… at the University of Texas make?

… [Augie] Garrido, the highest-paid coach in college baseball, received a $160,000 raise this offseason that will bring his annual salary to $800,000. The five-year contract, which begins in September, calls for Garrido’s salary to be increased by at least $50,000 per year, meaning he is scheduled to become the first college coach to make $1 million or more by September 2012.

The contract also states that if Garrido was dismissed from his job, he would receive $300,000 per year for each year left on the contract. However, he would not receive that money if he resigned or was terminated for cause under the university’s “standard of conduct” provisions.

Well, ol’ UD‘s gonna draw on her years of experience with university coaches and make a prediction about that standard of conduct thing. Although UT just suspended him for driving his Porsche drunk as a skunk at one in the morning — he was too wasted to remember to turn on his headlights, which attracted police attention — Garrido, with the help of an attorney, will get that money.

UT probably won’t even try to cite the provision. Fans would be furious.

If you’ve just tuned in, UD‘s kid, a female personage, eighteen years old,  is singing (she’s an alto) in the chorus at the first inaugural event, the big public concert at the Lincoln Memorial.

UD just caught up with her for a rushed cellphone chat on her way to today’s rehearsal.

“We’re singing America the Beautiful [If you can sing this, thank an English professor.] with Beyoncé and The Rising with Bruce Springsteen.  We rehearsed with Beyoncé yesterday…  What was it like?  Minus one degree!  I’m putting on many more clothes today… Yeah, security’s pretty tight… You have to get there via these special buses… I’m in a hurry because I have to get to the pick-up point by noon… How am I?  Exhausted.  But the sound the chorus makes — it’s wonderful.”

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Another update: She’s somewhere behind him, freezing her tail off.

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Another, Really Important, Update: Just finished a longish conversation with the child, and you can see her in the video. Occasionally. She’s in the front row behind Springsteen, to the very far right. In the first few seconds, you can see her – white hat, playing with her scarf. Then she’s out of camera range. She comes back into range at the very end.

She’ll be standing in the same place tomorrow. You should have a very clear view of her throughout the Springsteen song.

And yes. I know you’re a lot less interested in tracking my kid than I am. I’m just excited, and I want to share this.

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Mr UD’s out shopping for her. Chorus members have to wear black ear muffs and white scarves tomorrow.

More from my exclusive interview.

“Five of the kids in the youth chorus [La Kid’s in the adult chorus — the youngest member.] went to the hospital with hypothermia yesterday. I mean, we’re standing there, it’s nighttime, it’s insanely cold… Some of the kids were just in hoodies…. When the wind whipped up!

Springsteen was really nice. Met with us, chatted with us, and I’m in a couple of group pictures with him. He said he liked the sound we made. Told us to be way loud tomorrow.

We’re going to be in tents tomorrow, watching the show on monitors when we’re not onstage. Which sort of sucks. But it’s worth it to get to be part of it. Today, I didn’t remember any of the hassles involved in taking part — just the greatness of being up there, doing this thing… ”

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Viewing details.

What La Kid looks like.

… so I can’t really talk.”

UD tries to call La Kid.

She’s in rehearsal.

… of the W.D. Snodgrass poem, April Inventory, is now available for viewing at Inside Higher Ed.

“Normally when you put a large transport plane in the water, most of the time they do not have a good outcome.”

The smooth slate sea and the wall of slate clouds resting on the horizon make a city.

Midsky, the clouds break up, and their different tops are the city skyline. Like this.

A little like that. Venice.

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“Some would say that there is no greater pleasure than to walk a deserted beach on a cold, sunny day in winter,” writes a woman at the Gulf of Maine Aquarium.

There are many greater pleasures. Yesterday, the wind bit into my right ear and no thickness of scarf kept it out. My eyes were too dry. I squinted at the sand, scouting black stones with white veins, and when I found one I smoothed off its sand with the wrong pair of gloves — I keep forgetting to wear cheap gloves, not the cranberry Coach pair I got for Christmas — and put it up to the light and then pocketed it.

