The New York Times remembers UD‘s upstate neighbor, Yasuo Minigawa. He and his wife bought the Fangor house (constant readers know that Les UDs inherited their upstate house because Mr UD‘s father, Jerzy Soltan, was a very close friend of Wojciech Fangor’s, and Fangor asked Soltan to buy some acres adjacent to Fangor’s place).

How did this thing come about?

One thing of which you can be sure: UD didn’t plan it. She could never have planned it.

First she bought the birdbath. If you click on the picture and enlarge it, you can just make out the drips coming from the bottom of the basin. The birdbath was beautiful but began leaking soon after I bought it. I turned it over and let it be a kind of pedestal for the buddha.

Then there was that black container. It sat empty, some distance from the birdbath on the deck. I hadn’t yet decided what to plant in it.

Then Les UDs went one afternoon to Brookside Gardens, in whose little store UD bought some Black-eyed Susan vine seeds. She did it mindlessly, vaguely, distractedly… the store was about to close… she barely checked to see if it needed full light or anything. She certainly didn’t give any thought to its climbing habit and whether she could accommodate it. She just liked the sketch of the flowers on the packet.

Weeks later UD idly dropped the seeds into the container (turns out you’re supposed to soak them, etc., etc.), and as they began to show themselves climbers, UD had an aha moment: Let’s see if we can fit the container under the structure holding up the birdbath. If we can, we’ve got legs for the vine to climb.

At about the same time, UD figured out a solution to the leaky birdbath. She went to the basement in search of a shallow but not too shallow plate that would fit into the bath and collect water. She found a silver plate that looks something like this, only the Greek design along the edges is open and lets water flow out.

The plate fit perfectly, and its silver went well with the mottled gray and black of the original bowl.

So now UD was able to turn the bowl over and let the buddha sit in the shallow water. Birds began to appear again, drinking from the plate, and excess water drained down through the openwork along the edges of the plate into the vine below. A drip system!

UD loves to watch the vine do its thing; she loves to help train it along the legs and up to the top of the basin, where she hopes to have a flowery buddha soon. When the thing does flower, she’ll take another picture. Or rather she’ll have her sister take another picture.

Today the American universities not only form the best system of higher education in the world, but are morally impressive institutions. They are not incoherent, nor are they in crisis.

Well, I guess this ain’t Allan Bloom.

No, it’s UD‘s hero, Richard Rorty.

She likes Bloom, but she likes Rorty more.

Her other heroes? The two Christophers: Christopher Lasch and Christopher Hitchens.

Albert Camus. George Orwell. Philip Rieff. Tony Judt.

Can we derive some coherence from these dead white males? Can we say why the same human being would swoon reading both hyper-righties and hyper-lefties? (And weren’t Lasch and Hitchens sort of both?) Why the same human being would applaud when Rorty says universities aren’t in crisis, and when Bloom says they are?

Do we want simply to say, with Gwendolyn, that ‘In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.’? Because all of these men wrote well (Rieff wrote like a jerk, yes, but not all the time. Not in his earlier days.), and some of them (Orwell) wrote insanely well.

No. Surely we want to grant UD a tad more depth than this. It’s not merely about writing style. Yet writing style is part of it. These men are all impassioned moralists, impassioned social justice warriors, and their prose shows it. Their prose has the sort of kick you get when you actually care about what you’re saying, when you believe that language is politics and that politics is how you decrease human suffering. It’s very much like what George Saunders says in an appreciation of E.L. Doctorow:

What I found particularly inspiring about Doctorow was the way he would tweak form to produce moral-ethical effect — the way that he seemed not to see these two things as separate. Reading his great “Ragtime,” for example, I can feel that all of that technical verve is there necessarily — to serve and escalate meaning and emotion. But as important — the verve serves and escalates the fun, the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them. The work exudes fascination with the human, and a wry confidence in it, and inspires these feelings in us as we read. Doctorow, we might say, role-models a hopeful stance toward what can be a terrifying world.

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In the same remarks of his I quote from at the beginning of this post, Rorty says:

If I were writing a history of the American university, I would tell an upbeat story about the gradual replacement of the churches by the universities as the conscience of the nation. One of the most important things that happened in the U.S. in the twentieth century was that the universities became the places where movements for the relief of human suffering found privileged sanctuaries and power bases. The universities came to play a social role that they had not played in the nineteenth century.

