This memorable quotation from Springtime for Hitler serves nicely to introduce Harvard’s latest attempt to shut up its critics. UD‘s friend Bill sends her this link to a New York Times article. Excerpts:

Harvard Medical School is backing off a new student policy that would have restricted interaction with the news media after students complained it would chill their ability to talk about current issues in medicine, school officials said Tuesday.

… Nate Favini, a Harvard medical student and chairman of the Student Council Advisory Board, said in an e-mail message Tuesday: “Instead of limiting students, we should encourage bold thinking and allow them to advocate for the reforms that our health care system so badly needs.”

[The dean of students] did not deny that the policy was prompted in part by student remarks earlier this year about the influence of pharmaceutical companies on medical education.

… David Tian and Kirsten Austad, activist medical students at Harvard, said in an e-mail message Tuesday, “It is hard to imagine that this new policy is not somehow related to the past advocacy efforts of students. The reason we spoke out against conflicts of interest was to promote patient welfare as the primary concern of medicine, in the face of institutional practices that can harm patient care.”…

Half empty, half full kind of thing… Empty people protecting Joseph Biederman’s privileges… But, on the other hand, young people full of moral ferocity…

Usually the empty people win. Maybe this time they won’t.

This two-year school near UD‘s house has long prepared not-quite-ready ‘thesdanians for transfer to a university, or given them an Associate’s degree (UD‘s older sister got a mental health-related degree from MC).

Its new president looks to be a Benjamin Ladner clone (background on the ex-president of American University here):

A $4,051 hotel bill in Delhi. A $780 tab for limousine service in Boston. And a growing tally of missed meetings and unexplained absences at home. Critics of Brian Keith Johnson — and they are many — say the Montgomery College president has spent the past two years running up outsize expenses while neglecting important job responsibilities.

… The report alleges that Johnson’s “frequent and noted absences at essential meetings and functions have diminished the visibility and jeopardized the reputation of Montgomery College.” The president leaves his office for days at a time without explanation, the report says, and has not deputized anyone to sign documents in his stead, leaving college administrators “unable to carry out the daily and necessary activities and business of the institution.”

As the college has frozen long-distance travel and scaled back on refreshments served at faculty, staff and student events, Johnson has spent thousands on hired cars and fine dining and thousands more on hotels and airplane flights. Expense records obtained by faculty through a public records request and shared with The Washington Post show Johnson charged $58,165 on his corporate credit card between July 2007 and April, including several hundred dollars on floral arrangements and $302 in a single charge to a Borders bookstore. The reports do not contain details beyond what is listed on a credit card statement.

Faculty members allege that Johnson has directed administrators not to talk to college trustees and that information is “routinely censored.” Several employees say they believe that listening devices have been planted in offices and meeting rooms, according to the report.

A banner hung near campus late last week drew attention to another potential embarrassment: a bench warrant issued last year against Johnson by an Arizona court for $12,000 in unpaid child support to a former spouse. Johnson has since paid the sum.

… Johnson failed to attend at least a dozen meetings with state and county representatives, including such politically potent events as a March news conference for the county operating budget, according to the faculty report. He told trustees that he had met with Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) at a June 3 meeting of the Maryland Association of Community Colleges; in fact, neither he nor Mikulski had attended it, according to the report…

This Washington Post article makes it sound as though the president is on his way out. As opposed to the squalid Ladner story, in which a squalid board of trustees kept throwing MORE money at the man, and then, forced to let him go, gave him a massive golden parachute, Montgomery College will probably dismiss this guy pretty quickly.

… Marketing fraud cases against pharmaceutical companies have become almost routine, with almost every major drug maker having been accused of giving kickbacks to doctors or shortchanging the Medicaid program on prices. Prosecutors said that they had become so alarmed by the growing criminality in the industry that they had begun increasing fines into the billions of dollars and would soon start charging doctors individually as well.

… [Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen] Sebelius’s decision to make the Pfizer announcement in a news conference in Washington suggests that the political environment for the pharmaceutical industry has become more treacherous…

If they start doing perp
walks out of the med
school down the street
from UD‘s office,

she’ll take pictures
and post them.

… has for some time had its own annual college rankings, with categories and methodology quite different from the US News list. That makes the magazine worth a visit; but more, much more than this is the fact that they list University Diaries on their blogroll.

