… say Richard Vedder and Matthew Denhart in Forbes, nothing will change in the supremely scummy world of big-time university sports.
Wannabe schools in the shadows of the Ohio States of the world often lose $15 million a year or more on sports, usually directly or indirectly financed by socking it to students, a large portion of whom do not share the enthusiasm of some alumni and others for whom sports is a passion. Even at these schools, it is difficult to find a football coach who earns less than $200,000 a year. Fans often claim these salaries are driven by market forces. Yet one doubts that a properly functioning market would ever provide such high compensation to the chief executive of a company that loses millions annually.
But back to that unless. I doubt it’s unless a herculean scandal occurs. It will occur; and it won’t happen at just one school. There will be, simultaneously, herculean scandals at, say, five schools. The national headlines, for weeks on end, will feature universities — universities — buried in piles of pig shit. People will definitely notice.
And what will happen?
They’ll replace the head of the NCAA with another guy just like whatzisface.
.. and author of a series of books on strength conditioning, has killed himself.
He suffered from depression.
He jumped off the roof of the New York Athletic Club.
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On the same day, an opinion piece in Emma’s city’s newspaper, The New York Times, features this phrase:
suicide is generally wrong
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Indeed the opinion piece’s headline makes the wrongness of suicide paramount. It asks:
WHAT’S WRONG WITH SUICIDE?
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This is the writer’s second column, in the last couple of days, on suicide. In neither column does he even begin to hint at a justification for the claim that suicide — assisted or non-assisted — is wrong. Let’s see if we can do that.
There is an obvious religious way in which suicide is wrong. You are born by God, you live by God, you die by God. For many religious, taking your death into your own hands is – like abortion – denying the will of God in regard to the most basic of human realities. It is a sort of grotesque disobedience, a usurpation of divine powers, essentially unforgivable in its extremity.
Other spiritual traditions may not bring so punitive and outraged a rhetoric (and indeed damnation) to suicide, but they may well see it as … not exactly wrong, but, as the Buddhist Matthieu Ricard explains:
[W]anting not to exist any longer is a delusion. It’s a form of attachment that, destructive though it is, binds you to samsara, the circle of suffering existence. When someone commits suicide, all they do is change to another state, and not necessarily a better state either.
Here, suicide is just sort of stupid, since it doesn’t accomplish the surcease you’re after. On the contrary, it almost guarantees the unpleasantness of your next go-’round.
If you’re not part of a spiritual tradition in which the will of God or karmic action prevails, in what way is suicide wrong, or ontologically mistaken, and therefore to be rejected?
Here are three possible ways: One is the harm argument; a second is the antithetical-to-life argument; and, finally, there’s the cowardice argument.
Harm: Everyone knows that suicide hurts other people. When suicides write notes (apparently Tom Emma did not), they almost always include the words I’m sorry. Weighing on their minds as suicides do the deed is the shock and despair and guilt they’re handing people who love them, and they routinely ask their forgiveness.
Just as for the religious you are, in killing yourself, denying yourself to God, for human beings you are denying yourself to them. The act is the ultimate taking. Hence, suicide is wrong because it is cruel beyond reason.
Antithetical to life: In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis writes that “because of what I do all day ,… suicides … are antithetical.” An artist, a writer, creates, makes something out of nothing. Her material is us — living breathing human beings and their ongoing dilemmas — and she needs us to be there, to keep at it.
When we check out, we take the air out of everyone’s tires. We threaten the fundamental, unthinking commitment we’re all supposed to have to the human comedy and our part in it. Life is good… or at least interesting… or at least compelling in its pleasures. Something like that. Each suicide is thus an intimately demoralizing act for the rest of us. Why persist? Why create? Who says life is good? Suicide is wrong because in killing oneself one ontologically puts at risk all of us.
Cowardice: Old age, people like to say, is not for sissies. All of life is full of challenges and deficits and sorrows and anxieties, and old age is of course rife with them; but, as the cliché suggests, only a sissy would take the easy way out. Life, under any circumstances, is a gift. Your life is a gift to you, and to others. Suicide is wrong because its commission makes you a supreme sissy, someone whose unseemly fear of existence itself blights your very being.
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UD would argue that none of these three arguments succeeds in marking suicide as wrong.
The mother of a Purdue University student who died of heatstroke in the forests of Grand Cayman Island last week recalls his passion for reptiles. “We’ll find comfort in that, as upset as we are.”
Rescue crews had enormous difficulty reaching him.
The rescue attempt included fire and ambulance workers trekking through about two miles of bush land while carrying stretchers and other equipment to reach the man, who was believed to be suffering from hyperthermia (heat stroke). The bush was so thick that emergency vehicles could not be driven into the area.
Medical personnel stabilised the man while the Royal Cayman Islands Police helicopter was called out to attempt to pick him up.
One problem: Nowhere to land.
So firefighters used machetes and a chainsaw to clear trees and bush to create an area large enough for the chopper to touch down. The man was then carried to the helicopter to be transported to hospital.
In class.
A law professor conducts a study which reveals what we all know: Most students on laptops in class spend most of their time farting around.
“[W]hat causes students to vote with their fingers to ignore us [?]” he asks. He assumes it’s something having to do with us, with professors.
But here’s the thing. Certainly some professors are bores or worse, and students ignore them. Okay. But many professors are reasonably engaging… some are insanely engaging … not as engaging as Joel Osteen (UD‘s in Rehoboth and doing her yearly tv watching) but really quite engaging.
