From a profile in the Sacramento Bee of Tom Campbell, Republican Senate candidate :

… Campbell grew up in Chicago, the son of William J. Campbell, a federal judge. He obtained three economics degrees, culminating in a doctorate, all from the University of Chicago. His experience in the free-market Chicago economics graduate program helped to distance Campbell from his Democratic upbringing.

… Campbell also obtained a law degree at Harvard in 1976, satisfying his parents’ desire for him to secure a professional credential. He served two prestigious clerkships, first on the federal appellate court in Washington, D.C., and then with Supreme Court Justice Byron White.

During that time, Campbell met his wife, Susanne. She taught him how to ride a bicycle at age 25, amusing White, a former football star.

“Justice White was just amazed there was an adult male who couldn’t ride a bicycle,” recalled S. Elizabeth Gibson, a University of North Carolina law professor who clerked with Campbell. “If it had been me, I would not have announced it, but Tom announced he had learned how to ride as a great accomplishment.”…

… moves smartly along on the question of whether you can have private universities in your country.

Another dumbshit American university builds a sports facility it can’t afford … goes begging for money from the state… uses operating funds to service the debt…

Today it’s Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

[S]ome on campus, noting the bonds may have to be paid off with university operating funds, questioned why officials let a project with at least 40 percent of its funding not yet identified break ground in November 2008 amid a worsening economy.

“Folks, to quote a friend of mine, to get out of a hole, the first rule is to stop digging,” Robert Mutchnick, an IUP professor and president of the faculty union’s campus chapter, wrote in a campus e-mail… “They are mortgaging the future of the university,” he said.

Happens every day.

Deakin lecturer Paul Nicholson is teaching a course to students at the Melbourne, Geelong and Warrnambool campuses called ”creating effective learning environments”. There are no physical lectures.

”It’s a mediaeval technology, the lecture, and it’s so inefficient,” he said.

That whole physical thing where you’re a human being and I’m a human being and we’re in the same room at the same time looking at each other and listening to each other, working through ideas by tossing them around, or sitting quietly and pondering someone’s spontaneously expressed thoughts about something…

Yucko.

Embarrassing. Inefficient in a markedly medieval way… It would be so pre-modern for Nicholson to have to take your (shudder) embodiment into account… It would be like trying to get pregnant by having sex …

So, you know, as an efficiency move, more and more Australian – as well as Canadian – university students are skipping lectures, but that’s fine because qua physical entities universities are these insanely creaky medieval devices…

A few defiant antiquarians among students and professors persist. An international law lecturer at Monash keeps threatening to turn off  class-obliterating technology: He thinks “it’s bad for us,” reports a student. At the University of Ottawa, students report extremely high levels of dissatisfaction, in large part because of “lack of contact time with professors.”

Nicholson needs to explain to these people how icky and reactionary and … obscene, really …  it is to indulge these “contact” fantasies.  

You hide behind your computer screen. I hide behind mine. 

We do that long enough, and we’ll make the whole physical thing of a university go POOF. 

Once that happens, you’ll stop drooling all over yourself about “contact”….

… everyone’s quoting.

Buttons

Only the buttons did not yield
Witness of crime that survived death
They come from depths upon the surface
The only tribute on their graves

Only the buttons did not yield
Powerful voice of silenced choirs
Only the buttons did not yield
Buttons from coats and uniforms

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

The Katyn forest smokes with fog again.

I got the translation of “Buttons” from an anonymous commenter on a thread about the Polish crash in Smolensk. The third stanza appears here, on the Polish government’s page about the president:

…przeleciał ptak przepływa obłok
upada liść kiełkuje ślaz
i cisza jest na wysokościach
i dymi mgłą katyński las…

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Zbigniew Herbert is a ding an sich, cast a cold eye kind of guy. Many of his poems have him reckoning with objects – buttons… or pebbles:

Pebble

— Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

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

Herbert’s one of many poets attracted to the impassive enduring thingness of the world; our childish passions do us in; they need tempering by the earth.

And yet, in words very similar to Camus’ (“[O]ne must keep intact in oneself a freshness, a cool wellspring of joy, love the day that escapes injustice.”), Herbert also writes:

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

The pebble doesn’t need your warmth; nature doesn’t need your warmth. Nature’s not going to reach out and touch you…

Somehow you have to toughen yourself up to something approaching a pebble … a pebble with a heart in it… Keep a calm clear and cold eye. A dry eye. But not a dry heart.

Or, as Flaubert said, we should be “equal to our destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it.” Even with a beating heart.

Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

Albert Hunt, New York Times:

…[T]he leaders of college athletics [will soon introduce in place of] the 64-team tournament, which balances quality and inclusiveness, … 96 teams next year.

This would encourage mediocrity and make more money. The latter is the dominant concern of too many leaders of higher education; it trumps the academic interests of the players and institutions and the desires of fans, whether it’s the basketball tournament’s expansion or the insistence on keeping the antiquated football bowl game schedule.

One of the top teams in college basketball this season was the University of Kentucky. Recent figures show that just 31 percent of its players graduate; a year ago the university brought in a hot-shot coach, John Calipari, who took two other schools to the tournament finals only to have those achievements wiped from the record books for rules violations (though Mr. Calipari himself was not directly implicated).

His Kentucky team was led by four fabulous freshmen, all of whom indicated last week that they would leave without graduating and play professionally next year. So much for the student-athlete concept.

Many of the basketball-crazed fans in Lexington, Kentucky, probably couldn’t care less about student athletes or graduation rates, or their coach’s possible ethical transgressions; he wins games…

La Kid called to see how her father was doing. We cancelled dinner with our friends the Elkins and the Swistaks. Mr UD spent most of the day listening to and watching Polish media. His nephew Andzrej called from Warsaw. Les UDs talked and talked and talked about the catastrophe.

