University of Miami. President: Donna Shalala. Search her name on this blog and ask yourself: Why is this person still the president of a university?
University of Miami. President: Donna Shalala. Search her name on this blog and ask yourself: Why is this person still the president of a university?
Many of America’s most grotesquely twisted football factory schools have a Lewis Margolis, a faculty member who from the start – before Penn State becomes Pederasty Central; before sick jocks become a sick joke – speaks out strongly and eloquently against the corruption of his or her campus by big-time sports.
Margolis has become the go-to person as journalists crowd around the next university to lose much of its reputation because of its sports program – the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Watch for his name as the UNC academic fraud scandal heats up. We know from interviews that he speaks well; this terrific Inside Higher Education piece reveals him also to be an excellent writer.
The pseuds who pretended to have written it have no shame.
You would think their universities would have a smidgeon.
[T]he present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.
This was the unforgettable writer Robert Hughes in 2004. I mean literally unforgettable. I have never forgotten these lines and their great words: obscenity, immature, rotten, and, coming at the very end — Hughes, like all strong writers, knew to hold his strongest word for the very end of his sentence — pathological.
Obviously what one notices is the total lack of evasion, softening, the mealy-mouthed; but note too how the harshness of all that is indeed softened by the sweet Shakespearean lilt of his final phrase:
Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.
In talking about the super-rich he uses ugly modern words like super-rich; in talking about his beloved art he regresses as it were not only to (as Paul Fussell argues) archaic words like honor, but to the alliterative lightness of do, debase, and desire.
You see the care Hughes took with language everywhere, as in this brief description of Alfred Munnings:
a brilliant horse-painter in his better moments but a paranoid blimp of a man
See the same technique? brilliant… better… blimp mixing with painter and paranoid, moments and man — this is a writer working hard at the level of the word to create wit, beauty, and surprise, to mix, as he did in the sentence before this one, high and low (there, honor/super-rich; here, brilliant/blimp) to create interest, amusement, a sense of the weird wealth of the world.
Here again:
No serious artist could gain anything from having the tarnished letters RA tacked on to their name, so redolent of boardroom portraits, cockle-gatherers at work or sunny views of Ascot.
No reader moving her eye along this really takes in how Hughes puts tarnished and tacked and to together to make the phrase go tra-la-la; no reader realizes that the words redolent and boardroom balance one another interestingly or that cockle and Ascot are also a sort of a pair. This is the subterranean sonar of a sentence, the notes from underground you don’t think you hear or care about, but you do. They pull the sentence together, give it a ground tone, a thrum, a voice – this is what all those English comp textbooks mean by finding your voice – and distinguish it from the rest of the tossed off prose of the world.
The greatest prose stylists – James Joyce comes to mind – use this technique of groups of similar sounding words following one another in a sentence. I mean, note how there’s one short succession of somewhat similar words after another:
anything / having
tarnished / tacked
boardroom / portraits
cockle / Ascot
And what does this do? Why go to the trouble…? Because the effect is one of coherence, flow, a worked, mature (the Picasso is immature), individual, considered, musical voice. And because that stylistic coherence conveys to us the sense that there is a coherent world, and the writer has hold of it. That’s what the comp textbooks mean by writing with authority. We keep reading because we want to go where the writer goes; we want to be in his world.
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No surprise that the Hughes painterly ethos had also to do with work and the worked. Here it was the work of inquiring closely and tirelessly into the brilliant/obscene world, and demanding the same effort from your viewer:
About artists he admired, like Lucian Freud, he cast the stakes in nothing less than heroic terms. “Every inch of the surface has to be won,” he wrote of Freud’s canvases in The Guardian in 2004, “must be argued through, bears the traces of curiosity and inquisition — above all, takes nothing for granted and demands active engagement from the viewer as its right.”
“Nothing of this kind happens with Warhol, or Gilbert and George, or any of the other image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism.”
… [Goya] was an artist, he wrote, whose genius lay in his “vast breadth of curiosity about the human animal and the depth of his appalled sympathy for it.”
Courtside with Oklahoma State basketball!
… will appear at Inside Higher Ed in just a moment… link on its way…
… my latest lecture for the MOOC I’m giving appears. Here it is.
It’s a reading of Charles Wright’s poem, Black Zodiac.
… Zlatko Tesanovic, a Johns Hopkins physics professor who has died, age 55, of a heart attack suffered at Reagan National Airport (he was rushed to the hospital across the street from UD‘s office), sounds as though he was a lot of fun. He lectured in shorts and Hawaiian shirts. His students compiled his sayings.
From his Rate My Professors page:
What makes great people great is not that they’re always great, it’s that they’re sometimes great. Some people are never great. That’s just how it works.
From a student’s webpage:
We use now a piece of trickery…
The problem with liquids is that they are not a gas.
It will be like a light to you in dark rooms in the middle of the night, when you are despairing and everything else has failed you… and you will realize, the Method of Steepest Descents is your only true friend.
Maybe I hate the word; maybe I don’t. I don’t know yet. I know it doesn’t exist (no results in Google) so it’s all mine; I made it up.
