University Diaries brings you another instance of the amazing diversity of college experience, here distilled on one page of the Yale Daily News.

Starting from the top, there’s the announcement of a concert of sacred music. (That particular banner ad might not appear when you open the page. It alternates with others.)

Directly beneath, taking up the rest of the page, there’s a paean to FOUR LOKO, “a cup of coffee with three beers” which tastes like shit and produces, one student says, an “I don’t remember what the fuck happened kind of drunk.”

… for fearless entrepreneurial zeal.

… In IRS documents filed to maintain its tax-exempt status, the KU athletics department reported financial liabilities for 2008-09 of $93.67 million, an increase of about 57 percent from a year earlier. The report also showed long-term debt of about $46.56 million for 2008-09. That figure is more than triple the $15.06 million debt listed the previous year.

… There also are indications that even if the nation’s economy takes a turn for the better, donor dollars [which KU expects to pay the debt] may be harder to come by…

A money strategy as American as apple pie.

It’s finally October, and it’s finally chilly.

Autumn-wise, UD‘s a gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights sort of person; but she gets how for a lot of people autumn is melancholy.

Maybe it’s because of all the doleful news stories lately about young, sensitive people wracked by the world, but UD finds herself pondering this autumn poem in particular. It’s by D.H. Lawrence.

Dolor of Autumn

At the same time I stand exposed
Here on the bush of the globe,
A newly-naked berry of flesh
For the stars to probe.

[The tear-trembling stars regard the tragedy of human life unsheathed, stripped of cover and consolation; the speaker fears everything, as he says in his first stanza, because now the earth is sheer animal life, the breathing of a beast, and our vulnerability is no match for its mindless animal power.]

The Boston Globe reports on the overwhelmingly positive results of Northeastern, Boston U., and Hofstra having dropped football.

Quite a few other universities continue to “spend between $3 million and $5 million annually on the sport for equipment, scholarships, travel, coaches’ salaries, and facilities, and their teams generate little interest on campus or success on the field.” Some of these universities will certainly drop it…

It won’t happen in the south, of course, where football is a religion.

But imagine… Imagine how strange it would be if significant numbers of schools did can football. You’d have a diminishing group of big boys – Texas, Florida, that lot – begging someone to play with them…

Of course, these schools could just keep playing against each other, but fans would get bored and demand more variety. Hm…

UD predicts that eventually Alabama will pressure Nick Saban to give back 2.5 of his 4.8 million dollar yearly salary so that Alabama can create a football program at another university. Other southern universities with four million dollar coaches will do the same. In order to have someone to play against, these places will begin funding and running football programs at northern universities. Four or so times a year, an organized group of fraternities and alumni from these schools will come up here and deliver PowerPoints on how to do really sloppy drunken tailgates that the whole family can enjoy, etc.

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Update: Details on the Southern Model here.

“I’ve never been to Michigan-Ohio State, but I can’t imagine it being near the experience that the entire weekend is of [University of Oklahoma]-Texas,” OU senior Matt Patten said. “The stuff that goes on down there is just ridiculous. I mean you have an enormous amount of alcohol all over the place down by the hotels where we all stay. Fights are breaking out all around you between OU fans and Texas fans…”

David, the soil specialist from the University of Maryland, called this out to UD as she stood some distance from him in her back forest this afternoon, chopping down a tree.

David was in one of the many deer-ridden thickets in her half acre, planting a black oak between two immense tulip poplars. “The tulips will probably die in not too many years. You’ve got a Dutch Elm, too. The disease will catch up with it …”

As for all the Norwegian Somethings, get rid of them! Foreign interlopers, and we’re reestablishing the native canopy. Did UD have an axe?

She did, she did. It was one of many fine garden implements UD inherited from her mother…

She’d never used it; hadn’t seen it in years. It lay at the bottom of her little storage shed, its silver dirty and gray.

“Try girdling this Norwegian. Chop it all around the bottom, about an inch in. Only the bark is alive. The leaves will start to go… You should be able to push it over… ”

The axe’s blade was very, very sharp. UD girdled Norwegians here, here, here, and there. “And what,” she asked David, “about these excess honeysuckles? Could I take the axe to them?”

