… just after one of its trustees, Bernard Madoff, hit the headlines. It’s from the University of New Hampshire.
The top of the page announces a Bias-Free Language Guide, while the rest of the page is blank. Eloquently, poignantly, totally blank. As blank as all the YU Madoff pages suddenly became.
Where’s the Guide?
What story lies behind this latest weird visual outcome?
No, don’t try clicking on Bias-Free Language Guide. Won’t take you anywhere. It’s been scrubbed.
Wha’ happened?
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We don’t know enough yet to figure out exactly how the thing got written – I mean, we need to know precisely what group of people (students? faculty?) wrote it – but it takes the Orwellian business of replacing short clear simple descriptive words with long pretentious empty euphemisms to new heights.
One section warns against the terms “older people, elders, seniors, senior citizens.” It suggests “people of advanced age” as preferable, though it notes that some have “reclaimed” the term “old people.” Other preferred terms include “person of material wealth” instead of rich, “person who lacks advantages that others have” instead of poor and “people of size” to replace the word overweight.
I think they fell down on that last one. It doesn’t have enough words. People of larger size than other people, no?
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When David Ortiz called Jacoby Ellsbury a rich bitch, he managed to squeeze out only two words. Person of material wealth bitch is so much… richer.
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Instant Update: Wow. In the few minutes during which I’ve been writing this post, UNH disappeared Bias-Free Language Guide and replaced it with Page Not Found. Quick work!
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And again.
Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, which was fined a record 3 billion yuan ($483 million) for corruption in China last year and is examining possible staff misconduct elsewhere, faces new allegations of bribery in Romania.
…The company is already probing alleged bribery in Poland, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq.
Sepp Blatter’s coming in to clean up the mess.
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How do all the Glaxo Professors of this and that in med schools all over America and England feel about having their name cheek by jowl with this company?
UD‘s confident they don’t give a shit.
Here in Garrett Park (enter its zip code: 20896) we are rated, according to the latest national demographic thingie that people are quoting, “100% Top Tier.” That’s the highest category in everything – money, culture, education, home prices.
‘thesda – the vague area GP’s vaguely adjacent to – has for some time been ranked richest small city in America.
Here’s the language that accompanies Garrett Park’s category:
We’ve achieved our corporate career goals and can now either consult or operate our own businesses. We’re married couples with older children or without children. Every home maintenance chore in our lavish homes is handled by a variety of contracted services. We can indulge ourselves in personal services at upscale salons, spas, and fitness centers, and shop at high-end retailers for anything we desire. We travel frequently, sparing no expense in taking luxury vacations or visiting our second homes in the US and overseas. Evenings and weekends are filled with opera, classical music concerts, charity dinners and shopping…
I showed this paragraph to my across the street neighbor, a just-retired federal employee. We assumed British accents and talked about how we were looking forward to the charity dinner after the opera tomorrow night, at the end of which we planned to return to our lavish homes.
I said that the people putting the scale together seemed to have confused us GP/’thesdans with number two on the richest small cities list — Greenwich Connecticut, home of Brown University trustee Steve Cohen and other titans of post-industry.
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Still. It can’t be denied that we beat them out. We beat out Palo Alto. We beat out Brookline.
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Of course you can play with numbers in any number of ways and get different results, as Nate Cohn notes. Maybe we ain’t so hot.
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I suppose we are bourgeois bohemians.
This is an elite that has been raised to oppose elites. They are affluent but opposed to materialism.
I suppose I was happy a couple of days ago having to walk very slowly, with great difficulty, to the post office (my neighbor Peggy was with me and didn’t notice anything) because, my ancient Nike women’s walking shoes having recently imploded, I had, in desperation, gone into La Kid‘s room and found sneakers that looked like these. They were too large for me and they flapped around like clown shoes and the whole show was so ridiculous that I finally ordered replacement Nikes. I suppose it’s true that I like that sort of thing.
