“[R]unning a multimillion-dollar enterprise of de facto minor league football and basketball teams that essentially serve as uniformed billboards has exceedingly little to do with the curation and advancement of human knowledge.”

I’m with this guy, but would go further. Along with the bogosity of amateurism, dispense with the bogosity of studentism. Universities would continue to have teams, but the teams would be autonomous of the university, made up of full-time professional athletes not yet old enough to enter the major leagues.

… this book.

Or, I mean, they should. Their university, after all, was dumb or corrupt enough to make Bernard Madoff, and his comrade in crime, Ezra Merkin, trustees of the school. The Markopolos book will help Yeshiva’s students understand how Madoff was able to turn their university into a laughingstock. It will help them understand how to avoid having that happen to their university in the future.

Unfortunately, far from dealing openly and honestly with its embroilment in Madoff, Yeshiva airbrushed him and Merkin from its history, hoping, I suppose, that no one would notice the positions of trust and authority these men held at that school for years.

It’s a shameful story, as Yeshiva alumni with integrity, like Andrew Sole, know.

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Here are many UD posts about Yeshiva University and Bernard Madoff.

Institutional history is different at different institutions. For some institutions, it means memories of beloved professors or emotional alumni reunions …

For Florida State, it means fond recollections of cheating scandals, and the millions of dollars the university spent unsuccessfully appealing associated NCAA sanctions. It means reflecting on years of corrupt trustees, and bringing to mind those local firms that specialize in declaring almost all of the athletes FSU sends to them learning disabled. And, as the title of this post suggests (it’s a comment made by an FSU booster), institutional memory at FSU means remembering how the university deals with its generations of criminal athletes.

This FSU person, for instance, can’t remember a first arrest being enough to throw anyone off the team; so although Nigel Carr has just been hauled in for having committed many illegal acts in the space of a few hours the other night, FSU sports fans seem pretty sure he’ll still be able to play.

Many of the players seem to cluster in the rather mysterious Humanities and General Studies field (UD has clicked around on the Drexel site, and can’t find a simple listing of courses for this major). These two guys, for instance, are HGS majors.

Whatever these two are learning, their major is clearly not educating them in some important basics.

Security cameras, for instance. They don’t seem to know about security cameras. Where cameras tend to be located. How they work.

I’ve had that phrase from James Taylor’s song Walking Man in my head all day. Because one thing or another from morn til night hasn’t been right.

I’ve been staying in a ‘thesdan hotel for a couple of days – electrical trouble in Garrett Park – and as I chatted on the phone this afternoon with Mr UD (the Civic Studies Institute at Tufts just ended; he’ll be back from Boston soon) I looked idly out of my fourth floor window at the Rockville Pike.

“That has got to be the ugliest black cloud I’ve ever seen,” I said to him as I caught sight of a fast-moving mass off to the left. Behind it churned thick gray clouds. “Wow.”

The moment we finished talking, the cloud swooped onto the Pike – it looked as though someone had suddenly released canisters of tear gas – and a frightening wind and rain storm came up.

The speed of the thing! In an instant it was something out of Hurricane Andrew — vast horizontal rains, trees bending all the way down, stunned traffic edging away from the street, lightning streaks, a long horrible howling sound…

Clang. The electricity in my room shut down.

Should I go to the lobby? What if the door’s key card is electrical? I wouldn’t be able to get back in. On the other hand, I felt vulnerable in my room.

I called the front desk. “Stay in your room,” the woman said.

The storm quickly passed; the sun came out. I sat by the window and read Hitch-22. But the electricity stayed off, and the heat of the room became uncomfortable.

The front desk had no idea when PEPCO would get to the hotel, but they knew that an immense area was without power.

I packed, got a cab, and took another hotel room – a place in downtown ‘thesda which does, for some reason, continue to have electricity.

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All of this is by way of explaining why you’ve not heard much from me today.

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Update: La Kid and her friend Maura will join me in my hotel room. Maura’s family’s house is without power.

The University of Louisiana at Monroe is about to lose its sports-mad president, and people like this woman, speaking at a public meeting about the school’s future, worry that ULM’s tendency, even under the current president, to spend more on academics than athletics will continue. It might even grow! You might get a new president who spends distinctly more on academics than athletics.

