I’m sure next season will be much, much better.
And if it’s not, fire the latest coach and coordinators and hire another new batch.
Keep doing this long enough, and you’re gonna start to win!
The school’s governing body for athletics, the University Athletics Committee, voted in favor of a $12.5 million budget increase from the $91.9 million in 2012-13, a number the department actually exceeded by $4.2 million due largely to capital projects such as new track, softball and soccer complexes. Most notable in the new budget: projected football expenses are up 32.6 percent, from about $9.5 million last year to $12.6 million for ’13-14.
Roughly $2.4 million of that $3.1 million increase is to cover the higher salaries of the new football staff. Just counting head coach Mark Stoops and his two coordinators, that trio makes a combined $874,000 a year more than predecessor Joker Phillips and his coordinators. At Tuesday’s meeting, athletic director Mitch Barnhart said those numbers reflect the school’s strong commitment to a football program that last year suffered through a 2-10 season before firing Phillips.
And wow. As always, a big-time athletics program benefits the university academically. UK’s US News and World Report ranking has gone from 112 in 2007 to 125 today. With those numbers, no wonder UK is devoting hugely increased resources to sports.
University of Richmond luminary and all-around first-rate researcher, teacher, and human being Rick Mayes has proposed that the university end its football program.
What? What? Are you fucking kidding me?
Well, you know, this sort of thing will happen when you choose a reflective, principled person to be your faculty athletics representative. That and that alone is where UR went wrong. The faculty athletics representative is supposed to be an old jock desperate for free game tickets and occasional face time with the players. Rick Mayes is all wrong for faculty athletics representative.
Gory details, from his recent email to faculty:
I have come to the conclusion that it’s hard-to-impossible to consistently make DI-level sports conform and submit to the primary institutional focus on academics, because there’s just too much money and ambition involved… [A]fter three years of watching and studying sports up close, I believe UR’s long-term academic interests lie with D3-level sports and football being phased out over time due to legal, liability, and safety reasons. [Given the likelihood of concussion lawsuits,] this big-team sport and significant financial commitment could conceivably become extinct within the next two to three decades. Might it not be desirable to get out ahead of that potential outcome for the sake of our student athletes’ health and our institution’s financial long-term interests, not to mention our consciences?
Consciences the guy is talking about! And jeez – Watch his Last Lecture! He’s all about Dietrich Bonhoffer and shit! Who appointed this character??
Still – don’t sweat it. UR’s prez and athletic director and everybody else has come down on Mayes like a ton of offensive linemen. Of course we’re keepin’ football! Are you kidding me? Pay no attention to the man behind the conscience.
The world’s poster child for academic conflict of interest will soon arrive on your shores to grant his blessing to your new research center! You went right to the very top – the US of A’s own Charles Nemeroff – for the inaugural lecture. Perennial object of United States Senate interest because of his fascinating use of taxpayer money, Nemeroff promises to bring to you Brits, as you set out on your own research programs, the same … fascinating ethos he has brought to his own… peripatetic career.
As an American, I can’t hide my pride in the way England, once our ruler, has now summoned one of us for inspiration and advice on how best to pursue scientific endeavors.
Naturally, given Nemeroff’s record, there are nay-sayers at your institute.
Derek Summerfield, honorary senior lecturer at the Institute, wrote in the BMJ, formerly called the British Medical Journal, last week that the Institute of Psychiatry’s lauding of Professor [Charles] Nemeroff as “one of the world’s leading experts” showed how psychiatric academe “sails blithely on as if such revelations beg no broader questions about its associations and supposed scientific independence.”
Yes, sail blithely on! You have much to learn from Charles Nemeroff about grantsmanship. Good show!
Veteran UD readers know of her fascination with nihilism nada nothingness (“Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”) (“No-one is anything.“). She is particularly fascinated by the very expensive nothingness of certain American universities.
