But my wife’s school is, and if you give me another $7,000 dollars, I’ll arrange a transfer.
But my wife’s school is, and if you give me another $7,000 dollars, I’ll arrange a transfer.
One of its high-profile trustees is reported to be “pretty confident” he won’t be indicted for insider trading.
Whew!
… is currently being sued over its reappointment of the bodacious Bobby Lowder to the board of trustees.
Y’all know about T. Boone and how he runs Oklahoma State, right?
Well, it’s the same thing with the Koch boys and Florida State; only instead of choosing coaches and shit, they’re running the econ department! Staffing it and everything.
Smaller FSU donors get to write syllabi. BB&T bank “funds a course on ethics and economics in which Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is required reading.”
Controlling interest in courses and departments continues to be available at FSU, but you should probably act fast to get your first choice.
… some people have complained that although when you check in at Lufthansa online “you can choose between Herr/Frau, Dr, Prof, Prof Dr,” you cannot choose Prof Dr Dr.
Prof Dr Dr! A country that loves titles that much is gonna get itself into plagiarism trouble, with everyone scrambling for more Prof Drs. Indeed we’ve already followed Baron Googleberg’s story (it’s still going on). Now another prominent politician, Silvana Koch-Mehrin, is in trouble. Rumor has it the University of Heidelberg is close to taking away her PhD.
This is all moving much faster than Guttenberg’s case did; institutions realize that the people behind this website are finding cases left and right. But the targets of the website’s dissertation-analyses aren’t themselves up to speed. Koch-Mehrin has still made no comment (the story’s been out there for a couple of weeks); like Guttenberg, she’s hoping arrogance and disdain will make it all go away.
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Chris expands on German titles:
Germany is full of politicians who are Prof Dr Dr (sometimes even Prof Dr Dr h.c. mult., to signify that the person holds various honorary doctorates). Another common case is someone who is a medical researcher, as they are often Dr. med. and Dr. rer. nat.). Or people with bi-national degrees. The most prominent, in terms of TV exposure, is Prof. Dr. Dr. Karl Lauterbach, who holds a Dr. med. from the University of Düsseldorf and a D.Sc. from Harvard.
If you like titles, the United States is real shit. We don’t seem to have the same respect for them. I don’t see Donald Trump running off to get a PhD so we’ll call him Prof Dr Dr Trump. And he’s our next president.
We do have Major Major Major Major.
But only Germany has Johann Gambolputty.
… and, as expected, does after all award an honorary degree to Tony Kushner.
Clyde Haberman, quoting the chair of CUNY’s board of trustees on freedom of speech, asks the crucial question.
If free expression is such a “bedrock” principle, how come it didn’t occur to any of [the trustees] to make that point while Mr. Wiesenfeld was holding forth on Mr. Kushner?
Here’s UD‘s guess on the answer to that question. Her guess is based on absolutely no inside knowledge — just knowledge of Wiesenfeld’s bull-like personality, and knowledge of the way genteel groups of people – like university trustees – tend to behave.
UD suspects Wiesenfeld is a well-established irritant on the board, a person the other trustees dread and try to pretend doesn’t exist. When he suddenly went off on Kushner, the main thing going through the minds of his fellow trustees, let’s say, was How do we neutralize this guy prontoprontoPRONTO?? How do we make him go away? From their point of view, anything was better than challenging Wiesenfeld on this (or any other) matter and having to enter into a conversation with him. So they went along. They gave in.
… for-profit colleges going on right now, on the Kojo Nnamdi show.
… as I read Christopher Hitchens on having lost his voice.
… I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so. And timing is everything: the exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that. Now, if I want to enter a conversation, I have to attract attention in some other way, and live with the awful fact that people are then listening “sympathetically.” At least they don’t have to pay attention for long: I can’t keep it up and anyway can’t stand to.