… Donna Cathey made an impassioned plea for support of the Warhawks’ sports programs. “The next president needs to understand the importance athletics plays in the role of the university. We spend a disproportionate amount of money on academics.”

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UD finds a sentence from this university’s welcome page strange.

Increased student enrollment, campus revitalization, avocation of online degree programs, and the expansion of the state’s only publicly supported College of Pharmacy, are just a few of the areas in which President Cofer has provided leadership during his tenure.

How do they mean avocation? They avocate online learning.

Avocate, essentially an obsolete word, means to “call off or away; to withdraw.”

Which is great, IMO, since online is a shitty way to learn.

But I suspect the University of Louisiana does not mean to say this.

Time to find out what it feels like to have sun on your face.

When Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe was found to have plagiarized parts of one of his books, he issued a self-aggrandizing apology (It happened because of a “well-meaning effort to write a book accessible to a lay audience.”) and suffered no consequences at Harvard. Indeed his colleagues rushed to his defense.

After Tribe got trapped the other day in a supermarket elevator for a few minutes, he announced that “They need to be publicly accountable.” No doubt he will sue.

Tribe has never been held accountable for stealing someone else’s work. He figured he could get away with it. His colleagues got angry at the journalists who discovered it.

Now, because he was inconvenienced for a few minutes, he’s pontificating about public accountability.

“Yes, it’s promotional, but it’s educational,” said Dr. Lawrence Glad, a Uniontown-area gynecologist who was hired as a speaker for three of the four drug companies last year and received $74,916, the third highest amount in southwestern Pennsylvania. “I think we have some critical skills for our patients beyond who bought my last bagel.”

Biz Journals

… about the syndicates that run football and basketball at American universities, defenders of the racket have been fighting back.

In this opinion piece, the writer argues that university football should break free of the NCAA altogether:

… Now before you think they will set up a wild, wild west operation, remember that university presidents will be figuring this out. They lose their jobs when the football program is out of control and brings harm to the school’s reputation.

Presidents lose their jobs (for which they are paid, say, $600,000, while the football coach is paid four million) when their team loses games because the president puts the school at a competitive disadvantage by trying to introduce financial and academic reforms. (“All this ugliness is allowed to happen, in part, because university presidents, so-called educators, have ceded control to coaches who are treated as deities and are accountable to no one.”)

Without the NCAA, this writer argues, each school will handle rule-breaking its own way. For instance:

[W]hen a backup offensive lineman on a championship team cheats on an online course, gets caught and is declared ineligible after the fact, that single player [won’t] cost his school numerous scholarships, years of rebuilding and possibly a national title… [It’s all just a] a few wayward teens and a couple unscrupulous agents…

Have to take issue with one, too.

Cheating, bar fights, football titles – it’s about teamwork. It’s not going to be just one guy. A university football player doesn’t walk into a bar by himself and beat the shit out of someone. His teammates are there to kick in the guy’s balls once he’s down.

The same principle applies to cheating, a group effort involving academic tutors distributing tests in advance or calling out answers to the players while they’re in the exam room together. Often the faculty is in on it. It takes a village.

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Despite our differences, I share the opinion writer’s contempt for the NCAA.

I just think the writer needs to give more thought to the perennial question of order vs anarchy.

Right now you’ve essentially got the Myanmar junta reining in the syndicates. State-sponsored violence, as well as corruption and repression are rampant, to be sure, but blood isn’t absolutely flowing in the streets.

Once you lose central control, rival gangs will go at it very hard for dominance, and UD fears that the university’s ethos of quiet deliberative thought may be imperilled.

Even? Especially.

UD‘s already noted the increasingly criminalized nature of the University of Miami – perhaps our only university able to go head to head, jail-time-wise, with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Anyone surprised that an ethics honcho at the University of Miami is going out of his way to argue that a man caught stealing tens of millions of dollars from trusting clients shouldn’t really have to go to jail for very long doesn’t know this university.

Probably doesn’t even know that in an effort to hide his criminal career and give himself the look of a serious person, a philanthropist, Lew Freeman, like Bernard Madoff (a Yeshiva trustee) and like many others before them, gave lots of his dirty money to a university – the University of Miami, in fact. The University of Miami law school, in fact. An ethics seminar at the University of Miami law school, in fact.

