In 2007, [Humboldt State University] switched the Athletics Department’s primary funding source from the state General Fund to revenue collected by the student Instructionally Related Activities fees, which are currently the highest in the California State University system, according to Strategic Edge. HSU’s student fees have increased from $278 per semester per student in 2010 to the current $337 per semester rate, according to the university. [AD Tom] Trepiak said raising the fees any higher is not an option.
The funding model switch was made to free up funds for more academic purposes, according to a 2007 university memorandum of understanding.
But Trepiak argues that athletics are a form of academia.
“The job of a coach is to teach a student athlete how to do their sport, so part of that is a perception thing with people looking at it with their own special interest rather than the big picture,” he said.
In the wake of the most recent killing of a professor by a graduate student, one thing’s clear: Universities need to work harder to publicize their protocol for reporting troubled and troubling people on campus.
UD assumes no one contacted the University of Southern California’s counseling office about the graduate student who yesterday stabbed his faculty mentor to death. If someone did, we’ll find out about it; but it looks as though no one did, despite worries about his stability.
Of course reporting him would not necessarily have kept the attack from happening; but he would have had some monitoring. Maybe his mentor would have been alerted.
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You might argue that universities are uniquely bad places for the identification of unbalanced people.
There are simple logistical reasons for this. Unlike offices, universities are loosely run, with people on leave, seeing each other one day a week, finished with coursework but still sort of around, etc. It’s hard to perceive patterns or evolutions of behavior.
More deeply, universities are committed to the tolerance – even the championing of – freedom and non-conformity. You get zero intellectual culture in, say, Saudi Arabia – in repressive, conformist, strictly doctrinal, universal-surveillance societies. You get America’s spectacular system of universities when you offer exactly the opposite: individual freedom, radical self-fashioning, secularism, and privacy. Universities are hands-off zones, and indeed to the extent that they’re intrusive it’s often intrusion in the name of further hands-offism: seminars in the practice of tolerance, for instance.
But the problem goes beyond this. The combination of the valorization of eccentricity with a fierce commitment to personal privacy may mean that you think you’re respecting someone’s autonomy, and someone’s right to be different, when in fact you’re overlooking pathology.
And wait. The problem goes beyond even this. Years ago, UD got to know a fellow participant in a summer seminar for professors well enough to worry about her mental health. She said disturbing – self-destructive, delusional – things to UD, and UD was worried and didn’t know what to do. Eventually, with great delicacy and in the most tentative language, UD said something to one of the seminar’s organizers. The organizer fixed UD with a nasty look and said “Oh. Aren’t you healthy. I suppose you think you’re so healthy…”
“Uh, no,” UD replied, taken aback. “I don’t think I’m so healthy. I just worry B. is having difficulties.”
“Ugh.”
That was the end of the conversation. That was the end of the smackdown. And that was the beginning of UD deciding she’d better keep her trap shut on the matter of people at universities who seem troubled. UD vividly recalls not enjoying being made to feel like an East German Stasi agent by the seminar organizer. Being made to feel like a prison guard in the land of Michel Foucault’s panopticon. How dare I direct my smug hegemonic gaze anywhere other than at my own fucked up self …
So all I’m doing here is drilling down to what I take to be some of the underlying difficulties with identifying and reporting troubled people at universities. I fully acknowledge the vexed problem of distinguishing between fruitful, exemplary, odd, against the grain, selfhood, and mental problems. But I also think one should acknowledge the specific ways in which the university setting makes acting on your suspicions about someone’s mental health peculiarly daunting.
Michelle Herren used to be on the University of Colorado faculty, but the school seems to have decided to let her go.
UD kinda understands why, because Herren called Michelle Obama a ‘monkey-face’ and put it all over the web. Then when the university dumped her and also I guess when she started getting some… unfriendly feedback, she
… explained that her comments were taken out of context. [Also] she claimed that she had no knowledge that the phrase “monkey face” was an offensive term.
UD has explained endlessly on this blog how this happens so often at university medical schools. Universities have immense numbers of people vaguely affiliated with their medical faculties, and these people are rarely vetted in the ways other professors are vetted. They just show up with a white coat and start teaching. When you take many people on and do very little vetting, you can expect a few morons to slip through.
A Sydney woman “refused to take off her burqa in court to give evidence in a civil case, where she is suing the police over a terrorism raid at her house.” (As a result of that raid, her old man’s in jail.)
BALLA: Are you proposing that she would have her face covered while she’s giving evidence and being cross-examined?
LAWYER FOR THE WOMAN BRINGING THE SUIT: I’m afraid so. Yes. It’s not very satisfactory, your Honour, but it’s something we have to live [with].
BALLA: It’s not something I have to live [with].