[I have always been able to sing. ‘Twas in the genes. My father was in the Johns Hopkins Glee Club, and had a marvelous voice. My mother sang light opera and spirituals very prettily. They were always singing. We were all – my parents, their four children – musical, the house vibrating with guitars and pianos and recorders. I’d take my nylon string guitar into the bathroom and sit on the hamper and sing Joan Baez-style English ballads.
Last night, in my quiet house – my husband in Saudi Arabia, my daughter in Ireland – I took out my ratty, forty-year-old copy of the Joan Baez Songbook and sang, with the book’s simple piano accompaniments, all of the Lyrics and Laments, the Child and the Broadside Ballads, until my voice ran out of steam. All of the songs I sang with the nylon string guitar when I was fifteen.
That was a pleasant losing of the voice, a losing that happened after it had been used to generate deep and happy memories. After it confirmed that my fifteen-year-old voice and its ballads were still in there.]
… I owe a vast debt to Simon Hoggart of The Guardian (son of the author of The Uses of Literacy), who about 35 years ago informed me that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write “more like the way that you talk.” At the time, I was near speechless at the charge of being boring and never thanked him properly, but in time I appreciated that my fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun was its own form of indulgence… If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.
[My fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun. Yes. When you teach writing to smart and sensitive undergraduates, you’re torn between championing to them the personal pronoun and worrying about their being self-indulgent with it. And yet over the years I’ve seen that self-indulgence rarely. One of the best papers I received, just now, in my Novels of Don DeLillo course, took issue with DeLillo’s characterization of Phoenix and the American desert in Underworld. Its main character was displaced to Arizona from Brooklyn, and in the novel Brooklyn was all about authenticity and roots and identity, Phoenix about white noisy drift and vacancy. But my depth, wrote my student, resides in the desert; and this is why…]
The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn’t precisely one of the things that engage you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder. Indeed, I don’t know of any really good writer who was deaf, either. How could one ever come, even with the clever signage of the good Abbé de l’Épée, to appreciate the miniscule twinges and ecstasies of nuance that the well-tuned voice imparts? Henry James and Joseph Conrad actually dictated their later novels—which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time, even though they might have benefited from hearing some passages read back to them—and Saul Bellow dictated much of Humboldt’s Gift. Without our corresponding feeling for the idiolect, the stamp on the way an individual actually talks, and therefore writes, we would be deprived of a whole continent of human sympathy, and of its minor-key pleasures such as mimicry and parody.
… It’s in engagements like this, in competition and comparison with others, that one can hope to hit upon the elusive, magical mot juste. For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.
[And of course Humboldt’s gift was precisely – like Ravelstein’s gift – his self, his nuance, his idiolect, his stamp.
And if, in finally allowing yourself to hear the actual human voice, what you hear is what DeLillo’s character, James Axton, at the Parthenon, hears –
I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embedded in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice which is our own.
– then, well, what did you expect? What do our most well-tuned voices tell us? Why does Wayne Koestenbaum love the voice of Maria Callas? “The steel and the wobble announced a predicament; [I] loved the mistakes, because they seemed autobiographical, because without mediation or guile they wrote a naked heart’s wound.” The gift Humboldt and Ravelstein carry is the high-level articulation of their woundedness. Precisely Christopher Hitchens’ current gift.]
Mr UD is in Jeddah, La Kid’s in Ireland, and UD‘s home in Garrett Park, gazing at three ugly cardinal babies in a nest near her front door.
Earlier in the day, UD and her sister did some explosion tourism, visiting the site of a house across the train tracks from UD‘s place that blew up a few nights ago.
He was nominated for state health director, but shortly after accepting the nomination he turned it down.
He has just resigned as head of family medicine at the state university.
Allegations of medical reimbursement fraud keep following him around, but no one’s saying much.
If he is guilty of this, what an amazing, high-level instance of corruption this would have been – state health director! Even by Hawaii’s standards — it has long been one of our most corrupt states — this would have been quite an accomplishment.
Neal Palafox remains a tenured member of the UH medical faculty. I wonder how long that will last.