… in the New York Times. Across the page from Brooks, Paul Krugman takes up the same theme: Without a willingness to behave in a few non-self-serving ways, citizens of capitalist economies are going to bring their affluent democratic cultures crashing down around them. Krugman notes that between 1979 and 2005

the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. … In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

The claim that “the rich have a right to keep their money… misses the point that all of us live in and benefit from being part of a larger society. … [The wealthy presumably] have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future…”

(Krugman alludes to this Elizabeth Warren video.)

As to whether the wealthy feel as though they’ve got much stake in the nation’s future… Well, read Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites… or The End of Equality by Mickey Kaus. It’s definitely not a slam dunk. Here’s Lasch:

To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.

… have columns facing one another and playing off one another nicely. The Social Contract, headlines Krugman; The Amateur Ideal, headlines Brooks. Both writers want to say that in some realms of life capitalism’s competitive market ethos should be suspended; that, underlying all of the purely financial contracting among us, a social contract impels us to act in self-sacrificing ways for the good of the polity.

David Brooks regards the university as one of the most social contracty places in America, and well he might. Universities are non-profits, enjoying immense tax and other advantages, because the state defines them as privileged locations of social good. Unlike the justly detested for-profit schools, universities aren’t in it to make a buck. They’re dedicated to educating people. Brooks even thinks they have a moral mission:

As many universities have lost confidence in their ability to instill character, the moral mission of the university has withered.

UD understands how religious schools might perceive themselves as having explicitly moral missions (Catholic Seton Hall, for example, despite having had to blast more imprisoned alumni names off of buildings than any other school in America, and having hired one of the foulest coaches known to humankind, presumably sees itself in this way.) but she does not believe the non-religious university has – or should have – a moral mission. See Clifford Orwin for a nice expression of her views.

Brooks says what he says about withering because he, like everyone else, sees the amoral hypercapitalist joke amateur university sports (basketball and football, that is) has become. He laments, in a pointless way, the withering of the character-rich amateur university sports tradition. Couldn’t we bring that back? Its “lingering vestiges”? Even in the face of billion dollar tv contracts?

Lingering vestiges. Aren’t they kind of like whispering hope? Durn pretty language. But really.

How is Brooks going to gather up and preserve the lingering vestiges? Reverse the ten-year, billion-dollar contracts? Has Brooks noticed what the most popular major in America is? It’s business. Brooks doesn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the American student:

College basketball is more thrilling than pro basketball because the game is still animated by amateur passion, not coldly calculating professional interests.

No – it’s thrilling because it’s played by essentially professional players who are really good. And listen: Who spouts moral mission language at the university? It really isn’t faculty, or even administration. It’s precisely the clever sports programs. Go there – to your six-million-dollar coaches and money-under-the-table boosters – for all of the moral mission, character-building language you can stomach. UD‘s been there – at a host of university sports conferences – and she’s heard it all. If Brooks wants to play right into the hands of Nick Saban he can go on gassing about moral character. Nick’s right there with you. He’s been there waiting for you.

Until we can pivot our eyes back to what universities are – intellectual institutions – we’re going to stay all misty-eyed as Nick Saban and Jim Calhoun (Coach sets an example, you know! Here’s one of Calhoun’s hero recruits. Really made good. Lectures British civil servants! All because of the early example set by the richest public employee in the state of Connecticut!) lecture us on how universities are places that make us better men.

I’ll write about Krugman in a moment.

… and so are his university buddies.

… by reason of insanity is that her students reported she’d taught a class in her usual fashion – reading from the book, mainly, but nothing out of the ordinary – just before she opened fire on her colleagues.

(Click on the category of this post – Amy Bishop – for background.)

… making big strides and getting big attention.

Next up: US of A.

Just where do the pesky buggers go?

