She’s only just tamped down the Nevin Shapiro fiasco (thank God for Penn State!), and now here comes the Miller School of Medicine fiasco for University of Miami president Donna Shalala. Rather like big ol’ Larry Summers at Harvard with his interest-rate swaps and Allston expansions, Shalala’s all about thinking big and promising big and, you know, just going for it. Now she’s got a school hemorrhaging money as illustrious researchers like perennial UD favorite Charles Nemeroff receive millions in salary. Nemeroff’s BFF, Pascal J. Goldschmidt, Miller School honcho, must take most of the credit for this outcome.
Greed, ego – at Harvard or UM, you want to try to control these things.
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UD thanks Roy.
Why she remains obscure, despite having written several terrific novels:
Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life’s feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up.
In the few interviews that Powell gave, she often mentions as her favorite novel, surprisingly for an American, much less for a woman of her time and place, the Satyricon. This sort of thing was not acceptable then any more than it is now. Descriptions of warm, mature, heterosexual love were — and are — woman’s writerly task, and the truly serious writers really, heartbreakingly, flunk the course while the pop ones pass with bright honors.
Vidal notes a reviewer complaining about Powell: “[S]he views the antics of humanity with too surgical a calm.”
Like Vidal himself, who said “Love is not my bag,” love was, wrote Edmund Wilson, “not Miss Powell’s theme.”
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It’s a curious thing. John Montague once said, “The urge to comprehend is so deep. It would make little sense to live a life if you didn’t understand what you had done.” Yet this can’t be true, since we so often tend to loathe our best writers and intellectuals, the ones who – we grudgingly admit – tell us the truth so that we can see ourselves and comprehend. Look at the post-mortem contempt heaped on Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin… I mean, sure, plenty of tributes, too. But on and on about their heartlessness, their surgical calm as they dissect humanity…
Imagine how much harder this tendency toward clinical appraisal – absolutely typical of the great writer – is for people to take when a woman has it.
Here’s Vidal, at the end of his memoir, Palimpsest::
I’ve… been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts, ‘palimpsesting’ – all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what [my] first thirty-nine years were all about… [on] the small planet that each of us so briefly visits.
Recognizing that his patterns are all about an imperishable youthful love for a classmate killed at Iwo Jima, Vidal concludes his book in this way:
Finally, I seem to have written, for the first and last time, not the ghost story that I feared, but a love story, as circular in shape as desire (and its pursuit), ending with us whole at last in the shade of a copper beech.
Vidal will be buried near his lover in Rock Creek Cemetery.
Your bloggeure has occasionally sung in the chorus of St Paul’s Episcopal church, where the cemetery is located. A very rich aesthetic experience – the music, and then, after, the walk through the graveyard.
I’ll do a Vidal pilgrimage, and write about it here, once he gets there.
… here, in this Jonah Lehrer post, because I’ve always loved Gore Vidal’s phrase “a patter of penitence.” And – even stranger – I mention Johan Hari in the post, and Hari once conducted an interview with Vidal that Christopher Hitchens mentions in this 2010 essay about Vidal’s having become, in old age, a hopeless crank.
Vidal has died.
One can only wonder about that interview, now that we know Hari, like Lehrer, routinely made quotations up. But one doesn’t have to wonder about Hari feeding lines to Vidal that he must have known would bring out the worst of his nutty nihilistic nastiness.
Rounding off his interview, an obviously shocked Mr. Hari tried for a change of pace and asked Vidal if he felt like saying anything about his recently deceased rivals, John Updike, William F. Buckley Jr., and Norman Mailer. He didn’t manage to complete his question before being interrupted. “Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain.”
This description of Hari’s shock, and his motive in asking the question, makes Hitchens look naive, though I suppose he can’t have known, at that time, Hari’s amorality. It’s unlikely Hari was shocked and trying to cool things off when he brought up Vidal’s literary rivals. Hari was twitting the old guy; he got exactly what he expected to get.
When Vidal was good, he was very very good. Here’s the opening paragraph of a 1979 review he wrote of a Leonardo Sciascia novel:
Since the Second World War, Italy has managed, with characteristic artistry, to create a society that combines a number of the least appealing aspects of socialism with practically all the vices of capitalism. This was not the work of a day. A wide range of political parties has contributed to the invention of modern Italy, a state whose vast metastasizing bureaucracy is the last living legacy anywhere on earth of the house of Bourbon (Spanish branch). In fact, the allegedly defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has now so entirely engulfed the rest of the peninsula that the separation between Italian state and Italian people is nearly perfect.
