… and the result shows you American higher education and sports culture at its very best.

So pause a moment to think what University of New Mexico instructor Daniel Barto’s daily life at that benighted school (in a benighted state) is like. He opens the paper and reads the following opening paragraphs:

University of New Mexico athletics has projected ticket revenue for the current 2017-18 fiscal year that it didn’t come close to reaching this past season.

And this comes after the recent retirement of its athletic director, the launch of two state investigations related to … possible fiscal mismanagement and the reality of failing to balance eight of the department’s past 10 budgets.

In fact, UNM has budgeted to spend about $1 million more from ticket sales this year than it actually brought in last year from its three revenue generating sports of football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball.

Read the whole thing. It gets more delusional with every paragraph. Barto reads things like this every day.

This blog has spent years documenting wild wacko wastrel UNM. (The link includes non UNM posts – jump around.). If you want to know what its like to actually belong to the UNM community, read Barto’s letter in the student newspaper. After reviewing the serious financial difficulties of many people on campus, he notes:

This [financial difficulty] pertains to us all — except one certain delusional department that seems to think that the hard math of budgeting does not apply to them.

I am talking about the Athletics Department, the department that has the most paid administrators of any other on main campus.

This department was headed by director Paul Krebs (salary $319,262) until he “resigned” after committing fraud. Paul used UNM money to fund a personal golfing trip to Scotland. This trip ended up costing New Mexico taxpayers even more, because Paul failed to get enough people to lock in for the discount group travel rate.

Pathetic Paul, so much money to embezzle but too few friends to even embezzle with.

Of course the Athletics Department claims, “We bring in the most money!”

But this is a lie of omission. The department wastes more money than it brings in. According to the ABQ Journal, since 2007 the Athletics Department’s expenses have exceed[ed] their revenue every year except two. As of 2016, the department has a $1,525,257 deficit that the University must cover.

Barto is angry. Of course he concedes that the state of New Mexico itself is one of the most dissolute in the nation; he understands that public universities in our most corrupt states are royally screwed. But he still can’t help hoping for things to change.

His letter hasn’t yet attracted any comments. If it does, UD feels pretty certain they’ll be abusive, semi-literate, and deeply deluded.

America’s greatest postmodern poet has died. And just like he was saying, one is – on hearing of his death – bumped from one’s dog-perch.

DAY BUMP

It’s taken a while since I’ve been here,
but I’m resolved. What, didn’t I print,
little piles of notes, slopes almost Sicilian?
Here is my friend:
Socks for comfort (now boys) will see later. Did they come?
The inner grocery had to take three sets of clips away.
Speaking to him of intricate family affairs.
I’m not what you think. Stay preconscious.
It’s just the “flooding of the council.” No need to feel afraid.

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

Whatayawhataya. Hold on and we’ll try to make some sense of it. All the while remembering first this from Ashbery:

What [my poems] are is about the privacy of all of us, and the difficulty of our own thinking. And in that way, they are, I think, accessible if anyone cares to access them.

IOW: The soul of man is a far country (Heraclitus).

And second, this from John Koethe:

The tone [of an Ashbery poem is] likely to be nostalgic and its motions those of reverie. Its predominant feelings are passive ones, like resignation and loss; its language is resonant and suggestive; the use of narrative past tense invests it with a mythological quality; and its overall effect is one of tenderness. It dissociates itself, especially in its transitions and patterns of inference, from everyday ideas of rationality and control; its awareness of language is informed by a sense of its limitations…

So here we go.

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

DAY BUMP

[The poem will narrate a break in a day – something bumping into the normal flow of event. But as in the phrase bumping up, there is something clarifying about this disturbance, this – to use a word we’ll find in the poem – sudden roiling.]

Whether the harborline or the east shoreline
consummated it was nobody’s biz until you got there,

[Coastal holiday setting, it seems, harbors and shores; and if you look at the next stanza and note the word resolved, you’ll see that a conflict between, or confluence of, stability and instability appears in the poem. The speaker awaits a friend who will join him at the shore/harbor, and nothing will clarify itself until he gets there. Consummation has a sexual connotation as well, and I’m going to suggest that this poem may be about Ashbery remembering himself as a closeted young man among straight friends. Finally, on the assumption that many of Ashbery’s autobiographical poems are about writing poetry, there’s maybe a suggestion here that nothing in the world “consummates” or “resolves” into existence until the poet puts it into words. Until then, it’s all roiling and flooding and bumps.]

eyelids ashimmer, content with one more dispensation
from blue above.

