… (title: On the Statistical Analysis of Dirty Pictures), has died.

… Although [Julian] Besag was a leading figure in a notoriously complex field, he was himself highly averse to all forms of pomposity…

… Besag was a passionate man who was demanding of both colleagues and himself. He was a keen hockey player, devoted to Northop Hall hockey club, and once trialled for the Welsh national team. After moving to Seattle he loved to sail, voyaging single-handed through Puget Sound and beyond, even after kidney failure required him to undertake a punishing regime of self-dialysis…

It’s Washington’s first really sunny, cool, non-humid day, and I get out at Farragut North rather than Foggy Bottom to take a walk under the blue sky and the white clouds.

It’s noon, so everyone’s out; but downtown Washington, a clean, bland stretch of ‘sixties midrises, never pulses with excitement. Like most capital cities, it’s pleasant.

On the corner of 18th and Connecticut, two men waiting with me for the light chatter about

SurEEEna. That Serena Williams! Man.

Farther along, two women, one old, one young, walk arm in arm. As I pass, the younger says

And I’m lucky I have you.

A pair of businessmen, 19th and L:

They say it takes a week, but…

Let’s walk on the shady side.

Okay. They say it takes a week…

I’m on campus now, and everyone’s beautiful, young, and hoisting a backpack. A male student says into a cell phone:

I shouldn’t be making you suffer. I should be making her suffer.

Busts and statues of George Washington looking wise follow me about.

My mind is calm: La Kid called this morning to report all’s well in Galway, where she’s spending her junior year abroad.

Have you, I asked her, discovered the Galway Cupcakery? No, she said, and seemed to convey with her voice that this was an odd question for her mother to ask. It’s just that I remember how much you liked Georgetown Cupcake, I said. With my voice I conveyed that only a very good mother would remember this bit of trivia, and locate an Irish cupcakery for her child.

Not only is the president who helped steer the University of Kentucky into the ground about to retire, but, as reported here, a loud, contrarian faculty member is about to take a seat on the board of trustees.

And not only that, but the big tall Turkish guy UK was counting on coming to campus for a semester and playing basketball for them (no one reporting this story even pretends he’ll be a student, or that he’ll stay for more than three months) might not be able to make it.

One of us does the numbers.

… is what professors at the University of Kentucky call the entire academic side of their university.

If you’ve read University Diaries for any time at all, you know UD has long argued that only prodigious bourbon intake can explain the way the school is run.

Now, UK goes from the valley to the Peek — Joe Peek, UK professor of finance and newly-elected faculty member on the university’s absurd board of trustees.

Peek talks all kinds of amazing shit. Here’s some of it:

At the June Board of Trustees meeting, the budget that was approved included another $6 million for Coldstream [Research Park]. …My understanding is that Coldstream was supposed to be profitable long ago, and UK has already invested over $11 million in it. …I have heard, but do not know for sure, that an evaluation of Coldstream is on the agenda. Why would UK give Coldstream more money and only afterwards evaluate it?

Is UK really number 129 [on the US News and World Report ranking]? … Facts [like this one] don’t cease to exist because UK administrators choose to ignore them. … We are supposed to be Kentucky’s flagship university; it is about time we start acting like it.

Readers’ comments on the article are also intriguing:

[UK] has been held captive by basketball for as I long as I can remember (5+ decades).

UK [:] excellence in pharmacy and basketball…

Lets work together to end UKs idiotic sports obsession…

UD‘s ex-student, current
friend, was climbing rocks at

New River Gorge, West
Virginia, while UD, this
last weekend, was at Deep
Creek Lake, Maryland.

Courtney was at Guapo’s to
cheer UD on, you may
recall, on Bloomsday, when
UD did some molto dramatic
Ulysses readings.

UD‘s medical school colleagues labor over their scientific papers.

With a little help from their friends.

It’s win-win for the professors. Don’t lift a finger. Get hundreds of publication credits.

