… “The Cults of Chico,” is now up at Inside Higher Education.
… a University of Tennessee-based sports writer touches on the larger madness at tetched in the head UT:
[The UT athletic director] referred Sunday to UT going through 12 presidents since 2000. It’s only six, but the point is valid.
They go through presidents as fast as they go through coaches! It’s Ka-RAAAAAZY!
And it’s mainly because the rat finks and the squealers and the stoolies are suddenly crawling out of the woodwork and describing what actually goes on at schools that have long since whored themselves to sports but continue telling themselves they’re legitimate universities. One of the tutors at North Carolina Chapel Hill has decided to speak to the press, and you can read details of Nyang’oro Nation here. One of the football players at the University of Minnesota has written a long letter explaining that he’s transferring because he’s tired of being savaged by Coach Jerry Kill. A Washington State player spills the beans about our old friend Coach Mike Leach.
When people start talking, they encourage other people. Things could get… ugly? Ugly is what big-time university sports has been for decades.
Things could get really ugly.
Now that the University of Tennessee done chugged Coach Dooley’s butt clear out of the football program, consider the words in my post’s title. They were written not long ago by a Tennessee person who, given Dooley’s string of losses and that big ol’ empty expensive football stadium he and the guys were playing in, was anticipating his firing and reviewing UT’s situation.
It is not a good situation. It’s possible that even the constantly shifting gaggles of good old boys running UT are capable of grasping this.
The university’s athletic department posted a $3.98 million budget deficit for the 2011-12 fiscal year in part because of buyouts it was paying to [Phil] Fulmer, former athletic director Mike Hamilton, former men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl and former baseball coach Todd Raleigh.
The football program is on probation until August 2015. The NCAA handed Tennessee a two-year extension of its probation Friday after ruling former assistant Willie Mack Garza provided impermissible travel and lodging for an unofficial visit by former prospect Lache Seastrunk…
Dooley’s buyout will cost UT an additional five million dollars. Other millionaires on his staff will almost certainly also be fired, and they too will get million-dollar buyouts.
One of their hotly recruited players has been named as a suspect in the theft of objects from campus. Dooley knew he was a thief when he recruited him; he had a record.
The eyes of the world have been riveted to UT’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and its wine-enema-loving brothers.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things. Blog posts are supposed to be relatively short, and I haven’t yet gotten to why Knoxville is an attractive tourist destination.
So let’s take up the statement in this post’s headline. Although UT has a long history of filthy coaches and a filthy program; although its football program is on probation; although it has impoverished whatever academic value it had by continuing to give money to its filthy sports programs; although its sports programs recruit criminals; although the frat system that comprises the core of its football fans is currently a national laughingstock; although it will have to take millions and millions more from the school’s academic mission to hire a big-time coach (if it doesn’t, not only all of its investments in sports facilities — like its “eye-popping new athletic facility, a virtual Taj Mahal with cascading waterfalls, state-of-the-art technology, and workout areas that rival the U.S. Olympic training facility in Colorado Springs” — implode, but UT students almost certainly stage riots) — despite all of this, the culture of UT sports is a real fine drawing card for Knoxville. People want to be part of this picture.
And talk about generation of revenue! Football season lasts “up to eight weekends” a year!
Yes! For the sake of those few precious autumn days, a public university in the United States of America has turned itself into a tattered stinking whore.
Once they find the veteran cheater-coach they think will save their lives, the stench from UT will rise even higher.
UD will be there to sniff it — every aroma of the way.
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UD thanks Mike.
Tourism is dwindling. Who wants to vacation among bands of bearded savages raiding embassies, staking their black pirate flag over universities or burning trucks carrying beer?
… my latest Inside Higher Education column, will appear early Monday morning. I’ll link to it here.
It’s awkward. How entangled do universities want to get with businesses like Millennium?
A federal grand jury in Boston is investigating Millennium Laboratories of San Diego, a fast-growing private company selling urine drug testing services to pain clinics across the United States.
The company not only is under investigation by the Justice Department for allegations of health care fraud but also for intimidating former employees, one who was portrayed in a slideshow at a company meeting as a corpse in a body bag…. [It is also accused of] getting doctors to order unnecessary urine tests [– the testing, amid an epidemic of pain pill use, reveals whether patients are abusing the drugs –] and charging excessive fees to Medicare and private insurers.
I mean, nothing wrong with industry money, but you do want to keep an eye on the particular representatives from industry offering it.
Millennium sales tactics [it is alleged] included a chart showing doctors how much they could boost their own income by increasing the number of urine drug tests they ordered. For instance, a $15 payment to test for one drug could balloon to about $800,000 a year if 20 people a day were tested and each urine sample was tested for 11 drugs, the chart said.
It is a beautiful synergy, when you think about it. Keep prescribing the pain pills — the medical profession almost has the entire American population on them — and then, concerned at the shocking escalation in their abuse, make your patients pay for urine tests. It’s funny to think about how America’s hundreds of thousands of pill mills will be giving the test to make sure their customers are taking their Oxy and Roxy. If you’re in the urine testing biz, like Millennium, you get them coming and going, as it were.