[His friend is not a writer; he is merely content that nature has gifted him with another beautiful blue day, sunlight in which his eyelids shimmer. Actually, our writer isn’t a writer yet either; both of them continue to live in that blessed condition of unselfconscious youth in which you take the world, eagerly, just as it comes to you. You are one with it.].

And just like we were saying,
the people began to show some interest
in the mud-choked harbor.

[Hm. Maybe there’s a threat of flooding there – maybe it’s not a “harbor” at all, but, looked at more carefully, a mud-soaked about-to-be-flood.].

It could be summer again
for all anyone in our class knew.
Yeah, that’s right.

[Language drawn from the poet’s youth here, when he was still in “class,” and when he and his friends said to one another would-be cool phrases like Yeah, that’s right.].

Bumped from our dog-perch,
we’d had to roil with the last of them.

[Locals, these boys were above it all, watching the summer visitors with cool disregard; the oncoming flood has however knocked them from their dog-days perch, and they’ve got to join the rest of humanity as it tries to stay afloat in life. Which is to say, we have a Wordsworthian poem on our hands, lamenting the loss of childhood and the onset of adulthood.]

It’s taken a while since I’ve been here,
but I’m resolved.

[The poet has returned to his early home, and he is now a “resolved” adult – he has resolved into something – a personality, a poet, a citizen…].

What, didn’t I print,
little piles of notes, slopes almost Sicilian?

[Here is his reference to his career as a poet, his “fall” into writing and out of a world of soundless joyous unity with nature, his infinite strenuous burning efforts – Sicilian, with volcanic elements – to know the world as opposed merely to be in the world.]

Here is my friend:
Socks for comfort (now boys) will see later. Did they come?

[Ja, very obscure lines. Part of this I think is simply the “privacy” of Ashbery’s particular life – Ashbery was famously painted with argyle socks – but I think the larger idea super-compressed here is again the Wordsworthian one of youth regarded from the perspective of age. We’re boys now, with whatever – sports socks – but we will eventually be old men wearing comfort socks. As for Did they come? I’m thinking about sex – I’m thinking about how the word socks is not far from sex and sucks, and that the poet is recalling not comfort sex but athletic sex and asking a specific question about their youthful sexual experimentation. In this regard, and keeping the idea of whether something was “consummated” or not in mind, that “day bump” could also be read as someone’s erection.]

The inner grocery had to take three sets of clips away.

[Socks, clips, youth – I’m thinking bicycles here, with the poet’s mind full of the memory of objects which he takes off the brain-shelves and puts in his poems – his inner stocked grocery. Memory clips. Perhaps he’s talking about the poet taking “clips” of his past out of his mind and using them poetically; perhaps he’s alluding to the death of friends from home.]

[And now the way-enigmatic final lines of the poem:]

Speaking to him of intricate family affairs.
I’m not what you think. Stay preconscious.
It’s just the “flooding of the council.” No need to feel afraid.

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

Okay, so people are starting to take an interest in the mud-choked harbor — the boys’ eyes are beginning to “shimmer” with a sense of the congested psychic mess that the mature human mind happens to be. Or the boys are beginning to sense the power of their “pent-up aching rivers” – their libidos. They don’t quite feel threatened with all of that yet; but they sense the possibility of the oncoming flood of mortal pain and complication that awaits them.

In this particular remembered conversation between the poet and his friend, the poet recalls both deep candor and confidences between them (intricate family affairs) and his own actual disturbing, “roiling” secrets. I’m not what you think, he now says to his friend. I’m gay. Maybe you, my friend, begin to sense that disturbing fact, but from this vantage point I prefer that you stay preconscious, so that we can draw out this blissful pre-flood life as long as possible. What you’re seeing – what you’re disturbed by – is a sudden “flooding” of your precocious grown-up rational faculties – the “council” that sits in your head – as it begins to identity certain difficult truths. But stay young! Hold off fear and confusion as long as you possibly can.

