At George Washington University, where I’m an English professor, two students have committed suicide this semester, one in January, and one last month. A third student death has also lately taken place, not yet confirmed as a suicide.

All universities tremble a little, crouch a little, when suicides happen in succession like these; administrators know about suicide clusters, the weird capacity of the act to embolden others who might be leaning toward self-destruction, and they try to heighten scrutiny – through resident assistants and the like – of their student population in the aftermath of these events. Via their president, they issue – as GW’s president did – university-wide emails that remind people to take care of themselves and each other, to reach out to people who seem troubled, to make use of campus therapists, to call the following phone number if they think they might need counseling.

I’ve read, and blogged, about university student suicides – and other kinds of suicides – for years. I’ve read Hume and Durkheim and Camus. My father committed suicide. I’m teaching modern American poetry this year, which sometimes feels like a suicide-compendium. Each morning as I walk toward the end of the Metro platform on my commute to Foggy Bottom, a sign in front of the train tunnel implores me not to throw myself on the tracks. So many hurl themselves from the Golden Gate bridge that a decision has finally been made to install a mesh net.

Suicide, especially among the promising young, always shocks us; yet it is far from uncommon. Suicide, experts say, is a very impulsive act, and the young are inclined toward impulsivity. A lot of people seem to carry suicidal thoughts around with them from day to day, but it takes a special combination of personal attributes and environmental factors to actually make it happen. Being young makes it easier to make it happen.

When I hear (usually from colleagues) about a student suicide at GW, I tend to have one immediate feeling (pity) and one immediate thought (was this one of my students?). Then my mind goes to the last minutes of the person; I can’t help imagining the silent misery and desperation surrounding the act itself. Of the student suicides that have happened during my decades at GW, I tend to think most about the undergraduate woman who took the short Metro ride across the Potomac River from her dorm room to soulless Crystal City Virginia (a stark landscape of skyscrapers and parking lots), where she checked into a hotel and killed herself. I’m not sure why her scenario in particular moves me. Maybe her final gesture of removing herself from the social and intellectual buzz of a heady urban scene to the anonymous white noise of Crystal City evokes for me the gesture of suicide itself – the impulse to deafen yourself even to the most seemingly seductive blandishments of existence.

Martin Amis, in his autobiography, Experience, writes that “the writer is the opposite of the suicide, constantly applauding life and, furthermore, creating it, assigning breath and pulse to a ‘nonexistent prodigy.'” (The last phrase is taken from The Eye, by Vladimir Nabokov.) The creative writer may indeed embody suicide’s opposite principle, but this doesn’t stop surprising numbers of literary artists from ending their lives.

We are all, if you like, literary artists every day of our conscious life, telling stories in our heads about ourselves (“God, we simply must dress the character,” Stephen Dedalus broods in Ulysses), keeping journals that plot our progress through the world. Every morning we assign breath and pulse to the self we are as we rise. My teaching life has been about sharing not just formal poetic and fictive and dramatic narratives, but asking students to think about our informal universal demand for stories from our story-tellers – a demand that starts in early childhood. As we get older, we take over the task of narrating our life story and, like Scheherazade, keeping that narrative thread going for the sake of our survival. To teach literature is mainly to deal with successful story-telling: the finished novel, the realized poem. But it is also to remind students that the content of some of that successful literature will be the failure of characters to maintain their fictions. And that the larger story of some of this art will be the personal narrative failure of its flesh-and-blood creator.

… controversy currently raging about Brandeis University having changed its mind about the honorary degree they announced they were going to give Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a very outspoken – really, at times, an over the top – critic of Islam.

You’re supposed to be on one of two sides about this: She’s a pernicious Islamophobe and good riddance; or, she’s not all that different in the ferocity of her some of her statements from other people who have been honored in this way by Brandeis so what the hell.

UD‘s thing is: Whatever brings more attention to this woman’s powerful attacks on female genital mutilation and full veiling is a good thing. Instead of Hirsi Ali getting a nice little notice in a Brandeis University alumni magazine, she’s getting immense tons of coverage from the world’s media. Brava.

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

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan gets it said.

La Kid, Snoop Dogg,
Kennedy Center,
Washington DC,
December 2013.

… KOMPROMITACJE, a first-rate (according to Mr UD, who speaks the language) blog out of Poland. Its proprietor linked to UD‘s comments about Zygmunt Bauman’s plagiarism.

