In his five-plus years at [the University of] Florida, [Urban] Meyer has had players tasered while trying to flee police, arrested for being passed out drunk at a traffic light, stolen a laptop and then thrown it out the window when police arrived, fired an AK-47 into the air, stolen the credit card of a teammate’s girlfriend after she died and used it 70 times.

And that’s just a handful of the 30 times his players have been arrested or faced charges.

It’s a real out-there metaphor, but hell. Kentucky.

… Harvard Yard.

… brain dead. She now officially declares the University of New Mexico brain dead.

Cerebral function slowed badly beginning in 2007, with the hiring of President Dave Schmidly; it deteriorated further a year later, with football coach Mike Locksley.

Surviving on-campus synapses were beaten to a pulp by Mistress Jade.

No, said Mr UD. “Not irony. You leave the world in the place that meant most to you…”

UD quoted the statement in my title about irony to Mr UD as he ate breakfast.

It’s from a blog written by someone who knew Nora Miller, a Wesleyan student who a few days ago immolated herself on the university running field. Miller was a massively award-winning track star, first at Stanford, and then at Wesleyan, where she majored in film.

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Like many suicides among the intense and intensely promising, this one was as expressive as it was enigmatic. It meant, it meant, it meant. It meant like hell. But what did it mean?

A student writes in the Wesleyan campus paper:

Self-immolation is not a quiet act of suicide; it is clearly an intentional statement. I understand that the University had to respect the parent’s wishes to keep details about Nora and her death private, but when a suicide occurs in such a public way on campus property, it is the student body’s right to be able to mourn [publicly] and to be given time to process and think about what has happened.

It bothers this writer that Wesleyan hasn’t said and done more about the event; she suggests that a day be set aside for campus reflection. In this, she registers the staggering impact of the gesture. More should be made of it…

[A] status update on a Facebook account under Miller’s name read, “when there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire,” a lyric from a track by the band Stars.

Which made UD think of Cocteau’s famous answer.

Someone once asked Jean Cocteau, “Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?”

Cocteau considered, then said, “I would take the fire.”

There’s the swift intensity of life; there’s life burnt out.

I encountered the Cocteau story in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a novel about our subterranean fires.

Matt Yglesias detects the specific stink of the Martin Peretz situation. He begins by quoting Harvard’s defense of its celebration of Peretz (background here):

“We are ultimately stronger as a university when we maintain our commitment to the most basic freedoms that enable the robust exchange of ideas,” the statement said.

Yglesias comments:

It’s really too bad that Harvard has chosen to take this tack. Obviously the only person in this conversation who’s questioned anybody’s right to “free speech” or exhibited a weak “commitment to the most basic freedoms” is Peretz himself. Equally obviously, Peretz’s right to be a bigot does not create a right to be honored by prestigious universities. My alma mater is doing a disservice to their brand and to public understanding of the issues by deliberately obscuring things in this manner.

It would be more honest to say that Harvard is a business run for the benefit of its faculty and administrators. The business model of this business is the exchange of prestige in exchange for money. Peretz has friends who have money that they are willing to exchange for some prestige, and Harvard intends to take the money. It is what it is.

As an alum, I’d like to pretend to believe that I find this particular transaction outrageous, but it merely goes to illustrate a point I’ve made before. If you’re a person of some means who wants to make a charitable donation to make the world a better place you have a lot of options available to you. And one of the very worst things you could do with that money is give it to a fancy university. If you’ve specifically decided that you want to make a charitable donation to a provider of education services in the United States, you should find one that has a good track record of serving poor students. There are plenty of charter schools and colleges that fit the bill, but none of them are famous fancy schools with multi-billion dollar endowments.

[T]he reason Peretz’s friends are giving money [to Harvard in his name is that Peretz] has a deservedly bad reputation in many quarters, and in exchange for money Harvard University is willing to try to raise his reputation.

K-STATE MISTAKENLY CITED
AS ONE OF THE 25 BEST
LARGE PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES
IN COUNTRY

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

Thanks, Dave.

But… talk about LIVING! Dr. David Feinberg himself is soaring, baby. And it takes a lot money to keep his mojo working. You don’t keep the money coming, fuck you.

… [A]t a time of … difficult financial decisions, the [UCLA] regents … [have] antagonized some critics by boosting the annual compensation of UCLA’s top hospital executive by $410,000, to about $1.3 million.

… Feinberg, UCLA’s hospital system chief executive officer, will receive a $210,000 bonus. But in a more divisive matter, UCLA officials also received the regents’ approval to give Feinberg an extra raise of about $410,000, boosting his total compensation to more than $1.3 million.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said Feinberg was doing an excellent job and was being wooed by other employers. “Keeping this team together is essential,” he said.

It’s not like Feinberg’s a doctor or anything, who feels a moral commitment to what he’s doing here. If we don’t keep not only giving this guy raises, but giving him extra raises, he’ll… he’ll leave us!

And then what’ll we do? We … we couldn’t go on without Feinberg! The team has to be kept together. And what a great team member Feinberg is, with his willingness to sacrifice for the good of the university…

Yes, it’s essential that this great team player be kept on. Essential. I’m the chancellor, and I’ve just said that to the newspapers.

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So Feinberg knows what he has to do next pay cycle. $500,000 more in bonuses, plus I’ll take an extra raise of … of… $500,000!

Okay! Anything you say.