So, you know, a very becoming business altogether, and if you’re Duke or Washington you might want to keep an eye on the Justice Department proceedings and ask if you want to continue whitewashing the reputation of these outfits.
… who died last week, includes this poem.
Transgressions
He thinks about how important the sinning was,
how much his equity was in simply being alive.
Like the sloth. The days and nights wasted,
doing nothing important adding up to
the favorite years. Long hot afternoons
watching ants while the cicadas railed
in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.
Indolence so often when no one was watching.
Wasting June mornings with the earth singing
all around. Autumn afternoons doing nothing
but listening to the siren voices of streams
and clouds coaxing him into the sweet happiness
of leaving all of it alone. Using up what
little time we have, relishing our mortality,
waltzing slowly without purpose. Neglecting
the future. Content to let the garden fail
and the house continue on in its usual disorder.
Yes, and coveting his neighbors’ wives.
Their clean hair and soft voices. The seraphim
he was sure were in one of the upstairs rooms.
Hesitant occasions of pride, feeling himself feeling.
Waking in the night and lying there. Discovering
the past in wonderful stillness. The other,
older pride. Watching the ambulance take away
the man whose throat he had crushed. Above all,
his greed. Greed of time, of being. This world,
the pine woods stretching all brown or bare
on either side of the railroad tracks in the winter
twilight. Him feeling the cold, sinfully unshriven.
Well, I wrote about a cicada poem here, and the cicadas do the same thing in John Blair’s poem that they do here in Gilbert’s. They give out, says Blair, with a “warning wail” about, Gilbert says, “the brevity of life.”
Jack Gilbert is famous (among poetry types) for having had so much “greed of time, of being” that early in his career he turned his back on America, and the poetry world (in which he had already had high-profile successes), and lived pretty much alone on Greek islands. As “Trangressions” makes clear, Gilbert’s recognition of life’s brevity catalyzed a determination to be, not so much to do. He wrote some – not many – books of poems, but mainly he placed himself, open and ecstatic, in life. He lived, as it were, a microscopically intense existential ongoingness in one of the earth’s most intense settings.
Many of his poems arise from this peculiar ontological arrangement, this hyper-focused sensitivity to passing objects, moods, weather patterns. Undistracted by work, family, and social life, untethered by ideology or faith, Gilbert produced strange poems that starkly combine the two essentials of each human being’s being in the world: the physical universe, and the mind. His poems are both sharply clarified evocations of people and things in his sun-blasted environment, and insistent conversations with himself about his own motives in moving himself away from ordinary life, and the price he’s paid for that move.
Of course Gilbert would choose Greece for his slow sweet clear declension through time. Don DeLillo chose it too, for a few years, and saw the same things Gilbert did. In his novel, The Names, DeLillo described a Greek village in language that, put into short lines rather than paragraphs, could be Gilbert’s:
Laundry hung in the walled gardens, always this sense of realized space, common objects, domestic life going on in that sculpted hush. Stairways bent around houses, disappearing. It was a sea chamber raised to the day, to the detailing light, a textured pigment on the hills. There was something artless and trusting in the place despite the street meanders, the narrow turns and ravels. Striped flagpoles and aired-out rugs, houses joined by closed wooden balconies, plants in battered cans, a willingness to share the oddments of some gathering-up. Passageways captured the eye with one touch, a sea green door, a handrail varnished to a nautical gloss. A heart barely beating in the summer heat, and always the climb, the small birds in cages, the framed approaches to nowhere. Doorways were paved with pebble mosaics, the terrace stones were outlined in white.
Realized space – that’s what the artist is after. The world’s objects and people distributed deeply and fully and feelingly so that when you look at them you see reality, you see the actual world.
In particular, you see the earth’s empty spaces inhabited, elaborated, brought to life, realized by people through use. In Greece, even nowhere is framed.
This needs to be a domestic lived reality, not the techno-phantasmagoria of the great skyscraper city. You seek elemental truths, basic daily gatherings-up, using DeLillo’s word. You want to observe this. So you could live, for instance, on the edge of a Balinese rice paddy just as easily as in a Greek village, for both give you daily and nightly visual access to the interaction of small human communities and natural beauty and bounty. Actually, Greece is better because it’s dry, without natural bounty in the way of watery Bali — you want visual access to small human communities enacting the existential drama of drawing from the earth beauty, sustenance, and meaning.
So, you’re ecstatically, aesthetically, engaged in all of this, but your consciousness – your being a person with a past, with regrets and confusions and worldly avidities – is going to bedevil you, and from the conflict between your settled engagement in a settled world and your neurotic, restless, maybe guilty self (you’re an American behaving like this, for goodness sake) will arise a poem like “Transgressions,” in which the poet talks to himself about his passion for pure being and his sense of the sinfulness of this passion.
The sin of “sloth,” “waste” — yet those were his favorite years, when he was doing “nothing important.”
Using up what
little time we have, relishing our mortality,
waltzing slowly without purpose.