This has been a pretty big story all day, but UD was waiting for just the right headline (see above).
… is interviewed in this article about scholars traveling to dodgy parts of the world. He talks about one of this year’s institutes, in Ukraine.
Some U.S. colleges with overseas-study programs won’t touch Ukraine. Tufts University, on the other hand, is drawn to the turmoil in the former Soviet republic, which the U.S. State Department deemed dangerous for travel.
The potential to help activists and scholars, Tufts professor Peter Levine says, outweighs the risks posed by an unstable country. He is leading a conference in Ukraine next month on civics studies, in part because the country exemplifies the struggles of a fledgling democracy.
“American universities, at our best, have people who should be getting on a plane to go to a country that’s in crisis,” Levine said. “Sometimes they do a lot of good.”
Indeed at the end of this week Mr UD and Peter meet in Warsaw (where Mr UD has been reconnecting with many Soltans) and then fly together to Lviv (“also known as: Leopolis, Lwów, Lvov, Lemberg, לעמבערג, Լվով, İlbav, Leopoli, Léopol”) and then rent a car or get driven to (can’t remember which) Chernivtsi (the summer school will take place in the “phantasmagorical university building“.)
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Background on the civic studies initiative here.
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Ah. And UD has just received this comment from Peter himself:
I am in lovely L’viv with the above-mentioned Mr. UD. It is of course completely safe here. I am actually quite embarrassed by the AP article; I tried to emphasize that we weren’t facing any risks. When I talked about American professors going to danger zones, I didn’t mean to include us. It would be a shame if the article dissuaded Americans from visiting western Ukraine for pleasure – it’s an excellent destination.
… gets it said.
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UD thanks John for the link.
Women harassed when they refuse to go to the back of a public bus. Women forced to sit in segregated areas at public health clinics and at burials in cemeteries. Women berated for wearing clothes deemed to be immodest. Women’s voices banned from a radio station. Women excluded from participating in municipal programs and state celebrations.
A woman attacked in a [public] square for wearing jeans.
A woman soldier, in uniform, called a “whore.”
Israel.
… which is odd enough, since July in these parts usually just sits there boiling. UD was back from the beach and back from her two-day recovery from the beach, and she was alone, Mr UD having left for Warsaw and points east (family reunion; helping direct a summer school in civic studies in Ukraine). Her sister the Morrissey fanatic called to suggest a walk around Lake Needwood.
Boring! said UD. Let’s go into the city.
Are you crazy? Tourists!
Being a ‘thesdan in the summer is like being a Sentinelese. There’s an exclusion zone around your neighborhoods which allows you to go on living your simple preneolithic life without intrusion.
The other side of this is obvious: You don’t go into Washington. UD works in Washington but typically waits until September to venture there.
Yet the bright sun and low humidity made it seem physically doable; and there’s nothing wrong with what Saul Bellow calls an occasional humanity bath.
With some reluctance, UD‘s sister agreed to drive over and pick her up. They had no trouble parking at Grosvenor metro and piling into a car that filled ominously up as they approached Judiciary Square.
UD of course wanted to head for the Botanic Garden, but her sister wanted the other direction – the Reflecting Pool. UD pointed out that on a (still after all) hot summer day with full sun, trudging around the treeless rim of the pool – in crowds – would be kind of stupid. UD described La Kid’s graduation on the treeless sun-infested Mall, where UD, all-asmolder, listened to the now-disgraced Brian Williams tell the kids fish stories…
They compromised: They’d walk through some other gardens – museum gardens – on their way to the Lincoln Memorial. And this turned out to be a great idea, since UD didn’t know how landscaping mad the federal government had become since her last Mall walk. The gardens around The Castle were insane… I mean of course this was optimal bloom time, which UD usually misses because she’s afraid of the tourists… But still. Wow. Lordy. The Haupt garden was full of massive African and Brazilian shit that blasted right out at you. Any garden can stuff millions of teeny pink flowers into a hanging container and water it every day and make this big insipid thing. This garden had some of that, sure, but mainly it was grotesque monkey trees and canopies with big black bursting pods and walls of creepy succulents. Yum.