Indeed, the judge has ruled that the woman cannot give evidence wearing the burqa (several accommodations were offered to the woman; she refused them all).
… Wendy Taylor, whose 43-year-old sundial sculpture stands on the banks of the River Thames near London’s Tower Bridge, told British news outlet The Independent that a holidaying art aficionado alerted her to the apparent replica [of the piece in Shanghai].
… The Chinese version, by an unspecified artist, has stood in a park next to the Huangpu river, which courses through the commercial hub, since 2006, Shanghai media reports said.
It has since been removed and [a] journalist saw park workers filling its circular base with plants and flowers on Thursday.
At the same time [journalists watched] workers removing two other statues, one of which resembled “Lute Being Played by Evert Taube”, which stands in the Swedish capital Stockholm.
The other bore a striking similarity to the centrepiece statue of the Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Might as well get all our spring cleaning done at the same time.
UD finds this statement, at the end of an article in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s student paper, refreshing. It states the truth, bluntly. When you do this grotesque thing – when you import professional sports to universities, of all places – you’re going to have to prostitute the universities. That’s the cost of playing the game. Many of your players are going to play, and nothing else. Somehow you’re going to have to solve the problem of that pesky – even embarrassing – “university” identity, and it’s going to mean tutors who write papers for players, online classes ostensibly taken by players but actually taken by designated online-class-takers, and the creation of bogus departments with bogus courses designed to allow everyone to pretend that players have studied something.
Many of the players have already been admitted in bogus ways – they graduated from fake high schools (usually with reassuringly fervent Christian names) designed to produce legit-looking diplomas for sports guys. Your job, at Chapel Hill, is to figure out how to retain your recruits even though they’re not doing any schoolwork. Your biggest challenge is not the NCAA, which doesn’t give a shit, but rather the rogue tutor or investigative reporter.
A university like Chapel Hill – a community like Chapel Hill – sees itself above all as a professional sports team. Everyone, from the president down, has a role to play on the team. The president issues high-minded language about the glorious nexus of physical and mental achievement on campus. Professors pass the players along no matter what they do. Tutors do the players’ schoolwork. Local reporters are slavish panting boosters.
It all holds together very nicely – UNC’s bogus courses sailed along for decades – until, as most recently at the University of Missouri – someone has a crisis of conscience or something, and the ship goes down.
And then it comes up again. I mean, the scandal costs the school (taxpayers, often) zillions, and getting rid of a coach or two (this is de rigueur post-scandal: dump some coaches) is also expensive (you’re breaking a contract; plus these guys are liable to sue), but in the end none of these jock school academic scandals amount to anything. Even if you decide to dump the president, she’ll just move to another jock school, and you’ll have all the time and expense of finding another person able to talk about your rigorous academic program with a straight face.
Cost of playing the game.
… gets right back up on his Champions for Christ mount after the … unpleasantness at Baylor.
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And do you think the New York Post went out of its way to choose a photograph of McCaw that’s a dead ringer for this one?
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UD thanks a number of readers for linking her to this story.
In 2001, [Richard B. Spencer] received a B.A. with High Distinction in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia and, in 2003, an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. He spent the summer of 2005 and 2006 at the Institute Vienna Circle. From 2005-07, he was a doctoral student at Duke University studying modern European intellectual history…
More on Spencer.
And more.
The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche made a lasting impression; Spencer found his critiques of equality and democracy darkly compelling. He identified with the German philosopher’s unapologetically elitist embrace of “great men” such as Napoleon Bonaparte and the composer Richard Wagner. Yet Spencer found little in Nietzsche about the organization of the state; it was only after entering the humanities master’s program at the University of Chicago that he discovered Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed “race realist” who argues that blacks and Hispanics are a genetic drag on Western society. [Taylor has nothing to do with U of C; Spencer discovered him online.]
… He was attracted to the writings of the late University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss, a Jewish German-born philosopher who had been accused by some of supporting fascism. Spencer’s master’s thesis was an analysis of German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who he argued was afraid to admit how much he loved the music of Wagner because Wagner was an anti-Semite championed by the Nazis. “If you looked at what I was doing, there was a clear interest in radical traditionalist right-wing German philosophy, a semi-fascist type thing,” Spencer says. “But there was always plausible deniability to it all.”
By the time he entered Duke as a Ph.D. student in European intellectual history in 2005, his views were on his sleeve. Fellow students recall Spencer openly sharing his opinions on biological differences between races and endorsing books such as Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, which argues that Hispanic immigrants are less suited than Europeans for assimilation. One Caucasian woman who was a student at the time recalls Spencer saying that people with her level of education needed to bear more children. Yet Spencer was charming enough to maintain collegial relations with his peers; an official graduate student party that he hosted at his spacious apartment was well attended. “Not many of us had ever come across as an out-and-out fascist,” says a college professor who studied in the same history Ph.D. program as Spencer. “We didn’t know how serious he was.”
