Who knows why Les UDs keep skirting disaster? During this immense storm (it’s still going on), I looked outside to see a very large tree limb on our car – a heavy thick central limb and many smaller limbs, all bristling with leaves and twigs…. The sight would have been very pretty if it weren’t sitting on our car.

UD went out there in the rain and noted that it wasn’t exactly on our car but rather had sort of mainly fallen on the street and only lightly tangentially fallen on our car. I couldn’t see any damage. I pulled on the main limb. Much too heavy to move.

“Do you like a challenge?” I asked Mr UD when I got back inside. He squared his shoulders, marched out there, and did in fact move the whole thing closer to the curb. I stood about pointlessly, repeating Don’t hoit yourself!, as if this amusing New York accent would make the incident amusing.

Mr UD then drove off to get dinner while UD took out her lopper and lopped the limbs that lay in the lane. She laboriously lopped the leaves that lived down the lane.

While lopping, UD talked to herself about how interesting it was that her neighbors kept driving by, very carefully making their way around the thing, and then in a very neighborly and sympathetic way waving at me, but not stopping to help.

Soon enough, though, a town maintenance man came by, his white truck emblazoned on both sides with Washington Redskins flags. He took over.

It’s an archetypal American story, told here by Johnny Cash (scroll down), and rendered just as poignantly by the University of Iowa’s president on her Hangover Regret tour.

Given that she presides over the the nation’s second-ranked party school, she now muses about the wisdom of having signed a big high-profile deal with Anheuser-Busch:

“I’m not sure it’s worth the revenues we’re getting for our athletic department,” Mason said at a taping Friday for Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press.” “I probably would reconsider. More than likely not even do it.”

The university has been fighting its party-school image for years and has tried to push the message of “safe, responsible, legal,” Mason said. That seemed to fit with Anheuser-Busch’s pitch for drinking responsibly.

But recently, the university’s Tigerhawk logo appeared on posters advertising drink specials at Iowa City bars, a move not approved by the university.

You can appreciate the president’s logic:

1. After fighting our party school image for years, Iowa appears at the number two slot on the most recent list.

2. Therefore, inking deals that make our school’s logo virtually indistinguishable from the corporate image of the nation’s biggest beer distributor might NOT be the best way to fight our party school image.

Presidential leadership. It doesn’t get any better than this!

… aimed at students protesting the campus visit of Mr One Percent, Eric Cantor — a banner reading

GET IN OUR BRACKET

— so students at Georgetown University are marketing their investment fund to fellow students with the tagline

BECOME THE ONE PERCENT.

Much huffing and puffing about it here. But really – it’s a clever slogan, and it has helped attract a lot of investors.

… can be as big as all outdoors.

In 1997, the owner of a massive cattle ranch in Wyoming gave it to Colorado State University and the University of Wyoming “for hands-on agriculture education.” But the universities say “the working ranch isn’t a very practical place for students to learn,” and have now put it up for sale.

The donor threatens to sue, since it seems to her that the universities “violated the gift agreement by insufficiently promoting the ranch to university faculty as an available educational tool.”

Why hasn’t the educational set-up worked? “To date, the ranch has had 25 interns and employees from both universities studying geology, range and wildlife management, and equine studies.” That’s in fourteen years.

The same University of Wyoming newspaper, in another article on the subject, increases the number:

In the past, the ranch has had more than 50 interns from a wide variety of fields, including art and geology. Japanese ranchers have visited, and students from Europe have asked to intern at the ranch.

That’s still ridiculously tiny.

To UD’s madly idealizing, hopelessly coastal mind, 50,000 gorgeous acres, a working cattle ranch, should be a spectacular acquisition for a land-grant university interested in maintaining and improving a state’s traditional way of life. It should also be attractive to a university’s art departments, to environmentalists, to scientists…

UW dean of the College of Agriculture, Francis Galey, told the AP, “It’s a very, very efficient and lean working operation. So the way it was set up staffing-wise, there just wasn’t a way to accommodate the teaching we wanted to do.”

I’m not sure what this means. No one on the staff was willing to teach? Isn’t that what the professor is supposed to do? Or am I picking up the possibility that the staff simply wasn’t very cooperative with the whole educational thing — wanted to be left alone to do its work? Disrupted classes?

Wyoming’s student paper writes:

The hidden message is that more educated ranchers do not work the land. They work in management and let unskilled workers work the land. This shift in ranch politics will mean fewer jobs and less state revenue. Family run ranches will quickly become a thing of the past, confined to western movies and stories told by grandparents.

In this Working Ranch article, more reasons emerge, mainly having to do with difficult access and hard winters and the fact that both universities have closer similar facilities (which maybe undermines the claim about the sale’s hidden message).

The darkest theory is that the schools just held onto the land as long as they had to legally and are now selling it because it’s insanely valuable. They’ll get around twenty million, apparently. They say the money will go to agricultural scholarships, but I wonder…

Hey wait! We didn’t say you could actually track the patients to see whether our device works. We’re going to destroy your academic career now, because we told you what to do, you knew that your job was to provide university cover for our claim that the device works, and your university needs to know that you went off half-cocked like the madman you are and actually tracked your patients to see if the device actually worked.

The University of Saskatchewan’s Daryl Fourney is in big trouble. A big powerful company is filing complaints against him with his employer, and now the New York Times has noticed. After all, a 2010 article by one Chopko totally contradicts Fourney’s findings.