Now, as they started further down the Mall, they saw that an enormous construction project blocked the thing almost entirely, so forget the Reflecting Pool. They headed back toward the metro for lunch at Teaism, happy to get out of the sun.
But lookee here. A chaotic crowd milled about ordering bento boxes and chai and no way were we going to be part of that. We were after silence, order, and air conditioning. Teaism only had air conditioning. We glanced inside a Native Foods (Morrissey fanatics eat vegetables) but that, thank God, was equally chaotic…
Which left a fancy sit-down white table cloth sort of place called 701 Restaurant. So we’d pay a fortune. So what.
But we were sweaty and dressed down and we wondered if they’d snub us, a couple of biddies with aching feet.
“Afternoon ladies!” said the bartender as soon as we entered. “The host will seat you in a moment. Enjoy your meal.”
“Sorry, ladies,” said a server a second later. “Host will be here in a sec. Good to see you.”
Up comes the host, all dressed and scrubbed and non-judgmental. “Table by the window? Right this way.”
It was pleasant to survey the still-sweating masses from our quiet chilly lookout.
The server, a burly fortyish man with thinning hair and an ironic attitude, opened with “Did they tell you? Two martini requirement this afternoon.”
“Really?”
UD is notoriously gullible. She will really believe anything if said with a crisp commanding demeanor.
His eyes went wide and we all giggled.
“But it is your birthday,” he continued, looking at UD, “so you will be getting a free dessert. Two free desserts.”
UD was fully on board now.
“You’re right on the button. Thanks. Looking forward to dessert.”
UD had the Skuna Bay salmon with mustard spaetzle, rapini, pomegranate, and pecans (with “your cheapest white wine” – to which our server said “I’ll pop over to 7/11 and get some Yosemite Road.”); her sister, butter poached Maine lobster, brussels sprouts, salsify, papaya, and red curry.
Everything fell into place. The fresh air, the views onto the Navy Memorial with its weeping fountains, delicious food, a young version of Antonin Scalia lecturing someone at the next table.
As he brought out my sweet colorful whatever with a candle aflame upon it, our guy asked where we were from, clearly expecting Terre Haute.
“Bethesda? I live there too. Grew up there. What are you doing downtown in the summer?”
“Where did you go to high school?” UD asked.
“Whitman.” Where for decades UD‘s ‘thesdan playmate’s mother taught.
The sisters blew out the candle together, one of them no doubt wishing something having to do with shacking up with Morrissey.
We talked some more about ‘thesda with our server, who knew about Garrett Park and its trees; and as UD signed the bill she sensed an entreaty of some sort from him… Entreaty’s too strong a word, maybe, but something having to do with finding our company good and wanting to hold onto it for a little longer.
Last week it was Florida State; this week it’s San Jose State. Both universities have dumped two football players in the same week because of violence, though at FSU they’re like totally into beating women up, while at SJSU it’s a combo play: One guy beat a woman up, and the other guy hit a fellow player in the head with a skateboard. So hard that the guy’s in the hospital with broken facial bones. It was “a reaction to some displeasure with how [the player he hit] was encouraging his teammate during the team’s workout earlier Tuesday.”
The New York Times remembers UD‘s upstate neighbor, Yasuo Minigawa. He and his wife bought the Fangor house (constant readers know that Les UDs inherited their upstate house because Mr UD‘s father, Jerzy Soltan, was a very close friend of Wojciech Fangor’s, and Fangor asked Soltan to buy some acres adjacent to Fangor’s place).
How did this thing come about?
One thing of which you can be sure: UD didn’t plan it. She could never have planned it.
First she bought the birdbath. If you click on the picture and enlarge it, you can just make out the drips coming from the bottom of the basin. The birdbath was beautiful but began leaking soon after I bought it. I turned it over and let it be a kind of pedestal for the buddha.
