New York Times.

… For universities, business education is a kind of cash cow. Business schools are less expensive to operate than graduate schools with elaborate labs and research facilities, and alumni tend to be generous with donations.

Business education is big business, too. Some 146,000 graduate degrees in business were awarded in 2005-06, roughly one-fourth of the 594,000 graduate degrees awarded that school year, according to the Education Department.

Still, there have been signs that all is not well in business education. A study of cheating among graduate students, published in 2006 in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56 percent of all M.B.A. students cheated regularly — more than in any other discipline…

More mumbling about trying to make MBA spell ETHICAL.

New York Times money columnist on Yeshiva trustee Elie Wiesel, and other cargo cultists:

[They] entrusted their life savings to a man they thought “was God,” as Elie Wiesel put it not long ago….

It [is] hard not to feel sad for … all the victims of Mr. Madoff’s evil-doing. But one also has to wonder: what were they thinking?

At a panel a month ago, put together by Portfolio magazine, Mr. Wiesel expressed, better than I’ve ever heard it, why people gave Mr. Madoff their money. “I remember that it was a myth that he created around him,” Mr. Wiesel said, “that everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret. It was like a mystical mythology that nobody could understand.” Mr. Wiesel added: “He gave the impression that maybe 100 people belonged to the club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him.”

… People did abdicate responsibility — and now, rather than face that fact, many of them are blaming the government for not, in effect, saving them from themselves…

From a New York Times article:

…Dave Maggard, the University of Houston’s athletic director, predicted “a lot more scrutiny” for public universities that make expensive coaching changes. He said that the use of state money would come under increasing scrutiny, especially considering that many universities, even the larger and more visible ones, lose money on their athletic programs.

“A lot of places, even the big places, are running deficit budgets today,” Maggard said. “I think you’re going to see some real pulling back and I think some real effort to economize in every way possible. I just don’t think you can be flippant with the public today because it’s just not going to play well.”…

Can’t be flippant with students either. They’ve had it with athletics fees.

A reeling economy and student concerns over rising fees overwhelmingly sent the Beach Legacy Referendum that would have benefited Long Beach State athletics to defeat Friday.

By a vote of 3,912-2,615 over two days of voting on the Internet and campus, students defeated the referendum that would have added $95 a semester to student fees beginning in the fall of 2010. The proposal was designed to raise $7 million annually in new revenue for the department.

The referendum was intended to cover an expected 10 percent increase in scholarship tuition costs, a large increase in the cost of student housing, state budget cuts that could be as high as 10 percent and capital improvements for campus facilities.

The proposal included plans to build a combined soccer and track stadium, new practice field for the baseball team and a clubhouse for spring and aquatic teams…

UD wants to pause on that well-known, much-used phrase, intellectual snob. A columnist at the Jewish Telegraph Agency uses it in this instance, but everyone uses it — here’s the Google page for intellectual snob. It goes on and on.

Intellectual snob is a subset of snob. Rather than express a sense of superiority to other people based on wealth or family, the intellectual snob condescends to others based upon her appraisal of herself as having started off genetically smarter, and having then been better educated, than you.

UD doesn’t have anything earth-shattering to contribute to the rich literature on snobbery in general, and intellectual snobbery in particular. (She’s very fond of Judith Shklar’s chapter on snobbery in her book Ordinary Vices. Peter Berkowitz praises Shklar’s “delightful exploration of the psychology of the snob,” correctly noting, as does she, that snobbery is one of the great illiberal vices, a sign that one’s civic instincts are out of order, since, as Berkowitz writes, “the disposition to recognize the equality of your fellow human beings and treat them accordingly” is central to liberal democracy.)

But UD will say three things about intellectual snobbery — things she’s learned from being around a lot of professors and a lot of intellectuals.

1.) Her experience certainly confirms what the literature says about snobbery and its intellectual form: Intellectual snobs among her acquaintance are strikingly insecure — about everything, but particularly about their intellect. They regard virtually all human encounters – in classrooms, at conferences, at the supermarket – as the debate club’s televised finals, in which all eyes rivet to them for their ability to undercut the claims or belittle the ignorance of anyone who happens to address them.

Hair-trigger tempers, narcissistic irritabilities, and theatrical umbrages are the hallmarks of intellectual snobs.

2.) Intellectual snobs are extreme pedants. They know a lot about specific narrow fields, and they use this hyperspecialized knowledge in order constantly to denounce errors in other people.

