…[E]ven if we concede the point that athletics gives every school massive national exposure, it still does not address the lingering question: to what end is all this exposure?

Do athletics truly promote the academic mission of schools such as [Louisiana State University]? [Its president] certainly seems to think so, as he gushes that weekly televised football games give viewers “a chance to see what LSU is about.” How so exactly? Is LSU about being able to toss an inflated pig bladder around a old cow pasture? Even if television viewers manage to catch the repeated airings of LSU’s promotional spot that airs during commercial breaks in the football games, doesn’t the fact that the game is 60 minutes long (not counting breaks) and the ad 30-60 seconds long tell the viewers much more about where LSU’s true priorities are than any of the content of that advertisement?

… [I]nstead of spending millions to fulfill sports fans’ primal urge for watching virile, young men bang each other on the football field shouldn’t colleges and universities be about encouraging both their students and the public to seek after those things which are of true and lasting importance in life?

UD thanks Dirk.

Harvard University professor Bill George boasts of his seat on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs, and lectures the world on “character-based leadership.” What has he done at GS?

One wonders how much louder the alarm must ring before the drowsy Goldman board stirs. Last week, a judge’s description of Blankfein’s apparent role in persuading its client El Paso Corporation to work with Goldman in a conflicted situation was top news. The week before, Goldman reported that the SEC is looking into client disclosure issues, an alleged continuing problem at the firm…

Others much further from Goldman’s epicenter have heard the alarm, so where is the bank’s board in all of this? …

Is the SEC at all relevant to Blankfein and Goldman’s board? Blankfein and Cohn did not mention the recent headlines or scrapes with the SEC in the memo to employees. Last month, SEC Chair Mary Schapiro described the need to continuously police these kinds of firms — and yesterday, Propublica traced Goldman’s troubled regulatory history over the last 12 years. With all of these troubling instances, the current board has had several opportunities to awaken and act.

The board failed to seize a big opportunity last year when it oversaw the bank’s Business Practice Review amid the fallout surrounding the company’s role in the financial crisis. That inadequate 67-page document was big on platitudes but small on substance in addressing the ethical conundrums employees face. Goldman told the Times yesterday that client success mattered to the firm. But in the instance in which you are selling what you call junk, does only the seller’s success matter and not the buyer’s?

… The board missed another opportunity yesterday. Instead of brushing off Smith’s comments, the board should have ensured that the CEO took the allegations seriously. It should have used this opportunity to communicate to employees and others that it would move to understand what actions would make all employees and stakeholders comfortable that Goldman’s deeds match their words.

Instead, the board allowed Blankfein and Cohn to take the tact most likely to shut down future whistleblowers: reject Smith’s comments as out of hand. If they are willing to do this in public, what goes on behind closed doors?

The board itself should be taking action. It’s serious when your CEO has been publicly called out by both a judge and an employee in a two-week timeframe.

And shouldn’t it be a wake-up call when stakeholders mock the employee whistleblower for being naïve, implying that everyone should know that Goldman is as bad as Smith made it sound?

… Blankfein has been on the Goldman board for nine years and some Goldman directors have served terms ranging from seven to 13 years. Are some too embedded? Where have their hearts and minds been? Hello, Goldman board. Are you awake?

To be fair, Bill has done some things on behalf of Goldman Sachs. Here he is defending tens of millions in personal compensation for GS executives:

Goldman Sachs board member and Harvard professor Bill George defended the firm’s massive bonuses and compared employees’ compensation to that of professional athletes and movie stars during a recent interview.

In an interview posted Dec. 23, 2009, George told the ideas web site Big Think “I think that one feels like the shareholder value is made up in people and you need the people there to do the job and if you don’t pay them for their performance you’ll lose them and it’s much like professional athletes and movie stars I think.”

Well, they’re sure movie stars now. Spotlight couldn’t be any more intense right now.

In academia, the competition for grant money and prominent journal publication breeds exaggeration as to the importance of research programs, their past successes, and their future chances. The worst of these cross over the line into fraud, some of which makes the headlines, but even the honest stuff (the huge majority) is best-foot-forward all the time. You learn, after a short time doing research yourself, to mentally adjust for the titles of papers, presentations, and (most especially) press releases.

Derek Lowe reminds us of a basic and abiding truth behind many of the posts on this blog, and other blogs, like Health Care Renewal and Retraction Watch: The system’s pretty well rigged against strict research integrity, a fact that endangers universities in particular and everyone’s health in general.

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

UPDATE: A Case in Point.