Then there was that black container. It sat empty, some distance from the birdbath on the deck. I hadn’t yet decided what to plant in it.
Then Les UDs went one afternoon to Brookside Gardens, in whose little store UD bought some Black-eyed Susan vine seeds. She did it mindlessly, vaguely, distractedly… the store was about to close… she barely checked to see if it needed full light or anything. She certainly didn’t give any thought to its climbing habit and whether she could accommodate it. She just liked the sketch of the flowers on the packet.
Weeks later UD idly dropped the seeds into the container (turns out you’re supposed to soak them, etc., etc.), and as they began to show themselves climbers, UD had an aha moment: Let’s see if we can fit the container under the structure holding up the birdbath. If we can, we’ve got legs for the vine to climb.
At about the same time, UD figured out a solution to the leaky birdbath. She went to the basement in search of a shallow but not too shallow plate that would fit into the bath and collect water. She found a silver plate that looks something like this, only the Greek design along the edges is open and lets water flow out.
The plate fit perfectly, and its silver went well with the mottled gray and black of the original bowl.
So now UD was able to turn the bowl over and let the buddha sit in the shallow water. Birds began to appear again, drinking from the plate, and excess water drained down through the openwork along the edges of the plate into the vine below. A drip system!
UD loves to watch the vine do its thing; she loves to help train it along the legs and up to the top of the basin, where she hopes to have a flowery buddha soon. When the thing does flower, she’ll take another picture. Or rather she’ll have her sister take another picture.
Today the American universities not only form the best system of higher education in the world, but are morally impressive institutions. They are not incoherent, nor are they in crisis.
Well, I guess this ain’t Allan Bloom.
No, it’s UD‘s hero, Richard Rorty.
She likes Bloom, but she likes Rorty more.
Her other heroes? The two Christophers: Christopher Lasch and Christopher Hitchens.
Albert Camus. George Orwell. Philip Rieff. Tony Judt.
Can we derive some coherence from these dead white males? Can we say why the same human being would swoon reading both hyper-righties and hyper-lefties? (And weren’t Lasch and Hitchens sort of both?) Why the same human being would applaud when Rorty says universities aren’t in crisis, and when Bloom says they are?
Do we want simply to say, with Gwendolyn, that ‘In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.’? Because all of these men wrote well (Rieff wrote like a jerk, yes, but not all the time. Not in his earlier days.), and some of them (Orwell) wrote insanely well.
No. Surely we want to grant UD a tad more depth than this. It’s not merely about writing style. Yet writing style is part of it. These men are all impassioned moralists, impassioned social justice warriors, and their prose shows it. Their prose has the sort of kick you get when you actually care about what you’re saying, when you believe that language is politics and that politics is how you decrease human suffering. It’s very much like what George Saunders says in an appreciation of E.L. Doctorow:
What I found particularly inspiring about Doctorow was the way he would tweak form to produce moral-ethical effect — the way that he seemed not to see these two things as separate. Reading his great “Ragtime,” for example, I can feel that all of that technical verve is there necessarily — to serve and escalate meaning and emotion. But as important — the verve serves and escalates the fun, the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them. The work exudes fascination with the human, and a wry confidence in it, and inspires these feelings in us as we read. Doctorow, we might say, role-models a hopeful stance toward what can be a terrifying world.
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In the same remarks of his I quote from at the beginning of this post, Rorty says:
If I were writing a history of the American university, I would tell an upbeat story about the gradual replacement of the churches by the universities as the conscience of the nation. One of the most important things that happened in the U.S. in the twentieth century was that the universities became the places where movements for the relief of human suffering found privileged sanctuaries and power bases. The universities came to play a social role that they had not played in the nineteenth century.
An impassioned atheist, Rorty reveres the American university as the place where arts- and sciences-inspired free and democratic discourse about the world and how to improve it, and about humanity and how to know and love it, thrives. The university is where we gather to read and talk about morally charged language, like Doctorow’s.
