… blogger, dies at 81.

An avid member of a Pakistani university’s Anti-Sex League has sent an email to the entire university condemning a student for having pecked her boyfriend on the cheek, an act the emailer witnessed. 

The university has “promised to issue a code of conduct to ban PDAs.”   (Says in the article this stands for Personal Displays of Affection; but shouldn’t it be Public?)

… The brouhaha at LUMS, Pakistan’s premier educational institution, points to the drastically different ideological directions in which youths across the country are being pulled, says Asif Akthar, the Lahore-based blogger who first reported the story and is now a research assistant at the university.

“I think [the debate over the kiss] signifies a conflict between different cultural identities and shows there is something unresolved there,” he says.

LUMS’s leafy campus, located in a heavily fortified compound in the posh Defence neighborhood of Lahore, has stood out in Pakistan as a place where students of all stripes seem to coexist. Dressed in everything from burqas and shalwar kameez to tank tops and skinny jeans, and drawn mostly from the upper-middle class, the student body goes on to hold top jobs in finance, industry, law, and software engineering. Many continue their studies in the West.

“At LUMS, you’ll find people of all ideological persuasions studying and living together easily. There’s a deeply secular community. There are religious ascetics who believe in a more tolerant form of Islam. There are Deobandis [an ultraconservative branch of Islam], and there are Marxists,” says Ammar Rashid, a recent graduate and now research assistant in social sciences.

LUMS has also been more open about men and women studying together – in contrast with some government-run universities, such as the University of the Punjab also in Lahore, where “free-mixing” between the sexes is frowned upon and in some instances violently opposed by the Islami Jamiat Talaba, an Islamist student group…

… [Some students have] responded [to the kiss controversy] with sarcasm: “I have sinned. I do not believe that there is a God because I can not see, feel, hear or touch Him/Her… During the holy month, instead of attending Koranic recitals in the mosque, I was listening to the demonic sounds of Pink Floyd,” wrote one junior…

As regular readers know, UD follows with great interest growing tensions on and off university campuses involving secularity and non-secularity.

These tensions exist on religious as well as secular campuses; there will always be disputes about how overt the religious character of a religious campus should be (recall the controversy at Boston College, which recently put Catholic icons — mainly crucifixes — in every classroom). But they can be particularly difficult in hybrid places like LUMS, where there’s an effort to be culturally open in the context of a culture increasingly dominated by radicals who refuse compromise.

Sprinkled. Scathing Online Schoolmarm says this is interesting writing. Not sure I would have chosen sprinkled.

Fairy dust is sprinkled. Refreshing spring rains are sprinkled. Little dead squirrel bodies are… what? Lying around campus? Popping up around campus?… Nah…

But anyway. San Jose State University has a problem:

In the past, San Jose State University had a humane way to deal with pesky squirrels—they trapped and released them, according to Pat Lopes Harris, SJSU’s director of media relations. However, budget cuts recently forced the school to turn to more lethal methods when they no longer had the staff to check the traps. The result? Corpses strewn around the campus. [Strewn is just right. Did the writer use sprinkle because she’d already used strewn?] That practice is about to come to an end. After years of routinely poisoning their population of bushy-tailed tree- and burrow-dwellers, the school administration is reportedly “looking into” humane alternatives to industrial strength rat poison as a form of squirrel population control. The campus has had a rampant ground-squirrel infestation for years now, with the little guys chewing away at landscaping and upturning lawns and building foundations. Since the grounds crew began baiting their fluffy nemeses in 2007 [Fluffy nemeses is wild.], it has become a common sight to see little dead squirrel bodies sprinkled around campus in the morning. According to the Spartan Daily, the SJSU student newspaper, the choice method of termination is currently anticoagulants, which “essentially cause the animal victim to bleed to death throughout a period of a few days to a week.” Dead or dying rodents flailing on the ground then become prey for predators like falcons and hawks, which in turn get poisoned.

In the immortal words of UD‘s own fluffy nemesis, La Kid: Yuck.

Bloomberg’s Middle East correspondent visits the Cavafy Museum in Alexandria, Egypt:

… Much … has disappeared from Alexandria: the taverns where Cavafy’s illicit liaisons took place, the exotic interaction of a diverse population and a tolerance that inspired the late Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine and the novelist Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid.

… In Cavafy’s era, the Mediterranean port city was a mix of Greek, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Maltese, British and other nationalities adding to the majority Arab-Egyptian population, all lured there by trade in cotton and wheat.

