But it doesn’t sober this writer up enough to draw the obvious conclusion. Oh no. He’s a little stunned, a little daunted. But no.
Rentschler’s capacity, by the way, is 40,000.
The Oxford University Press has warned its writers not to mention pigs, sausages or pork-related words in children’s books, in an apparent bid to avoid offending Jews and Muslims.
It’s often only years later, when the lawsuits start teasing out emails, that you understand how certain harrowing instances of university research misconduct get to the point where, as at Duke University, “the methods used by [a] research group [weren’t] validated — and yet they [were] being used to assign patients to clinical trials.”
And just as in the University North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud case the (ignored, defamed) whistle blower was a person who ranked low in the local hierarchy, so in the Duke case, Bradley Perez was just a medical student, and when he complained to the now-notorious Anil Potti about the bogus research Potti was involving Perez in, the faker drew himself up to his full measure of fakery and told Perez “he takes it as a personal insult if people don’t believe in what he is doing.”
Perez persisted, casting about for other administrators who could help him put an end to Potti’s fraud. They weren’t helpful. They still aren’t. Two of Duke’s highest level administrators – Sally Kornbluth and Victor Dzau (famous Victor Dzau!) continue to insist they knew nothing about Perez’s early and frequent warnings.
Did Kornbluth know about the Perez case? Did Victor Dzau, who was then Duke Chancellor?
The answers are yes and yes.
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One scientific observer, considering this case as it has now revealed itself, comments:
“There is more to this story than the heroic and principled actions of an erudite young man and the shame that has befallen a great university in blindly and selfishly defending its own. It is indicative of a lack of understanding of the scientific method among many scientists… The Duke scandal is extreme, to be sure. But irreproducibility in academic research is common. And the reward structure and complacency of universities is to blame.”
There’s money on the table, in other words, so let’s not fuck it up.
UD has long felt this too. The NFL never presents itself as anything other than a whore. Watching its leader smirk his way through his role as The Voice of Moral Outrage during the Ray Rice thing was oddly reassuring, in a Popeyesque, I yam what I yam, sort of way.
The NFL is like Germaine, Henry’s favorite whore in Tropic of Cancer:
Germaine was a whore all the way through. … However vile and circumscribed was that world which she had created for herself, nevertheless she functioned in it superbly. And that in itself is a tonic thing.
The NCAA, on the other hand, is untonically complex – a whore that must pretend it’s a university student. Take Penn State, featured in the recent film, Happy Valley:
[Happy Valley] is not really about a sexual predator and his enabler. It’s about what their downfall illuminates: a nation so drunk on sports, especially on big-time college football, that it has lost the ability to think and feel. America has become a nation, as one reviewer of Happy Valley wrote, “put under a spell, even reduced to grateful infantilism, by the game of football.”
Grateful infantilism – pretty much the perfect opposite of what universities are about.
[T]here are people who actually dislike football and openly criticize many of its institutions.
A columnist in the University of Tennessee newspaper (Tennessee! Athletics! A blog like this one couldn’t survive without UT athletics!) shares some of his shock and awe at the presence of football haters (He doesn’t really mean football haters. He means people who don’t like or who don’t care about the football program at UT.) on his campus.
People who mainline booze up their ass and then hold surrealistic press conferences about it – now that’s nothing to write home about at UT; but people who fail to come out for the games… Are you fucking kidding me? Actually??
Tennessee’s athletic department, along with most other large football schools in America, is historically very profitable. [Yes, the lad believes most large football schools are profitable. I mean, look no further than the king of large football schools, the University of Texas.]
Robert Stone’s sobered-up appraisal of his ‘sixties youth appears in a New York Times appreciation – Stone has died, age 77 – of his terrific novels and short stories. His story “Helping,” which UD teaches whenever she teaches The Short Story, is a hilarious toxic gem, told from the point of view of a cosmically, confusedly embittered Vietnam vet. It’s not really Elliot’s war experience that’s “undermining” him (both the main character and his wife use this word to describe their general condition); life itself, that sickening mystery, is eroding his capacity to survive. His wife channels her fundamental misery, her disgust with the awfulness of human beings and human fate, into social work (they’re both social workers), but if you push her she’ll “[shudder] with loathing” for some of her clients:
“You can’t imagine! The woman munching Twinkies. The kid smelling of shit. They’re high morning noon and night… The Vopotik child will die, I think… Of course, sometimes you wonder whether it makes any difference. That’s the big question, isn’t it… You wonder. Ought they to live at all? To continue the cycle?”
