… the American poet, has died at 89. UD recently wrote about one of his poems here. Simpson’s sensibility was odd, original; the language of his poetry is less interesting than its moods, the things his eye notices. As in his poem titled There Is.

Nice title, There Is. It strips the propositional, look at this, feel of poetry right down. The poet writes that there is this, and there is that; the poet names things… Yet in this particular poem (I’m reprinting most but not all of the stanzas), the poet can’t get it together to say there is anything. He’s in one of those moods… the city’s getting to him…

Look! From my window there’s a view
of city streets
where only lives as dry as tortoises
can crawl — the Gallapagos of desire.

Look! There is… an island of dry hardbacked tortoises crawling about. The dynamic city’s gone — at least I don’t see it. I see aridity, paralysis.

There is the day of Negroes with red hair
and the day of insane women on the subway;
there is the day of the word Trieste
and the night of the blind man with the electric guitar.

It’s a city, full of charged, fraught moments. All these there ises I need to tell you about: the red hair, the insane women, the day I encountered and was haunted by the word Trieste, and what about that blind musician… These things mean something, add up to something…

But I have no profession. Like a spy
I read the papers — Situations Wanted.
Surely there is a secret
which, if I knew it, would change everything!

A silent flaneur, the poet ranges the city, reads the paper, looking for the situation, the secret, the word (Trieste?), that will crystallize into a there is worthy of our attention – a scenery of meaning.

I have the poor man’s nerve-tic, irony.
I see through the illusions of the age!
The bell tolls, and the hearse advances,
and the mourners follow, for my entertainment.

The problem seems to be self-consciousness, sophistication, cynicism; even the serious essentials – death, for instance – seem mere entertainments.

I tread the burning pavement,
the streets where drunkards stretch
like photographs of civil death
and trumpets strangle in electric shelves.

The mannequins stare at me scornfully.
I know they are pretending
all day to be in earnest.
And can it be that love is an illusion?

The flaneur poet walks the arid tortoise street in search of inspiration, waiting for the real to come at him and cut through irony. But like the red-heads and the insane women and the blind man with the guitar, the surreal, poignant, belligerent city visions he now experiences (drunkards, trumpets) instantly become photographs, shelved silences. The guitar was electric; the trumpets strangle in electric shelves; actual suffering human beings on the streets are mechanical snaps — Part of the problem is the alienating and distancing technology of the modern city, and the way our embroilment in that technology makes us see things as pictures, as already-aesthetically-messed-with elements. Which leaves the poet with nothing to do.

O businessmen like ruins,
bankers who are Bastilles,
widows, sadder than the shores of lakes,
then you were happy, when you still could tremble!

All locked up now, the city dwellers, like the poet, once had an erotic past (“the air is filled with Eros” at night on the streets), an innocent and avid receptivity to the wonder of being. Out of this trembling life might come the poetic inspiration the poet – arid, ironic, disillusioned – lacks.

But all night long my window
sheds tears of light.
I seek the word. The word is not forthcoming.
O syllables of light … O dark cathedral …

God knows the world still expresses itself, still beckons the poet to his window so that he can see it. This light that comes through is the sorrow of the world, a word for which he seeks. But the word is not forthcoming. Trieste is nice – so close to triste. But Trieste was another day, and he’s lost it. All he can do is listen to the syllables as they strike his window, as they murmur from the dark cathedral where irony is forever silenced.

The university has permitted drinking in the football stands, and the results may surprise you.

We had beer spilled on us three times; a fight broke out in the row behind us over the unspeakable sin of wearing a nonmaroon visor, and those of us who spent the better part of the entire game trying to keep the peace received multiple offers to have our faces rearranged.

Whoda thunk it?

The man who – until his recent firing – presided over endless sports, academic fraud, and sports-related misuse of funds cases at the University of North Carolina was a saint. A saint. He did his best. He was powerless.

Big-time college athletics have long been a minefield for university administrators. They often find themselves at the mercy of highly paid coaches under intense pressure to recruit top players – who may struggle academically – and wealthy boosters who want successful teams.

… A 2009 Knight Commission survey of university presidents and chancellors found many of them feel powerless to stop or slow the financial arms race in athletic departments that has often brought scandal.

“(P)residents would like serious change but do not see themselves as the force for the changes needed,” the report said.

As poor little David Boren of Oklahoma University says of the coaches’ salaries there, “We can’t control the marketplace.”

These guys can’t do anything! They’re only the president.