Today’s my first day of teaching — Novels of Don DeLillo and The Short Story. Who knows how much blogging I’ll get done…

The New York Times Ethicist, Randy Cohen, asks whether Texas Tech was right to create a crony-mandated professorship for disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who will be teaching one course for $100,000.

Well, it’s a real brain twister, but Cohen comes up with the correct answer: No.

The only argument his defenders have is that it’s valuable for students to listen to someone who’s been there, at the heart of history, etc. Cohen responds that there’s a difference between people who happen to have been around when things were happening, and scholars able to reflect on those things:

A better way of studying Gonzales’s “direct hands-on involvement” in Washington would be for him to deliver a series of public lectures that students could subsequently analyze under the tutelage of actual scholars, who would earn in a year what Gonzales would be paid for one hypothetical hour of nostalgic palaver… Tech is paying him a lot of money to do a job for which he is unsuited. It was improper for the school to offer and indecorous for Gonzales to accept.

Jerzy Soltan, UD‘s father-in-law,
a lieutenant in the Polish cavalry.

He fought until the last battles of
October 1939.

He spent the duration of the war
a prisoner of the Germans,
in Murnau.

This piece has idiotic graphics and calls university students kids, but look past that. It lists five ways to avoid swine flu on campus.

Summary: Don’t take some sniveling miserable person to bed with you. Wash your hands compulsively, and spray anti-bacterial stuff on shared surfaces (classroom desks, cellphones if you pass them around, etc.). Avoid salad bars; don’t share food. Ixnay on the moronic drinking games. Keep your spliff to yourself (the article forgets to mention this).

And don’t touch your face!

UD thanks her friend Jeff for suggesting that she add a Share This feature to University Diaries. If you click on the Share This icon at the bottom of each post, you can easily forward the post to people, or put it on Facebook, or Tweet it, or whatever.

UD also thanks her beloved webmistress, Carolyn, for strapping the thing on for her.

It also generates such excitement and good will among alumni that they will want to make donations to the school.

These are two things we’re always told about football and basketball at our universities.

But it’s one thing to be told this. It’s another to hear about it from people who’ve been there.

Justin Sugg is a columnist for the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa newspaper.

[I had a] a phone conversation with an alumnus years ago. I was working for the UI Foundation and was trying to extract a donation. He interrupted my pitch and asked, “Is any of this going to the football program? Because I’m hanging up now if it is.” I told him no and explained all the money raised that day went directly to the students.

He wasn’t alone in his misgivings. Many people I solicited feared their hard-earned money would go toward what they believed to be an overly compensated program.

And that’s understandable, considering current football coach Kirk Ferentz is the highest-paid official working for a state-sponsored program, with an annual salary of more than $3 million…

On the other hand, Justin goes on to detail the many ways in which Iowa athletics does raise revenue, among them this one:

[W]hat I call the “drunk tax” — fines for alcohol-related violations — brought in $87,600 in 2008, according to a DI series last fall.

Yeah, the drunk tax is a good one… Iowa can look to other cities for similar sorts of taxes… solicitation tax… property destruction tax… When your municipality specializes in activities that make people act like assholes, sources of revenue enhancement abound.

… as she discovers a link to her blog — to a particularly nasty post at that — on the Facebook page of George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.

Columbian College of Arts and Sciences English Prof. Margaret Soltan’s blog weighs in on “fair market value” for doctors’ consulting fees after surgeon resigns during Congressional probe.

Etc.

I’m on an official GW university page?

UD ran back to bed and woke up Mr UD.

“Doesn’t this,” she said anxiously, “make me legitimate?”

“Don’t worry,” said Mr UD. “No.”

… and terrible youth wrote James Joyce at the very end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Today, UD only saw the exultancy — on the playing field, the college quad, the city street.

The playing field was in Poolesville, a distant suburb of Washington and site of the Chesapeake Open frisbee tournament, where, under massive white clouds and blue sky, UD listened as her friend Courtney started explaining how frisbee’s played and then suddenly raced off to the field with her team, Scandal. Courtney wore a backwards baseball cap, a powder blue team shirt, and gray shorts that said SCANDAL in big black letters.

