If you’re a just-hired university president, you want to go easy on the confidentiality agreements. As the new leader of Virginia Commonwealth University is discovering, it makes people wonder what you’re hiding.
Remember the brief tenure of Brian Johnson at Maryland’s Montgomery College?
Faculty members allege that Johnson has directed administrators not to talk to college trustees and that information is “routinely censored.” Several employees say they believe that listening devices have been planted in offices and meeting rooms, according to the report.
… kills herself, leaving a last Facebook image of a bloodied hand from Madame Butterfly.
… 39 year old Roxana Briban chose to leave the world stage in a spectacular way, somehow inspired by the great tragic heroines she embodied on stage… One of the last messages Roxana Briban posted on Facebook is dated Wednesday four minutes before midnight and posts an image with a bloody hand, from Madame Butterfly, a part she … sang in 2008 for the National Opera.
The last messages Roxana posted online are [YouTubes of] Casta Diva from Norma by Vincenzo Bellini, and the staggering finale of Verdi’s La Traviata, where Violetta dies.
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Roxana Briban sings.
You can play it unprettily and it still sounds pretty.
I’ve been playing from a virginal book tonight on my baby grand. In particular, I’ve been trying to master O Mistris myne, by William Byrd. (Here’s the book.) (At 1:21 on the YouTube: Hear the dissonance? Fun.)
My error-ridden rendition of this gorgeous tune and variations sounded so good that Mr UD, sitting nearby in the living room, protested when I stopped.
I’ve been trying to figure out why you can get away, when playing music for virginal, with being a bad pianist. It’s actually difficult to play these pieces (sometimes you think If it’s old, it’ll be easier than something new. Not so.); so it should sound a mess…
The best I can do is that this music combines a very strong and intensely charming tune, to which it returns very clearly again and again, even as the variations keep manically coming and going. The listener is in love with that tune, and seeks it out in a way that rather blurs the rest of the playing… The listener feels deep happiness each time his ear relocates the tune…
And, after all, the complex variations on the tune are … complex, so if your fingers are muddying them, maybe it sounds as though you’re following directions! The runs and trills, the accidents and ornaments — they merge with your modern messiness until things get all Elizabethan.
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Stephen Dedalus, with his impeccable taste, loved this same music, and in conversation with Leopold Bloom singled out a composer also in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book: Sweelinck.
American universities seem to like having a special place on campus for dunces and suckers, a kind of reverse-world Center for Excellence, and that place is always the football program. The overpaid coach; the losing team; the fucked up budget; the students who don’t show up even when the games are free.
The University of Akron is a case in point. Its October 23 football game in its new $61.6 million stadium attracted 756 students.
That’s bad news for an athletic department responsible for about two-thirds of the $3.15 million annual debt payment for the stadium…
So sad, when a high-ranking administrator takes to the local paper to try to calm the populace.
In the wake of the University of Central Florida cheating scandal – brought on by the exquisite synergy of a professor who couldn’t be bothered to write his own exam (“Prof. Quinn barely created anything at all. He just pulled questions from a source that the students had access to as well and copied them verbatim. It would seem that, even if you think the students did wrong here, the Professor was equally negligent. Will he have to sit through an ethics class too?”), and students who, sensing he couldn’t be bothered, found the online exam he used and copied it – the school’s provost natters about how much integrity the school has, how this was an isolated incident, and how they’re going to “add to and improve upon our existing safeguards.”
A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you.
UCF must sense how unpleasant its transformation into a Vegas casino, bristling with security cameras, is, since the provost lists all sorts of behavior-improvement initiatives on campus, but doesn’t mention this one. And this is the one that’s gotten the most press.
UCF is a failed enterprise. It has too many students, and professors can’t handle it. Pretty much everything it does reflects badly on the American university. It should shut its physical campus and enter fully into online oblivion.
It’s not just for classes anymore!
Your university’s games are increasingly available live, and online.
Recent studies show that students who watch football and basketball games online do just as well as, or better than, students who watch face-to-face. On every parameter – excitement, inebriation, school pride – results suggest that, as with their education, students lose nothing in quality — and indeed maybe gain in quality — by watching games online.