Intellectual snobs are particularly fond of history and linguistics, for these fields allow error-spotting infinite scope. You can get dates wrong, battles wrong, treaties wrong, the language of treaties wrong. You can fail to list all of the salient theories about the onset of the American Civil War. You can fail to take into sufficient account the Hitler/Stalin Pact.

Language use is even better for snob purposes, because our deployment of language is so personal, goes so deep… Which brings me to

3.) For the intellectual snob, the purpose of drawing your attention to your errors is to make you feel very, very bad. When the snob witnesses just how bad — how abashed and off-balance — she has made you feel, she tingles with a sense of her exceptionality.

This sensation reassures her (but not for long; she has to keep provoking it) that despite her various failures in life, she’s still the smartest kid in the room.

From New York magazine:

… Ezra [Merkin] had served as chairman of Yeshiva’s investment committee since about 1994. Not long after that, the committee directed $14.5 million of Yeshiva’s endowment to Ascot, which Ezra passed along to Madoff, collecting his usual fee, initially one percent and later 1.5 percent, standard for all of Yeshiva’s money managers.

Yeshiva saw no conflict of interest or, if it did, didn’t mind. The university required nothing more than that those who served on the investment committee disclose that they were doing business with the university. The 2003 disclosure to the board, a copy of which was obtained by New York Magazine, reported that Ezra was managing about 10 percent of Yeshiva’s endowment through four different funds. For his efforts, he collected over $2 million in fees, almost $1 million for Ascot alone.

That 2003 memo stated that Madoff was Ascot’s “executing broker,” a term that means he was executing buy and sell orders, supposedly those dictated by Ascot. In fact, though Merkin looked at Madoff’s statements every month, and they were detailed and thorough, and questioned him about his accounts, he left the trading—or, as we now know, lack thereof—to Madoff.

Some now wonder about the propriety of the chairman of the investment committee’s taking fees for simply passing along money to Bernie—especially since Bernie was elected to Yeshiva’s board of trustees in 1996, when Hermann served as vice-chairman. Why not just give the money directly to Bernie and save Yeshiva the fee? To some, it seemed like Ezra was skimming profits, and from an institution he loved…

Yeshiva University: Dollar for dollar, more conflict of interest than all other American universities combined. And there’s absolutely no indication that it’s operating any differently now.

… attack on for-profit universities. The article is unavailable online.

We’re really not in Rehoboth anymore.

I’m on a boardwalk near Pier House, and the ocean beyond the ropes and poles is aquavelva.

The sky, divided from it by a thin line, is a weaker, more conventional, blue. Sky blue.

Pelicans and gulls rest on pilings. The pilings are graywhite against the aquavelva.

“Try to get it away from the pelicans and near the barracuda.”

A guy fishing off the pier gives advice to another guy who, having caught a small fish, drags it back and forth in the water in hopes of catching a barracuda with it.

“Fastest fish in the water,” the first guy says to me. “Had a big mackerel the other day and I’m reeling it in and here comes a barracuda and just grabs it.”

But I’m trying to get across the beaming fantasy, the crayola storyboard, of UD‘s current setting. Such a cotton candy concoction. Nature can’t be serious.

The cotton is the clouds, stretched out and using just enough of the sky to be picturesque. Seaplanes buzz beneath them.

“The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair.” This is Saul Bellow’s narrator in Ravelstein, describing a peak moment in Paris in June. “I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.”

You feel that about the people around you along the water in Key West. There’s an unhappy assurance of their inability to keep up.

A model of good writing, complete with a clever rounding back to his literary theme at the end.

I found these two paragraphs in particular a precise evocation of what I see and feel every night.

Taking my cue from the Wallace Stevens poem ”The Idea of Order at Key West,” which describes the harbor at night, I found myself doing a lot of walking around Key West after dark – not just the harbor with its colored reflections (”emblazoned zones and fiery poles,” as Stevens writes), but the residential streets as well. It’s cooler for one thing, and you don’t have the distraction of the daytime tourist trolleys. The old frame houses, which somehow look New Englandy and tropical at the same time, send out light from their shuttered windows, sometimes through the beautifully complex interference of palm fronds.

All sorts of flower fragrances fill the air, plus the occasional pungency of deep-fried conch fritters when you pass one of the boatmen’s houses. The tropical plants – flame trees, orchid tree, royal poinciana, kapok, jacaranda – show handsomely in the lamplight. Occasionally you come into an open space where the sky looms into prominence, with high, heaped-up cumulus clouds against the midnight blue background, a scattered handful of stars, and perhaps a crescent moon.