… “In this weird way that Trump is trying to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to America, [Spencer says,] he’s also, like, bringing America to an end in the sense that he is a first step to white identity politics, which will bring about fragmentation… This is where I am kind of a Hegelian. Whenever you see a phenomenon, you see its negative aspect. There is a dark side to something that is happening, and I think that is Trump’s dark side, that he is reviving America and accelerating [the end of America]… That’s why I love him…”
CASTRO MOVES INTO THE HAVANA HILTON
BY SANDRA M. CASTILLO
[To mark his death, UD looks at this poem, which reflects on the ironies of history and the disastrous tendencies of revolutions. The title alludes to Castro having in victory taken over and reclaimed the very Batista-esque Hilton Hotel, renaming it Free Havana.]
“History always dresses us for the wrong occasions.”
—Ricardo Pau-Llosa
[Scruffy guerrillas from the hills crowd into the plush Hilton.]
Camera Obscura
[The whole poem will concern itself with obscurity, enigma — the ungraspability of the meaning of historical events and world-historical figures. Part of the problem, it will suggest, is precisely the images through which we try to take in the real world.]
The afternoon lightening his shadow,
Fidel descends from the mountains,
the clean-shaven lawyer turned guerilla,
his eyes focused on infinity,
El Jefe Máximo con sus Barbudos,
rebels with rosary beads
[History once again seems to dress us wrong – anti-clerical revolutionaries retaining their rosary beads.]
on their 600-mile procession across the island
with campesinos on horseback, flatbed trucks, tanks,
a new year’s journey down the oldest roads
towards betrayal.
[Towards betrayal. The revolution will be betrayed. Betray itself.]
Ambient light. Available light
[We always have very partial knowledge. We move by what’s available to us in terms of understanding, but it’s never enough.]
Light inside of them,
nameless isleños line El Malecón to touch Fidel,
already defining himself in black and white.
The dramatic sky moving in for the close-up
that will frame his all-night oratory,
he turns to the crowd,
variations on an enigma,
waving from his pulpit with rehearsed eloquence,
a dove on his shoulder.
[First the references to the rosary, and now, in this stanza, many suggestions that this “faith” (Fidel) revolution is really a slightly transposed religious event – variations on an enigma – with people lining up to touch their deity, who dresses like a priest in black and white. He speaks from a “pulpit” and sports a dove.]
This is a photograph. This is not a sign.
[People stubbornly “symbolize” reality, a process by which a revolutionary leader becomes a god.]
Flash-on camera. Celebrity portraits.
1. Fidel on a balcony across the street
from Grand Central Station,
an American flag above his head,
New York, 1959.
2. Fidel made small by the Lincoln Memorial,
Washington D.C., 1959.
3. Fidel learning to ski,
a minor black ball against a white landscape,
Russia, 1962.
4. Fidel and shotgun,
hunting with Nikita,
Russia, 1962.
Circles of Confusion
Beyond photographs,
Havana is looted and burned.
Women weep at our wailing wall,
El Paredón, where traitors are taken,
and television cameras shoot
the executions, this blood soup,
the paradoxes of our lives,
three years before I am born.
[Random photographic images trace Fidel’s reduction to a celebrity – or, if you like, the process by which the revolution’s strongman becomes a kitschy version of god – while the rest of the religious story plays out as well: The wailing wall where we mourn the loss or theft of the original faith; the devolution of divine passion into inquisition. But it’s a modern inquisition – it’s all photographed and filmed.]
Photoflood
[A photoflood is a lamp that sheds intense illumination in order to produce artificial light for photography and filming. The only form of true lucidity available to us is the artificial brilliance we rig up in order to “flood” the world with yet more images.]
But it is late afternoon,
and a shower of confetti and serpentine
falls from every floor of the Havana Hilton,
where history is a giant piñata,
where at midnight, Fidel will be photographed
eating a ham sandwich.
[This final stanza returns us – after the poem’s meditation on history and revolution – to the narrative immediacy with which the poet began. We are back at the Hilton, and celebrations of the revolution’s victory take place. Of course, given the treacherous and enigmatic nature of such events, they are “serpentine.” The last lines make everything explicit: history is a nightmare of chaos and grief, a great violent shaking up which nonetheless can be seen to smuggle back in precisely the cultural realities that inspired the revolution in the first place. Its final image has Castro – at midnight, the darkest hour – fully reduced by the camera and celebrity culture: he is pictured eating a ham sandwich.]
A Clear Midnight
by Walt Whitman
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, death and the stars.
