For twenty years, the state of Illinois has been on the verge of doing something drastic about Chicago State University. Through seven million CSU presidents, fourteen million embezzlement scandals, twenty million expensive whistle blower lawsuits, and thirty-seven trillion misappropriations of taxpayer-provided funds, CSU has kept on keeping on. And now comes its most amazing accomplishment: The reduction of a university to a Samuel Beckett play.
Go to its campus and see the windy nothingness of Waiting for Godot. No one is there. Occasional buildings rot among the weeds.
Wait a few moments and onto the stage wander Vladimir and Estragon, two trustees who for the last decade have been sniping at each other about what’s best for the school. Listen in on their endless irritable exchange, an exercise in hilarious self-delusion about the Endgame their project has become.
Chicago State University poses the question: Can a university exist without students?
And the answer is: Actually, yes.
As long as the people of Illinois are willing to continue subsidizing a university run solely for the faculty and administration – ultimately of course run solely for the administration, because someone has to do the job of eliminating all of the faculty positions – there’s no reason why CSU can’t go on forever. Or at least for a very long time. The trick will be to eliminate faculty positions… very… slowly… In order to justify the continued existence of the administration. When you run out of faculty, simply hire more faculty – you need an administration to do that – and then gradually eliminate that faculty.
Rinse. Repeat.
Berkeley’s Center for Social Ontology
Specializes in Dad/Babe pornology
Its director John Searle
Is in search of a girl
To help him explore his pathology
Wouldn’t you like to know how to do that?
Why should UM fire a tenured professor who’s got so much to share about high finance techniques?
A spokesperson for the university
could not provide details about what the school policy is on faculty members who face criminal charges [apparently that stuff in the headline is, like, illegal].
So UM is all of a mucksweat. What to do? What to do? Wait until after his [HUGELY EMBARRASSING NATIONAL PUBLICITY] trial? I mean, chances are the guy is totally innocent, this is all a bad dream, and he’ll be back in a flash, his gravitas intact, sharing with his charges the ins and outs of investing…
Last week, for the second time in not that many years, my husband and I were jolted from our bed late at night by an explosion. What was that? What happened? we said to one another as we threw on clothes, grabbed flashlights, and examined our roof for the enormous tree we figured broke away from the earth after days of snow and wind and landed on top of us.
But all of the limbs that have long lurked near our house – we live in Garrett Park, Maryland, an arboretum full of big old trees, some of them menacingly close to residents’ homes – remained neatly poised above the roof. As we scanned our front and back lawn for other tree falls, our neighbors emerged into the night: What happened? Did you hear that? What was that?
Sirens came from everywhere – it had been about a minute since something blew – and we heard them congregating in precisely the same place they’d congregated before: a neighborhood of small architecturally uniform brick homes called Randolph Hills, just across a gully and some train tracks from Garrett Park. My husband and I live not far from the tracks, so the explosion was very close to us – right on the other side of the divide.
***********
My day job is lecturing on modernist writers, and I happened, on the morning after the second Randolph Hills house explosion, to be teaching Kafka’s great short story, “The Metamorphosis.”
“Metamorphosis” is easy to admire and hard to teach, and my class prep that day had me looking for critics who had something interesting to say about that pedagogical mix. Part of the problem, the writer David Foster Wallace suggested, was the extent to which Kafka’s stories rely on “what communication-theorists sometimes call ‘exformation,’ which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.”
It seemed to me that the first Randolph Hills explosion was not Kafkaesque, because it turned out to be a couple of people meddling inexpertly with their gas lines (which, to be heartless about it, puts it closer to Three Stooges farce than the complex tragicomedy of Kafka), whereas this latest boom, as its facts came out, did have the feel of something explosively associative, full of human information whose power lay in the fact of that information’s absence from the scene.
For the shattered male body and canine body found in the rubble both had bullets in them; the owner of the house had killed his dog and then himself; and then somehow the house exploded around them. Gas to the house had been cut off years ago for non-payment, but apparently the man had figured out a way to keep using it illegally… The very day of his suicide, his house was going up for auction… Did he fill the house with gas, toss a lit match, and then shoot?…
Now, this zealous speculation and information-mongering, in which I and many of my neighbors have been engaged, does have the feel of the Kafkaesque. We are staring at an evocative hole and trying to fill it up.
In one of his tortured letters to his friend Max Brod, Kafka wrote about his impending death as the collapse of the “house” of his being:
What right have I to be shocked [by my demise], I who was not at home, when the house suddenly collapses: for do I know what preceded the collapse, didn’t I wander off, abandoning the house to all the powers of evil?
Maybe what we who follow this post-explosion story so closely find so evocative is the vital information which that emptiness that used to be a house conveys about the difficulty all of us have being “at home” in our lives, inhabiting our lives meaningfully so that we feel alive and not dead. Franz Kafka sensed he was always already dead, unable to muster sufficient whatever – faith, energy, love, ambition, desire, curiosity – to negotiate existence. Perhaps we sense, as we try hard to walk back – to narrate – the events behind the Randolph Hills explosion, associative connections that can lead us to vital information of the sort Kafka’s great stories are trying to share.
As big-city lawyer Simkin says in Herzog… But OTOH, if it didn’t get more corrupt, Saul Bellow couldn’t have written hilarious scenes like this one with Simkin… And our own wee UD wouldn’t be able to feature on her blog major machers (to keep the Yiddish thing going) like the Howard E. Buhse Professor of Finance and Law at the University of Minnesota. This guy was a dean; he got an award in counseling…
While holding down a demanding job as a law prof, Edward Adams was running multiple personal businesses, and he was doing some pretty amazing counseling there too. After allegedly embezzling lots of his investors’ money (the FBI describes the “brazen theft of millions of dollars of investors’ funds over the course of several years”), he started to worry that the “theft [would be] uncovered through bankruptcy litigation.” So he
convinced shareholders to convert their worthless Apollo stock into stock in a new company — Scio Diamond Technology Corp. — that [Edward] Adams secretly controlled…
These have got to be the stupidest investors since Bernie Madoff’s lemmings.
Adams is busier than ever. I guess he’s still running a bunch of businesses. He’s still a bigshot law professor at Minnesota. He’s suing the local paper for defamation because of all the mean things they’re saying about him. And he needs to get his best suit dry cleaned for his first court appearance next week. UD hopes UM has a very long Faculty Annual Report form.
Here are more details, including a yummy statement from the university insisting that the guy’s activities are “fully outside” of his university role — moral turpitude not, I guess, being a UM thing.
… which is now one of America’s Coolest Small Towns. They must have lived there because of its proximity to Ocean City, where the Rapoport family (Joseph Rapoport was my father’s father) had a boardwalk amusement store (scroll down for news of it burning down in suspicious circumstances in 1954).
Les UDs stopped at Berlin for lunch on their way back from Assateague on Monday, eating at this diner, which turns out to be famous because it was featured (along with the rest of the town) in Runaway Bride.
The Atlantic Hotel (1895) dominates the town and has sitting rooms like this.
… Wild Life Trail hike
on Assateague Island.
An amazing, bird-filled walk,
during most of which we had
the whole place to ourselves.