The city, and Egypt as a whole, grew more homogenized after the ouster of the monarchy in 1952, the rise of Arab nationalism and the confiscation of private property by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser.

In the past two decades, the emergence of Islam as a prime source of identity among many Egyptians made Cavafy’s sensuous subject matter unfashionable. By all accounts, Alexandria is a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s biggest opposition party. The brotherhood wants Egypt ruled under Islamic law. Alexandria was once a place where women strolled in sun dresses, not headscarves and caftans, and where religion was a matter of personal choice …

After visiting the museum, I discuss Cavafy at the office of Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood member of parliament. Saleh says Islamic law precludes publishing Cavafy’s poetry.

“Cavafy was a one-time event in Alexandria,” he says. “His poems are sinful.” …

Cavafy wouldn’t be surprised. Long ago he wrote a poem, Walls, about the failure to pay attention to the killers of cities, the builders of burqas.

Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.

And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.

But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.

… Jean Sarkozy, who [has] yet to complete a university degree, is all but assured of being elected to the presidency of Epad, the public corporation that runs the La Defense office park, after his candidacy was endorsed by his father’s ruling UMP party.

Epad brings in more than 1 billion euros a year, and has plans to triple the size of La Defense, a cluster of office sky-scrapers to the west of Paris.

“Whatever I say, whatever I do, I’ll be criticised for it,” Jean Sarkozy, who only recently cut his long blond hair into a more respectable serious style, said Monday night in an interview with the Le Parisien newspaper.

On Tuesday, UMP officials rallied to the young Sarkozy’s defence.

“The political scene is made up of people who started very young, very early, without having too many diplomas, and we’re lucky because this acts as a social elevator,” said UMP spokesperson Dominique Paillé.

“Jean is the son of a political genius, so it’s not surprising that he’s precocious,” said UMP regional counsellor Thierry Solère.

“I can tell you that Jean Sarkozy, at 23, might just have more talent than his father did at his age,” UMP official Patrick Balkany said.

Sarcastic endorsements have proliferated online. The twitter feed jeansarkozypartout or “Jean Sarkozy is everywhere” sprung up Monday night, with comments like Florent Latrive’s: “Jean Sarkozy, candidate for L’Académie française”, referring to the French-language council of wise men, or Bertrand Lenotre’s “Jean Sarkozy is chosen as the model for the next bust of Marianne,” an honour already bestowed upon French beauties Catherine Deneuve and Letitia Casta…

… a Harvard professor of biostatistics in the School of Public Health, has died in a car crash. His wife and mother were also killed:

[H]is SUV veered over the center line on a rural New Hampshire roadway and struck an oncoming car, killing its driver as well, police said. … “We don’t know where any of the vehicles were coming from and where they were going,” Guinard said, adding that “there was nothing to indicate” that alcohol was a factor in the crash.

… Lagakos had until recently served as head of Harvard’s biostatistics department, a rotating post, and had developed statistical methods used for numerous clinical trials on AIDS research in the United States…

… of UD’s friend, Lisa Nesselson, and a professor in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts (note way cool faculty webpage), has died. She was 57.

Friedberg wrote about the strange new world of screen media — the constant presence of screens, our constant scanning of screens — but she was also an historian who complained about the “presentness,” as she called it, of media studies. She was interested in shifts in the ways we envision the world, and her work went back as far as the sixteenth century.

In an email to me, Lisa, who lives in Paris, writes:

She was smart and funny.

She and [her professor, novelist and screenwriter husband] Howard liked to stay at the Hotel Louisiane because of its spartan style and famous guests.

The only drawback to their incredibly cool house [in the Hollywood Hills] was that it didn’t have enough walls for the giant vintage film posters they brought back from France.

There’s a tiny clothing boutique a few blocks away from here called Hug & Co. and …Anne liked to take a photo in front of it with her son each time she was here.

Friedberg’s very vivid web presence, in interviews and films and interactive sites, reminds UD that to her it does indeed still seem strange and new, this online history we leave of ourselves…

… where Mr UD has been a visitor, houses the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics: Elinor Ostrom. She is Mr UD’s friend.

“She’s the most prominent person working to preserve the connection of political science to all things civic. So she was, for instance, part of the small group of people that we brought together to plan the Summer Institute in Civic Studies.

You need to keep alive the civic impulse of the social sciences, and she’s been active in promoting, for example, civic education.

It’s a wonderful endorsement of a way of thinking about social science which connects it to civic practice.