There’s a completeness about this paragraph. It’s not only sly and witty and stylish; it actually encapsulates everything Vidal is going to go on to say. When I say stylish I mean that it does poetic things with prose. Take a phrase like
vast metastasizing bureaucracy is the last
Vast and last are a straightforwardly rhymed pair; but there’s also the ast lurking in metastasizing. Few prose writers have this sort of ear, though …
Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we’re in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we’re leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night.
Light/night; again/peneplain/rainbands; secluded beauty… Don DeLillo does it too.
Of course you could argue that Vidal overdoes it in his last sentence –
In fact, the allegedly defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has now so entirely engulfed the rest of the peninsula that the separation between Italian state and Italian people is nearly perfect.
You could argue he sticks in too many intensifiers and modifiers: in fact, allegedly, so entirely, nearly… But aside from the fact that defunct and engulfed are a nice assonantal pair, there’s the way in which this overloaded language conveys the beyond-maddening reality of life in the broken Italian state. When he wrote this, Vidal lived there, and in his both careful and over the top prose you sense that he’s been stewing in contempt for so long that he’s been able to produce a spectacularly mature carbonade.
This sense of a writer having overcome his raw emotions (see the problem with raw emotions here) enough to create chiseled language, but at the same time having retained enough emotion to keep his blood flowing through the passage is exciting to us — it’s what we go to the best prose for, as in George Orwell’s essay about charity hospitals, and Hitchens’ and Tony Judt’s essays about their last illnesses. You want the writerly control of the language; you also, just as intensely, want the honest, immediate reality of the writer’s emotions. It’s very difficult to provide both of these things, especially at a time dominated by fakers like Hari, Jonah Lehrer, James Frey, Jason Blair, Stephen Glass and a ton of others. We have to be wary now; we have to look out for prose that looks honest but is actually cynical and manipulative.
You never needed to worry about – even to think about – that with Orwell, Hitchens, and Judt. Vidal, for all his nuttiness, was like that.
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… in the wake of the cinema massacre. Of the three kinds of mass murderers (“psychopaths, the delusionally insane, and the suicidally depressed”) Dave Cullen writes about here, Professor Rainer K. Reinscheid of the University of California Irvine med school sounds to UD like the suicidally depressed. His fourteen-year-old son killed himself after being disciplined by his high school, and since then Reinscheid’s been homicidally vengeful, committing arson and making death threats. As Cullen writes:
Most vengeful depressives blame their girlfriend, boss, or schoolmates. Some just aim to kill those targets. But the eventual mass murderer sees it differently: it wasn’t one or two mean people who drove him down, it was all of us. Society was brutal, the whole teeming world is mean. We all need to understand what we did to him; we all need to pay.
In Reinscheid’s case:
Detectives on Friday discover[ed] e-mails on Reinscheid’s cell phone from April, when he allegedly discussed with his wife plans to burn down Uni High School, commit sexual assaults, purchase firearms and murder school officials and students before killing himself.
“Most mass murderers intend to die in the act,” writes Cullen, and although Reinscheid – who’s in custody – now seems unlikely to be able to carry out any killings, he’s obviously a profound suicide risk.
My MOOC on poetry is almost up to nine hundred. If you want to check it out, go here.
I’ve already, on this blog, compared Jonah Lehrer to Johan Hari – both of them madly successful, incredibly prolific writers whose prolificness indeed turns out to be incredible. Hari looked like the greater sinner of the two – he plagiarized and made up quotes, while Lehrer, last we heard, was guilty merely of self-plagiarism.
However, a tenacious writer and Bob Dylan freak has
[put] to rest the notion that Lehrer’s most egregious literary sins were a matter of the inaptly titled “self-plagiarism.” That’s the offense that the New Yorker uncovered in June, after Jim Romenesko reported that one of Lehrer’s posts for the New Yorker repeated material that he’d written in the Wall Street Journal.
The Dylan guy pestered Lehrer about quotations from Dylan that appear in one of his books. Turns out that, like Hari, Lehrer makes stuff up. His editor, in firing him, says it’s a “terrifically sad situation,” but UD wonders why he says that. Hari’s writing a book, and I’m sure it’ll do well (just as I have high hopes for von Googleberg’s book — and he got a job at a fancy Washington think tank too!); these guys always pop back up with something. Lehrer will write a book about his downfall and then he’ll write a book about his recovery (thanks to Buddhism, a woman, the sheer humbling indignity of it all…) and all will be well. As Gore Vidal put it in one of his greatest essays, “For those who cannot sing songs, a patter of penitence will do.” I’m assuming none of these guys can sing songs.
