March 15th, 2015
Another trashy online course.

I attended a brick-and-mortar, affordable community college nursing school, and the in-person experiences with professors were invaluable to me as a student, as a practicing registered nurse and as a human being. I am finishing my bachelor of science online.

There is no teaching going on. For my online statistics class last semester, we used Pearson Education’s MyStatLab.com. No one taught me statistics; it was abysmal.

March 15th, 2015
No matter how repulsive the genital mutilators…

Clegg’s was the right move. Universities have to be free to draft their own policies on invited lecturers, and campuses should always lean hard in the direction of free speech.

The Deputy Prime Minister personally vetoed the plan during private talks with David Cameron, after one of the worst Cabinet rows in the Coalition’s five-year rule.

Mr Clegg said he could not support moves to require university bosses to vet visiting speakers and prevent impressionable students from falling under the spell of extremists – because Liberal Democrats feared the move would erode “free speech”.

… Theresa May, the Home Secretary, told the Telegraph that academics must now “play their part” in preventing radicalisation, even though there is no government guidance on how they should tackle extremist speakers.

Recent student protests against mandatory gender segregated seating at university events, and against speakers calling for the criminalization of the scourge of godless homosexuality, have been quite effective. International astonishment at Westminster University having gestated the fucker who cuts off everybody’s head has also helped clarify matters. Let this process play out.

March 14th, 2015
After all, there’s almost always a venture capitalist, with fond memories of hazing and being hazed, willing to make up the difference.

We would propose that the IRS begin sending letters to all Greek organizations putting them on notice that if they discriminate, their tax-exempt status will be revoked. They can retain their tax exemption if they demonstrate that they do not discriminate based on race. This provides Greek organizations with a choice. If they are willing to comply with the norms of society, then they can enjoy the benefit of their tax exemption. If they do not wish to conform, they can explicitly signal that desire by forgoing the public subsidy implicit in being exempt from taxation.

… [W]e should also leverage the universities’ tax exemptions. The time is long past for universities to condone — or, at best, turn a blind eye to — this type of behavior. If a university wants to ignore the discriminatory behavior, then it should also be required to clearly signal where it stands.

Not a problem for the frats. Just keep the system intact: The ME BIG BOY thing graduates American capitalism’s most successful predators. They can easily make up for the loss of the tax exemption.

As for the universities: A place for everything, and everything in its place. The absence of the tax exemption will reveal which universities the country’s corporate elite will want to consider.

March 14th, 2015
No pain no gain

[Salisbury University] suspended the chapter in response to a [hazing] lawsuit. In retaliation for the suspension, J. Michael Scarborough, a founder of the school’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter and an investment giant, withdrew a donation of $2 million. Because the school took a hard line against torturing students. (The fraternity is up for review and a possible return to campus this fall.)

March 14th, 2015
“[T]he culture must legitimate its own existence, forcing out those who fail to conform.”

Just the thing you want dominating the social life of universities.

And he didn’t even get to drunk and violent.

March 13th, 2015
“Yeshiva U. Board’s Culture of Risk-Taking Led to $500M …

… Meltdown.”

That being the case, this letter from the trustees to that school’s students is the very definition of chutzpah.

Having royally fucked the now junk-rated school through greed and irresponsibility, its trustees turn around and lecture its students.

Sometimes change can create concern. But the fact is that change needs to be embraced, and change provides an opportunity to make improvements in our structure, and in the way we support the needs and aspirations of our exceptional students.

Don’t be scared, boys and girls! We were nervous before we invested all that money with Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, but we had the courage to do it! And that was only one of the practically criminal financial risks we took with your money! Make us – epitomized by the most high-profile among us, Zygi Wilf – your model of personal behavior!

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

Let UD just say this for the record: If she were a Yeshiva University student, professor, or graduate, she would have serious anger issues.

March 13th, 2015
Come to Football U and Get Your Brains Bashed Out

You started the process in high school… continue it in college! … and finish it altogether when you go professional…

[Y]ou see all those former players with CTE on television, or in person, and you can’t help but wonder if you might be among them someday, and you can’t help but ask yourself whether it’s worth the trade-off.