Oh. Except for:

“How many other drugs have been promoted in the same way, but you never find out about them because nobody’s suffered heart attacks?” [Leemon McHenry, a medical ethicist at California State University in Northridge] says. “Nobody finds out about this at all until there’s been some major damage and the lawsuits get filed.”

But he’s talking about the little people.

And really, if it weren’t for their doctors prescribing dangerous drugs to the little people based on ghostwritten papers, how would we find out the drugs are dangerous? That’s how science works.

… to the departing athletics director at the University of Kansas.

… [T]he university … has been disgraced by the recent ticket scandal and the ongoing investigations by the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

… [Lew Perkins’] personal manner was arrogant with little concern, interest or appreciation for the long and generous support and help given [by alumni] on behalf of the university.

… [F]aculty members and alumni became upset at the millions upon millions spent on athletics facilities when university officials were being asked to trim expenditures for academic purposes and cutbacks in faculty and support staff. Consider the huge debt Perkins is leaving for someone else to pay.

… Perkins’ receiv[ed] more than $4 million for one-year’s service, clearly the highest salary paid to any athletic director at any U.S. university…

There’s more. Read the editorial. And then ponder the fact that Lew Perkins is the very model of a modern major athletics director.

… from a New York City high-rise.

Background on Janet Hamburg here.

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

Update, Kansan.com: “A detective with the New York City Police Department said Hamburg jumped from the 19th floor of a building on East 57th St.“

… that the whole Marla Ahlgrimm thing (background here) is nothing, don’t mean a thing, fuck off.

Sandy Wilcox, president of the UW Foundation confirmed Ahlgrimm is currently serving on the UW Foundation’s Board of Directors, and said whether she maintains her seat is up to the rest of the board.

Wilcox said the board does not meet in the near future, and only the board members have influence in her status on the board.

Ahlgrimm’s arrest is a separate issue, not relating to her involvement on the board, Wilcox said.

“Her arrest has nothing to do with what she’s done in the past and the fact of the matter is she hasn’t been convicted of anything,” he said.

There’s everything wrong with this response. Let us count the ways.

1.) Whether she stays on the board is not exclusively up to the board. If she’s convicted of running a pill mill (extremely likely), and the board, for whatever reason, cleaveth to her nonetheless, the university will certainly step in and rip her muy embarrassing name off of this page.

2.) The arrest has everything to do with her involvement on the board. If I were a potential donor to the university, and the first name I saw on the list of 2010-2011 board members was a drug pusher, I’d say Hm. Should I give my money to UW, or should I give it to my coke dealer? … Coke dealer.

3.) Her arrest has everything to do with what she’s done in the past. What she’s done in the past is sit on a university board with extremely serious fiscal and ethical responsibilities, while at the same time apparently pack illegal, expensive, and dangerous drugs for delivery to people all over the world.

4.) No, she hasn’t been convicted of anything. But if the University of Wisconsin Foundation’s only basis for dismissing a member of the board jailed for something this serious is the absence of a conviction, it’s got a big problem.

An article in the Guardian about “strong calls for a proper memorial to [Sylvia Plath’s] life and work” prompts UD to consider just why she’s such a fine poet.

Readers tend to think of the spiky violent famous poems (Daddy, Lady Lazarus), but for UD it’s mainly about small moody works which are able, like many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, to make the natural world somehow broadcast the poet’s inner extremity.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

The unsettling unclarity of this poem — the sense that the perceptual sense of the speaker is strangely and movingly messed up — signals a spiritual condition of urgent existential threat. A depressive person gradually loses her sense of the physical world around her in these few lines, and the final lines of the poem confirm that as the perceptual world dissolves, an entire world of death supercedes it.

Plath’s ability to establish this imperiled mood quickly, and sustain it through mere sequences of sketchy images, goes to the very heart of what makes lyrical poetry great: condensation, image, and the intense evocation through condensation and image of a particular state of consciousness.

The poem’s title is a painting’s title, naming what the artist will (we assume) describe — here, the way white sheep on a foggy hillside merge with the fog and become a sort of nothingness. The larger point of course will be the way in which the poet’s entire world is losing sharpness, definition, meaning, legibility.

