[W]hat are we to do about those of dubious stature who procure naming rights to adorn their philanthropies? Teaching my section of [Columbia University’s] Contemporary Western Civilization, I have several times used a classroom designated the J. Ezra Merkin classroom. Philanthropists pay to name everything. Hospitals have named elevators and named water fountains. Mr. Merkin was a hedge fund tycoon who fed funds invested with him into the operations of the swindler Bernard Madoff. Sued by New York State’s Attorney General for (in the words of the New York Times) “deceiving his clients by collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in management fees, when, in fact, he was just funneling money to Mr. Madoff rather than investing it himself,” Merkin agreed to pay a $410 million penalty.
***********
A Columbia University professor notes one of the few remaining public appearances of Ezra Merkin’s name outside of a courtroom (for background on Merkin, type his name into my search engine).
Ever since his BFF went to prison, Merkin’s life has been an absolute flurry of lawsuits, darling. Plus he had to sell all his Rothkos and stop being president of a synagogue and chair of Yeshiva University’s investment committee and all. He’ll spend the rest of his life in courtrooms. He’s being sued by everybody.
On the other hand, students contemplating contemporary western civilization can gaze up at a name supremely iconic of contemporary western civilization.
***********
One bit of good news for Merkin: He will be immortalized by Lewis Black.
… the University of Nebraska.
[Nebraska football player Lawrence] Phillips was arrested [in 1995] for assaulting his ex-girlfriend, Kate McEwen, a basketball player for the Nebraska women’s team, and was subsequently suspended by head coach Tom Osborne. The case became a source of controversy and media attention, with the perception arising that Osborne was coddling a star player by not kicking Phillips off the team permanently. Osborne walked out on a press conference when asked “If one of your players had roughed up a member of your family and had dragged her down a flight of steps, would you have reinstated that player to the team?” Outraged Nebraska faculty proposed that any student convicted of a violent crime be prohibited from representing the university on the football field.
Some of Phillips’ heartbreaking letters from prison can be read here. He has killed himself.
*****************
A fond look back at the Coach Osborne years.
*****************
JND, a friend of this blog, points out in his comment that UD went and missed the best part of this article. Here it is.
“If I had to guess, [Coach Osborne] genuinely believed that he was the best person to address the problems a player was having—that with his strengths as a role model, as a disciplinarian, as a man with great moral turpitude, he could put these guys on the right path,” said Paula Lavigne, a reporter for ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” who was a reporter and editor for the Daily Nebraskan in the mid-90s.
Well. She learned her stuff at Nebraska.
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.
************
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?
If not
Why ought
He have been so sought?
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!
… 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.
************************
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.
… 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.