“Sure,” he said; and it was when he heard UD‘s cry of triumph at felling a honeysuckle – wood chips flew in her face as she slashed – that he said the thing about empowerment.

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Later, when Les UDs took a walk along Lake Needwood, UD explained to Mr UD that she was now a woodsman, that she enjoyed axing, and that he should expect her to axe many things.

“Along those lines,” he said, humming the famous song, “What’s a lumberjack, exactly? What does a lumberjack do?” He asked in that special I’m-Polish-and-you’re-American-plus-an-English-professor way.

“Er, much more than chop down trees,” said UD, trying to sound authoritative. “They chop them down, of course; but then they chop them into logs, and then they send the logs, uh, down the river, which is called log-rolling… Or they just, you know, transport them in whatever way they need to be transported, and, uh…”

“You don’t really know, do you?”

Then they drove to Johnson’s in Kensington and bought many packs of moss for their topiary bulls. Also they bought pumpkins.

Mr UD knows nothing about pumpkin placement, but as soon as he parked the car he raced to the trunk, took out all the pumpkins, and placed them here and there around the front of the house. He didn’t even understand that pumpkins need to be massed.

Seth Abramson shuts down Hospital.

The last one of these UD recalls involved a faculty member somewhere (can’t find the original article) who claimed someone stole his new computer.

Before giving him another one, the university checked recent footage from a security camera near his office. It showed the professor removing the computer from his office.

Oh, and there was another one. More recent. A University of South Florida professor was filmed stealing a bicycle.

Most recently (thanks, MattF, for the link) a University of Michigan post-doc was filmed sabotaging the experimental work of another student in a cancer research lab.

This page contains two photos of him. Look carefully, so you can see him coming.

… PowerPoint.

But no one listens.

After this appearance on CNN, an attorney general takes personal leave.

Michiganders can take comfort in the fact that he’ll be back, bringing his judicious temperament to the laws of their state.

There are many variants of plagiarism. The one Rodney Glassman, Democratic candidate for Senate in Arizona, seems to have committed is the young-man-in-a-hurry type, in which a very ambitious person accumulates many advanced degrees in order to produce a burnished cv. Corners get cut.

A few years ago, Scathing Online Schoolmarm featured here a satire of a Christmas letter to friends (she seems to have lost it — she’s still looking for it). She thinks Gregg Easterbrook wrote it, but she’s not sure (she sent an email to him asking about it). The author found just the right combination of insufferably boasting tone and vulgar materialist content, and SOS went into some detail, in that post, praising and analyzing this little masterpiece…

Ah! Just heard back from Easterbrook! (His latest book is Sonic Boom.) Good man. It’s no longer at the New Republic (showed up in ’04), but Easterbrook found it for me in a pretty obscure place, and I’m very grateful to him. Here it is:

UD is so glad she and Mr UD passed up a trip to Sundance when we were in Utah this summer…

Anyway, why is UD revisiting this great piece of satire? Because a non-satirical, entirely sincere version of the form is now being passed around online, and a comparison of the real thing, written by the novelist Janette Turner Hospital, who’s on a visiting appointment at Columbia’s MFA program at the moment, with Easterbrook’s fake, is instructive.

Before she came to Columbia, Hospital taught at the University of South Carolina. In a letter to her former students there, Hospital admits she prefers Columbia.

Forwarded below are a couple of emails sent to all of our Columbia MFA students. It’s the kind of invitation students here receive-and take up-at least once or twice a week in a cornucopia of literary riches. It seems to me that USC writing students should also know about these opportunities, since you could car-pool up to NYC very cheaply and stay at youth hostels on Manhattan (within walking distance of Columbia U and Central Park) for just $30/night (shared room) with linen, towels, and breakfast provided. MFA students from other states take advantage of this and visit in groups. Why not USC?

As for news from this very different MFA planet, I’m in seventh heaven teaching here, and not only because I have Orhan Pamuk (whom I hope to bring to USC for Caught in the Creative Act), Oliver Sacks, Simon Schama, Richard Howard, Margo Jefferson, etc., etc., as colleagues, though that is obviously part of it.

