Graphic images.

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UD thanks a reader.

… but strongly optimistic, on a beautiful summer day at the Garrett Park pool, where UD has just finished her swim, and where she now (they’ve got wifi this year) blogs. The little square of orange light on her computer panel shivers and shakes, and it takes an awfully long time to go from one window to another, but UD will take what she can get by way of internet access (on Thursday her home computer problems should be solved). Hotel lobbies, Starbucks, and now the local pool — when computers disconnect, UD reconnects with her little ‘thesdan world.

Five people have emailed UD about the clout list at the University of Illinois (she’s afraid if she tries to link to an article, it’ll take forever), and she’s grateful to them. She’d already read an article or two about it, and had decided not to post on the subject. But since so many of her kind readers think of UD and University Diaries when they read coverage in the Chicago Trib and elsewhere about the well-established use of clout on the part of politicians and trustees to get unqualified students admitted to the flagship public campus, she’ll happily share her thoughts.

Used to be UD was real radical on the subject. When she first started going with Mr UD, he told her about various Harvard friends of his who’d been admitted with middling grades and scores because their parents were well-connected. She was scandalized, and did quite a bit of populist railing against it, which irritated Mr UD no end.

He tried to explain to her that no university merely looks at grades and scores — there are all sorts of special admits, like athletes and musicians and the geographically well-distributed (UD recalled her father saying that he wasn’t that impressive a candidate for Johns Hopkins, but “No one had ever applied to Hopkins from Ocean City High.”) and, yes, children of alumni. “The main question,” said he, “is Can they do well at the university? All of my friends did very well. Most graduated with honors. And you know all of them and how well they’ve done in life.”

Although her position has moderated a bit, UD remains scandalized by purely money admits — Duke and Brown seem particularly fond of them — where if your father is Ralph Lauren or Rudy Giuliani (how else to explain Andrew Giuliani?) you have a much better chance of getting in than someone more impressive and less wealthy. And sure, many of the University of Illinois admits she’s reading about sound unable to do well at the school — Mr UD’s minimal criterion. One in particular — a law school candidate — sounds terrible, and it’s sad to read the admissions dean begging the administration clout-slaves not to make him write an acceptance email to this person. He worries that the candidate’s wretched test scores will damage the law school’s competitive statistics; he’s sure the candidate will be unable to pass any bar exam.

UD takes both a case by case and a larger, political-atmosphere approach to the clout admissions phenomenon. Illinois is of course one of our most corrupt states. And bad clout admits certainly increase when you’ve got players like Blago at the bat.

Similarly, many of our corrupt, provincial southern states have long regarded colleges and universities as patronage machines, charitable arms of the legislature designed to give jobs to governors’ wives and advanced degrees to children of the prominent. So when there’s a background of deep-rooted cultural corruption, you want to pay particular attention to clout practices.

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

Update: Wrote this yesterday. Apologies for light posting — continued connectivity difficulties. They’re on their way to being solved.

… of James Agee’s poetry is very portable — one of many good things about it, especially when you have to go to the Starbucks in Rockville Town Center for connectivity BECAUSE YOUR CONNECTIVITY AT HOME HAS COLLAPSED (we’re working on it). Mr UD sits beside me, drinking an iced coffee, holding Philip Selznick’s The Moral Commonwealth, and taking notes. That’s a big book, but the Agee is thin and light, and has paragraphs of very intelligent criticism from Andrew. Like this one:

The poems derive their energy from their own internal conflicts in trying to become American and to absorb their many influences; the journalism of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a failure in its own time, remains heavy with a self-absorption that approaches hysteria; the movie criticism never quite becomes a coherent whole; the screenplays, although brilliant, were produced only in part or not at all; the great novel is piercing, beautiful, and perhaps great, but was not actually completed; the superb letters for all their honesty and self-criticism don’t quite attain a transforming self-understanding. Yet Agee delivers in huge measure the pleasures – eminently Romantic – of the glittering fragment.

