… Where’s the team when it’s Nine Ten Eleven?
How do we get on the comeback trail?
Who plays ball when they’re all in jail?

Ya gotta envy their coach, though. He’s the functional equivalent of the laptop lecturer (see post just below). Both are getting paid to work with groups that aren’t there.

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UD thanks Veblen.

… by a Wesleyan University undergrad. One of the keenest, calmest, most honest, considerations UD has seen of the phenomenon.

It is our obligation as students to delve more deeply into the impacts of technology on our education and our values, and this can only happen through reflection about the influence of technology on what and how we learn… The questions raised by technology are not just questions about distraction or temptation. They are deeper human questions about how we learn, and they must be addressed if we ever hope to reach an understanding of how technology should be used in the service of learning. Whatever decision professors or students might make about the use of technology in the classroom, these questions can serve as springboards for discussion about the importance, for example, of an engaging classroom environment, and about why complete focus and open interaction with one’s classmates are essential to this environment.

Concisely, incisively, she gets to the core of why professors who allow – much less encourage – laptops in their classroom are guilty of pedagogical malpractice.

But – as UD has said for years on this blog – laptop lecturers, who totally grasp the advantages of talking to an audience that ignores you (especially if, like many of these lecturers, you spice up the classroom sizzle with extensive PowerPoint use), will never shut down the enterprise. Nor will their university’s administrators, who after all have been giving these drones awards for innovative use of technology in the classroom. As UD has always said, and as this and other student editorials suggest, change will come only from a popular revolt.

… never highly turned UD on, has died. Let’s see what he could do at his best – here’s a lovely poem about death and ruination. As always, UD will mess the thing up with constant interruptions. To see the poem in pristine condition, go here.

RUINS UNDER THE STARS

1

All day under acrobat
Swallows [He’s noticing the gyrations the birds make as they fly.] I have sat, beside ruins
Of a plank house sunk to its windows
In burdock [PlanK, sunK, burdocK… with burdock picking up on “bird,” a word maybe floating in our heads with the swallows.] and raspberry canes, [This isn’t going to be “Tintern Abbey.” The setting is ordinary, an ordinary collapsed house in the country.]
The roof dropped, the foundation broken in,
Nothing left perfect but the axe-marks on the beams.

A paper in a cupboard talks about “Mugwumps”,
In a V-letter a farmboy in the Marines has “tasted battle…” [He’s going through old papers lying about – marks of the particular domestic history of the house.]
The apples are pure acid on the tangle of boughs [Great line. Everything in the setting is rotted, old, convoluted – even nature. Nice assonance (apples, acid, tangle), and wonderful meld of purity and rottenness and – I don’t know – Snow White? – in the phrase pure acid as he describes the years of untended growth around the house.]
The pasture has gone to popple and bush. [Great word: popple. It’s a way of saying aspen, but in this ruinous setting there are hints of topple, bobble (the aspen trembles).]
Here on this perch of ruins [Perch feels very close to porch – and on the porch of ruins sounds rather classical, giving a certain dignity and grandeur to the tone.]
I listen for the crunch of the porcupines. [Perch/crunch: these words are very close to one another; and porcupines keeps going the alliteration throughout on the letter P.]

2

Overhead the skull-hill rises [Skull Hill in Israel is said to be the place where Jesus was crucified, and with the next word in the poem (crossed) we have perhaps a deepening of a religious theme.]
Crossed on top by the stunted apple. [And of course the apple has us thinking about Eden.]
Infinitely beyond it, older than love or guilt,
Lie the stars ready to jump and sprinkle out of space. [This is where I find Kinnell to be a less than stellar, if you will, poet. Older than love or guilt comes out of nowhere and means too much and too little, in my humble opinion. Why broaden your poem out to these big concepts when you haven’t yet done much beyond beautifully describe a scene? I get the idea – we sublunary humans have our major life issues – love, guilt – but the stars are indifferent. As stated, it’s a trite observation.]

Every night under the millions of stars
An owl dies or a snake sloughs its skin, [Basically an extension of the we’re here and minute and transient and the stars are there and vast and permanent – but he’s also reminding us that his theme is ruin. Ruined houses, the ruination/transformation of animal lives.]
But what if a man feels the dark
Homesickness for the inconceivable realm? [But in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss, as the woman in Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” puts it. Snakes and owls don’t have this problem.]

3

Sometimes I see them,
The south-going Canada geese,
At evening, coming down
In pink light, over the pond, in great,
Loose, always dissolving V’s-
I go out into the field,
Amazed and moved, and listen
To the cold, lonely yelping
Of those tranced bodies in the sky,
Until I feel on the point
Of breaking to a sacred, bloodier speech. [See now if you ask UD there are far too many adjectives packed in here: south-going, pink, great, loose, dissolving, cold, lonely, tranced, sacred, bloodier. It’s just top-heavy and self-consciously pretty. Much too top-heavy for a description of birds in flight. With sacred the Biblical feel is sustained; but rather than saying he’s breaking into sacred speech, he should probably speak sacred speech.

