Not long ago, UD almost witnessed a Being Dead incident. She was in her office, typing away at the blog, when a massive something struck the glass doors leading to her deck.

Of course she knew what it was, and she approached the deck grimly. A bird. A bird had flown into her windows.

But this was two birds, two red bellied woodpeckers, and together they’d slammed into the glass and fallen, inches away from one another, under the deck table. (Here’s the table a couple of weeks ago, with my woods’ enormous mushrooms on it.)

So now UD had the questionable privilege of examining beautiful woodpeckers very close up.

They weren’t dead. They lay still, eyes wide, chests aflutter, heads occasionally turning.

In shock. Dying, or trying to recover? They seemed to look right at me, and I thought: “Ugh. Bad enough to be traumatized as you’ve been; now you get to witness inches away the monster whose slightest shadow you fly from.”

I stood there for awhile, staying inside my house, staring at the paralyzed birds, and I thought more thoughts.

If they die, Mr UD will have to dispose of them. I won’t do it.

If they die, I should get the really flashy one stuffed. How difficult is it to get someone to stuff a bird for you? And then… what? You put it on the wall?

I left them there and went back to work. I checked on them every few minutes. Quiet, panting, waiting together for death or recovery.

And then, minutes ago, I wandered over to the windows and they were gone. They’d made it. Flown off.

Manure Central.

… the latest Presidential psychoanalysis, UD reminds you that her own George Washington University houses one of the form’s pioneers. Here’s a LaRouche interview with him.

… is a George Washington University senior who has not seen fit to take any of UD‘s classes. Probably it’s because his aesthetic preferences (Favorite film: Scarface) are a bit fast for UD.

She will pay homage to him anyway here, since he’s a smart guy, a remarkable athlete, and has an unusual personal story.

(UD, as you know if you read her with any regularity, likes to feature students at her university – and at other schools – who seem to her intriguing.)

The Georgetown men’s tennis team hosted the annual Georgetown Classic exhibition tournament this weekend…

GWU senior Yan Levinski emerged as the singles champion, defeating Penn junior Phil Law, 6-2, 6-1 in the title match. Levinski, who defeated Georgetown junior Michael Clarke, 6-0, 6-2 in the semis, did not lose a set in the tournament.

Levinski was born in Ukraine; his father, who went to Australia for graduate school and stayed there, is an engineer in the defense industry.

An Australian tennis page gives us more information about Levinski:

Yan was inspired to play tennis after watching Yevgeny Kafelnikov compete at the Kooyong Classic in Melbourne. He was eight at the time and later admired Marat Safin, because ‘he is really unpredictable and the chicks love him’. A stand-out competitor in Melbourne’s top state grade pennant competition, where in 2006 he represented Kooyong, Yan came to the attention of the wider tennis community at Australian Open 2006, where he reached the round of 16 at the Australian Open juniors… At primary school, he was a grand master at chess and lists among his hobbies driving fast cars… ‘I play tennis like it’s a chess game,’ he says. Yan loves the feel of new balls, new grip and fresh strings. ‘Brand new socks are phenomenal.’

Oh, and by the way. 4.0 GPA, Fall and Spring 2009.

Last week it was the Psych department chair’s triple negative.

This week it’s a dean’s … Well. Couple of things.

She’s responding to a reporter’s question about the man who committed suicide a few days ago on the steps of Memorial Church on Harvard’s quad.

“It’s really sad, it was horrible, and these kinds of incidents affect all of us really negatively,” Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds said in an interview yesterday. “This campus is situated in an urban context, and we can’t control these kinds of things.”

You tell me why there are Little Icks within Little Icks in these statements.

Hawaii’s athletics department had been trying to rely on the $23 million a year it generated from ticket sales, donations, television and marketing, plus an additional $10 million in direct and indirect support from the university. But by this summer, the department had accumulated about $10 million in debt and was adding to that at a rate of $1.5 million to $2 million a year. Over the objections of undergraduate and graduate student organizations, the state board of regents voted in July to impose an athletics fee for the first time.

