June 7th, 2012
“He don’t eat no meat?… That’s okay. I make lamb.”

Aunt Voula captures the problem of for-profit non-profits. Just as she doesn’t realize that lamb is meat, for-profit non-profits don’t realize that profit is profit, and therefore that profiting from running a non-profit organization makes it not not-for-profit. If you catch my drift.

This very category confusion (for-profit / not-for-profit) has tripped up the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, a putative non-profit long run for the personal profit of its director. Le tout Dallas is shocked and offended that the director has now been forced out and forced “to repay the medical center for every cent of his inappropriate spending.” How dare taxpayers humiliate this man by prying their money out of his hands!

June 7th, 2012
Also in the pipeline:

Burqa Bourbon and Clitoridectomy Claret.

June 7th, 2012
The growing-weirder-by-the-minute Paul Frampton story…

… has sprouted a diagnosis.

UD‘s amazed it’s taken so long. The eminent University of North Carolina physicist has been in prison for weeks for drug smuggling and yet only now does the sluttily obliging medical establishment put out for him. UD has no doubt that within minutes of her being arrested for, say, jaywalking she could find a doctor to diagnose her with … let’s see, what’d they give this guy… schizoid personality disorder.

Frampton’s friends aren’t really helping him.

“He doesn’t even drink, except perhaps wine with dinner, and he’s concerned about his health and goes to a gym,” [a colleague] said. “He is completely dedicated to his research and his students, and for the moment, since his divorce, to chasing girls.”

A divorced gym-membership-holder with his dick hanging out. How could anyone believe such a person capable of criminal conduct?

June 7th, 2012
Insta-Rise

Sunrise blogging begins…

now, with a pink horizonal swelling that tells me and the person in a folding chair on the beach that the thing is about to pop. I’m watching, jammied, on the balcony.

The burning circle rises – fast – over the pewter sea. A container ship glides across the path the sun’s making on the water.

All the way up. Took less than a minute.

There’s the usual cheering section: Gulls, crows, joggers, policemen in light blue shorts. Praying section? I figure the guy on the beach is at the very least meditating

Me? I’m thinking I will never really believe the universe of which the burning circle is apparently a teeny teeny teeny teeny part… Ever since I was eight everybody’s been showing me diagrams of the solar system, and I don’t really believe that either… Everybody’s been impressing on me the awesome massive violence out there while giving this particular place a pathetic spin… And as to spin: I’ve never really been able to feel the rotational breeze, as it were, on my face… If you know what I mean.

I mean, as Buck Mulligan puts it in Ulysses:

When I makes tea I makes tea… And when I makes water I makes water …

Squinting my brain to see The First Three Minutes is one thing; leaning my arms on a railing and feeling the sufficiency of sun earth and moon is another. Gimme that old time cosmology. It’s good enough for me.

June 6th, 2012
Part Two of UD’s Bloomsday Series…

… is now up at Inside Higher Education.

June 5th, 2012
The Beach at Sixty-Nine Degrees

I’ve seen it year after year, this Atlantic beach, and maybe for various reasons I’m especially grateful this summer to be here, but I can’t recall a time, in the last four decades, when it’s been so beautiful. The clear mild air sharpens the green horizon. Also extremely precise are the white clouds gathered above the green line. Above the clouds there’s nothing but opal sky and contrails from jets out of Dover.

The deep blue sky clashes with the deep green water (darker and lighter green as the clouds drift), and you think of the palette of nature, so pleasing to us here on the sand.

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

The beach is a hospital ward. We lie under blue umbrellas that lean on their sides against the wind. This is the quiet floor. We watch the tidal ribbon wash toward us and we say nothing. The ocean makes us mute. The sun, readying itself for the transit of Venus, stuns us. We feel its heat on our arms, our faces. It makes our eyes heavy.

The sleeping, on and off, of the quiet room. We wake up stunned again into submission. Human voices wake us and we drown.

What can it mean that it’s this beautiful, and that when it tips over into this beautiful all we can do is fall asleep again?

It’s too much for us, the shadows on the field of water as the clouds go overhead. Elemental earth with umbrellas at the edges. How can that be? What are we, if not lovers of the earth – so full of love we can’t bear it? Once in the midst of our passion, we shut our eyes and let the atmosphere – air, sky, water and sand – drug us. Nature’s palliative palette.

Shall we gather at the river? The beautiful, the beautiful river. But that assembly prays, praises, implores; here we assemble to disassemble, to break apart under the sun into clouds that blacken the dreaming mind. Blacken, deepen… Anyway, discolor each blue serene with the mind’s own shades.

Let us all nod off. Let part of the beauty of this scene be the sight of our bedmates’ eyes in rapid dream movement. The sight of their bodies circled by gulls.

June 5th, 2012
UD is quoted in today’s ….

….. Chronicle of Higher Education.

Enjoy.

June 4th, 2012
No cost is too high!

Go OSU!

June 4th, 2012
University Diaries welcomes students (professors?) from Bogazici University…

… in Turkey. She has no idea why, but her referral log has lit up with tons of readers from there, all of them interested in her analysis of the Don DeLillo story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky.”

June 3rd, 2012
Scathing Online Schoolmarm

The scandal at Ohio State further fueled perceptions of a tail-wagging-the-dog culture at major universities, where administrators look the other way as long as the golden goose athletics program is reeling in wins and dollars.

Edit this sentence.

June 3rd, 2012
The few, the proud.

Hopefully this serves as a reminder to not only Stoneburner and Mewhort, but the entire team, that they must conduct themselves properly 24/7 because they are held to such a higher standard than the average college student.

Two Ohio State football players learn the hard way that while average college students can piss freely all over town, players are held to a higher standard.

June 3rd, 2012
My Second Bloomsday Post…

… will appear at Inside Higher Ed tonight.

June 2nd, 2012
Important Announcement from the Chief Academic Officer of Mississippi State University!

Read carefully, because there are many nuances.

June 2nd, 2012
What does Vanderbilt get for three million dollars a year?

A head football coach who says:

“I’ve been saying it for a long time, I will not hire an assistant coach until I’ve seen his wife,” Franklin said. “If she looks the part, and she’s a D-1 recruit, then you got a chance to get hired. That’s part of the deal.”

June 1st, 2012
LOVE’S FATAL PASSION!!

A passion so strong he was ready to kill for it!

Watch as his passion for a middling school with an overpaid president drives him over the edge!!

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