Avner Magen, a computer science professor, and Andrew Herzenberg, a biologist, were climbing a glacier in Alaska.
… Maureen McLaughlin of Denali National Park and Preserve, said avalanches are “not uncommon this time of the year in the area where they were climbing. The temperature gets warm and snow gets heavier . . . and we see avalanches.”
The park is best known among climbers for Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America.
In the middle of Monterey Square,
in a hot city with – on this day –
occasional wind and rain, stands
one of many American monuments
to the memory of Kazimierz Pułaski,
who fought for American independence.
(Click on the image to read the inscription.)
The monument emerges out of a mist made
up of trailing tree moss. From the pretzeled
limbs of live oaks, the gray veils part to
reveal iron railings, an obelisk, and a pale
slab under which may or may not lie the
remains of the soldier.
And Tom Petters gave millions to Miami University of Ohio to set up an ethics center. (Miami has returned the money. Not to Petters. He’s in prison for fifty years. To a court-appointed receiver.)
What are we to make of Merkin, Blagojevich, and Petters?
Well, read your Elmer Gantry.
——————————-
[UD thanks Daniel for correcting her on the name of the university.]
… is, as you know, a category on this blog which watches the ways a university’s trustees can wreak havoc.
There’s a strictly limited number of ways, but with a really bad board of trustees, you don’t have to do too much to make a school take a tumble.
The crucial characteristic really bad boards of trustees share is cronyism. They’re all sort of buddies. With each other and with the university’s president. Culturally, they’re very similar to one another. Almost no outside voices are heard. It’s an insiders’ game.
Take scandalous, conflict-of-interest-ridden, Yeshiva University. Several on its all-male board had special financial dealings with fellow board members Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. That didn’t work out well for them, or for the school, whose Madoff-related woes aren’t over — another Yeshiva trustee and Madoff investor, Elie Wiesel, is currently threatening a high-profile lawsuit against a playwright who put him in a play she wrote about Madoff. And even without Bernie and Ezra, Yeshiva seems to have a notably conflicted board…
As does Shaw University. Shaw’s been in the news lately because its alumni association is trying to get its entire board of trustees to resign.
This is a rather dramatic gesture, but you can understand their desperation. This isn’t merely about conflict of interest (“[T]he university contracted for insurance coverage with the relative of an unnamed board member.”); it’s about institutional corruption and financial irresponsibility generally:
Citing “gross neglect,” Shaw University’s national alumni group has called for the school’s board of trustees [which includes “boxer Evander Holyfield and boxing promoter Don King”] to step down or be dismissed, an appeal addressed to multimillionaire lawyer, alumnus and board Chairman Willie Gary.
The May 14 letter from the alumni association’s president, Emily Perry, cites no specific grievance, but says: “We can no longer stand by and allow Shaw to appear to deteriorate due to poor judgment. … We have serious concerns regarding conflict of interest, fiduciary responsibilities, adverse interest and commitment.”
Shaw, the South’s oldest historically black college, has spent the last year trying to shovel its way out of debt exceeding $20 million. The May 14 letter is not the first rebuke. In March, the school’s Florida alumni group sent a letter to Shaw administrators saying it was “amazed” that giving among board members totaled only $41,089 since July, despite Gary’s pledge that each of the roughly 40 board members would chip in $50,000.
When the alumni refer, in their letter, to “continued mistrust, negative news media coverage, hostility, calls, faxes and letters,” they allude to the predictable outcome of trustees who don’t attend board meetings, who may be financially corrupt, who hand out contracts to relatives (or to themselves), who have financial dealings with other trustees, and who simply do not understand what a university is.
… at ten pm at the raucous Crystal Beer Parlor was all it took to get UD all silly last night in Savannah.
She felt silly even before the drink, actually, because Savannah’s hopping and you want to hop along with it.
She’ll take a long walk now, and then meet her just-graduated student, Carolyn, for lunch at the Soho South Cafe. Carolyn lives ’round these parts.
… Corruption is the NCAA’s life partner. Passing itself off as an institution promoting the ideas and values of “amateur athletics” is a fraud so bold and laughable that it borders on criminal.