An article in USA Today features Hawaii, and lots of other universities, soaking their students with athletics fees.

Lots of universities don’t disclose the fees. Why disclose them? You know that if you do, students are likely to vote against raising them. Just sneak them into unitemized tuition bills.

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At the rate they’re going, Hawaii will accumulate $20 million in athletic debt in not too long a time. Students will to have to take care of that.

… completely bann[ed] the use of mobile computing or communication devices in his classrooms, barring extenuating circumstances.

Indeed McGill may be on the way to an institution-wide ban.

The professor cites “multiple studies linking evidence of the use of such devices in the classroom to poor academic performance, greater distraction for users and fellow students, and decreased ability to ‘digest and synthesize’ main points.”

… this week’s elitist whipping boys. I’ve been whipping them. Pretty much everyone’s been whipping them.

There are a few more things to say about Henderson and Peretz, things specific to their membership in university communities. Start with this, from an Atlantic magazine blogger.

I would not have this vast population of people [ – the world’s Muslims – ] presented as smiling egalitarians, characterized by an affinity for peace, love and tickle-fights. I would them presented as problems, brutal and caring, as whole quartiles of humanity tend to be. Bearing that in mind, [Peretz’s] statement “Muslim life is cheap” must be seen not simply as bigoted, but as shockingly stupid. Indeed the precise kind of stupid that hallowed academia exists to disabuse us of.

It’s a simple point, but easily forgotten amid the bigotry of the Peretz remarks. Harvard is the world’s leading university, and, I think, rightly so. When high-profile teachers there go on record, over a long period of time, with gross generalizations, emotional intemperance, and small-minded, in-group, self-regard, they degrade the institution’s intellectual integrity. Worse, they play into the perception that different rules apply to elites, that elites can get away with bad behavior.

On Henderson: Jacob Davies, at Obsidian Wings, has a concise and sensible set of remarks, among them, these responses to Henderson’s fiscal and psychological problems:

Massive debt loads can make you poor whatever your income, and once they’re run up, you don’t get any enjoyment from them. Judging yourself by the standards of wealthy people is a good way to make yourself very unhappy (as is hanging out with wealthy people, often, as many of them didn’t get wealthy by being nice). And you cannot possibly keep up if you try.

I feel bad for the professor for much the same reason I feel bad for anyone who has made a series of bad decisions – that they may have found impossible to avoid making at the time – that have put them in a situation where they are both unhappy and unable to escape the consequences of their actions. I don’t know what advice to offer. But I don’t think avoiding a 4% hike in marginal rates is going to solve his problems.

I’ll add something else, from my perspective as a writer about universities.

Henderson seems a pretty fierce libertarian, complaining, in much of what he has written in response to this dust-up, about the overriding badness of government, and the way it can’t be trusted to do any good with the taxes we give it.

For the sake of moral consistency, Henderson should consider working for private industry. The University of Chicago can give him his enormous salary in part because taxpayers like you and me underwrite non-profit universities. Maybe this is the one and only use of government funds of which Henderson wholly approves; yet I think he owes it to us to explain how he’s able to square being the beneficiary of subsidies with the rest of his social positions.

… his name was among those scheduled to speak at a Harvard event celebrating its Social Studies degree. Now the Harvard Crimson reports that Marty Peretz’s name has been removed from that list. (Background here.)

[A Social Studies] standing committee will report its conclusions today about [accepting an undergraduate research fund in Peretz’s name] in an official statement to Social Studies concentrators and the national press.

The smart and gracious thing for Peretz to do at this point would be to suggest that the research fund be renamed Undergraduate Research Fund in Social Studies. He already has another fund in his name at Harvard. This way, he spares the institution embarrassment.

UD, an NU grad, is quite familiar with the library where, last May, a student was found dead.