There’s every reason why, in a trend parallel to the onlining of American university education, we should be seeing an onlining of university sports. Universities will save hundreds of millions of dollars in stadiums, tailgate cleanups, etc. And – most importantly – students who are too shy to paint their faces and cheer in public will finally be able to take part in this campus experience.
… round-up gets going, check your university’s trustees, its Outstanding Alumni Award winners… Check the names on your most prominent buildings, because some of those donors might be going to jail…
Matt Taibbi gets at the heart of insider culture:
The other crimes on Wall Street have been so pervasive and so massive in scope in the past decade or so that good old-fashioned insider trading — hedge funds and other gamblers robbing the great mass of uninformed investors by acting on exclusive intelligence not available to the rest of us — seems almost quaint.
… However there is a mounting pile of evidence suggesting a sort of widespread culture of insider trading in which a few players (specifically the major banks and a few of the biggest and best-connected hedge funds) have milked a seemingly endless stream of exclusive information, not occasionally or opportunistically but as an ongoing commercial strategy.
For sure some of the robbers have turned some of their loot over to their beloved alma maters – rather in the way Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin cut Yeshiva University into some of their winnings.
UD gets a nice warm feeling as she anticipates knowing which campuses have the most insider traders in the most prominent positions.
Lowe said pharmaceutical companies refer to him as a “Thought Leader.”
Columbia! the gem of big pharma!
The home of the hack and the shill!
The shrine of drug-makers’ devotion,
The campus where all promote their pills.
Thy professors are prostitutes assembled;
They will read any script you put on view;
Their payments make lesser salesmen tremble,
When borne by the proud and the few
When borne by the proud and the few
When borne by the proud and the few,
Their payments make lesser salesmen tremble,
When borne by the proud and the few.
Of course. It’s been burning for years. It makes the University of Georgia look like the University of Bologna. In 1088.
The Mephitic Factor is getting out of hand on the Corporation of Brown University.
When you mob a university’s boardroom with the mega-rich, you expect, especially from some of the financial biggies on it, a bit of bouncy-bouncy morality-wise. Yes, there’s a whiff of fraud here, a rumor of rule-breaking there, lawsuits trailing like wisteria everywhere… Big deal. Ruth Simmons, president of Brown, sits on the university corporation board, and we all recall her remarkably destructive activity on the compensation board of Goldman Sachs. The president of the university sets the moral tone, so okay…
But now we’re talking straightforward, high-profile illegality. Brown University board member Steven Rattner is described by New York’s attorney general as “a central player in the criminal conspiracy to use bribes and kickbacks to get $150 million in state pensions that he could invest through his company Quadrangle.”
Code Brown, as the doctors say. Things are really beginning to stink.
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UD thanks Roy for the link to the Brown Daily Herald.
… is having trouble swallowing.
… I’m a big Tom Izzo fan, but the news that he has just received a $500,000 raise and use of the [university’s] private jet in severely economically depressed Michigan is a bit hard to swallow.
To put that in perspective, the university president makes roughly $570,000 per year and has use of a state car.
Izzo makes 3.5 million, plus winning incentives.
… about the new president’s salary at the University of Minnesota. But remember: This is the man who will go up before all the peoples of Minnesota and plead for alcohol sales at the university’s new football stadium! On his shoulders alone falls the responsibility of explaining to the politicians of the state the indispensability of beer and wine sales to the health of the state’s flagship. How much does the head lobbyist for the National Beer Wholesalers get? That’s what you’ve got to go by.
From an article in the Boston Globe titled DARK CLOUDS COVER AUBURN:
The buzz across the South, where college football is a religion, is that the [Cam] Newton story, because of its implications, is the biggest story ever in the SEC.
It may evolve into that, since the FBI is interested in the concept of football players being “shopped around’’ to schools.
That raises another question. Right now, Mississippi State is the only school that has been mentioned as a potential bidder — and, again, Mississippi State has not been accused of making an offer or accepting one, only of hearing about one.
But can we really believe in the high-stakes world of the SEC — which has had six of its 12 schools make off-the-field headlines this season, be it for recruiting violations, agent problems, or assorted crimes and misdemeanors — that Mississippi State was the only school in the conference contacted about Newton?
The Mississippi State article is titled: THE CLOUDS GATHER OVER A ONCE-BRIGHT SEASON.