The NCAA’s goal is profit by any means necessary. That’s why TV dictates that college football and basketball are played nearly every night of the week at all different hours. That’s why kids who have no intention of pursuing an education are enthusiastically welcomed on campuses.
It’s greed…
From the Washington Post:
The Republican candidate for President Obama’s old Senate seat inaccurately claimed to have received the U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award for service during NATO’s conflict with Serbia in the late 1990s.
Rep. Mark Kirk, a Navy reservist elected to Congress in 2001, acknowledged the error in his official biography after The Washington Post began looking into whether he had received the prestigious award, which is given by top Navy officials to a single individual annually…
Kirk, an Appropriations Committee member, changed his Web site last week to incorporate a different account of the award. Kirk wrote on his blog that “upon a recent review of my records, I found that an award listed in my official biography was misidentified” …
Eric Elk, a spokesman for Kirk’s campaign, would say only that “we found the award was misidentified and corrected the name.” …
A cat looks at a queen.
************************
UPDATE: We’ve seen Mina Dulcan on University Diaries before. The earlier post quotes University World News citing a statement Dulcan made to the BBC:
Mina Dulcan, editor of the Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry which published a study on paroxetine and children, told the BBC investigative show Panorama two years ago that she was not bothered by the fact the published article was at odds with the data and appeared to have been ghostwritten.
“I don’t have any regrets about publishing at all. It generated all sorts of useful discussion which is the purpose of a scholarly journal,” Dulcan said.
Way queenly!
… on you.
All our magical doctors put a spell on us. They toss their mystic parchments into a brew and sing
Doctors, Doctors, PhDs,
Honor’ble those, Honor’ble these,
‘Plomas of birth-strangl’d thought
Express-deliver’d, sold and bought…
The magical doctors teach at universities and run legal systems and lead political parties and keep us on the true path at church.
The charm is firm and good.
An editor of the Brown University newspaper writes a remarkable little essay about irony — the irony of Brown students, and the irony of Brown’s president, a longtime director of Goldman Sachs.
… where the university went. Where the university’s president went. Where everybody went.
Not merely because she’s learned a lot from his scholarly work, but because of his attack, last year, on “the arrogance, self-indulgence, and recklessness” of Harvard’s managers as they speculated away massive amounts of its endowment.
Now, via James, a reader, she sees she has a third reason to admire Higgonet. He writes in today’s Harvard Crimson:
… [The French have a] highly communitarian definition of what citizenship should be… [P]ublic space in the French scheme of things is not just a non-private and therefore public space by virtue of default. It’s a universalist space where citizens interact. From a French perspective, refusing to show your face in a public space is a refusal not just of custom, but of interactive citizenship.
… In my head and in my heart, full as it is with the memories of a French childhood, I do so dislike the burka that outlawing it in France seems to me to be more or less acceptable, even if that should not be the case in the United States. It has no place in French life and history, and outlawing the burka might well have been one of the very few items of public policy on which Robespierre and Marie-Antoinette, or Joan of Arc and the Marquis de Sade, would have readily agreed.
Wanting to wear the burka seems to me to be a self-inflicted wound that I just can’t accept. In this symbolic matter, the French tradition seems to me to be for France, at least, the more plausible alternative: for France, and eventually, for all women everywhere…
Peter Popham, in Prospect, shares his disgust at the dumps Italy has let Pompeii and Herculaneum become.
Both sites are located in areas notorious for organised crime, with rackets run by the Camorra, the Naples mafia, within spitting distance of the front gates. The port of Ercolano, the suburb of Naples in which Herculaneum sits, is said to be a focal point for the Camorra-run drugs trade. Up until the 19th century, Ercolano was a seaside resort for grandees, but today the old villas are hemmed in by squalor. Gang shootings are common on the streets.
UD is grateful that she and her mother (who studied with Wilhelmina Jashemski, an expert on Pompeii’s gardens) visited Pompeii thirty years ago, before it became derelict.
UD‘s been archaeologically lucky. When she was a kid, she visited the original Lascaux Caves. Later that year, they were permanently closed to the public. (Cool website here.)
… with plans to demolish them and put campus parking and landscaping in their place.
Some locals aren’t happy. One comments:
Sad news about the buildings. There are plenty of other pubs in the vicinity, though, which is some comfort to alcoholics like me.