An impassioned atheist, Rorty reveres the American university as the place where arts- and sciences-inspired free and democratic discourse about the world and how to improve it, and about humanity and how to know and love it, thrives. The university is where we gather to read and talk about morally charged language, like Doctorow’s.

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Remember what Bartlett Giamatti called the university: a free and ordered space. When Rorty calls the university “not incoherent,” he doesn’t mean it’s coherent, as in fully pulled together, fully ordered and organized around some shared principle or faith. (And as readers of this blog know, once a university decides to organize itself around Joe Paterno, forfuckinggetit.) He means it’s coherent enough – it’s ordered enough to be free enough to generate the sorts of conversations, readings, and experiences that tend to make people (students, professors, readers of the research professors and students generate) more lucid and more compassionate. And more free, rather in the way of, as Saunders puts it, having fun — being part of a classroom where people are experiencing “the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them.” That mind, in the university setting, is a collective one, made up of the free and at the same time ordered synergy between a professor and her students.

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All of this is by way of background for a few comments on this intriguing opinion piece in today’s New York Times.

Kevin Carey is clearly on Bloom’s side. This is his opening paragraph:

To understand the failures of the modern American college system — from admissions marketing to graduation rates — you can begin with a notorious university football scandal.

So we’re going to talk about Chapel Hill as emblematic of what has made American universities a failure. Not just a failure – a nothing. An illusion. Carey’s title: The Fundamental Way that Universities are an Illusion. Later in the piece he will talk about them as Easter eggs – beautiful on the outside, dead on the inside.

The Nyang’oro fraud went on as long as it did because

U.N.C. had essentially no system for upholding the academic integrity of courses. “So long as a department was offering a course,” one distinguished professor told the investigators, “it was a legitimate course.” … The illusory university pretends that all professors are guided by a shared sense of educational excellence specific to their institution. In truth, as the former University of California president Clark Kerr observed long ago, professors are “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”… When college leaders talk about academic standards, they often mean admissions standards, not standards for what happens in classrooms themselves. Or they vaguely appeal to traditions and shared values without any hard evidence of their meaning… The problem for students is that it is all but impossible to know ahead of time which part of the disunified university is which. [And the problem for faculty is that this] kind of profound dissonance can knock askew the moral compasses of people who have ostensibly dedicated their professional lives to education. How else to explain the many people at Chapel Hill — including, incredibly, the director of a center on ethics — who abetted or ignored rampant fraud?

It’s the free and ordered thing again. Carey believes the freedom Rorty identifies in the American university has dissipated into disorder, so that anything goes in terms of pedagogical content, which makes the world safe for the endemic cheating we know goes on at virtually all big-time sports schools. At such schools – the cutting edge, Carey seems to argue, of the frayed American university – even faculty – even ethics faculty – are cheaters. And why? Because they recognize “no shared values,” no “shared sense of educational excellence,” that would give existential identity, much less academic integrity, to the place where they happen to work.

In response to this, I’d like to cite Rorty once again:

In one sense, [the term “morality”] is used to describe someone relatively decent, trustworthy, and honest – one who gives correct change, keeps promises, doesn’t lie much, can usually be relied upon to take an appropriate share in cooperative efforts, and so on. It seems to me if you’re not that sort of person by the time you’re eighteen, it’s probably too late. I don’t think that sociopaths who enter the university are corrigible by any measures that the academy might adopt. If the family, the community, the church, and the like, haven’t made you a relatively decent member of society, haven’t given you a conscience that stops you from cheating the customers, administering date rape drugs, or doing a lot of things we hope our eighteen year olds won’t do, the university won’t either. The academy can’t take on the job of straightening you out, of creating the conscience that the rest of the culture didn’t manage to produce during your first eighteen years.

This is the same point UD tirelessly makes about the absurdity of ethics courses in business schools – and those are older students. They’ve had four or five years past undergraduate school to acquire a sense of decency.

