UD‘s sister took this picture of
World War Two observation towers

along the beach at Rehoboth.

… unusual.

Many are the adjectives used to describe big-time university sports. UD likes “unusual,” as used by Frank Deford:

We in the U.S. think, nostalgically, of athletics as integral to higher education, but perhaps they’re so unusual that they should be entirely separated from the academic and simply turned into an honest commercial adjunct.

In making this increasingly popular proposal, Deford chooses (from dozens and dozens of examples) to talk about the University of North Carolina at Wilmington:

The University of North Carolina, Wilmington provides a typical recent case. The Seahawks field teams in 19 Division One sports, but unfortunately, like many colleges, UNCW athletics are in the red, so the chancellor, Gary L. Miller, assembled a committee, which recommended the elimination of five sports: men’s and women’s swimming, men’s cross country and indoor track and softball.

Well, that produced a firestorm, especially with swimming, which has won the conference 12 years in a row and, which, financially, is about on budget. Now, by contrast, the basketball team has a deficit of a million dollars; the coach himself earns almost a half million a season, notwithstanding that the team lost two-thirds of its games and is academically on probation.

UD is aware that the only problem in this scenario, from the point of view of millions of Americans, is that the coach only makes half a million. But Deford is arguing that he could make ever so much more than most of us could even imagine if we freed him from the pointless restraints of universities.

“Let alumni and local businesses pay for sports,” says Deford. Do that, and the sky’s the limit.

…DOMA.

The most amazing physics instructor in the world: Denis Rancourt.

Stanley Fish is right. UD has read the same report about the crisis in the humanities that he has, and Fish nails it.

[L]aden with bland commonplaces and recommendations that could bear fruit only in a Utopia, [the report] will be dutifully noted by pious commentators and then live a quiet life on the shelf for which it was destined.

The report has indeed prompted plenty of humanities huzzahs, like this one from David Brooks, in which he quotes from an embarrassing letter written by a history professor at the University of Chicago…

Why embarrassing? Because it’s a completely stereotypical professor-complaint letter in which the professor pats himself on the back for his intellectual and emotional acuity, and bitches that his students (people who are between eighteen and twenty-one years old) don’t share his capacity for depth.

I feel like screaming suddenly: ‘Oh, God, my dear student, why CANNOT you see that this matter is a real, real matter, often a matter of the very being, for the person, for the historical men and women you are looking at — or are supposed to be looking at!’ … [W]hen I have spent an hour or more, pouring all my enthusiasm and sensitivities into an effort to tell these stories in the fullness in which I see and experience them, I feel drained and exhausted…

Yes, why can’t these recent high school graduates at the University of Chicago see and feel the very being of my stories? I pour my sensitivity out at them and then just feel drained and exhausted at the futility of my efforts! Oh, God, my dear student…

This is condescending, self-aggrandizing, crap. Brooks won’t go to the trouble of making the case for an historically deep education, so he quotes this heavy breathing and hopes we’ll nod our heads – the youth today! So soulless!

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

Everyone’s ready to agree that the humanities are in crisis (even if the picture isn’t all that clear), and the authors of the report are happy to stoke that crisis with language about the very security of the nation being thereby imperiled. But the language of the report is as empty as that professor’s letter. Fish notes:

[T]he key words — “framework,” “context,” “complex,” “meaningfully,” “understanding,” “diverse,” “sensitivity,” “perspectives” — are spectacularly empty; just where specificity is needed, sonorous abstraction blunts the edge of what is being asserted, rendering it unexceptionable (no one’s against understanding, complexity and meaningfulness) and without bite.

Grand emotions and grand abstractions attach themselves to talk of the humanities with the implication always that this form of study will make us better people and the world a better place. Like Fish, I see the humanities as “a cloistered and separate area in which inquiry is engaged in for its own sake and not because it yields useful results.” Reading novels like Lolita and The Tropic of Cancer and The Elementary Particles will have God knows what impact on your personal morality and your engagement as a citizen. These are funny, nihilistic, cynical works, and I’d hate to have to be the one to determine their moral or character-building potential. As Georg Lukacs long ago pointed out about Kafka (and what serious education in the humanities is without Kafka?), great writers of our time have a tendency to maunder on inconclusively about the hopelessly alienated consciousness; or they sketch a world with very little collective action in it… Writers like Don DeLillo, America’s greatest living novelist, routinely get called bad citizens.

