… graduate students and secretaries?
Aw now Bill don’t put yourself down. (Bill’s executive director of the Bowl Championship Series.) BCS makes all kinds of serious money, and goodness gracious there are entire universities impoverished and prostituted by your organization! You’re worth the attention the federal government’s giving you. You’re totally worth it. Hell, everybody’s reading that letter you got today from the Department of Justice about your anti-trust problem. Everybody’s wondering what the head of the NCAA’s gonna say in response to that letter.
You’re big news! Don’t you worry your pretty little head about the taxpayers’ money!
Two years ago, one day after its opening ceremony, I went to the Pentagon Memorial, where I sat on Leslie Whittington’s wingseat and thought about her. Here’s my Inside Higher Ed post about that visit.
I’m here again, barely able to write for the wind. But the wind stirs the ponds under the wingseats, so there’s the sound of water (if you ignore the roaring George Washington Parkway traffic), and the wind makes currents that make ripply shadows along the grounded wings.
Four red roses and a lily lie in Leslie Whittington’s pond. I’m sitting on her husband’s seat just opposite hers, looking at the flowers in the water.
Big jets about to land at Reagan keep appearing above the Pentagon’s roof, each one a shuddering reminder. A big helicopter – looks presidential – just buzzed the memorial.
At the memorial’s entrance, there’s a plaque, and under the plaque someone’s propped a photo of Lady Liberty holding aloft the bleeding head of Bin Laden. WE GOT HIM, someone has written on the bottom of the picture. 5/1/11.
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Heat and wind and a cloudy sky. Already a tropical day. If you really want a meditative experience here, you’ll need to get the Pentagon to let you in at one AM. Otherwise it’s jets and helicopters and eight lanes of fast cars and all the daily activity of the Pentagon.
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Is there more security here than usual?
Who knows? It’s the Pentagon!
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Everyone’s assimilating the Bin Laden news in their own way. For me, it’s definitely about this second trip to Leslie Whittington’s wingseat, and some chat with her.
But I didn’t know her – I only feel an affinity with her – and I find that talking’s difficult. The way she died makes her rather unapproachable. I can’t – I won’t – imagine that. But I can’t think of her apart from it.
This impasse makes me dull and stupid on a hot day in the middle of – let’s face it – parking lots. The long walk from the metro stop to the memorial is all about the million miles of parking that surround the Pentagon. Once you get past that, you’re in a water garden hedged with grasses and herbs. You’re in a bounded place of 184 beige hillocks and illuminated basins. Your feet crunch on the gravel as you move from bench to bench, protecting your eyes from the sun as you squint at each engraved name.
Having found Leslie Whittington, I’m struggling against many forces – my fear of reckoning with the reality of what happened to her; the crazy wind and heat of a Washington afternoon; the distractions – in order to lose myself and find her.
The wind suddenly blows the yellow water lily out of the water. It scuds along the gravel. I go after it, pick it up, and float it back on the pond. The simple business of realigning it with the roses does the trick. I sit back down on her husband’s bench and reflect.
At three AM, Les UDs were shocked from sleep by a big explosion.
“I’ve never heard anything like that before,” said UD. “Sounds as though it might be coming from the train tracks.”
Her first thought was a blast of (possibly dangerous) materials on a boxcar.
“Isn’t it raining?” said Mr UD. “Maybe it was lightning?”
“Don’t think so. It’s not raining very hard. And that just sounded like an explosion, not lightning. Maybe a house exploded? I’d go outside and look around, but if there’s been a release of chemicals… Let’s listen for sirens.”
Sirens started up in two minutes. Les UDs went back to sleep.
This morning’s newspaper reports that a house exploded.
Right next to Garrett Park.
Two people were seriously burned overnight after a large explosion destroyed a Rockville area home and threw the pair into the backyard …
Damaged adjacent houses too.
To have grown up here in Washington DC is to have known the children of spies and scientists and satellite image readers and war strategists. Abstract, abstracted people, symbolic analysts, silent about the precise nature of their work. “My former wives,” writes Jack Gladney, hero of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, “had a tendency to feel estranged from the objective world – a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the intelligence community.” Some of my friends’ parents commuted to Fort Dietrich to study military applications of poison. Others – like UD‘s father – drove to the National Institutes of Health to fight President Nixon’s war on cancer.