This was a pleasure, to be sure — finding a stone whose lines would lengthen the mosaic something I’ve been writing here.

And being alone was a pleasure, walking the unprinted beach with zen sitting gulls on it. And then I wasn’t alone, because no matter how cold or late or gray it gets, there’s always someone else drawn like me to the beach, eyes down to the stones or up to the sun that now, thirty minutes after it made Venice, makes a little prayerbook illustration.

… you’re the only one like you,” sings Barney, and the reassurance extends, surely, to countries. No other place is like Bulgaria, Germany, France … These countries might now be part of the European Union, but they retain their unique national characteristics…

And so the current president of the Union – the Czech Republic – commissioned a Czech sculptor to create for the European Council building in Brussels a vast mosaic celebrating the rich uniqueness of each member country. The sculptor would subcontract, as it were, each country’s part of the mosaic to a sculptor in that country, and the result would be a big colorful celebration of diversity.

… Here is Bulgaria, represented as a series of crude, hole-in-the-floor toilets. Here is the Netherlands, subsumed by floods, with only a few minarets peeping out from the water. Luxembourg is depicted as a tiny lump of gold marked by a “for sale” sign, while five Lithuanian soldiers are apparently urinating on Russia.

France? On strike.

The 172-square-foot, eight-ton installation, titled “Entropa,” consists of a sort of puzzle formed by the geographical shapes of European countries…

[The sculptor] admitted that he and two of his friends constructed the whole thing themselves, making up the names of artists, giving some of them Web sites and writing pretentious, absurd statements to go with their supposed contributions.

For example, next to the piece for Italy — depicted as a huge soccer field with little soccer players on it — it says, “It appears to be an autoerotic system of sensational spectacle with no climax in sight.”

The fake British entry, a kit of Europe in which the piece representing Britain has been taken out, says, “This improvement of exactness means that its individual selective sieve can cover the so-called objective sieve.” [Someone’s been reading Alfred Jarry.]

… The Germans are probably not too thrilled that their country is represented as a series of highways that, looked at a certain way, possibly bring to mind a swastika. Spain has to settle with being a huge construction site, while Romania is shown as a Dracula-themed amusement park…

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Update: Pictures. Plus this, from the Daily Mail: “The eight-tonne mosaic will also go ‘live’ later this week, when certain country ‘pieces’ will start to move and make noises.”

Well, that little item about the college football coaches who got to wrestling with each other at the Opryland Hotel and fell out of a window [go here] has hit the bigtime.  Google News is on fire.

And you know why?  Because every now and then an event occurs that so distills the essence of a certain world as to give the event mythic stature.  What a local Nashville reporter calls the “tragic” defenestration of two big drunk semi-nude members of the Westminster College community has swiftly taken on the same important national resonance as Borat.

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Reminder: Here’s another recent university coach story. These guys really know how to get into the paper.

The spoiled ‘thesdan theme has gotten totally out of hand.

You know. The University Diaries theme involving the ridiculous privileges accruing to UD’s kid. It’s gotten totally out of hand.

Here’s who she’s singing with in a few days. She’s already had one rehearsal with the chorus.

Recording artists Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Bono, Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow, Renee Fleming, Josh Groban, Herbie Hancock, Heather Headley, John Legend, Jennifer Nettles, John Mellencamp, Usher, Shakira, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, will.i.am and Stevie Wonder are scheduled to play the opening celebration, which will be free and open to the public.

Um. Words fail me.

… has died. Here’s a memorable poem of his.

April Inventory

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven’t learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I’d ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who’s trusted me
I’d be substantial, presently.

I haven’t read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead’s notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler’s.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body’s hunger;
That I have forces, true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

NASHVILLE, Tenn.: Two assistant coaches apparently wrestling with each other fell through a hotel window Tuesday morning and fell four stories to a concrete sidewalk, leaving one in serious condition.