All aboard the college train! Where we take your brain for quite a ride… And some people don’t want to get on… Yes, some people want to get off…

***********

UD thanks dmf.

… Marbella.

CS50 Updates Course Policies, Asks Students To Go To Class

Okay, not the Onion. But Onion-worthy, no?

Look at this last part of the article, where one of the professor’s teaching assistants praises his experimental, innovative, problem-solving approach to teaching:

For at least one former CS50 staffer, the changes to the course signal [David] Malan’s willingness to solve problems through experimentation.

“Seems like he’s continuing to experiment and learn as I think he should and does relatively well,” said former CS50 teaching fellow Mark D. Grozen-Smith ’15. “I’m glad that we have innovation alive in such an impactful, high-demand class.”

Asking students to attend your course! Why didn’t I think of that?

The funny thing is, it’s often very easy. You don’t really need my instructions on how to detect con men (it’s usually men), because most con men are right out there. Very, very obvious. Let us consider three of them who are currently in the news, starting with … let’s call him the mildest of the cons.

This man’s trickery is in the long and highly rewarded academic tradition of Julius Nyang’oro, Thomas Petee, and Leo Wilton — all of them professors who systematically, over years, provided fake courses and fake grades for athletes. For professors who don’t give a rat’s ass about actually educating anyone, ever, the rewards of this behavior are deep, profound, and monetary. Schools almost entirely devoted to their football and basketball teams – like the schools these men work and worked for – reserve their eagerest gratitude for professors willing to confer upon athletes the trappings of academic respectability. Administrators can’t do it; trustees can’t do it — only professors can put the A-/B+ on the record and keep players eligible.

The system works beautifully, except that occasionally mistakes of judgment are made, and some female pipsqueak hired to help with the grading (in all of the cases I’ve mentioned, except that of Petee, it was a woman) turns out actually to care about educating people. She’s appalled when she realizes she’s part of a con game, and she goes public with the scandal.

In the case of Florida State University’s athlete-positive professor, we’re talking about an online (has to be online – makes it much, much easier to cheat or indeed do absolutely nothing and ace a course) hospitality course called Beverage Management.

I’m not making this up. At FSU, we have entirely entered the world of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where a local university offers a course called Eating and Drinking: Basic Parameters.

But don’t be too harsh. FSU started out with much more curricular gravitas for its players. For decades, a music theory professor there let hundreds of athletes cheat their way through his intro course. When that scheme was revealed and became a big ol’ national scandal, FSU had to hustle to find another online curricular home for people it didn’t give a rat’s ass about educating. It lowered itself all the way down to a person who heads one section of his 33 page cv Scholary Honors (some of his students have had it up to here with his spelling). (Oh. And there’s this.)

Where does FSU go now? When this latest cheating scandal is over, where can they go that’s even lower than online courses in Beverage Management?

Okay, so the two other con men the media’s paying attention to this week:

Like the FSU guy with his article-length cv trumpeting his amazing accomplishments (come to think of it, Professor Gun-Spree also has the self-presentation of an egomaniac), the children’s book author whose PEN nomination has been withdrawn on PEN discovering what actual Native American writers have been trying to tell the world for years – the writer is a con man – also displays a hilarious sense of his own greatness.

And let’s end with Paolo Macchiarini, shall we? Stem cell research of course is the hard-science con man’s Emerald City … And this guy, like the others, didn’t exactly hide his borderline-psychotic world of lies.

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

UD thanks Barney.

The Ballad of James Ramsey is being written as we speak, and since the whole point of University Diaries is to pay attention to strange and unsettling things that happen in our country’s university system, we will follow his saga closely here.

A forensic audit demanded by [University of Louisville] donors recently confirmed that under Ramsey’s leadership, the foundation [which Ramsey, quite the monopolist, ran, along with running the university] authorized excessive spending, including on executive compensation, and realized unrecorded endowment losses to the tune of $120 million.