Brown’s cozy friendship with pharmaceutical companies should concern every one of us. The University’s failure to launch a public investigation into Keller’s research threatens the integrity of other research coming from Brown. Not only does it discredit Brown’s integrity as a research university, but it also threatens patient safety since doctors are misinformed about the negative side-effects of drugs they are prescribing. The University should be devoted to researching medicine for the sake of benefiting humanity, not corporate profits.

An eloquent opinion piece by a Brown University undergrad revisits the ongoing scandal of Martin Keller. Background here.

UD thanks Roy.

… sits on the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs. Bill’s job at Goldman: Doing nothing. He has recently been joined by Barnard president Debora Spar on the Goldman board. Her job: Doing nothing. Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, has just left the Goldman Board of Directors. Her job: Doing nothing.

[S]ix of …seven [former GS managing directors and partners] said they agreed with [Greg] Smith’s [NYT op/ed] criticism of how the firm has treated clients under Blankfein and Cohn’s management and that current members of the management committee would, too. Even so, they said they don’t expect the board of directors to take action or that anything will change because the firm has made money and outperformed most rivals.

Harvard, Barnard, Brown: Some of our best universities are Goldman-infested. In exchange for hundreds of thousands of GS dollars, some of our highest profile academics sit on their asses there, rousing themselves to approve – as Simmons did – a $68 million dollar bonus for Lloyd Blankfein. “There’s no indication … that Simmons takes her fiduciary responsibilities to Goldman’s shareholders particularly seriously,” wrote Felix Salmon of Simmon’s time at Goldman. He noted she knows virtually nothing about finance, making it absurdly easy for her to be “snowed” by Blankfein.

[GS] should get to work on the board, appointing people who will look hard at managerial business decisions, and won’t allow themselves to be snowed by Lloyd.

Or, as Salmon put it yesterday:

The real muppets, in this story, are Goldman’s board members, who have never had any real control over how the company is run. And, frankly, never will. The most remunerative skill, at Goldman, is the ability to flatter someone into believing that they’re incredibly important and clever and sophisticated, even as you’re getting that person to do exactly what’s in your own best interest. No one rises to lead Goldman Sachs who doesn’t have that skill. And you can be sure that Lloyd Blankfein uses it on the board every time he meets with them.

Everyone commenting on Muppetgate agrees that the board remains useless at best and an enabler of sick personal greed and toxic corporate culture at worst. (You’d think Harvard would be embarrassed that Incurious George promotes Me Heap Big Leader shit like this under Harvard’s name.) How disgusting that the names of some of our best universities are dragged into this mud.

[A group of consultants for the United Nations has] called for the Divine Comedy to be removed from schools and universities …

When UD was a tyke, her mother, who bred dogs, took her to many dog shows up and down the east coast. Once, while her mother was gazing at handlers running English Cocker Spaniels round and round and round, UD wandered away and got lost. (What’s the definition of trauma if you grew up in Bethesda, Maryland? Getting lost at a dog show.)

The one thing UD took away from all those shows was a phrase she heard over and over again at them: CLEAN-UP CREW, RING ONE. Or two or whatever. UD seems to have been impressed that a group of people existed whose function was to rush about cleaning up dog shit.

With the soon to be infamous “muppet” letter published in today’s New York Times, corporate clean-up crews are pressing pooper scoopers into service all over the country. Let’s see if we can help them. Here’s the mess in the ring. Here’s what Brown University’s president, until very recently a highly paid member of the Goldman Sachs board of trustees, was in with.

Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence. [Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Nice bit of humor there.]

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.

My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore. [He’d actually have done better not to list the particular accomplishments – it edges toward boasting, and humility is the idea here.] [Update: See? A lot of people are having fun with this.]

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

Hokay, so what’s corporate clean-up going to do?

Oh, you know.

So do I.

First, it’s going to impugn the guy. Secret resentments; he was close to retirement; he was increasingly irrelevant and he knew it so he thought he’d take a last potshot. (Damn! Traitors everywhere.)

And – if that’s how he feels, why did he stay so long? Cashing in baby, cashing in, just like everyone else! Do you know how much money he made last year? Twenty, fifty mil, maybe? If he’s so pure, we await his return of the cash…

Stuff like that.

And anyway! Muppets is a term of endearment.

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Notice that one thing his conscience couldn’t take anymore was looking college students in the eye and telling them Goldman was a good place to work when he knew they weren’t exactly going to be turned into model citizens.