In the comment I’ve quoted in the headline to this post, a citizen of North Carolina grapples with the fact that her taxes pay for the University of North Carolina, a location she’s watching shrink into nothing. Entire instructorless, contentless, and evaluationless departments! By definition nothing should cost nothing. It’s an unimpeachable tautology: Nothing comes from nothing. Yet here she’s dishing out dough to underwrite nada nada nada. She feels like an idiot, a fool, a dupe. Shouldn’t a university be… something? Yet here’s the fuck-up ex-chancellor of UNC proclaiming that the most important job of the school’s leader, the thing that takes up virtually all of his time, is sports — sports, which has nothing to do with academics, and the ceaseless scandals that sports generates – the nothingness classes, the $500,000 to coach university leaders in scandal-talk… Where, she wonders, did the university go?
Here it is.
Here’s her university – one
robed figure clinging to the
book that’s survived
the nothingness.
Expect, in a few years,
to see this image on the
cover of UNC’s course catalog.
… a sample of his great prose, and some words about why it’s great.
This is from Herzog, the book UD considers by far his best.
Moses Herzog, an urban American intellectual in his forties, is having a slow-motion nervous breakdown as his personal life falls apart. Here he’s in Chicago on a hot day, getting into his car to take his young daughter (who lives with his about-to-be-ex-wife and the man with whom she was unfaithful to Herzog) to visit an aquarium.
He had an extraordinary number of keys, by now, and must organize them better in his pockets. There were his New York house keys, the key Ramona had given him, the Faculty Men’s Lounge key from the university, and the key to Asphalter’s apartment, as well as several Ludeyville keys. “You must sit in the back seat, honey. Creep in now, and pull down your dress because the plastic is very hot.” The air from the west was drier than the east air. Herzog’s sharp senses detected the difference. In these days of near-delerium and wide-ranging disordered thought, deeper currents of feeling had heightened his perceptions, or made him instill something of his own into his surroundings. As though he painted them with moisture and color taken from his own mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals. In this mingled way, therefore, he was aware of Chicago, familiar ground to him for more than thirty years. And out of its elements, by this peculiar art of his own organs, he created his version of it. Where the thick walls and buckled slabs of pavement in the Negro slums exhaled their bad smells. Farther west, the industries; the sluggish South Branch, dense with sewage and glittering with a crust of golden slime; the Stockyards, deserted; the tall red slaughterhouses in lonely decay; and then a faintly buzzing dullness of bungalows and scrawny parks; and vast shopping centers; and the cemeteries after these – Waldheim, with its graves for Herzogs past and present; the Forest Preserves for riding parties; Croatian picnics, lovers’ lanes, horrible murders; airports; quarries; and, last of all, cornfields. And with this, infinite forms of activity – Reality. Moses had to see reality. Perhaps he was somewhat spared from it so that he might see it better, not fall asleep in its thick embrace. Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line, his business. Vigilance. If he borrowed time to take his tiny daughter to see the fishes he would find a way to make it up to the vigilance-fund. This day was just like – he braced himself and faced it – like the day of Father’ Herzog’s funeral. Then too, it was flowering weather – roses, magnolias. Moses, the night before, had cried, slept, the air was wickedly perfumed; he had had luxuriant dreams, painful, evil, and rich, interrupted by the rare ecstasy of nocturnal emission – how death dangles freedom before the enslaved instincts: the pitiful sons of Adam whose minds and bodies must answer strange signals. Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas.
Let’s analyze this paragraph. My comments are in parenthesis, in blue.