4

This morning I watched
Milton Norway’s sky blue Ford
Dragging its ass down the dirt road
On the other side of the valley. [Same deal as in other parts of the poem: Sharp moves from sacred to profane and back again. Reminder that we can be brought, by nature’s amazing and moving “speech,” to the verge of something higher, but that we’re basically pretty low.]

Later, off in the woods, I heard
A chainsaw agonizing across the top of some stump
A while ago the tracks of a little, snowy,
SAC bomber went crawling across heaven. [The gross violent noises and marks of the fallen earth – axe-marks on the beams, chainsaw agonizing, and bloodily enough a bomber – bring the poet out of his “tranced” perching on the ruins and back into reality.]

What of that little hairstreak
That was flopping and batting about
Deep in the goldenrod,
Did she not know, either, where she was going? [The poet flits about in confusion from scene to scene, like a fragile butterfly.]

5

Just now I had a funny sensation
As if some angel, or winged star,
Had been perched nearby watching, maybe speaking,
I whirled, and in the chokecherry bush
There was a twig just ceasing to tremble. [Again, for UD, too precious. Metaphysically vague but emotionally sentimental. A brief supernatural visitation? Not my thing. Too happyface.]

Now the bats come spelling the swallows, [Nice – after the early evening swallows the bats… Spelling is wonderful, as if the bats and the swallows had some sort of understanding about who would stand guard when. Spelling also puts us in mind of the poet himself, spelling out his words.]
In the smoking heap of old antiques
The porcupine-crackle starts up again,
The bone-saw, the pure music of our sphere,
And up there the old stars rustling and whispering. [He concludes by bringing physical and metaphysical together, having solved, thanks I guess to that trembling twig, the problem of his “homesickness.” In our ruined smoking heap of a world (bombed out by the SAC bomber), there is anyway always life again, always the crackle of the porcupine, the whine of the bone-saw (bone reminding us of our specifically human vulnerability.) Heard correctly, those homely crackles and whines and drag-ass Fords are the music of the spheres – or the sphere… our sphere, our sacred earth. All we can hear from the distant stars are rustles and whispers; here, we have the clear articulation of our home — our ruined, bombed out, “tasted battle,” ever renewed home.]

… in the wake of Barry “Slam Dunk” Freundel’s stumble.

My most uncomfortable [conversion] moments were when an adult male had to lie on a table with his private parts exposed so the Bet Din could witness the hatafat dam brit (a quasi-circumcision). And yet, no man – not a single one – ever complained about the process because each knew that it was a small price he had to pay (a requirement) for membership in an eternal people.

Jared Kushner, the publisher of the New York paper Observer, is an old hand at defending those near and dear to him who have become enmeshed in the American criminal justice system. He tried to keep his father out of jail, but eventually Charles Kushner

pled guilty to eighteen felony counts of tax fraud, election violations, and witness tampering. In the strangest twist, Charles admitted to taking revenge on a hated brother-in-law by secretly setting up him up with a prostitute, then taping the encounter. He spent sixteen months behind bars for his crimes.

That was in 2009, so Jared had a few years respite before today, when “a federal judge certified a RICO class action” against his father-in-law, Trump University president and soon to be United States president Donald Trump. The class action will argue that Trump “misrepresent[ed] Trump University… to make tens of millions of dollars but deliver[ed] neither Donald Trump nor a university.”

(And that’s just the class action. Don’t even talk about the

court battle [Trump just lost] against New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman when a judge ruled that Trump was personally liable for running the university without a license.

Schneiderman accused Trump of fraud, claiming he had cheated students out of $40 million. New York Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Kern found that Trump and Michael Saxton, who served as the school’s president, knew that the university was being run without a license.

A determination of damages in that case is pending.)

This latest effort on Jared’s part (read the badly timed editorial in his paper here – I mean, badly timed because a day after Kushner published it the RICO thing happened) to keep a family member out of the hands of the justice system has a wonderfully DeLilloesque postmodernity to it, with Trump insisting that after all Trump University was bogus and the class action people ought to have known this:

[Trump argued that anyone] could have known as early as July 2009 that Trump University was not an actual university…

It’s possible that Trump – and his son-in-law – and maybe his son-in-law’s paper – know, as of today, that the Attorney General’s case against Trump and his namesake university is actual.

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

UPDATE: Though there’s not much his son-in-law’s paper can do for him at this point, Donald Trump still has friends in high places:

[Florida Attorney General Pam] Bondi accepted $25,000 from Donald Trump three days after a spokeswoman said she would be reviewing a complaint filed by the New York attorney general against Trump’s for-profit schools. Even though they’ve received complaints in Florida as well, Bondi’s office has yet to take action.

Sweet! Helluva job, Pam. Keep working for Florida!

La Kid shows off the
blue sweater that her mother
found for her last weekend
at the Rehoboth Beach
J Crew outlet.

… is at it again.

Must be really weird being a cheerleader there.

