At Notre Dame, Touchdown Jesus scores the biggest touchdown of his life.
La Kid and her man Ed Fitzgerald
at University Hospital Galway not
long after her appendectomy.
She goes home today.
The flowers are from her anxious parents.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Now that the NCAA’s in deep shit, brace yourself for long strings of cliches. Even from the New York Times.
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UD thanks Dirk.
… benddownments. As in bend down (I guess bend over would convey it better) and take it. We already have $32.3 billion, but you still have to pay almost $60,000 tuition and we’re going to dun you for huge donations for the rest of your life, even though
Student tuition at places like Harvard is now almost an afterthought. It runs on a budget of about $4.2 billion a year in spending. Tuition, fees, room and board at the full price of $58,607 for its 6,700 undergraduates would amount to $393 million, or less than 10 percent. And after taking need-based tuition reductions into account, the university collects only about half that projected total from undergrads. So for $200 million a year, Harvard could be totally free to all undergraduate students.
And does it sometimes run through your mind to wonder what just a few … afterthought expenditures from the tens of billions of dollars sitting in Harvard’s funds might do for the… uh… world? Well, shush. It’s all gonna be okay. You’re gonna grow up to be a hedge fund manager with the sort of ego that needs a biz school building at Harvard with your name on it much more than you need to help some obscure village full of suffering people. People who need schools or whatever. Relax.
… NASCAR!
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PS: Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Ward excited his vehicle presumably means to say Ward exited his vehicle.
I’m not sure. I don’t speak NASCAR.
Colorado State, one of America’s more markedly delusional, testosterone-run universities, has just said goodbye to its slightly too-delusional athletic director, Jack Graham.
To be sure, everyone in charge there – trustees, high-level administrators – appears to share the whacked-out, Blanche DuBois personality I’ve isolated so often on this blog when talking about schools like University of Nevada Las Vegas (panting to build a $900 million stadium) and Colorado State. Like Blanche, they have much less money than they need to live the grand life they fantasize for themselves; but – again like Blanche – this in no way stops them from traipsing around telling everyone that they’re rich and grand.
CSU, for instance, insisted its rich gentleman callers (to allude to a different Tennessee Williams play) would give it mucho millions toward the big ol’ football stadium it was gonna build. Indeed, just the other day the soon-to-be-erstwhile CSU AD – Graham, that is – announced to a gathering that fund-raising was going swell, swell! But then right after that
CSU’s vice president for advancement Brett Anderson told the Coloradoan a day later that only $24.2 million had been raised as of June 30…
Bummer! Blanche DuCSU sits around in her gauzy duds waiting for gentleman callers to cough up $110 million… She has always depended on the kindness of strangers… And then… the pathos of no one showing up…
On the other hand, Graham is a university coach, so his exit will be a little more secure than Blanche’s:
[CSU] still [has] to pay his annual $260,000 salary in monthly installments through November 2016…
For, you know, doing nothing… Standard operating procedure, and one of many reasons why big-time sports are such a boon to the American university…
But anyway. When the Lord closes a Blanche window, he always opens a new Blanche door.
Tyler Shannon, who represents the pro-stadium group Be Bold group on the advisory committee … says donors have committed quite a bit more money to the stadium than the $24.2 million that’s already in the bank.
It’s all still hush-hush, mind you! We can’t let the information out yet! But there’s a LOT more money where that came from, believe me!!
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Local commentary sees the same DuBois pathos in play:
Please. Fort Collins is an affluent community. Just say it like it is. [CSU’s president] finally figured out that CSU completely botched selling the community on the project, and anti-stadium proponents effectively derailed the project. [CSU’s president] finally became uncomfortable, which was not unreasonable. Making music with Graham wasn’t working, and [the president] decided to save [his] reputation and let Jack go because Jack wasn’t giving up his dream.
Presumably CSU’s president has been peeing himself over the idea that the now-gone AD (a multimillionaire) was another Phil Knight (a billionaire). That Graham would, uh, ride in like a Knight in shining armor? … to put the few extra cents needed for the stadium into the piggy bank… ?
Sad, sad. Butterfly net time.
… The Hummingbird Clearwing Moth. Very wonderful. Thought it was the smallest hummingbird I’d ever seen; then thought it was some freakish humming bee… It was bzzzzing over my head as I left the house just now to do some gardening.
I’ve trained a butterfly bush into an arch at my front doorway (very clever of me, though I’m not really sure how I did it), so as you enter and exit there’s an aromatic canopy of bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and, now, it turns out, hummingbird moths.
A former president of notorious Florida A&M gives a talk in which he mentions nothing about the academic mission of the university (at least the reporter reports nothing), and in which he simply commands people to be positive about the place.
“We can’t have naysayer[s]; people who doubt and let the doubt overcome them in terms of what they are willing to do. …This year, we need to all get behind Florida A&M and don’t accept negative viewpoints about the university.”
