… leftover chicken from Nando’s Peri-Peri (there was an ugly fight, last night, over the lemon & herb sauce), and I say to him:

So there’s this town near Tacoma Washington which is on a beautiful bay – Chambers Bay. Pretty name, Chambers Bay, but the town’s name is University Place.

Silence. He’s fiddling with the toaster.

What university, you might ask — you’re supposed at this point to ask — is located in University Place? [Pause. Silence.] And that’s just it. There isn’t a university. Ain’t hide nor hair of a university. When the town was established in the 1800’s the University of Puget Sound thought it might locate there, but then it didn’t and they were stuck with the name. The US Open’s being played there in 2015, and some in the town – including the mayor – think they’d be better able to benefit from all that publicity and possible tourism and all if they were Chambers Bay instead of University Place. Easier to remember, prettier…

Mr UD responds:

Barring some truly important reason, you shouldn’t change names. The absurd fact of that name’s history is part of the lore of the town. Continuity matters. And it costs money to change the names of towns.

UD responds to Mr UD:

Yeah. The reporter interviews this very anti guy, Bill Callier: “He owns University Place Radiator, Mufflers and Brakes.”

The Ute Wars continue among Republicans, with Romney repudiating the orgasmic platform of the same man whose views he embraced quite fervently during his 2008 presidential campaign.

Some, like the professor in my headline, may dismiss these views as nuts. Decide for yourself.

“This is a traumatic thing — she’s, shall we say, she’s uptight,” Dr. [John] Willke said of a woman being raped, adding, “She is frightened, tight, and so on. And sperm, if deposited in her vagina, are less likely to be able to fertilize. The tubes are spastic.”

My plastic spastastic lover!

So that was a couple of years ago at Tennessee State, and as is customary with schools that graduate not much over ten percent of their students in four years, the place since then has sort of kept limping along, barely getting re-accredited in time for more incompetence.

Now the school has devolved into farce, with the head of the faculty senate led away in handcuffs from a meeting about allegations (apparently now disproved) that the administration went into the computer system and changed (improved) student grades. The meeting was also about the results of a faculty survey having to do with whether to dismiss the head of the senate.

But the details are unimportant. These are the sorts of deeply humiliating events which occur in dropout factories.

Oh my. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is going to have to do a much better job of talking about its latest national scandal if it wants to avoid a significantly worse outcome than its preceding scandals.

Here, for instance, in my headline, you have the athletic director candidly pointing out that his athletes, many of whom were admitted to Chapel Hill academically unprepared for it, get to have full-time jobs plus academic work. How do you think that’s going to work out? How ready are you to believe everyone’s protestation of shock – the president is shocked; the faculty is shocked; everyone is shocked – that an entire department (and probably others – wait for that development) corrupted itself on their behalf?

And given that outrageous corruption, isn’t it striking that, as the university newspaper puts it, the department chair behind it all was “asked to retire”?

Asked to retire? Oh Julius sorry to bother you but now that you’ve destroyed us as a serious university (“Every single UNC degree will now be questioned and doubted by potential employers and other universities throughout the nation.” “Every degree earned here is less valuable now than it was a year ago.”) could you please retire? Here’s a spectacular buyout to help you along…

No, UD doesn’t know anything about a buyout. But shouldn’t she? Shouldn’t we all know the conditions under which this man, who along with his assistant (what were her retirement details?), helped destroy the academic reputation of Chapel Hill (as a sports factory with a bit of academic legitimacy, Chapel Hill was already well on its way toward a national joke; after all, Chapel Hill spawned the AFAM department under Julius Nyang’oro), was asked to retire?

Of course if they were paid big bucks to go away, we know, more or less, where that money came from. Big-time sports at Chapel Hill generate so much cash. Can’t have your football players jeopardizing that money by taking classes. You didn’t admit them to educate them.

… from the Yale Corporation.

… practicing the withdrawal method.

Once again a commenter on an article captures the essence of a situation. Central Michigan’s lousy football team drives people away.

Students stay away, and they don’t even pay for tickets. So the problem is the desolation of the empty stadium.

Like a lot of other universities with this problem, CMU is now trying to solve it by dousing the students with drink. There used to be a limit on how much you could put away, but now —

For the upcoming fall tailgating season, the university released a new policy that changed some of those former guidelines, including the limit on alcoholic beverages per person and mandating students stay in a specific lot.