And it’s the glittering fragment from a poem called Description of Elysium that rivets me, because I sang it before I saw it in Hudgins:

Sure on this shining night
Of starmade shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.

Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wandering far alone
Of shadows on the stars.

Almost hysteria again, I guess — that wandering long line that breaks out of the concision of other lines as it weeps for wonder….

Eminently Romantic, overcome with the glory of life, the mystery of the universe, the perfect moment.

I’ve sung these lines for years. Samuel Barber put them to music. The piano accompaniment is difficult for me – damn modern music – but I manage. Barely.

This is one of my worst puns. It’s not as bad as this one in a Wall Street Journal headline — the article’s about credit-rating downgrades at universities —

BIG MOAN ON CAMPUS

— but it’s pretty bad.

A campus building in Chicago now bears the name of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose Solidarity movement in the ’80s helped trigger communism’s collapse.

Former Polish President Lech Walesa (LEHK vah-WEHN’-sah) spoke Friday at a ceremony at Northeastern Illinois University where the classroom building was named in his honor.

And yes, I’m only running this post to make Mr UD happy.

He’s Polish, in case you didn’t know.

Driven out of her house by connectivity problems (a virus?), UD’s in the lobby of a Marriott Hotel on the Rockville Pike, her teeny Aspire balanced on her knees. Outside, yet another stormy evening.

A line of Barwood cabs waits along the circular hotel driveway; beyond them and up eighteen floors, there’s my aunt’s condominium with its views of the Montgomery County Aquatic Center, and, on clear days, Sugarloaf Mountain.

Like my mother when she was alive, my aunt refuses to learn how to use a computer. She refuses to touch a computer.

I remember how hard my niece — University Diaries’ blog mistress — tried to get my mother on board. She installed a computer in an office across from my mother’s bedroom and taped a big piece of paper saying PUSH THIS BUTTON TO TURN ON YOUR COMPUTER – I think I even recall an arrow pointing directly to the spot – next to the start button. She showed her how easily she could access gardening sites and English Cocker Spaniel sites. But nothing worked. She wasn’t having any. Neither is her sister, my aunt.

So even if I’d wanted to go to my aunt’s luxury condo and sit in one of its big rooms and gaze at the Aquatic Center and use one of her computers, I can’t. No computers. And it’s a pity, because, like me, my aunt writes poetry — she’s been at for it decades, and has an impressive body of work — and I’d love to exchange poems and comments with her online. I’ve mentioned it to her more than once. Nothing doing.

Here in the lobby it’s all about muted tans and whites – a calming color scheme, and UD can use some calming after hours of struggle to connect various computers in her house.

UD is not emotionally complicated. She has two gears: Happy and Angry. She’s mainly happy, and when happy moves through existence looking and acting roughly like everyone else. (Not quite, but pretty much.)

When angry, UD, who never inherited the Repression Gene, storms. She storms like one possessed. Her storms are rarely directed at others; they’re private rages.

When truly cyclonic conditions pertain, as they eventually did tonight after hours of frustration with computers, she turns on the kitchen radio to 1003 FM, the oldies station, and dances and sings with great violence to whatever shake it baby thing is on. Her dog, stationed near the kitchen table in case someone comes in for a snack, gazes at her. Her husband peeks in, laughs, calls her a fool, and goes off to read a good book.

On the drive over here, UD was eloquent: “I come from a land where the sun always shines. In that land, my house had a hot spot and the hot spot was always hot. My heart yearns to go back to Key West. But I must live in this land, where it rains every day and is so dark that we leave our outside light on all afternoon. For two weeks, I’ve been back in this land, where the computers don’t connect, and where I must take to the roads during dark storms in search of a hot spot. Where I must blog among strangers and flat screen tvs.”

Congratulations,
Mort.

Part-time Traverse City resident Mort Gallagher won a Florida contest for the best new poem about colonoscopies.

