That’s ESPN.
The same thing’s coming to a university near you.
… that the NCAA will be looking to hire around ten thousand lawyers in the next couple of decades. Cases like these are going to be a steady source of employment.
… you get a wonderful shot of the University of Hawaii athletic director leaning comfortably back in his office chair and wearing one of those relaxed Hawaiian shirts and drawling about how firing someone you’re paying more than your state’s governor… firing that person after only a few months… and giving that person a huge buyout to go away… and giving no reason why you’re doing all of that is utterly routine, no biggie, a real yawn. Happens every day in the business world~!
Well, number one, no, it doesn’t happen every day in the business world.
Number two, the University of Hawaii is a public, taxpayer funded, institution.
And while we’re at it, number three: The AD casually mentions that there’s no scandal here because after all the position was budgeted anyway, so why be upset that UH is paying the budgeted money for no one to do anything in the position?
I mean, let me be understood here about exactly what the AD is saying. He is saying that we quickly fired the highest-paid public employee in the state of Hawaii for reasons we’re not sharing (UD‘s been at this game long enough to know that quick secretive firings like this one almost always involve the discovery of an alcohol problem, or criminal misbehavior of some sort), and we’re going to keep paying this person as if he still worked here (I mean, he will physically be here until the end of the year; he just won’t do anything), and that’s your tax money, but nothing in this picture is amiss.
… when barbarians attacked, America’s own university Don is fast-becoming martyr to the protection and dissemination of knowledge: He must now fight on two fronts.
Yeah, GW offered the same deal to English professors but we turned it down. Too showy.
… featured in a recent YouTube that went way viral, you know your school has a lot to be proud of. Dave Christensen remains the coach at the University of Wyoming because… well, you saw the video. You don’t let a man like that go. Precious. Plus, under Christensen, Wyoming “struggles finding victories against opponents with a pulse”!
With all that as background, you can understand why Wyoming’s president has just gone public with his love of Wyoming football. In a heartfelt column in the “news” section of the university’s website (UD is unsure why the president’s love letter is “news”), President Number One Fan says nothing about Coach Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You, Opposing Coach, for Beating Us and nothing about the team’s problem with pulsating opponents. What excites him instead is the way football at Wyoming inculcates a
drive to succeed, good work ethic, sense of responsibility, knowing how to win and how to lose, skill in planning, understanding the rules of a game, treating others including competitors with respect, ethical behavior toward others, knowing how to work with teammates, and so forth.
Is President Sternberg being ironic?
UD doesn’t think so.
… OSU still has Gee-like Chief Financial Officer Geoff Chatas:
While traveling to an OSU fundraising event in February 2012, Chatas flew to Florida on OSU’s private jet and stayed at the five-star Ritz-Carlton Naples, which features clay tennis courts, two golf courses, stunning views of the Gulf of Mexico, a pure white sand beach and pool-side cabanas. The bill was 1,264 for two nights.
The Plaza Athenee on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where OSU spent 2,235 to accommodate Chatas in July 2011, is a five-star luxury hotel with high-end amenities including personal yoga and pilates instructors.
Chatas was a Gee hire, after all.
The report says the investigative team planned to make public its complete findings on sexual and physical abuse but was directed by a special committee of the Yeshiva board of trustees, “as a result of the pending litigation,” to describe the findings “in summary fashion.”
This direction, as the Yeshiva student newspaper points out, “[casts] doubt on the true independence of the investigation.”
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UD decided to pay a visit to those honchos, with their impressive legal delicacy. What manner of man (they’ve recently put some token females on the board), now that it’s lost Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, sits on Yeshiva University’s board of trustees?
UD decided to choose one name on the list and find out all about him. She chose an unusual name because she wanted to be sure she was getting the right guy. She chose Zygmunt Wilf. How many Zygi Wilfs can there be out there?
Here’s the latest, as of August 5, 2013, on Zygi:
[New Jersey Judge Deanne] Wilson found that Zygmunt Wilf, along with his brother, Mark, and their cousin, Leonard, committed fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty and also violated the state’s civil racketeering statute, or RICO…. Discussing the Wilfs’ misdeeds, Wilson said they failed to meet the “barest minimum” of their responsibilities as business partners. “I do not believe I have seen one single financial statement that is true and accurate…”
Zygi got an honorary doctorate – for “philanthropic values” – from Yeshiva.
Good to know that as Yeshiva University begins the process of dealing with its faculty’s misdeeds, it will have people like Zygi at the controls.
… that the British legal establishment supports a judge’s insistence that a woman accused of a crime remove her burqa in the courtroom.
Michael Turner QC, chairman of the criminal bar association, insists Judge Murphy made the correct decision. He told Radio 4: “The public are entitled to see an individual who is entering their plea.
“If you carry it forward to the trial process and a person in a full burka intends to give evidence, is it right that the jury cannot see the person giving evidence?
“Our whole courtroom is set up so that a jury can see a witness give evidence and the reaction of that witness is very important in terms of the jury’s thinking.”
