the obvious stuff about how exceptional Harvard is, etc.
Yet Harvard is one of maybe thirty spectacular private and public schools in the United States to which the battering ram image applies. Everyone’s writing today about the wealthy Chinese couple suing a former Harvard professor after they gave him over two million dollars to get their sons into Harvard or someplace similar. (The wise writer at Gawker points out their fatal mistake: “Always, always bribe the school directly. Can’t stress this enough.”)
I thought China was cleaning our clock. Instead the Chinese, the Indians, tens of thousands of Americans, and vast numbers of people from other countries, seem to be keeping the university bubble at bay.
The national media is all agog about the University of Tennessee’s butt chuggers. Google Tennessee Enema and you’ll get pages and pages of the sort of coverage other universities can only dream about.
As UD‘s father liked to say: Rectum? Damn near killed ’em.
Intellectual seriousness, intellectual passion – they make strange bedfellows. Eve Sedgwick, the mother of queer theory, would seem as frigidly distant as it’s possible to be from the author of The Closing of the American Mind; but she was in fact Allan Bloom’s fervent undergraduate student at Cornell in the late ‘sixties, and she pays an odd homage to his passion and seriousness in her best-known book, The Epistemology of the Closet.
In particular, Sedgwick found inspiring, and based her own academic career upon, the open vulnerability Bloom displayed inside and outside the classroom. She believed in “revealing oneself, however esoterically.” She argued that interpretation means, among other things, “undergoing the perverse danger of setting in motion all the contradictory forces” of a subjectivity.
Saul Bellow saw this brew of paradox, this all too human oddness (the word “odd” recurs constantly in Ravelstein, and is indeed the novel’s first word) and he made Bloom the final member of his long series of flamboyantly human intellectual heroes, actual and fictive: Isaac Rosenfeld, Victor Wulpy, Delmore Schwartz, Moses Herzog. As James Wood writes, “while Bellow insists on our free agency as intelligences and souls, he gestures at the same time toward the physical imprisonment of our bodies.”
Delmore Schwartz inspired Bellow’s Von Humboldt Fleisher, a character who all his life, Bellow writes in that novel, “struggles with the heavy weight of selfhood.” Schwartz’s poem, The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me, describes the poet’s ridiculous physicality, always at odds with his aesthetic and intellectual spirit. Here are some lines from that poem:
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
… Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
… Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.
… A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone …
Bloom’s muscular, visceral prose – and I will be arguing that the initial best-sellerdom and continued cultural importance of Closing derives more from its powerful style, its riveting mode of address, than anything else – that prose manages to haul this beast of heavy self and unwieldy body into the world of abstractions. Indeed, far from wrestling it out of his writing, Bloom – like other first-rate essayists – George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal – lets his darkness-visible trembling do its thing, lets the power of his full humanity out on the page.
Bloom’s prose, I think, excited readers with an odd, tentative, achieved, balance, a balance whose suffering into being (I’m taking this last phrase from William Arrowsmith) we can actually see, or if you prefer, intuit, inside his sentences. In Giants and Dwarfs, Bloom wrote that in reading any polemical book, “the most important experience is … the recognition of seriousness.” Readers instantly recognized that Bloom was serious, that he wrote from a personally-evolved, humanly vulnerable, depth and conviction. The author of a book about Isaac Rosenfeld writes that he wanted to “say something essential about one singularly self-aware life spent in intimacy with books.” That is what The Closing of the American Mind does.
Here’s the full quotation from Arrowsmith, keeping in mind that the ultimate point of Bloom’s book was a defense of the humanities:
[The] enabling principle [of the humanities is] the principle of personal influence and personal example. [Professors should be] visible embodiments of the realized humanity of our aspirations, intelligence, skill, scholarship… [The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too.
In his preface to Closing, Bellow calls Herzog a comic novel which follows an intellectual trying to “make sense of life” and becoming “clearly aware of the preposterousness of such an effort.” Yet if he meant the novel “to show how little strength ‘higher education’ had to offer a troubled man,” he also wrote it to affirm within Moses Herzog “some primal point of balance… an open channel to the soul,” an independent consciousness “immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings.” The soul, Bellow goes on to say, is importantly and everlastingly up against bad ideas, which seek to kill it.
And here is the entryway into the university, for this location, with its persistent, undistracted inquiry into basic questions, allowed him to shed “superfluities so that my mental body could recover its ability to breathe… protecting the root simplicities of being.” It is from this point in his preface that Bellow ushers us into Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.
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When I talk about Bloom’s distinctive, lucid, and exciting prose – the sort of prose that might generate a best-seller – I have in mind passages like this one:
The third island of the university is the almost submerged old Atlantis, the humanities. In it there is no semblance of order, no serious account of what should and should not belong, or of what its disciplines are trying to accomplish or how. It is somehow the repair of man or of humanity, the place to go to find ourselves now that everyone else has given up. But where to look in this heap or jumble? It is difficult enough for those who already know what to look for to get any satisfaction here. For students it requires a powerful instinct and a lot of luck. The analogies tumble uncontrollably from my pen. The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found castaway treasures that made them rich. Or they are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling, either unemployed or performing menial tasks. The other two divisions of the university have no use for the past, are forwardlooking and not inclined toward ancestor worship.