Well, he can stop worrying about that. These students come from universities whose boards of trustees and presidents have been in bed with Goldman and Goldman veterans for a long time. So…

Muppets of Barnard College! I give you your president, Debora Spar, Goldman Sachs board of trustees! Goldman will be giving her around $500,000 a year to do … pretty much what Brown University’s Ruth Simmons did. Pretty much nothing. Pretty much rubber stamp hundreds of millions in compensation each year for Goldman executives.

See, she’s a muppet too.

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

Update: Live-blogging the Muppet Show:

TO SAVE GOLDMAN SACHS, LLOYD BLANKFEIN MUST GO

shouts a headline that just appeared at Forbes.

B-b-but…! What happens to Barnard College in that case? The reason its president got on the Goldman board is that Blankfein’s wife – until recently herself a member of Barnard’s board – seems to have put her there.   This is from 2011:

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein’s wife, Laura, is a Barnard College alumna and is listed on the school’s website as a member of the board of trustees. She has resigned that post, Stephen Cohen, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, said today. The Lloyd & Laura Blankfein Foundation donated $50,000 to Barnard College in fiscal 2010, which ended Jan. 31, 2010, and $25,000 in the previous year, according to the nonprofit’s federal tax filings.

You put me on the Barnard BOT; I put you on the Goldman BOT. And look at those numbers, will you? Blankfein’s been making around fifty million dollars in compensation each year for many years. Can you believe he and his wife were willing to part with – let’s do the math – $75,000 for Barnard?  Who said greed?  Shut up about greed!

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Favorite headline so far:

Goldman Sachs Exec Suddenly Realizes His Company Is Evil, Quits in NYT Op-Ed

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G is for Goldman, it’s good enough for me!

Be proud, Barnard muppets, of your very own Cookie Monster!

The real muppets, in this story, are Goldman’s board members, who have never had any real control over how the company is run. And, frankly, never will. The most remunerative skill, at Goldman, is the ability to flatter someone into believing that they’re incredibly important and clever and sophisticated, even as you’re getting that person to do exactly what’s in your own best interest. No one rises to lead Goldman Sachs who doesn’t have that skill. And you can be sure that Lloyd Blankfein uses it on the board every time he meets with them.

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

We promise it’ll never happen again: Andy Borowitz writes a Lloyd Blankfein response.

At Goldman, we pride ourselves on our ability to scour the world’s universities and business schools for the finest sociopaths money will buy. Once in our internship program, these youths are subjected to rigorous evaluations to root out even the slightest evidence of a soul. But, as the case of Mr. Smith shows, even the most time-tested system for detecting shreds of humanity can blow a gasket now and then. For that, we can only offer you our deepest apology and the reassurance that one good apple won’t spoil the whole bunch.

Wayne Blackmon, a psychiatrist and lawyer who teaches at George Washington University Law School, said he commonly sees patients taking more than one antipsychotic, which raises the risk of side effects. Blackmon regards them as the “drugs du jour,” too often prescribed for “problems of living. Somehow doctors have gotten it into their heads that this is an acceptable use.” Physicians, he said, have a financial incentive to prescribe drugs, widely regarded as a much quicker fix than a time-intensive evaluation and nondrug treatments such as behavior therapy, which might not be covered by insurance.

There’s lots more here, including some choice remarks from UD‘s friend Allen Frances.

… the community weblog MetaFilter. Feel free to look around.

UD’s cousin-in-law, Todd,
just won Best Stage Combat
Choreography from
Washington Area Theatre
Community Honors.

It was for some sword slashing in
Romeo and Juliet. Here he is
in full regalia at the awards event.

…. up and running. Scroll down. Enroll!

An article by two Emory University law professors with the great title Law Deans in Jail argues that fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and false statement charges ought to be brought against some administrators and against US News. (Click on one-click download at the top of the page to read the entire article.)

Deans and professors say they are simply trying to game the U.S. News rankings when they deploy schemes to produce false, misleading, or partial data in an effort to improve their school’s position in the rankings. We hope that the analysis in the paper helps people in the legal education industry recognize that competing for higher rankings is serious business, as serious as a federal prison.

The authors are particularly scathing about UD‘s institution, George Washington University, which, when US News started counting part-time as well as full-time student scores, apparently dealt with its sudden drop in ranking by slashing the part-time program.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Few writers have the guts to express their hatred of particular artworks. This wasn’t always the case (read the reviews that came out when Joyce’s Ulysses appeared), but in our day, as Brian Phillips writes, taste – and the ability to defend it – seems to have died:

A kind of obscurity, something felt but not quite formulated, overwhelms aesthetic judgment. It becomes difficult to say what is good or bad, and worse, what one likes or dislikes.

