Things seem to be calming down, but universities in Baltimore remain wary, with class cancellations and early closings. Some conferences have pulled out of the city. Baltimore, which has tried so hard to thrive, has had a terrible setback.

UD will be in the city tomorrow. She will take a look around and blog about it.

… the running of the university athletic program numbers is an annual display at once shocking and idiotic.

Cleveland State University’s numbers are typical: Almost no students attend the school’s games, but “[a]n estimated 89 percent ($9,361,508) of the athletics budget is paid for by CSU’s students.”

Men’s basketball, without a doubt the most popular CSU sports team, averaged an attendance of just 1,996 people at their home games in the 2014-15 season.

The Wolstein Center, their home arena, has a capacity of more than 13,000. The 2015 budget projected that the Wolstein Center would operate at a $917,000 deficit this year.

You and I know what the next step is at CSU. We’ve been following university sports for a long time, yes?

CSU will announce that they’ll spend 60 million dollars to expand the arena and add 30,000 seats.

… the gilt.

Johns Hopkins University has told students to stay inside buildings, due to reports of protesters near the university’s north Baltimore campus.

UD‘s grandfather, father, and uncle all graduated from Hopkins. Baltimore is where she was born and lived until the family moved to England for my father’s postdoc year. When we came back, we moved to Bethesda and stayed there; but most of UD‘s extended family remained in Baltimore.

UD plans to be in Baltimore for a wedding this Thursday, but is keeping an eye on the riots.

Well, that didn’t work. A judge just ruled that the mother of an eighteen-year-old pledge pummeled to death by a CUNY Baruch fraternity may indeed bring her suit.

In a myriad of sordid fraternity beating deaths, this one stands out for sheer brutality and moral depravity.

The world of sadomasochism to which UD has been introduced by her decision to cover fraternities on this blog has shocked and confused her. And she’s no shrinking violet. She’s read her de Sade and her Story of O. She’s thought about the subject. She’s been around.

But there’s no denying it: Many college fraternities house concentrations of just about the sickest people in American culture.

… features

Borucinski, Michal & Zofia & daughter Hanna Soltan

— Hanna being Mr UD’s mother, and the Borucinskis being her parents.

Together they rescued, and hid for years in their Warsaw apartment, a Jewish boy.

As of the beginning of this year, their names appear in Yad Vashem’s list of the righteous.

… It’s spring. It’s sunny, cool, slight breeze, Garrett Park, Maryland. “The Park,” as some people call it (sounds pretentious to ol’ UD) is in industrial-strength bloom. Many friends, old and new, are emerging for brunches, lunches, and dinners at Black Market Bistro, a few hundred steps from UD‘s house.

And why not? This is the time to be here, a boffo Sunday in the right season, with UD‘s hometown arboretum pumping out its best views ever. Visitors don’t need to know how these tranquil plantings represent endless quibbling and kvetching at the Town Council (Why are we taking down the tulip poplars? Is that cherry tree unusual enough? What do you have against bamboo?…); they only need to breathe in the scent of the viburnums.

All of which is to say ne quittez pas. UD will get back on the blog horse in a few hours. At the moment, on top of her social obligations, she’s got to practice reciting It is Marvellous to Wake Up Together, which she will be reading next week at the wedding of her friends Courtney and Alicia. They asked UD to choose something, and they both very much like Elizabeth Bishop’s love poem.

It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air suddenly clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

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

‘Course, UD could get the same message across at the ceremony by clearing her throat and singing this.

… you’ve produced a species of cheap irony:  A management professor who cannot manage his management class.

Whatever the back story, UD would argue that a professor who sends his students a long rant denouncing them and puffing himself up, and who announces in the same email that he’s failing every last one of them and deserting the class (he seems to have handed it off to someone else on the faculty) is un p’tit peu out of control. Texas A&M Galveston has a strategic management problem on its hands.