Whitman loafs and invites his own and the universal soul; but Gilbert isn’t inviting. His “transgression” resides in his greedy taking of life for himself. Lust, pride, violence, the narcissism of “feeling himself feeling.” He concludes:
This world,
the pine woods stretching all brown or bare
on either side of the railroad tracks in the winter
twilight. Him feeling the cold, sinfully unshriven.
Nice the way the word shiver shivers through unshriven in that unredeemed cold… But he’s feeling it… Feeling himself feeling the cold, and that’s much more important to him than any reckoning in conventional terms of his transgressions. He wants the true world, all of it, including the true world of his mind and his body and his own ways of being. These may be ugly or beautiful but it is their being existent that elates him, lends him the only redemption he really cares about. Leave all of it alone, he writes – let the world be and let myself be. Let me watch as I become part of the realized space of the globe, and let me transgress and transgress against the higher waste of a labored existence until I come to an end.
At least one pieces it together as a suicide: A medical school professor, a 53-year-old woman, is found drowned in the Baltimore Harbor six months after her longtime partner – also a Hopkins med school professor, which whom she collaborated on research – dies of a heart attack.
*************************************
From a Baltimore Sun article about her.
Dr. O’Hearn was an overachiever from the start, according to her sister. They grew up with four brothers in Wilton, Conn., where O’Hearn was president of her 1977 class, homecoming queen and co-captain of the field hockey team at Wilton High School.
She went on to Yale University, where she sang with “perfect pitch” for the Yale Slavic Chorus and earned dual degrees in biology and Russian and Eastern European Studies in 1981. Her sister said she also studied philosophy at the university. She went on to the Johns Hopkins medical school.
… it can be a kind of a brain-twister, can’t it? If that one, who put a player with a concussion in a shed, got in trouble, shouldn’t this one, who slapped a junior coach so hard “his headset went flying,” get in trouble too? Or is a slap less serious than negligence? That shed bit? Hm. Hmm…
Even if the Big 12 isn’t interested in setting a proper example, […] then [Texas Tech] should. After all, they were quick to pass judgement on their last coach, Mike Leach, for allegedly putting a player in a shed when he had a concussion. Now they need to practice what they preach. Stay consistent. If that was enough for Leach to be canned, then this is surely enough for Tuberville to be.
Imagine yourself – or someone you know – being forty million dollars in debt. Forty million! Can you imagine that?
Well, they can at the University of Arkansas! The football coach at the University of Arkansas is forty million dollars in debt.
He’s got a really big salary from Arkansas, of course, because Arkansas can tell a winner when it sees one.
But lately he’s been doing some funny stuff with his salary in his bankruptcy proceedings.
[O]ne week before he filed for bankruptcy, Smith arranged to have 71 percent of his $850,000 salary at Arkansas deferred until after the football season – a move that has raised legal questions about whether he was trying to shield that money from his creditors.
Smith claims “on his bankruptcy filing to have a net monthly income of just $107.66.”
**********************************
UPDATE: I should not have told Mr UD about this. He spent all of dinner anxiously figuring out how Smith can possibly be making ends meet. Numbers, numbers numbers — he was trying to do the math to make it possible for Smith to eat, commute, find shelter.
I reminded him that Smith lives in Arkansas, not Bethesda. “We pay five dollars for a loaf of Black Russian bread at Whole Foods. I’m thinking a cheap loaf of bread in Arkansas is like seventy cents.”
“Okay. Say seventy cents. And after all you don’t eat a whole loaf of bread every day… But there’s still rent! A car! Could he even afford a tv?”
“Soyez tranquille. He lives in his plush coaching quarters on campus, where you don’t have to be Jerry Sandusky to know they have showers and all. Plenty of tv screens available there too. And since he lives where he works, no need for a car!”
“Whew,” said Mr UD.
… fails to bring context to SUNY Albany student hazing and other rituals. Like Chico State and U Mass Amherst, SUNY Albany is one of America’s most violent, dangerous universities. Fights, sometimes escalating to riots, are part of the fabric of life for students, faculty, and the surrounding communities. Suspensions happen; a few fraternities get shuttered… Nothing changes. Things get worse. The administrations of these universities assume a sort of perpetual crouch, waiting in dread for the next horror.
Naturally, an important element of the SUNY Albany mix is a huge expenditure of funds on sports. Without it, Albany wouldn’t be able to attract all those applicants who want to come to SUNY to watch games and get drunk and beat up people.
In light of a student drinking death and other hideous things (background here), the school’s president has just shut down all fraternities and sororities. No Greek life of any kind is permitted. Greek buildings must cover up the letters on their facades.
Addressing a gathering of the Greek community in the Bell Memorial Union Auditorium, he said students don’t get a “free pass” for allowing a brother to drink 21 shots on his 21st birthday, and “pass out in his vomit.”
… Zingg told the Greeks they will not be able to recruit or have socials until the spring semester, at which time a re-education and reinstatement program will be developed.
Having read the sorry history of this shit-faced school, UD isn’t hopeful about the re-education bit. She believes, as she wrote in the background post she linked to in her first paragraph, that all current Chico State students must be told to leave. All must transfer. A new class of students will then be admitted to a campus with permanently shut down fraternities and sororities.