Denmark, arguably Europe’s most humane and progressive country, has understood where human rights lie in the burqa debate, and has acted on this understanding. As is virtually always the case, the vote in favor of the ban wasn’t even close. And as to popular sentiment!!

Indeed, UD begins to think that the battle for the hearts and minds of compassionate democrats has clearly already been won; it is the benighted elites, who can always, on these occasions, be counted on to tut-tut about religion (the burqa has nothing to do with religion) and freedom (if you can keep your eye trained on a woman in a burqa and keep whistling about freedom, your next stop is corrective surgery) who need help. As one democracy after another bans the burqa, it’s pretty clear which position is on the side of history.

Rather than passively responding to every ban with the same boilerplate about how great it is that women can freely express their right to full shrouding, Amnesty International should join that cadre of international businessmen (where are the women?) who pledge to pay the fines women are racking up all over Europe for continuing illegally to entomb themselves.

… interviewed UD in a hotel room during a New York City MLA convention; they then invited her to spend three days in LA – she gave a paper, walked around the cool campus, got taken out to cool LA restaurants, and left the city feeling extremely good about USC.

She was thrilled to get a job offer a few days later, but ultimately decided she was more of an east coaster.

UD recalled all of this when reading an opinion piece by Braudy about the resignation of USC’s benighted president, Max Nikias. He left under the impossible pressure of multiple very big sex and drug scandals, and he really had to leave. But Leo makes the important point that despite the awful scandals on his watch, Nikias did a huge amount of good for the school.

When Nikias became provost in 2005, one of his first acts was to institute Visions and Voices, an arts and humanities program that is free to all students, bringing writers, actors, dancers and other prominent artists to campus to create a vibrant nighttime activity rather than the commuter wasteland that had existed before.

… More than 100 endowed faculty chairs and 20 new research centers were established under Nikias’ leadership and with the funds he raised. The number of residential colleges, where students can fruitfully interact with faculty, graduate students and each other, increased from one to 15. Older campus buildings were renovated and new ones added, including the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, and the Iovine and Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation. The campus itself has been beautified with more than a thousand new trees as well as numerous places for students and faculty to sit, have coffee and converse.

And if you are in search of an ethical as well as a bricks-and-mortar legacy, consider his enormous expansion of the diversity of USC’s community of scholars, and especially his strong support of first-generation students, students from foster families and DACA students.

The USC student body now is drawn from all 50 states and 129 countries. Sixteen percent of the incoming freshman class will be the first in their families to attend college; about a quarter are underrepresented minorities. Two-thirds of all USC students receive financial aid, which has increased almost 80% under Nikias, from $187 million to $325 million — the biggest financial aid pool in America. Very few “spoiled children” here.

Nor is USC any longer the University of Second Choice. The university is rated 15th nationally by the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, and USC this year had 63,000 freshman applications.

Fabricating a fascinating heroic you is American as apple pie among all occupations, but this is University Diaries, so we follow in particular academics who make themselves out to be far, far more than they are.

Always overcoming appalling upbringings, ever duking it out on the world’s dirtiest battlefields, ceaselessly being summoned to the offices of the great for advice, these inspirational disrupters are pleased to deliver pep talks to the rest of us as we model our paltrier lives on theirs.

But – and you know UD has been saying this for years – you will only successfully forge a longterm career as a total fraud if you follow a few simple rules.

#1: Do not fly too high. The mistake Sergio Garcia, bigshot chief of staff and senior vp at SUNY Upstate Medical University, made was becoming bigshot chief of etc. The higher your profile, the more likely the local press is going to want to get to know you. Certainly Garcia’s bet that a university which hired David Smith as president would blindly hire a sociopathic liar was completely correct; he overlooked the local press, however.

#2: Choose a really cheesy school. As a product of the local culture of Albany politics, SUNY could hardly be called non-cheesy. It remains however a mildly respectable sort of location – the sort of school where, once the fraudulence of high-ranking administrators is revealed, someone on campus will actually care. Place yourself instead in a school (Southern University; Chicago State University; almost any university in Saudi Arabia) where no one cares.

#3: If you must join a non-cheesy school, make sure you are besties with the school’s president. James Ramsey protected generations of fellow scammers at the University of Louisville; and though this is hardly a guarantee of serious longevity for you (since presidents like Ramsey may themselves have rather short shelf-lives), it’s your only hope. Like the protagonist of Black Widow, you are going to have to find out what the president loves – handball, hockey, humpback whale watching, whoring – and do that thing with him so as to create an unbreakable bond.

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

UD thanks Eric.

… among faculty and staff. At our most career-criminal schools, like the University of Louisville, the theft starts at the top (UL is currently trying to use the courts to claw back a few of the millions their last president apparently swiped) and moves briskly and efficiently through various heads of programs (who can forget Dean Felner?) and also into – no kidding – athletics.

UD has learned over the blogging years that the less legitimacy – hell, the less reality – something calling itself a university has, the more the random people hanging around this random place will steal. Schools with a graduation rate approaching zero percent – for instance, Southern University, with its beloved, larcenous band leader – and schools approaching zero enrollment, like Chicago State University, will be the national theft standouts.