He had an extraordinary number of keys, by now, and must organize them better in his pockets. [Ends on his strongest word – pockets – and a word tonally at odds with the other words in the sentence. It kind of pops out sharply – pockets – at the end of a sentence that has been mainly about mushy words. This little wake-up, this little satori, at the end of the sentence, rouses us for the next sentence, subliminally leads us to expect an intensification or deepening or emotionalizing of the idea of personal disorder. The keys, we must be led to understand – but led at the same time as Herzog himself is led to understand, since it’s the motion of his consciousness moving unsteadily toward difficult truths that we’re following in real time – symbolize Herzog’s inner deterioration, his having lost the key to existence. We must grasp this subtly, incompletely, obliquely, as a particularly defensive and clotted human consciousness grasps it. Note, then, how his prose will accomplish this feat.] There were his New York house keys, the key Ramona had given him, the Faculty Men’s Lounge key from the university, and the key to Asphalter’s apartment, as well as several Ludeyville keys. [Attempting to organize himself mentally, Herzog first simply lists the keys and their provenances; this is a familiar mental game we all play, pulling our thoughts together by identifying things, listing things. Formally, it’s also a clever move, since this list serves as a kind of summary of the plot so far, reminding the readers about the scenes and characters we’ve encountered.] “You must sit in the back seat, honey. Creep in now, and pull down your dress because the plastic is very hot.” [Bellow will interrupt his stream of consciousness with the intrusive facts of immediate social reality. His character has not fallen so far that he’s psychotic, unable to register and assimilate external event. Yet the narrative back and forth between long involved paragraphs of thought, memory, reasoning, and sudden brief flashes from the outside world conveys the difficulty Herzog’s having negotiating his oppressed and trying-to-puzzle-it-out consciousness and the simple fact of other people and a daily social life.] The air from the west was drier than the east air. [Note that this very simple, essentially monosyllabic sentence will be followed by a series of more and more complex sentences as Herzog gradually transitions from the outer world – he has just said something to his daughter – to his much more engrossing inner world.] Herzog’s sharp senses detected the difference. [All of Bellow’s books are about the effort to intensify consciousness, to apprehend the truth of the natural, the human, and the divine. He has endowed Herzog with the same hypersensitive awareness he gives most of his protagonists, an awareness at once the glory of humanity – our insight and lucidity are amazing, our distinguishing power – and – at least for people like Herzog – our doom. For Herzog is debilitatingly self-conscious, a comic figure asking for more illumination than his human mind can yield. His wife in fact has left him for an idiot, but a big happy lusty idiot.] In these days of near-delerium and wide-ranging disordered thought, deeper currents of feeling had heightened his perceptions, or made him instill something of his own into his surroundings. [Note by the way the indirect discourse technique Bellow has adopted here. We’re clearly in the mind of Herzog, but things are being rendered in third-person. But notice also, later in this passage, that we will slip out of third into first-person. Bellow learned this technique – and so much else – from James Joyce’s Ulysses. He even got his hero’s name – Moses Herzog – from a minor character in Ulysses. Moving always from third to first back to third, etc., is a way of registering not only our restless consciousness, but the way we shift from regarding ourselves with a certain neutral objectivity to often simply being enmeshed in a direct and not particularly reflective way in the ongoing business of being us. And this idea of instilling oneself into one’s surroundings — isn’t that the way we perceive and encounter and lend meaning to the world? We interpret it as a projection of our consciousness; we shade each external object with our particular internal emotional condition, our inner coloration. Thus, for instance, Wallace Stevens in “Sunday Morning” talks about passions of rain.] As though he painted them with moisture and color taken from his own mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals. [This bizarre sentence and idea is one mark of the great writer. It has an almost repellent anatomical literalness, a grotesque and off-putting oddness. And yet this sentence has an important function in the evolving consciousness of this passage, moving us yet closer to the disordered, suffering, vulnerable existential state of Herzog. He is becoming naked in this passage, exposed, just as his mental illness, if you will, involves the destruction of his privacy, defenses, self-control, self-respect. He has been laid bare by misfortune. It’s like Prufrock:
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall…
When very bad things happen to you, suddenly everyone can see you. It’s one of the many indignities of misfortune: There it is in all its glory for the world to see: Your weakness, your failure.]