It’s by Alfred Corn, and it came out in the New York Times in 1988.

… it looks as though his place is on the market too.

Much more expensive.

… for $500,000 (and the price keeps dropping). It’s a couple of blocks away from UD‘s place, and it’s part of a small hidden compound where Richard Wilbur, John Ciardi, and Ralph Ellison also lived.

Scroll down to 719 Windsor Lane.

… reminds us about the openness of university classrooms.

The University of Oklahoma issued a warning to professors on Thursday after several men walked into a classroom and refused to leave.

In the alert issued to Arts and Sciences chairs and directors, Dean Paul Bell Jr. warned staffers about the incident last Wednesday.

It said two groups of men went into two large adjacent lecture halls in Dale Hall. The letter said that the men walked in uniform and most of them sat down at the same time, while two stood by the back doors. The letter said the men refused to leave when asked by the instructor, but eventually did walk out without incident.

In uniform meaning wearing uniforms, or simply together? The same way?

Could be a frat prank, but it’s very similar to the way terrorist dry runs look. There have been enough mass shootings at American universities for this to be extremely scary behavior.

If it were only one classroom, I’d wonder about some local gang protecting a member in the class. This is more sinister.

… here’s how to write total nothingness, at a cost to the citizens of Ohio of over a million dollars a year.

Frost and Wallace Stevens were together on a train to Florida.

The two poets were nervous with each other. Stevens however was more in the vacationer’s mood. He made witty remarks, and finally said, “The trouble with your poetry, Frost, is that it has subjects.”

This begins to get at UD‘s problem with Frost. Many of his poems have a sort of didactic, subject-driven intentionality about them. Seamus Heaney talks about “the knowingness that mars [certain] poems by Frost.” Rather than gradually reveal the writer’s consciousness, and, in so doing, suggest the living, ongoing, tentative complexity of what one person thinks about the world, these poems simply, flatly, state the facts of existence. Their slightly over-engineered rhymes don’t help matters.

Robert Lowell notes what those subjects are: “[I]solation, extinction, and the learning of human limitation. These three themes combine, I think, in a single main theme, that of a man moving through the formless, the lawless and the free, of moving into snow, air, ocean, waste, despair, death, and madness. When the limits are reached, and sometimes almost passed, the man returns.”

Or not. In a poem like Desert Places, the experience of nothingness is all there is, without much movement, and therefore with no real return:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it — it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

The first rather panicky lines make us expect a serious reckoning with nothingness; we await the emotional effect of this blank world on the poet. But for me at least the rest of the poem reads like poetry rather than utterance, especially the awkwardly redundant “no expression, nothing to express.” It feels like a strategic poet manipulating words, rather than a consciousness responding to things.

Which is why the final lines are for UD at once wonderful and bogus. I mean, they’re perfect; the perfect ending to a poem about nihilism, depression, morbidness, all those subjects. But it’s too neat for me. I don’t, on some very important level, believe Frost. Not a drop of blood seems spilled.

Compare this similar poem by Auden. I mean, similar in that he’s trying also to evoke inner emptiness.

Brussels in Winter

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

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

Why is this a much better poem, IMHO?

Hold on. I need to take a break.

… in UD‘s Key West apartment has a remarkably good library, and among its books is Auden’s Collected Poems. 

Every time UD starts reading a Robert Frost poem BECAUSE SHE PROMISED YOU SHE’D WRITE ABOUT ONE ON THIS BLOG BECAUSE FROST LIVED ON KEY WEST she gets about four lines in, puts it aside, and reads an Auden poem instead.  What does this mean, doctor?

Anyway.  It says here that when UD walks through Frost’s KW garden, which she’s about to do, she’ll hear his poetry coming off the walls.   Something special in the air.  Here I go.

Madoff will likely join a corps of aging white-collar convicts including former WorldCom Inc. Chief Executive Officer Bernard Ebbers, 67, now housed at the Federal Correctional Institution in Oakdale, Louisiana, and John Rigas, 84, the ex-CEO of Adelphia Communications Corp. who is imprisoned at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina.

Possible spinoff: The Producers.

… Madoff will have to take a job in prison that will pay anywhere from 12 cents to 40 cents an hour… Offering inmates help with legal or financial needs might give Madoff a certain “diplomatic immunity”…