Larry Levine, the murdered English professor at Umpqua Community College, seems to have lived his life precisely as he wished, pursuing poetry, fishing, travel, and solitude.
Teaching was a side gig of sorts. Levine had only been at Umpqua Community College a few years. He spent more time earning his living as a fly fishing guide on the North Umpqua. He also went fly fishing in Patagonia…
But she figured that whenever it did take off, the leading edge of the scandal was likely to be the University of Louisville. (Put Louisville in my search engine.) The only real competition for Louisville would be the University of Miami, but, post-Nevin Shapiro, UM is lying low.
What other American university features a trustee who tried to resign but was forced to stay on the board by the governor of the state?
[Steve] Wilson, who is co-founder and CEO of 21c Museum Hotels LLC, said he has been unhappy with the effectiveness of the U of L board and had offered his resignation to Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, who declined to accept it.
Bet Steve wishes he’d risked… what? what can a governor do to you? … and gotten out while the getting was good…
Go ahead and read this first article of many. The details are titillating, the taxpayer money impressive, and I promise the accounts will get even better after they interview the players. The school people call the U of Smell is at it again.
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Louisville’s coach, Rick Pitino, has had his own … uh… Here’s UD, back in 2009, posting on Pitino’s… er…
Brian Friel, author of Dancing at Lughnasa, has died.
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His comment about the origin of certain kinds of writing is similar to what Don DeLillo said the other night at the New Yorker festival:
“That assassination [of JFK] was the thing that made me a novelist,” he said. “The power of it… I couldn’t come to terms with it.”
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Add A.R. Ammons:
[Poetry] comes from anxiety. That is to say, either the mind or the body is already rather highly charged and in need of some kind of expression, some way to crystallize and relieve the pressure. And it seems to me that if you’re in that condition and an idea, an insight, an association occurs to you, then that energy is released through the expression of that insight or idea, and after the poem is written, you feel a certain resolution and calmness. Well, I won’t say a “momentary stay against confusion” (Robert Frost’s phrase) but that’s what I mean. I think it comes from that. You know, [Harold] Bloom says somewhere that poetry is anxiety.
Dan Kane, a first-rate and persistent North Carolina journalist, broke and pursued and ultimately owned the University of North Carolina academic fraud story.
Given the loathing of sports factories for outsiders who disrupt the smooth production of football games, Kane “was subject to violent threats from UNC fans and a variety of multimedia smear campaigns.”
He wasn’t the only one, of course – all sorts of people who take academic integrity seriously got hit right in the kisser by everyone from the highest snoots in the administration to the lowest yahoos in the stands. But since everything that Kane and the whistle blowers were saying about the big ol’ UNC cheating machine was true, the school was forced to back up into p.r. mode and stop trying to disembowel all the mean people who were saying mean things about it.
Kane has now won (UD thanks her friend John for sending her the link) the McCulloch Courage in Journalism Award.
UD sees that Kane “grew up on a small dairy farm in Upstate New York” (Les UDs, regular readers know, have a small spread of their own upstate) and is “a graduate of St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y.” UD taught for a couple of semesters at that school way back when (Mr UD had taken his first job, at the University of Rochester), and it’s not impossible that this guy might have been in one of her classes…
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UPDATE: Dan Kane read my post and said he graduated from St. John Fisher in 1983 and “took enough English classes to qualify for a minor but I don’t remember having [Soltan] as a professor.” But I was Margaret Rapp then, so there’s still the teeniest possibility…
… somewhere way below that, there’s Southeast Louisiana University, a public school where the taxes of the good people of that state are funding new football recruit Jonathan Taylor.
Taylor, so determinedly criminal-minded that even the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama dismissed him, has been welcomed with open arms by SLU.
Outside the Lines asked [a school spokesman] what SLU’s admission process is for students with criminal records and/or a pending felony charge, to which he responded, “Southeastern Louisiana has no specific admission policy regarding an individual’s police or court records.”
But actually SLU does. Basically, if you haven’t been convicted… of anything … super-serious (murder?) and if your court proceedings are still ongoing (i.e., if you haven’t been convicted yet), c’mon down y’all!
“While we are aware of past controversies, Jonathan has not been found guilty for the incidents he was accused of that led to his dismissal from his prior institutions,” Southeastern Louisiana said in a statement Wednesday.
So here’s Taylor’s student profile.
Domestic violence charges in Alabama against former Georgia defensive lineman Jonathan Taylor were dropped Tuesday as part of a plea agreement.
The 6-foot-4, 335-pound Taylor, who was dismissed from the Bulldogs’ football team last summer, still faces an aggravated assault charge in Athens-Clarke County from a July 2014 incident in which he reportedly choked and struck his girlfriend. He also faces a misdemeanor case of theft by deception in Athens for a cash-checking scheme that involved other Bulldogs players.
Taylor pleaded guilty in Alabama to a misdemeanor count of criminal mischief stemming from an altercation in March with a different woman. The woman, however, recanted her story.
[The University of] Georgia, which had a string of players suspended or dismissed over the last several years for various incidents, has stayed fairly clean and has not been associated with any major discipline problems since the start of the 2014 season.