My students also live and move and write in seventh heaven and in a fever of creative excitement. Columbia’s MFA is rigorous and competitive but students don’t just have publication as a goal – they take that for granted, since about half the graduating class has a book published or a publishing contract in hand by graduation – so they have their sights set on Pulitzers.

This program is huge, the largest in the country. It’s a 3-year degree, with 300 students enrolled at a given time. Each year, 100 are admitted (in fiction, poetry, nonfiction) with fiction by far the largest segment. But 600+ apply, so the 100 who get in are the cream of the cream.

Students take workshops and literature courses in equal measure. They are avid readers and intense participants in seminar discussion. And here is one of their toughest hurdles: they do not pick their own committee for the thesis. They do not even pick their own supervisor. These roles are assigned. They are not even informed who their committee members are until one week before the defense, when they receive the detailed written reports signed by their committee members. This is certainly a bit nerve-wracking for the student, but replicates exactly what happens in the publishing world where the coldly neutral eyes of agents and editors are assessing your manuscript. Columbia’s MFA feels this rigor has a lot to do with the high publication rate of students.

In my first week here, I was presented with two theses of students unknown to me and required to write detailed reports. I was given the names of other committee members, and it was up to us to make contact and arrange to meet to discuss the theses we’d been assigned. There are 30+ members on the MFA faculty, but the program also uses a number of well-known writers resident in NYC who are not faculty. I have found these meetings and discussions with NYC writers rather wonderful.

Sixty theses have been submitted for fall graduation (approx. 35 fiction; 15 poetry; 10 nonfiction). On average, each year from 5 – 10% of these will be failed, and the student will be advised to try again for spring graduation. If the thesis is failed, the student will not meet with the committee but will receive the detailed reports. In the two weeks from Oct 4 – Oct 15, all those who pass will meet with their committee for the “thesis conference.” Since pass or fail has already been decided, this is not a “defense” but a conference in which the committee discusses positive and problematic issues with the student and makes recommendations of what should be done before submission to a publisher.

This kind of rigor about the thesis (absolutely no easy rides here) has a lot to do with the high publication rate. But there are certainly other factors which contribute: students do internships at the New Yorker, Publishers’ Weekly, Paris Review, and at major publishing houses. They attend multiple readings by famous writers every week (not by any means all at Columbia, but at the NY Public Library, the 92nd St Y, at NYU, etc.

Also, the program hosts a reception for all graduating students with about 30 major editors and agents invited. At his reception, each agent or editor is presented with an anthology of the work of the graduating students, along with contact emails. No wonder the students are off to a flying start. Agents and editors hover like major-league recruiters at college championships.

But I think what thrills me most of all is the sheer intellectual intensity of the students. Although I have taught at a number of the most highly regarded MFA programs in this country and in England, there’s only one other place I’ve ever taught where there was a comparable atmosphere, and that was MIT, where I taught for 3 years. At both places the crackle of intellectual energy in the air is almost visible, like blue fire.

And then there are all the peripheral pleasures of living on Manhattan: we’ve seen the Matisse exhibition at MOMA, have tickets for the opening of Don Pasquale at the Met Opera, have tickets to see Al Pacino on stage as Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, etc etc. Plus I’m just 15 minutes walking distance from Columbia and from all the sidewalk bistros on Broadway, and 3 minutes from Central Park where we join the joggers every morning. This is Cloud Nine living on the Upper West Side (which is known to my agent and my Norton editor, who live in Greenwich Village, as “Upstate Manhattan.” ) We love it.

All best wishes,
and think about the invitations below which my Columbia students will be attending.
JTH

These two headlines, from the New York Times and The Gothamist, give you a sense of how the mainstream and non-mainstream press are framing this one, an expansion of the Cecilia Chang story [earlier charges against her here].

As the dean of the Institute of Asian Studies at St. John’s, Ms. Chang had the authority to grant 15 scholarships a year. The recipients, most of whom were from overseas, were told they had to work 20 hours a week under her supervision.

The students thought they would be doing work related to the university. Instead, according to the prosecutors, she forced them to perform menial tasks at her home in Jamaica Estates, Queens.

