… and introducing them to the thoughts of certain zealots… all at taxpayer expense! – so that when they get to university they’ll be ready to be forcibly sex segregated while listening to the zealots…

Here in the States we complain about all sorts of ridiculous stuff our taxes go toward; but turning our daughters into compliant … the favored term is sisters … is not, I think, one of them.

… Northern Kentucky University’s much-beloved athletic director, Scott Eaton. Ooh la la. Well, we already knew Scott was a bit of a rascal…a massively overpaid rascal… but … heck… you know, what AD isn’t? … But even with all the acclaim and money the desperate, pathetic, sports fans at would-be jock school NKU (jock school is pathetic enough; can there be anything more pathetic than would-be jock school?) threw at Eaton… w-a-all… lessee… (UD scratches her overalls in private places) seems like it jest wernt enuf. Hyuk! He done stole ’bout $350,000 and is going to jail for ten years. And people is kinda confused.

Many will wonder how Eaton could’ve gotten away with his theft for six full years, and had the former employee not come forward, it could’ve been even longer.

Jail will be especially challenging for Eaton, given his, er, needs.

An internal investigation determined that Eaton had “intimate, inappropriate relationships” with four university employees, including two he supervised, and a similar relationship with a student in a class he taught.

Hyuk. Is zat five? And that don’t count, you figure, all the rest which is too embarrassed to come forward.

Enjoy this photo from happier days. Read the chart behind him. And weep for schools like NKU, epicenters of the dumbest shit the American university has to offer.

Danny Kuo, who pleaded guilty in 2012 to swapping illegal stock tips, asked a judge on Tuesday to delay his sentencing so he can attend next month’s commencement ceremony at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and receive his MBA.

The latest from UD‘s stomping grounds.

A Montgomery County judge has dismissed a couple’s lawsuit alleging that a top private school jeopardized their son’s college career by not doing enough to help him.

The couple accused the Bullis School in Potomac of breaching its contract by failing to help after the boy received a poor grade, causing him to receive rejection letters from colleges.

… The family’s attorney says the school violated oral agreements in advertisements that promoted “an extraordinary educational experience” in a “nurturing environment.” He expects to appeal.

All the way to the Supreme Court.

Mediapart said [Aquilino Morelle] used the presidency’s chauffeurs to drive his son around; that a shoe-shine man was ordered to come to his office to take care of his 30 pairs of luxury shoes; that he dipped into the Elysee’s fine-wines cellar and that he spent most Fridays at a luxury Paris hammam. Mediapart also mentioned his rude attitude toward some Elysee staff.

… the Soltan?”

The Soltan is currently at home, resting up after having interviewed Fran Lebowitz last night at a George Washington University event.

UD is rather curious in that appearing on the PBS News Hour, where her interview was watched by millions, did not make her nervous, but going to a teeny little reception at a lovely historic Foggy Bottom home scares the bejaysus out of her. I suppose it’s about people being an undifferentiated mass versus people being in your face. So she had her friend Gabe accompany her to the gathering at the president’s house, where we welcomed Lebowitz and where UD introduced herself to Lebowitz as her interviewer.

I have a bunch of questions for you, I said.

Great. I have one answer, she said.

Great, I said. We’ll do variations on that answer.

The evening was pleasantly chilly, with late afternoon sun on budding pears and dogwoods. Gabe and I were joined by Molly McCloskey, a terrific writer who’s in residence at GW this semester. Sweet and ceremonious undergraduates met us at the door of the president’s home, took our coats, and led us to the drinks. We quickly encountered another Ireland-related English professor (Molly lived in Ireland for a long time), and UD had a chance to talk about La Kid’s upcoming departure for Galway.

In formally welcoming Lebowitz, GW’s president made a number of gaffes. He began by calling her the author of many books. She is, famously, the author of not many. He described her as the author of Notes From A Broad. Lebowitz said she is not the author. The author of A View From A Broad is Bette Midler.

Ultimately, UD was willing to be forgiving. Being president of a university means fourteen similar events a day, and his staff screwed up on this one. Big deal.

