Dan Fulks answers this question, posed in the first paragraph of a Birmingham News article:
Why did the University of North Alabama board of trustees ignore its students, staff and faculty [who all voted against] by voting 6-3 this week to pursue a move from Division II to Division I?
My dear little brothers in Sport, we meet this August in retreat, to think on our misdeeds and heartily repent of them and pledge to be better men in Sports.
For, as it is said, “College Football Live is … depressing and full of tragedy.” And, as it is said, college football is “morally bankrupt.” And that’s just football.
I invite you to meet me in a verdant space, where we, together in retreat, shall think upon our misdeeds while playing golf… Where, through warm summer evenings, we shall confess our naughtiness and sip sweet liqueur… What a fellowship, what a joy divine.
And after! Ah, after! Cleansed, we shall, each of us, stand before our local scribes and try to control our ecstasy as we speak of the new men in Sports we have become.
… has been found dead in her swimming pool.
She is prominently featured on the center’s website.
Paul Durcan’s poem, Glocca Morra, will mark Father’s Day at University Diaries. It’s a cheery miserable morbid sort of thing which UD discovered in this morbid volume. She doesn’t find the poem online, so she will simply quote parts of it here – enough to give you a sense of the thing. (The poem also appears in this collection.)
It’s a longish unrhymed casually expressed series of thoughts the writer has while gazing at his father dying in a hospital bed.
The whole poem, beginning Dear Daughter and ending Love, Dad is a letter to Durcan’s daughter, who “one day … will watch me die” as the poet now watches his father die. Generation after generation, the poet suggests, people closest to one another, who most love one another, remain painful mutual mysteries. (Norman Maclean’s father says to him, in A River Runs Through It, “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”)
Someone a few beds over has a little radio, on which the treacly How are Things in Glocca Morra?, from the musical Finian’s Rainbow, is playing. The song evokes a “fine day” in an idealized Irish village, nostalgically yearned after by the speaker, who has left it.
The cheap Irish sentimentality of that song counterposes itself throughout the poem to the bitter reality of the poet’s unfinished business with his always-remote, soon to vanish, father. When the poet was young, he and his father played games together in Phoenix Park:
Football, hurling, cricket, golf, donkey,
Before he got into his Abraham-and-Isaac phase
And I got the boat to England
Before he had time to chop off my head.
The transistor reminds him of
The day you bought your first transistor
You took us out for a drive in the car
The Vauxhall Viva,
Down to a derelict hotel by the sea,
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent,
And, you used add with a chuckle,
Scandalous.
This is stream of consciousness, thought association, random music prompting a memory of a place in time when that same song emerged — in this particular case, as the name of a seaside hotel. The poet recalls the same irony that animates his reflections in the poem — the distance between that name’s winsome evocations, and the derelict reality to which the name is affixed.
You dandled it on your knee
And you stated how marvellous a gadget it was
A portable transistor,
And that you did not have to pay
A licence fee for it,
You chuckled.
A man not much known for chuckling.
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent and scandalous.
Dandled it, like a child; stated how marvellous it was, this beautiful thing you could lift and carry around with you, like a child. In the silent dereliction of the father’s emotionless world, and now in the roofless windowless silence of the dying father’s ultimate vulnerability, this will turn out to be the best his son will get by way of paternal love — this moment of oblique joy. It will do.
Realizing this now, the poet begins to cry (The tears are lumbering down my cheeks ), and the tears awaken another, equally important memory – the memory of his father’s handwriting:
You had a lovely hand,
Cursive, flourishing, exuberant, grateful, actual, generous.
The son has been able, at the father’s moment of death, to reanimate him, to recall, in an act of filial blessing and love, the most intensely vivid life within the man. He has been able to decode a little bit the mystery of the transistor, the mystery of human transmission; and he shares that mystery – for what it’s worth – with his daughter.
If she too one day watches him die, as he has just watched his father die, the poet advises her to
Consider the paintwork on the wall
And check out the music in the next bed
‘How are Things in Glocca Morra?’
Every bit as bad as you might think they are –
Or as good. Or not so bad. Love, Dad.
This blog’s category, TRUSTEES TRASHING THE PLACE, chronicles the twisted, tortuous, Catch-22ish character of university trustee appointments.
You want someone filthy rich, but you don’t want someone filthy. Someone rich as Croesus, but not a criminal.
You’re after a person who may be greedy as all get-out, but who’s also a generous philanthropist. A market predator and a shaping-young-minds idealist…
UD ain’t saying it’s impossible to find people like this. America was built by high-minded robber barons. But from pious Yeshiva University’s Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin to the petty thieves of lesser schools, it’s easy to find compromised trustees.