The American Football Coaches Association is holding its annual convention at the Opryland Hotel, and hotel security had been called around 4:10 a.m. with a noise complaint when officers found a broken window and Scott Coy and Darren DeMeio outside on the ground below.

“They wrestled each other too close to the window going through it and down to the ground floor,” Nashville police spokeswoman Kris Mumford said. “That’s four floors.”

Coy, 29, is 6-foot-2 and 300 pounds from Newcastle, Pa. He was in critical condition and having surgery Tuesday afternoon at Vanderbilt University. DeMeio, 24, is 6-4, 225 pounds and from Clinton, Ohio. Police said he was in fair condition but remained in the hospital as of Tuesday afternoon.

Coy is co-offensive coordinator at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa., and DeMeio is the running backs coach, according to the college’s Web site. A telephone message left with the sports information office was not immediately returned Tuesday afternoon.

Hotel spokeswoman Kim Keelor said the window the men fell through was double-paned with a strong wooden sash in the middle.

“It’s very sad. I definitely want to express our sympathy to their families. It’s just a very strange and unfortunate occurrence,” she said.

The unassuming development economist [Esther Duflo], recently named as one of the 100 most influential thinkers in the world, this week became the youngest woman ever to lecture at one of France’s most prestigious institutions when she addressed the Collège de France – a 500-year old open university on the Left Bank in Paris.

The lecture – which sparked a fervour rarely seen since the days of Jean-Paul Sartre – was packed, with one former prime minister failing to secure a seat.

… She is a world expert on understanding why despite throwing billions at development programmes in poor countries, many fail, and why others succeed. A pioneer in this field, which has only existed for ten years, she has devised a technique to test the effectiveness of anti-poverty programmes through “random testing”, much like pharmaceutical companies test drugs.

Rather than pontificate on abstract, lofty thoughts, her work is about homing in on precise details, such as raising pupil and teacher attendance in schools in poor countries by offering free meals…

Some details on her ideas and methods here.

… from the Bellingham Herald:

… [W]e applaud Western president Bruce Shepard for being willing to make the tough decision to cut the football program. It took a brave leader to cut a program that some consider important to the school’s reputation. Some students, alumni and community members are very sad to see football go. But academics should always come before athletics – for students and for schools.

… The University of Washington could use the same kind of leadership. In Seattle, the university has agreed to pay nearly $3 million in total annual salaries to the new head coach and offensive and defensive coordinators. That seems an incredible waste of public funds…

An essay about Greece in Harvard International Review.

[T]here is a certain cult of student unrest in Greece which goes back to 1973, when the occupation of the Polytechnic school by students contributed to the overthrow of a military dictatorship which had ruled Greece since 1967. The cult of this occupation persisted well after the reestablishment of democracy in 1974. It is celebrated every year and taught at schools as one of the most glorious events of Greek history. Those who lived it have often kept a belief that the politicization and mobilization of the youth is essentially good for democracy, even when it takes violent forms.

• Remove the management of the academic counselors in the Academic Success Program from the Athletic Department, transferring it to the dean’s office in the College of LS&A. ASP counselors do “excellent” work and become athletes’ second families, said [a member of the committee reforming athletics]. But their advice has to be aligned with athletes’ post-graduation goals.

• Remove the task of hearing appeals of student athletes who wish to stay academically eligible to participate in sports from the Committee on Academic Performance. That faculty body has come under scrutiny on campus because its members are offered free trips to attend Michigan football bowl games, courtesy of the Athletic Department.

These are a couple of the recommendations a University of Michigan faculty committee has put forward in order to clean up various athletic scandals, or scandals in the making, there. For background on the ticket business, go here. UD figures the recommendation about this means to put pressure on the conflict of interest-challenged members of that committee so they’ll give up their precious freebie.