In response, Dr. Fourney noted that Dr. Chopko’s positive 2010 report failed to disclose his financial ties to Vertos; Dr. Chopko, who is Vertos’s director of physician education, described the omission as a “clerical error” and said it would be rectified.

Pesky clerical error! When it comes to conflict of interest, UD, who follows the topic, can tell you that this specific little fuckup occurs with astounding frequency in the scientific literature. I’m sure it will be rectified, along with the study protocol, which will once again specify that you must under no circumstances follow up with your patients beyond the point where we tell you to stop.

Technology in the university classroom creates all these adorable cat-and-mouse games.

Which gambit? The gamut gambit?

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Update: The writer corrected the error.

So here’s UD, for the first time in her life, in a cardiology waiting room.

Because her cholesterol is up there, and because she’s une femme d’un certain age, her doctor told her to get a stress test and a something-count (starts with a c?) and other things.

So, you know, it’s ‘thesda, so everything’s nice, pleasant building, pleasant waiting room, pleasant receptionists.

UD looks around.

The other people in this room are seriously old. One of them – thin, pale, palsied – is wearing a helmet.

A helmet! Call UD delusional, call her effing nuts, but she feels certain she is way out of the way of wearing a helmet. These people have weak hearts. UD may be proved wrong in a few moments, but she is willing to swear up and down that she’s got a strong heart.

She doesn’t belong here, id est. She’s a displaced person, id est.

So here’s Dr Sanderson, rational, forbearing, good listener. In sum, a kindly WASP. He shows up after his assistant sticks stuff all over me, etc., etc., etc.

Sanderson looks at the results of all my tests and then he looks at me.

“We’re not doing a stress test on you. It would be pointless. It’s obvious that your heart is fine.”

I knew it! Good old ticker! Tarzan chest pound here! AH EE AH EE AHHHHH EE AH EE AH.

Sanderson gives her a Go and sin somewhat less sermon, with special attention to the Mediterranean Diet, and UD leaps off the examining table and gets the hell out.

… is becoming a symbol of the American propensity to work too hard. Recall what Ted Koppel said of Russert’s sudden heart attack:

“I think we need to learn something from this. You can’t work people 20 hours a day, month after month after month after month, without some kind of consequences,” Ted Koppel, the former “Nightline” anchor, said on CNN Friday night. “I don’t know what it was that was wrong with Tim. I don’t know why Tim died. But all I can say is that man worked too hard.”

Johnstone, a young lawyer who reportedly worked 80 and sometimes 100-hour weeks, was found dead a few months ago at home, in the midst of long hours of working. Autopsy results are inconclusive, but a sudden heart attack is a possibility, and plenty of observers are speculating that she worked herself to death.

… because he has stamina and guts and epitomizes this blog category: BEWARE THE B-SCHOOL BOYS. And I’ll always be able to follow his lawsuits because I don’t think they’ll ever end. Always another effort to appeal an NYU decision to deny him his MBA because while he was a student there he was found guilty of insider trading.

UD enjoys the special human interest part of Rosenthal’s story: It’s a family affair.

Assuming this is true (it appears in an opinion piece about how the University of Georgia newspaper should cover student alcohol arrests) it’s part of an intriguing trend at American party schools. As at the University of Iowa, another booze-soaked extravaganza with full cooperation from the administration, so now at the University of Georgia, you’ve got this rhetorical tweaking – a small line about drinking responsibly at the bottom of screaming ads for Saturday night specials; regular emails to teaching assistants discouraging them from telling students funny alcohol-related stories…

Every semester, as you gaze out your office window at the massive two-day cleanup after the last campus tailgate, every semester a vaguely coercive little note about how Oh by the way lose the When me and the lads got shitfaced bit… And God no Baudelaire wafts your way…

… Journalists are punning about a long-ago-stolen and now-recovered sculpture of Robert Frost.

Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)

Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.

This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:

[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.

Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”

UD has said it again and again on this blog: Go ahead and get your diploma mill degrees, but be sure not to rise too high in the world. UD has even specified how high you can rise before someone actually looks at the shit on your resume.

So. Let’s review:

Teacher, but not superintendent.

Police officer but not captain.

City council member but not mayor.

Mid-level but not chief bureaucrat.

How difficult is this to grasp? With fraudulent degrees, you’ll do fine, the two thousand dollars were well spent, but you’re going to have to spend your life under the radar. You’re not going to be able to rise. When you rise, people start paying attention.

A number of wise observers comment on the sublime and seductive FBS.

There’s some glamor. Arguably, there’s some payback. But the culture you’re inviting into your organization is problematic at best.

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[It has] the capacity to hurt a university’s hard-earned reputation in the blink of an eye.

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[M]ajor college football [is like] the credit-default swaps that wrecked the economy four years ago – risky and little understood investments that can blow up and hurt owners and innocent bystanders alike.

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FBS football is like a cancer cell implanted inside an institution – innocuous at first but growing into something destructive. Schools struggle to win initially and throw money at the team, alienating faculty whose own salaries are frozen. Gradually, the university loses control of the athletic program, and student-athletes suffer.

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“What do you think (new president) Rod Erickson is spending his time on at Penn State, any of those guys?” said John Burness, a former head of public affairs at several major universities, including Duke, where he saw a good year of work spent almost entirely dealing with the lacrosse case there.

“When you get involved in the negatives, the scandals, it’s such an enormous sinkhole of the time of the institutional leadership they almost can’t deal with anything else,” he said. “When schools start out no one is assuming there will be a problem. But there’s so much money involved in this, there are inevitably going to be problems.”