Look, it’s OK to fork over hundreds, even thousands of dollars for those season tickets and prime tailgate spots; it’s OK to fly the alma mater’s flag from your front porch on game days; it’s OK to wear the colors, to Hail the Victors, to Script Ohio, and to shake down the thunder and cheer, cheer for old leprechauns.

Be proud and hope for the best. But always remember one thing. College athletics are a cesspool.

Dave Hackenberg, Toledo Blade

Surviving a gunshot wound to the stomach.

As with the students of Mark Hauser, so with Suchitra Holgersson’s students: You can’t train them in empirical methods and then expect them to look the other way when you fudge things.

… Holgersson, who joined the [Sahgrenska] Academy [in Sweden] two years ago, [has been found] guilty of severe science fraud in several cases where she has fabricated data … and distorted results, and also in that she has forged documents in attempts to mislead the expert [review] panel itself during the investigation.

Professor Holgersson’s own PhD students blew the whistle on her.

Holgersson studies transplantation and immunity.

In 1972, Mr UD, a graduating senior at Harvard, went to a party Martin Peretz threw for Social Studies concentrators. (Peretz was acting chair of Social Studies while Michael Walzer was on leave.)

“I remember having one conversation with Marty. I don’t remember what we talked about. What I remember is that a group of us got together at one point and cautioned each other not to try putting ketchup on our burgers anywhere near the Rembrandt.”

UD‘s only encounter with Peretz happened a few years ago, at the Harvard Club. Peretz gave a talk at the annual ACTA meeting there, and instead of the short polemical thing about the betrayal of the humanities UD expected, it was a rambling, self-indulgent, insider’s attack on various Harvard faculty members.

He seemed to me precisely the sort of person outsiders assume populate places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton – a clueless insular snob.

The reality is that very few people at these schools are like this. But Peretz seems to be.

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Peretz is currently in trouble for some remarkably ill-timed remarks, in The New Republic, about Muslims:

Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. …I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

“Privileges?” Mr UD said, reading this. “Marty thinks they’re privileges?”

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

The timing thing involves these statements (Peretz has apologized for the First Amendment remark) coinciding with the announcement of a high-profile We love and honor Marty Peretz event at Harvard. Harvard has issued a We’re distressed of course but free speech thing; but Mr UD points out that you can honor free speech and withdraw your institutional association with an event at the same time…

Anyway. Having seen Peretz in action, UD can’t be surprised that this is his response to the situation.

Reached by phone, Peretz offered the following response to [critical] comments before hanging up: ‘The notion that after teaching 45 years at Harvard and people giving money in my honor that I have to defend myself – please.’

First note the simple illogic of this. People love me! They give money in my name! Plus I taught at Harvard for decades! Clearly I don’t have to defend myself when I dehumanize swathes of humanity.

And then notice his clueless indifference to the whole thing, the way his remark and his hanging up the phone conveys the very worst of this or any country’s smug elites.

As Jack Shafer writes, “The current furor will have no effect on Peretz, whose pride, wealth, and self-image as the big boss has made him deaf to his detractors.”

I’m sure he’s right. But Harvard’s still free to take a stand.

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

UPDATE: People on the Social Studies Committee at Harvard have sent out a petition opposing the Peretz celebration, as well as the research fund being set up in his name.

One Social Studies concentrator points out that celebrating a person whose views on Muslims are largely indistinguishable from those of Glenn Beck isn’t very seemly.

Without Division I athletics, Northern Iowa’s not on the cover of the Sports Illustrated. Without Division I athletics, the Panthers aren’t whisked to Los Angeles and handed an ESPY award.

… where UD was born (her father was a Hopkins post-doc at the time) has always sat in a dangerous neighborhood.

In a breaking story, a doctor there has been shot, with the shooter still in the hospital.

No word yet on the condition of the doctor.

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

More details. Doctor is in critical condition, and the gunman is holed up in a locked room on the eighth floor. He apparently has a hostage who may be a relative of his.

A nurse who said she was on the floor at the time of the shooting said that the shooter was upset about the medical treatment of his mother. He was threatening to jump out of a window, she said.

“I started running,” she said. “When you hear gunshots you run.”

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My friend Courtney, the rock climber and competitive frisbee player, works at Hopkins, and Gchats me the following:

they’ve caught the guy

looks like that won’t be happening

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UD is grateful to Courtney.

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

Update: Earlier reports about the shooter were wrong. He hasn’t been caught. Courtney writes:

police scanner is discussing “ongoing unresolved tactical situation”

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

Another update: I’m told (this is unconfirmed) that the doctor is out of surgery and in stable condition.

—————————————————-

Police have shot and killed the gunman.

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Correction: The gunman killed his mother and then himself.

… New York’s St. John’s University is certainly giving the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and the University of Miami, a run for their money.

First there was this sadsack, who came to his court hearing in a bright red sweatshirt with ST JOHN’S UNIVERSITY emblazoned on it in huge letters, in case anyone was wondering what university molded him into an embezzler. He got the Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award in 2008.

Now there’s a former dean, on trial for embezzling (am I the only person who loves the word embezzle?) a million dollars via expense account chicanery (chicanery’s good too — sounds like the name of a spice).

The final paragraph of the New York Times article about her could only have been written in America.

… Ms. Chang’s home … has seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, a gym, a sauna and a Jacuzzi tub. Ken Winslow, 74, a next-door neighbor, said that other than the Mercedes-Benz Ms. Chang drove, she did not appear to live ostentatiously.