You really don’t want to know how they’re made. I mean, good ol’ Auburn’s looking for a couple of trustees at the moment — dumb as a goal post Auburn, which is about to get hit by the NCAA again — and I can tell you (if you really want to know) the mix they’re looking for. A guy, a local yokel, who played football for Auburn coupla decades ago and graduated with the sort of higher level understanding of the world you’d expect from a jock who took scads of independent studies with some of Auburn’s finest – like say Thomas Petee . Basically Auburn’s looking for two of the most feeble-minded football freaks it can find. Luckily, the school has graduated many of these, so the search will be a cinch.
You want to know how Penn State makes its sausages? Its thirty-two sausages?
Well, take long-term trustee (since 1997 – wouldn’t want any new blood) Carl Shaffer. Carl’s formal education stopped in high school. He is an impressive farmer, but there’s nothing in his description to suggest knowledge of universities. Or for that matter of public relations. Interviewed about changes to the BOT recommended in the wake of Sandusky (for instance, reducing the number of them to 21), Shaffer said
“This is our university — this university is unique in a lot of ways from other universities … I think it’s up to this board to decide how we’re going to take this university forward.”
… Shaffer said Penn State’s size and location are what make it different: “A lot of things might not fit for us,” he said.
So the same board of trustees that oversaw Sandusky, Graham Spanier, Joe Paterno, Timothy Curley, and Gary Schultz, should be left alone to work out Penn State’s problems because… we’re unique! There’s no one else like us! And how are you unique, Carl?
Well, there’s our location.
You mean you’re the only university situated in the place where you’re situated? Yes, Carl, true; but I can name, oh, hundreds of thousands of universities — all of them, really — unique by virtue of existing on terrain on which no other university exists.
And your size? Let’s see. You have a large student body scattered among many campuses throughout the state. That’s because you’re a land-grant university.
Sometimes one or another guy in one of my classes hangs around after class and doesn’t say anything but sort of looks sideways at me and I sort of smile at him, encouraging him to ask a question or make a comment or something. But he doesn’t say anything, and I gather my notebooks and walk out; and he follows me for a little, at some distance, and then, rather sadly, goes his way.
I don’t know what it means, but I’m moved by it, and I wonder if there’s a maternal something I’m giving off in class, and, if so, whether these young men, missing their mothers, want to be around a certain warmth they’re perceiving. Is the effect – I go on to speculate, wildly – deepened by my talking in literature classes about confusion and suffering and longing?
Literature classes are special, Mr UD often reminds me; they’re not like his political science classes, where they cozy up with constitutions and international law. Not even philosophy has these embodied characters aching for clarity and thrown back on mysteries.
This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for the strange intensity of the literature classroom – an intensity to which my students are highly responsive… That is, I mean to say, I’m grateful to my students.
I’m grateful for their resistance to me – the way a few of them will always, all semester, have a cocked head and skeptical eyes; how some of them will say “Why are all the stories you’ve chosen so dark?”
Which will make me think, and think hard: Am I choosing dark? I riffle through the table of contents of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, desperately looking for happy stories I’ve missed. I want there to be a world in which that student is right, and serious art is as joyous as it is tragic. But even the one story that ends with a reasonably unclouded epiphany – Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” – gets there by way of the evocation of a fully despairing form of life.
I’m grateful for the class sessions when discussion is just dynamite — ideas and questions and jokes and anecdotes blasting away for an hour and fifteen minutes. Afterwards, my blissed-out head spins. My brain’s lit up. I feel the same way I do when at the piano I play non-stop – with some fluidity, some feeling, and even some proximity to the piece as written – through a longish composition. I’ve been engaged – with energy, precision, rapidity, nuance – and the result has been rather beautiful.
I’ve formed lifetime friendships with a surprisingly large number of my students. I’m grateful they let me watch their passion and disillusionment and then their rebuilding of passion. Some of them have terrible crises in which they sit in their stopped cars for hours staring through the windshield and wondering what they’ve missed out on and if they’ve made disastrously wrong decisions about what to do with their lives. I tend to tell them to calm down; that they’re still ridiculously young, and there’s plenty of time to make more mistakes… I try to make them laugh. They do laugh.
On the simplest level, I’m grateful to them because they’re so beautiful. I mean, just beautiful to look at as they gallop their city campus in skinny jeans and low boots. Their faces are ruddy with life.
But the deeper gratitude, the one I’m mainly trying to convey, involves what you might call intellectual vulnerability. It glitters in their eyes as they sit in front of me and begin to take in, in a disciplined way, the difficulty of being human.
Hell it’s just pourin’ out … Slopping over the sides… Sheeit!
… For winning 15 games and losing 21 times over the past three seasons, Derek Dooley walks away from Vol Ball with $5 million in parting gifts. In January, Dooley will start collecting monthly installments of $104,166.66 through 2016.