It’s not sad. These stories are kind of funny – in the sense of farce. Even James Frey has done fine.
It’s alright, ma. He’s only bleeding a little.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm will let you decide.
No she won’t.
Look. If you’ve got something to say, and that something matters a lot to you, and you’re lucky enough to have what you say appear in all sorts of high-profile places, you should really go to the trouble of writing it competently.
You’re a smart person, so you know you have trouble writing well. You also know that the crappier your statement of your position on a subject, the more likely you are to be ignored. So you write your thing, and then you give it to a friend for editing. Right? You give it to someone who’s a good writer before you send it out to all those publications. Yes?
If you’re William Wulf, hotshot computer professor at the University of Virgina who resigned in protest during the Teresa Sullivan dust-up, I’m afraid no. You don’t bother giving your writing to someone who can shorten it, clarify your points, take out the heavy breathing. All the things good writers know how to do and bad writers may never learn.
So here’s Wulf, reprinted in the Washington Post, explaining why he still won’t return to U Va, even though Sullivan has been reinstated. His basic point, which should have taken four paragraphs tops, is that the board remains a bunch of corporate know-nothings, and until people who understand and care about universities appear on the board, he won’t reappear at U Va. So far, of the six comments on the letter, two are about his terrible writing. Terrible writing distracts from what you want to say. It draws attention to your writing, rather than to your argument. And when your writing is this terrible, it also makes people wonder how generally cogent you are, and therefore how strong your arguments here (or anywhere else) are. See why competent writing — SOS doesn’t even say good! She just means writing that gets you there, that gets it said! — really does matter?
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Just in case you missed it, I am one of the folks that publicaly [glaring spelling error] resigned over the forced resignation of President Sullivan. I resigned because I deeply care about the University, I thought President Sullivan was doing a great job, and thus felt deeply that this action, and the way it was taken, was profoundly damaging to the University. [Commas where semi-colons should be, but this isn’t important, and SOS wouldn’t even mention it if it weren’t part of a larger shitpile.]
I was frankly surprised by the magnitude of the positive faculty and media reaction to my resignation – I don’t think of myself as the “marching in the street, and placard waving” type. [Unnecessary, distracting quotation marks. Why are they there? Who is he quoting? Is marching in the street and placard waving a well-known phrase?] So, after the initial flurry of email, except for bland replies to some, I have kept pretty quiet about the whole fiasco. But now I feel I need to voice a perspective on the solution to the underlying problem.
I have been asked by President Sullivan, my Dean, and even my departmental faculty, to “un-resign” – I have said NO, and the rest of this note is to explain to all of you why, and perhaps what it means to you. It is not because I don’t love UVa, and would love to rejoin its faculty – quite the opposite, it’s precisely because I do love and respect it so much! [Vaguely messy, conversational feel to the whole thing. Which is fine. No one says you have to write with more formality than that, and this is after all a letter. But lack of parallel structure – would he or would he not love to rejoin its faculty? – as well as what’s going to be an avalanche of exclamation marks will confuse and distract the reader.]
Like most of you, I was delighted by the re-instatement of Terry Sullivan – but that, I my view, didn’t fix the underlying problem! [typo, exclamation] As my original message noted, my wife [Relevance of wife to his expertise?] and I have extensive experience in both executive positions and board positions in industry, academia, and government – we’ve seen the executive-to-board relationship from both sides, and in multiple contexts – and my judgment is that the current BOV is incompetent to govern UVa! Let me repeat – it’s incompetent for the task of governing UVa! [Bad writing is often hyper-emotional, insistent, vehement, compulsively redundant. Note that he repeats in almost exactly the same words what he’s just said. A pointless, diluting move that merely makes the reader wonder what he’s on about.] I am more than willing to stipulate that the BOV members are smart, good and accomplished people –but to be competent on a board requires a significant understanding of the institution they are governing. That’s what is lacking! [The editor he didn’t consult would have put a big fat red line through the last sentence.]
