The wins get taken away, so where are you? One after another cheater university gets its wins taken away, so what does that make all the effort to play and win the games?

As with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which will almost certainly vacate yet more victories once its slow-moving academic scandal picks up steam, it makes the effort either a sick pathetic joke, or it makes it performance art.

UD thinks it’s more healthy to think of it as performance art, à la Dada. Our football program is shit and then we die. Let’s do the rhumba around a Paterno statue and then blow it up. Let’s turn our victory banners into burqas and wrap them around our labrador retrievers.

Far better to adopt the absurd, says UD, than wallow in the bathos all the boys are in at the moment. The boys need to evolve. They need to see the possibilities.

Take this guy, with his anguished questions, his incredulity, his Blanche Dubois Ah see the world ah wanna see thing:

We tend to believe what we want, and since my sister graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and loved the school so much that she still lives nearby, I didn’t want to believe this school — her school — could be so shameful.

Impeccable reasoning, wouldn’t think of criticizing this way of understanding the world, but it takes him to this grim panicky place:

[This might be] the ugliest academic scandal in NCAA history.

UD would ask him to calm down and recall what the great landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll once said:

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.

Go toward the ugliness; bring to it the same pep and pageantry you used to bring to game day, and you will find that laughter and fellowship will not be far behind.

The hope amongst the Carolina blue is that this thing is isolated and no matter what, it doesn’t involve the mens basketball program. My gut tells me the men who have led this program, the great Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge and Roy Williams would never take part in anything like this, that they are men of honor and the basketball program will remain clean forever. It is my personal belief that, that is true and whatever ends up coming out when everything is out in the open, it will remain true.

You see that he says the North Carolina Chapel Hill basketball program, not football. Football is obviously utterly dirty… Yet it being in the nature of fandom to cling to one’s magic blanket even as it tatters before your eyes, the writer professes his faith in the spotlessness of at least basketball. At least that, for God’s sake. You wouldn’t take that away.

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Meanwhile – the infinite bounty of sport! – the professional organization that represents literature professors may soon be headed by someone who teaches at an unaccredited university.

No university wants a first paragraph like this in its newspaper.

Yale Trustee Fareed Zakaria ’86 was suspended by Time Magazine and CNN today after plagiarizing parts of his Aug. 20 Time column on gun control.

He’s a Yale graduate. A Yale trustee. An important voice on behalf of the very controversial Yale Singapore campus. He’s out there. And although he’s one of the most privileged people on earth, he wouldn’t break enough of a sweat to do his own writing. The image that comes to mind is Marie Antoinette.

… locking down the campus.

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Two dead.

Researchers at UNC are exploring the question of how a football player’s transcript got reverse engineered in such a way as to appear plastered all over the national press.

The details of the transcript, particularly the fact that [Julius] Peppers took three independent study courses in the now scandal-ridden [African and Afro-American Studies] department, raise troubling questions amidst the unraveling of one of the most damaging scandals in the University’s history.

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If the transcript does, in fact, belong to Peppers, it digs the university deeper into an already damaging scandal. An internal review of the African Studies Department found that the majority of the aberrant courses were administered beginning in 2007, but this development would mean that the trouble began much earlier. It would also add to the growing speculation that athletes have been specifically pointed toward African Studies classes by counselors assigned to the athletic department.

And speaking of counselors:

Peppers’s agent, Carl Carey was also his academic adviser while at UNC and helped him get a re-test on a failing grade that would have ruled him academically ineligible.

Impressed? Impressed that Carey has worn two hats – agent and counselor? Well, hold on to your hat, because that number is three: Carey also taught at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill!

[AF/AM department chair Julius] Nyang’oro reportedly hired Carl Carey Jr. to teach a course this summer without telling Karen Gil, dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, that Carey is a sports agent.

Wow.

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(UD thanks Dave.)

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Oh – apparently there’s a bidding war for Julius Nyang’oro going on between Auburn and Clemson.

“My veins run with cheese, bratwurst, and a little Spotted Cow and some Miller,” Ryan said to cheers from the crowd.

… says Malcolm Lowry’s autobiographical narrator in his story, The Forest Path to the Spring, and he’s right; but useful only if a writer can narrate the man’s experience well.

You know UD as a mad lover of Lowry’s despairing novel, Under the Volcano. She admires just as much the totally different Forest Path, an extended meditation on happiness.

Like Lowry during the 1940’s, the narrator is an artist who lives as a squatter in a shack on the water in Dollarton, Canada. He writes a strange story, with no real plot beyond a spiritual one which traces, through his general love of nature and his particular daily ritual of carrying a water canister through the forest to a spring, his recognition of the character of happiness.