Before I talk about why this is great prose, look at another, much more recent academic writer attempting to say exactly the same thing Bloom is saying. This is from Andrew Delbanco’s just-released book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (A version of the following remarks about Delbanco’s and Bloom’s prose has already appeared in a review of Delbanco’s book I wrote for Inside Higher Education):
Over the past half century or so, this expansion of freedom has been the most obvious change in college life – not just sexual freedom, but what might be called freedom of demeanor and deportment, freedom of choice as fields and courses have vastly multiplied, and, perhaps most important, freedom of judgment as the role of the college as arbiter of values has all but disappeared. Relatively few colleges require any particular course for graduation, and the course catalogue is likely to be somewhere between an encyclopedia and the proverbial Chinese menu – from which students choose a little of this and a little of that, unless they are majoring in one of the “hard” sciences, in which case their range of choice is much narrower.
Notice how, just on the level of style, Delbanco’s writing is markedly weak. And it’s weak because Delbanco isn’t serious; his heart’s not in it. He hasn’t been there while formulating this point of view, and his bland evasive language reflects his disengagement. It also conveys the fact that his focus is on what his audience might think of what he’s saying rather than on the content of his beliefs. He lacks the intellectual autonomy Bloom highlights as a supreme value in Closing. Let me be more precise.
Instead of staying with his main point about the humanities until the end of his paragraph, Delbanco tacks on an afterthought about the sciences: “unless they are majoring in one of the ‘hard’ sciences, in which case their range of choice is much narrower.” This vague meander weakens his point about the humanities; but we might also ask why he puts the word “hard” in quotation marks. I think the answer must be that on the off chance one reader out there thinks the humanities are hard and the sciences soft, Delbanco doesn’t want to stir anything up.
The Chinese menu (a reference instantly made hokey by the word proverbial) is a dull, overused image. And note the many wimpy qualifiers throughout this short paragraph: or so, might be called, perhaps, all but, relatively, likely to be. This is not argumentation; it’s dithering.
Bloom’s is a famous passage, and rightly so. It has straightforwardness, humor, a relaxed, modern, American idiom, and spectacular images (the Paris Flea Market, the refugee camp) which aren’t just plopped down there like chop suey but get elaborated, extended, so that the point can be vividly and precisely made.
Bloom knows what all good writers know: End on your strongest word. He does that in every sentence in this paragraph. There’s assonance everywhere here (third/university/submerged), which delights the inner ear, gives the sentence rhythm, and in its verbal playfulness enacts one of the delights of reading lots of books and encountering lots of kinds of language.
There is exact rhyme: jumble and tumble.
A word like “repair” (the repair of man or of humanity) has a delicacy and a hint of obsolescence to it that prepares us for the flea market.
Even the sly use of “or” in this passage ironically enacts the vague maybe this/a little of that of the humanities curriculum. Great poets like Wallace Stevens know that a poem made up of “or” phrases beautifully conveys a sort of languid confusion, a gentle intellectual disarray; a landscape of mental possibilities among which one has trouble choosing:
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
The humanities in America are a flea market. Or a refugee camp. Or a repair shop…
Bloom’s strong, original, stylish prose represents the successful infusion of his liberally educated sensibility into every phrase of his writing. His book becomes an exemplar – beyond any overt instances of argumentation within it – of the playful, and at the same time deadly serious voice of an inspiringly educated person.
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But what of those arguments? I’m not of course suggesting that Bloom’s book’s success – and, I believe, its likely endurance as an important culture document – is all about style and not at all about content. I would note, however, that plenty of books similar to Bloom’s in significant ways – Philip Rieff’s Fellow Teachers, George Steiner’s Death of Tragedy – have gone mostly unread — in part, it seems to me, because of their impossible prose styles. And on the other hand, Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, written with the same powerful lucid straightforwardness as Closing, was also a best-seller. All of the books I’ve mentioned have a strong anti-modern streak, a fundamental complaint about the flatness and superficiality and materialism of American culture, and a complaint that Americans substitute psychotherapy and solutions-seeking for ongoing spiritual struggle. These days our culture critics’ books complain not about psychotherapy but about dependence upon pills, but the same essential critique abides. It preceded Bloom’s Closing, and it will continue to appear.
What I’ve been suggesting is that Bloom’s book took off not because he railed against rock music and relativism; but because he modeled in his prose a powerfully attractive alternative to those things. Bloom’s book’s contribution is not primarily on the level of political theory – abstractions about how best to live a communal life. Its contribution lies in its modeling, through the intensity, originality, seriousness, and playfulness of its prose, an alluringly achieved self.