And how much more hopeless when you’re whatever age professors Jan Boxhill and Julius Nyang’oro were when they dedicated year after year of their lives to robbing students of an education and trashing their school’s integrity…

Carey wants us to believe that the openness of their work setting, the structural trust of faculty and students upon which the maturity and generativity of the American university rests, knocked askew the fragile moral compasses of Boxhill and Nyang’oro. But that trust did nothing to their morality because they lacked morality all by themselves; they were the sort of people who take advantage of the trust others place in them, and the openness of the American university simply made it easier for them to do the sorts of things they do because of the way they are. UD doesn’t think we should press the great free liberal arts schools of America in the direction of moral explicitness and constraint merely because some of the people there are bad actors.

Temple University’s most high-profile (and at the same time most low-profile — as a member of the board of trustees, Bill Cosby attended one meeting in thirty-two years) sort-of graduate likes to drug and mount women.

This predilection has caused some difficulty for the school, which did manage to dismount him from the BOT, but has not been able to sever the intimate relationship between Cosby and his defense lawyer, who doubles as chair of the Temple BOT.

Taking a page out of Yeshiva University’s book, Temple has decided that pretty much any conflict of interest can go down if there’s disclosure. We’ll see how that goes.

This is from Saul Bellow’s Herzog, describing a hard-nosed friend of Moses who enjoys lecturing him about The Real World. Simkin sees Herzog as a head in the clouds dreamy idealistic type who because he’s not watching out for reality will always crash into it and fuck up his life:

I’m a greedy old money-grubber — I don’t claim I’m a candi­date for sainthood, but . . . Well, that’s just the frenzy of the world. Maybe you don’t always take cognizance, Professor, being absorbed in the true the good and the beautiful like Herr Goethe.

Ever since the multiple woman bashing incidents on the Florida State University football team, we’ve had a rash of Reality-Instructors. Their job is to tell us what’s up, what the deal is, the lay of the land, the facts on the ground, prevailing conditions, the stone cold sober truth. On the subject of big-time university football.

UD‘s favorite Reality Instructor so far is this guy. From his title (Let’s Stop Pretending FSU is Different Than Anyone Else) to his final paragraph, this guy has some cold water to throw on our assumption that universities are universities.

His main point is that all the other jockshops recruit with arrant disregard when it comes to criminal records and things like that. Why should FSU be any different? It’s not as if universities are about moral values or something. (And don’t even ask about intellectual values…) Get with the program, fool!

[This is what bothers me most about criticism of the coach]: The idea that he should be blamed for recruiting these kids at all.

It’s preposterous.

I mean, we’re all adults here, right? We know how the world works.

College football is a billion-dollar business. Virtually every coach in the Power 5 conferences is a multi-millionaire. These universities are making anywhere from 20 to 40 million dollars with these new TV deals.

With big money comes big pressure. And these coaches – all of these coaches – try to get the best players possible to come help them win football games at their respective schools. Many times that means recruiting kids from rough cities with tough backgrounds. It’s just the nature of the sport.

To the rest of the country though it’s Florida State that has become the poster child for what is wrong with college football. Wins trump everything else in Tallahassee. It’s all Fisher cares about. It’s all the community cares about. It’s the only thing that matters.

What I find fascinating — and just a bit ironic — is how [the coach] and FSU are vilified for this culture while not a peep was written or spoken about what happened in Gainesville last year.

The everybody does it argument always has as accompaniment

1.) they’re just as bad; and/or

2.) they’re worse.

UD had read long, long comment threads in which fans compulsively compare their team’s vileness to the slightly greater vileness of this or that other team. In this case, Gainesville – the University of Florida – is trotted out to demonstrate that very bad actors and cynical multimillionaire coaches are equally distributed among America’s institutes of higher learning, so why pick on us?

NYT obit.

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I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad… A writer’s life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure’s bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen.

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For the White Noise fans among us, this comment brings to mind Murray Jay Siskind:

I’m here to avoid situations. Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people. There are parts of my body I no longer encourage women to handle freely. I was in a situation with a woman in Detroit. She needed my semen in a divorce suit.

Highly recommended. UD put her name in and laughed long and loud.

So jockshop Ball State takes huge amounts of money from students to pay for a pathetic football program whose games they ignore. So what. That describes many American universities.