She starts with personification:

The hills step off into whiteness.

Not merely the sheep step off, white into white, but rather the hills themselves, along with the entire natural world, undergo a white-out.

People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

This strikingly perceptual poem includes not merely the poet’s perceived world, but the poet perceived by the world; and since in her affectless state the distinction human/natural doesn’t really apply, she feels herself equally surveyed by stars and people. Or is it that she can’t tell the difference? Between the face of a star and the face of a person? Between a white sheep and a white hillside? In any case, in a reflection of her self-hatred, her despair reads all apprehensions of her as disappointed.

A brilliant and packed objective correlative here, the train carrying, as it were, the weight of her self- and world-annihilating misery. Her own final breath is anticipated in the trace of breath the train leaves behind; her mental and physical lassitude expresses itself in the poetic O slow; her sense of her rusted-out life appears in the color of the train – the train compared to a horse, with, again, a weird melding of the natural and the human-made… And note how carefully she’s worked the repeated O sounds in this stanza: O, slow, colour, hooves, dolorous. It amounts to a lament: O, O, O, O. Color and dolor make a rhyme, part of the odd incantatory feel of this lyric.

From white to black here – from the sheep, and the steam, and the foggy hills, all white, to the immediate reality of her inner experience: the blackness of sorrow. The world moves O slowly; but her depressed day moves swiftly, blackening by the hour as a flower left out will quickly blacken. Her repetition of morning, in the context of blackness, hints at mourning.

Her frantic mind moves her toward death; she feels herself as a physical being already dead: her bones hold a stillness. Her feelings, though, are most acute: From her infinitely pulled-back perspective, the far fields, the fields dissolving into obscurity and meaninglessness as she withdraws from life, break her heart, for they are the avatars of her oncoming reduction to nothingness.

See how she returns to stars at the end of the poem; liberated into death, the poet no longer suffers the disappointed face of stars (notice also all of the near-rhymes here, which deepen the poem’s mystical, chanting feel: threaten/heaven, star/dark, father/water, a feel conveyed throughout in any case merely by the radical shortness of each line). Her paradoxical heaven looks like hell – it’s pure death, after all, dark and starless. But heaven nonetheless, because it removes her from an agonizingly inchoate and uncomprehending world.

… is discovering yourself on blogrolls all over the world. University Diaries has been listed as a favorite blog on quite a few sites lately, and she wants to share those sites with you. Which she will do later this afternoon. UD teaches today, and is busy preparing classes.

Another year with Mike for the University of New Mexico.

Background on Mike Locksley, $750,000 a year UNM football coach, here.

Can’t win a game, but sure as hell can throw a punch.

And, you know, there’s losing and there’s losing. Mike does it with panache. First game of the season, Oregon 72, Lobos nada.

Dave Schmidly’s still president too!

… luxury whipping boy.

From The Economist:

… Why don’t some [American] universities compete by hiring teaching superstars? And why don’t others slash prices? The big problem is that high-status institutions such as universities tend to compete with each other on academic reputation (which is enhanced by star professors) and bling (luxurious dormitories and fancy sports stadiums) rather than value for money. This starts at the top: Yale would never dream of competing with Harvard on price. But it also extends to second-division universities: George Washington University has made itself fashionable by charging students more and spending lavishly on its facilities.

Similar idea expanded upon here.

UD thanks James.

…how universities are getting caught up in pill mills, she didn’t expect the first such story to happen so soon.

Marla Ahlgrimm, a high-profile University of Wisconsin board member (the board in question is UW’s fundraising arm, the University of Wisconsin Foundation), has been arrested for running a pill mill.

Ahlgrimm’s the leading edge. You should expect more revelations about universities housing, and giving legitimacy to, pill mill proprietors.

Why?

Because now that police are shuttering the cheesy little pain palace storefronts you see people lined up in front of in your cities, and indeed now that many cities are passing anti pill mill laws, some pushers will seek refuge and respectability inside universities.

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

“Incredibly personalized medicine.” Ahlgrimm is interviewed.