Even less than scintillating, less amiable, professors can, if they’re smart and enthusiastic about their subject, be quite tolerable. I mean, you know, there’s a variety of human personalities out there, and part of the jolt to your system college is supposed to be might include your coming to appreciate the fact that not everyone has to be as chipper as Kathie Lee Gifford to command your attention.
UD, that is, doesn’t think this news about students and laptops and texting should prompt an agonized reappraisal of the way professors do things. She thinks the phenomenon is mainly about the massively online culture which birthed the American college student. College is really the country’s only counter to that culture, being about sustained intellectual focus and real-world verbal interaction.
The Sydney Morning Herald quotes the vice-chancellor of Macquarie University on acquisitive, amoral universities.
Among his complaints:
… [M]edical researchers lend their names to articles written by drug companies to boost sales. Ghost writing has benefited researchers by giving them additional publications to add to their resumes..
The problem, which has alarmed medical editors in the US, arises when ”publications are the coin of the realm in university scientific careers…”
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He says a university should produce people “who understand the world and their place in it, who can speak coherently, who know what a poem is and who can tell a symphony from a jingle.”
UD leaves today for her annual Rehoboth Beach vacation. (Haven’t read the book I just linked to. Good title.) Blogging, of course, continues as ever.
Here are two current snapshots from Rehoboth:
Yesterday, tons of headless fish washed ashore. (HEADLESS FISH ON TOPLESS BEACH?) This story reminded me of my brief swim, many years ago, in the Baltic waters off Gdansk. Quite a few dead fish there too.
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Lingo’s Market, a Rehoboth landmark where the summer people shop for groceries, is being fought over by the son and daughter of the woman who for many years (she just died, in her nineties) owned and operated it.
The woman seems not to have liked her son. This is from her will:
I make no provisions in this will for my son Archie, except the same amount of love that he showed me after he started living with his French girlfriend, because he has been well provided for. This is because, Archie, you came to me and said, ‘Mother, let me show you how to save money by incorporating Lingo’s Market.’ You incorporated it as ‘Archie Lingo’s Market.’ I trusted you my son, but you used me for [your] own money grubbing ways.
Ooh la la.
Why would anybody pay $675 for convicted swindler Bernie Madoff’s honorary diploma from Yeshiva University? The real question, exclaimed Rich Kroll, slapping his head after he got outbid for the diploma, is why anybody wouldn’t pay it.
“It’s history! It’s the big thing! It’s the biggest thing of the century!” said the anguished Kroll, a North Miami online retailer. “I should have bought it — I should have kept bidding. I dropped out at $600, because I only have $500 in my pocket, but I should have found a way! I wanted it!”
Miami Herald
Marcia Angell, New York Review of Books.
With long-term use of psychoactive drugs, the result is, in the words of Steve Hyman, a former director of the NIMH and until recently provost of Harvard University, “substantial and long-lasting alterations in neural function.” As quoted by Whitaker, the brain, Hyman wrote, begins to function in a manner “qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state.” After several weeks on psychoactive drugs, the brain’s compensatory efforts begin to fail, and side effects emerge that reflect the mechanism of action of the drugs… The episodes of mania caused by antidepressants may lead to a new diagnosis of “bipolar disorder” and treatment with a “mood stabilizer,” such as Depokote (an anticonvulsant) plus one of the newer antipsychotic drugs. And so on.
Some patients take as many as six psychoactive drugs daily. One well- respected researcher, Nancy Andreasen, and her colleagues published evidence that the use of antipsychotic drugs is associated with shrinkage of the brain, and that the effect is directly related to the dose and duration of treatment. As Andreasen explained to The New York Times, “The prefrontal cortex doesn’t get the input it needs and is being shut down by drugs. That reduces the psychotic symptoms. It also causes the prefrontal cortex to slowly atrophy.”
Getting off the drugs is exceedingly difficult, according to Whitaker, because when they are withdrawn the compensatory mechanisms are left unopposed. When Celexa is withdrawn, serotonin levels fall precipitously because the presynaptic neurons are not releasing normal amounts and the postsynaptic neurons no longer have enough receptors for it. Similarly, when an antipsychotic is withdrawn, dopamine levels may skyrocket. The symptoms produced by withdrawing psychoactive drugs are often confused with relapses of the original disorder, which can lead psychiatrists to resume drug treatment, perhaps at higher doses.
Angell’s review of three books about psychoactive drugs and depression suggests that for the most part the pills don’t work, and are (see above) positively dangerous.
And what’s this got to do with universities? High-profile professors of psychiatry all over this country, some of them paid by drug companies, legitimize the use of these pills by millions and millions of Americans, including very small children.
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UD thanks MattF for the link.
… the disgusting, injurious corruption of medical knowledge in America.
[T]he $310 billion pharmaceutical industry quietly buys … the contents of medical journals and, all too often, the trajectory of medical research itself.
[Continuing medical education courses are] pedagogic playdates [that] familiarize doctors with pharmaceutical companies’ patented products to the exclusion of cheaper and sometimes safer and more effective alternatives.
[A Canadian bioethicist says:] “Many psychiatric medications are little more than placebos, yet many clinicians have come to believe that SSRI [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a newer class of antidepressants] drugs are magic, all through the suppression of negative studies.”
[Another observer calls much of the content of our medical journals] “little better than infomercials.”
[At least] 50 …Elsevier journals appear to be Big Pharma advertisements passed off as medical publications.
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UD thanks Adam for the link.