In this mingled way, therefore, he was aware of Chicago, [Note that words like extraordinary and therefore mark what’s left of Herzog’s intellectual orientation. His impressive reasoning mind is being overtaken by emotional chaos, but this language marks his effort to keep analytical dispassion alive. Thus we remain in the third-person for this; only when he’s at his most naked will Herzog move into first-person.] familiar ground to him for more than thirty years. And out of its elements, by this peculiar art of his own organs, he created his version of it. [Creating your version of the world is knowing it the only way we can know it; it is marking it with our consciousness in the way a dog marks his territory, makes it his.] Where the thick walls and buckled slabs of pavement in the Negro slums exhaled their bad smells. [Note that assonance: walls/buckled/slabs/slums/exhaled/smells. Notice buckled and slums. Notice slabs/slums/smells. All of it gives poetry, of all things, to this sort of description, and thereby – since it is Herzog’s poetry – gives his consciousness individuality, romance.] Farther west, the industries; the sluggish South Branch, dense with sewage and glittering with a crust of golden slime; the Stockyards, deserted; the tall red slaughterhouses in lonely decay; and then a faintly buzzing dullness of bungalows and scrawny parks; and vast shopping centers; and the cemeteries after these – Waldheim, with its graves for Herzogs past and present; the Forest Preserves for riding parties; Croatian picnics, lovers’ lanes, horrible murders; airports; quarries; and, last of all, cornfields. [You see how we’ve gone from that earlier short monosyllabic sentence to this massive list, this amazing and still-romantic rendering of Chicago? And see how he’s kept his degraded/glorious contradiction going? Glittering, golden, vast, lovers… We could take these words and make this place a Wordsworthian delight. But also sluggish – see how sluggish picks up and extends the slabs/slums/smells series? – and crust, decay, scrawny, murders… See too how subtly Herzog personalizes this passage, reminding the reader of his particular losses and the way they mark the city’s land – the graves of Herzogs. Notice above all at this point how much Bellow is juggling: The immediate present of his daughter, the drive to the aquarium; his rageful, troubled consciousness; his analytical, truth-seeking consciousness; his personal coloration/interpretation of the city and larger world; his reckoning with his past and with death…] And with this, infinite forms of activity – Reality. Moses had to see reality. [By now, you’re picking up on Bellow’s constant poetic shaping of his language: all of those short i’s: with, this, infinite, activity, reality.] Perhaps he was somewhat spared from it so that he might see it better, not fall asleep in its thick embrace. [A recurrent theme in Herzog is the character’s privileged American immunity from real suffering — physical suffering, the suffering of poverty, the sort of suffering so comprehensive as to make it impossible to take that analytical step backward and see reality.] Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line, his business. [I think we are meant to smile at this as a species of delusion, arrogance. Bellow always described Herzog as a comic send-up of intellectual arrogance. Here we have a man, Moses Herzog, exceptionally intellectually gifted and yet living one of the stupidest lives imaginable. His big brain isn’t doing him any good. Arguably it’s making things worse.] Vigilance. If he borrowed time to take his tiny daughter to see the fishes he would find a way to make it up to the vigilance-fund. [Vigilance-fund signals the truth of what I just wrote. This is Herzog self-aware enough to satirize his endeavor.] This day was just like – he braced himself and faced it – like the day of Father’ Herzog’s funeral. [Okay and note: No paragraph break as we switch to this family theme. This is stream of consciousness. Also, it’s not as if we haven’t been prepared for what will now be a memory of and meditation on death, and the weird relationship of the living to the dead. Already his family cemetery has been mentioned.] Then too, it was flowering weather – roses, magnolias. [Herzog heads into his memory of the day of his father’s funeral. Like everyone, he moves, consciousness-wise, via associations. The particular spring weather this day has prompted thoughts of the same weather that day. And again the poetry: roses, magnolias. To his other conflicts in this passage we can add the conflict of death on a day of intense flowering life.] Moses, the night before, had cried, slept, the air was wickedly perfumed; he had had luxuriant dreams, painful, evil, and rich, interrupted by the rare ecstasy of nocturnal emission – how death dangles freedom before the enslaved instincts: the pitiful sons of Adam whose minds and bodies must answer strange signals. Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas. [Cool, huh? Start with the end: Of course now we get one of our forays into first person: Most of MY life… Having really stripped himself as this passage concludes, Herzog has nowhere else to go but to the “pitiful” fact of his own particular fleshly, enslaved self. This passage has taken us from the heights of rational consideration of the world to the nighttime depths of one vulnerable infantilized weeping utterly overcome slob. The air was wickedly perfumed; his dreams were evil. The obscene grotesquerie of his father’s death inspiring in Herzog not noble philosophical despair but ecstatic sexual liberation so strong as to inspire a wet dream — what are we to do with this? These are incoherent ideas, incoherent feelings – one’s beloved father’s death as a seductive spectacle of freedom? – and then this absurd final sentence, written as if part of a grant application:
Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas.