Bridgepoint Education, a for-profit online school that has been under scrutiny for what Mr. Miller, the Iowa attorney general, called “unconscionable sales practices,” turned to [a lobbying firm] to set up meetings with [Florida Attorney General Pam] Bondi’s staff, to urge her not to join in the inquiries underway in several states. Again, her office decided not to take up the matter, citing the small number of complaints about Bridgepoint it has received.

You do not want to know what goes into it.

Disbursing about 5 percent a year from an endowment ensures its principal will not shrink over time. At 5 percent, Harvard’s endowment would generate $1.8 billion annually in perpetuity. So how can Harvard possibly need more? That sum equates to $2.6 million per undergraduate per year — almost 50 times the school’s sticker price. Harvard already has ample endowment for every undergraduate to attend free, with vast reserves remaining for other purposes. Yet Harvard is in the midst of a capital campaign, demanding another $6.5 billion.

At least, however, struggling taxpayers get to help generous Harvard donors:

The deductibility of donations to higher education means [Robert Griffin, who just gave Harvard $150 million,] really gave Harvard about $100 million, with taxpayers covering the balance. Ordinary people whose children are buried under student loans, and can only dream of attending Harvard, will be taxed to fund the transfer of another $50 million to the Crimson elite.

The same occurs any time donations from those in the top bracket go to the Ivy League, Stanford, Williams, Amherst — average people are taxed to pamper the children of affluence. Grant Hill just gave $1.25 million to Duke University, his alma mater. Good for him! After the deduction, Hill pays about two-thirds of the announced total. The rest comes from average taxpayers who can only dream of a child attending Duke.

Easterbrook’s recommendation:

[E]nd the deductibility of donations to colleges or universities whose endowments exceed $1 million per enrolled student.

Keep that third one in mind: most athletic. Read this article about sororities and add to an undergraduate woman’s non-academic time commitments participation in one or more university teams. Get the picture?

After the student’s initial lawsuit against the university, Ludlow also sued Northwestern for what he alleged was its “flawed” handling of the investigation. He also sued several media outlets over the reporting of the student’s initial suit. The student later filed suit against Ludlow alleging violation of the state’s Illinois Gender Violence Act.

Really beginning to pile up.

Background here.

A George Washington University graduate, now a GW graduate student, writes about her experience with Barry “Slam Dunk” Freundel.

Over the period of my conversion process, Rabbi Freundel would remark in various conversations that I was a young, attractive female, especially during times I mentioned I was in no rush to get married. I went to several congregants with my concerns [about his comments] but they dismissed them… Upon returning to the D.C. area for graduate school, I moved to Maryland, in large part to escape Rabbi Freundel and the people that followed him blindly.

These dedicated men and women worked tirelessly in the courtroom and together formed an ironclad defense that will be remembered for generations to come. Just as importantly, throughout their time here, they remained equally committed to the ideals and core values of Penn State.

Honoring Penn State’s finest.

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

UD thanks Wendy.

Amid all the bad world news, some truly good news.

So here’s where the ethos of the serious university hits up against a perfectly reasonable question from a person outside the university.

The greatest damage UNC’s corruption has done is not to its students’ degrees (despite all the coverage and hoo-hah, no one cares about what happened at UNC, and they won’t look at its graduates’ degrees any differently than they did before), but to the American university as such.

Why? Go back to those empty classrooms nobody noticed. Of course many people did notice; but they were in on the game. What about everyone else?

Serious American universities, like the American economy, ultimately run on trust. They are special places in part because there isn’t anyone racing around checking to see if you’re meeting your class. The assumption at serious universities is that faculty obviously meet their classes. It is that kind of community. It is a serious place full of serious people, both students and faculty.

UNC isn’t a serious university anymore (it can become one again); at UNC, in the wake of the scandal, all professors are subject to spot checks. At UNC

administrators are making surprise inspections in class to make sure courses are actually taking place.

You’re in the army now, fella! Sheets on tight? Maybe I’ll just burst in on you some afternoon…

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

That is why no one noticed the empty classrooms. No one was looking. Everyone was trusting that a tenured professor, the chair of a department, a researcher in a recognized field, would – duh! – meet his classes. Are you kidding me?

UNC has fucked it up for all of us, especially those sentenced to life at a sports factory. Because now that the lid has fallen off UNC, it’s going to fall off a lot of other schools. Don’t forget that a critical mass of these absurdity-based institutions has been growing: Exactly the same academic hoax has been reported on at Auburn, SUNY Binghamton, etc. Everyone knows that a variant of the UNC scheme operates at virtually all of the big-time sports schools, and now that we’re paying attention, we can expect dozens of other unshocking revelations from other campuses.

The UNC thing goes straight to the heart of what distinguishes universities from all other institutions, all other workplaces. The university is an odd creature, a rare thing. Bartlett Giamatti called it “a free and ordered space.” Get it? Free and ordered?

It’s also a delicate thing. Our friends from the southland have really done a number on it.