Obviously, as the school tanks, very few conscientious people will want to have anything to do with trying to run it. You end up hiring rogues, hastening the process of decline.

Just hours before Richie Incognito, a violent paranoid wreck with a long history of mental illness, was hauled off to the hospital, this Vikings fan wrote:

[S]igning Incognito at least gives the Vikings more options at figuring out the best offensive line combination for next season… [H]e has seemingly turned a corner for the better …

Sho nuff. That’s what they said of Richie way back when he attended the University of Nebraska, and then during his … brief scholarship run at the University of Oregon.

Incognito fell into [a] mind-numbing pattern of offensive behavior, always washed away by the fact that someone was willing to ignore his troubles because he could physically handle himself on the football field. He’s been identified as a menace, suspended and dismissed. He’s been kicked out of games for fighting, accused of being dirty, and now, exposed as an apparent bully who shook down a younger teammate for $15,000 in milk money.

Universities and professional teams have been all over this profoundly damaged man for years and years and years, excited by the vicious bullying that is his sickness and their field advantage. Surely after Richie’s latest incarceration and observation for dangerous insanity he will be picked up by a team once again, and we can once again enjoy the spectacle of this volcano of a man erupting all over a town near you, as local reporter/boosters and coaching staff assure us he’s turned a corner.

UD leaves today for a vacation at the beach. Longtime readers know this almost always means Rehoboth, where over the years a passel of family and friends has also gathered.

Mr UD totally needs the break, his week in Warsaw having been way gratifying but exhausting.

Much to say about bizarre developments in academe, and I’ll say them from the beach. Ne quittez pas.

Photographed outside, in front
of one of UD‘s dragonfly pillows.

… Nebraska, which just loved him, and which still loves him. Like Johnny Manziel, Richie was lionized during his college years even though everyone could see he was all fucked up.

Jock schools can’t get enough of broad-shouldered psychotics cuz they make the best plays, and these schools are certainly not in the business of noticing that their hotly-recruited wrecks are sick in the head and in need of help.

And then it’s on to the pros for these shambling bohemoths, for more fun basket-case-voyeurism. We’ve even got Richie’s latest paranoid attack and collapse on tape.

… at the exhibit honoring his modernist designs.

*************
Photo: Joanna Soltan

Prolific, hilarious, shameless, truth-bearing.

Like his anti-hero, Mickey Sabbath, Roth had “the talent of a ruined man for recklessness, of a saboteur for subversion, even the talent of a lunatic — or a simulated lunatic — to overawe and horrify ordinary people.” Whether young and reckless like Ozzie Freedman, or old and reckless like Sabbath, Roth’s characters tend to age toward self-hatred at the settled spectacle of their all-too-human depravity, their daily hopeless struggle (no; they’ve given up the struggle) against sloth, filth, lust, despair, envy, violence…

Notice how, in the excerpt from Sabbath’s Theater, the name Dostoevsky recurs:

I had been reading O’Neill. I was reading Conrad. A guy on board had given me books. I was reading all that stuff and jerking myself off over it. Dostoyevsky — everybody going around with grudges and immense fury, rage like it was all put to music…

The unbearable lightness of being. Unmitigated rage at being. Writers put this to music. What was it I quoted in a post a few days ago? A writer’s comment on the suicide of musician Scott Hutchison:

Frightened Rabbit [Hutchison’s band] was virtuosic when it came to expressing the odd anxieties of an early, hungover morning, when a person wakes up and has to reckon with herself, again — the relentless ennui of being, and being, and being, and being.

The deeply hopeless lowness of the human can be played strictly for laughs – Portnoy’s Complaint, or Woody Allen’s “Notes from the Overfed” – but the best writers at their best (Kafka) throw in high and low for a real Alban Berg effect.

Roth located this modern leit-motif and settled there, teasing out variations on our vileness and our moment-by-moment reckoning with our vileness, a reckoning that grinds on without any Jesus to perceive and forgive and redeem.

Right now. Warsaw.

Mr UD: Far right.

On her way to her Uber, UD spied
a turtle in her pachysandra.

At Potomac Park, she bought tea
and coffee at this new Italian cafe,
stuffed her backpack with grapes,
Cheerios, toothpaste and dog treats
from Harris Teeter, walked briskly
around residential Potomac Park,
and then Ubered home.

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

UPDATE: UD‘s rather – uh –
informal garden turns out to be
a perfect spot for turtles.

Hungary goes down the tubes.

Daddy’s Guns. (Sing it.)

When people ask of me
What would you like to be,
Now that you’re not a kid any more?
I know just what to say,
I answer right away.
There’s just one thing
I’ve been wishing for.

I wanna take Daddy’s guns
I wanna take Daddy’s guns
That’s the most important thing to me.
Cuz when I get Daddy’s guns
When I get Daddy’s guns
I’ll blast the girls who aren’t nice to me.

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

Gunny, isn’t it?

Gunny. You’re a land that loves weapons
That’s a peculiar sign
Gunny. You give guns to your children.
Gunny, isn’t it?
Large, and gunny, and mine.

Bravo, Trudeau.