A long story like this one, with little event, has to carry you along on the strength of its mood and language, and Lowry’s open-hearted, earth-besotted prose accomplishes this from the outset. (Another great example of this sort of story is Katherine Anne Porter’s Holiday.) We are accompanying a man whose mood is happy, first, because the woman he loves is with him and loves the water and forest and sky as much as he does. And he’s also happy because, engrossed in natural life, he suspends his customary anxious self-consciousness.

His awareness is overwhelmingly of the earth, the “ever reclouding heavens” which, when they finally clear at evening, reveal a stand of pines that “write a Chinese poem on the moon.”

Awareness itself – this astoundingly sharp perception of the natural world – is a symptom of his happiness, one that he sees too in his lover:

[I]t was … her consciousness of everything that impressed me …

“Joy,” wrote Simone Weil, “is the overflowing consciousness of reality.” That overflow is what the writer gathers when he goes to the spring. “Ah the pathos and beauty and mystery of little springs and places where there is fresh water near the ocean… [S]uch happiness… was like what is really meant by freedom, which was like the spring, which was like our love, which was like the desire to be truly good.”

The writer says the same thing at the end of his long story as he remembers his years in Dollarton:

[I]t was as if we were clothed in the kind of reality which before we saw only at a distance…

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Burdened, to be sure, by thoughts of the war in Europe (“The shadow of the war was over everything. And while people were dying in it, it was hard to be really happy within oneself. It was hard to know what was happy, what was good. Were we happy, good? Or, being happy at such a time, what could one do with one’s happiness?”), and, more immediately, by the gradual encroachment of the nearby city into his paradise, the writer nonetheless spends most of his time moving unselfconsciously through the natural world and reflecting upon that world.

His little community of fragile shacks and penurious squatters represents

something that man had lost, of which these shacks and cabins, brave against the elements, but at the mercy of the destroyer, were the helpless yet stalwart symbol, of man’s hunger and need for beauty, for the stars and the sunrise.

Part of the answer to the question of happiness has to do with the realization here of the perilousness, the jerry-built vulnerability, of oneself even as you brave the elements of mortal life. Part will have to do with – despite this – fashioning your life as “a continual sunrise… a continual awakening.”

An ideal of all-transcending serenity flickers occasionally in these pages – “the Tao… came into existence before Heaven and Earth, something so still, so changeless, and yet reaching everywhere, and in no danger of being exhausted…” – but the writer knows that he exists confused, in a human world of suffering. Like Thoreau, he also knows the extremity of his human-world-estranging gesture:

Often I would linger on the way and dream of our life. Was it possible to be so happy? Here we were living on the very windrow of existence, under conditions so poverty-stricken and abject in the eyes of the world they were actually condemned in the newspapers, or by the Board of Health, and yet it seemed that we were in heaven, and that the world outside – so portentous in its prescriptions for man of imaginary needs that were in reality his damnation – was hell.

He can’t keep his own hell off the forest path to the spring, though, and another part of happiness is somehow admitting into this new lucid consciousness one’s own ugliness:

Half-conscious I told myself that it was as though I had actually been on the lookout for something on the path that had seemed ready, on every side, to spring out of our paradise at us, that was nothing so much as the embodiment in some frightful animal form of those nameless somnambulisms, guilts, ghouls of past delirium, wounds to other souls and lives, ghosts of actions approximating to murder, even if not my own actions in this life, betrayals of self and I know not what, ready to leap out and destroy me, to destroy us, and our happiness…

These theatrics, though, these anticipated beasts, weren’t really what his unfolding spiritual life was about:

I became convinced that the significance of the experience lay not in the path at all, but in the possibility that in converting the very cannister I carried, the ladder down which I climbed every time I went to the spring – in converting both these derelicts to use I had prefigured something I should have done with my soul… [As] a man I had become tyrannized by the past, and… it was my duty to transcend it in the present.

Those derelict objects – his own dereliction – would not be rejected, avoided, denied, made ghoulish; they would be made useful in the capture of something beautiful.

Having, on the path, encountered and to some extent calmed these ghouls, the writer enters into a lucid stillness in which

I dreamed that my being had been transformed into the inlet itself… so that I seemed to contain the reflected sun deeply within my very soul, yet a sun which as I awoke was in turn transformed … into something perfectly simple, like a desire to be a better man, to be capable of more gentleness, understanding, love –

It is the same selfless stillness that Norman Maclean describes at the end of A River Runs Through It:

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

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The Dollarton shacks. Long bulldozed; now aestheticized.