A similar principle applies in the university classroom. Professors who cannot see their students cannot teach them very well, since they have lost one important way of knowing whether students are understanding them. We rely on facial expressions – among other clues – to tell us how we’re doing.
My aunt, who loved and wrote poetry, lives, post-stroke, in Brooke Grove. UD has inherited her poetry collection – three boxes of hardbacks which UD‘s cousin delivered to Rokeby Avenue yesterday afternoon. Today – a very quiet Sunday – UD unpacked them, glancing at their spines and setting them in little piles on the dining room table.
In the background as she worked, Philippe Jaroussky sang, repeatedly, Sposa Son Disprezzata — a song UD has fallen for and is trying to learn. Can she become a brilliant countertenor by listening to Jaroussky night and day? She’s giving it the old college try.
She’s got the music (follow along here) and has spent a lot of time, this weekend, at the piano, desperately seeking the calm lyrical mastery she notices Jaroussky and, among females, Cecilia Bartoli, have hold of. In place of the sustained, emotionally intense line, the subtle and thrilling lift from piano to forte and back down to piano on raaaaaaaaaaaaanza, and the poignant catch in the voice as the plaint picks up, UD cannot help noticing that her own performance features a paint-by-numbers pedantry. Hers is a patchy stomp-through in which the singer struggles under the weight of musical signage in this after all quite easy to play piece (at least in my version).
I try to slow myself down – part of my lack of calm lyrical mastery is my anxious tendency to speed things up – but it’s not working. I remind myself to be a Buddhist about it for God’s sake, to get over myself and get in there and be in the moment and let the fucker unfold etc. But it’s like I’m a thirteen year old doing a piano recital.
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Anyway, my brain runneth over with this music, which I guess is reward enough – the swirl of its sounds as I mow the lawn… as I wake from a midday nap…
When I’d piled all the books, I went out to the deck with The Oxford Book of English Verse.
With my weary-of-life aunt in mind, I found myself reading aloud Swinburne’s Garden of Proserpine.
… I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
… There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.
And then, toward the end, there was the stanza Richard Rorty found himself repeating as he lay near death. He was, he said, “oddly cheered” by this verse, which he “had recently dredged up from memory.”
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Rorty writes that
neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.
In point, rather, and even comforting, were
those slow meanders and those stuttering embers. I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose. Not just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythm were needed to do the job. In lines such as these, all three conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.
The slowly shaped charges of the baroque aria (if you’ve read this blog for any time at all you know of my Purcell fandom) possibly have the same sort of function for UD – compressed comfort.
New York’s attorney general sued Donald Trump for $40 million Saturday, saying the real estate mogul helped run a phony “Trump University” that promised to make students rich but instead steered them into expensive and mostly useless seminars, and even failed to deliver promised apprenticeships.
Flaunting? The writer flouts all standards of good writing by flaunting his ignorance.
And doesn’t the Washington Post have editors?
People are scandalized by the obscene post-game meltdown of Indiana University’s softball coach; but UD is much more scandalized by her very public dark-night-of-the-diamond moment, in which her rock-hard faith (shared with virtually all university coaches) that God takes a personal interest in the games she coaches suddenly collapses into skepticism.
God. Doesn’t. Care??????
Violent spectacle encourages manliness, and manliness ensures a nation’s capacity to defend itself and its values in organized warfare. Max Boot, defending football in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (against those who want to shut it down or make it less violent so that players avoid brain injury), clarifies the nationally sacrificial function of the players:
[T]hough football can be a violent sport, those who watch it are, on the whole, peaceable and tolerant — especially as compared with foreign fans of soccer (“football” to the rest of the world), who make up for the relative lack of violence on the field with melees in the stands.
It’s an either/or: You either sublimate man’s intrinsic violent anarchism by allowing him regular staged access to it; or you end up with compensatory chaos. (A milder version of this argument, by Walter Russell Mead, defends university football’s firing up of male atavism as crucial to the continued survival of universities.)
It’s a delicate balance; you want a culture that makes men capable of violence; you want that capacity stoked by violent sport; but you want always to be able to control the violence. That’s why Boot stresses the comaraderie, teamwork, and discipline, at the core of football, even as he anxiously echoes Teddy Roosevelt’s worry that if you outlaw football you’ll turn out “mollycoddles instead of vigorous men.”
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What sort of person would be a mollycoddle?
Well, let’s say some guy impugns your honor. If you’re a mollycoddle, you say I’m gonna tell Mom! You say I’m gonna tell my lawyer! If you’re a vigorous man, you challenge the guy to a duel. Or if you want to be civilized and sublimate that violence, you challenge him to go public with his impugning, to go one-on-one with you in a public forum, where he can repeat his charges and you can defend yourself.
But all that football watching hasn’t made Boot himself particularly vigorous. Just as he uses a research assistant to do the grunt work on his columns, he plans to use a lawyer to do his fighting against a fellow writer who claims Boot plagiarized him:
“I will defend my hard-earned reputation with legal action if necessary if you decide to print these scurrilous and unsubstantiated allegations.”
Take that, you naughty, naughty boy!