To have come back here to Washington after graduate school, to have spent my working life at four-blocks-from-the-White-House George Washington University, is to have made a lateral move, to have remained in a world of CIA recruiters and lobbyists and speech writers. White Noise takes place on a college campus, arguably the white-noisiest of wealthy, high-tech American locales, and indeed even an urban campus like GW is very white-noisy. Things tend to be smooth and hushed and abstract — the carpeted, geometric mid-rises, the light-jazz-and-laptops cafes, the calm precise Reagan-bound jets.
To have watched my students rush the White House at midnight on Sunday and raggedly sing The Star Spangled Banner was to have witnessed a breach in the white noise protocol. They were the first to arrive, my students, their dorms just down the block from Lafayette Park. They raced along the darkness of Eighteenth Street, shouting to one another, pumping their fists, conjuring flags from somewhere. From the fog of final exams they were lifted, by Osama’s demise, into a collective clarity having to do with justice.
Strange to think that my students were too young, in 2001, to understand what I understood, to do what I did. I lay down on my basement floor and I said out loud to myself Nothing to do but be brave. Because no one knew how much more punishment we were in for. Someone was trying to bomb us back to the Stone Age. (“They have gone beyond the bounds of passionate payback. This is heaven and hell, a sense of armed martyrdom as the surpassing drama of human experience,” wrote DeLillo in an essay published a few months after 9/11.) My students were too young to marvel at the unity Americans felt and expressed, all of us having been hit so hard. We didn’t know how to respond in the immediate aftermath, but we knew we loved this country, and we all wanted to say that. We wanted to be clear about this love, its particularities. DeLillo praised “the daily sweeping taken-for-granted greatness of New York.”
They were too young, my students, but they took it in, just the way we did. And when Sunday’s story broke, there was a lot of emotion to let out.
Under the hum of white noise beats a perfectly functioning human heart. Even in the fog of Foggy Bottom.
Dave Cooper, in the Huffington Post, reports on the latest idiocy out of the University of Kentucky:
[A] new proposal by the [University of Kentucky] Athletics Department to spend over $6 million on a new football stadium scoreboard — replacing an existing scoreboard that is only 12 years old — has UK faculty seeing red. … Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart stated the stadium’s current video boards “don’t provide the kind of sophisticated viewing experience that fans have come to expect across the country.”
… [T]he UK Faculty Senate voted unanimously to “strongly oppose” the stadium scoreboard proposal. The UK faculty representative on the Board, finance professor Joe Peek stated “The university’s current classrooms don’t provide the kind of sophisticated educational experience that students have come to expect across the country.”
[B]usiness ethics lacks a core body of knowledge and an agreed methodology. With calls for business schools to “teach ethics”, this confusion is damaging. Courses can be added, but it is impossible to assess how well they fulfil their purpose without a sense of what that is.
Martin Sandbu, in the Financial Times, calls for serious moral philosophy to be taught in business schools. He contrasts traditional analytical thought to “faux-analytical concepts of strategy management and corporate responsibility,” and insists that rather than try to make business students into good people (he points out what UD has pointed out since this blog was a baby, that universities can’t make people good; they can only train them in strong forms of self-consciousness about goodness), b-schools should sharpen students’ moral self-awareness in general by teaching them how to argue intelligently about morality, and how to distinguish bad arguments about morality from good.
His idea will never fly because it lacks glamor. It’s not new, whereas “business ethics” is new (even if, as Sandbu points out, it doesn’t mean anything). It’s not based on specific workplace examples so it lacks that whole Group Project / Psychodynamics thing that people seem to like so much. It’s not based on charts (it has instead to do with unpredictable collective reflection), so it doesn’t work with the PowerPoint bullets many business school professors like to read.
Finally, moral philosophy is hard.
An art student at NYU sells cheese.
… from the gates of the White House.
Years ago my mother planted a calycanthus occidentalis in my front garden.
Only this season did it put out flowers – strangely scented lotus-like burgundy things .
(Charles Webber © California Academy of Sciences)
[Click picture for a bigger image.]
They run up and down its long thin branches.
When I scrape its bark, my fingers smell of cinnamon.
It wasn’t until I asked my neighbor, Barbara Shidler, to come over and tell me what it was that I could identify the calycanthus. I’d tried Google Images and gotten nowhere.
It’s so beautiful, it suits so well my dark house and garden, that I want to move it forward. (“Move your mahonia and put the calycanthus there,” said Lizzie, another neighbor who happened by. “Get rid of the mahonia. Stick it in the back.”)
