… has died.

His Stanford commencement speech.

A young mountain lion sleeping in a tree on the University of Colorado campus has been captured and “will be fitted with a collar and become part of the Front Range Mountain Lion Study.”

… warns Bloomberg.

Pish posh.

The Bloomberg writers rehearse all the familiar outrages –

Rutgers University forgave $100,000 of the football coach’s interest-free home loan last year. The women’s basketball coach got monthly golf and car allowances. Both collected bonuses without winning a championship.

Meanwhile, the history department took away professors’ desk phones to save money and shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. After funding cuts by the deficit-strapped Legislature, New Jersey’s state university froze professors’ salaries, cut the use of photocopies for exams and jacked up student tuition, housing and other fees.

Rutgers also increased funding for sports. The 245-year-old school spent more money on athletics than any other public institution in the six biggest football conferences during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg. More than 40 percent of sports revenue came from student fees and the university’s general fund.

— that sort of thing… But no one cares. A few odd professors maybe.

The tension the writers are picking up on has to do with fans worrying about how their teams are going to do this year.

This is from a talk he gave at Berkeley.

Society’s attention to athletics, Nader said, has moved people down what he called the “sensuality ladder,” a theoretical scale of people’s interactions with the world…

“Your education is supposed to push you up the sensuality ladder,” he said.

One problem here is that Nader – known, when he ran for president, as “ascetic-in-chief,” is so far up the anti-sensuality ladder that he can’t really be seen at all. The most commonly used name for him is Saint Ralph.

Another problem is that your university education should feel perfectly free to push you down the sensuality ladder. Educated people – with some exceptions, like Nader – like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality.

Dylan’s the front-runner for the literature Nobel at the moment.

A kid from Wisconsin comments on all the green pumpkins available this year. Les UDs bought only greens – dark green, gray green – last weekend. Butler’s Orchard had tons of them.

They look right, paired up and down the brick steps to our little brown house.

… is science advisor to a new non-profit – Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care – which is trying to do something about the over-prescription of anti-depressants in the United States. Psychosprawl, as it’s known.

David Pollack was medical director of Oregon’s mental health program when he learned just how far psychiatric drugs had spread. About 250 kids between ages 1 and 6 whom the Oregon Health Plan tracked were prescribed antipsychotics and antidepressants, despite no proof of early-age safety for them.

… sends her this article by Allen Sanderson, who proposes a sin tax on

college football games. Yes, I am advocating that we impose steep taxes on all intercollegiate football advertising, television broadcasts, logo merchandise sales, and gate receipts.

… This money could be set aside to provide funding for the ex-players to return to earn a degree, enter a graduate program, and/or start a small business.

Fans and universities benefit enormously from [the] exploitation [of players]. It is no stretch to treat this as in the same category as smoking, drinking, gorging ourselves on hot dogs and nachos, most of which we do in the stands or our family rooms while these exploited workers toil for our entertainment and the coach’s yacht. As citizens we should be above having our entertainment whims sated on the backs of these youngsters. Will it put an end to the cesspools at Ohio State, Oregon, Miami, USC, Auburn, LSU and …? No…

Nice, the way he calls them cesspools. UD‘s been doing that for years, but no one at those schools seems to mind that multiple people call them cesspools. Strange.

… as they used to say on Sesame Street.

With the literature Nobel looming, people are talking about UD‘s beloved Don DeLillo (her work on him appears here, and here, and here).

UD‘s friend Jeff sends her this appraisal of him as insular and narcissistic. Read it alongside this (“The American Writer as Bad Citizen”), by Frank Lentricchia. (Scroll down.) It says the exact opposite. Decide for yourself.

UD has exchanged some emails lately with Laura Nelson, an anthropology professor at Cal State East Bay. Both UD and Laura were close friends of David Kosofsky, about whom UD wrote here.

Laura’s husband, Saul Perlmutter, just up and won a Nobel Prize.

Ohio State has had so many players suspended or in trouble that Smith, who spoke and answered questions for 18 minutes, has to differentiate between the tattoo-related violations — “the broader issue” as he calls it — and other suspensions.

No wonder Gee is the country’s highest-paid public university president. Keeping an eye on things.

… by one of his students.

[W]hen information technology was introduced at [the University of East Anglia], he refused to have a PC installed in his office. Sebald never wrote an email and if, to his dismay, he received one, it was printed out and delivered to him by “some clown from the Registry”, as he told me.

… [Sebald] predicted further continuing deterioration of academic culture in UK higher education as a result of increased bureaucracy, the imposition of profit-driven, short-term policies that aimed to turn universities into business operations, the introduction of benchmarks, the redefinition of students as customers, time-consuming quality assurance mechanisms and superfluous staff development training.

… Throughout his life, one has to conclude, it was Sebald’s desire to protect his waywardness and individual freedom from those who aimed to curtail it, be they university administrators or literary critics.

… has long been an object of fascination for University Diaries.

It’s hard to think of a writer who could do justice to it. Emmanouela Seiradaki tries.

First they fail to sell out Boone Pickens Stadium. Now some guy from Bethany (I checked. It’s definitely in Oklahoma.) writes a letter to the editor:

The University of Oklahoma Board of Regents voted to give OU football coach Bob Stoops a $4 million to $5 million salary per year. No coach is worth that kind of money …!

What in tarnation’s going on??

… writes at length, and writes well, about the whirling words of the university technoworld. An excerpt:

In the old days, professors would come to class and lecture; it was like watching a live performance. Students would interact with each other through conversation guided by the professor. Thanks to the wonders of technology, students now sit in a darkened room and watch PowerPoint presentations. Posting to an online forum to respond to posted comments your classmates have made is in no way the same as having a actual conversation in the classroom.

… Face-to-face is now my preferred method of communication …

Like so many others – professors, administrators, and students – she has come ’round to the shocking proposition that the best way to exchange important ideas with other human beings is directly.