You start at a lower level than Yeshiva University, haunt of too many financial criminals and close-to-criminals to count (put YESHIVA in this blog’s search engine to sample merely the Madoff and post-Madoff eras); you start in high school, where Sheldon Silver’s son-in-law, himself a convicted Ponzi schemer, apparently taught economics to the lads.
Silver, whose piety is splashed all over today’s headlines, is a proud son of Yeshiva University – honorary degree recipient, commencement speaker.
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A look back: Jeffrey Goldberg asks why.
The hilarious details of the national student athletics fee scam can be found here. Most fun section:
[One University of Kansas student] wonder[ed] why the [athletics] department needed $50 from each student every year in addition to ticket payments.
In two years, Kansas athletics spent $9 million in severance on fired football coaches Mark Mangino and Turner Gill. When [the student] did not notice any corresponding layoffs or cutbacks, he decided to do some research.
He reviewed financial statements that showed Kansas athletics income rose from $50.8 million in 2005 to $93.6 million in 2013. In early 2014, [he] sent a 35-page report to the student senate, arguing that the fee, which produced about $1.1 million for athletics, should be eliminated.
“Students were seeing a rise in tuition, more student debt . . . and the athletics department was making more and more money every year. It just didn’t seem like they needed it,” [he] said in an interview.
[His] report was persuasive. Students voted to kill the fee.
Terrorism sickens and compels, so that when you go to a concert at Washington’s Kennedy Center days after a massacre at a Paris concert hall, you cannot help but think about an attack.
You know it’s unlikely, but after Paris the unthinkable is in the air. Mass death has become a remote possibility for everyone who lives in big cities, and a somewhat less remote possibility for the people who live in and around DC.
The conductor of the Washington Chorus, in its Sunday performance of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Sea Symphony, thanked us, in his opening remarks, for our bravery in coming out. Julian Wachner brought forward, when he did that, the latent thoughts we’d all taken with us into the theater, and though I don’t think any of us agreed that we were brave, we appreciated the realism of the statement, the way it acknowledged what was going on in our heads.
Mr UD and I had checked out the security at the entrance, and I expressed surprise that our bags weren’t examined. I sort of wanted that to happen. Instead, a few uniformed guards met our eyes and welcomed us as we walked in. I thought of all the cameras that had to be trained on us as we moved in a big crowd (no one seemed to have decided to stay home) toward the Concert Hall. Beyond the windows overlooking the Kennedy Center’s deck, late afternoon sunlight rested above the skyline. The look and the mood was calm, autumnal, and I felt the contrast between this happy orderly setting and the madness of a threatening world.
I’d bought close-in box seats because La Kid sings in the chorus and we wanted a good look at her. “Our exit is right outside the door,” my husband said, noting that we were only steps from a “Chorister’s Entrance.” We glanced at the people around us, vaguely appraising them, which seemed both absurd (they looked exactly like us) and irresistible. I made various silly remarks about whether I’d survive leaping to the orchestra seats, and how here in the first level boxes we had the advantage of a full view of the hall. I thought of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, in which Chechens kept terrified people in their seats for two days until Russian forces killed the terrorists (and many theater-goers) by pumping in poison gas.
The first piece was Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a piece I’ve heard in various venues all my life and which I’ve long found almost unbearably emotional. In his introductory remarks, Wachner talked about the “colors” of Victorian music, and for me at least, in this piece, these are the colors of gray curtains obscuring the once-green landscapes of youth.
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Not that I feel anything like this poignant nostalgia about my own youth. But the music is so powerfully insinuating (and my memory of the great and tragic Jacqueline Du Pre, who became famous for her performances of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, is evoked when I hear anything by him) that it makes me enter that attitude whether I own it or not.
That same power of music – a power intensified by human voices – took possession of me much more happily in the Vaughn Williams piece, whose words are drawn from Walt Whitman’s spirited, ever-youthful, and optimistic poetry. Behold, the sea itself, the massed voices thundered at the start, and, in the waves of sounds they went on to make, one felt the power and mystery not merely of the sea but of the earth altogether.
The words and music made us all out to be heroic mariners navigating perilous waters in a ship whose flag is
A spiritual woven signal for all nations, emblem of man elate above death…
This was great art doing what great art does: Grounding us in the enigmatic realities of mortal life and at the same time transcending them, taking us somewhere “elate” above them. After all the sea-going, “Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name, / The true son of God shall come singing his songs.”
Poets remind us that we have a brave and mystery-sailing spirit within us; they give that spirit words and music.
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At the end of the Ralph Vaughan Williams piece, the poet rejects grand abstractions:
Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death…
But he is ecstatic at the thought of his “actual me.”