It’s positively hallucinogenic.
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Okay, so that was rather difficult. Not the digging up part and the transplanting part. It’s been raining; the soil is soft. The tree is still thin and delicate.
But the bush just adjacent to the newly placed Spicebush has a cardinal nest with three eggs and an hysterical mother. [Scroll down for eggs, nest.] As I dug a hole for the calycanthus, I told off the bird for putting her nest steps from my front door.
I went to a great deal of trouble not to disturb the nest with my digging and watering. The mother bird flew off as I worked and watched me like a hawk from my roof. She didn’t stop chip-chip-chip-chip-chipping until I left.
UD‘s daughter, La Kid, is in Rome, and suddenly she’s surrounded by a million beatifiers. She and her friends didn’t realize they’d scheduled their Rome jaunt to coincide with this event. “Flags. Shirts with his name printed on them in big letters. Songs. Prayers…”
She’s upset that she missed gathering with her GW friends at the White House last night. I reminded her that she was in the crowd there for the Obama election celebration.
I also pointed out that she missed one world historical event, but was at the right place at the right time for another one.
… that there’s big news about Osama Bin Laden.
Killed or captured?
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Update: Bin Laden is dead.
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Remember.
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People are gathering at the White House to celebrate.
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Looks as though there are a lot of GW students among the celebrants.
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From the Gaston Gazette:
[Adam] Royston lives in a dorm just a few blocks away from the White House. He held up his cell phone and chants of “USA, USA” could be heard. He likened Sunday night’s celebration to gatherings for a new government in Egypt.
“There are tons of American flags,” said Royston, who is studying Middle Eastern government at the private school in the nation’s capital. “People are just running for the White House. I just knew that since this is a great day that I had to be there.
“This has got to be the most exciting day at George Washington University in my freshman year.”
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From the Associated Press:
Twenty-year-old Alex Washofsky came despite finals on Monday at George Washington University. He’s also a member of the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps.
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More GW reaction.
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Tomorrow, after she gives a final exam at GW, UD will again visit the Pentagon Memorial. She wrote about it in 2008, here.
Mike Bianchi, Orlando Sentinel.
[University of Central Florida] basketball coach Donnie Jones is being accused of using a convicted felon with ties to a sports agent as a conduit to funnel big-name recruits into his program.
Sadly, my first response when I read this story in The New York Times Saturday was this: Doesn’t everybody?
… At this point, it’s impossible to know if Jones is breaking the rules or simply pushing the envelope. And, frankly, when you look at the sad state of the NCAA, does it really matter?
Auburn, the national football champion, had a star player who somehow kept his eligibility and won the Heisman Trophy despite the fact that his father tried to sell his services for $180,000.
UConn, the national basketball champion, has a coach in Jim Calhoun who will be suspended for a grand total of three games next year despite the fact that the NCAA says he runs a cheating program that “fails to promote an atmosphere of compliance.”
John Calipari has been in charge of two different programs that had to vacate their Final Four appearances because of NCAA violations. He now holds the premier job in college basketball at Kentucky…
… when someone running a secondary school or a university turns out to be a plagiarist. These people spend a lot of time pontificating to their students about honesty, academic integrity and hard work, and when they are found out, it makes their students – and their students’ families – look like dupes.
As Karen Francisco reports in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:
Gwendolyn Griffith Adell is a member of the Indiana State Board of Education and administrator of a Gary charter school singled out for distinction by Gov. Mitch Daniels. She also stands accused of plagiarizing her doctoral dissertation.
Purdue University officials have confirmed they are reviewing the allegations.
Adell’s response so far is the classic I’ve just been hit with this response: Bullshit! I’m getting me a lawyer!
Once she calms down and realizes she’s been caught, she will probably go through many of the same stages most people – from the high and mighty German defense minister on down – go through:
She’ll admit there might have been one or two inadvertent lapses on her part.
She’ll ask her university for permission to correct the dissertation. This will be denied.
She’ll say she was busy having five children, running for political office, caring for her sick aunt.
She’ll say there’s a political conspiracy to get rid of her because she’s an outspoken critic of the establishment.
She’ll say her plagiarism occurred long ago and has nothing to do with what a great job she does. Judge her by her current work.
In her resignation speech, she will portray herself as a religious martyr.