Profane UD was in her element here, as the mild summer air rang with fuck, shit, bitches, asshole, eat me and other cheers. These were women after UD‘s heart – frolicsome foulmouths who already knew what that silly British scientist felt he needed to prove scientifically: swearing is a beautiful thing, especially in a woman. It makes the pain go away.

Later Les UDs met up with La Kid, just moved into tony new digs at George Washington University. All over campus groups of students gathered to talk about their summers and get to know one another again. UD gazed at them as they lounged in the evening light. Beautiful.

.. Courtney Wang play frisbee in the Chesapeake Open.

She plays for Scandal.

Last year, UD introduced a new category on this blog —TEA.

She’s a serious tea drinker, mainly Marco Polo, and she wanted a place on the blog to write about what the plant means to her.

She’s written a poem for this blog about tea.

There’s a new documentary film out – The Meaning of Tea – which evokes the cultures and flavors of tea. Here’s the trailer. One of the people interviewed in the film gave me my post title. He says preparing and drinking a cup of tea creates a moment of windless calm within the frenzy of life.

There’s probably some sort of cosmic convergence (UD hasn’t thought enough about it yet) between UD‘s idea of the university as a place apart, a place of repose, of thought for the sheer joy of thought, the sheer delight of putting the mind in motion without worrying much about questions of utility, and UD‘s delight in the silent musing business of the brew.

UD‘s life perhaps appears to some visitors to her blog stereotypically professorial, with its not terribly social round of reading, writing, gardening, and piano playing. And drinking tea. UD doesn’t drive; she doesn’t watch tv; she goes shopping when family members tell her that her clothes are falling apart. The sabbatical she just completed mainly involved walking along beaches, thinking, and then coming inside and typing.

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

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock must be the most famous tea poem, and here tea conveys a timid obscure maundering existence:

… Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

… Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

… And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

Prufrock’s foggy little life – the life of nightmare pedants like Casaubon in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, who substitute books for the human relationships they fear – might meet its metaphor in the measuring out of one teaspoon after another until the end of that life; but the meaning of tea, surely, is more than this, a richer mix.

Yet UD resists the opposite interpretive tendency, the counter-Prufrockian take on tea in which the drink represents not merely the secret to great health and mental acuity (one constantly reads these claims, especially about undrinkable green tea), but a vehicle of vedic bliss. Tea has meaning, but it is more elusive than this.

Details.

UD thanks Brad.

… a few riled Cornellians aren’t such a big deal.

The hot Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, fond of mid-rise buildings with holes in them, designed the CCTV Tower annex (headquarters of Chinese tv) in Beijing,

and now that it’s up, hundreds of millions of Chinese think that if you really look at the primary tower and the nearby annex, it’s obvious that together they “were meant to look like a penis, next to a bent-over woman.”

Here are a couple of

efforts to make the case.

Koolhaas has had to give an interview denying it all, etc.

Meanwhile, his design for new architecture workspace at Cornell has annoyed many faculty there, who think it’s too expensive, and insufficiently environmentally minded. A government professor writes to the campus newspaper:

This $55-60 million building project comes at a time of deep cuts to core academic programs in many other departments… It is not fancy buildings that attract people to a university. It is faculty, research funding, graduate stipends, library collections. And ideals … like a genuine commitment to sustainability… The architect Rem Koolhaas has made no secret of his contempt for sustainability… He belongs to that old fraternity of starchitects who brook no human or natural interference with their artistic ‘vision.’ So we will get an absurd set of glass boxes projecting forward and backward (because the projecting glass box is this architect’s signature), instead of a future-oriented building of the sort other Ivy universities are building, at LEED platinum standards, beautiful to look at and work in, and concordant with the movement to fight climate change.

[SOS says: Lose the contemptuous quotes around vision. You’re attacking Koolhaas for being contemptuous; you shouldn’t be contemptuous in return.]

Having looked at all sorts of images of Milstein Hall [click on the images for a slide show], UD would have to agree that it ain’t pretty. To her eye, it looks like an awkward over-sized fill-in (the task was to connect established buildings and close a gap).

UD‘s got nothing against its break from the historical context of the buildings around it. Rather, it’s the severely flat-topped, too-big feel of the thing she dislikes.

As for the overhang – UD‘s spent decades driving under (being driven under) the Kennedy Center overhang, and it’s just deadly. Dark, loud, creepy. Why do it if you don’t have to?