With an $8 million budget, but no toilet paper in the bathrooms, broken air-conditioned systems and a lack of computers in the classrooms, students are beginning to wonder where all this money is going at [Los Angeles] University High School…

Following salaries and utilities, the athletics program requires a large portion of University High’s overall budget, estimated [at] between $80,000 and $100,000 a year. LAUSD had left University High with the responsibility of paying for all sports-related costs, causing the school to go bankrupt.

Not just supernovae, but the explosion of his own and others’ careers, seems to attract Christian Ott, a Caltech astronomer. Ott has a fiery – and fire-y – personality.

Casey Handmer was a grad student in Ott’s group until June 2013, when he was fired partly because Ott didn’t want him to keep his bicycle locked up inside. “Either you accept my rules or you go look for another advisor,” Ott wrote him by email. “Your call!”

“As his student, did I have an obligation to manage his moods and pussyfoot my way around the extent to which a grown man is unable to control himself?” Handmer told BuzzFeed News. “I hadn’t come to Caltech to join some weird cult where you have to do whatever the leader says.”

Ott has now been suspended from Caltech, having been found guilty of sexual harassment. The details of not one but two cases against Ott have been shared in all their grotesqueness with BuzzFeed – indeed, the details were provided by the two harassed women, who are annoyed that Ott’s suspension will probably be temporary (he’s tenured). Here he is with one of the women:

Ott began messaging her late at night online, where they talked about their shared insecurities about work. Sometimes their chats were casual; he’d recommend that she read Charles Bukowski or listen to Leonard Cohen.

The recommendations transmit his subversive yet sensitive ways, which she should emulate… But eventually he fired her too, because he loved her too much. Not that the student understood his motivation; she just felt rejected by her mentor.

[She] didn’t find out about Ott’s feelings for her until June 4, when Caltech’s Title IX coordinator called her into her office and presented her with a stack of 86 poems Ott had posted about her on his Tumblr page.

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UPDATE: Since the Ott story has already inspired one of my readers to poetry (see comments), I thought I’d try my hand.

The Is/Ott Problem: Some Questions

Is Ott
The sort of lot
By whom we should we taught?

Once caught
Wouldn’t one have thought
He’d be sent to trot?

Donald Trump recently said football “has become soft, and our country has become soft.” He accused NFL referees of throwing penalty flags to impress their wives watching the games on television.

The Republican poll leader continued: “What used to be considered a great tackle; violent head-on. You used to see these tackles, and it was incredible to watch,” Trump said. “Now they tackle — ‘Oh, head-on-head collision, 15 yard [penalty]’ — the whole game is all screwed up. You say, ‘Wow, what a tackle.’ Bing. Flag.”

Trump asked, “It’s a Sunday, who the hell wants to watch these crummy games?”

And while you’re at it, bring back this graphic!

… Mick Jagger.

… its This Is Madness article and sticking it on Page 1A again. UD remains baffled as to why none of these articles (here’s a good one) (what the hell – go to town) tells you why this is going on — the degrading, bankrupting business of new stadiums, multimillionaire coaches, and expensive conferences.

As UD has pointed out before, it’s because the people who run these particular universities cannot think of anything else to do. They’ve already pretty much dismantled their universities as, say, teaching institutions… Everything’s online, or bogus… Their ideal student, their big man on campus, is Johnny Manziel, held up by Texas A&M’s chancellor as a model for us all. Or Richie Incognito, loved up as much by the University of Nebraska as Manziel was by Texas A&M. Did these universities help or hurt Manziel and Incognito, with their veneration and love and no classes and don’t bother graduating and feel free to beat up our students and sell merchandise and reel around being a drunk motherfucker? Have you followed these men’s subsequent careers in the NFL?

If these universities could think of anything to do with their money other than put on games and recruit criminals and destroy players’ lives, don’t you think they would? This is the only thing they can think of doing. This is what they think a university is.

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Since we’re all remembering David Bowie today, let’s remember what he told us.

On the whole, you know, this whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid. Frankly.

… George Washington University has now decided to revoke Bill Cosby’s honorary degree.

… All the way from Washington...”

Typical of wee UD to have gotten the Bowie lyrics wrong – and wrong in a way that made the lines be about her, a young American from Washington…

*****

She heard the song for the first time in an Evanston Illinois apartment shared by four Iranian engineering students at Northwestern University. She remembers loving it so much that she just sat there, for a long time, listening again and again.

David Bowie has died.

… I’m thinking that if this bill passes (it won’t; we’re just playing around), Harvard will have a whopper of a problem on its hands.

A U.S. Congressman is floating an idea that’s likely to find opposition from the wealthiest colleges: devote 25 percent of a school’s annual endowment income for financial aid or lose tax-exempt status.