So – nothing new here. Like all of us, Herzog is torn between instinct and reason, his animal and higher nature. This passage puts us right into the seriousness, pathos and comedy of that grappling. It reminds us (the dreams, the nocturnal emission) just how enslaved our instincts are, and how elusive the keys (you remember the keys) to ourselves and to the world.]
When you get a wild and crazy sentence like this, a truly mad mix of metaphors, you perceive the intriguing connection between lazy cliche and hyperactive metaphor. Let’s first look at this remarkable sentence more closely. I’ll highlight its images.
Though skyrocketing tuitions and a growing anti-government tide are seemingly swimming against traditional university education, the true educational bubble forming is in the online space.
We set out here with skyrockets in flight. The rockets are up in the air with a tide. Together the rocket and the tide appear to be swimming. The actual mixed water and air action, however, is a space bubble.
Are you trying to picture this? To make the picture make sense? That tends to be how we read – we’re not only reading for an argument; we’re enriching our sense of the emotional and intellectual meaning of the writer’s claims by assimilating his various figures into our reactions, by allowing his images to ground and dramatize what might otherwise be mere abstract statement. But excess and confused figures – coupled here with modifier-madness (skyrocketing, growing, seemingly, traditional, true, online – no noun is left unaccosted) – just produce a confused mess. They make thinking harder, not simpler. And they tend to happen when your argument is little more than a string of cliches. Here are some, from this Forbes piece.
… [C]ollege students tune out during their four years on campus; that, or they memorize what’s needed to get As on the tests… [T]eens go to college with an eye on a fun four years, after which they hope the school they attend will open doors for a good job… [W]hat’s learned in college is irrelevant to what’s done in the real world. … [C]ollege is not about learning much as we might wish it were… [W]hen parents spend a fortune on their children’s schooling they’re not buying education; rather they’re buying the ‘right’ friends for them, the right contacts for the future, access to the right husbands and wives, not to mention buying their own (“Our son goes to Williams College”) status. …Parents and kids … aren’t buying education despite their protests to the contrary. Going to college is a status thing, not a learning thing. Kids go to college for the experience, not for what’s taught.
Note how a weak argument full of overstatement relies on a repeated pounding of the reader by means of cliche. It should not surprise us when a robotic redundancy insisting that American university education represents status obsessives and their bad seed eventually produces nutty sentences like this one.
The University of Hawaii has it all; and its last president just gave up – years before her contract’s end – in the face of it. Now UH’s clueless trustees will spend months and lots of money trying to come up with an interim president and then a (cough) non-interim one…
A common theme at Thursday’s meeting was that the university needs to return its attention to students.
Now there’s an idea!
One trustee pointed to “abysmal graduation rates.” Enrollment’s declining on virtually all campuses. Over the last eleven years, tuition has gone up 141%. Much of the money seems to have gone to administrators.
Regent Jeffrey Acido, the board’s sole student member, also stressed that the university lacks a culture in which students feel committed to the school and its mission.
Now a Ph.D. student in his 10th year at UH, Acido said that he’s regularly had professors tell him to leave the university because of Hawaii’s dismal job prospects or because he has greater academic opportunities elsewhere.
“It kind of hurts because I believe in this institution, but (the university needs) to cultivate a culture in which you breed amazing students with faculty that encourage you to stay and not leave,” he said.
He recalled visiting campuses such as the University of California at Berkeley or Harvard, campuses at which he felt that “culture of commitment.”
“But I don’t stand toe to toe with them,” he said. “That culture has to expand. That culture has to multiply.”
