One day in the near future, [Andrew] Zimbalist says everyone will wake up and realize what is obvious: There is an excess of college football on TV, a surfeit of networks to show it and even more obscure networks launching.
The market could become oversaturated and the multitude of games would attract smaller, niche audiences that won’t command as much in advertising dollars. Rights fees would either plateau or peak and fall.
“College athletics would have to adjust to that reality,” Zimbalist said.
They would have to scale back, not to pre-’84 levels, a drastic and likely impossible turn away from commercialism.
… is here. (Registration required.)
I now have over a thousand students.
The lecture is about T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Virginia” —
Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still. Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.
The wildly controversial prostate-specific antigen test (PSA) continues to be the subject of studies and debates. Does it help prevent prostate cancer, or is its use actually destructive, subjecting people to unnecessary surgeries? Results and opinions vary too widely, at the moment, to conclude anything with certainty.
Yet the expression of opinions about it would seem fundamental to medical school professors involved in the issue, and you’d think a respectable school like the University of California Davis would encourage its faculty to be part of the debate.
Yet Davis, already dealing with one med school fiasco, now has another, because a dean there got so angry at a professor’s published disapproval of PSA that he told him
he would be punished in two ways. First, he would lose his position in the doctoring program [a special training program he’d put together], and second, he would lose the funding support for a Hungarian student exchange program that he organized.
Why so angry?
Well, money’s involved. The doctor decided to write an anti-PSA opinion piece when he realized that a seminar at Davis was “primarily a sales pitch about the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, and that its main message was that men should get tested regularly beginning at age 40.” University seminars aren’t supposed to be homes for hucksters, especially when what they’re selling might hurt people. I mean, of course it happens, as in this case at the University of Toronto; but it’s not supposed to happen. Not to mention that professors have a right to say what they like without deans and university lawyers making threats against them, as they did in this case.
They’re keeping med schools open, but that’s pretty much it. The entire sector is state-funded (the state wants to open things up to privatization, but the unions say no), so I guess the state can go ahead and kill it. Behind this astonishing event lie months of strikes by professors and students, and behind those strikes of course lie years of complex civil unrest.
Sri Lanka had better be careful. Enough of this and its people will begin to resemble the citizenry of Nevada.
Stanford’s Henry H. Jones. A life outrageously well-lived.
Okay, so that’s one North Carolina taxpayer unhappy to be subsidizing a diploma mill.
We’ll keep count here at University Diaries.
… at the Empire State Building. A developing story.
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Chicago.
… to discern the figure in the carpet. …It was invaluable training,” said Ryan Crocker in a recent interview at his college,” in how to think about complex foreign societies.”
But that Henry James short story, which Crocker “analyzed for my senior oral,” concludes with no figure found, its enigma intact.
We interpret stories; we tell stories. We chase down meanings and patterns and plots all our life -in some sense, this is our life – but we never solve the mystery, discern the figure. Tzvetan Todorov puts our rather brutally simple situation this way: “Narrative equals life, absence of narrative, death.”
Crocker’s storied, harrowing diplomatic career has ended, and, as some sort of result, he seems to have fallen apart, having been arrested for DUI and hit and run. Although named as dean of Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, he has not been much in that role. He left to take an ambassadorship, and, for next year, he’ll be a teaching fellow at Yale.
The life Crocker lived for decades pitched him forward from one byzantine, bloody narrative to another – an existence nightmarish, but engrossing and heroic. Now there’s the business of being an ordinary man with nightmares.
Remember this handy phrase when allegations of ghostwriting swirl around high-profile medical school professors, politicians, and pundits. As a rule, the more prominent and celebrated and busy you are, the more likely some of your writing’s being done by other people.
That’s the allegation here, against Fareed Zakaria, who is already dealing with having plagiarized another writer.
… and looks like this little tyke has blown it.
Five handguns, brass knuckles, and a pocketknife.
He’s seventeen years old. Just getting started.
Yes, Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes that this sentence is triply redundant (unpredictable, predict, in advance), but it comes from a reasonably thoughtful consideration of suicide. I like the way the guy – a psychiatry professor – says he does understand suicide, even though the meme, the thing, the trope, the conceit, is that suicide’s all enigmatic.
Because it is at its essence a perceptual disorder, [depression] causes one to see the entire world as pain. It feels painful inside, but it also feels painful outside.
When a person is depressed, the entire world is disturbed and distressed, so there is nowhere to escape. And it is this fact that makes suicide so seductive, because it seems to offer the one available escape option.
(Go here for an elaboration on this from David Foster Wallace.)
This writer goes on to say that “the means for committing suicide should be removed from the environment.” He’s talking about the home. We can’t do much about a world brimming with suicide locations.
And yet even as we speak Cornell and NYU, who’ve had suicide clusters, are both futzing with their environment in just this way. Cornell is netting its bridges, and NYU is digitally shielding its high-atrium library.
Heads up, North Dakota! They’re trying to hide him, but he’s right in your neighborhood.
The Board had not been aware until Friday that Potti lost a job earlier this year in South Carolina, according to Houdek. But the Board did look at Potti’s public reprimands from state medical boards in North Carolina and Missouri, as well as the Duke scandal.
When states are desperate for doctors, they’ll take anyone.
It’s true Potti has settled about a dozen malpractice lawsuits from patients, Houdek said…
Background.
This account from a new biography of Paterno is so icky in so many ways. Paterno tells Penn State’s castrated-by-coaches president he’s not retiring, and he makes clear what the Best Party School lists make clear year after year: At Penn State, it’s all about playgrounds.
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From another review of the same book:
[E]ven leaving the scandal aside, the coach comes across as a self-mythologizing monster, consumed by his legacy of winning on the football field.
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UD thanks David for the second link.