So I figure this would mean Harvard would have to give out close to $500 million each year in financial aid. How the hell do you dispense that much money? Where do you find the students?

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

I mean, maybe I’m wrong. In 2012, “Harvard spent about $242 million from its endowment on tuition assistance.” Maybe they’ve doubled it since then? (UD can’t find current figures.)

Even more appallingly, under this bill Harvard might be forced to reduce the tens of millions of dollars it pays many of its fund managers. Talk about income inequality!

The highest profile, highest paid representative of the University of Louisville, the front man of that university’s front porch, the keeper of the keys to the UL whormitory, has now entered the moment in his long day’s journey when he wanders onstage and, like morphine-addled Mary Tyrone, speaks his delirium. It’s curtain-speech time for Rick Pitino.

As locker rooms full of guilty and embarrassed journalists look on, Pitino floats into – as the Chicago Trib puts it – “an alternate reality,” in which he confesses that he has had it with a world intent on sullying his purity. He has brought to university sports the same saintly ways of Joe Paterno, and, like Paterno, has been done in by Assistant Coach Iago Hitler.

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

Bides there a university somewhere in this tumult? No. So editorials of this sort, which reference things like presidents and trustees, are a waste of time. The University of Louisville is an empty stage on which its coach struts his last.

… Harvey Markowitz, got her this book for her birthday many years ago. She still has it somewhere. He wrote a note to UD on its first page, and UD recalls that this note was amusing.

The bar is an eight hour, nineteen minute flight for UD, so she will not be able to attend the poetry reading.

… perforation.

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

Details, if you’ve got the stomach for them.

Background on Professor Persinger here.

One of his students recalls:

Autumn Daggett took the professor’s Brain and Behaviour course last fall. Although he didn’t ask students in that class to sign the statement of understanding, Daggett, 20, said he would sometime[s] use profanity.

She recalled that on the first day of the class he introduced himself to students by asking them to repeat after him: “F–k you, Dr. Persinger!”

UD readers who share UD‘s enthusiasm for the 1983 film, Local Hero, will immediately recall the northern-lights-loving tycoon played by Burt Lancaster. Felix Happer’s aversion therapist constantly bursts into his office and calls him a motherfucker, a piece of shit … In the scene at the end of this clip, the therapist scales Happer’s building to tape HAPPER IS A MOTHERFUCKER on his windows. (Start at 4:00.)

Persinger’s approach, drawing as it does on roomfuls of abusers, is superior.

This University of Central Florida student can’t help noticing she attends a really shitty school that spends all of its money on its total-loser football team. Oh, and on its hideous president – he just got a huge bonus for grinding this shabby, overcrowded, scandal-ridden (put University Central Florida in my search engine) wasteland into dust.

You have to wonder, though: If she’s smart enough to see the reality of the University of Central Florida, why doesn’t she attend a different school?

UD‘s Canadian friend Jack sends her news of another Acting Out university instructor. The Acting Out person is almost always a middle-aged guy whose sense of himself as uniquely possessed of difficult and shocking truths that must somehow – anyhow – be conveyed to students has gotten way out of hand.

Like this guy a few years ago at Columbia University who taught physics by “stripping down, curling up in a fetal position and letting ninjas harass him while a projection of the Twin Towers falling and the Holocaust played on the television.” Or this guy – at Leeds University – who also stripped down to convey important truths about events management. There was also a Canadian who taught physics by talking almost exclusively about hidden political “power structures” and then giving all of his students A’s.

And now there’s this other Canadian who teaches intro psych by having his students sign a contract in which they promise to let him use all the naughty words he wants, in exchange for which students will be exposed to such “advanced methods of problem solving” that they will no longer be “duped by social-political agendas.”

Or – as he puts it in another section of the contract – after taking his course, the student will “be minimally influenced by unpleasant experiences.”

Students must read a list of the naughty words and then sign off on them.

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Some of the writing in the contract is mysterious.

If I require special needs I will not approach the professor in order to maintain my anonymity but instead arrange a convenient meeting with the professor and the Special Needs Office.

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

Sample exam questions, some of them anecdotal (Students at Laurentian’s med school were told to stick their fingers in a corpse’s rectum and then lick their fingers…) also appear in the contract.

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For UD there has always been a pathos to the Acting Out professor. This is a man who has, after years of confusion and repression, liberated himself – politically, sexually. He’s excited about this, and wants to share it with students. As James Merrill put it, these men are “sharing pain like fudge from home.” Pain (“unpleasant experiences”) has been for them, and will be for their students, superseded by pleasure, so that by the end of the semester everyone will be like Joel Osteen, bursting with the joy of a new life.

You got a problem with that?