It’s odd that Acido has been hanging around UH for ten years; but put that aside. He has detected the problem, the fundamental cause of all the UH embarrassments UD has chronicled on this blog. (Put Hawaii in my search engine for details.) But what he’s calling for – a setting of intellectual seriousness – is unlikely to emerge at UH. Hawaii’s one of those states – like Nevada, Montana, and South Carolina – with a toxic mix of anti-intellectualism and corruption. To make matters worse for Hawaii, it is, like Alaska (another state with terrible universities), much too far from the mainland for any of us to pay attention or care. Hawaii is doomed – university-wise – and would therefore do best to appoint a total insider its next president. Someone who will leave it alone to continue stewing in its own juices.
… but their tendency toward insularity and self-regard is easy to satirize. By definition, they must be small lest admission cease to be an honor; but this very smallness – and the always somewhat obscure (and to some extent corruptible) business of how one gets in – represents a danger.
Todd Wallack, an enterprising Boston Globe reporter, broke the story of Lesley Cohen Berlowitz’s apparent fake credentials, as well as her very real obscene salary and perks as head of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She handles a tiny staff and budget and makes more than most university presidents.
Now the Massachusetts attorney general is looking into the matter (a law firm is already on the case), and of course I’ve already talked about the hydra-headed nature of almost all organizations — even small ones. So we can expect a Berlowitz blow-out pretty soon, in which rumors about her bullying of staff, use of a limo for the short trip between the AAAS and her apartment, etc., etc., are confirmed…
Looking ahead, we can also see that the AAAS will go from invisible (Les UD’s own a house fifty yards from the AAAS and knew virtually nothing about it) to notorious in the public eye. Notorious and ridiculous.
Nice ambiguity there, huh? To what does “they,” in Joe Nocera’s sentence refer? The teams or the universities?
I guess he means it to refer to the teams; but, if so, should he not at least have reversed the order – between the universities and the teams, and stop pretending they have any ‘educational’ value (and why put educational in quotation marks?)? Nocera presumably believes some universities have either educational or ‘educational’ value…
Consider too the content of his claim. Nocera’s one of many writers who, faced with the superscummy world big-time athletics has brought to America’s universities, urges that we “create some real separation” between athletics and universities.
Easy to say, Joe. What the fuck, pray tell, might you mean? When two people who can’t stand each other but find themselves married decide to really deal with that, they separate. Real separation means you live in different places and have little to nothing to do with one another. But I doubt Joe has in mind this clean a break.
I mean, plenty of people are calling for universities whose campuses are routinely trashed — literally and figuratively — by their sports programs to spin them off, to have a merely symbolic association with a local professional team that continues to carry the name of the university. That’s one way to go. But there are many more people, like Nocera, who seem to think that universities and big-time sports can be separated and yet reconciled, can have broken up and still live together under the same roof.
There are many reasons why this is impossible, prominent among them the simple dynamism of the phenomenon itself: Every year, unstoppably, scandals get more lurid, more expensive, more absolutely disgusting. Every year, coaches and players get more out of control, gain more power. Every year, the shreds of academic integrity these schools have managed to maintain shred yet more. Every year, more and more classes are cancelled to make way for games and for the dictates of the media conglomerates that now run the university show. Etc. Nocera’s column happens to be about university presidents destroyed by their athletic programs, but that’s only one of countless corruptions intrinsic to the decision to import professional sports — whose even more repulsive scandals (the latest being baseball boys and their steroids) Americans really seem to get off on — to universities. So you can put the smell over there, as it were, but it’s always going to work its way deep into your nostrils.
And I’m afraid absolute separation won’t fly either. I mean the idea of spinning off the teams, professionalizing them, but keeping University of Georgia in their name. Let me explain why.
Think of alum fandom as a delicate and nuanced perfume. It has a note of nostalgia, a bouquet of beer, a hint of hazing… studded about with the scent of sorority and the fragrance of frat. Alum fans are connected to their team through memories of sadistic initiation rituals, drunken stumbles into lakes, and other cherished keepsakes. Pack up the team and send it across town and you rip those memories from their moorings. Won’t work.