And, well, here goes …

[T]he Athens Special Affairs Unit carried out an inspection in the Development Grants Account of the National Technical University of Athens and found that during the years 2002-2013, the university submitted false income declarations and as a result it failed to pay 20,796,216 euros in tax returns.

Excellent writing about one of America’s most prominent university figures, the University of Kentucky’s John Calipari. A sample:

Anyone who follows college basketball sooner or later develops a kind of ethical dementia. The sport is a perfect example of a functioning underground economy. Players have skills that CBS—to name only the most prominent parasite—values at something over $1 billion a year. Because this is not Soviet Russia, players find ways to get paid for these skills under the table, largely because a preposterous rulebook (and a feast of fat things called the NCAA) works diligently to prevent anyone from getting paid over the table. Since everybody involved in the sport has known this for decades, there’s a lot of the old nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on.

… But even in this culture, which is pretty much what a dockside saloon in Singapore would be if it had shoe contracts and golf outings, John Calipari always has been notable for the baroque happenings that seem to surround his every move. Coaches who have barbered the rulebook like Edward Scissorhands look upon Calipari with a weird mixture of awe and disdain. When he was but a baby brigand in the employ of the University of Pittsburgh, Calipari’s recruiting tactics very nearly incited a general hooley at the Big East’s annual meeting.

During his brief, and clamorously unsuccessful, stint coaching the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, a job he landed because of that UMass Final Four run that doesn’t officially exist any more [it was vacated because of rule-breaking], Calipari enlivened things by calling a reporter a “Mexican idiot.” Then he moved on to Memphis, a university with a proud history of employing coaches whom you would not trust to hang up your coat.

Those southern sports factories… You can’t keep ’em down…

… at a George Washington University event next week, and of course she’s been reading and watching a lot of Lebowitz (interviews; this film; and Lebowitz’s agent is sending UD The Fran Lebowitz Reader). She’s been pondering Leibowitz as a person and as a writer, pondering the mix of character and personal history and intellect that makes a person a certain kind of writer, and in particular pondering Lebowitz in connection with UD‘s old friend David Kosofsky, who, like his well-known sister Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, died a few years ago, in his fifties.

While his sister became a famous academic writer, David died without producing the writing he had the ambition to write. This was partly because he lacked his sister’s focus – David tried on academia, tried on freelance travel writing, wrote some unpublished short stories, but nothing really took (a language teacher in Korea for many years, he published two books about English acquisition). Yet thinking about Lebowitz, who calls herself not just a blocked but a “blockaded” writer, UD wonders whether a certain complex attitude, an angle toward the world the two of them share, has something to do with this outcome.

On the simplest level, Lebowitz and Kosofsky are rather steadily depressed, extremely well-read Jewish intellectuals of a socially radical disposition. Yet because they actually seem not to believe in the possibility of even incremental (forget radical) human improvement – because both have the satirist’s amused pity for the incorrigible stupidity of the human race – their radicality is really what’s blocked. The blocked writing is the natural outcome of a wry hopelessness which may – as in the case of Lebowitz and, say, someone like Karl Kraus or Alfred Jarry – produce some hilarious satire which evokes the liberating and clarifying shock we feel when a writer aggressively strips us of all our delusions, but it won’t produce very much, possibly because the pull of the writer’s underlying hopelessness gets more and more powerful, moves more and more toward disappointment, with time and experience.

Think here of what George Orwell, in “Politics vs Literature,” says about Jonathan Swift. There’s much in the passage I’m about to cite that does not correspond to Lebowitz and Kosofsky – neither the point about authoritarianism, nor the point about envy of others who may be happy seems right – but there’s much in this passage that does correspond:

[T]he most essential thing in Swift is his inability to believe that life — ordinary life on the solid earth, and not some rationalized, deodorized version of it — could be made worth living. Of course, no honest person claims that happiness is now a normal condition among adult human beings; but perhaps it could be made normal, and it is upon this question that all serious political controversy really turns. Swift has much in common — more, I believe, than has been noticed — with Tolstoy, another disbeliever in the possibility of happiness. In both men you have the same anarchistic outlook covering an authoritarian cast of mind; in both a similar hostility to Science, the same impatience with opponents, the same inability to see the importance of any question not interesting to themselves; and in both cases a sort of horror of the actual process of life…

… 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.

