Andrew Wolfson, The Courier-Journal:
Under her watch, …university employees have stole[n], misspent or mishandled at least $7.6 million in schemes at the health science campus, the law school, the business school and the athletic department’s ticket office.
[Provost Shirley] Willihnganz also was criticized for approving about $1 million in buyouts for former high-ranking employees, some of which included agreements not to disparage the university or its leaders.
She also was forced to apologize to faculty in 2008 for failing to act against [Robert] Felner, the education dean, despite more than 30 grievances and complaints that he had intimidated, harassed, humiliated and retaliated against faculty, staff, students and alumni.
Willihnganz said at the time that she tended to dismiss the early complaints against Felner — including a no-confidence vote by faculty — because he was a “high performer” and because the complaints came from professors and staff “entrenched in their ways and resistant to change.”
She later told faculty at a meeting that she was sorry. “Mostly what I think I want to say is people have been hurt and something very bad happened, and as provost I feel like I am ultimately responsible for that,” she said.
Felner was sentenced in 2010 to 63 months in federal prison for taking $2.3 million from U of L and the University of Rhode Island.
Ave atque vale!
… shrinking market for law students in a manner so byzantine it would take up a chapter of Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ if Hieronymus Wolf were still alive. Then, after talking to a buddy on the Georgetown University law faculty, she began to realize that the very same byzantine practice goes on there, and is in fact spreading among all but the lowest ranked law schools in America.
The lowest ranked can’t do it because it involves netting (details here) huge shoals of second-year transfer students from law schools in the abyssopelagic rather than hadalpelagic zone.
Although I guess if you’re the nadir in the States – like, for instance, Arizona Summit (someone there probably thought it’d be clever … distracting? … to name the place Summit) you can try harvesting a school of foreign fish (though given many differences among legal systems, this would be a challenge).
The small fry are starting to fight back. Not only is Arizona Summit fucking with its first-year curriculum, making it difficult both to get a good grade point average and to have taken the sorts of courses you need on your transcript to move to the second year curriculum at many schools. Also:
Arizona Summit students have to meet with a dean at Arizona Summit before they transfer and before they can get their transcripts.
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Before their transcripts are released, female Arizona Summit students have to submit to a mandatory transvaginal ultrasound.
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Just kidding.
That’s not happening yet.
A (cough) remarkably strong commitment to athletics has drawn the attention of the world to Penn State University; but the same public university system (Correction: Not the same. UD thanks a reader for pointing this out.) boasts another campus – California University of Pennsylvania (motto: Building Character) – whose long-term president (they finally dumped him after two decades, and in response he’s suing) took over that school’s football program.
Just that one guy ran the operation … And that guy was president of the whole dealie… And he turned the team into one of the winningest criminal conspiracies this side of Palermo.
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Not long ago, six of the lads got together and shouted Football Strong! after they beat some guy almost to death.
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You get a sense of the ex-president’s mentality when you read that he called the cancellation of a recent game – it seemed an appropriate gesture, given the fallout from the Football Strong! incident, and given the revelation that in the last two years not thirty, not forty, but forty-three players were in trouble with the law – “tragic.”
… ranged from leading an early morning corporate seminar on John Updike’s short story, “Trust Me” (the participants were managers who have been doing some long-term thinking about trust and organizations) to attending a GW faculty seminar on the subject of “Christian Zionists” (a term UD had not heard before). She needed to cover large swathes of DC in a hurry – she metroed, ubered, and shuttled her way up and down and all around.
Best of all, at the end of the day, a generous colleague gave her a lift right to her door.
It was cold, and intensely sunny, with no snow. It was so cold that UD wore her massive alpaca coat, which she rarely does because it feels as though you’re carrying around a massive alpaca. But the thing undeniably keeps her warm.
Take an obviously ugly, unloved, unused or underused public building. A grotesquely out of place building (urban, it has been placed in a rural setting) loathed for decades – since its inception – by virtually its entire community (they after all have had to look at it every day). Finally the community is about to be able to blot it from the landscape – or, more precisely, to alter it so radically that they’ll probably be able to live with it going forward without hating themselves and the world. All good, right?
Well, no.
Architecture remains the realm of The Great Man, and Paul Rudolph is part of that crew, so every building he designed must be defended, even if that building – as is the case with the Orange County Government Center, in Goshen, N.Y. (two hours directly south of UD‘s house in New York) – gives off the rank sweat of an unseam’d bed. And not just defended but stuck there, dammit, forever and a day.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm, student of prose, now examines the New York Times architecture critic’s attempt to keep Rudolph in the Land O’ Goshen. How do you write against the obvious? How do you avoid revealing any off-putting elitism? How, as a dynamic modernist, do you deny the validity of change itself?
You want to avoid this gambit, tried by an earlier defender of the place:
“It’s like saying, ‘I don’t like Pollock because he splattered paint,’” said Nina Rappaport, chairwoman of Docomomo-New York/Tri-State, an organization that promotes the preservation of Modernist architecture. “Does that mean we shouldn’t put it in a museum? No, it means we teach people about these things.”