Yes, yes, Lawrence Summers, when Harvard prez, lost one billion from the endowment, so what’s a paltry $120 m? I mean, your university can lose twelve million in a matter of minutes if you have ninnies minding the till, so big deal. Money in, money out. At UL specifically, the job of donors is to give money; the job of trustees is to take it; the job of students is to shut the fuck up.

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

Turns out, though, that even in America’s arguably most corrupt state, a few people find abundant high-level university theft annoying, and though Ramsey probably won’t live long enough to go to jail … wait lemme check his age… guy’s pushing seventy… that’s not that old these days!… he has, er, tons of money with which to countersue, to appeal, to fall mysteriously ill and delay his trial, to become a shimmy shimmy koko bop fundamentalist preacher and get too famous to finger blahblahblah… he might be able to swing it so he can spend the rest of his days weeping to reporters about how he’s being treated exactly the way they treated Jesus …

Poor (impoverished; pathetic) UL is right now floating on this very same stream of consciousness, asking themselves if they want to take a big financial and reputational hit (and when your most recent dorm renovation involved retrofitting the building so it’s no longer a whorehouse for your athletes, you got you some reputational issues) and go after Ramsey and his cronies… Already “donations to the university have been falling rapidly, down 25 percent from 2016–17,” and the question is whether allowing the Full-Ramsey shitstorm to hit the public in the interest of eventually clearing the air (‘cepn nobody who knows Kentucky thinks anything will ever clear its air) will appease donors or simply remind them what an icky place the school, grosso modo, is.

… as you may know, the winner of Michael Kinsley’s Most Boring Headline contest. Less boring, and just a bit tweaked, is a headline to accompany the recruitment news out of the Canadian Football League:

SOMEWHAT SHORT OF WORTHWHILE CANADIAN INITIATIVE

Yes, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats recruited (briefly) Mr Baylor-Rapes Art Briles; it also seriously considered (before rejecting) Johnny Manziel. Deadspin‘s indispensable Emma Baccellieri reports:

Manziel was charged with domestic violence last year for allegedly hitting his girlfriend and threatening to kill her; charges were dropped several months later after a plea deal. He also has a history of partying and drug use that repeatedly threatened his career. [Briles oversaw] a football program where players were accused of up to 52 rapes in four years …

***************
UD thanks Jack.

… and flies to Malaga,
where she’s meeting up
with American friends.

But, as Mike Bianchi points out, it’s only Wednesday. We know this team can do better.

As the University of Louisville’s last marauder-president attracts more and more attention from the Kentucky attorney general, it’s just a matter of time before his story – and the story of his merry band of fellow marauders – hits the front page of the nation’s paper of record. Already James Ramsey and The Louisville Muggers have hunkered down in their multiple luxury homes hoping no one can find them in all the square footage… But the long arm of the law might just extend to that tenth bedroom at the back of the basement, and then all of the Ramsey regime’s efforts to erase its possibly criminal record will have been for nothing.

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

Assuming things go as expected, here’s what we’ll soon see on Page One.

IN KENTUCKY, A UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT ACCUSED OF GRAND THEFT

The accession of James Ramsey, a folksy local boy made good, to the presidency of the University of Louisville, was greeted with great enthusiasm…

Babadebah. You and I can write these things in our sleep. Utopia at last! And then – shocker – A Grand Reversal…

Your regular update of the Greek university system.

Sing it.

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

To the benefit of Mr. Ross
There will be a tax write-off
Of massive size

Michigan will stand and cheer
Its charitable buccaneer
What a prize!

From nothing much to thirty mill
A splendid haul
Is guaranteed for all

But of course
Fed’ral courts
Are not as enthralled

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

The celebrated Katz/Levine
Will engineer the money scheme
What a scene!

The IRS and auditors
Will look away and gently purr.
Don’t be late!

Messrs. K and L. assure the public
Their deduction will be second to none

But of course
Federal courts
Are having less fun

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

The celebrated tax judge James
Unentertained by fiscal games
Has ruled against

Appeal begins without delay
When Mr. R. performs his tricks another day
And Mr. R. will demonstrate
The many clever ways to calculate

And tonight Mr. R. is topping our bill!

UD will resume blogging tomorrow – right now she’s recovering from a very long day on campus.

Ne quittez pas.