The energy despite the jaundice – yet, if my theory is right, that energy does indeed dissipate, with the satirist increasingly unwilling to face the horror-content she is bound to produce if she does in fact write. “All contemplation of oneself is unpleasant — even the contemplation of your own ideas is fairly nerve‑racking — and that’s what writing is,” says Lebowitz in a Paris Review interview. When your own ideas feature the ignobility and lack of interest of most other human beings, you may have difficulty taking them seriously enough to write about them. In one of the few unkind reviews of Lebowitz’s work I found, a Tablet writer says

[A] tastefully nihilistic pose has been [Lebowitz’s] fortune and, perhaps perversely, also her undoing as an artist. “I’m not interested in other people, so I don’t expect them to be interested in me,” she claims. Fair enough (if somewhat specious), except that the single requirement of the art of writing — to say nothing of the art of conversation — is exactly that.

Actually, it’s not that an interest in other people is a requirement of writing; it’s a requirement of deeper, non-satirical writing. Nor is such an interest a requirement of conversation; it is, again, only a requirement of conversation that goes beyond what can be enormously amusing (see Oscar Wilde’s Earnest) badinage and point-scoring. Iris Murdoch puts it this way:

[M]ost great writers have a sort of calm merciful vision because they can see how different people are and why they are different. Tolerance is connected with being able to imagine centers of reality which are remote from oneself. The great artist sees the vast interesting collection of what is other than himself and does not picture the world in his own image. I think this kind of merciful objectivity is virtue…

Lebowitz and Kosofsky’s charisma derives and derived in part, I’m thinking, from their patent, and very cool, uninterest in this sort of thing. Flaneuse and flaneur, they are and were the “idle observer” on the surface of things, the observer who makes out of a public/private experience involving a totally out-there walker’s life in the city and a totally in-there retreatist’s life inside one’s library, a fascinating, but perhaps ultimately pretty demoralizing, spectacle.

“I think greed is healthy,” [their speaker] told the graduating class at Berkeley’s business school in 1986. “You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” The speaker was Ivan Boesky, who shortly thereafter would be fined $100 million, and later go to prison, for insider trading.

The Senate is not impressed with the deficits the University of Hawaii sports programs have racked up. [Resolution] SCR 38 urges the university not to raise student fees to balance that budget, noting that students already pay $50 apiece for athletics fees each semester and generally aren’t stoked enough about football to actually attend games.

Just a little nudge from hapless Hawaiian lawmakers to hopeless UH. Even though it’s just a nudge, it won’t go anywhere. No one cares.

Whether authorizing the payment of a modest stipend to student-athletes in order to ensure their continued loyalty or penalizing academically noncompliant programs to remind fans that college sports are not simply a farm for professional sports, the NCAA will do whatever it can to preserve its extremely marketable illusions. Absent organizing myths that appeal to casual fans, public interest in a spectator sport will dwindle. A purely cynical atmosphere is bad for business… Revenue-generating college sports will endure as an ungainly appendage to American universities until the precise moment when its costs outweigh its benefits. That day may come sooner rather than later. A chain of unfavorable legal decisions, culminating with a massive judgment award in one or more of the 65 concussion-related lawsuits pending against the NCAA in state and federal courts, could accomplish what a long tradition of media outrage has not been able to: the effacement of a puzzling 100-year marriage between research universities and high-end athletics. Should the plaintiffs prevail in some of these cases, payouts to injured athletes could run into the millions or perhaps even billions of dollars, rendering athletic departments insolvent and unable to continue subsidizing athletic exhibitions of any sort.

While UD agrees with Oliver Bateman that absolutely nothing will change about university revenue sports (beyond these sports plantationizing [Don’t think it’s a word? Look it up. – And I use it because Taylor Branch calls the revenue sports-mad university a plantation.] our universities yet more than they’ve already been plantationized), she disagrees about the cynicism thing. What more purely cynical atmosphere can you think of in current American culture than professional revenue sports? Professional football, professional basketball, professional baseball… I mean, baseball — are you kidding me? UD barely follows baseball, and every year it’s a race to the bottom to see which component – players, owners, agents – can out-cynical the other. Cynicism is part of the American Master of the Universe mystique (watch the game players in this film) and a national hero like Nick Saban or Bob Knight or Johnny Manziel or Cam Newton is a hero because he’s cynical, not despite the fact that he’s cynical.

(Sports like cycling are definitely bringing up the rear in the matter of sports and cynicism in America. What brought down Lance Armstrong would never bring down a baseball player. Not a really good baseball player. Eventually we’ll come to revere cyclists for their cynicism in the same way we revere other sportsmen for their cynicism.)

There’s no reason to think the illusion of student athletes is what makes university revenue sports profitable. The most profitable university programs are the most professionalized, the most nakedly cynical. These programs will fail – if they fail – due to financially crushing personal injury lawsuits.