No, the humanities aren’t evil; and yes, they can help you think about everything. But as Fish points out, they don’t mix well with our current outcomes-based mania, and it’s really not plausible to scare people (as this latest humanities report tries to do) with the degradation to the republic attendant upon insufficient care for them.

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

UD thanks David.

Isn’t bald-faced theft enough to trigger dismissal? And the guy’s an assistant professor! In every case UD‘s covered of a physics or engineering professor creating a fake company to steal university/state/federal funds (she’s covered tons of them), the thief is like in his sixties. This guy has his scheme up and running in his twenties!

… Yi in the summer of 2011 pushed the purchase of a high performance illumination simulation tool that he said he needed for renewable energy research at CSI.

That fall, he submitted a memo to the City University of New York and the state Dormitory Authority stating that only one company, 3G Institute of Renewable Energy Inc., could supply the software.

But the Joint Commission on Public Ethics said Yi failed to mention that he was president of 3G…

The guy just has to pay a fine?

Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler
Is a most peculiar scholar:
Fucks with data for a dollar
Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler.

Alas poor Ulrich’s just been collared.
Mass retraction – ach, the squalor.
Now his output looks much smaller.
Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler.

(Put football colorado in my search engine.)

But at least now it’s bankrupting the school.

Excerpts from editorial commentaries at the Daily Camera:

If we think of football as a business, as we should, we should expect the campus CEO to tender his resignation.

Interim Athletic Director Ceal Barry stated, “We need to look at efficiencies”. Current inefficiencies include $9.8 million in football coach’s severance packages, the $1.3 million overrun in “miscellaneous expenses” and the $1 million in renovation of football coaching offices! There are 23 football coaches and directors. Men and women’s basketball has six coaching posts each, skiing five and women’s tennis two.

More on enforced gender segregation at Israel’s Hebrew University. Haaretz notes the Catch-22 – if you want to educate and make employable this enormous, growing, anti-democratic minority, you need to assimilate them into twenty-first century universities. But their regressive ways, especially their bigotry toward women, make them refuse norms of equality. The editorial in Haaretz concludes:

Hebrew University, like other academic institutions, is a public space in which students from different groups study and, while doing so, meet one another. This crucial interaction is one of the hallmarks of a liberal society in which women and men are to be treated equally. The university’s leaders would do well not to sponsor – academically or otherwise – an institution whose principles contravene these basic tenets.

So you keep the bigots out; but then you sustain a system of separate schools where the anti-democratic norms of the minority continue to thrive, and the minority continues to be what many Israeli commentators describe as a major existential threat to the nation of Israel.

The only possible solution I can see involves places like Hebrew University going ahead and assimilating these groups but making it clear the university will not budge on its democratic principles. No sex segregation. Probably a few haredim will attend despite the democratic nature of the institution; and perhaps eventually, as more and more of them find ways to tolerate the presence and equal status of women in university settings, the problem will be to a significant extent solved.

The farcical University of Southern Mississippi is being helmed by a bunch of big strong men who know exactly what they’re doing. The school’s very president turns out to be a major jocksman who – now that he’s prez – is gonna jigger things so that that pesky ol’ million plus athletics deficit is gonna be gone with the wind just you wait and see. He’s hired a really expensive search firm (for the fourth athletic director) and he’s paying coach Vince Dooley to advise and … well, all this extra expenditure and personnel turnover is gonna make the deficit disappear!