… [Assuming] Jim Chaney is not retained by the next head coach, he is owed about $645,000. Seven other current assistants are working under multiyear contracts and would be owed a combined $3.71 million…
… When Dooley canned [wide receiver coach Charlie Baggett] after last season, Baggett walked away with $425,000, which is being paid in 24 equal installments.
… The school still owes Phillip Fulmer one more installment on the $6 million exit fee he got after being fired in 2008…
… Despite the fact that he was fired after lying to NCAA investigators, ex-Vols basketball coach Bruce Pearl kept getting $50,000 a month from UT until the pipeline ran dry in July.
… The man who hired those coaches and brokered those deals, former Athletics Director Mike Hamilton, walked away with $1.335 million after what was termed a “negotiated resignation.”
… When Buzz Peterson was fired as Vols basketball coach after the 2005 season, UT had to take out a loan to cover the $1.39 million it owed him within 29 days of his ouster. Why? Because UT was still on the hook to Peterson’s predecessor, Jerry Green, for $200,000 at the time. The short-term loan cost UT almost $80,000 in interest.
… All told, the extreme makeover of UT athletics during the past five years could wind up costing more than $20 million in buyouts.
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David Climer, The Tennessean
… that the New Yorker magazine used to have an amusing feature (maybe it still does?) called Block that Metaphor!, in which the editors printed excerpts from writing that featured mixed or excessive metaphors.
SOS considers the problem of excessive and awkward metaphors in a recent piece of writing by a North Carolina state senator denouncing the athletic/academic scandal at Chapel Hill. As always, her comments are set off from the main text. The senator’s writing is bolded.
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The UNC academic fraud scandal is like a pesky staph infection that just won’t go away for university officials — nor should it. As reporters at the Raleigh News and Observer continue to dig, they uncover more and more dirty little secrets. The latest problems swirl around a pus pocket called the Academic Support Program.
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Okay, so first things first: Figurative language is basically a good thing; it’s there to pep up your writing, make it more vivid. But the figures you choose should have some pertinence to the situation about which you’re writing; they should help us envision it, or think about it, more clearly, as in this famous opening paragraph from Orwell’s essay, “Down the Mine”:
Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported.
The caryatid image takes our mind to that paradigmatic location, the Acropolis. Orwell thus has us, from the outset, exactly where he wants us, equating the miners with the foundations of civilization. Thom Goolsby’s pus pocket does have a connection to his subject in that we often talk about corruption in the language of spreading sickness. The “cancer of corruption,” for instance, has become a cliche. But his elaborately evoked, way icky, somehow comical image is simply over the top, especially for an opening paragraph. It suggests an out of control anger about his topic that immediately diverts the reader’s attention from the subject at hand to the mentality of the writer.
Here’s a really extreme example of a bad comparison, from Morrissey:
“We all live in a murderous world, as the events in Norway have shown, with 97 dead. Though that is nothing compared to what happens in McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried [Chicken] every day.”
Of course Goolsby’s isn’t that grotesque, but it has that same feel of absurd incommensurability, an unfitness to the topic under discussion.
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For many years some football and basketball players, known to the University as “Special Admits,” were assisted by the Academic Support Program and allowed to take no-show classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. Billed as lecture classes, the courses were offered by none other than the chairman of the department. The classes never met — leading one to wonder why the courses were scheduled at all.
Mary Willingham, a reading specialist at UNC, worked in the Academic Support Program. She told reporters she met numerous athletes who had never even read a book, nor did they know what a paragraph was. Willingham reported numerous instances of academic fraud, but no administrator wanted to hear from her. Why would they?
These student-athletes (the term “student” is used lightly here) played in the all-important category of revenue-producing sports. Such individuals are precious commodities at any major university because college sports programs bring in billions of dollars every year to the schools that maintain them. The money comes from many different places, including trademarks, endorsements, media revenues, postseason games and big money from alumni donors.
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This is okay, though the final sentence in the first paragraph would have more impact if Goolsby dropped the last part of it (“which leads one to wonder…”). Just end with “met.” It makes the point, and the finality on the monosyllabic word “met,” combined with the white space before the next paragraph, nails the idea of the nothingness of the courses. In the same way, drop Why would they? at the end of the next paragraph. When expressing rage and disgust, you want to be cool, collected — even cold. Hot rhetorical questions dissolve the sharp substantive language you want.
Wordiness in general – saying much more than you need to – is a problem in this essay. Drop the parenthetic the term ‘student’ is used lightly here. It’s much better simply to use the term – without quotation marks – and proceed. Trust the reader to understand the irony you’re bringing to it. And think of the other words better dropped to make this attack lean and mean: The writer uses the ugly, clunky word numerous (just says lots, or tons, or plenty, or many, — trim your syllables when possible) twice. The final paragraph here would be better if you dropped all-important (precious makes the point). Individuals, like numerous, is a multisyllabic, vague, and rather pretentious word. If the writer had combined his first two sentences, he wouldn’t have needed to come up with another word for players. His second sentence should have ended at billions (same principle as in the first sentence of this excerpt). Or, once having dropped that verbiage, the writer could have attached his final sentence to this one:
These student-athletes played revenue-producing sports, making them precious commodities able to bring in billions from trademarks, endorsements, media revenues, postseason games and big alumni donors.
