… and suffer no consequences. Their universities, now… certainly their universities suffer consequences… but both of these people hold on to their jobs and indeed continue to do what they do.
In the case of the cynic – provost at Southern Methodist University – what he does is overrule faculty committees trying to keep unqualified basketball players from being admitted.
In the case of the pig – chancellor at UC Davis – what she does is accumulate money-for-nothing board memberships – one of them a conflict of interest, and another DeVry! – until some local politician notices and she runs away squealing Sorry Sorry Sorry!
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UD thanks dmf and Wendy.
And drawn from UD’s own university.
It all started back in the ‘eighties, with Donald Trump’s alma mater producing so many financial criminals that newspapers started keeping track of the ever-growing Wharton “Hall of Shame.” (Type WHARTON in my search engine for all the gory details.) The tradition persists today, with Wharton featuring prominently in articles with titles like Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals? and The Wharton Mafia. It’s positively embarrassing.
The Wharton School of Business has deified Donald Trump, boasting in its alumni magazine of his greatness and influence. It can’t get enough of him. It’s pleased as punch and bursting with pride to have spawned him…. or at least it was until around 2007. In a recent article about him in the U Penn paper, people are beginning to sound less enthusiastic.
A Wharton spokesperson said that the leadership of the alumni office and magazine have turned over since the publication of the article, and declined to comment further on Trump.
Hm. A bit snippy there… But, you know, it’s one thing to go the silence route (Trump? Trump who…?); it’s another thing – especially given Wharton’s cultural role as National Fraternal Order of America’s Great Insider Traders – actually to come out and repudiate “the worst human being who has ever won a Republican primary.”
UD doesn’t mean revoke his degree or anything. She means that given Wharton’s already filthy reputation, and given Trump’s incessant dropping of the Wharton name alongside his name, the school might consider issuing a statement distancing itself from its most famous graduate.
The Republican party will do it all for her.
In response to Trump’s many promises that he will commit war crimes and force American military personnel to commit them too, one of the Washington Post’s most conservative columnists today writes:
[H]is most important and devastating utterance [in the debate] has left little doubt about his contempt for democracy and the moral necessity to defeat him either before or after he gets the GOP presidential nomination… For all of his professed concern and respect for the military Trump considers them to be errand boys, like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. A commander in chief who truly respects the troops and looks out for them does not order them to commit war crimes, setting off a constitutional crisis and subjecting American service personnel to court marshal and criminal prosecution. His attitude — I say it, so they will follow — is the thinking of a thug, a proto-fascist and a narcissistic personality.
Jennifer Rubin has just updated her column with Trump’s latest effort to clear his mind.
Trump, apparently told that what he was saying was outrageous and illegal, now tells the Wall Street Journal that what he said at the debate is not his position. And this man wants to be commander and chief of our armed forces?! It’s hard to know if he is evil, ignorant or both.
… and the man after whom the school’s Rennert Entrepreneurial Institute is named, once again shows YU students how to conduct themselves in business.
[T]he government said that Renco had lied when asked about the transaction to keep the pension insurer from finding out about the ownership change until too late. Once a controlled group has been broken, the pension agency loses its ability to go after the parent company’s assets.
And four months later, when R.G. Steel declared bankruptcy, the federal government had to take over the pension obligations and cover a $70 million loss. It sued Renco for fraud, arguing that the deal with Cerberus was a sham, intended primarily to break the link between R.G. Steel and Renco’s wealth.
Details on pensioners and their retirement income here.
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Sure, every once in awhile, just like Yeshiva trustee Zigi Wilf, you attract the attention of the courts. Big deal. Price of doing business.
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Now, REI grads, go out there and make some deals!
But before we hear from UD, let’s hear from Scathing Online Schoolmarm.
SOS notes that Romney found a fine speechwriter. Here’s some of the good stuff.
[Trump is a] twisted example of evil trumping good.
Nice use of the last name. “Twisted” is a strong word, and gives the sentence a gently tripping alliteration. Twisted also helps make one of Romney’s larger points: Trump is nuts.
There is a dark irony in his boasts of his sexual exploits during the Vietnam War while at the same time John McCain, who he has mocked, was imprisoned and tortured.
Dark irony is pretty effing sophisticated for a political speech, in SOS‘s humble opinion. SOS expects to find dark irony in essays about Franz Kafka. Color SOS also pretty astonished that Romney’s willing to say Trump humped his way through the war. This is a point best made by Bill Maher (now that Robin Williams is no longer with us), but even without going for the easy laugh, Romney does more than respectably with it.
His imagination must not be married to real power.
The he’s nuts point again, made pithily and well. SOS thinks that Romney’s decision to stress Trump’s disordered grandiose mind was a wise one. If the point is to needle Trump in order to get him to act even more insanely than he’s been acting, nothing will work better than heading for the complex private terrain of his mind. It’s like that cruel game in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf when George finally has Martha madly shrieking that she’s NOT nuts, she’s NOT nuts! “You’re all flops,” screams Martha (losers, in Trumpspeech), and I’m the only sane one around here…
A later phrase along these lines – Trump’s “absurd third-grade theatrics” – adds infantile to grandiose and disordered. And look at the poetry of the phrase: absurd rhymes with third; grade is a nearish-rhyme with third, and theatrics wakes the phrase up by putting a long-voweled, tri-syllabic word at the end.
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Ok, and as for UD‘s response: She has two points to make.
1. As a university maven, UD was pleased to see Trump University rear its head.
His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.
2. For UD, who will vote for Hillary, the speech is also a winner because Romney’s intemperate remarks about Hillary will, UD thinks, inspire more people to vote for her:
Even as Romney condemned Trump as a fundamental threat to the nation, he gave credence to Republicans’ wide-ranging hysteria about Hillary Clinton. “A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president,” he declared, reflecting a variety of negative GOP tendencies — accepting distortions as plain truth, making it seem as though the fate of the Republic constantly hangs on Republicans winning the next election, arguing that their opponents are not just wrong but illegitimate.