In the end, this is probably a good thing for professional football, at least in the short term. It is a young man’s game for a reason, but in the longer term, it does make you wonder if the NFL can ever stem the tide, as the players themselves become increasingly disposable. What happens if the game continues to be more and more compressed by its own violence?

On that compression idea: Maybe you’ll start to see players retire during their university years. The need for fresh blood will make freshman players a hot commodity, while juniors and seniors will be shunted into special on-campus hospital/retirement homes once they’ve gone gaga.

The plus for the university community will be an increase in student opportunities for Volunteer Points.

March 13th, 2015
Our new dog, a rescue we’ve named Emilia, looks rather like…

this.

We named her after Emilia Plater, a Polish heroine to whom Mr UD is related.

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

Oh, okay. So this is
what she really looks like.

emilia

March 13th, 2015
UD’s friend John Shelton Reed is featured in this long Sports Illustrated piece about the UNC Chapel Hill fiasco.

John Shelton Reed,a UNC sociology professor for 31 years, sat on the special-admits committee in the mid-’80s and recalls three athletes – one a men’s basketball player – being admitted with rock-bottom SAT scores of 200. That was possible then under NCAA rules but far from the norm for most UNC athletes. Reed and two colleagues voted no, lost, and moved on. “To this day I regret that I didn’t blow the whistle right then and there,” Reed says.

Also see:

As the athletic budget was expanding from $9.1 million in 1984 to $83 million last year, no one in power saw that a department with that much weight would seduce, intimidate, or alter everything in its orbit.

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

“I have hanging in my home office a framed Distinguished Alumnus award that the university was kind to give me about twenty-five years ago. It’s always meant a lot to me. But I look at it now and think, Jesus, do I really want that on my wall?”

March 13th, 2015
Bi-Coastal

aniasd

La Kid‘s in San Diego for work.
But she had time yesterday for the zoo.
(Click for the big pic.)

March 13th, 2015
Island in the Works

There’s the Merrill poem; and there’s the amazing photographs.

In “Island in the Works,” James Merrill has the emergent volcanic island speak for itself, describing its desire to exist.

From air seen fathom-deep
But rising to a head –
Abscess of the abyss
Any old night letting rip
Its fires, yearlong,
As roundabout waves hiss.

Already you can sense that he’ll play with a comparison between the birth of a poem and the birth of an island – both express depths rising into a head. This head, inspired, has let rip the fire of creation… Abscess of the abyss – Merrill’s love of wordplay is there, as is the theme, sounded throughout the poem, of ambivalence in regard to things coming to a head, coming into being, things being given language, location, lore. Isn’t nothing, or a thing without names (the island before we name it, map it), better than an ugly routine humanized protuberance?

Jaded by untold blue
Subversions, watered-down
Moray and Spaniard…

It was wild and free in its original expulsion of itself from nothingness, but in time the island becomes “jaded,” watered down by history, usage.


Now to construe
In the original
Those at first arid, hard,

Soon rootfast, ramifying,
Always more fruitful
Dialogues with light.

How to generate a new poem, a new creation, a fruitful dialogue with the world? How to get back, each time you try as a poet to create, to that original generative intensity?

Various dimwit under-
graduate types will wonder
At my calm height,

Vapors by then surmounted
(Merely another phase?)
And how in time I trick
Out my new “shores” and “bays”
With small craft, shrimpers’
Bars and rhetoric.

Dimwit because they have no sense of the underlying agonizing forces out of which the poet writes, out of which the creation construes itself. All they see is the calm height of a formal construction (natural, aesthetic); to them poetry is a shrimpy “small craft” whose clarity has seemingly surmounted any “vapors” of artistic torment.

Darkly the old ones grumble
I’ll hate all that. Hate words,
Their schooling flame?
The spice grove chatted up
By small gray knowing birds?
Myself given a name?

Thoughtless youth, in love with novelty and amusement, will enjoy the new Key West; older observers will understand how language waters down, trivializes, the thrilling mystery of all things being simply existent. A world of words drowns essential fires and puts in their place schooling flames – makes a tepid world of meaning and moral instruction. Worst of all, this subverting diminishes the island itself by giving it a name.

Waves, as your besetting
Depth-wish recedes,
I’m surfacing, I’m home!