… where she will talk, at a Harvard conference, about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind 25 years after its publication. William Kristol will introduce her; Thomas Pangle is a fellow commentator. Other speakers include Paul Cantor (whose essay on White Noise I always assign when I teach Don DeLillo) and Nannerl Keohane.
UD will blog throughout this experience.
After only a few months on the job, Geoffrey Orsak has been sacked as president of the University of Tulsa. These searches are expensive and time-consuming, and it makes no one look good when things collapse. Reasons ought to be given, so that the process and its failures are as open as possible to the people who pay for both the search and the extra expenses associated with this sort of failure. So far Tulsa and Orsak have said nothing.
Sometimes presidents leave for reasons of clear incompatibility. It was simply a mistake for them to take the job, and that is openly acknowledged. When John Balkcom left St John’s College Santa Fe after only a couple of years, he said “I have come to the difficult conclusion that the responsibilities of this position are not a good fit with my professional skills or desires.” If something like that has occurred at Tulsa, Orsak should say so.
Another good reason for the school and Orsak to release statements is that of course we’re now all free to speculate wildly. Was he stealing money, or being in some other way financially irresponsible? Had he engaged in an extramarital affair with someone on the staff? Is he a drinker? When something anomalous like this happens, people are going to try to figure out why on their own if you don’t tell them.
What you tell them might not be true; or it might not be all of the truth. But some statement should be forthcoming. Otherwise, people on campus have a right to worry that animosity and legal bills might be involved.
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UD thanks JND.
… can be as big as all outdoors.
In 1997, the owner of a massive cattle ranch in Wyoming gave it to Colorado State University and the University of Wyoming “for hands-on agriculture education.” But the universities say “the working ranch isn’t a very practical place for students to learn,” and have now put it up for sale.
The donor threatens to sue, since it seems to her that the universities “violated the gift agreement by insufficiently promoting the ranch to university faculty as an available educational tool.”
Why hasn’t the educational set-up worked? “To date, the ranch has had 25 interns and employees from both universities studying geology, range and wildlife management, and equine studies.” That’s in fourteen years.
The same University of Wyoming newspaper, in another article on the subject, increases the number:
In the past, the ranch has had more than 50 interns from a wide variety of fields, including art and geology. Japanese ranchers have visited, and students from Europe have asked to intern at the ranch.
That’s still ridiculously tiny.
To UD’s madly idealizing, hopelessly coastal mind, 50,000 gorgeous acres, a working cattle ranch, should be a spectacular acquisition for a land-grant university interested in maintaining and improving a state’s traditional way of life. It should also be attractive to a university’s art departments, to environmentalists, to scientists…
UW dean of the College of Agriculture, Francis Galey, told the AP, “It’s a very, very efficient and lean working operation. So the way it was set up staffing-wise, there just wasn’t a way to accommodate the teaching we wanted to do.”
I’m not sure what this means. No one on the staff was willing to teach? Isn’t that what the professor is supposed to do? Or am I picking up the possibility that the staff simply wasn’t very cooperative with the whole educational thing — wanted to be left alone to do its work? Disrupted classes?
Wyoming’s student paper writes:
The hidden message is that more educated ranchers do not work the land. They work in management and let unskilled workers work the land. This shift in ranch politics will mean fewer jobs and less state revenue. Family run ranches will quickly become a thing of the past, confined to western movies and stories told by grandparents.
In this Working Ranch article, more reasons emerge, mainly having to do with difficult access and hard winters and the fact that both universities have closer similar facilities (which maybe undermines the claim about the sale’s hidden message).
The darkest theory is that the schools just held onto the land as long as they had to legally and are now selling it because it’s insanely valuable. They’ll get around twenty million, apparently. They say the money will go to agricultural scholarships, but I wonder…
… leftover chicken from Nando’s Peri-Peri (there was an ugly fight, last night, over the lemon & herb sauce), and I say to him:
So there’s this town near Tacoma Washington which is on a beautiful bay – Chambers Bay. Pretty name, Chambers Bay, but the town’s name is University Place.
Silence. He’s fiddling with the toaster.
What university, you might ask — you’re supposed at this point to ask — is located in University Place? [Pause. Silence.] And that’s just it. There isn’t a university. Ain’t hide nor hair of a university. When the town was established in the 1800’s the University of Puget Sound thought it might locate there, but then it didn’t and they were stuck with the name. The US Open’s being played there in 2015, and some in the town – including the mayor – think they’d be better able to benefit from all that publicity and possible tourism and all if they were Chambers Bay instead of University Place. Easier to remember, prettier…
Mr UD responds:
Barring some truly important reason, you shouldn’t change names. The absurd fact of that name’s history is part of the lore of the town. Continuity matters. And it costs money to change the names of towns.
UD responds to Mr UD:
Yeah. The reporter interviews this very anti guy, Bill Callier: “He owns University Place Radiator, Mufflers and Brakes.”
University of Miami. President: Donna Shalala. Search her name on this blog and ask yourself: Why is this person still the president of a university?