The clouds are gathering at the University of Texas medical school, as its new corporate acquisition, Ronald DePinho, president of the cancer center, produces yet more bad publicity.

DePinho, the very model of the modern money man, does not see why conflict of interest should apply to him (since it would mean temporarily giving up certain income flows), or why his wife – hired on his faculty – shouldn’t get special treatment…

Taken in Galway Ireland,
one day before her birthday.

Out goes the chancellor of the University of North Carolina, zillions of sports, academic fraud, and misuse of funds scandals trailing him. His firing/resignation probably means there are yet more scandals looming.

This local commentary is interesting, along the lines of Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play:

Otherwise, Thorp seemed [to] have the makings of an excellent chancellor.

He writes an opinion piece in the school newspaper protesting the destruction of the university by athletics.

You’d think newspapers at Auburn and Clemson and Georgia and Montana and all of the other American universities degraded by big-time sports would feature similar professors – committed, responsible people capable of tracking and analyzing the deterioration and writing about it. Hell, many of these people have tenure, a level of job security unimaginable to most people. But – as UD discussed in what seems to have become her most famous column – for a variety of reasons, they don’t say anything.

Rutgers is an exception. William C. Dowling – a Rutgers English professor – wrote a 2007 book about how sports has long undone, and continues to undo, Rutgers. And now, with things far, far worse than when Dowling’s book came out, an economics professor there – Mark Killingworth – has described the ongoing (and, old UD will guess, ultimately failed) effort to “clean up” after its athletics mess.

A New York Times article about Dowling was written in 2007, when things looked way cool at Rutgers athletics. The author writes that “the number of undergraduate applications has risen along with Rutgers’s sporting fortunes, as have annual donations to the university.”

Really? Here’s Killingworth, 2012:

[B]ig-time University athletics hasn’t attracted more first-year students with high SAT scores, and hasn’t raised our “yield” (percentage of accepted applicants who actually attend), relative to peer institutions. Our academic rankings are sliding steadily downwards, and for two years running, our enormous athletic subsidies have landed us in the Wall Street Journal’s “football grid of shame.” This isn’t “building the brand” — it’s making us a punchline.

What happened to all them big donations and big smart students?

See, this is something sports factories don’t want to parse for you, but getting more jerks to apply to your school because they want to get pissed and join the fun is not a good trend. The state of Massachusetts has set up the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take those students.

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Killingworth touches on the Rutgers board of trustees. He is far too kind, merely asking them to “rethink their priorities.” No. They are the people who killed Rutgers. Like Penn State’s trustees (UD predicts all or most of them will resign in the coming months) they should be booted. Instead of holding the university in their trust and working toward its benefit, they shat on it and created the absolute failure Killingworth describes. Out they go.

This chick, Kristen Juras, a law professor at the University of Montana, came down hard on the campus newspaper when it inaugurated a sex column. Said it had to be stopped because it was ’embarrassingly unprofessional’ and reflected badly upon her as a faculty member.

That was a couple of years ago.

You really want unprofessional? Unprofessional is setting yourself up as a private consultant to write articles favoring your clients, and then using the cover of your university appointment to give your hackwork legitimacy. It’s failing to disclose that your work is paid independent work for a client – tailor-made to promote that client’s legislative interests – and has nothing to do with the university which has you on its faculty.

When Montana’s governor complained to the university’s president that one of his faculty was misbehaving in this way, it irritated the president. He was caught off guard. You could say he was embarrassed.

Juras’ written study contained no disclosure saying her conclusions were her own and not the university’s views, nor did she seek prior consent from her dean to use the university name in working as a consultant, [the president] said.

Now of course Juras is screaming about free speech… A confused woman.

Central Michigan University (go here – scroll down – if you have the stomach) is a Division I unibrewery with a losing team. The only fiscal solution to this problem is full-throttle student bacchanalia in the parking lots of games no one attends. The presidents of div I unibreweries spend most their time tweaking alcohol policies with an eye to two things:

1. maximum consumption; and

2. the mobilization of personal responsibility rhetoric.

The University of Hawaii and South Carolina State University give UD an empty feeling. She doesn’t like this feeling any more than you do when you have it — as if existence is suddenly stripped of meaning and value and you’re inside a howling panorama of futility and anarchy.

Corrupt outposts of corrupt states, these two are always on UD‘s radar, not only for the commonplace (theft of funds, exploded athletics budgets), but for the baroque (Stevie Wonder concerts about which Stevie Wonder doesn’t know; just-completed federally funded research buildings turning into instant ruins).