Elliot, a mean drunk, viciously calls her “the friend of the unfortunate… the Christian Queen of Calvary.”
Art and alcohol, with their shared promise of desubliminated emotion and clarified perception, constantly attract and then repel this spiritually congested, bitterly disillusioned man, and Stone has the short story writer’s gift of condensing this attraction/repulsion business into sharp small moments:
Elliot’s cubicle in the social-services department was windowless and lined with bookshelves. When he found himself unable to concentrate on the magazine and without any heart for his paperwork, he ran his eye over the row of books beside his chair. There were volumes by Heinrich Muller and Carlos Castaneda, Jones’s life of Freud, and The Golden Bough. The books aroused a revulsion in Elliot. Their present uselessness repelled him…. There seemed to be nothing but whirl inside him… He could not control the headlong promiscuity of his thoughts.
Later, driving home:
When the engine turned over, Jussi Bjorling’s recording of the Handel Largo filled the car interior. He snapped it off at once…
After he goes to a bar and gets drunk (he’s had his alcoholism under control for awhile, but now that’s gone), he drives home and sits parked there for awhile.
For five minutes or so, Elliot sat in his car in the barn with the engine running and his Handel tape on full volume. He had driven over from East Ilford in a baroque ecstasy, swinging and swaying and singing along.
That mania quickly crashes into rageful despair, which again he understands in terms of art:
As he drank, a fragment from old Music’s translation of Medea came into his mind. “Old friend, I have to weep. The gods and I went mad together and made things as they are.”
Back in the house, the phone rings. One of his wife’s clients, a violent and disturbed man, calls to threaten the couple, and Elliot, drunk beyond caring, tells the guy to come on over. “You know where we live… Come on over… Bring your fat wife and your beat-up kid. Don’t be embarrassed if your head’s a little small.” He puts the phone down and happily grabs one of his guns and tells his wife: “Most of the time… I’m helpless in the face of human misery. Tonight I’m ready to reach out.”
Getting drunk was an insurrection, a revolution – a bad one. There would be outsize bogus emotions. There would be petty moral blackmail and cheap remorse.
The story ends with Elliot encountering his tall blond handsome professor neighbor (married to a tall blond beautiful woman, with two beautiful brilliant blond children – Elliot and his wife have so far been unable to have children) in the snowy woods around his house. Elliot’s envy of this pleasant enlightened compassionate man is homicidally total, and both men realize (Elliot is still holding his gun) they’re in a very dicey situation.
But the moment passes, and Elliot trudges on, sunk in the lower depths…
UD‘s about to go to Teaism to meet up with a friend, but she wants to write a little bit, when she gets back, about this now-notorious blog post from a very good writer and a very thoughtful doctor.
Because Richard Smith’s candid thoughts about the best death angered a lot of people, he has written a follow-up.
UD thinks his writing on death might profitably be read alongside another notorious recent essay on the subject, also by a doctor: Ezekiel Emanuel’s piece in the Atlantic.
As is often the case with very controversial writing, the responses (one’s own as well as those of others) are perhaps more interesting/important than the writing itself. I’ll chew over these matters while chewing on a scone and downing a mug of chai, and I’ll write about them when I return.
The unpleasant tendency of newspapers to cite statistics – and put them in high-profile editorials – has yet again reared its ugly head. The Boston Globe casts a rational eye at the U Mass football program and makes the obvious call: kill it.
So, you know, here’s the paper of record for that team’s city saying shut it down.
UMass had to assure many more football scholarships, meet minimum attendance requirements, and make facility improvements. But instead of leaping into glory, UMass hurled itself into a money pit. A program that cost the school $3.1 million in 2011 in direct support and student fees is projected to cost $8.6 million next year — even after projected revenues are taken into account — according a recently released faculty report. The school has precious little to show for it, with a 5-31 record in the last three years and a fan base in suspended animation. The Minutemen averaged 16,008 fans this season, barely more than last year’s home game average of 15,830.
Pushing athletes to enhance the university’s brand on the field often leads to problems in the classroom, and that pattern held true at UMass Amherst.
… Football losses are nearing $10 million a year… [T]axpayers can’t be expected to pay for an extravagant football program indefinitely, especially as the changing economics of college football make it even more expensive for UMass to stay competitive.
Franchement, here’s the worry on the part of the school. U Mass Amherst has arguably the most violent student body in America. The post-game riots there are terrifying. But if you take away that important emotional outlet for the large numbers of drunken bullies who go to school there, who knows what they’ll do instead? (Put amherst in my search engine for many posts about that school’s long history of riots.)
It’s … taxing.