Sure, some professors occasionally walk out of their classes in the middle of a lecture or discussion. Scott Jaschik reviews a few such cases here. In these examples, however, it’s about something very specific — students texting, or watching films on their laptops. In the Galveston case, the professor’s email (assuming the paper covering the story has published the correct email) shades off into the paranoid, with talk of whisper campaigns against him and his wife, and of needing police protection to teach the class.

UD doesn’t doubt that this guy’s got some shitskies in his class. You’re not supposed to deal with them by going nuclear.

Lucye Millerand, president of the [Union of Rutgers Administrators], pointed to the $1.2 million in severance pay Rutgers made to Mike Rice, a former men’s basketball coach, Tim Pernetti, former athletic director, and John Wolf, former interim senior vice president and general counsel, after their departure following a public outcry over a video that showed abusive behavior by Rice toward players on the court.

“Rutgers’ budget seems to have money for crazy priorities,” Millerand said. “That 1.2 million would be about a 1 percent raise for my entire union of 2,300 people. If there is money to reward people that embarrassed the university so badly they had to go, why does management tell us they don’t have that much money to bring an equivalent settlement with Rutgers’ faculty.”

Rutgers’ masochistic relationship with its coaches draws some criticism.

… Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney on Wednesday reiterated reservations about how schools will implement the oncoming trend of providing “full cost of attendance” to scholarship student-athletes. He said that while he’s all for “modernizing the scholarship,” he opposes “professionalizing college athletics.”

Mr. Swinney’s defense of the amateur-athletics ideal would sound more convincing if he weren’t making $3.3 million this year to coach Clemson on a contract that runs through the 2021 season.

Absolutely. UD has said it for years – in the United States, you don’t need a university to have a university football team. Several American universities already are, for most purposes, football teams. Their presidents are their six million dollar a year coaches. Their trustees are ex-football players or football boosters.

So she’d suggest posing the question about the possible bankruptcy of Louisiana State University like this:

If there is no football team, would the school be able to field a fall semester?

M.H. Abrams, whose Natural Supernaturalism illuminated Romantic poetry for generations of literature students, has died at the amazing age of 102.

Here’s a passage UD has always liked, linking Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens:

[The] Romantic endeavor to salvage traditional experience and values by accommodating them to premises tenable to a later age has continued to be a prime concern of post-Romantic poets. Stevens expressly identified the aim “of modern poetry” as the attempt to convert the setting and agents and language of Scripture into

Stevens represents the musing in solitude of a modern woman as she savors the luxuries of her Sunday breakfast in a brilliant un-Wordsworthian setting of sun, rug, coffee and oranges, and a green cockatoo. In these subdued lines, however, we recognize something approximating the high argument of the Romantic poet who (while “Beauty – a living Presence of the earth” waited upon his steps) proclaimed the power of the mind of man to realize an equivalent of “Paradise, and groves / Elysian, Fortunate Fields,” by the “consummation” of a union with the common earth which will require of us “nothing more than what we are.”

Quite the cascade of events in the Little Rock Arkansas school district, where things were so bad the state took over, and now there’s a lawsuit from the dysfunctional school board the state ousted…

And now, the Little Rock superintendent turns out to have plagiarized … maybe more than plagiarized… in some accounts, it sounds as though he virtually stole another person’s dissertation… And I guess the general consensus would be that the top official of a large educational system probably shouldn’t be a massive plagiarist who when asked about it says he doesn’t think he “consciously” plagiarized.

So he has had to resign.

But the person quoted up there in UD‘s headline – Matt Campbell, who discovered the plagiarism – is confused as to why the guy, having lied and embarrassed the state and all, got a large money award. UD thinks he’s probably right that that most benighted of American states thought it would be clever to give him money to go away and in that way make the story of their having hired a superintendent without checking the legitimacy of his credentials (it’s easy to put documents through plagiarism-finders) go away. It wasn’t very clever.

*********

UD thanks a reader for correcting her identification of the person quoted in this post’s headline.

There’ll always be a Clemson.

… or vice versa.