The prosecutor said Freeman’s misconduct was particularly bad because he built a reputation as the “go-to” forensic accountant in South Florida who could be trusted by the community. He noted, for instance, it was “ironic” that Freeman sponsored an ethics lecture series at the UM School of Law.

Nothing ironic about it. Standard operating procedure for criminals hiding behind something legit.

But the University of Miami had better watch it. Eventually its rep will get so bad, the pool of criminals willing to underwrite its ethics seminars will dry up.

UD wonders – if your whole career is the college sports beat, do you ever get to write anything that’s not sarcastic?

… It was a bit priceless — pun intended — that Alabama Coach Nick Saban (annual salary: $4 million) went on the offensive Wednesday, bemoaning how money is ruining this quaint little sport.

Saban was joined in this particular rant by Florida Coach Urban Meyer (annual salary: $4 million).

… [I]t’s almost professional college football season…

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Update: More sarcasm.

The professionalization of university sports proceeds (here’s a recent defense of agents on campus, for instance) as quickly as the onlining of higher education.

It’s now possible to see a future in which the only actual human activity on university campuses will be the buzz of sports: agents in negotiation with about-to-be-drop-outs; training sessions; games. Classrooms will be used for press interviews and police investigations.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm very much likes Leonard Bernstein’s lectures on music, The Unanswered Question. She especially likes the way he explains musical modernism as having introduced, among other things, a striking chromatic ambiguity into composition. Take Chopin’s Etude in Thirds:

Are we in the major or minor? Or in the Phrygian mode? Is this music tonal or modal? Are we to infer ninth chords, or diminished sevenths?

This sort of ambiguity, Bernstein remarks, is intriguing – even exciting – in art forms like music and poetry.

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But SOS is here to tell you that being up in the air like this for extended periods of time does not work very well in the essay.

Certainly readers are willing to be confused or disoriented for awhile in reading essays – the writer might be drunk or dreaming or just mentally drifting at the beginning of an essay – but pretty quickly the form needs to find its dominant, its key, its voice, its mood, its argument. If it starts with an anecdote, it has to tell us why it starts with an anecdote, where that anecdote stands in relation to the subject around which the essay is organized… If it doesn’t do this sort of thing, it’s not really an essay — it’s a prose poem, maybe, but not an essay.

A glance at Wikipedia yields, among others, this definition of an essay: A prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. We can of course think of ways in which essayists can depart from this emphasis on steady focus and dominant subject matter; but SOS would suggest the nature as well as the strength of the essay as a distinct mode of writing involves its relative non-ambiguity. It tends to want to argue something clearly, or make you see what it’s like to be inside of a particular experience clearly. And even when we’ve got the second sort of essay – call it a narrative essay – that narrative is still, almost always, in the service of some sort of cultural or spiritual or political argument.

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One of the signs of a very bad essay is indeed an unpleasant interminable ambiguity. The writer doesn’t allow you to get a foothold in the writing. You’re not sure what she’s on about. What is she urging that you believe, or feel?

Where, for that matter, is she? It’s not that bad essays lack a voice; typically they have all too many voices, a sort of confused, insecure trying on of many tones, attitudes, and dialects.

You never know what key you’re in. The feeling grows upon you, as you read, that you are in an emotionally and intellectually muddled world; and since you have entered the essay for the dual pleasures of good writing and clarified perceptions, you are eventually put off by the essay, and you probably stop reading it.

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Carlin Romano’s recent essay about Christopher Hitchens exemplifies the failure of the form.

Its title – No One Left to Pray To? – poses a question that – like the essay that follows – seems to come from a person at once insecure about his hold on his subject and boastful about his superiority to it (the subject here being a human being, Christopher Hitchens). One of Hitchens’ books – the one about Bill Clinton – is titled No One Left to Lie To, and, as that title makes clear, it’s a strong polemic arguing that Clinton is so intense and inveterate a liar that eventually no one believes anything he says.