Students can now reel from tailgate to tailgate, and they can drink all they want.

CMU is spinning this desperate strategem as a great advance in safety … or something… UD‘s having a little trouble understanding the athletic director’s statement about it.

“If you look at this policy compared to the previous policy, there are no significant changes, but there are a series of very very important changes,” Deputy Director of Athletics Derek van der Merwe told Central Michigan Life. “Every aspect is stressing responsible behavior and defining acceptable behavior. We want responsibility, and that’s left to the individuals.”

A couple of hours ago, four women
and two men gathered around the
curb at the corner of Argyle and
Rokeby to watch this molting
cicada (click on the picture
for a good image).

It vibrated back and forth
and around and around while
shedding its shell. We
watched its legs come out
and tap at the curb.

We watched its enormous
eyes watch us. While we
watched, we talked about
real estate.

After lunch with her
sister (Morrissey fanatic;
molting cicada photographer),
UD returned to
the curb. The cicada was gone.

Senior clerics in Iran’s theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates.

… is titled Suiting Up for the New Academic Year.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare [said Rep. Todd Akin, Republican nominee for Senate]. … If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

The raped escape
The rape if it’s a rape!
I think she’s got it…
The raped escape
The rape if it’s a rape!
I think she’s got it…

So if the rape’s legit …
That’s just it!
That’s just it!
You shut the naughty bits!
No shit!
No shit!

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

“There are ways of telling if she’s been legitimately raped!“

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

[M]y view is that insensitive comments concerning rape are especially likely to be deemed inexcusable by voters, and that the swing against Mr. Akin could be larger than the average of 10 percentage points from similar events.

The New York Times’ Nate Silver gives UD hope that a man this stupid will not defile the United States Senate.

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Strategic Uterine Defense Initiative.

Plus, they make the best potatoes.

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A British historian of science returns to medieval times to help the British understand the mind of one of America’s candidates for the Senate.

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Missouri: The Show Me Your Uterus State.

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Republicans Going After the Ute Vote

… gives you a sense of what it must have been like to sit in your communal apartment in Leningrad in 1956 and read about the anticipated glorious fulfillment of the Soviet Union’s Sixth Five-Year Plan.

ASU Regents Chairman Rick Brezhnev assures a reporter that “To think of sports as something that isn’t an integral part of the university is inappropriate… Sports is part of the life experience we want people to have.” And so comrades we must all sacrifice! To do otherwise would be inappropriate!

At ASU we subsidize pathetic teams no one wants to watch with the people’s tuition. We take millions of the people’s dollars to hire fine upstanding coaches like Todd Graham and to buy out the contracts of all the coaches currently living in the Gulag.

Since 2005, ASU’s total spending on athletics has grown by 44 percent, to $57 million, yet its performances in football and men’s basketball — the only two sports that made money — have been lackluster. ASU’s ticket revenue spiked in fiscal 2008, then began sliding and plunged in 2011. ASU has struggled to raise money from donors.

But it’s about the future! The future is bright! We will fulfill – and more than fulfill – the athletic department’s five year plan with honor!

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

Update: UD originally got the new coach wrong. She thanks Doug, a reader, for the correction.

Stanford’s got a bit of a problem on its hands. It’s the sort of problem you get when you’re an exceedingly entrepreneurial university and you’ve got your hands and your professors’ hands in a lot of businesses.

Remember the problem they had with Alan Schatzberg’s investments and Alan Schatzberg’s research? It just doesn’t look good for empirical analysis when you stand to make gazillions on its outcome… So Stanford spends half its time tweaking its conflict of interest rules…

And another thing. Take NU Skin, an outfit that, among other things, sells face-whitening cream to women in the Philippines who want to look white, and an outfit with which Stanford’s had a long relationship (meaning NU Skin gives Stanford big money to do anti-aging research). NU Skin’s in serious trouble with the FDA for this and that — the usual stuff, questionable marketing tactics, questionable claims… And Stanford’s name’s being dragged into it… NU Skin’s scientific claims for its products rest on its association with Stanford researchers, and NU Skin talks up that association in its advertising.

So, seeing the shit about to hit the fan, Stanford has done a cease and desist letter

asking the company to stop using a university researcher’s name in its advertising, adding new scrutiny to the skin product maker’s business claims and practices.