Gallagher submitted a limerick.

Prime Time

There once was a man in his prime
Who felt his life was sublime
He was told by his wife
Your health IS your life
And his polyp was caught just in time.

The Bottom Line Poetry Contest was organized by a gastroenterology group in Broward and Palm Beach counties. Gallagher spends part of the year in Jupiter, Fla.

The contest received 230 entries from 34 states and seven countries.

It’s how you manage conflict of interest. 

You know. 

University administrators are always telling us that it’s not a matter of avoiding conflict of interest but managing conflict of interest.  

So here’s how you manage it if you’re chief of spinal surgery at UCLA.  You take out your little conflict of interest form, and where it says Do you have a conflict? you say No.

[Senator Charles Grassley says that] Jeffrey Wang, chief of spine surgery at UCLA … didn’t inform the school of $459,500 Wang was paid from 2004 to 2007….  Companies that made payments such as consulting and speaking fees to Wang included medical-device makers Medtronic and FzioMed and the DePuy unit of Johnson & Johnson. Grassley says Wang “consistently checked no” on UCLA disclosure forms when asked whether he had received income of $500 or more from companies funding his clinical research.

Fellow UCLA professors of the spine! Show some backbone! Follow your chief!

Lie.

First, go to Inside Higher Ed for a post with UD’s thoughts about the possibility of doing a series of Teaching Company lectures.

And now —

It was fun. The day was dreary, one of a spell of dreary days we’ve had in DC. But there’s nothing like a chauffeur at your door to cheer you up and remind you life’s worth living.

This was the same deal UD had when she went to the studios of ITN to talk about Kurt Vonnegut — swept through the city in a quiet ride featuring tinted windows and fine upholstery.

Only this wasn’t the city. It was the dull Dulles Corridor, miles of corporate headquarters along suburban Virginia highways.

The very successful Teaching Company, having outgrown its earlier digs, just moved to the brand-new — not even really finished — building where UD gave her lecture. Their two floors of studios and offices really shine, though the views of highways and tree clumps are uninspiring.

Escorted to a big dark room in which a podium, a cup of green Earl Grey tea, and a digital studio clock awaited her, UD made herself ready.  She scanned each of her talk’s jacketed pages (so the mike wouldn’t pick up any paper-rattling) and chatted with her wonderful hosts.  They were anxious she be comfortable.  Would she prefer an audience?  They’d be happy to rustle up some bodies.  Is everything in the format okay?

Everything’s fine.  There’s nothing UD likes better than the sound of her own voice, and she’s perfectly able to conjure a roomful of admirers — the same imaginary friends who ooh and ah as she plays the piano and sings That Ole Devil Called Love like Billie Holiday if she’d been a ‘thesdan.

From out the digital clock come the voices of her producers, telling her stop now and go now and sounds great.  She times the thing just right, coming in at 29 minutes.  They like it, and tell her she doesn’t need to do a second take.

… and of course its money, nobody does it like the University of Kentucky.

Having just given John Calipari over thirty million dollars to coach one of its teams for a few years, Kentucky must now deal with his predecessor’s lawsuit against it for six million.

Kentucky’s adminstration smokes too much bluegrass. UD has nothing against a toke or three, but when you’re running a university, you need to be able to think clearly. UK is into that thing where you don’t care about anything anymore.

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

Update on Kentucky’s thirty million dollar man here.

UD fears this news will only drive UK’s administrators into deeper drug dependency.

Meanwhile, she wrote a little ditty!

Calipari
isn’t vari
wari.

When there’s quarri
he ain’t sorri.
Chase them in his
Maserari.

… beware the B-School boys.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a civil lawsuit against two people, including a Texas A&M University professor, and two companies in an alleged multimillion-dollar foreign-exchange fraud scheme starting in 2006.

U.S. District Court Judge Sim Lake froze the defendants’ assets and allowed the commodities trading regulator to seize records.

