[T]here are no grounds for the sweeping pronouncements about the virtues of non-Ivy students (“more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive”) that [William] Deresiewicz prestidigitates out of thin air. It’s these schools, after all, that are famous for their jocks, stoners, Bluto Blutarskys, gut-course-hunters, term-paper-downloaders, and majors in such intellectually challenging fields as communications, marketing, and sports management.
Of course, he’s talking about professional football players. You don’t see this in our colleges.
Here they are. UD comments on each one.
The writer starts with a new building at Yale, and there’s a reason he starts with this project. It’s the best. By far. Most of the others are quite bad, but the Edward P. Evans Hall, with its soft light ‘fifties modernism footprint is simply a pretty, non-jarring, non-aggressive addition to the campus.
Like a lot of contemporary buildings, its interior is so insanely open and abstract that things like privacy and the human specific seem totally absent. And while UD herself might not be keen on the tendency away from autonomy and individuality, she acknowledges that – especially in a business building – an architect has to reflect the digitized groupworld of the people who inhabit the construction. Evans Hall’s walls feature massive childish Sol LeWitt wall art, reflecting the thin bright bold everything-supersized world of postmodern hedgies (Yale has plenty of gothic architecture and brooding squinting portraiture for its humanities division).
Lee Hall at Clemson (AD’s #8), for its school of architecture, is also excellent. It mirrors the mini-Dulles-Airport, modestly soaring, white-sail-like, radically open floor plan, all-windows, exteriorized technology (see the Pompidou Center) thing the Yale building’s doing – and it does all of this well. And #9, the Reid Building, is equally fine, in the same almost-all-white, radically open, large masses luminescently lit way as Lee and Evans (a critic of the building notes that “Doors are in notably short supply, the whole interior presenting a Piranesi-like fluidity.”). You could argue that Reid is out of keeping with the bricky gloom of its Scottish street, but there’s nothing wrong with having a lighthouse to perk things up.
Eh, okay, so that’s the good stuff. The bad buildings all have stuff in common, just as the good buildings do. Mainly the bad stuff features pointless gigantic dead abstraction (see #4, which clearly has no context at all – I don’t see anything around it – and therefore randomly sprouts, a dying mushroom and a red oxygen canister trying to pump life back into it via an obscure connecting unit); yet more abstract gigantism plus deadly overhangs (#2; #7); desperate chaotic wedging in (#3); overhangs, gigantic abstraction, and dramatic Spiderman-like pointless design features (#5); and, finally, runty off-kilter deconstructed blah with overhangs (#6).
It’s so much easier to whore yourself when you’re a think tank than when you’re a university. Think tanks don’t really have any of the public accountability universities do. Washington think tanks are increasingly set up to make money by prostituting their intellectual work to paying foreign governments. Pressure is building for some of them to do the decent thing and register as foreign agents.
“It is particularly egregious because with a law firm or lobbying firm, you expect them to be an advocate,” [says one observer]. “Think tanks have this patina of academic neutrality and objectivity, and that is being compromised.”
UD ain’t sayin’ some professors at some universities (some departments at universities) don’t get away sometimes with whoring themselves to corporations and governments. This blog couldn’t stay in business without global pharma having its way on a semi-regular basis with some universities, and without econ professors issuing custom-built papers the real estate industry, for instance, pays them to write… She is saying that, as in the recent dual but failed assault on the university’s virtue by rich Jonnie Williams and handsome Governor Vaginal Probe, American universities tend to do a pretty good job of defending ye olde patina.
Think tanks? Meh.
You have to understand how much that shut-out cost EMU. To do that, you have to revisit the following University Diaries posts:
1. The post pointing out that “virtually no one shows up to watch” games which cost EMU millions to put on.
2. The post pointing out that
NCAA rules stipulate a school must average 15,000 fans per home football game to remain in Division I. Eastern Michigan, which averaged 6,401 fans per home game in 2010, uses $150,000 from a distribution contract with Pepsi to purchase tickets from itself at a rate of $3 apiece to remain NCAA compliant.
3. The post quoting an EMU finance professor saying
“We’re down to 57 percent regular faculty, and the other 43 percent are lecturers and part time. Searches are being held back, and I’m unhappy that they spend so much money on athletics and not academics. It’s important that we have full time faculty…Over the last few years, the budget for academics was cut by four million dollars. They need new programming. They redid the football stadium before they redid the academic buildings. … The football coach makes more than the president.”
****************
UD calls football the freak show that ate the American university.