But that I, turning, call to thee, O Soul, that actual me
And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
And fillest, swellest full the vastness of Space.
… isn’t quite so tolerant of new stuff when it comes to his womenfolk. Professor Youssif Omar’s niece, a fourteen year old student at a local high school, apparently decided to experiment with what life without the hijab would be like – I mean, this is America, you get to decide… Or can you decide if you’re fourteen?
Haha, I guess not, because when Uncle Youssif saw her unveiled at her school he grabbed her by the hair, dragged her to his car, and beat the crap out of her.
Among his skills on his Linked In page (a page that lists a staggering number of advanced degrees in a wide variety of fields), Omar features teamwork, and ain’t it the truth. When it comes to keeping the family “team” in working order, Omar goes above and beyond the call of duty. Risks arrest.
I mean, he has been arrested. For felony child abuse. Plenty of time to read through those creative writing entries when he’s in jail.
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UPDATE: Missouri disavows any connection.
Here’s a professor at UC Chapel Hill who thinks that his institution having wasted ten million dollars on its latest sports scandal is impressive.
Over $5 million went to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. The folks at Skadden, Arps got a couple million more. We paid $1.3 million to Bond, Schoeneck & King; another million to Baker, Tilly. Almost double that amount went to Edelman, a giant PR outfit, offering expertise on “corporate reputation management.” FleishmanHillard raked in almost $400,000. You’d think the Old Well had relocated to Madison Avenue.
Yadda yadda. It’s like Dr Evil threatening to “hold the world ransom for… one MILLion dollars!” These are pathetic sums.
Penn State has so far paid out $93 million in its sports scandal. Talk to me when you’ve hit fifty mill.
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UD thanks John.
Some American universities have become little other than full football stadiums; others, like the University of Hawaii, take the opposite approach: empty.
Think of someone who buys a Hummer and spends tens of thousands of dollars a day filling its tank — only there’s something wrong with the tank, and no matter how much money the Hummer owner spends on fuel, the tank is always totally empty. At UH, the football stadium’s capacity is maintained at empty through vast punishing institutional expenditures (“dismal academic reputation”).
The school’s latest plan to keep the stadium doors open to no one is to double student athletic fees.
Although the fools in flower shirts who run UH see nothing wrong with this picture, students are upset. As this post’s headline, taken from the school newspaper, suggests, students have run the numbers and correctly concluded that the university cannot afford to field a team and therefore “UH needs to close the financial black hole that is football.”
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The problem is that UH is one of those schools about which UD has written for years on this blog. The flower shirt people cannot think of anything else to do. A university is a football team or it is nothing. It doesn’t matter if its team is nothing – an entity that gathers at an empty stadium a few times a year to throw a ball. That thing – that empty team in an empty stadium – is the university.
Since nothing comes of nothing, students are forced to be the something that keeps paying to top up the tank.
More comfortable down below in that thick stew pouring into the Gare St. Lazare, the whores in the doorways, seltzer bottles on every table; a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters. Nothing better, between five and seven than to be pushed around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to move along with the tide and everything whirling in your brain. A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend. Each morning the dreary walk to the American Express, and each morning the inevitable answer from the clerk. Dashing here and there like a bedbug, gathering butts now and then, sometimes furtively, sometimes brazenly; sitting down on a bench and squeezing my guts to stop the gnawing, or walking through the Jardin des Tuileries and getting an erection looking at the dumb statues. Or wandering along the Seine at night, wandering and wandering, and going mad with the beauty of it, the trees leaning to, the broken images in the water, the rush of the current under the bloody lights of the bridges, the women sleeping in doorways, sleeping on newspapers, sleeping in the rain; everywhere the musty porches of the cathedrals and beggars and lice and old hags full of St. Vitus’ dance; pushcarts stacked up like wine barrels in the side streets, the smell of berries in the market-place and the old church surrounded with vegetables and blue arc lights, the gutters slippery with garbage and women in satin pumps staggering through the filth and vermin at the end of an all-night souse. The Place St. Sulpice, so quiet and deserted, where toward midnight there came every night the woman with the busted umbrella and the crazy veil; every night she slept there on a bench under her torn umbrella, the ribs hanging down, her dress turning green, her bony fingers and the odor of decay oozing from her body; and in the morning I’d be sitting there myself, taking a quiet snooze in the sunshine, cursing the goddamned pigeons gathering up the crumbs everywhere. St. Sulpice! The fat belfries, the garish posters over the door, the candles flaming inside. The Square so beloved of Anatole France, with that drone and buzz from the altar, the splash of the fountain, the pigeons cooing, the crumbs disappearing like magic and only a dull rumbling in the hollow of the guts. Here I would sit day after day thinking of Germaine and that dirty little street near the Bastille where she lived, and that buzz-buzz going on behind the altar, the buses whizzing by, the sun beating down into the asphalt and the asphalt working into me and Germaine, into the asphalt and all Paris in the big fat belfries.