Charged was Robert D. Watson, an executive professor in the Finance Department, Houston lawyer and accountant Daniel J. Petroski and two companies, PrivateFX Global One Ltd. and 36 Holdings Ltd. The CFTC accused the two men of urging potential investors to purchase shares in PrivateFX Global One by touting their supposed quarterly trading returns of 6% to 10% from January 2000 through June 30, 2006.

About 60 investors purchased $19.5 million in Global One shares since it began operations in 2006, according to the CFTC. The defendants reported returns of 1.5% to 3% a month and claimed to never have had a losing month, the agency noted.

A university spokesman couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

According to the complaint, the defendants provided the CFTC with falsified account statements showing alleged profitable trades at an international brokerage firm from the start of this year through April totaling $7.5 million in the trading account of 36 Holdings, of which $2.1 million was allocated as Global One profit. The defendants also allegedly provided the CFTC with false Swiss bank statements for 36 Holdings…

The university might not be ready to comment, but it seems already to have air-brushed Watson from all finance department webpages. UD can’t find him anywhere.

… for the length of our drive to our house in Upstate New York, Mr UD played a set of Teaching Company lectures he’d ordered on How to Listen to and Understand Good Music. There were many, many disks, but I didn’t mind listening along.  The professor was engaging — a regular guy who cracked bad jokes and all.

“I could do this sort of thing,” UD thought, as she listened to the guy.  “I’m just like him.  Salt of the earth.  Do anything to make people laugh.  Know a thing or two about a thing or two.”

She didn’t share this thought with Mr UD, because it seemed a touch grandiose.  A touch pathetic.

A few months later, while UD was in Key West, she got an email from the Teaching Company asking if she’d audition for a series of lectures on how to write well.   She was thrilled.

She’s become phone pals with Lyndon Johnson’s granddaughter, Lucinda Robb, who works for TC and has helped UD through the stages of preparation for the audition lecture.

Tomorrow a car comes to Rokeby Avenue to take UD to Chantilly, Virginia — TC headquarters.   The lecture UD records there will be sent to sample audiences around the country.  Good reviews – she gets the gig.  Bad – back to non-corporate life.

She tells you all of this because she won’t be posting as heavily as usual today and tomorrow.  She’s putting finishing touches on her talk even as we blog, and pretty much all day tomorrow she’ll be recording the lecture.

As she’s written the lecture, UD has come to realize that she harbors a certain, er, fervency about the subject of what writing is, why it’s so wonderful, and why you should do it well.  It’s one thing to leap from scathe to scathe, as she does in a daily way; it’s another to pause and think in Big Terms about why a person might make herself into something called Scathing Online Schoolmarm in the first place…

Whatever the outcome of the TC process, UD‘s grateful to the place for prompting her to think in this way.

From the New York Times:

Born in the Bronx on June 23, 1954, she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 8. Her father, a factory worker, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse at a methadone clinic, raised her daughter and a younger son on a modest salary.

Judge Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and became an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office before entering private practice.

But she longed to return to public service, she said, inspired by the “Perry Mason” series she watched as a child. In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended the politically centrist lawyer to President George H. W. Bush, making good on a longstanding promise to appoint a Hispanic judge in New York.

Not very Darwinian of the great-great-grand-daughter of Charles Darwin to have resigned, under pressure (she turns out to have written emails reminding people that her rival, Derek Walcott, had an accusation of sexual misconduct against him), from the Oxford University poetry chair she just won. 

Having done what she needed to do to triumph in the struggle for dominance, Ruth Padel caved to pressure from the pack.

… is a beautiful farmhouse on a snowy night in Upstate New York. Les UDs were getting started in their academic careers, both teaching at the University of Rochester, and they’d been invited to take part in a faculty discussion group that met at various homes. I don’t remember the subject of the reading group; neither does Mr UD.

Perez Zagorin, a history professor, was the genial host that night. Christopher Lasch sat to my left, smoking. He was emotionally intense. He was always intense.