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Remember what Bartlett Giamatti called the university: a free and ordered space. When Rorty calls the university “not incoherent,” he doesn’t mean it’s coherent, as in fully pulled together, fully ordered and organized around some shared principle or faith. (And as readers of this blog know, once a university decides to organize itself around Joe Paterno, forfuckinggetit.) He means it’s coherent enough – it’s ordered enough to be free enough to generate the sorts of conversations, readings, and experiences that tend to make people (students, professors, readers of the research professors and students generate) more lucid and more compassionate. And more free, rather in the way of, as Saunders puts it, having fun — being part of a classroom where people are experiencing “the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them.” That mind, in the university setting, is a collective one, made up of the free and at the same time ordered synergy between a professor and her students.
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All of this is by way of background for a few comments on this intriguing opinion piece in today’s New York Times.
Kevin Carey is clearly on Bloom’s side. This is his opening paragraph:
To understand the failures of the modern American college system — from admissions marketing to graduation rates — you can begin with a notorious university football scandal.
So we’re going to talk about Chapel Hill as emblematic of what has made American universities a failure. Not just a failure – a nothing. An illusion. Carey’s title: The Fundamental Way that Universities are an Illusion. Later in the piece he will talk about them as Easter eggs – beautiful on the outside, dead on the inside.
The Nyang’oro fraud went on as long as it did because
U.N.C. had essentially no system for upholding the academic integrity of courses. “So long as a department was offering a course,” one distinguished professor told the investigators, “it was a legitimate course.” … The illusory university pretends that all professors are guided by a shared sense of educational excellence specific to their institution. In truth, as the former University of California president Clark Kerr observed long ago, professors are “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”… When college leaders talk about academic standards, they often mean admissions standards, not standards for what happens in classrooms themselves. Or they vaguely appeal to traditions and shared values without any hard evidence of their meaning… The problem for students is that it is all but impossible to know ahead of time which part of the disunified university is which. [And the problem for faculty is that this] kind of profound dissonance can knock askew the moral compasses of people who have ostensibly dedicated their professional lives to education. How else to explain the many people at Chapel Hill — including, incredibly, the director of a center on ethics — who abetted or ignored rampant fraud?
It’s the free and ordered thing again. Carey believes the freedom Rorty identifies in the American university has dissipated into disorder, so that anything goes in terms of pedagogical content, which makes the world safe for the endemic cheating we know goes on at virtually all big-time sports schools. At such schools – the cutting edge, Carey seems to argue, of the frayed American university – even faculty – even ethics faculty – are cheaters. And why? Because they recognize “no shared values,” no “shared sense of educational excellence,” that would give existential identity, much less academic integrity, to the place where they happen to work.
In response to this, I’d like to cite Rorty once again:
In one sense, [the term “morality”] is used to describe someone relatively decent, trustworthy, and honest – one who gives correct change, keeps promises, doesn’t lie much, can usually be relied upon to take an appropriate share in cooperative efforts, and so on. It seems to me if you’re not that sort of person by the time you’re eighteen, it’s probably too late. I don’t think that sociopaths who enter the university are corrigible by any measures that the academy might adopt. If the family, the community, the church, and the like, haven’t made you a relatively decent member of society, haven’t given you a conscience that stops you from cheating the customers, administering date rape drugs, or doing a lot of things we hope our eighteen year olds won’t do, the university won’t either. The academy can’t take on the job of straightening you out, of creating the conscience that the rest of the culture didn’t manage to produce during your first eighteen years.
This is the same point UD tirelessly makes about the absurdity of ethics courses in business schools – and those are older students. They’ve had four or five years past undergraduate school to acquire a sense of decency.