How much more explicitly, how much more eloquently, can you say football school?
And we do mean “bend” – as in, at the University of Tennessee, bend over and take it. If Peyton Manning wants to sit “on the face of a female athletic trainer, bare-assed, spread wide,” the job of the female trainer is to lean back and take it, and the job of the university is to destroy her reputation for failing to take it.
It’s simply not possible to overstate the scumminess of the University of Tennessee – an entire university which bends to it.
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UD to Tennessee: Enjoy your lawsuit.
Like the guys in The Hangover, Chicago State University and the University of Louisville wake up every morning amid mysterious and elaborate wreckage.
In the case of Chicago State it doesn’t help that the state of Illinois is currently without a budget; but over the last decade or so Chicago State has fucked itself up royally with no help from things like budget standoffs. One of the nation’s great drop-out factories, Chicago State goes way past corrupt to inexplicably self-destructive. It can always be found spending heavily on whistle blower cases it always loses. In order to spend even more, it’s pressing its latest losing case up to the state Supreme Court. All of this while handing out potential layoff notices to everyone on campus.
At Louisville, some members of the board of trustees are finally organizing to give that school’s grotesque president the heave-ho. The president’s fellow good old boys on the board are launching some hilarious attacks on these critics.
[Bob] Hughes alleged that the dissident trustees are elitists who didn’t go to U of L and wouldn’t send their children there, and that they are trying to replace Ramsey with someone who is related to one of the trustees.
The intellectual elite! At a university! And they won’t send their kids to one of America’s most depraved universities!
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UD thanks Wendy.
Location, location, location.
The New York Times editorializes:
There were opportunities to stop [Trump], early on. Possessed of a crack team of researchers, the Republican Party did not turn its resources on investigating this man’s record of falsehoods and business failures. When struggling families worry that their children’s American dream will be obscured behind a mountain of college debt, even a passing reference to the scam that is Trump University would surely have resonated many months ago.
Yes, now that people are truly desperate, they can’t say enough about Trump University. (Here at University Diaries, we’ve been writing about that peculiar institution since 2010. ) People want that school to be the key to the scummy scammy Trump gestalt and therefore – once this resonates – a significant part of his downfall. Here’s why this is false reasoning.
For more than a decade a firestorm of fraud involving hundreds of taxpayer-supported for-profit universities has raged freely throughout this country. Since very few Americans seem to care, and since there’s huge money for politicians from the for-profit school industry (an industry in which Goldman Sachs has a huge investment), almost nothing of significance has been done to regulate or shut down the scam. Even the fact that accreditors for these schools are almost all former executives at the same schools gets a rise out of exactly no one.
This is an incomparably more destructive scandal than Trump’s little academic foray into sucker-scamming, but no one cares. If Americans are content to let the rigged, filthy, for-profit schools continue to bankrupt them and make Goldman rich, what makes you think they’re any less content to ignore Trump University? In a vast landscape of corruption, Americans maybe have time to notice, say, massive athletics organizations like the NFL (America’s FIFA); but even there they don’t care. They’re spectators, not social activists. There are games to be watched.
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All institutions, starting with all government institutions, are corrupt as far as many of Trump’s supporters are concerned (this is an attitude now known to all as Tea Party Nihilism), and at least Trump is defiantly, amusingly, attractively, even flamboyantly, corrupt. At least he is, in the words of Florida’s current governor, “fun to watch.”
We can say of Trump what John Ashbery said of avant-garde art:
Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing… [Take Pollock, and Rothko:] Does their work amount to anything? There’s a possibility that it doesn’t although I believe in it and want it to exist.
Trump gestures recklessly toward nihilism (“founded on nothing”) or toward a New Wave, or toward both. Millions of Americans find this beautiful.
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Like Chauncy Gardner, Americans like to watch. In particular, we like to watch us being us. You don’t get any more us than Donald Trump. Americans instinctively recognize that he is radically of their moment, radically of their time, and they feel comfortable with him as a candidate. Little Trump U will have no effect on that.
Donald Trump’s distinctive rhetorical style — think of a drunk with a bullhorn reading aloud James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake under water — poses an almost insuperable challenge to people whose painful duty is to try to extract clarity from his effusions.
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[Chris Christie, standing at a podium behind Trump, whom he has endorsed] had the eyes of a man who has looked into the heart of light, the silence. A man who had seen the moment of his greatness flicker, and seen the eternal footman hold his coat, and snicker.
And, in short, he looked afraid.
(The allusions are to T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.)
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So, that’s fiction and poetry. Let’s round things out with a dramatic monologue for Christie — from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna [“Chris”] Christie:
And I was thinking maybe, seeing he ain’t never done a thing for me in my life, he might be willing to stake me to a room and eats till I get rested up. [Wearily.] Gee, I sure need that rest! I’m knocked out. [Then resignedly.] But I ain’t expecting much from him. Give you a kick when you’re down, that’s what all men do. [With sudden passion.] Men, I hate ’em–all of ’em! And I don’t expect he’ll turn out no better than the rest.
The Pitino dynasty is at it again.
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A father and son named Pitino
Ran two basketball teams molto fino
A whorehouse, sex tapes
And assorted odd scrapes —
It’s a screenplay by Q. Tarantino
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UD thanks John.
… UD encountered, very close up,
a Cooper’s Hawk.
Click on the image for a nice big view.
Faculty and students are beginning to leave – or fail to attend – the University of Texas because of the state’s impending guns-in-the-classroom law.
Not a bad idea to leave, particularly because this is the beginning, with the real aim open carry.