Yet see if you can make sense of these comments from a member of the board of trustees.

“We lost money last year… We’re going to lose money every year unless we have some unreasonable sponsor come forward and until we have 15,000 people paying for tickets to football games.”

Unreasonable? What does the trustee mean?

“I’m not saying it’s right,” said [the trustee], owner of Sport Graphics Inc., an Indianapolis company that works with clients like the NCAA, several collegiate athletic conferences, the 2012 Super Bowl, the Indianapolis Colts, and the Indiana Pacers. “I’m not saying schools should be seen more in favor for winning football championships or being in tournaments than having Rhodes scholars. But I am saying if you’re going to have athletic programs we’ve got to do our best to support it.”

Oh baby… if loving you is wrong… I don’t wanna be right…

Like the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board, UD has been struck, since the inception of his campaign, by what a Wildean character Donald Trump is. But while she has been tending toward Lady Bracknell, the paper points to Dorian Gray.

He is our nation’s “Portrait of Dorian Gray,” the not-so-secret creation of our worst values.

Like the hidden portrait which over the years manifests the cruel and dissolute truth of Dorian Gray’s life (while he himself maintains a black-magic youthfulness), Trump is the portrait with the curtain drawn fully aside, the picture of young and at the same time dissolute America which many of us would prefer not to see (hence the outrage his candidacy has excited).

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For UD, the Trump Bump isn’t quite this grim or this simple or even this moral a tale. That’s why the rollicking amorality of The Importance of Being Earnest – subtitle: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People – seems closer to the truth. Though loud, Trump is – like Aunt Augusta – trivial (note that the Huffington Post is covering his campaign in its Entertainment section). The Trump/Bracknell comedy derives from the contradiction between this triviality and their cosmic self-importance.

The reason the Bracknell role is often played by a man is the same reason Donald Trump is played by a man: Both are unfortunate victims of too much male hormone. Both parody The Hyper-Male of any culture, not just America: Braying, belligerent, boastful, brainless, and utterly beside the point.

Both care, in the crudest fashion, only about money (“A hundred and thirty thousand pounds! And in the Funds! Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her.”), and both make absolutely nothing happen. Bracknell flounces and rages but both parties marry over her objections; Trump flounces and rages but the Republic romps along.

Bracknell and Trump are the best parts of the shows they’re in, yes. But this glorious country is not going to form an alliance with a parcel.

How quaint!

I’m sorry, but in this as in so many things, we are so much farther along.

Plus they’re missing a whole world of guns.

Deferment veteran.

[The University of Tennessee football team] had to hit a 930 score in the APR report that covered a rolling four-year period from 2009-10 through 2012-13. It was going to be difficult. They made a 932…

[The coach] described it as “the greatest win in the history of Tennessee football that nobody knows about.“

Yeah, nobody knows about it because no one cares. It’s only their education.

Hence the article writer’s need to remind us:

The university is, at its core, an educational institution, not a sports franchise.

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The University of Tennessee, one of the most farcical sports stalwarts of this blog (go ahead and type university tennessee in my search engine) is about to have far more to worry about than that silly APR thing.

But both are slowly being recovered – the stands by the Coast Guard, and the way of life by wise citizens and a responsible local government.

It’s the same deal as in UD‘s beloved Garrett Park (type in 20896): Profiteers are always going to want to get rich off of prized locations, and the way you do it is by building immense houses and taking down the trees and the neighborhood. Rehoboth, like Garrett Park, is struggling to defend itself.

Les UDs now begin the trek back to Garrett Park.

… marching band, but details like these are pretty newsworthy too.

There have been four athletic directors and three head football coaches in the past 12 months.

For an approximately two-week overlapping period, the university had two entire football coaching staffs; this resulted in an additional $55,000.

I got an email earlier this week from the mother of an Orlando high school senior who is in the process of selecting her college…

“We recently toured FSU and the violence against women by the players was in the forefront of my mind, therefore putting FSU at the bottom of my list,” the mother wrote. “I do not want to send my daughter to a school where her safety is at risk due to other students with a violent past.”

Florida State University: On its way to being Lord of the Flies U.