Yale University: Eat the Rich.

… who has died, age 97.

ELEGY

Look to the heavens, Heliotrope.
Follow the sun. Sun, shine!
The streets are numbered, shelled, and soft:
Eleventh, Olive, Chestnut, Pine.

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

The epigraph is from Rimbaud, a very grotesque poem of his in which “the poet’s heart is puking over the poop of a ship.” He asks the waves – the magical, transformative, abracadabra, waves – to take his heart and wash it, clean it, make it no longer a heart that has been “depraved” by a depraved world. So let’s say that Smith has taken from Rimbaud the idea that the world is so nauseating and sordid (he’s writing this poem in the midst of yet another war) that our desperate desire to escape it becomes downright suicidal. Maybe it’s better to be dead.

The poem itself – a brilliantly condensed, weirdly suggestive and associative lyric – seems to address a soldier killed in the war (You shipped him off…), a young man to whom the poet softly and sympathetically speaks.

You, a young plant, a lover of the light, a follower of the sun – as you lie there dead, look up in the sky and see that sun. Follow it heavenward, to a cleansed realm of light. Throw off your casket (Pine), your dead body, your “shelled” body (bombed, eviscerated), and leave the degraded world, the realm of finitude and division, where the streets, like your days, “are numbered.”

And now there’s a stanza about that world left behind, with its indifferent partying semi-human (mannikin) cigarette and club girls who lean back in their chaises and briefly note the absence of the dead man (Over the waves extends the Rimbaudesque waves).

And now the voice shifts, and a mother or a wife angrily mourns his loss, and again an image from the sea appears in a reference to the famous ice-entrapped ship, Endurance. He could not survive the extremity to which he was subjected, and his survivor cannot fathom the distance now put between them.

Note how, like T.S. Eliot and many other modernists, Smith melds very high spiritual language (Look to the heavens) with very low modern/commercial language (He left me all his life insurance). The party girls, and his survivors, remain in a dark degraded world, while the heliotrope twists toward the sun.

And now this strange unsettling little song repeats its first verse, presses on the dead soldier its insistence that he cleanse himself entirely of this world, and ascend.

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

That was one way of putting it, to quote Eliot. Like most great highly compressed lyrics, this one is wide open to interpretation.

… A recent survey of police records show that Washington State University has the most football players [in the country] who have been arrested within the past five years.”

Background on Washington State’s terrific football program here.

Or, as the article’s headline has it:

DOES COLLEGE FOOTBALL SUCCESS CORRELATE WITH CRIME?

Yes. Yes, it does. Which makes all the clucking certain universities do about the importance of student safety extremely amusing, doesn’t it? And then there’s the NC “Why should you exist?” AA.

The University of Nebraska went way out of its way to recruit Richie Incognito. Most of the SEC schools in particular seem to try really really hard to get some of the most violent of the young and concussed to be part of their campus.

The college athletics arms race includes increasingly intense competition for the biggest and nastiest out there; and of course only the biggest and nastiest make it to the professionals, where fighting isn’t simply something you do at bars near campus. It’s a way of life.

How does Nick Saban earn a zillion dollars a year? He recruits the biggest and nastiest to the University of Alabama.

Excerpts. In honor of the dean of the WVU School of Public Health.

I brush my teeth with Coca-Cola, wash my face with mountain dew
We live down in chemical valley, licorice water runnin’ through,
Licorice water runnin’ through

… All is money, all is power, one man’s loss is another’s gain
I just do the best I can, put out my bucket, pray for rain
Put out the bucket and pray for rain

… Once we were Almost Heaven, now we’re open for business
That’s the place that I call home, West Virginia

University Diaries has long
chronicled the efforts of dozens of
thoughtful people who feel called
to do something about this:

All sorts of people have stepped up
with good ideas about how to stop
one school from hoarding billions
and billions of dollars. Hoarding
them. Not using many of them, for
educational or charitable or whatever
uses. Just sitting on them. Or handing
out huge gobs of them to their
fund managers.

How did the money grow so fast and
get so big? A combination of
tax benefits – “Harvard’s income
from capital gains, interest, and
dividends is all tax free,
and the donations it receives
are tax deductible.”–
and the inexhaustible ego of
hedgies who can’t think of anything
better to do with hundreds of millions
of charitable dollars than throw
them at one of the world’s richest
institutions. That way, they get
their name associated with Harvard.

All sorts of proposals have come
forward, most having to do
with messing up those exemptions,
although a few appeal directly to
Harvard alumni to divert their
contributions to actually worthy causes.