At some point we trudged over to the auditorium at the public affairs building for the main event. UD took the stage a few moments before Lebowitz came out, and as she sat down the audience hushed. “Don’t get excited,” UD told them. “It’s just me.” UD was damned if Lebowitz was going to get all the laughs.

Lebowitz entered to applause, wished UD a good evening, UD returned the favor, and they were off.

UD began by reminding FL that like a lot of satirists she thinks human beings stink (UD read the following phrases from FL’s writings and interviews: “human nature is horrible …people – they’re not that great …human beings are not the finest species”), and she went on to inquire what’s wrong with us, and how can we fix it. This got a laugh from the audience and seemed to set FL up nicely. She went off on a long riff about our ghastliness. When she finished the riff, UD – who had decided to conduct this interview in a serious way, FL being an intellectual who makes claims about the world, and UD being the sort of person to challenge claims – went on to establish that FL doesn’t believe in hope – finds people who hope contemptible. So UD asked her why she votes, why she’s politically active in New York City issues, etc. If people are unimprovably awful, and if hope about change for the better is contemptible, why do anything? Beyond writing about it?

Which led to further questions about the nature of the satirist in the Swiftian tradition (quoting Orwell here: “Swift’s world-view is felt to be not altogether false — or it would probably be more accurate to say, not false all the time. Swift is a diseased writer. He remains permanently in a depressed mood which in most people is only intermittent, rather as though someone suffering from jaundice or the after-effects of influenza should have the energy to write books. But we all know that mood, and something in us responds to the expression of it. … Part of our minds — in any normal person it is the dominant part — believes that man is a noble animal and life is worth living: but there is also a sort of inner self which at least intermittently stands aghast at the horror of existence.”) and how odd this particular, pretty nihilistic impulse is…

So we bounced it around for a half hour, and UD kept trying to see if she could land somewhere near as many laughs as FL, and although actually the whole exchange is a bit of a fog, UD seems to recall that she did get her share. UD was also pleased to see that FL took her serious questions seriously, and as a result the interview seemed to UD a cut above a number of the FL interviews on YouTube, which tend to be people tossing softballs (“Talk about Michael Bloomberg.”) at FL.

UD went home on a very late-arriving, very-crowded metro train with her old friend Kim, who also attended the event. They stood and swayed and gabbed, at high volume, for the whole trip.

… of the Republican party.

Its leader.

There’ll always be an Arkansas.

But you’ve got to let them know. There have to be people out there watching for sex-segregated events at university campuses. Thank goodness there’s Peter Tatchell. He told UEL what the school was about to host, and UEL immediately cancelled the event.

OTOH… It occurs to UD to ask… Why didn’t UEL know about this? The organizers sent out via Facebook and all a big poster trumpeting the enforced segregation of women… Trumpeting also the preacher who instructs us to throw gay people off of mountains…

Tonight UD interviews Fran Lebowitz in a large elegant auditorium at George Washington University.

As you know, UD has been studying Ms Lebowitz in preparation for this event (over-preparation – she’s only interviewing her for thirty minutes), and she has, scholar-squirrel-like, set out four categories of questions for her (plus, if there’s time, UD has a wild card question). The Four Categories:

The Human Animal
Income Inequality and Democracy
Writing and Reading
The Satirist and Happiness.

Here’s the wild card:

In Metropolitan Life, you predicted America’s current immense pain pill addiction problem. You wrote:

Presently it appears that people are mainly concerned with being well rested. Those capable of uninterrupted sleep are much admired. Unconsciousness is in great demand. This is the day of the milligram.

Could you update this remark?

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

What strikes UD most about Fran Lebowitz is something seldom touched on by people who interview her. She’s a remarkably self-made woman. She was thrown out of high school and simply got her ass over to Manhattan and made her way. She never went to college; she’s all about being educated by solitary reading.

She drove cabs, had the guts to connect with all sorts of people and enterprises… She seems to have appeared in the big city with an achieved sensibility and writing style, along with an outrageous but amply vindicated confidence in her own way of being. No wonder she loves New York City. Cities are designed with people like Lebowitz in mind.