She’s very committed to interdisciplinary studies. She’s done a lot of work on systems governing the allocation of water.

Farmers and governments develop such systems. The general question is: How do you get people to cooperate? She works pragmatically with people and institutions on this, and does the theoretical work.”

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

Here’s an excellent place to read an essay of Ostrom’s. Hers is the first chapter in the book.

Oliver Williamson of Berkeley is the other winner this year.

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

Update: A nice take on what Ostrom’s about.

A letter to the campus paper, the Daily Lobo, from an emeritus professor brings us up to date on this perennial class act.

The TV ads featuring Lobo Louie and his Lobo floozy accurately convey the tackiness of the partnership between the University of New Mexico Athletics Department and the Route 66 Casino Hotel. How did an institution of higher learning end up with the gaming industry as a roommate?

Sadly, these organizations have become soul mates. Intercollegiate athletics in America today has a bad case of gambling addiction. I do not refer to fans wagering on games. I refer to institutions that throw good money after bad in hopes of hitting that elusive jackpot — a championship.

Few, if any, NCAA Division I athletics programs cover their costs, especially if indirect subsidies for physical plant and utilities are factored in. Yet programs and their boosters insist on spending more and more for coaches’ compensation, sumptuous facilities and player recruitment. They say they want to “reach the next level.” Their behavior resembles that of a problem gambler who, in placing ever-higher stakes to recoup his losses, succeeds only in reaching the next level of penury.

Just as the family of a problem gambler suffers from the diversion of limited resources away from essential needs, so the academic communities of Division I universities suffer from the diversion of limited resources away from their basic educational mission.

Teaching, learning and research are starved as money is lavished on games.

Viewed from this perspective, Louie and the floozy are perfect for each other…

He sounds embarrassed, doesn’t he? But when it comes to tacky and the University of New Mexico under President David Schmidly, there’s so much more. Here’s a start.

From Corporate Board Member:

Are the board members of nonprofits that put money into the vaporized funds of Bernard Madoff legally vulnerable for the losses? Possibly. Some individual donors may go after the trustees if charities they supported invested that money in a Madoff fund. So might the attorneys general of states where the nonprofits are based.

… Directors of nonprofits are legally shielded from monetary liability unless they engage in criminal acts or are grossly negligent or reckless. “You’re not liable for bad judgment; you’re not liable for mistakes; you’re not liable if things just don’t go well,” says Jack B. Siegel, head of Charity Governance Consulting LLC, a Chicago outfit that advises nonprofits on governance issues. Still, the dollar amount that Madoff made off with has invited new consideration of what constitutes gross negligence or recklessness. “My personal view is that this is an area of the law that’s going to be tested heavily as you see more and more nonprofits suffer significant losses in their investment portfolios,” says Keith Freid, a senior vice president with American International Group, a leading underwriter of directors’ and officers’ liability insurance for nonprofit organizations. Donors who see that universities invested their donations badly rather than using the money in the way they intended, for instance, might sue the college trustees for legal redress.

… Directors of nonprofits who have business relationships with the outfits—or “wear more than one hat,” as Steven Scholes, a partner with the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery, puts it—face the greatest risk of being accused of breaching a fiduciary duty. Both Madoff and hedge fund manager J. Ezra Merkin, for example, were members of the board of trustees of Yeshiva University in New York City, which lost a $14.5 million investment with Madoff, along with some $95.5 million in phantom profits. Merkin was chairman of Yeshiva’s investment committee and managed a portion of the school’s money, apparently by simply turning it over to Madoff…

T.S. Eliot has won a BBC-sponsored vote on England’s favorite poet.

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

VIRGINIA

Red river, red river,

Slow flow heat is silence

No will is still as a river

Still. Will heat move

Only through the mocking-bird

Heard once? Still hills

Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,

White trees, wait, wait,

Delay, decay. Living, living,

Never moving. Ever moving

Iron thoughts came with me

And go with me:

Red river, river, river.

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

On the page the poem looks like a river, its banked lines holding the poet’s fluency as it moves down the white of the page — or, now, the screen. But the words don’t really move on the page, just as the river which the poet observes seems not to move.

His feelings as he faces the water’s impassive lines flow in the direction of the river’s paradox: Visually unmoving, it nonetheless, he knows, moves massively along to some mouth.

Slow flow heat is silence

The poet’s consciousness, his emotions, are aflame in the face of the river’s beauty and power; but his is a silent intensity — the first of many paradoxes to come in this impossibly compact poetic utterance. He crackles, but only within.