According to a copy of the letter emailed to Reuters, Stanford geneticist Stuart Kim is listed as a “Nu Skin Partner” in developing its ageLOC anti-aging products, though he has nothing to do with the company. Nu Skin touts its skin creams and pills as using innovative technology to “reset” genes that promote a more youthful look and feel for its clients, according to its website.

“Neither Dr. Kim nor Stanford is a ‘Nu Skin Partner’ and neither has anything to do with the company,” states the letter, signed by Steven Rosen from Stanford’s Office of the General Counsel.

Which isn’t true, I’m afraid. Kim did do research with NU Skin money (he doesn’t anymore), and while that doesn’t make him what you’d call a “partner,” I guess, it certainly doesn’t rise to nothing to do with the company. To make matters even less factual, Stanford indeed continues its long association with NU Skin via the work of other faculty researchers.

As this guy, an outraged NU Skin investor (its stock value has withered like a ninety year old kneecap) points out, Stanford had to issue another letter directly contradicting this one and admitting that the school has plenty of NU Skin in the game:

Not only does the university cite their longstanding relationship with the company, they essentially apologize for creating any misunderstanding that a relationship did not exist.

It is rather bad form to take millions and millions of dollars from someone, and then when that person has a run-in with the law to disown him. But these are the dilemmas inherent in the entrepreneurial university business model.

[A University of Southampton student] was bewildered when she… flicked through [a university] publication [with her photo in it] and discovered her arms and legs had been covered up using computer software to make the image less revealing.

[The change was] made in deference to conservative cultural sensitivities of prospective students from abroad.

International pupils are a lucrative market for universities, particularly as the number of UK applicants has declined following the recent increase in top-up fees.

The institutions have an added incentive to recruit pupils from abroad as they pay 50 per cent more in fees than those from the UK.

It’s interesting to watch the various evolving photographic technologies here. The choice seems to be between

Erasure (as in Hillary Clinton’s removal from the famous Osama raid photo); and its opposite,

Sheeting (as in draping various amounts of material over pictures of women).

Of course the real solution is right in front of our noses, and it’s practiced by men all over the world.  Never let them out of the house.

Yesterday afternoon, I rested a pair of scissors on top of one of my split rail fence posts while I was mulching. When I reached for it later, my hand fell on a cicada shell.

The screaming coming off the trees for the last week, I now realized, was late-summer cicadas.

I looked for a cicada poem, and here it is.

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

Cicada

I want to tell him what it is to crave darkness,
to want to crawl headfirst into a dirt-warm womb
to sleep, to wait seventeen years,
to emerge again.

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

These are the seventeen-year ones, not this summer’s smaller emergence, and the poet uses their long underground life and the way, once they emerge, their wail can sound like a warning siren, to make a point about human life.

He begins with his memory of a younger brother who, having gestated for seventeen years, suddenly left home forever with a bang.

The “warning wail of insects” tells us that “repudiation is fast like a whirlwind.”

Meaning?

Meaning it’s pretty easy and exciting to ditch it all and with the fervor and disdain of youth do your own fine full life. When you’re that young you don’t see that “all you live is leaving.” Life is something we have to leave, and most of life – whether we dramatically repudiate or undramatically persist in it – is departure of one sort or another, the loss of this, the erosion of that.

Our experience of the passage of time deepens our tendency to be borne back ceaselessly into the past, since adult life moves toward deterioration and makes our youth seem an icon of wholeness.

The brother’s repudiation is therefore both “arrant” and “orphic” – extreme (plus, given the closeness of “errant,” in error), and mysterious, unaccountable.

Even obviously future-oriented thoughts – provoked, say, by looking at your pregnant wife – are “still so much like trying to find something / once lost.” Pregnant to bursting with his own future, the brother has broken through the door into – illusion, dissolution (things falls apart), the immutable truth of all lives. The drone of the cicada tolls this immutability: that we slow down, undone as much by the pull of mortality as by the impulse to disbelieve it.

So listen to the cicada; consider its incredibly patient rhythms, its relationship to darkness and light; hear it tell our fast fragile passage through existence. Seeing as “we are all so helpless,” adopt pity rather than disdain. Pity for everyone, including yourself.

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

The poem reminds me of Philip Larkin’s Poetry of Departures.

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

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

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

UD thanks John Blair for permission to reprint the poem, which appears in The Green Girls (LSU Press, 2003). His most recent book of poems is The Occasions of Paradise.