Maybe it’s no different from Lobstermato. In Woody Allen’s essay, “Conversations with Helmholtz,” a man interviewing Helmholtz (a psychoanalyst) says that
I explained to Dr. Helmholtz that I could not order the Lobstermato (a tomato stuffed with lobster) in a certain restaurant. He agreed it was a particularly asinine word and wished he could scratch the face of the man who conceived it.
Blogs are written in real time. When I find techtimonial asinine enough I’ll delete the post.
Meanwhile, here’s part of a techtimonial from a former tech enthusiast – a political science professor at Queen’s University.
[My classroom] technologies were slowly teaching me how to un-teach, and they were teaching my students how to un-learn.
Aside from their distractive potential in the classroom, my students had become passive and expectant of pre-formulaic lectures.
Devices had become a barrier between teacher and student — rather than the revolutionary learning tools that everyone was claiming them to be.
Perhaps what irked me the most is that I’m now convinced that many university administrators have promoted the use of teaching technologies not because it enhances the quality of university education, but because of its potential to service vast numbers of paying students with fewer and fewer expensive faculty members.
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When presented with a visual display during lectures, students become passive. Most simply sit and wait for the next slide, taking their cues as to what is important from the slides and images presented. When I first banned laptops, panic set in. Students claimed that I spoke too fast and that they couldn’t write fast enough. When asked what they were writing down, to my horror the response was ‘everything’.
… Not only has a dependence upon technical devices caused students to disengage, professors are equally at fault for losing their skills to inspire, engage and mentor.
Often, their lectures conform to pre-formulated presentations that are nothing short of a series of bullets.
Many once skilled lecturers have slowly lost their ability to speak with personality, passion and throw ideas around in impromptu ways that leave heads buzzing with ideas for hours afterwards.
It’s what UD calls the morgue classroom.
There’s not much information yet, but it sounds as though UCLA has a problem on its hands. I’m going to search for more on this story, but I’ll link you to this much now.
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Details of the allegations.
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The guy being sued (along with UCLA) directs the university’s anxiety disorders program. Here’s its home page.
Nobody asked me, but if anybody had asked me, I’d say that an image that takes you down a path to a deep ocean probably isn’t ideal for a psychiatric disorders page.
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Seven minutes ago, ABC picked up on the story. More details.
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Experts said the case would be divided into two issues — the standard of care provided and ethical considerations involved in soliciting donations from a patient [Alexander Bystritsky is accused of having come after the family for research money while at the same time treating Harvey].
If true, “It would be a horrible indictment of the fund raising efforts of UCLA,” said Donna Darling, a former New York assistant district attorney who now represents plaintiffs in medical malpractice suits. “They should have known she was a patient.”
… to make things look not quite as sordid as they are. Note how this article, about two University of Texas San Antonio players just arrested for drug-related armed robbery, begins:
Two former University of Texas at San Antonio football players have been released from the program after their alleged involvement in an armed robbery Tuesday.
Not a problem! Former! Years ago they were on the team!
… What? … They were on the team when they did the deal? They were dumped minutes ago, shortly after their incarceration?
Well, that makes them former…
… your university hospital is the most treacherous part of campus. There’s lots of money at stake, so corruption is highly likely. Conflict of interest among your professors may be rampant. There’s always someone on the staff stealing oxycontin to sell it. Some of your anesthesiologists are addicts.
Cowboys on the surgery team try this and that without bothering with the institutional review board. Since you don’t really pay attention to the doctors you allow to affiliate, some of them will turn out to run pill mills or, like UCLA’s Arnold Klein, will embarrass you in other ways.
You try to make the hospital a big profit center, but that almost never works. Meanwhile, as in this story from the University Medical Center Göttingen, some of your surgeons are managing to make it work quite nicely on a personal basis.
A surgeon identified as Dr. Aiman O. is suspected of fraudulently manipulating dozens of his patients’ test results, making them appear sicker than they were to get them liver transplants more quickly — and possibly putting them ahead of people who more desperately needed them. The case first emerged in late July at the University Medical Center Göttingen, in the northern German state of Lower Saxony, from where the senior physician has been suspended since November for allegedly tampering with some 23 transplant cases. A gastroenterologist suspected of involvement has also been suspended.
There’s huge money in this. Truly rich, truly desperate people will pay amazing sums for an organ, and all you have to do is shove aside other sick people who’ve been following the rules and waiting.
He’s a humongous donor, a trustee, and a saintly presence at Cornell (‘”We [he and his wife] are both crazy enough to think we can make a bit of difference in this world and crazy enough to try,” he said.’), but Sanford Weill, who made the zillions he gave the university by creating a bank too big to fail, now announces we should break up the banks.
Jon Stewart’s calling Cornell’s Joe Paterno an asshole, and Matt Taibbi, who also calls him an asshole, notes that
Through his ambitious (and at the time not yet legal) decision to merge Citibank, Travelers, and Salomon Brothers into one giant wrecking ball of greed, self-dealing and global irresponsibility called Citigroup, Weill more or less single-handedly created the Too-Big-To-Fail problem. You know, the one currently casting that thick, black doomlike shadow over all humanity which, if you look out your window, you can see floating over all our heads this very minute.
The people interviewing him should have “beat Weill repeatedly about the neck and head with a Swingline stapler, until he screeched out a tearful apology to every last living soul on earth.”
Paterno apologized. I wonder if Weill will. Nah.