She’s been charged with forced labor and bribery. On top of embezzling.

Slave does seem a bit over the top, though it’s possible yet more lurid coercions and uses could emerge…

St John’s, a Catholic institution, does need to do some thinking. Its 2008 Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award winner is on trial for fraud and bribery; one of its vice-presidents turns out to be – allegedly – quite a monster. She did her thing for years, unimpeded.

Asleep at the wheel is the phrase that comes to mind.

What bothers me more is that a coach who is responsible for a non-academic activity and for a team that is smaller than most classes at IUPUI would earn more money than most faculty members, and that she would have a contract that allows her to earn three years of pay after the university determines that her services are no longer wanted.

A professor at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis notes the strangeness of a fired basketball coach getting $300,000 in severance (the local newspaper has had to file a complaint with the state for release of records, since IUPUI sees no reason to explain to the world why it has done this). The professor wonders why athletics “loom larger than the central mission of the campus.”

The answer to this is clear: Athletics is the central mission of the campus.

Judith Shklar asked this question in a talk she gave in 1981; and it’s true that when you read about acts of brutal and consequential cruelty it’s hard to resist a feeling of hatred.

Yet when considering the two Rutgers freshmen who secretly filmed a fellow freshman – a gay man – having sex, and then broadcast it all over the internet, and when considering the student’s response to this exposure — he killed himself — the hatred rather rapidly gives way.

In its place is sorrow for him, and contempt for his tormentors. His tormentors’ youth and stupidity created a toxic brew; and UD has no trouble with the thought of both of them reflecting, for a couple of years, from a jail cell, on what they’ve done.

Virtually all good universities generate opinion pieces like this one, by Eve Samborn at Washington University. She begins:

During a class discussion a few weeks ago about existentialist philosophy, my professor informed our class that in the 1950s, every college student in America was reading the works of Jean-Paul Sartre.

She goes on to worry that no comparable figure exists today – a global intellectual posing challenging existential questions, questions discussed inside and outside of the classroom by many students. “[O]ur generation has no revolutionary philosopher to tear down our previously held core beliefs. [O]ur campus shows little interest in finding such a figure.”

One irony here is that her campus enjoyed for many years the presence of William Gass, a remarkable novelist/philosopher (he’s emeritus now) who brilliantly posed the sorts of questions Samborn has in mind. In a 2005 interview, he recalls his teaching days:

[T]hat was one of the nice things about teaching. You get to assign books you love. It’s hard to beat, that kind of life. You’re reading philosophers who are just incredible—they may be creeps [laughs], but it’s wonderful stuff. It’s helpful to you. You learn. It forces you to pay attention to the texts in a way that I think is helpful… Thoreau, for example, … uses the word “margins.” He says, “In my life I like to have wide margins.” Then there’s a sentence about enjoying the sunshine, and meditating, and so forth. Well, he takes all the sounds in the word “margin,” and they just dominate the words that follow. This whole description—from the ms to the ns. And I’m just thinking, My God!, you know. And so: Life is justified.

Gass complains, in the same interview, that philosophy as a discipline has changed in ways that make existential inquiry rare:

In philosophy, there’s been a big shift. Philosophers say that it’s because that’s the way philosophy should be going. But I think it’s because that’s where the money is. Our philosophy department was pretty strong, what was called PNP—philosophy, neurophysiology, psychology. Working again on all kinds of things that interested biologists: artificial intelligence, genetics. And there’s been a shift, generally, in that direction.

UD, at Northwestern in the late ‘seventies, studied Rilke (a big favorite with Gass) with Erich Heller and Sartre with James Edie, and she recalls exactly the sort of intellectual buzz Samborn’s talking about. I’m not sure UD had any very well-formulated core beliefs (the phrase is Samborn’s) but encountering (in Lionel Trilling’s anthology, Literary Criticism) Susan Sontag’s and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s disdain for core beliefs excited her.

Maybe most people in college are careerists; but Samborn speaks for many when she laments the absence of something she’s right to want and expect in college: An atmosphere of sustained and excited and subversive discourse about foundational human questions (And so: Life is justified.). She worries about “what kind of educated people we will become if we have not given sufficient thought to the world.”