When she wasn’t talking or reading about the crash, UD remembered 1992, her year in Warsaw.

She wrote about it here, in the journal Salmagundi , in 1994.

The article is an orderly little reflection on post-Communist Warsaw, on being an American and a woman and a Jew in Poland… But what went through her head today wasn’t pulled together like that. It was a series of disconnected but enduring memories of that Fulbright year, when UD taught in the literature department and Mr UD in political science at the University of Warsaw.

She thought first of her black jacket. UD had bought, in the States, an expensive quilted jacket, and it hung in the bedroom of the elegant small apartment Mr UD had found on Ulica Boduena.

The attractive young woman they’d hired as a nanny for two-year-old La Kid was lively and sweet with the baby, but she was also a thief. UD knew she admired the jacket, found it exciting, liked to try it on… And when UD left the apartment for a few days (giving a paper somewhere), the nanny took advantage of her absence to remove the jacket from the closet. UD almost never wore it, and the nanny knew this. The nanny also correctly recognized that UD was scatterbrained and might not notice anything.

And yet I noticed right away. I must have figured she’d steal it. I noticed and did nothing. I remember thinking Oh let her have it. Let her show off her expensive quilted black jacket. I don’t care.

I remembered another scene in that apartment. Our landlord, a successful thirtyish Warsaw entrepreneur, came to the apartment one day to fix something for us. Mr UD wasn’t there, and, on his way out, the landlord – who spoke good English – suddenly took me in his arms, said something ridiculous about how sad he was, and set about passionately kissing me.

I snorted and pushed him out the door. He went quietly…

… Czeslaw Milosz remembers friends killed at Katyn:

Crimes against human rights, never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of a friendship between nations. Anthologies of Polish poetry publish poems of my late friends – Wladyslaw Sebyla and Lech Piwowar, and give the date of their deaths: 1940. It is absurd not to be able to write how they perished, though everybody in Poland knows the truth: they shared the fate of several thousand Polish officers disarmed and interned by the then accomplices of Hitler, and they repose in a mass grave.

A plane carrying the president and other important officials has crashed in Russia. Mr UD tells UD that it was part of a delegation on its way to commemorate Katyn.

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

Before he was president, Lech Kaczynski was a professor of law in Warsaw.

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

“I fear,” said Mr UD just now, “a lot of historians may have been on board.” He’s having trouble getting to Polish news sites — too much traffic.

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

Among those on board, former Deputy Prime Minister Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka:

For her opinions, she has been constantly attacked by right-wing parties and populists. The most spectacular offense, however, came from Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek. In 2002, he called her “a feminist block of concrete that will not change even by means of HCl acid.” The words were repeated by [everyone in the] media. “It did not discourage me at all. Women’s rights issues happily became crucial in EU politics, and more and more Polish politicians see that they are important. If there is a little of my input, I am glad. For sure, I am not going to back off.”

She was trained as an anthropologist, specializing in Mongolian cultures.

An editorial in the University of Oregon newspaper describes Mike Bellotti’s classy exit from his athletics director position at UO (background here):

… Bellotti believes he was promised a five-year contract, which would have given him an even larger buyout, though it’s hard to know without evidence in writing. He said in a press conference he is not taking anything that isn’t owed to him, a statement that seems out of touch amid the ongoing argument that the University places a higher priority on athletics than academics. It’s irresponsible for Bellotti to insist upon so much money, when as former athletic director, he knows the athletic department already owes $16 million annually to cover debt service payments for Matthew Knight Arena…

[A] midday ceremony [on a recent Monday in honor of its victorious basketball team] violated an internal Duke agreement established in 2006 that no such celebrations would be held during precious class time.

The 2006 agreement was spearheaded by Richard Hain, a math professor at Duke since 1991, who waged a four-year campaign to limit those activities to evening hours. Hain sent me an e-mail message about the breach and also formally complained to university officials.

“This is the first time since that agreement was made that Duke’s men’s BB team has been to the Final Four,” Hain wrote. “This year, the agreement was completely ignored.”

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Provost Peter Lange, who negotiated the original agreement with Hain, said: “There was a planning meeting, and someone at the meeting was assigned to check in with me about whether there was an agreement. That person never got in touch with me.”

Hain asked, “How can somebody schedule a major event that wipes out basically all undergraduate classes the whole afternoon, without talking to the provost?”

Lange added, “That mistake obviously is never going to be made again because, obviously, now everybody’s aware of the mistake.”

The team, flying back from Indianapolis, arrived an hour late, further disrupting students’ schedules…

… on whistleblowers in university sports.

It’s part of the College Sport Research Institute‘s annual conference, this year held at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

UD‘s excited that Sally Dear will be on the same panel.

… his niece’s newborn.

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

La Kid.

“Without the athletic teams, nobody outside the state of Maine would even know the university exists.”

… why the thrill is gone.

… [M]ost of [my education here] revolves around manipulating the system to my advantage: learning the art of answering multiple choice questions, or when I can zone out during PowerPoint presentations. Discerning what the professor cares about and will probably put on the midterm, while ignoring the rest.

… I believe that the problem itself lies in the structure of Cal’s undergraduate program. Conducted in large auditoriums, much teaching is based mostly on lectures in which a professor simply transfers his or her ideas to the students. Even if you’re lucky enough to get into a good discussion section, there is still inadequate time allotted for student-generated discussions or ideas.

… Which has made me realize that, in the midst of heightened student activism and concern for California’s educational system, we need to expand the list of things that we are fighting for. That we should focus not only on budget cuts and the privatization of public education but on how we are educated as well: on our right to intellectual curiosity, critical thinking and the opportunity to pursue the passions that brought us to Berkeley in the first place…