But, you know, why? Why shouldn’t people be free to act on their ethical judgement and do what they’ve been doing since the violently hazing marching band beat one of its members to death not long ago? Why shouldn’t people stop coming to football games where the band plays, and stop giving money to the university? The university conducted itself hideously through the hazing scandal, basically blaming his death on the student himself.
And this is the aspect of the school’s culture – athletics and the marching band – that the speaker wants to make the top priority.
Florida A&M could begin to put a dent into its nagging athletic budget deficit in a short time if the Marching 100 band and the football program are given top priority, Frederick Humphries said Friday at the 220 Quarterback Club’s luncheon…
“The best indicators for black colleges; two things give the greatest visibility that they have,” he said. “It’s the athletic program and the marching band.
“If you were to put it in priority where you should spend some money; you keep your athletic program strong and keep your marching band strong.”
Yes, athletics – that’s the ticket.
At the University of Oregon, presidents come and go (“for the third time since 2009, the state needs a new president for what University of Oregon supporters insistently refer to as the state’s flagship institution”) but Phil Knight goes on and on.
… He was a man always breaking disappointedly away from a realm whose human and material compensations were not merely inadequate but somehow personally humiliating to him. Many of his great poems follow the same emotional trajectory – creeping intimacy with another human being, or with a particular geographical location, and then a quick appalled exit. His eyes lifted, in poem after poem, from the blandishments of the social world, the seductions of other people and of the simple stuff of bounded, grounded, earthly life (marriage, children, travel, money…), to “sun-comprehending… high windows,” “long french windows,” “a strong / Unhindered moon,” “arrogant eternity.”
There was always a pane of glass that compelled him, a higher clearer region from whose vantage point sublunary life was
[F]athers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres …
That arrogant eternity was in part about Larkin’s version of artistic transcendence: His poetic vocation made him literally and figuratively immaterial – both indifferent to (contemptuous of) money (money lies about the purchasability of meaning and happiness), and happy to be anonymous, “unhindered” by a world that wanted to make him poet laureate (he turned down the offer). Religious transcendence, like money, was a lie, but unlike money it was a rather pretty one, in a shabby/chic way:
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die.
And even a past-it church can impress:
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
Religion’s robe is tattered, but it’s still a robe.
His sense of his sordid life as transcended by his art served Larkin only for a few years; middle age, for him, meant the poetic grappling with the end of his poetic energy, so that the “brightness and the plain/ Far-reaching singleness” of the unhindered moon’s “wide stare” gradually became
a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young…
His inability to maintain his “arrogant” social “singleness” gradually informs him that
Only the young can be alone freely.
The time is shorter now for company,
And sitting by a lamp more often brings
Not peace, but other things.
Beyond the light stand failure and remorse…
In place of his awareness of himself as an unassailable self-sufficient aesthetic self flying by the nets of marriage and children —
Why did [Dockery] think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution.
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Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.
— he now has a mind that “blanks at the glare” given off not by the high windows of eternity but by the frank and simple fear of crashing up against death:
[I]t stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
The world more and more is a sort of menacing, automated, sepulcher:
[T]elephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
It’s the same mood evoked in Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel:
A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.
In shoeless corridors, the lights burn.
The phones ring, the lights burn, the world churns on. It has no need of us, and is for all its intricate workings uncaring. We after all are passing through – for us, it’s a rented world, a hotel world (the hotel offers “headed paper, made for writing home / (If home existed) letters of exile”) – and the world has its permanent work of worlding to do. That’s the true self-sufficiency – the world as such. The spinning top. Larkin was more than ordinarily aware of his own peripherality, his Kafkan alienation, his coming invisibility, his faint impress on a world about to white him out. He was remarkably generous with his curiosity, anxiety, and despair about his existential condition, and was even able to make this condition sing.
Athletics have been an ongoing point of contention at [the University of] Oregon. The Chronicle [of Higher Ed] notes that the faculty has long felt that the athletic spotlight has overshadowed the university’s academic mission… [Nike] money has allowed the athletic department to become financially independent from the university, which has led to questions of accountability. [Campus football] scandals only support the claim that there is none. Further, while athletics have had all the focus in the past few years, the academics have suffered.
Oregon has fallen in our ranking of America’s Top Colleges for the second time in a row (210th in 2012; 217th in 2013; and 236th in 2014).
… We wish Scott Coltrane, the university’s provost and now-interim president, the best of luck, and hope that he refocuses the school on academic success. What better time to do that than while the football team is on probation?
Your cartel days are numbered.
Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia suggests in his book “Strangers to Ourselves” that we shouldn’t see ourselves as archaeologists, minutely studying each feeling and trying to dig deep into the unconscious. We should see ourselves as literary critics, putting each incident in the perspective of a longer life story. The narrative form is a more supple way of understanding human processes, even unconscious ones, than rationalistic analysis.