[Peter] Goldie’s philosophising arose from his own experience and out of novels he loved, especially by Joseph Conrad and Robert Musil. He was determined to make sense of topics – grief, jealousy, the nature of emotion in general, artistic response – which, as he said, philosophers tend to “over-intellectualise”, and thus distort. Without ever abandoning philosophical rigour, he excelled at revealing the richness of human life from the inside.
… why should we be impressed by a person somewhat higher than it?
When USC, Ohio State, Miami and North Carolina are caught cheating in one way or another, most people roll their eyes and say, ‘Here we go again.’ When public records from a lawsuit allege that an agent was bankrolling a basketball player and his mother starting when the kid was 14, the reaction is more eye-rolling. The university presidents publicly wring their hands, declare they’re shocked cheating is going on and go back to counting their money.
But Joe Paterno is Joe Paterno…
The university that Joe Paterno made.
None of this nonsense about finishing out the season.
Penn State finally gets serious.
Gail Collins: I don’t think making the 84-year-old coach retire and arresting two administrators no one has heard of is enough to make people understand how critical this is. I think Penn State should do the right thing and cancel the football season. Really.
David Brooks: I disagree on this last point. A lot of good young men have put a lot of time into playing football and being part of that team. I don’t think they should be punished. If a history professor commits some atrocity it would be wrong to shut down the whole department.
Gail Collins: I know the football players would be disappointed, but they’d still get to stay in school — which is why they’re at Penn State, right? Right?
… in his position as Director of Account Services, Robert Harlan says he’s too depressed to go to jail.
His wife says his real problem is he’s too generous.
He is by nature a very generous person.
Mean judge sent him to prison anyway.
… about to step down, according to this report.
“If only he had displayed this kind of intensity during practice.”
The president and the board of trustees at Indiana tolerated years and years of intolerable behavior from [Bobby] Knight, looking everywhere but right at him when it mattered…. The key was that [earlier] incidents were kept private.
… is most eloquent. But Sandusky will nonetheless be painted over.
… know everything, and those who know nothing and want to know nothing. Those who know everything are a small group of insiders extremely close to the president and the coach and local politicians. They do the president’s bidding. Those who know nothing and want to know nothing have a spotty attendance record at trustee meetings (why go?) but get a huge kick out of being able to say they’re a university trustee.
Auburn University’s board of trustees is instructive. For decades, ex-trustee Bobby Lowder basically ran the school – academics (intellectual inquiry at Auburn centers around figuring out how professors can help athletes cheat without the athletes getting caught) and sports. A power-obsessed, corrupt mover and shaker, Lowder typifies the broad-shouldered bullies who can intimidate and take over boards of trustees.
When the shit hits the fan at universities, unseemly blame-tossing almost always breaks out on BOTs — between members who’ve been meaningless muckety mucks, and the power boys. Recall the panic in AU Park when its president turned out to be robbing the school blind. In that case it was William Jacobs, strapping head of the BOT, who withheld information and shooed trustees away from his endless shoveling of money to Benjamin Ladner. When the American University story broke, the know-nothings moaned that they’d been blindsided.
Same thing at Pederasty State.
The trustees dislike how a few board members appeared to have been notified that charges against Curley and Schultz were imminent while the vast majority of trustees were left in the dark until Saturday.
Yes, and that’s in a big old article all about how we’re supposed to pity and admire the principled trustees… the good trustees, who got all beat up by the big boys…
No. When these things happen, the entire board of trustees has got to go. They are trustees, kids. The university is in their trust. They either didn’t do anything, or they worked as hard as all the other Paterno-tools to cover up things.
University trustees are, in UD‘s experience, either a nothingness or an embarrassment. Or both.
… their outside research?”
That would be one way to go. But extend questions about business ties to trustees.
Another direction UD would suggest: That pesky thirty-two billion dollar endowment. That’s an awful lot of money for one university to be sitting on. What’s Harvard University doing with it? What are the moral obligations attached to having accumulated an endowment bigger than the gross national product of many countries?
Whether frightening a congressional blowhard afraid of dissent, or drawing attention to a professor who thinks concern about economic inequality is “the politics of envy,” campus protesters these days are looking pretty sharp.
*********************************************
Jonathan Chait in 2005, on the envy meme:
In a recent National Review Online column in which he was forced to acknowledge the higher incomes enjoyed by the super-rich, [Lawrence] Kudlow fired off the following sarcastic ripostes to a New York Times article by reporter David Cay Johnston on the rich: “How dare they be successful earners and investors”; “Should we go out and shoot these 145,000 [taxpayers] for their success?”; and “Germans have an ‘equality sickness’ that makes them dependent on the welfare state. Is that what David Cay Johnston has in mind for America?”
Speaking as a member of the liberal media, I can answer the last question very certainly: Yes, yes it is. If you walk in any newsroom in America, you will find reporters whispering to each other in German, humming “Deutschland Uber Alles” and scheming to install somebody of Teutonic stock in the White House. (Making Arnold Schwarzenegger governor was just the first step in this plot. Shhh.)
A slightly less inflammatory response than Kudlow’s came from Harvard economist and former Bush economic advisor Greg Mankiw. “The data show that the rich take a rising share of income when the economy is booming, such as during the 1920s and 1990s,” Mankiw wrote in a letter to the New York Times, concluding that if policymakers “want economic prosperity for all, they should avoid focusing on the politics of envy.”
Mankiw’s choice of decades to focus on is a bit strange. Although I’m not an economist, I understand that the 1920s did not end well. Moreover, Mankiw ignores the nearly three decades after World War II, when the nation enjoyed high economic growth while the share of income held by the very rich fell. It’s worth remembering that period because although people nowadays tend to think of the rich getting richer and the poor getter poorer as inevitable, some of our most prosperous years coincided with rich and poor growing more equal.
Anyway, it’s not just a matter of which decades you focus on. Mankiw is simply wrong. UC Berkeley economist and former Clinton Treasury official Brad DeLong ran an analysis, finding no connection between general prosperity and the share of income held by the very rich.
What’s depressing is that even highly credentialed conservatives such as Mankiw equate any discussion of class inequality with “envy” of the rich. The accusation is actually bizarre. Liberals want to make the rich pay higher tax rates not because they hate them. (In fact, as conservatives love to point out in other contexts, many liberals are rich.) It’s because somebody has to pay for the government, and the rich can more easily bear higher rates.
Moreover, there are ways of accomplishing this short of shooting the rich or imposing socialism, say raising the top tax rate to where it stood during the Clinton years. That, by the way, was the other decade of prosperity invoked by Mankiw.
… but the quieter, ongoing, incredibly expensive bullshit of big-time university sports looks like this.
UD‘s latest Inside Higher Education post at University Diaries II.