The present BOV appointed by the Governor is 14 lawyers or corporate executives with no experience with academic governance, one part-time medic at John-Hopkins [Don’t bother to learn how to spell the university; you wouldn’t want the reader to think you cared enough about the people and the situation to get that sort of thing straight.], and one CEO of a small university. Alas, they don’t even seem to know much about UVa! While fond of selectively quoting Jefferson out of context, they overlook the deeply philosophical fact that Mr. Jefferson’s design for UVa had *no* President or central administration – the faculty governed the University, and did so in an open collaborative way, not in secret meetings behind closed doors,with no faculty input. Total faculty control wouldn’t work for today’s larger university, BUT … the BOV’s instincts were that top-down, command and control management was “right” [More pointless quotation marks.] and so tried to impose it. Well, it’s not right for universities, especially for UVa – and in fact,the data says that it is not right for most corporations either! It certainly wasn’t right for the corporations that I ran! But my main point is that faculty involvement in university governance is central to all universities, and especially to UVa.
Moreover, the current BOV clearly didn’t even investigate the issue they expressed concern about – for example on-line presence of the University (seemingly a big deal in TS’s firing), but they apparently just reacted to the hype of recent announcements by some other universities without investigating UVa’s record on the subject. Well, our involvement in digital scholarship and learning goes back at least twenty years – I know because I was a principal in getting it started! Please note in the prior sentence I said scholarship AND education. Great universities are about both – not just mass teaching! And a future great UVa must be about both! The current BOV, or at least those involved in firing Terry Sullivan, pretty clearly doesn’t understand that.
Are these uninformed folks likely to make smart future decisions for UVa? Alas, I think not! Smart and accomplished as they may be individually in other contexts, they just don’t have the knowledge base to make good decisions for UVa.
Just imagine a board imposed upon General Motors that consisted of 14 smart/accomplished academics, but with no industrial experience, one Chevy customer, and the CEO of a mom-and-pop grocery store. Would that work? No, of course not! And the converse isn’t working here either! [Pretty well-stated, pretty strong point. But look how he takes the air out of his tires by his goofy garrulous sentences at the end. Just stop at store.]
What we need is a significant fraction of the BOV to be folks that deeply understand academia, and UVa in particular – I have been astounded by how shallow and un-informed the comments [verb needed here] by rector Dragas, for example.
I have a substantial list of distinguished current or former academic administrators that I know first hand, that are really bright and I would be happy to recommend them to serve on the BOV, and I’d even to be the first contact with them – but I haven’t been asked. Alas, they almost certainly didn’t make major contribution to the Governor’s campaign, so the chance of their selection under the current system are probably nil. BUT, it’s the system needs to be changed!
I am a more-than-a-tad concerned that the reinstatement of President Sullivan has taken a bit of wind out of the sails of faculty/student pressure for reform. In my view the time is not to compromise, but to stand for the principles of the University, and particularly the principle of faculty deeply involved its governance!! [Ah. There we go. Double exclamation marks. Will he go for three?]
Corporate style boards (of which both my wife and I have deep experience) are NOT the model for the BOV – nor is “damn the torpedoes” top-down executive management – and the fact that the current BOV doesn’t understand that is damning and destructive, and says a lot about the selection criteria that chose them! We MUST fix the selection criteria! [What are you visualizing, personality-wise, for the guy at this point? I’m seeing a guy who can’t get one thought out without bursting his appendix.]
Permit me to cycle back to my opening – I am not a “march and wave placards” type – partly because I find it intellectually repugnant, but also in no small measure because I don’t think it’s especially effective in our context. You may disagree. What I do think we need is a moderate,well-reasoned argument for why the structure of the BOV needs to be changed for the benefit of the University – and the state. But please note that I think the argument needs to be delivered to the folks that can effect that change and that the present process is a political one,and while I am not in favor of marching and placard waving, I also think our actions need to include political ones – just what those actions are should be needs to be a collective decision of the faculty, so I’ll stay silent on that for now.
But we DO need to act to fix the problem underlying President Sullivan’s firing! Will she stay long term, or would we be able to recruit a comparable replacement given the current BOV and the criteria for future BOV selections? In my view — NO! Unless there is fundamental change, UVa is on a downward spiral. It hurts me to the core! UVa has been SO special! To see it self-destruct is as painful as I can imagine.
The ed biz. Wow.
Post-Penn State, everyone’s talking about sports culture and how we have to understand it and control it and all. The beginning of my tutorial on the subject (this whole blog can be seen as a tutorial on the subject, but let’s go with our most recent stuff) is here.