And how much more hopeless when you’re whatever age professors Jan Boxhill and Julius Nyang’oro were when they dedicated year after year of their lives to robbing students of an education and trashing their school’s integrity…
Carey wants us to believe that the openness of their work setting, the structural trust of faculty and students upon which the maturity and generativity of the American university rests, knocked askew the fragile moral compasses of Boxhill and Nyang’oro. But that trust did nothing to their morality because they lacked morality all by themselves; they were the sort of people who take advantage of the trust others place in them, and the openness of the American university simply made it easier for them to do the sorts of things they do because of the way they are. UD doesn’t think we should press the great free liberal arts schools of America in the direction of moral explicitness and constraint merely because some of the people there are bad actors.
Temple University’s most high-profile (and at the same time most low-profile — as a member of the board of trustees, Bill Cosby attended one meeting in thirty-two years) sort-of graduate likes to drug and mount women.
This predilection has caused some difficulty for the school, which did manage to dismount him from the BOT, but has not been able to sever the intimate relationship between Cosby and his defense lawyer, who doubles at chair of the Temple BOT.
Taking a page out of Yeshiva University’s book, Temple has decided that pretty much any conflict of interest can go down if there’s disclosure. We’ll see how that goes.
This is from Saul Bellow’s Herzog, describing a hard-nosed friend of Moses who enjoys lecturing him about The Real World. Simkin sees Herzog as a head in the clouds dreamy idealistic type who because he’s not watching out for reality will always crash into it and fuck up his life:
I’m a greedy old money-grubber — I don’t claim I’m a candidate for sainthood, but . . . Well, that’s just the frenzy of the world. Maybe you don’t always take cognizance, Professor, being absorbed in the true the good and the beautiful like Herr Goethe.
Ever since the multiple woman bashing incidents on the Florida State University football team, we’ve had a rash of Reality-Instructors. Their job is to tell us what’s up, what the deal is, the lay of the land, the facts on the ground, prevailing conditions, the stone cold sober truth. On the subject of big-time university football.
UD‘s favorite Reality Instructor so far is this guy. From his title (Let’s Stop Pretending FSU is Different Than Anyone Else) to his final paragraph, this guy has some cold water to throw on our assumption that universities are universities.
His main point is that all the other jockshops recruit with arrant disregard when it comes to criminal records and things like that. Why should FSU be any different? It’s not as if universities are about moral values or something. (And don’t even ask about intellectual values…) Get with the program, fool!
[This is what bothers me most about criticism of the coach]: The idea that he should be blamed for recruiting these kids at all.
It’s preposterous.
I mean, we’re all adults here, right? We know how the world works.
College football is a billion-dollar business. Virtually every coach in the Power 5 conferences is a multi-millionaire. These universities are making anywhere from 20 to 40 million dollars with these new TV deals.
With big money comes big pressure. And these coaches – all of these coaches – try to get the best players possible to come help them win football games at their respective schools. Many times that means recruiting kids from rough cities with tough backgrounds. It’s just the nature of the sport.
To the rest of the country though it’s Florida State that has become the poster child for what is wrong with college football. Wins trump everything else in Tallahassee. It’s all Fisher cares about. It’s all the community cares about. It’s the only thing that matters.
What I find fascinating — and just a bit ironic — is how [the coach] and FSU are vilified for this culture while not a peep was written or spoken about what happened in Gainesville last year.
The everybody does it argument always has as accompaniment
1.) they’re just as bad; and/or
2.) they’re worse.
UD had read long, long comment threads in which fans compulsively compare their team’s vileness to the slightly greater vileness of this or that other team. In this case, Gainesville – the University of Florida – is trotted out to demonstrate that very bad actors and cynical multimillionaire coaches are equally distributed among America’s institutes of higher learning, so why pick on us?
NYT obit.
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I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad… A writer’s life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure’s bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen.
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For the White Noise fans among us, this comment brings to mind Murray Jay Siskind:
I’m here to avoid situations. Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people. There are parts of my body I no longer encourage women to handle freely. I was in a situation with a woman in Detroit. She needed my semen in a divorce suit.