UD has said it again and again: online is the salvation of big-time university sports. You can cheat like hell with online courses.
UD has no idea how Southern Methodist University – famous for having so filthy a sports program that in 1987 it got one of the very few death penalties the NCAA has handed down – its entire football season was cancelled that year – got caught. It apparently did what a lot of schools with this sort of program no doubt do – signed a player up for an online course and had someone else take it for him.
Once SMU got caught, it didn’t help that the school is just a longterm rascally ol’ give-a-shit sort of place.
In a conference call with reporters, [an NCAA representative] noted SMU’s history of violating NCAA rules. The school has been called before the NCAA infractions committee 10 times since 1958. The basketball program last ran into trouble in 2011, when it admitted that coaches sent impermissible text messages to recruits. [This] history of violations was taken into consideration when this year’s punishment was issued.
Or, to put it less delicately;
SMU is the NCAA compliance version of Old Faithful. Just a matter of time before it erupts again. The infraction dates: 1958, 1965, 1974, 1976, 1981, 1985, 1987, 2000, 2011 and now 2015. And for all that rule violating, the Mustangs have one football national championship it can claim, from 1935… SMU is historically corrupt.
I think this guy is getting at the fact that corruption is SMU. That’s it. That’s the school.
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This puts SMU’s coach “3-for-3 in putting programs on probation.” If you’re shocked that a death penalty school hired a coach who put his two previous schools’ basketball programs on probation, you’re not reading this blog with care.
A totally random reminder that not many people write lyrics as well as Paul Simon.
To that end, UD‘s University of Chicago recently assembled a faculty committee which came up with “a powerful new statement on the importance of freedom of expression on campus.” Here’s a place where you can, if you like, add your endorsement to it.
The U of C statement revisits and clarifies the nature of free thought.
Under the category democracy, this blog has covered growing numbers of hideous, farcical, tiresome, and alarming instances of speech repression on campus.
More on a depressing trend here.
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Think back, in this connection, on Carl Schorske, who has died at the age of 100.
At UC Berkeley, Schorske was regarded by colleagues as a liberal thinker and a reputed supporter of the aims of the Free Speech Movement, identifying with students’ demands for free speech and respect.
“You have to convert the poison of social discord into the sap of intellectual vitality,” Schorske said in an interview in 2000, reflecting on his time at UC Berkeley.
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UD thanks Dirk.
For Moody’s it’s tricky to rate
The train wreck that’s Alabam State.
“It should be a D
But our lowest is C.
We’ll need to revise the whole slate.”
Corrupt, mismanaged, hemorrhaging students, running through administrators a mile a minute, and getting close to being unaccredited, Alabama State University doesn’t need to do anything else to embarrass itself. But the other day, in the very first moments of his deposition in the wrongful termination trial of ASU’s trillionth football coach, trustee Herbert Young deepened the embarrassment.
Something about the way questions were put to him enraged him and he began to leave the room. Here’s a description of a court reporter’s audio recording of the incident:
Young and [Donald] Jackson [the attorney asking Young questions] begin arguing a few minutes into the deposition after Jackson tells Young not to answer questions before he completes them. Young begins to leave, and as he’s doing so, Jackson states that he wants [the] court reporter to note that Young is leaving in the middle of a deposition.
That seemingly angers Young more, who says he’s leaving “because (Jackson) is disrespectful.” He goes on to tell Jackson that he will “respect him as a man” and spells out the word respect. Jackson repeatedly asks [Young’s attorney] to “get him out of here.”
Once the situation calms for a few seconds, [the coach, Reggie Barlow,] can be heard saying: “A board member acting like that.”
Young replies: “I got something for you too!”
At that point, things get chaotic. There is clearly a physical altercation of some sort — whether it was Barlow throwing a punch or Young choking Barlow is not evident on the recording — and [Barlow’s attorney] and Jackson are left screaming at their clients and trying to separate them.
… UD watches her Black Pearl and
Black Olive pepper seeds start to take off.
(The kitchen window’s all messed up because
I compulsively spray the plants.)
I promise the quality of photography
will improve as these plants grow.
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Regular readers know that UD is
Morticia in the garden. She’s always looking
for black stuff. And this stuff is black.
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I know I’m planting them at
exactly the wrong time – it’ll
be getting cold soon. I’ll
transfer them to containers
and keep them inside (assuming
they continue thriving).
I love the way some of the
shoots come up still holding
aloft their seedpods. Victory.
This blog has dumped on WVU for its sports-nuttiness and of course for Mr Coca Cola.
But look what a modest lab there did. It uncovered the Volkswagen fuel fraud.
UD‘s off to a day boating on the Chesapeake.
She will blog about it.
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A walk around Annapolis and
the Naval Academy; a boat
trip around the Bay; lunch
back in Annapolis overlooking
the Bay. Back home now, tired.
… reminding us that sometimes universities – respectable universities – do inexplicably moronic things.
That the board of trustees at Emory University did absolutely nothing at the time is absolutely expected. You have been reading my Trustees Trashing the Place category, yes?
Details. See if you can hold your sides in.