The island announces its moment of creation, its victorious struggle with the waves’ depth (death) wish in regard to it. The poem, in spite of everything, emerges into being, finds the surface of the page.

Open the atlas. Here:
This dot, securely netted
Under the starry dome.

My head full of vaporous stars has done it, has finished the poem and securely dotted every i. You can find it here, in the atlas known as my Selected Poems.

(Unlike this page – no sooner
Brought to the pool than wafted
Out of reach, laid flat
Face-up on cool glares, ever
So lightly swayed, or swaying…
Now who did that?)

But that atlas, that physical book tricked out with rhetoric, is the cooled-to-calmness post-poem… the posthumous poem, if you like… It is the poem detached from the fire of the living Merrill, the poem subject to mapping, criticism, vulnerable to cool glares in the same way the molten proto-island is subject to the cool of the water and the glare of the sun as it is forced to make something of itself, as the world insists on making something of it. Once written, the poem falls out of the poet’s fervent grasp, and all of the private intensity that produced it wafts away.

Still, some mystery clings even to this watered-down, public document. It “sways,” moved by some unknown force (Now who did that?) – and this must be the force of inspiration itself, the massive seismic fires that rip through the poet’s head and ultimately generate one more wordblack wordscape.

March 12th, 2015
The question is not: What punishment is appropriate for TSU basketball players involved in a massive on-court brawl?

The question isn’t even: Why does a school as desperately bad as Texas Southern University even have athletics programs? The question is: Why is Texas Southern University a university? Why hasn’t it been shut down?

Texas Southern University fell in the bottom 5 percent of all institutions on graduation rates in 2011, graduating only 11.8 percent of its full-time freshmen within six years of initial enrollment. Some 80 percent of Texas Southern’s freshmen are from low-income families (i.e., Pell Grant recipients); 90 percent are from underrepresented minority grants and many are weakly prepared for college, with a median SAT score of 800 out of 1600 and an average high school GPA of 2.7. But so too are the students at Tennessee State University and North Carolina Central University, yet they graduate at rates more than three times as high (35.5 percent and 38.4 percent, respectively). In fact, Texas Southern performs at the very bottom of its closest 15 peer institutions and has for many years.

Sickeningly corrupt TSU needs to lose its accreditation. Its pathetic, out of control sports program is only a small part – but of course the most notorious part – of its utter institutional failure.

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

As for TSU’s sparring partner, Southern University, here’s how it did in a recent APR review:

Southern University received the stiffest penalty of all; the NCAA said its [academic progress for athletes] data was unusable and barred all of its sports teams from post-season competition.

March 12th, 2015
Michael Graves, a student of Mr UD’s father at the Harvard Graduate School of Design…

… has died.

March 12th, 2015
I hear America singing.

Either have a great basketball program or have a lousy one with great students. Give me the great program every time. [I] don’t care if our starting point guard got a D in anthropology. I don’t care if our center cheats on an English lit test. That’s on them. These guys are here because it’s a step on the way to pro ball. If they want to apply themselves in the classroom and get something more out of the college experience, that’s great but I don’t care about that either. These guys aren’t here to learn how to fix the world’s problems. They’re here to entertain the fans and bring money into the school via tv and ticket revenue, as well as raise the school’s profile to a segment of perspective attendees.

A lot of people will disagree with me and that’s fine but I feel like I’m being realistic and honest and they are not. Look into ANY D1 school with a fine tooth comb for 10 years and you’re going to find dirt. Only difference between SU and those other schools is that for some reason our school and our coach were the subject of long-term NCAA harassment and they were not.

From the comment thread on this article (UD thanks Alan for the link to the article).

March 11th, 2015
La Boeheim

Mi Chiamano Jimi

Yes, they call me Jimi,
but my true name is Mother Teresa.
My story is short.
A championship team
I embroider on campus.
I am happy happy and at peace
and my pastime
is to make friends at the YMCA.
I love all things
that have gentle sweet smells,
that speak of love, of spring,
of dreams and fanciful things,
those things that have poetic names …
Do you understand me?
They call me Jimi…
Buds in a vase…
Leaf and leaf I spy!
That gentle perfume of a flower!
But the flowers that I make,
Alas! Vacated.
Other than telling you about me, I know nothing.
I am only your martyr who comes out to make your school a champion.

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