… Charles William Eliot, who was president of Harvard from … 1869 to 1909? Forty years???

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

In a 1904 letter to a friend, Eliot wrote:

I am inclined to think that you would be more tolerant than I of the presence of stupid sons of the rich...

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Not a peep all this time from the far more tolerant subsequent presidents…

We sure the fuck did.

[Gal Luft] was arrested in Cyprus in February on charges of willfully failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”), arms trafficking, Iranian sanctions violations, and making false statements to federal agents.

He’s currently on the run.

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Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson claimed on Sunday, before the release of the indictment, that authorities had arrested Luft “to silence him,” and called for the fugitive to be granted immunity. 

You tell ’em, Ron!

First there was an update on frat life there:

[M]ultiple individuals reported they were drugged at an AEPi house event, and according to the Saturday notice, another individual reported they were drugged at an SAE house event… The University suspended [SAE] in April 2017 after a report that four women were drugged at the house that January. Despite the report, the chapter faced no disciplinary action from NU, and returned to campus on probation in 2018 after completing a one-year suspension. 

That’s from a 2021 article about a large student demonstration in front of SAE, along with calls to shut down NU’s long-lurid Greek system.

Most recently, there are the school’s closely-associated sports teams:

A former Northwestern player said the alleged hazing acts that took place within the football program were “egregious and vile and inhumane behavior.” …

If a player was selected for “running,” … they would be restrained by a group of 8-10 upperclassmen dressed in various “Purge-like” masks, who would then begin “dry-humping” the victim in a dark locker room...

[A] Daily Northwestern article also mentioned other allegations of hazing rituals, including a practice where freshmen had to duplicate a snap from the center to the quarterback while both players were naked. It also cited a second player who noted the existence of the ritual.

[Jon Gabriel recently wrote:] ‘The Arizona GOP had less than $50,000 in cash reserves as of March 31. That’s not much money to fund crucial expenses such as rent, payroll, and campaign operations. Four years earlier, it had close to $770,000….  The party blew $300,000 on ‘legal consulting,’ much of which focused on overturning Trump’s 2020 defeat. All they have to show for it are a Democratic governor and U.S. Senate delegation... If they [Republican party bosses] waste their money on Cyber Ninjas and futile lawsuits, they can’t be shocked when donations dry up…‘

From 1995 until 2019, Arizona boasted not one, but two Republican senators. What is more, from 1991 until 2023, Republicans held the governorship for all but six years. And before 2020, the last time a Democrat won the state’s presidential election was 1996… [T]he shift toward electing Democrats has little to do with the notion that the state has somehow turned blue. It has much more to do with candidate quality and incompetent management by the state’s Republican Party… At one speech in 2022, [Kari] Lake literally told John McCain supporters to “get the hell out.” That didn’t work out so well for her—or Republicans.

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Sweet, sweet words to UD‘s deep blue ears.

… is a very good photographer.

Two items of interest:

1. Governor DeSantis has announced his first foreign policy measure if he gains the White House:

“I will immediately cut off all recognition of/cooperation with Latvia, which has just elected its first admitted homosexual president. Bad enough that this person is known to be an ‘ardent’ supporter of Ukraine; he adds insult to injury by poisoning the minds of our children with woke ideology. With friends like these, America doesn’t need enemies.”

2. Yale University has issued its first statement about its practice of favoring legacy applicants:

“Ron DeSantis was one of our few non-legacy admits his year at Yale. We’ll stick with legacies.”

(UD thanks Al.)

… where she went for a very quick, very hot, beach stay.

Expect [,post-affirmative action on campus,] more antiracist action plans, more vaporous decolonization, more mandated training, more huckster consultants, more vacuous reports, more administrators whose jobs no one can explain, more sleazy land acknowledgments (“Sorry I stole your house!”), more performative white self-flagellation, more tokenization of minority faculty members.

The second most radical option would be for the Ivy League to abolish what is called “ALDC” — athletics, legacy, dean’s list and children of faculty and staff. Forty-three per cent of Harvard’s intake come from one of these groups. The first, athletics, includes sports that can only be learned by the privileged, such as lacrosse, sailing and rowing. The generous athletics intake by universities is why so many recent admission corruption scandals, such as the FBI’s Varsity Blues sting operation, involved athletics directors. Contrary to popular opinion, most athletics scholars are not black basketball players. Sixty-five per cent are white. 

This is in the Financial Times, all of whose readers, one assumes, passionately disagree with these options.

And then there’s the author, Edward Luce himself!

… celebrates the town’s 125th year.

… AmmoFest.

NOSTALGIA OF THE LAKEFRONTS

By Donald Justice

Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters.
A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;
Another, by the lake, the times of cruises.
Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises,
Is fading to a landscape deep with distance –
And always the sad piano in the distance,
Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling
(O indecipherable blurred harmonies)
Or some far horn repeating over water
Its high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies.
At such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world,
And this is the world we run to from the world.
Or the two worlds come together and are one
On dark, sweet afternoons of storm and of rain,
And stereopticons brought out and dusted,
Stacks of old Geographics, or, through the rain,
A mad wet dash to the local movie palace
And the shriek, perhaps, of Kane’s white cockatoo.
(Would this have been summer, 1942?)
By June the city always seems neurotic.
But lakes are good all summer for reflection,
And ours is famed among painters for its blues,
Yet not entirely sad, upon reflection.
Why sad at all? Is their wish so unique –
To anthropomorphize the inanimate
With a love that masquerades as pure technique?
O art and the child were innocent together!
But landscapes grow abstract, like aging parents.
Soon now the war will shutter the grand hotels,
And we, when we come back, will come as parents.
There are no lanterns now strung between pines –
Only, like history, the stark bare northern pines.
And after a time the lakefront disappears
Into the stubborn verses of its exiles
Or a few gifted sketches of old piers.
It rains perhaps on the other side of the heart;
Then we remember, whether we would or no.
– Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.

… Roman baths, etc.