… VP.

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.

Does Washington State University exist? Last week, one of its engineering professors (natch) was arrested on way-serious federal fraud charges, and not only does Haifang Wen still offer his steely gaze on behalf of that university, but WSU spokespeople, when asked about our nation’s latest engineering department fraud (it’s as common as oxycontin abuse), say Huh? Dunno.

As longtime readers know, UD has proposed stationing armed guards at the doors of all university engineering professors (this would be easy at Texas universities, whose students could be offered work/study arrangements) in order to try to head their fake companies and pretend employees off at the pass… I mean, far be it from UD to malign an entire field, but in the many years she’s been blogging about universities she’s been amazed at the constancy with which engineering professors take federal research money and deposit it directly into their personal checking accounts.

UD has also proposed, since these guys make so much shit up, that they be transferred to Creative Writing, where they can be useful teaching students how to write fake investor letters. Wen in particular had a mind-blowingly elaborate series of fictions going.

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UD thanks Seelye.

A handy cheat sheet. But even if you follow this stuff closely, like ol’ UD, it’s impossible to keep up.

… who has inspired a lawsuit from Renee Rabinowitz.

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WALK AWAY, RENEE

And when I see the breasts that point my way
The sluts I’m forced to pass by every day

Just walk away, Renee
You won’t see me foul myself near your filth
The empty seating over there will do for you
Apostate Jew

From deep inside the vomit I’m forced to spew
From deep inside the vomit triggered by you

Just walk away, Renee
You won’t see me foul myself next to you
Now as my lust beats down upon my weary eyes
Crush her, it cries

Your breasts and hips inside a plane upon a seat
Still find a way to haunt me with their heat

Just walk away, Renee
You won’t see me foul myself by your side
The empty seating over there will do for you
Apostate Jew

The Friedrich Schleiermacher of Trump University is back in academic news, with everyone questioning his commitment to intellectual rigor.

We’ve followed the president of Trump University as his political engagements – much like Woodrow Wilson’s – took him more and more away from the task of running a scholarly institution. As he transitions – again like Wilson – from academic to national leader, the university Trump founded is … foundering, with litigation and general contempt the main challenges.

Now is the time for Donald Trump to affirm the founding principles of his school if he wants to save its reputation.

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Doonahd Troomp is without question the woold’s most famous businessman…

God, I miss that British accent.

… at the Georgetown Public Library. Details here.