Also with UD‘s old friend Lisa Nesselson in mind. UD finds herself thinking of Lisa when thinking of Lebowitz, except with Lisa the city was Paris and Lisa finished college (the same college UD went to, Northwestern). Lisa seems to have landed in Paris and within seconds decided this was it – her city, forever. When I first stayed with her she lived in a seventh-floor closet-sized walkup on the Boulevard Saint Germain. Communal toilet down the hall. She got to know the woman who owns the building, and now lives in a roomy apartment on the second floor.

Money? Far as I can tell, neither Lebowitz nor Nesselson has ever had much. They are bohemians, and they make do. Honesty and wit have allowed them to push forward and make the world accept — even celebrate — their spiky uncompromised personalities.

… admit you cut corners and pledge never to do it again. Very simple. Your public statement should have two sentences, tops.

People never learn this. Ye olde ego seems to make it impossible. Instead of a brief apology, you get Surprenants. Surprenants are named after ex-Manchester University professor Annmarie Surprenant, who was found to have slapped A‘s on all her student exams and returned them without mussing one eyelash in actually looking at them. (This class management method is especially popular now that online courses are the rage. Venetia Orcutt, an ex-colleague of UD‘s at George Washington University – chair of its physician assistant program! – did nothing for the entire duration of two online courses and awarded all of her students A’s.) Cornered, Surprenant went on and on about her glorious misunderstood being:

I am quite politically incorrect, outspoken and have never adhered to the oft-repeated and probably excellent advice to ‘watch your back’, because I believe watching one’s back will never move us forward.

This makes me an easy target for a certain type of person. Half-truths, false accusations and malicious gossip readily ruin one’s reputation in the eyes of that certain type of person. But in the end it is your work that stands.

Moving us forward… But my work will stand!

And now you’ve got Deborah Martinez, a University of New Mexico public radio reporter who plagiarizes her stuff. Here’s her apology:

“I’ve earned four Associated Press awards over my decades-long broadcast career, producing hundreds of stories with the aim of telling the truth,” she writes in an email … “I made a mistake and was disciplined for it and KUNM and I now move forward with the same goal of informing the public in an open and honest way about news that affects them.”

Moving forward again! Always moving forward!

Scathing Online Schoolmarm doesn’t know quite what to say about people who allow the same self-regard that got them into trouble to generate the apology for having gotten into trouble. This isn’t really about helpful editorial hints. Character is destiny.

The Pistorius trial generates its first truly powerful writing. This article is going viral in South Africa.

… diff?

… asks Algernon, in The Importance of Being Earnest; and it is a question a number of law professors have been posing lately about law students, whose duty is to set us (law profs, that is) a good example by paying $50,000 and up (plus living expenses) a year for law school, and then being unemployed or taking a public interest job that may pay close to nothing.

As you probably know, law jobs are collapsing in this country, largely due to far too many law school graduates constantly being added to the job-seeking pool. Some schools are looking for ways to respond to this problem. Others are not.

In response to this New York Times opinion piece, written by two law school professors who basically deny the problem, Paul Campos first debunks their optimistic statistics, and then remarks:

The most nauseating aspect of …this [op-ed] is the gelatinous patina of sanctimony the authors slather onto their exercise in profoundly anti-intellectual — if “intellectual” is taken to mean “minimally honest” — hucksterism. “Legal education is still an excellent choice for those committed to serving others in a rewarding career,” they primly observe. Yes, it’s certainly been an excellent choice for them. Let’s take a moment to contemplate how well these public-spirited scholars are doing for themselves by “serving others.”

The first person Chemerinsky hired onto the UC-Irvine faculty when he got this self-abnegating enterprise rolling five years ago [Erwin Chemirinsky, notes Campos, is dean of a brand new law school that, “in a hyper-saturated legal employment market,” [charges] $47,300 in resident and $53,900 in non-resident annual tuition.] was his wife. In 2012 this dynamic academic duo pulled down a combined salary of $597,000 from the University of California’s perpetually cash-strapped system.

Meanwhile [the co-author of the NYT piece] took home a salary of $320,000, so it’s safe to say a career in public service is working out OK for her as well.