These schools are the public non-profit twin of America’s private for-profit schools: Both surreal ruinations are fueled by the trapped, hapless, American taxpayer.

This first paragraph from today’s Brown University newspaper isn’t quite correct. It should read “co-ghosted.” Because not only did Brown’s Keller put his name on a fraudulent study, he seems to have allowed his good friend Glaxo to write the article for him. “Keller acknowledged in 2006 that over the years, he had received tens of thousands of dollars from GSK and its affiliates.”

Brown University stands in fervent solidarity with Martin Keller.

After all, this sort of corruption is a drop in the bucket for Brown, whose last president signed off on the Goldman Sachs bonuses, and whose board of trustees is a Rappaccini’s garden of shady hedgies.

Brown has grown a certain money culture; in it, special relationships with friends like Glaxo Smith Kline and Goldman Sachs bloom. That’s Brown.

UD‘s only question, as you know if you’ve read this blog for more than five minutes, is What took so long?

This article about NYU is amusing. One professor, who points out that laptops create a physical barrier between students and professors, says that if you love laptops in the classroom, “Drop out of NYU and go enroll in the University of Phoenix.”

The NYU student reporter is way down on no-laptop professors like UD. It turns out we’re motivated by fear:

[E]ducators are always afraid that their lessons will be overshadowed by the outside world. Often, that’s because their lessons are boring.

Digital media scholar and professor Melanie Kohnen, also of the Media, Culture and Communication department, thinks that teachers who enforce a draconian laptop lockdown are “motivated by the fear of losing students’ attention.”

It is scandalous. The idea of trying to arrange your classroom so that people pay attention…

Anyway. Read the comments on the article. They’re very thoughtful.

After only a few months on the job, Geoffrey Orsak has been sacked as president of the University of Tulsa. These searches are expensive and time-consuming, and it makes no one look good when things collapse. Reasons ought to be given, so that the process and its failures are as open as possible to the people who pay for both the search and the extra expenses associated with this sort of failure. So far Tulsa and Orsak have said nothing.

Sometimes presidents leave for reasons of clear incompatibility. It was simply a mistake for them to take the job, and that is openly acknowledged. When John Balkcom left St John’s College Santa Fe after only a couple of years, he said “I have come to the difficult conclusion that the responsibilities of this position are not a good fit with my professional skills or desires.” If something like that has occurred at Tulsa, Orsak should say so.

Another good reason for the school and Orsak to release statements is that of course we’re now all free to speculate wildly. Was he stealing money, or being in some other way financially irresponsible? Had he engaged in an extramarital affair with someone on the staff? Is he a drinker? When something anomalous like this happens, people are going to try to figure out why on their own if you don’t tell them.

What you tell them might not be true; or it might not be all of the truth. But some statement should be forthcoming. Otherwise, people on campus have a right to worry that animosity and legal bills might be involved.

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UD thanks JND.

It’s an unavoidable task of a blog like University Diaries to go to where the big-time university sports fans are, and to listen to them with care.

I read this sort of thing on a regular basis.

I re-read it. I circle around it. I pore over it.

It’s always the same: A halting recital of the current top rung of university sports scandals. A few forced laughs along the way. A final pledge to do all one can to deny that they happened.

It’s a guy thing.

UD‘s not a guy.

UD likes guys.

She knows that guys power the billion dollar tv contracts that have killed any number of universities as serious institutions. But she still likes guys. She likes this guy.

Like all guys, he’s basically Blanche Dubois: Ah see the world ah wanna see. Like her, he deserves our effort to understand, and our pity.

This time last year, the incredibly violent University of Massachusetts, Amherst – a university which seems to have a gang-legacy admissions category – was the scene of extensive back-to-school bloodshed.

It’s exactly the same thing this year, with party/riots so massive and attacks on police so vicious that the poor little town of Amherst, once host to gentle Emily Dickinson, now host to hordes of scary drunks, has begun considering its options.

It wants, to start with, to know just how seriously the university is disciplining its large numbers of remarkably vile students. UD isn’t sure what Amherst intends to do once it gets this information, but considering the long history of U Mass student riots (read that history here), the town has been astoundingly forbearing.

UD has proposed shutting the school down and making it an online institution. The negative here is obvious – Amherst currently enjoys a captive audience of thousands of thirsty alcoholics, and that’s got to be great for its bottom line. But gradually the whole Zoo Mass phenom is costing Amherst – and all Massachusetts taxpayers – more than it’s bringing in.