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It’s not so easy to know what to do with them. Yeshiva held on to the Madoff/Merkin tag team until their investment strategies became an unignorable scandal. Other universities move very quickly, dumping a trustee as soon as there’s a whiff of conflict of interest or fraudulent dealing. Scroll through this category for details.
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The latest story, one UD has been following for awhile, involves veteran University of Cincinnati trustee Stanley Chesley. Here’s the background on this attorney’s astounding greed and cynicism.
The latest on Chesley has him about to be disbarred. He is an embarrassment to the political culture of Ohio, where the attorney general has just pulled him from a high-profile case; and of course he is an embarrassment to the University of Cincinnati, where he presides over the intellectual and ethical – and legal – life of the institution.
UD understands as well as universities do the process by which robber barons cleanse theirs souls – or at least brighten their images – via philanthropy. The process is not to be sneezed at, I guess. But when the delicate balance between predation and patronage is upset, universities look like asshole-enablers. U Cincinnati needs to have a little parley with the governor (who appoints their trustees) and tell him they want this guy out.
… my Garrett Park garden.
After having been away for two weeks.
1. Six rabbits — teens, toddlers — play leapfrog all over my front lawn. Nearby, lying down on a bit of green between a clump of hosta and a clump of liriope, a mother rabbit watches them.
2. In the forest behind the house, a doe leads two spotted fawns through honeysuckle bushes. The fawns trip and tremble on their long stiff legs.
3. All daylily flowers have been decapitated. Ditto hosta flowers.
4. My friend Kim has taken my suggestion and stuffed my bulls with fresh green and hay-colored sphagnum moss.
5. From the bedroom window, I watch the latest cardinal nest shimmy and shake with activity.
6. The Good Humor truck, tooting down the street, scatters the rabbits.
(I found the picture here.)
For [Ohio State University athletic director Gene] Smith, the [free courtesy] Cadillac is part of his deal. He earns $800,000 a year and his contract requires a free car for him and his wife. [OSU director of NCAA compliance Doug] Archie, who is directly responsible for making sure players don’t go wrong with car dealers, makes $117,000 a year. He does not have a contract that guarantees a free car.
Archie’s [free] car comes … from Miracle Motor Mart, located at 2380 Morse Crossing. Former 1980s-era Ohio State player Mike D’Andrea, who owns the lot, said he sometimes employs student athletes during the summer.
In exchange for the cars, D’Andrea said he received a pair of season tickets to Ohio State football games.
… finally gets its own Adzillatron. [Scroll down for UD‘s earlier Adzillatron posts.]
… will get you.
Dean Baker has resigned.
Students were, at first, impressed by the inspirational speech about a doctor’s never ending quest for knowledge. But some knew something was amiss when Dr. Baker referenced the “velluvial matrix,” a term the original author invented and included in his convocation address to students at Stanford University in California last year.
Background here.
The latest Teutonic text-trafficker understands that the best defense is a good offense.
Silvana Koch-Mehrin, forced out of high-profile political jobs by the discovery that she plagiarized her Heidelberg University dissertation, has blamed the university. “The dissertation commission granted me the title in 2000 being fully aware of the considerable weaknesses of my work,” she complained.
Heidelberg is at fault in the matter, in other words, because it enabled Koch-Mehrin’s unfortunate tendency to produce crap. Her hands were tied.
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(UD thanks Chris.)
Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith said Thursday he is considering hiring private investigators to strengthen the monitoring of Buckeye student-athletes.
Hard to imagine a finer intellectual setting than this: Your students trailed all day by the school’s private investigators.
And what an excellent use of university funds.
The prez of Barnard College joins the board of Goldman Sachs.
“I find Goldman to be a particularly interesting company …”
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Women of Barnard: Congrats!
A University of New Mexico football player is in jail for suspicion of “trespassing, battery and resisting arrest,” after refusing to pull his pants up.
An airline employee spotted [Deshon] Marman before he boarded Flight 488, bound for Albuquerque, and complained that Marman’s pants “were below his buttocks but above the knees, and that much of his boxer shorts were exposed,” [Sgt. Michael] Rodriguez said.
The employee asked Marman to pull up his pants before he boarded the plane, but he refused, Rodriguez said. Marman allegedly repeated his refusal after taking his seat on the plane.
“At that point he was asked to leave the plane,” Rodriguez said. “It took 15 to 20 minutes of talking to get him to leave the plane, and he was arrested for trespassing.” Marman allegedly resisted officers as he was being led away.
… has inspired some good writing —
One Canuck-clad hooligan made several attempts to throw a five-gallon water bottle through the remaining unbroken windows of the Budget office. His eyes were glazed over in pointless rage and he was easily exploited by the crowds to do their destructive bidding… These weren’t hardened criminals raised on poverty, but rather booze-fueled suburban youth who gulp their courage from a bottle.
— and reminded UD of all the post-game university football and basketball riots she’s covered on this blog over the years.