Romano’s title is a question rather than a statement – a move that ushers us in to the vagueness and timidity of his essay’s assertions. Hitchens may be dying and doesn’t believe in God, so … he has no one to pray to. Is that it? Okay. But why put the twist on his title in the form of a question? If your essay is going to be about how sad or strange or ironic it is that Hitchens is dying and, since he doesn’t believe in God, God won’t keep him from doing that — a not very generous thought on Romano’s part, but let’s go with it — then why not put the title in the affirmative? Why the weaselly question mark?

Or is Romano simply trying to be clever? Where is his conviction in this matter? We assume, from the title on, that Romano is a religious person. We’re prepared, having been signaled by this title, for an essay in which Romano will, let us say, lament the desperation and sterility of this atheist’s last days. But we’re not fully prepared, because the tentativeness of that question mark puts us someplace ambiguous.

First paragraph:

If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist—to show who’s boss, or simply to vent—it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus.

Are we being funny? Is this an effort at the folksy humor of the preacher, or is it the insouciant observation of a secular sophisticate? What’s the key?

As organs go, it’s long and conveniently placed, stretching from throat to stomach, making a good target for an elderly yet determined deity with possibly shaky hands. Its importance to speech heightens the symbolic force intended. And its connection to swallowing suggests the irony some believers think God enjoys too much: You can’t swallow me? You won’t swallow anything!

Since this last statement is about as funny as God saying to a woman with breast cancer You don’t enjoy breast feeding? You don’t even get a breast! the reader right away dismisses the possibility that this essay means to be somehow lighthearted and witty as well as serious. The vulgarity of the piece suggests that the writer wishes to be seen as… brash? We’re not sure.

For atheist apostle and recent memoirista Christopher Hitchens, who announced on June 30 that he’d cancel the rest of his Hitch-22 book tour to undergo chemotherapy on said cancerous organ, the argument for such personalized intelligent design presumably doesn’t hold. Hitch does recognize the role of vengeance and resentiment in believer/nonbeliever relations, but only in fueling institutions established by believers further down the Great Chain of Being. “Religion,” he wrote in God Is Not Great, “does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths.”

By this point the careful reader has stepped pretty far into that sense of reading unpleasant interminable ambiguity I described earlier. It’s not that the reader takes offense at any particular position in regard to Hitchens — she’s ready to read someone hating or pitying him or admiring or taking energetic issue with this or that position of his. It’s rather that the reader is beginning to take offense at being asked to remain within the prose world of a person whose writing is confusing rather than enlightening.

To be sure, there are many cutesy words and turns of phrase here (apostle; memoirista; said organ) that continue to make us play with the idea that this means to be a lighthearted and ultimately charitable take on the bad turn in Hitchens’ life; yet these words seem a strained effort at lightness, and when we get to the writer’s use of Hitch – a nickname – we wonder why he uses it. Yes, the Hitchens memoir (Is this supposed to be a book review?) titles itself with that name; yet Romano seems to use it in the way of an intimate. This comes across as pretentious, or at least as weird, especially since the essay is beginning to look unfriendly. Maybe.

We also note that Romano has misspelled ressentiment, which makes us wonder why he uses the French version of the word resentment. What did he think was gained by the French spelling? Since his subject is an erudite man who would not make this mistake, Romano’s foray into French makes him look inferior to Hitchens, whereas his rhetoric, to the extent that we can understand it, suggests a self-appraisal as superior. Romano also spells god is Not Great incorrectly.

One thing’s for sure—Hitch is not in great health. Indeed, he faces the possibility of not being at all if the chemo proves useless. Should believers pray for him, a man celebratedly insensitive to norms of politeness and acts of altruism?

Not being at all. Romano’s essay turns out to be a jig atop a grave-to-be.

At this point, the reader – this one at least – turns away from the prose in embarrassment.

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SOS has often said on this blog that bad writing is, among other things, writing that cannot help betraying things the writer clearly does not mean to betray to the reader. This is one of the things we mean by saying that good writing is about control.

It does Romano no good that he goes on, in his essay, to pretend a sort of even-handedness about his subject. He has betrayed his hatred. Nor is it the honestly and sometimes wittily proffered hatred of certain ideas and people for which Hitchens is notorious. It is the unpleasant inchoate passion of a writer who has not learned to master himself or his prose.

“College football is my favorite sport, and I’d rather not be ashamed of that fact.”