… but you have to admit that, given the context, it’s pretty brilliant.

MP Amna Nosseir, professor of comparative jurisprudence at [Egypt’s] Al-Azhar University, who has backed [a niqab] ban, said that wearing the [full face] veil is not a requirement of Islam and in fact has non-Islamic origins. She has argued that it is a Jewish tradition…

Whatever works.

… to be with her relative who’s recovering from surgery. She will blog all along the way. She will in particular try to say something meaningful about professors who say outrageous things and professors who say outrageous things.

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Somewhere north of Philly. I seem to have said what I wanted to say in this post’s comment thread.

Uterus transplant.

Jonathan Chait writes:

Trump has … exposed [a] deep insecurity among right-wing intellectuals: the fear that their movement appeals to rubes. The conservative movement’s tightening grip over the Republican Party has coincided with its elevation of leaders incapable of explaining their policies cogently. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin all drew the disdain of liberal elites for their reliance on simplistic aphorisms and poor grasp of detail, humiliating conservative intellectuals, who defended the keen minds of their heroes. Whether or not Donald Trump the human being is intelligent, there’s no question that “Donald Trump,” presidential candidate, is not. His entire campaign operates well below the level of rational thought — it’s all boasting, absurd promises, repetitive sloganeering, and abuse. Just as email scammers intentionally salt their messages with typos in order to weed out anyone educated enough to see through their swindle, allowing them to focus on the most gullible, Trump seems to consciously repel anyone possessed of a brain.

It has indeed been strange, over the years, for UD to read impassioned defenses of people like Sarah Palin from people like Joseph Epstein:

Here is a woman raising five children who is able not only to have an active hand in the life of her community but actually win the highest political office in her state. As the governor of Alaska, moreover, she took on the corrupt elements in her own party, which requires courage …

Once a Northwestern University literature professor, once editor of American Scholar, Epstein of all contemporary essayists has prided himself on his own high literacy and his championing of only the most cogent and brilliant of writers (Henry James in particular). It was remarkable to UD — who knew Epstein when she attended Northwestern and found him as scrupulous a speaker, writer, and cultural critic as most of his published work suggests — it was remarkable to find him, in 2008, employing his pellucid writing in service to Palin.

If the founder of Trump University becomes the Republican nominee, as seems likely, it will be interesting to see which Epsteins step up to spend their intellectual capital on him.

The reporter tells the story straight, without a hint of irony: Football and basketball success has created a $1.2 million deficit for the obscure, already-struggling, school. SOU didn’t figure their teams would actually win games; it has no reserve fund; it overlooked the fact that almost no one buys tickets to its games; and it seems to have forgotten to budget for team travel. SOU also forgot that the school is located in a state whose constant economic turmoil means constant cutbacks at its public universities. Whoops!

No, no irony detectable in this article about it from a local booster rag; and certainly no derision, which is abundantly deserved…

Paging Bernie: How are you planning to sell America on your free public university tuition plan when this is the way public universities spend our money?

Will the New York Times take action against the plagiarist?

No.

Why not?

Well, if you ask ol’ UD (she’s grateful to a number of readers who have linked her to this innovative form of plagiarism), the whole thing’s just too measly. Pursuing a lawsuit about crossword puzzles would be like crossword puzzles themselves:

1 ACROSS: SEVEN LETTERS, OF LITTLE IMPORTANCE
1 DOWN: PHRASE, ELEVEN LETTERS, THREE WORDS, POOR USE OF ONE’S MORNING

Trump-Hitler Roundup: Here’s Who Compared Donald Trump to Hitler This Weekend

… becomes a serious
kick boxer.

All UD
can think about,
looking at her
done up like
this, is how
much we spent
on her teeth.

“I’ve gone door to door,” said Marshall Cohen, the campaign manager for Jamie Raskin, the state senator, “and people ask, ‘What’s your cash on hand?’ ”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: When you’ve been saving up a lot of anger, and you want to spend it stylishly and well, listing is your best friend. Listing allows a writer to organize and compress her many grievances instead of spewing them about and making herself, like Sarah Palin, an object of satire.

Listing makes you look rational, and your grievances plausible. Inside you’re raging, but your calm and systematic prose suggests that your rage is not composed of inchoate superficial and personal stuff; rather, what’s bugging you amounts to a coherent indictment of something real, with large and shared implications.

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Consider some introductory paragraphs from David Remnick’s recent New Yorker piece on Trump. SOS will highlight each list.

It was all so funny once. For a long time, Trump, with his twenty-four-karat skyscrapers, his interesting hair, and his extra-classy airline, was a leading feature of the New York egoscape. The editors of the satirical monthly Spy covered him with the same obsessive attention that Field & Stream pays to the rainbow trout. Trump never failed to provide; he was everywhere, commandeering a corner at a professional wrestling match, buying the Miss Universe franchise and vowing smaller bathing suits and higher heels. You could watch him humiliate supplicants on “The Apprentice” and hear him on “The Howard Stern Show” gallantly describing the mystery of Melania’s bowel movements (“I’ve never seen anything — it’s amazing”) and announcing that, “without even hesitation,” he would have had sex with Princess Diana. As early as 1988, Trump hinted at a run for the White House, though this was understood to be part of his carny shtick, another form of self-branding in the celebrity-mad culture.

And now here we are. Trump is no longer hustling golf courses, fake “universities,” or reality TV. He means to command the United States armed forces and control its nuclear codes. He intends to propose legislation, conduct America’s global affairs, preside over its national-intelligence apparatus, and make the innumerable moral and political decisions required of a President. This is not a Seth Rogen movie; this is as real as mud. Having all but swept the early Republican primaries and caucuses, Trump — who re-tweets conspiracy theories and invites the affections of white-supremacist groups, and has established himself as the adept inheritor of a long tradition of nativism, discrimination, and authoritarianism — is getting ever closer to becoming the nominee of what Republicans like to call “the party of Abraham Lincoln.” No American demagogue –– not Huey Long, not Joseph McCarthy, not George Wallace –– has ever achieved such proximity to national power.

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

List, list, O list! Lists within lists (re-tweets conspiracy theories and invites the affections of white-supremacist groups, and has established himself as the adept inheritor of a long tradition of nativism, discrimination, and authoritarianism)!

And how does Remnick avoid turning this essay into the dreary recitation of one list after another? He varies the way he presents them. He breaks them up with humor (trout), anecdotes, quotations. He packs each of his paragraphs with all sorts of things – history, neologisms (egoscape), fresh similes (as real as mud), and fun alliteration (mystery, Melania, movements, amazing).

Indeed, if SOS could take Melania’s bowel movements out of that parenthesis and propose a simile of her own:

Good writing is like Melania’s feculence. It is the product of someone who has gone to the trouble of secreting herself in a private room and thoughtfully shaping what must be expressed into something solid and not off-putting.

… 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!

*******************
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.

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

Now, REI grads, go out there and make some deals!