UD, long-term readers know, likes to write these. You can only use phrases from a newspaper article. Slight alterations are permitted.

Click on this post’s category – newspaper poem – to read earlier UD efforts.

Here’s one for today, from this article.

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Canterbury Tale

Lighter than water, the rocks quickly rise
To cover an area Belgium-size.

Abidi is the head of a university in Tunisia. UD knows it’s ethnocentric of her, but she finds the idea of murderers running universities quite scandalous.

…that has to be asked, these days, when anyone even slightly high-profile plagiarizes:

Might [Fareed] Zakaria … have fobbed off the drafting of his ill-fated Time article to an assistant or intern … and given the draft his glancing approval before letting it run under his byline in Time?

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There are, of course, varieties of plagiaristic experience (as William James might put it). UD has simplified the matter for you with her tripartite A scheme. There’s:

1. ATELIER

3. ADDICTED

Jim’s assuming Zakaria’s is the atelier method, a variety made famous by busy Harvard law professors who, to use Jim’s word, appear to fob off much of the writing of their books to student assistants. Other busy Harvard people (Doris Kearns Goodwin) also seem to have gotten to P in this way. You get there not out of ambition (see #2). On the contrary, all of your ambitions have already been realized. Rather, you get there out of grandiosity. Having more than achieved your ambitions, you decide you’re too important to do your own work. Atelier is très pomo, being all about one’s transubstantiation into a simulacrum.

2., Ambition, is when you’re still young and struggling to be grand. This is Jayson Blair, Jonah Lehrer, Johann Hari, Stephen Glass, Glenn Poshard, Baron von und zu and unter von Googleberg or whatever his name is (put these names in my search engine for details). This is all those eager young German, Romanian, Czech, etc. PhD students panting toward political careers and totally not interested in actually writing something. This is saying yes to every project and assignment that comes your way, and therefore making it impossible to do everything.

Bringing up the rear is Addicted, in which, having been caught plagiarizing, you explain that you do it because you’re a drug or alcohol addict. Addicted is a tricky one, because successful plagiarism takes a steady hand and mucho planning. It’s not the sort of thing you can do staggering down the street. James Frey, Q.R. Markham (again use the search engine), and plenty of others blame their stealing on a deep-seated insecurity which drives them to drink and then the drink clouds their judgment yada yada.

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One other thing to keep in mind about plagiarism is the More Principle. There’s always more. Once the guy (Doris alone holds the banner aloft for the girls) is found out, anyone who wants to discover more of his plagiarized work only has to look.

… is too delicate to use the word ‘plagiarism’ in his apology. It was a ‘mistake,’ a ‘lapse,’ and UD is sure he feels as terrible about it as Jonah Lehrer did about his. Like Lehrer, Fareed Zakaria had already been called out for self-plagiarism (for each duplicated speech he gets $75,000). Now he’s at Step Two. Step Three is the discovery of a pattern of plagiarism.

Zakaria has been a big defender of Yale’s controversial venture in Singapore. This might be a good time for him to take a visiting position there.

It’s always a little upsetting for sports schools when they fail – as they so often do – in their effort to twist privacy laws. The bigger the athletics program, the more it has to hide (recall the legal hysteria about Happy Valley emails), so they scream FERPA whenever newspapers ask for substantive information.

A judge just ruled that this season’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, cannot use the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to keep those of us outside the coaches’ circle from knowing every choice detail about their disgraced football program. Urp!

… this two million dollars a year?

Because they’re worth every penny. A university can’t put a price tag on this sort of international publicity.

… is Southern Methodist University, which, despite its beyond-notorious sports past (people keep talking about its death penalty in relation to Penn State), seems determined to get right back up on that particular horse and ride itself into oblivion again. Their athletic deficit is over a hundred million dollars, and they just fired – in an act of obvious desperation – the swaggering bigmouth athletic director in charge of making that deficit much, much bigger.

Read the background here, if you can stomach it.

Like the University of Georgia (which UD has long designated the Worst University in America), SMU has a president who seems a wholly owned subsidiary of the NCAA, a jocko di tutti jocki who will do absolutely anything to get SMU back on track toward another death penalty, either via the NCAA or via institutional bankruptcy.

… writes a pithy and precise defense of her country’s burqa ban.

Debate about the legality and morality of allowing men to put their wives and children in bags will continue, but the direction of things is now pretty clear, as more and more municipalities and countries enact a ban.