At EMU, you can actually watch the process of digestion.
UD, à ce moment-là, sits drying off on her bed after a Rock Creek Trail walk that ended just as a big summer thunderstorm came up.
The walk was fine, but the big nature news today was UD‘s encounter with an Eastern American Toad as she watered her front garden (who knew she didn’t need to water?). It plopped out from a rock UD was watering around and then hunched absolutely motionless on her gray driveway. A lesser toad hand might have assumed it was a clod of mud or a piece of dog waste, but UD knew from her time with Elphaba (a toad who, years ago, took up residence on UD‘s front stoop and ate all her bugs) that this was a toad for sure. UD lifted the water hose and sprinkled the toad, which immediately hopped into UD‘s pachysandra lawn and disappeared.
And that’s because our universities – bless their hearts – are unlikely to want to waste their time studying bullshit substances even if the state the universities are in makes it clear it’s willing to throw a lot of money at the universities to do so.
So Governor Vaginal Probe and the Missus have been found guilty of corruption (the maker of the bs substance threw money at them in order to get them to get the universities to produce studies of the substance in order to give it respectability so people would buy it…) and will go to prison in part because they were too stupid to realize that rank and total intellectual corruption is something almost no university (in the States; they should have tried the scheme in Italy) is going to approve.
Rate My Professors got there before UD did.
It’s very dangerous, teaching chemistry in Pocatello, and you’ve got to pack heat.
Nobody thinks of assigning him when they stop wining and dining him…
So out he goes, in search of consultancies and media appearances for himself…
The sad post-presidential story of George Washington University’s Stephen Trachtenberg (he was, during his tenure, a dead ringer for Gordon Gee – genial, bow-tied, tending toward inept public statements, and scandalously overpaid) displays all the pathos of a man who can’t sit still after having been a university leader, a man flailing about in search of things to do and failing to do them well.
****************
Defense of the indefensible is a Gordon Gee/Stephen Trachtenberg trademark. Both men – like Sarah Palin – “get increasingly adorable” as their statements get increasingly deplorable. The bow tie enlarges… becomes pink…
Trachtenberg ran to the defense of Yeshiva University when its greed and corruption turned it into a conflict of interest paradise ruled by Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. In 2008, he dismissed as a Monday morning quarterback anyone who criticized this now junk-status catastrophe.
Trachtenberg’s recent remarks about rape and its causes have embarrassed not only him, but GW, since he’s closely associated with the school. GW is doing what it can to distance itself from him, and Trachtenberg is becoming beyond belief adorable.
****************
Gee landed on his feet, at West Virginia University.
*****************
Americans really like guys like these. UD has no idea why.
UD and her sister this afternoon in
Port Deposit, Maryland, in front of
their grandfather Joseph Rapoport’s
department store. The store is now
a wildly successful seafood restaurant.
**********************
UD thanks her sister Frances
for taking the picture.
It begins to dawn on a University of Texas student that the professional football team that uses his school’s field has nothing to do with his school.
Professors are always the weirdos; egghead university culture is always the bizarre thing against which the wholesome normality of college sports stands in all-American relief. Here’s the google-eyed weirdo peacenik photo that typically runs with articles about university professors. How much finer and firmer, how much more real, the football players racing out of the arena’s mist amid battle songs to start the fight on the field…
Yet football – routinely touted by idiots as the front porch of the university – is so much freakier than anything the professoriate could come up with. Football makes the American university not merely academic fraud central; it makes it a kind of endlessly looping Chien Andalou, with the first school out of the gate at the beginning of a new (cough) academic year the already notoriously disgusting University of Southern California.
USC has mainly been about the obvious stuff – cheating, impermissable benefits, blah blah. But now it’s Front Porch Surreal:
USC is finding itself in the media for all the wrong reasons this week. First, there’s the saga of Josh Shaw, who broke both his ankles this weekend by jumping off a balcony for an unknown reason [and lied about it]. And now senior Anthony Brown is accusing the team’s coach, Steve Sarkisian, of being a racist.
Sarkisian “treated me like a slave,” complains the player, who abruptly left the team; and, well, given the prominent and pretty plausible description of the university football landscape as a “plantation,” one can’t be too surprised at this latest grotesquerie.
But I mean. It’s not just USC. Richie Incognito? Out there in the clean-living heartland of Nebraska? They’ve still got their beloved torturer’s bio up on their university website. No professor can compete with University of Nebraska Weird. The University of Nebraska should audition for kink.com.
… But it’s always possible to be yet greedier.