In response to huge gobs of student audience routinely leaving football games early and embarrassing the school with their obvious indifference to the proceedings, USD coach Joe Glenn said, back in 2012:
… [The] legacy of a fan base lies on the shoulders of the students.
“If students get to know their players and learn to cheer them on, then the longevity of the fan base will extend,” Glenn said.
This comment boasts some high-dollar-value words (legacy; longevity) but it’s basically saying what all pathetic, athletics-run universities say to their students: We didn’t admit you to this university for you to be a student. It’s on your shoulders to sit in bleachers for hours, screaming and pulling your hair out at the sight of your football team.
Just get to know them!
So… let’s take a look…
In 2012, even as the coach was insisting USD students get to know their team, no fewer than six football players had an active conspiracy going (teamwork!) to commit big-time tax fraud. They
gather[ed] names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other identifying information, federal authorities said of the scheme, which went on between June 2011 and May 2012. They used the data to file fraudulent tax returns, using addresses that weren’t associated with the identity theft victims so that members of the scheme could retrieve the refunds.
So, with the help of federal authorities, Coach Glenn got his wish. University of South Dakota students have gotten to know their team, gotten to know that a significant part of that team, working together, stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is a high level of organized crime for a group of twenty year olds, and, as sentences are handed down, their activity is attracting high levels of national attention…
So now you know the sort of people you’re cheering for, kiddies! Get out there and scream your head off!!
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And spare a cheer for the team’s impressive recruiting staff. These guys found six tax fraudsters! Six identify thieves! Now they need your support as they work night and day to repeat the magic…
That was Washington State University’s athletic director, doing a little damage control in 2012. It’s now 2015, and the school lucky enough to hire Mr “lock [his] fucking pussy ass in a place so dark that the only way he knows he has a dick is to reach down and touch it” Mike Leach to coach its football team now has not a 6.6 million dollar athletic program deficit, but … let’s see… how profitable have they become…
Oh. They’ve now got a thirteen million dollar deficit.
But Bill Moos is still at it, promising the suckers at WSU that if they’ll just sit tight for another two or three years…
Moos said all Pac-12 schools will see significant increases in television money …
Just hold on, dammit! Another couple of years! I swear it’ll be zillions from tv!
Well, a little over a million. Maybe.
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But… wait a minute!
“We expected a sizable deficit as we put our numbers together and then we decided to make it even larger to take care of some things that we felt needed to happen…”
You expected? But you told me back in 2012…
“When I got to the scene there were cordons… People didn’t want to tell me he was dead… One of his security guards was killed because he didn’t have time to take out his gun because the terrorists had Kalashnikovs…
I didn’t want to leave; I didn’t want to leave his body…
He died standing. He defended secularism; he defended Voltaire’s spirit… He was executed with his comrades, as he would say; not companions, comrades…”
Jeannette Bougrab, professor of law; and companion, Charb.
… the Charlie Hebdo killers are dead.
Ben Carson or Dartmouth College, the irony’s getting a little thick around here. Coughcough. UD‘s having trouble breathing.
One quick bit of advice from UD, by the way: In general, avoid the word integrity. People who use the word integrity seem to get themselves slapped down a lot. Find another word. Better yet, try to be honest about who you are and what your local culture is.
Carson’s majorly lifted book included cautionary tales about how important it is to have integrity, the way he has integrity, and how people who have integrity do not, for instance, plagiarize… Dartmouth College, which pretends to believe that people like this are chockablock with integrity, allowed some floating lamblike being from the religion department to offer not only a course designed for athletes about sports ethics (in the direct footsteps of America’s best-known sports ethicist, Jan Boxill) but a course featuring that most perfect of ed-tech devices, the clicker.
The clicker boasts all the advantages of today’s cutting-edge classroom devices:
1. It’s expensive to the student.
2. It’s so easy to cheat with that even students inclined toward honesty will be tempted to use it in that way.
3. It’s dehumanizing.
4. It allows lazy professors to avoid any interaction with students.
5. It has zero educational value.
I know you don’t want me to pile on, but the full name of the course was Sports, Ethics, and Religion. With Dartmouth rapidly becoming the nation’s epicenter of vile fraternities and cheating classrooms, UD recommends that it continue offering these classes as a smokescreen (rather in the way Bernard Madoff put himself on the board of trustees of an orthodox religious institution) but add to their names. Next semester: Sports, Ethics, Religion, and Patriotism. After that, Sports, Ethics, Religion, Patriotism, and … Integrity! Und so weiter.
Put Out More Flags. Put a Bird on It.
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UD thanks Dave.