College fans only care about the same thing professional fans care about: winning. You’ll find a few rows of drunks freezing their asses off in the stadium waving their school colors, but everyone’s laughing at them.

Even the drunks aren’t in it for whatever the old school thing means. They’re in it to get disorderly.

It’s not the sports program which is an ungainly appendage to the university, but the university which is an ungainly appendage to the sports program, and the university is ungainly because by definition it cannot be purely cynical (it’s a non-profit, and people like Charles Grassley are watching). It can be very cynical indeed, as Gordon Gee made clear when he made the mistake of going public with the absolute cynicism he brings to the concept “university president.” (‘When asked in March 2011 whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, a grinning Gee said: “No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.“‘)

Many presidents of our present-day Penn States know they owe their job to the politezza of the coach. They are very very very cynical. But unlike Gee they keep it to themselves.

Of course the American Association of University Professors draws our attention, in a just-issued report, to massive overspending on sports and underspending on academics at American universities. After all:

“This comes from the American Association of University Professors, which has a vested interest in finding that too little money is going to faculty and too much to sports and administration,” [Terry W.] Hartle said.

Let’s not be naive! Get with the program! The AAUP is part of the universities-should-educate-people cartel. Take what they say with a big grain of salt.

Get used to it. Socialism used to be the “historical inevitability.” That didn’t work out too well. Football and basketball coaches as university presidents will happen. Anyone who looks at American universities can see it coming, and you don’t need to be a fancy social theorist.

At one time, trading a scholarship for athletic performances made sense. There wasn’t much money available in college sports even in the revenue producing sports of football and basketball. But as TV money seeped into the industry, coaches were paid more and more money and colleges felt they needed to spend more money to get the best available coaches to recruit and instruct. State legislatures approved astronomical raises for coaches and in many states where public colleges are part of the college sports industry, the football or basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees… Millionaire coaches like Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim bristle at the idea of paying college players even though the industry is flush with money from television and marketing partners…

College sports are not-profits. The industry has a blanket antitrust exemption that allows schools who play in college football bowl games to skip paying taxes from bowl game earnings. Yet NCAA members are getting billions from TV, and hundreds of millions alone from the Final Four weekend. At the same time, players are no longer content with missing out on their earnings. Dr. Harvey Schiller may have predicted the future for the industry, becoming a professional entity because there is too much money at risk for it not to happen.

The professionalization of our academic McDonalds (billions and billions sold) continues, with increasingly insistent arguments being made against the maintenance of non-profit status for athletics money, and for endowment money. Because it’s the same thing, isn’t it? Athletics and endowment?

If Harvard University generates a thirty-five billion dollar endowment (a number of other Ivies are not far behind), all of it in very significant ways protected from taxation… And if because of this astronomical profit people like Harvard investment managers get multiple millions in salary each year from the institution, and people like coaches get multiple millions in salary each year from the institution, but very little of the billions left over are spent for academic purposes (Harvard notoriously hoards its endowment; revenue sports players aren’t paid), why should we be surprised that communities surrounding McDonald’s schools are constantly challenging their tax exempt status in court? That Felix Salmon’s much quoted statement has it that Harvard is “a hedge fund with an educational institution attached“?

All of this is a small element of the immense income inequality debate in America today. CEOs like Gilead’s John Martin taking home almost $100 million each year are the real attention-getters in this debate. Yet America’s John Martin problem is a straightforward one: It is about capital markets and unlimited greed. Easy to grasp that.

And of course most of the people in this country have no trouble – applaud, in fact – one man or woman pulling in any amount imaginable for themselves. Ten years from now, Martin’s yearly compensation with be five hundred million. Bravo! Job well done. No upper limits, and people who question upper limits are jealous losers who have to be restrained by the state or the next thing you know it’s Kristallnacht.

Fine, okay, but does the same psychology pertain to high-minded non-profit universities becoming greedy billionaires? Even in America, there’s some vestigial sense that universities are different from John Martin. That sense could grow, could come to understand itself more clearly. And if that happens, there’s trouble ahead for the most profitable McDonald’s franchise-holders in the land.

Two Upstate senators say they voted against each incumbent University of South Carolina trustee because of “questionable activities” allowed to occur on two of USC’s campuses.

… [The senators cited] a performance on the campus of the one-woman show, “How to Become a Lesbian in 10 Days.”

“All we are asking for is balance,” [one] said.