Drawing upon the growing University of North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud scandal (which this blog is following closely), we take our next step:
Joy Renner, [UNC] athletics committee chairwoman and associate professor and director in the Department of Allied Health Sciences, does not believe the [athletes’ academic] advisors had ill-natured intentions.
“I don’t think there was anything malicious,” Renner said. “I don’t think there was any surreptitious types of activities going on. I think it was truly people trying to help our athletes be able to compete on the field and also in the classroom.”
… The findings [of a university report on the situation] present a continued sense of secrecy coming out of the athletics department and the subcommittee’s report calls for more transparency throughout the university. Renner said that must happen if UNC is going to move forward.
“I’ve not gotten one shred of feeling of someone not being transparent or wanting to get to the bottom of this,” Renner said. “Trust me, is there anyone on this campus that doesn’t want this to go away? Things don’t go away until you get to the bottom of it, until you know what actually happened and didn’t happen.”
Confused? The report describes “a sense of secrecy” and “calls for more transparency throughout the university.”
But Renner says nothing “surreptitious” was going on.
But Renner says more transparency “must happen.”
But Renner says the advisors and professors were “truly people trying to help our athletes be able to compete on the field and also in the classroom.”
But Renner says we need to “get to the bottom of it.”
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Joy Renners abound at all sports factories; they are the joy of sports factories. Without people on the faculty, and on important committees, willing to say the shit you just read, the culture couldn’t thrive.
Joy chairs the athletics committee and so there’s a lot of press attention coming her way. UD recommends that Joy get her story straight or do the no comment thing.
Meanwhile, as we build our knowledge of university sports culture, we keep front and center the pivotal value of the useful idiot.
The University of the District of Columbia has responded to the discovery of three diploma mill grads on its faculty (it’s bad enough when, as at Ramapo College and Northeastern Illinois University, you’ve got one) with lethargy and defensiveness. They’ll… you know… look into it (others have done that for them, though of course it was UDC’s responsibility from the start to winnow faculty frauds); and hey “the university considers more than academic credentials when hiring faculty.”
This is the time-honored response of hapless organizations to diploma mill people — It doesn’t matter that we retain (at tax-payer expense, at UDC) people who’ve lied and cheated their way to a bogus degree in order to get a raise; we love other things about them.
Last year the Munich tabloid Abendzeitung questioned the legitimacy of the PhDs of two of [former CSU president of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber’s] children – daughter Veronica’s doctorate in law from the University of Konstanz, and son Dominic’s treatise on politics from the University of Innsbruck. Veronica was subsequently stripped of her PhD, according to Spiegel Magazine.
This year Spiegel reported Dominic was being investigated over allegations he’d plagiarised his thesis – a dissertation on the work of his father. Dominic has reportedly been given the red carpet treatment in his own career in the CSU.
As the University of North Carolina sport scandal begins to take off, pay attention to the details. People use phrases like sports culture all the time (Penn State, we are told, has to confront its sports culture) but until you look at things like the background of the trustees at Auburn or the background of the people who run the academic support program for athletes at North Carolina, you don’t grasp the reality.
UD attended a university sports conference a couple of years ago, here in Washington, where a high-ranking administrator at a local university demanded to know why coaches and coaching staff were not professors. They are teaching, after all; and erasing the line between coaches and professors will heal the rift between athletics and academics, making the university one big happy family.
If it seems a grotesque idea, it shouldn’t. It’s already being implemented, in a way, at a lot of universities, where the president is little more than a sports nut with impressive corporate or political ties, several of the trustees played football or basketball for the school, and plenty of professors sit on sports-oversight committees and don’t do anything other than enjoy the free tickets and other perks they get to make sure they don’t do anything.
“The athletic enterprise has grown so large and so remunerative that it may not be appropriate at universities anymore,” said Lew Margolis, a [University of North Carolina] public health professor.
Yes, it has grown into the university, to the point where we’re supposed to shed tears because Penn State and its surrounding towns and villages will go bankrupt because of football sanctions. Penn State created and sustained a happy seamless valley where children got fucked in its showers by one of its coaches and now just because of that you’re going to remove the very basis of our economy and indeed of our valley life itself?
Take it out of universities. It’s of course fully appropriate for the larger culture, which laps up the much viler world of professional football. But it is really rather inappropriate at universities.