No will is still as a river
Still.

Willfulness suggests forward motion; yet the powerful will of the river is still. The second still carries another meaning: The river endures in a way the poet will not. The river’s will is still there; will always be there. And perhaps the secret of its longevity is precisely its self-stilled, silent trick – its way of being both powerful and impassive.

Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once?

Slow/flow, will/still, bird/heard — Within his narrow simple lines the poet’s wordplay is almost silly, almost infantile in its obviousness. The feel is that of a litany, a sort of chant or prayer, from a simple consciousness, or from a consciousness in search of a certain simple purity of call and response. Then too, like the river, the poem seems to progress; the rhymes aren’t static rhymes, they’re language moving forward by small substitutions of letters, small increments, to gather up more and more meaning as it goes, the way the river gathers up limbs and leaves and carries more and more of them forward as it goes. Content is beginning to accumulate so subtly, so slowly, that we barely register it.

As to a paraphrase of the poet’s question about the mocking-bird: Am I right to feel anxious and sad that my poetic inspiration seems so random and fleeting a thing – the mocking-bird heard only once? Does the earth offer me more enduring forms of bliss? Why does my experience of my life feel so mockingly brief and stingy?

Still hills

Delay, decay.

How shall we read this? Shall we say that the poet speaks to himself here, reminds himself that despite the apparent tumbling contingency of his world the deeper reality is that the beauty of the world awaits him, holding open for him its gates that disclose lovely purple and white trees and a vast patient landscape of creative richness? Shall we say the poet anticipates heaven’s gates, heaven which awaits him and is beauty’s only permanent place? Shall we read this instead as a kind of demand — Wait! Don’t change! Delay the decay (Again the river poem’s curious movement forward via one small new letter.) that moves, unnoticed but undeniable, within me; let me live longer in this world. Let me learn the river’s secret of endurance — a certain self-calming, self-quieting, self-slowing, underneath which persists the heat of life.

Living, living,

Red river, river, river.

Final paradoxes: The deepest form of life never moves; it lacks, let us say, the agitation of the poet, the agitation of the human being. The human being who comes at the world with anxiety and restlessness, with questions and insistences, with an absurd headstrong commitment to unnaturally rapid motion through the world… This is the wrong form of will, a will that has not grasped the enigma of stilled power. Ever moving iron thoughts… Iron’s the toughest word in this poem, the most obdurate and mysterious. The powerful hot flow of creative blood through the poet – inspired for a moment by the mocking-bird – is iron now: cold, unflowing. The poet ends the poem with a deathly final thought – my thoughts will die with me. They will never move, like a river, beyond me.

Yet iron is precisely why the river’s red, perhaps; iron in nearby rocks will redden a river’s water. So the purity of the river in comparison with the impurity of the poet isn’t quite what it seems. Both poet and river are stained by the world, stained into existence… The poet’s thoughts enter fully here into the paradox of the natural world: Their very redness — readness? — constitutes their ever-moving endurance.

Stain, taint
Of the world
Is on them.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

A UCLA professor who taught the student accused of slashing a female classmate’s throat last week said Saturday that he told a university administrator 10 months ago that he had concerns about the student’s mental health, but strict federal privacy laws prevent UCLA officials from disclosing how they handled the issue.

Stephen Frank, an associate professor in the university’s history department, met the suspect, undergraduate student Damon Thompson, when he enrolled in the instructor’s Western civilization class late last year, Frank said in an interview.

Frank said he grew concerned about Thompson in mid-December 2008, after the student sent several e-mails complaining that classmates sitting around him had been disruptive and made offensive comments to him while he was taking a written exam.

In one of the e-mails that Frank provided to The Times, Thompson, 20, also accused Frank of taunting him.

“I believe I heard you, Professor Frank, say that I was ‘troubled’ and ‘crazy’ among other things,” Thompson wrote in the e-mail. “My outrage at this situation coupled with the pressure of the very weighted examination dulled my concentration and detracted from my performance.”

There were other such complaints from the student about a range of campus people. He seems, from the article’s descriptions, to be a severe paranoid.

An official told Frank that they could only suggest to Thompson that he seek treatment, but they could not require him to seek psychological services.

“My concern was in the context of other violent incidents on campuses around the country,” Frank said…

It can’t be true that merely suggesting help was UCLA’s only option. Surely it can suspend students who seem threateningly unstable.

[A spokeswoman] noted that campus police have said they have no record of any formal complaints being made about Thompson prior to his arrest.