Mr UD thinks we might have been discussing Jacques Derrida, which would explain why I recall Lasch not only as intense, but as angry.

I do remember thinking that if we ended up staying in Rochester (we didn’t want to) the thing to do would be exactly what Zagorin had done: Get a farmhouse and some acres in the hills outside the city.

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That was almost thirty years ago.

Today UD reads two obituaries, first that of Zagorin’s wife, a noted artist. She died April 17.

He died nine days later. Both were 88.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview Zagorin gave about his wife at the time of a 2007 exhibit of her work at the Smithsonian (“Anatomy of a Painting: Honoré Sharrer’s Tribute to the American Working People,” Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery of the Archives of American Art.).

When Kathy Calderwood – when we first knew her, she came over to our house one day… We had a big fireplace there. It was very pleasant, we were having a conversation. … I said to her, what’s so great about self-expression? I said, the self isn’t that important. She was stunned by it.

I mean, when you’re a worker, such as Honoré is, you don’t think about self-expression at all. … [S]he was not an artist. I don’t ever recall her ever thinking – just wasn’t, and for myself as a historian and a writer – of course, I have the experience of intellectual creativity, which is very satisfying and sometimes exciting, but it’s the work that counts; it’s not the self. It’s so tiresome, you see. And I think this profoundly important in dealing with [university] students.

When I have students … I feel great concern about – I would never humiliate a student or anything like that, and I have had quite close relations with some of my students. What I want to teach them is to be competent, to be really good at something, and when you’re good at something, you’re confident of yourself and you’ll be wanted. And it’s hard work.

… [S]elf-expression should be – it’s like happiness.

The greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western tradition and quite possibly of the literature the whole world is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and it begins with the theme that all men aim at happiness. But how do you – you don’t aim at happiness. Happiness is not a goal. Happiness is the byproduct of the things you do. And I could say, truly, I’ve had a happy life and I know Honoré’s had a happy life, and that was because we were all the time doing just what we wanted to be doing. Happiness emerged, it effervesced.

So you don’t aim – I mean, to your husband, your self is very important, and it should be, and the other way … the other way around. But for other people, why should they give a damn about your self? There’s a famous remark that T.S. Eliot made with regard to self-expression… One of his critical essays has a remark to the effect that – he posits a disjunction between the artist’s personal emotions and sufferings, and the work, which is a very anti-romantic attitude, and he always said he was in favor of classicism. I mean, not that there aren’t romantic elements in his work, there are, but this is a distinct critique of romanticism.

And so – and many people have hunted out the personal things in his work which seem to run contrary to the doctrine of impersonality, but in speaking about self-expression, he says somewhere – he says, self-expression – but of course, you have to have something to express, and that’s the heart of the thing, you see. These selves that are being expressed in those [purely personal] cases, we must respect individuals, but they are very ordinary selves. They haven’t anything much to say. So that’s why Kathy was stunned by this remark of mine. The work is everything…

Harvard’s pissed.

A Brooklyn woman who is a Harvard University senior has been barred from graduation next month due to her connection to the fatal shooting of a 21-year-old man in a university dorm last week.

Police have arrested Manhattan resident Jabrai Jordan Copney, 20, for the murder of Justin Cosby; police said Copney, whose girlfriend is a senior at Harvard, and two other men intended to rob Cosby of marijuana and money. Two (unidentified) female Harvard students are described as “the nexus between Cosby and Copney.”

A lawyer for the Harvard senior told the Boston Globe, “This is a highly educated, independent young woman who has literally been cared for since she was a teenager by Harvard – and now they have terminated her right to be on campus. There is no justification for it. She may have known the people involved, but you know, it’s not guilt by association in this country.”

The student was also kicked out of her dorm, Kirkland House, which is where the shooting took place; a previous report said that Copney’s girlfriend’s “gave Copney her dorm hall access card, which allowed him to float in and out of Harvard dorms.”