Okay, back to metaphors.
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It’s the gladiators who bring crowds to the arena and it should surprise no one that schools will do whatever it takes to field the best possible team. What is shameful is the continued smokescreen produced by the UNC administration around this scandal. Academic fraud has prompted no less than four investigations at UNC. One is currently being led by former Governor Jim Martin. So far the governing body of college sports, the NCAA, has not sullied its hands in the most recent fraud revelations.
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Should be no fewer than.
You see what I mean by an excess of metaphor and simile? In this short paragraph, gladiators wrestle with smokescreens and dirty hands. It’s not that any particular image is bad; but jamming them together, one after another, has the reader’s mind dashing off in distracting directions.
In the next few paragraphs, SOS will highlight in red language that if dropped would make this a more powerful argument.
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Governor Martin’s investigation should provide clear answers and solutions for dealing with the scandal. So far, administrators are using the former Republican governor’s inquiry as a dodge to avoid any comments. When asked about the problem, Chancellor Holden Thorp refused [say refuses] to talk, stating that everyone was focused on the Governor’s investigation and that’s all he had to say.
Further, university officials repeatedly claim that FERPA does not allow them to discuss developments in the academic fraud case or release records to the public. FERPA is an acronym for the federal “Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.” [Put this information in a parenthesis after your first use of FERPA.] The University claims this law does not allow them [Find a way to avoid repeating these words.] to release records or face the loss of federal funding. A few documents were disclosed, providing strong evidence as to the extent of the scandal.
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Weak or odd metaphor, redundancy, and unnecessary words will now appear again.
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It is past time for a criminal investigation into these fraudulent activities. For far too long, academic scandals have been treated with the soft glove approach. The local district attorney’s office should begin an immediate criminal probe. If the DA does not wish to handle this matter, he should request that the Attorney General appoint a Special Prosecutor to handle this case.
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The word “criminal” appears twice; you can drop into these fraudulent activities and for far too long. Adding the word “approach” to “soft glove” weighs it down. Just write with a soft glove. End on your strongest word – and that’s glove, not approach.
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The reputation of the state’s flagship university is at stake and someone must take this matter seriously. [This is just blahblah at this point in the essay. Drop the whole thing, or risk looking like a blowhard politician.] Any prosecutor worth his salt would turn detectives loose on staff and administrators involved in the fraud and subsequent cover-up. If necessary, the General Assembly could consider legislation to make prosecuting this type of academic fraud easier.
Additionally, the UNC Board of Governors should seriously consider [Drop seriously consider; makes you look weaselly. If you think they should resign, say it forthrightly.] asking for the resignations of current UNC Trustees who failed to safeguard academic integrity. They have shown little willingness to get to the truth of this scandal and cure the infection. When UNC comes to the General Assembly for more funding, university officials should expect that legislators charged with representing the taxpayers will demand answers.
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He does circle back nicely at the end to infection, which gives the piece some coherence.
… says Sid Gilman on his University of Michigan medical school page.
You said it. Ever since his insider trading charge, Sid’s been too busy with lawyers to make time for students:
Dr. Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan Medical School … was chairman of the safety monitoring committee overseeing the clinical trials of the Alzheimer’s drug.
[Hedge fund manager Mathew Martoma, also charged,] met Gilman some time between 2006 and 2008 through paid consultations, the SEC complaint says. “During these consultations, Gilman provided Martoma with material, nonpublic information about the ongoing trial,” the SEC complaint said.
In mid-July 2008, “Gilman provided Martoma with the actual, detailed results of the clinical trial” before an official announcement on July 29, 2008, the SEC said.
And wow did these guys make a lot of money. Most lucrative insider trading scheme ever.
Details, in case you want to try this yourself.
Martoma allegedly found out from Sidney Gilman, a leading Alzheimer’s investigator at the University of Michigan, that bapineuzumab–then owned by Wyeth and Elan–had failed a key study. Not only did the hedge fund sell all of its shares in the two companies, they shorted the developers as well. And they made a killing when the share price for both cratered on the news. Gilman, who reportedly was connected to Martoma through an expert networking firm that paid him $100,000, is now cooperating with the feds.
Here’s Sid in happier days, sleeping and perchance dreaming of making a killing and then having to try to save his ass by cooperating with the feds.
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Update: A fellow University of Michigan professor comments.
Gilman’s conduct raises fresh questions about firms that match investors with experts in subjects that could move stock prices, said Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business professor who follows the pharmaceutical industry.
“If the allegations are true, it’s reprehensible conduct for someone who has misused a position of trust,” said Gordon, who added that he doesn’t know Gilman. “This is crookery of really the lowest possible ethical standards. It doesn’t get much lower.”
One does wonder… Here’s a much-venerated man with, you figure, oodles of income. Why do it? Why be so greedy as to risk ruining your life — when you don’t need the money?