Well, whether it’s OSU, or any seriously sporty American university, it’s about lawsuits. (Can you imagine how many University of Miami tuition dollars are going to lawyers and public relations people and penalties and all?) The stinkier the program, the higher the cost of covering the stinkiness, or, when the smell escapes, trying to pay your way out of the malodor-closet.

Ever since Brother Tressel had his cover blown, OSU has been spending mightily along these lines. Among their many outlays: Dealing with an ESPN public records lawsuit.

ESPN stated in the lawsuit that producers at the sporting news network had made several public records requests for all emails sent or received by President E. Gordon Gee, athletic director Gene Smith, compliance officer Doug Archie and former head coach Jim Tressel, that included the keyword “Sarniak.”

Ted Sarniak is a businessman in Jeanette, Pa., closely associated with former OSU quarterback Terrelle Pryor.

… In addition to documents containing the word “Sarniak,” ESPN also requested several documents without success. ESPN said some of their requests were wrongfully denied for being overly broad.

And OSU said… and then ESPN said… For every “said,” add ten thousand or so dollars.

Sell the college programs to the leagues with which they already do business. Sell college football to the NFL and the television networks for $25 billion and a cut of all future revenues. Same with basketball and the NBA. Let the leagues oversee player development and safety and training. Pay players in the same manner as minor league baseball players. As a condition of service, all players get an irrevocable academic scholarship to be applied whenever and wherever they choose, toward any degree from an AA to an MD.

Two liberal arts types at NYU live blog a Stern (NYU’s business school) class.

Results? Amusing.

“Tailgates are the core of this school in the fall.”

… just-released report about the real slave class in big time university athletics. These are the professors and academic tutors who devote themselves to play-acting the student part of the student-athlete. Shadowy simulacra sacrificing themselves for the good of the team, mentors/assistants/helpers (they go by many names) often do more than write papers and attend classes for the guys. One of them at the University of North Carolina paid thousands of dollars in parking tickets for a player.

Despite the large, one-time payment being made by credit card just one day before UNC attempted to [interview the tutor about academic fraud], University officials say they did not know about the [player’s] parking tickets until November 2010.

“The University learned this information during a separate review of parking citations received by football student athletes in response to media requests for records under the North Carolina Public Records Act,” the response states.

Those records, for which The Daily Tar Heel [the UNC student paper] and other media outlets sued, showed UNC football players racked up 395 tickets totaling more than $13,000 in a three-and-a-half year span.

One of the additional monitoring measures UNC has now imposed is a biweekly report of student-athlete parking citations from UNC’s Department of Public Safety.

LOL. The Biweekly Student-Athlete Parking Citations Report. This is going to crowd out the biweekly student-athlete police citations report.

Plus, in response to rampant cheating via tutors, here’s what UNC’s going to do:

… UNC has abandoned the academic mentor program, imposed additional constraints to student athletes and their tutors or learning assistants, increased the budget to hire and retain tutors and to expand rules education for tutors, among other corrective actions.

That academic mentor program sounded so good… academic… good… mentor… good… But now they have to trash it! What are they going to put in its place? What are they going to call it? Academic Enactor Program? Meanwhile they’re going to “expand rules education for tutors.”

What about rules education for professors, like this guy?

The author of the much-discussed long Atlantic article about paying college athletes sends a comment to University Diaries:

Big universities are addicted to sports money, but not because it helps the academic budget. Nearly all athletic departments have such enormous expenses that they run deficits, not surpluses, covered partly by involuntary student fees. I quoted unversity presidents saying forthrightly that sports are an unsustainable obsession at the expense of academics.

We are the only country in the world that hosts big-time sports in higher education. You seek to divorce sports from academics to preserve the latter. The two may well be incompatible, but we have not yet even begun an honest debate on that question because the NCAA has reform efforts mesmerized by phony issues of amateurism.

UD thanks Branch for the comment. She agrees that in important ways her railing against big time sports is a kind of throat-clearing for the real argument that can only ensue when things get de-mesmerized.