Henry Miller, The Tropic of Cancer, 1934.
All the life flowing through that city. Captured by a hungry American in love.
We are thankful that here in America, even our homeless have arsenals.
They may be down, but they’re not out. Of ammunition.
America’s rapeabilliest campus prayed for a president able to deflect relentless incoming sexual assault claims, and God gave it the perfectly named Thrasher — a man willing to spend his twilight years (he’s in his seventies) thrashing back and forth like Bonnie and Clyde in their 1934 Ford Model 730 Deluxe Sedan as one sex-bullet after another smacks him pow right in the kisser.
As they pass the turkey, students, faculty, administration and alumni can reflect with gratitude on the way Thrasher’s long career as a Florida pol and lobbyist, er, seasoned him for the curious job of chief academic officer at a school with virtually no academics and virtually non-stop rape claims.
FSU is the star of a new film; it’s featured in big splashy New York Times articles; and just this morning, as FSU football fans begin to dig in to the bird, news outlets all the country are headlining the just-released content of court papers that detail special treatment for football players accused of rape, the fear of retaliation on the part of victims, and… you know … just the whole stinky stewpot of a school that wants everyone to shut the fuck up so it can watch men bash each others’ heads in.
And sure – things are closing in on FSU. Even the DOE is after them for mishandling the assault claims. But did Bonnie and Clyde give up? Did they run and hide and try to live respectable lives? No! They were what they were unto the breach! Sic Semper FSU and amen!
… but apparently Korean academia’s project to re-wrap hundreds of book covers is a homegrown effort.
[200 Korean] professors, mostly in science and engineering majors, are accused of publishing others’ works under their own names by simply changing the book covers to boost their academic profiles ahead of assessments for rehiring.
UD‘s always complaining about how boringly uniform the act of plagiarism is, but HEY. New one on me.
Yet is it even right to call this innovation plagiarism? Plagiarism involves at least glancing contact with, and often manipulation of, the writing of other people. In this scheme, carried out with the full cooperation of publishers, and in many cases with the original authors’ cooperation (publishers got to re-market “new” books; authors allegedly got kickbacks), you simply supply your name to the publisher, who redesigns the cover with you listed as the author. This looks more like the decorative arts.
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Plenty of scope here for puns in any case. Korean publishers offer non-binding contracts… Psychoanalytic volumes? Shrink-wrapped… The wit of Seoul is brevity…
A Baltimore school name of Towson
Was recently found to be housin’
Both Freundel and Mead
Who sure seem to need
Lots of videotape for arousin’
LSU’s football program is rich as all get-out; whatever’s left of the university it’s sort of attached to is totally up shit’s delta.
So what to do with the shabby close to bankrupt nothing that used to be a university? The bunch of rags dangling off the quarterback’s Platinum Dazzle thigh? Team boosters at LSU are about to find seventeen million dollars to buy out a coach they don’t like, but money for a … school?
This guy’s panicking because after all “there is no football team without a functioning Louisiana State University… [T]here is no LSU Athletics without Louisiana State University.” You gotta keep the school at least on life support to keep the football team alive. Don’t you?
Not really. Think of the evolution of LSU in the following way. You know how in the first Alien film the alien baby needed John Hurt’s body in order to gestate? That’s LSU football. Needed a nice warm university to grow in, but now it’s all grown up and its host has no reason to live anymore.
There are plenty of ghost universities with thriving football teams, and UD has often named them on this blog. Auburn.* Clemson. Nebraska. Their spectral story is also LSU’s. Accept it, says UD.
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Some [Auburn] purchases … were optional, like two new twin-engine jets: a six-seat 2008 Cessna Citation CJ2+ ($6.4 million) and a seven-seat 2009 Cessna Citation CJ3 ($7.8 million), each bearing a blue and orange “AU” insignia on its tail.
The jets are used primarily by coaches to criss-cross the country meeting with recruits, contributing to Auburn’s recruiting costs nearly doubling in a decade, from $1.6 million to $2.7 million.
[Its] new video board, the largest in college sports, was also optional. Auburn has a history of trend-setting electronics displays. In 2007, it installed the first high-definition video board in the SEC, a $2.9 million purchase Athletic Director Jacobs decided was obsolete eight years later.
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UD thanks John.