Hop away from the hog oiler and listen up – you might learn something.
No, Michael Kimmelman will take a different tack. Let’s scathe through his piece.
Headlines:
A Chance to Salvage a Master’s Creation
Paul Rudolph Building in Goshen, N.Y., Faces Threat
Master, Threat. But there’s a chance to Salvage. Faces Threat: Immediate Drama. Urgency. We are alerting the troops.
Unless county legislators act quickly, a paragon of midcentury American idealism will be lost.
Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center, in Goshen, N.Y., announces itself as a civic hub. It’s made of corrugated concrete and glass, organized into three pavilions around a courtyard, like an old wagon train around a village green.
First move: Go folksy. Go Americana. Ignore the fact that the photograph that accompanies your article fails in any way to resonate with paragon, idealism, civic, pavilion, courtyard, old wagon train, and village green. Press forward.
And that’s the approach SOS is going to note in Kimmelman’s piece. When you got nuthin’ your only option is to go all out. Know what I mean? It takes balls. It takes writerly skill.
A county proposal would tear down huge chunks of it, flatten the roof, destroy windows, swap out parts of the textured concrete facade and build what looks like an especially soul-crushing glass box. Goshen would end up with a Frankenstein’s monster, eviscerating a work that the World Monuments Fund, alarmed by precisely this turn of events, included on its global watch list alongside landmarks like Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China.
A building made of huge chunks of monstrous soul-crushing concrete is now threatened with transformation into a building with huge chunks of monstrous soul-crushing glass. So far not a strong defense. Still, he’s jammed some very pretty scary words – SOS likes the lip-smacking eviscerate – into this, and he’s just getting started.
Plus, whatever it looks like, this thing is up there with Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China. Damn hayseeds don’t appreciate what they’ve got.
Haters in Orange County government have been contemplating its demise for years, allowing it to fall into disrepair and shuttering the building, citing water damage after Hurricane Irene in 2011. Pictures of the interior from the early 1970s, when the center was still new, show a complex of animated spaces, by turns intimate and grand. Later renovations ruined the inside, making it cramped and dark. Rudolph was a master of sculpturing light and space, following in the footsteps of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose emotionalism he married to the cool Modernism of Europeans like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.
Haters is also scary stuff. Haters. When Kimmelman, a man of strong opinions, writes with hatred about buildings he hates, he’s not a hater. He’s a… what… a potent discriminator…
Now we get some familiar archi-adjectives – animated, grand, intimate, cool. All are there to create a vague flush of excitement in us as we contemplate inhabiting this paragon of light and space; all are there to obliterate the obvious impossibility of attaining anything like a sense of grandeur or intimacy in this building.
And since when are grandeur and intimacy things anyone associates with county government? Since when are Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China continuous with the Goshen New York municipal building?
Still, The Great Man was continuous with earlier Great Men. We are to be impressed with this lineage (Corbu, Wright, Gropius).
His style, unfortunately, came to be branded Brutalism, and turned off many. But the government center was conceived with lofty social aspirations, making tangible Rudolph’s concept of energetic governance as a democratic ideal. It was a beautiful notion; and while the architecture may never win any popularity contest, it was beautiful, too, with its poetry of asymmetric, interweaving volumes.
This is what SOS means by just going for it. When you’ve got nothing going for you, go for it. Acknowledge the bizarre, motiveless ascription of the name Brutalism to this sort of building; insist that if a building means well, it looks well (“conceived with lofty social aspirations”), and then stick in some patriotic cliches to keep the flush of vague excitement going (energetic governance as a democratic ideal). The awkwardness here is that central to democracy is the will of the people, and in regard to Paul Rudolph’s building that will is overwhelmingly clear.
Now make your boldest move: Call an ugly building beautiful. Go ahead. You’ve gone this far; the only place to go is yet farther. Call it poetic.
Okay, so we’ll skip a little.
Demolishing Penn Station seemed expedient to politicians and other people a half-century ago, when only a noisy bunch of architecture buffs and preservationists pleaded for its reprieve. Back then, Rudolph was a leading light in American architecture, his work the epitome of American invention and daring.
The original Penn Station was beautiful, monumental, and deserved every bit of the effort devoted to salvaging it. But here we’re back at the Machu Picchu/Great Wall of China problem. Machu Picchu, Great Wall of China, Penn Station, Goshen County Building. Seriously?
Final paragraph.
History is on the Government Center’s side, too. Here’s hoping county legislators are.
Another grand statement for a small subject. Goshen must be on the side of history!
Actually, Goshen, with energetic governance as its democratic ideal, can be wherever the hell it wants. Goshen seems to see itself as a place of vernacular buildings which express its actual history, rather than as a Mount Rushmore of all-American, world historical architects like Paul Rudolph, who, after his early work met with hostility
turned inward to lavish interior-design projects, evincing through the 1970s a comfort with the extravagant that was out of tune with professional norms. Then he turned away from the American scene altogether, to rework old ideas in a series of large projects overseas, such as the Colonnade apartments in Singapore and the Lippo Centre in Hong Kong…