About ten years ago, when people realized
that this non-profit was paying several
of its money managers 35 million a
year, there was an upsurge in outrage
and in proposals for change.
You can type harvard endowment into
UD‘s search engine if you want to track
years and years of reform proposals from
many different people.

As my post’s headline suggests,
none of this reformist activity
has had the slightest effect.
Harvard keeps hoarding what it
has and supplementing it with
hedgie vanity thingies.

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

If you’re aware of this history,
you tend to respond to the like-clockwork,
beginning of the academic year,
New York Times op-ed about this
with a certain wryness. You begin to
recognize the ritual by which
Harvard acknowledges the fact of
complaint and bats it down with
the familiar bullshit (Everyone needs
a rainy day fund!) and then the
whole thing goes away for another year.

But anyway. (Deep mournful breath.)
Here’s the latest gesture, this one from
a professor who’s a tax attorney.

“We’ve lost sight of the idea that
students, not fund managers, should
be the primary beneficiaries of a
university’s endowment. The private-equity
folks get cash; students take out loans.”

So (world-weary sigh) here’s the latest
go-nowhere proposal:

“Congress should require universities with
endowments in excess of $100 million to spend
at least 8 percent of the endowment each year.
Universities could avoid this rule by shrinking
assets to $99 million, but only by spending the
endowment on educational purposes, which is
exactly the goal.”

Yes, yes, hear, hear, good fellow.
Jolly good fellow.

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

UPDATE:

Some good snark from Malcolm Gladwell.

Yale’s endowment spent $480 million paying its hedge fund managers last year and $170 million on its students.

—————

I was going to donate money to Yale. But maybe it makes more sense to mail a check directly to the hedge fund of my choice.

—————

Why doesn’t Yale spin off its university division and concentrate on its core money management business?

—————

It came down to helping the poor or giving the world’s richest university $400 mil it doesn’t need. Wise choice John!

[John Paulson Gives $400 Million to Harvard for Engineering School

The gift from Mr. Paulson, a billionaire hedge fund manager, is the largest in the university’s history.]

—————-

If billionaires don’t step up, Harvard will soon be down to its last $30 billion.

Thirteen arrests, fifteen wins. They are almost at parity. Something for the school to – er – shoot for.

A [Central Connecticut State University] professor has been placed on administrative suspension, without pay.

Last week, Ravi Shankar was arrested for the third time this past year for stealing from a Home Depot. In December he was arrested twice–once for driving with a suspended license, and once for evading responsibility for an accident that he fled from. Both of those cases are still pending.

Before that he had previous convictions for two DUIs, operating with a suspended license, reckless driving over 85 mph, interfering with police, giving police false statements in a credit card fraud scheme and violating his probation. He served a 90-day sentence broken up into several periods.

The controversy came to a head when he was promoted to a full professorship while he was in jail serving time for his convictions.

Drinking tea in New York City.

Peru’s leading newspaper said it will no longer publish editorials by the cardinal and archbishop of Lima after accusing him of plagiarizing past popes in his articles.

… Juan Luis Cipriani … copied portions of the book “Communio,” written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI, and of the encyclical “Ecclesiam Suam,” written by Pope Paul VI in two of his editorials.

… He suggested to listeners of his radio program, “Dialogues of Faith,” that the newspaper’s response was “revenge” for his inflexible opposition to abortion and gay marriage…

In February, [Norwood] Teague paid $750 for a limousine to transport nine donors and three staff while in Bloomington, Ind., during a Gophers men’s basketball game against Indiana. “Our priority was to keep the group together and multiple stops need to be made. The reserved vehicle provided more reliability than trying to find multiple cabs near the basketball arena following the game,” Teague’s report stated.

Your education taxes at work.

How to approach the delicate topic of football culture and the gifts it has given the American university? It’s not merely the obvious stuff – the pointless stupid scary violence that scads of sports heroes like Richie Incognito bring to campus (idle Google Newsing turns up the latest helmet-bashing-in-the-campus-locker-room, this one at the University of Delaware, where last February another player “was charged with assaulting three other students at a party.”).

This violence has turned professors into police:

Days after the incident, [an Oregon State student who got beaten by team members] said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

The violence is hard-wired, of course, into the coaching of both university football and basketball, so that on a routine basis latter-day Bobby Knights are filmed and parodied (start at 1:15). The coaches are quickly replaced, sometimes by women, who are symbolically part of the clean-up routine cuz you know women just want to mother the team and would never be violent…

In fact, let’s pause there and think about the incredibly important role of women in big-time university sports. I don’t mean merely as tools of recruitment (several schools attract players via, er, dates with carefully selected female students), and objects of rape, assault, and harassment (see, most recently, the Norwood Teague unpleasantness at the University of Minnesota). And I don’t mean merely the importance of trotting out mom, post-assault, on Good Morning America. (Or, as Matt Hayes puts it, “GMA’s utterly repulsive decision to allow De’Andre Johnson on television to apologize for punching a woman in the face.”)