Who knows . . . maybe we’ll even succeed in impressing Margaret Soltan.

… the University of Oklahoma.

[T]he OU board approved a raise for football coach Bob Stoops before it got around to giving the school president authority to break its commitment to the Big 12. Stoops had been trying to get by on only $4.9 million a year in Norman.

Three women respond to a benighted article in the Guardian about the burqa.

… MacArthur recipient, writes a hell of a poem. Look at her elaborate rhyme scheme here. Quite something.

Sublunary

Mid-sentence, we remembered the eclipse,
Arguing home through our scant patch of park
Still warm with barrel wine, when none too soon
We checked the hour by glancing at the moon,
Unphased at first by that old ruined marble
Looming like a monument over the hill,
So brimmed with light it seemed about to spill,

In the penumbra of a tree. At last
We rose and strolled at a reflective pace
Past the taverna crammed with light and smoke
And people drinking, laughing at a joke,
Unaware that anything had passed
Outside in the night where we delayed
Sheltering in the shadow we had made.

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

Source: Poetry (June 2008).
Reprinted here.

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

So… it’s a narrative, describing a couple walking home from a dinner out (they had wine; maybe they’re a little tipsy), under the moon … The poem’s title, the word sublunary, refers to anything that occurs on earth, beneath the moon … anything earth-bound, really, as opposed to heavenly. In John Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, the speaker rather disdainfully refers to “dull sublunary lovers” whose love isn’t true love because it lacks the transcendent quality of the speaker’s. So to be sublunary is not only to be resident on the earth; it can also imply that you are a little dull, grubby, material, stuck in the thinginess of things … incapable of reaching the heights of passion and clarity.

And indeed this couple, arguing, hot with wine, unprettily earthbound in a scant patch of park, feels sublunary enough.

They suddenly remember there’s a lunar eclipse tonight, and they look up at the moon, which is so far as “unphased” as they.

The poet means unfazed – undisturbed, calm – but she packs the phases of the moon into the word unfazed and comes up with this remarkable neologism. The moon hasn’t eclipsed; and the couple hasn’t changed from its sublunary dullness.

In the eventual darkening of the moon the couple sees their own darkness, their daily confused sublunary struggle (we are here as on a darkling plain, as another moony poem has it). Their disturbance at this sudden perception is mirrored in the disturbance the eclipse generates in the world around them: dogs bark, confused and disbelieving birds and crickets complain. The world is out of sorts; in the absence of the moon there’s not even the understanding of oneself as sublunary, not even the stability derived from a sense of one’s place in the universe.

And then the moon was gone, and in its place,
A dim red planet hung just out of reach,
As real as a bitter orange or ripened peach

In the penumbra of a tree.

The cold hard clarity of the moon – shedding at least some light on our lives, and offering at least an icon of transcendence toward which to aspire – now gives way to the bitter reality of our hopeless and confused embroilment on the earth, our

old chaos of the sun,
Or … old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free…

Ah love! Let us be true to one another! says Arnold, and so says Stallings; the oblivious world of the taverna misses this eclipse of all light, but, having ourselves seen it, we of course cling to one another:

we delayed
Sheltering in the shadow we had made.

It’s like the end of another poem set in Greece – James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak. At the end of his walk, the speaker finds himself ready for a “tavern in the shade,” a place to shelter from the too-harsh sunlight and moonlight of an untranscendent world.

The only thing that can “eclipse” the pain of our all-too-humanness is love ((Reaching for each other’s fingertips)); the only true sheltering shade from this harshness is the shade we create for ourselves, together.

And that tour de force of a rhyme scheme, with its sly unexpected recurrences – eclipse only eventually finding fingertips, marble, long-since forgotten by the reader, returning as warble? It conveys both our continued (modest) mastery of a world we might be tempted to give up on as an object of understanding; and in its snaky sneaky gorgeousness it helps accustom us, in any case, to the penumbra.