The investigation into his cause of death took ages, which seems to me already strange, since it’s not all that difficult or time-consuming to find opioids in people.

When the NU student reporter asked the medical office for details, she was told that “More details [are] not available because the doctor who worked on Tsay’s case is no longer employed there.”

Huh? Does the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office throw out all of a doctor’s files when the doctor leaves?

The report said that the student died of an “accidental opiate overdose.” How do they know it was accidental?

… Zappa gets his statue in the city of UD‘s birth, Baltimore.

UD will try to make a pilgrimage next weekend.

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Update: Extended remarks from Professor Mondo.

The President’s threats to increase the taxes of Americans who make more than $250,000 a year have exposed the ugly underbelly of the shame of a nation: Law professors.

Already, under pressure of budget cuts at the University of California, law professors have gone public with their working conditions ($200,000 to $300,000 a year, tenure, light teaching loads) and argued that the best way to save money would be to lay off, as Kristin Luker points out, “anyone but professors.”

Now, the proposed tax increase has brought more suffering out of the shadows. A University of Chicago law professor with a household income of $400,000 has sketched so powerful a portrait of what John Edwards called The Two Americas that his testimony has been picked up by the New York Times’ Paul Krugman. Krugman quotes from a post about this professor written by Brad DeLong.

[Todd Henderson] knows of one person with 20 times his income. He knows who the really rich are, and they have ten times his income: They have not $450,000 a year. They have $4.5 million a year. And, to him, they are in a different world.

And so he is sad. He and his wife deserve to be successful. And he knows people who are successful. But he is not one of them–widening income inequality over the past generation has excluded him from the rich who truly have money.

Is this America? I’ve searched my library for any account of degradation in this country comparable to what we’re beginning to glimpse in these testimonials. I had to go to Italy — to Danilo Dolci’s 1959 Report from Palermo — to remind myself what Henderson and his family must be undergoing.

I read Krugman’s account of Henderson’s situation to Mr UD. He shook his head. “He’s fallen so low,” he finally said, “he thinks 4.5 million is rich…”

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In a dark and drear room on the quad
Sits a man quite abandoned by God:
“We make half a million
But not a gazillion.
Dear Lord, can you hear me? It’s Todd.”

… are readers from Wesleyan University, opening University Diaries in hopes of finding further information about — maybe even finding a sort of explanation for — a student’s suicide by self-immolation on their campus this week.

At about this time two years ago — Halloween night, actually — a University of Rochester student went to the cemetery next to campus and immolated himself.

In April 2000, an MIT student burned herself to death in her dorm room.

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The cruelty to which you subject your body in this method is only one of its shocking features. There’s also the will to leave in a public or semi-public setting your charred corpse.

The reality is that we’re shocked senseless by self-immolation, especially when, as in these cases, it has no political or spiritual motive.

Without those motives we’re forced back on sheer vindictive rage — against oneself, against the world.

Madness, we say. Lunacy. Yet if we truly believed that, we wouldn’t keep circling the fire.

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University students are young, intense, in their physical prime. Their methods of suicide often reflect, bizarrely, their vigor. They race off of the Empire State Building. They leap over campus bridges. There’s a twisted vigor to self-immolation as well.

“When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire,” were the words, from a Stars song, the Wesleyan student left on her Facebook as a final message.

Which is strange. If you listen to the song, that sentence seems to be about hyper-vitality, about fiercely illuminating the world with your passion, and when you’ve accomplished that, making your very being a beacon of life. The lyrics affirm a person’s survival of dashed passions; when the speaker encounters an old girlfriend, it’s nothing to him, because he’s put it away. Still impassioned, he moves forward into more life, unencumbered by the past.

You were what I wanted
I gave what I gave
I’m not sorry I met you
I’m not sorry it’s over

The song’s form — an insistent, dissonant, waltz — conveys the brittle nature of sexual passion even as it affirms its reliable recurrence. Broaden the idea out to life itself, and once more there’s the insistence on burning brightly without fear of scorching.

This scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin
Tried to reach deep but you couldn’t get in

Nora Miller took the lines literally. For her, having used up her life force, she could do nothing but direct what force was left against herself.

************************************

Maybe. We can’t, as Donald Justice writes in his poem For the Suicides, know.

At the end of your shadow
There sat another, waiting,
Whose back was always to us.

What we can know, and what I think can help us think about and respond to suicides, is the other side of all of this — the particular incandescence of the not-at-all suicidal lives most of us live. Suicide wounds because it throws in our faces, forces a confrontation with, the foundation of our willingness to live. The question Why did they do it? can’t really be answered; but the question Why don’t we? can. It can be answered, and it should be posed.

As it is posed, again and again and again, in so much of the poetry that we love. Often poets simply want to convey what it feels like to exist, what we adore about the world, how the world comes at us and how we come at it, the mystery of our lives and the electrifying delight we take in them even as we understand almost nothing about the world and human existence.

That’s where I would go in the face of a suicide like this one, that shatters my sense of what life is — to the best poems about what life is. Because if Henry James is right that “Life is, in fact, a battle… [T]he world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it,” then suicide should have us girding our loins.

Take a poem like James Schuyler’s ridiculously long Hymn to Life. It takes him over a half hour to read it! And what is it… It’s a tumbling riot of observation and feeling and meditation… The poem itself, in its luxuriance, is life overflowing, the poet bursting with things to say to us and to himself about … about everything. The seasons, love, God, cities, animals, illness…

… The truth is
That all these household tasks and daily work—up the street two men
Install an air conditioner—are beautiful.
… The days slide by and we feel we must
Stamp an impression on them. It is quite other. They stamp us, both
Time and season so that looking back there are wide unpeopled avenues
Blue-gray with cars on them…
Not
To know: what have these years of living and being lived taught us?
… Attune yourself to what is happening
Now, the little wet things, like washing up the lunch dishes. Bubbles
Rise, rinse and it is done. Let the dishes air dry, the way
You let your hair after a shampoo. All evaporates, water, time, the
Happy moment and—harder to believe—the unhappy. Time on a bus,
That passes, and the night with its burthen and gift of dreams.
… Life, it seems, explains nothing about itself.
… You
Suddenly sense: you don’t know what. An exhilaration that revives
Old views and surges of energy or the pure pleasure of
Simply looking.
… Art is as mysterious as nature, as life, of which it is
A flower.
… You see death shadowed out in another’s life. The threat
Is always there, even in balmy April sunshine. So what
If it is hard to believe in? Stopping in the city while the light
Is red, to think that all who stop with you too must stop…
… Life, I do not understand…

On and on it goes like that, a mind in motion, taking in existence, teaching itself to accept enigma, wondering why the person attached to this mind is so beautifully fitted to the world…

So. UD says: Burned by negation, turn back, full-hearted, to the world.

A vice-chancellor at an Australian university tries to come to grips with the remarkable variability of that country’s universities on international rankings over the last few years.

Emory University cardiology professor Bobby Khan already has lots of money, but he couldn’t pass up this opportunity to make tons more:

… Khan acquired material nonpublic information regarding the acquisition of Sciele Pharma, Inc. (“Sciele”) by Japanese pharmaceutical company Shionogi & Co., Ltd. (“Shionogi”) from a long time business associate and friend, who was then an officer of Sciele. Following his receipt of this information, Khan opened an online brokerage account, his first since 2003. Khan then transferred approximately one-third of his then-liquid net worth into that account and purchased a combined total of 4,000 shares of Sciele stock, days before Shionogi’s public announcement of its tender offer for Sciele shares on Labor Day, September 1, 2008. Following the tender offer announcement, Khan sold all of his Sciele shares in October 2008, realizing substantial profits and returns in less than two months.

The SEC has charged him with insider trading.