What are we calling a formal complaint? A faculty member had sent the university plenty of evidence that the student was seriously unbalanced.

Another thing. UD‘s followed enough of these stories to know that getting anything useful out of the student’s family is unlikely. For whatever reason (denial?), in a number of cases, when family members comment to the press, they express amazement that an obviously troubled brother or son or cousin had anything wrong with him. If even Susan Klebold can claim she hadn’t a clue…

Which leads UD to suggest that universities looking to avoid trouble should pay serious attention to what professors and teaching assistants tell them.

… Yeshiva University, which did not respond to requests for comment, may… be at risk for clawbacks. The university’s initial investment of $14.5 million with Ezra Merkin’s Ascot Fund, which was invested indirectly with Madoff, had reached a purported value of $110 million by November 2008. The university has not responded to inquires about whether it withdrew an amount greater than its initial investment

… While both Yeshiva University and Hadassah have substantial endowments that far exceed any amount they could be asked to return by the Madoff trustee, neither would identify steps the organizations had taken to reassure donors that new donations would not be used to pay off future clawback requests…

Background here.

A psychiatrist writes a letter to the Psychiatric Times about the ongoing preparation of the latest edition of the DSM-V, the humongous – and always getting more humongous – reference book on which insurance company payment for mental illness treatment is based:

[T]here are a bunch of pre-conditions for DSM revision, which include among others, that the new version must not be a radical departure, and must be consistent and compatible with the existing DSM, thus guaranteeing continuity and preventing disruptions in the diagnosis and treatment of existing patients, assuring continuity in education and training for residents in psychiatry and existing practitioners, and in managed care  and insurance coverage, and Treatment Guidelines and in psychiatric record-keeping, as well as research, unless we start labeling our diagnoses with vintage-like DSM numbers, like we label wines.

It is clear from the above pre-condition of continuity that there will be no significant departure from the established DSM path, and we can scratch the answer to our query, ie, “One psychiatrist” no matter how much he or she really wants to change the DSM [will be able to do so].

However, although they may consider introducing criteria to add dimensionality to designate severity, or the course of an illness, or degrees of impairment of symptoms, etc, for field-testing in accordance with the already existing studies on DSM defects, there will be no move in the direction of incorporating a brain-based, neurophysiologic paradigm, although there is a growing consensus which indicates that is the way to the future of psychiatric diagnosis.  We are still impeded by our attachment to the scientific studies of the past.  We appear to be rowing into the science of the future backwards, while anchored to the science of the past.

Background here.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

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

‘It was the tidiest exorcism on record — completed in minutes and absent the pungent mess typically associated with demonic possession.

While most everyone at Berry College, located just north of Rome, doubts junior Nathan Mallory’s claim that he cast the devil out of a former student, the alleged exorcism has reignited a festering debate about religion’s role at the liberal arts institution. [How do you reignite something that’s festering?]

“There is a concern that something like this could go on here,” said junior Kyler Post, managing editor of the Campus Carrier, Berry’s student newspaper. “People are afraid we’re going to be looked at as some sort of radical, right-wing school.”

At the heart of this debate is the school’s unabashedly Christian WinShape program, bankrolled by Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy. Mallory is among the 100-plus Berry students to receive a WinShape scholarship.

“The WinShape students live together, worship together, study together,” said Berry religion professor Harvey Hill. They pledge to abstain from alcohol and drugs and must attend weekly chapel meetings at facilities located about three miles from the main campus.

That’s where the alleged exorcism occurred, on Sept. 24, in Mallory’s Pilgrim Hall dorm room. School officials have not released the name of the young woman Mallory claims was demonically possessed.

“While we were worshipping, she began to repeat ‘no, no, no’ just like the other demon-possessed cases I’ve seen in the past,” Mallory wrote in an e-mail to WinShape students. “That’s when [the demon] showed itself.”

“Her face changed right in front of me and the most evil, hideous grin came on her face and her eyes seemed to turn red and I prayed that the Holy Spirit would just take over from there and he did,” wrote Mallory. The student did not return calls seeking comment.

Berry officials have been quick to distance the college from the exorcism, removing Mallory from his job as a resident assistant.

… Boasting eight deer for every student, the private liberal arts college, founded in 1902 as a Protestant institution, sits on a bucolic 26,000 acres. Roughly 1,800 students attend Berry.’

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

26,000 acres for 1,800 students! A 1:8 student/deer ratio! An exorcism if you say NO three times! Whadda place.