… as Stevie Smith might have said. Our bog, University Diaries, has been dood, and is still somewhat moribund (takes rather a long time to open, for instance). The reasons are complex (we weren’t hacked; the problem has to do with success, as in this blog generates too much traffic for the old server it’s on) but they are (slowly) on their way to being resolved, and I have as always to thank my webmistress, Carolyn, and my readers, several of whom wrote to tell me that things weren’t working. I apologize for the difficulties UD readers have been having with the site; things should be much better very soon. Feel free to write to me or Carolyn (see bottom of this page) with any updates.

Meanwhile, I’ll try to post a bunch of new stuff I’ve been accumulating. We’ll see how things go.

UD grew up being told that Israel was the only democracy in the middle east. With gender segregated buses and city streets and clinics, Israel looks less and less like a democracy to UD, equal rights of men and women being pretty basic to democracies. And now one of its major universities seems on the verge of mandating segregated courses of study:

[Hebrew University plans] to offer special B.A. programs to ultra-Orthodox students who want to study in gender segregated classrooms.

The plan hasn’t gone up for a vote onaccounta the faculty is a mite upset.

“When I hear of gender segregation on a bus or in the street, I am outraged as a citizen. I don’t want this kind of thing to take place in my academic home,” says Prof. Rehav Rubin of Hebrew University.

“It’s a shocking idea,” one lecturer wrote. “Neither gender segregation or sectorial instruction should be allowed within university walls.”

“Gender segregation at Hebrew University would lead to disaster,” a female lecturer wrote.

“The norms of gender segregation and female exclusion are expanding,” said deputy rector Prof. Orna Kupferman, who was in charge of integrating Haredim. “They are contrary to every principle the university stands for. We’re dealing with a separation that constitutes hierarchy and discrimination…Women are [seen as] inferior and that’s that.”

Yes, the norms of exclusion are expanding in Israel despite very strong efforts to contract them. When a great university begins to move toward this form of bigotry, you know Israel is losing the battle.

… and the pounding of the boardwalk by runners – these are the elements, so far, of morning at the beach. Dolphins, photographers, runners.

It’s overcast enough to allow me to sit here, on the balcony, and see my screen in order to type this.

The sun emerged about an hour ago but almost immediately looked red-faced and hid in the clouds. The clouds were thin and let out some rays, but that didn’t last long.

In other words, today’s mariner’s tale hasn’t gained much traction. One dolphin pod; one photographer trying to capture the pod and the pallid rays; the boardwalk runners.

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

Flat ocean, sandflats. And the water and horizon gray. There’s none of last night’s antics under the supermoon, the cartwheeling and kiting that seemed a dance to the moon. Two beach weddings, set off by lines of streamers, went on during the revels. The guitarist sitting by one of the canopies played Pachelbel. You could hear the ground bass.

White streamers and wedding parties on moon-blanch’d sand on the longest day of the year. Now it’s Sunday and solitary and pensive with no sun and no moon.

I woke up with Schubert’s Litanei in my head. All souls rest in peace.

… runs, rather close to our shore,
big red container ships.

With my small binoculars, this afternoon, I read Hamburg Süd, in white letters, along the side of a vessel. I could see its massive containers, on their way to the port of Philadelphia I guess, lined up on board. This is a thing I do from my Rehoboth Beach balcony; I follow the movements of container ships as they balance on the edge of the horizon.

Mr UD joined me on the balcony, looked through the binoculars, and said Brian Barry wrote his long review of A Theory of Justice from a Greek freighter bound for Africa.

I said Tony Judt, when he lived on a kibbutz, used to go to Haifa whenever he could, to gaze longingly at freighters bound for “Famagusta, Izmir, Brindisi, and other cosmopolitan destinations.”

This was the longest day of the year; we stood on a balcony that would remain clear and light for hours. We thought of dolphin-torn gong-tormented seas.

But this, right now, was a calm sea. On the almond sand in front of it, huge ridiculous kites tethered into the sand twisted and swelled.

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

We love this child’s garden of light. It is one of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, and we are just as grateful for it as she was.

… West Virginia University, America’s Number One party school, where… ugh. I can’t. I’ll puke. You can read it if you want. You read it. You read it.