Obviously there’s plentiful comic territory here for those who enjoy either Wildean languidity about class privilege or straightforward Tartuffian riffs on hypocrisy (if you haven’t read Brian Tamanaha’s hilarious classic on this subject, do so).

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

Add to Chemerinsky’s hearty assurance that all is well the rage of University of Oregon professor Robert Illig at the possibility that he and his colleagues in the law school might not get raises this year. The blog UO Matters quotes from two emails Illig sent to the faculty in which he worries about the possibility that the dean of the school (this might be a faculty proposal rather than something from the dean; it’s not clear at the moment) might take away raises and invest them instead in enhancing job prospects for recent graduates.

I feel that having given up the chance at a seven-figure annual income [for a six-figure one] is charity enough for the students.

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

Campos wonders if Illig’s thing is “an elaborate parody.”

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

More information on the faculty resolution.

… who has won the poetry Pulitzer. Take “Bright Copper Kettles” and “Three Persons.” They’re both halting little dances to the music of time, or, if you like, rivulets of consciousness from a poet afloat in the present and at the same time darkly encroached upon, occasionally even flooded by, that old catastrophe.

His life will start to break apart eventually. Then he will die. He wouldn’t mind knowing something about that. He wouldn’t mind knowing more about his strange relationship to his condition of knowing something about that. So in the first poem, its title taken from the treacly Sound of Music song, his favorite thing is consort with the dead, since they know all and can enlighten him as to what awaits. They come to him in dreams, and

I like it so much I sleep all the time.
Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed
deep in the dreams where they appear.
In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids,
before the empress with the melting face, under
the towering plane tree, they just show up.
“It’s all right,” they seem to say. “It always was.”

This is no night of living dead absurdity; they don’t menace him. Why would they?

They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides,
why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it.
One of them shyly offers me a pencil.
The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster.
Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music,
the right Reverend Al Green is singing,
“I could never see tomorrow.
I was never told about the sorrow.”

The right Reverend has no fore-knowledge of life’s breaking apart and then the end of life; no dead people ever told him about it. The poet however has puzzled out a path to the dead, and they have broken the silence of his mind with the knowledge the Reverend lacks. The poet’s rapid eye movement as he dreams registers his excitement about what he is about to understand.

Yet the poem ends not with sage words from the dead, but with one of the dead shyly (earlier the poet has called the dead in his dreams “diffident” and “polite”) offering the poet a pencil. How to interpret the gesture? Perhaps something like this. Wake up! You’re horizontal all the time, just like us, because you’re so desperate to know what awaits. Death is … eh… I dunno… It’s another condition; like life. Both are all right – in the sense that both are, and there’s little point in acts of resistance. You, however, at the moment, write. You’re a poet. Allow me to be bold enough to suggest that you should just keep doing what you’ve been doing: Recording what it feels like to be a human being in the middle of your journey.

The second poem also ends with a pencil. Here the speaker fixates not on the dead dead, but the alive dead. He contrasts himself, a vital successful sort of person, with losers, slow people, people you leave behind when you make it. While you stride about organizing with an electric clipboard / your big push to tomorrow, you can’t avoid thinking about those you’ve left in your dust, people “coaxing” their “battered grocery cart[s] down the freeway meridian.” You see yourself, others see you, as a mythic, storied figure striding life like a colossus; but the loser has a special insight into the truth of you (and here the poem begins to merge with the one we just looked at; this is a poet drawn to has-beens because he knows that having-been is the ineluctable human truth, however we delude ourselves about that):

He doesn’t see you as a story, though.
He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines,
he chortles. When your barometric pressure drops
and the thunderheads gather,
he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with
the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library.
He asks me to look out for you.

The prince and the pauper; the poet and… the poet. The loser turns out to be wielding the same pencil the winner’s got in his hand. Here’s his special knowledge; here’s why he’s worried about the poet’s welfare: They are equally vulnerable to the gathering thunderheads.

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

UD would say that these poems are variations on Lear’s

Oh, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel…

Encounters with the wretches, though, disclose something rather odd, and moving: He asks me to look out for you.