I mean, think about Donna Shalala’s tenure as president of Miami University. Her main role was as cover for a team that got in big on-field brawls and whose best buddy was Nevin Shapiro. She was like the Good Morning America mom times a hundred. They kept wheeling Shalala out to apply the back of her hand to her naughty charges, and this routine actually worked for a while.

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

A local commentator asks incredulously where the University of Minnesota found the likes of Teague (the answer is that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a search firm). “Were the other finalists Bill Cosby and Donald Sterling?”

Donald Sterling, Zygi (“bad faith and evil motive”) Wilf, these are the guys who give professional basketball and football such a great name… And, as the commentator suggests, there’s not a lot of discernible difference between professional and big-time university football. Even in the matter of violence, there’s the NFL…

In the N.F.L., … fits of violence hardly blacklist players chasing roster spots. The day after punching [Geno] Smith, [Ikemefuna] Enemkpali latched on with the Buffalo Bills, whose new coach, Rex Ryan, has created a haven for wayward players…

(What a sweet, Victorian, girly way of putting it! A haven for wayward players! Like Ikemefuna’s teammate, the aforementioned Richie Incognito! The way Jane Addams created a haven for wayward girls! SWEET.)

… and there’s college ball, where getting kicked out for violence means the same thing it meant for Ikemefuna – you just find another team.

All of which is why, as UD has often recommended, universities with big-time football need football coaches, not academics, as presidents. (See Jim Tressel.) In a pinch, a politician will do. You could also go with a figurehead, a Queen Elizabeth to Nick Saban’s prime minister. But you’ll keep getting stories like the one coming out of the University of Minnesota as long as you take some guy – some random polite reflective well-meaning university denizen – and hand him the management of what is essentially a professional football team.

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

The petri dish for university football culture is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their new field design is all about Vegas. A sample headline:

UNLV REBELS WILL BE PLAYING FOOTBALL ON ONE BIG CRAPS TABLE IN 2015

“The team’s field and uniforms now reek of the Strip — it’s glitz, gold, gambling and most importantly, its promise of future fortunes.”

This is a team with one of the worst records in university football. An appalling record. Very few people show up to their games. Season tickets sold last year: 3,890. In response, the university decided to build a $900 million, 55,000 seat stadium with an Adzillatron spanning the length of the field. Although they’ve cut back on that original plan, they’ll surely come up with something like it. And they’ve got yet another miracle coach who’s going to shock everybody with the greatest comeback story this side of Elvis.

… for UD‘s garden…

… is a gift from UD‘s sister,
the (increasingly famous)
Morrissey fanatic.

UD thanks La Kid
for taking the pic.

Giving Donald Trump some competition.

Ah, a walk down memory lane. This is from a 2010 AAUP report expressing dismay at Phyllis Wise (then a high-ranking administrator at the University of Washington) following in the footsteps of UW’s then president Mark Emmert (who as current head of the farcical NCAA makes far far FAR bigger bucks than he did on all of his presidential corporate boards) and displaying her I could give a shit greed to the world.

To Wise’s claim that Nike’s board was interested in her special expertise in their line of work, the AAUP responded:

It is difficult to see what special interest the Nike Corporation could possibly have in Phyllis Wise’s research expertise in obstetrics and gynecology.

Er… How to screw your employees?…

UD is therefore SOOOO not surprised that Wise is insisting on leaving her latest place of employment with every penny coming to her.

One day after the board of trustees rejected her first attempt, the former UI chancellor again tendered her resignation Thursday night, saying she would not accept a position as special assistant to the president and that she is consulting with her lawyers about ways to protect her reputation…

‘[T]he University agreed to provide the compensation and benefits to which I was entitled, including $400,000 in deferred compensation that was part of my 2011 employment contract.’

I want it all! You think by changing your mind and ‘terminating’ instead of retiring me you can avoid yet more ridicule (the University of Illinois has generated tons of that over the last few years) about the four hundred thou reward for the way I handled Salaita and other matters?

YOU CAN’T FIRE ME. I RESIGN. I RESIGN AGAIN. I RESIGN AGAIN. AND AGAIN.

It’s what Kierkegaard called infinite resignation:

Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.

As Wise embarks on her spiritual journey, the rest of us can giggle at the spectacle (see this post, about comedy and repetition) of Wise and her university tossing the terminate/resign ball back and forth. At great expense to Illinois taxpayers, of course.

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

UD thanks Wendy.