SOS has already, on this blog (though she can’t find the post), drawn your attention to one strong survivor of the death of taste – the New York Times critic Jon Pareles, who, in his review of a Sarah Brightman concert back in 2008, showed you how it’s done: How to have aesthetic judgment, and how to write about a negative response to a particular work.

Now Brightman… well… you might say she’s already obviously big-time kitsch… It’s like going after Celine Dion… And I’m inclined to agree with you. But although the target was soft, Pareles penned an exemplar of the pan, so SOS wanted you to see it.

Remember? Here are snippets, with the mean parts helpfully bolded by SOS:

… Ms. Brightman’s pop is an enchanted castle, luxurious and remote, a refuge from turbulence and untidiness. Her spectacle is meticulous; even when confetti dropped, hardly a particle landed anywhere but onstage.

… Her finale, “Running,” merged two Gustav Holst melodies with thumping pop fit for Abba: “We are running to save the save the world,” she sang, promising hope.

… Ms. Brightman proffers sweetness and light, as well as diva graciousness. Between songs she spoke in a plummy accent about the “amazing, amazing journey” of her career. Although she started out as a dancer in musical theater, now her stage movements are limited to promenading, swirling the fabric of her dresses or slowly raising her arms to acknowledge applause.

… The night’s oddity was an ominous electronic remix of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” throbbing and tinkling as Ms. Brightman, dressed like Little Red Riding Hood, pedaled a (stationary) bicycle through darkness with holographic wolves looming nearby. She was rapping, “Even if you cry you won’t be heard,” and wailing, “It’s just in my mind!” It was a strange outburst, a breach amid all the plush, soothing kitsch.

Notice that killer pans aren’t this fake bitch made me puke. You want to keep hold of yourself, and of your prose — it’s much meaner that way. Colder. More analytical.

This morning, in the Times, there’s another winner. Read and learn.

Alastair Macaulay is reviewing Russia’s Eifman Ballet. First paragraph:

Bad [First word sums up review. No shying away from negativity here. No platitudes, softeners. B.A.D.]  choreography crops up all too often, and yet nobody else today, now that Maurice Béjart and Roland Petit are no longer with us, [No longer with us.  Note the amusing disrespect here, Macaulay’s importation of pious language even as he’s clearly putting these two down.  Fun.]  makes the kind of awful ballet that is Boris Eifman’s forte. Ken Russell’s more sensationalist movies seem like models of restraint beside Mr. Eifman’s lurid, overemphatic, far-from-coherent oeuvre. Mr. Eifman flaunts all the worst clichés of psycho-sexo-bio-dance-drama with casual pride while he rushes headlong to commit a whole new set of artistic felonies.  [Laugh Out Loud.  The farcical image of Eifman rushing about in search of more felonies – and by the way, note Macaulay’s sly, stylish, use of alliteration: far from/forte/flaunts/felonies – is amusing, belittling, over the top verbally in the same way Eifman is over the top balletically.]

… [Eifman] is an exponent of crudely sensationalist trends that were fashionable in Europe several decades ago (Béjart and Petit were both approved by the Soviet artistic authorities in Leningrad, where Mr. Eifman began work in the 1970s) and have long been notorious elsewhere. Ballets like his two-act “Rodin” …were much easier to find 30 years ago. I had hoped the species was extinct. [I had hoped... Snooty?  Yes! ]

“Rodin” tries to give us sex, art, mania and martyrdom. Tries to. Mr. Eifman lacks the skill to depict any of these things seriously. [Lacks the skill.  Simple declarative English.  Macaulay will now go on to explain why he lacks the skill.]

Perhaps the silliest scene is one in which [Camille] Claudel, alone in her studio with a rectangular block of stone, starts sculpturing. She attacks it with both hands like a tympanist at full climax, punctuating her efforts now and then by turning to us and planting her wrist on her brow to indicate creative exhaustion, and then she recycles this series of gestures so it becomes a dance phrase. The point of the sex is to show Rodin’s manipulation of Claudel; still, the way in which he handles her groin, though unpleasant, has far more originality and artistry than the way she tackles sculpture.  [Great simile, drawn from music; and climax has a nice punny feel to it.  His exact, amusing descriptions of the dancer’s movements make clear just how pretentious and obvious and heavy-breathing it all is.  The groin-handling bit is hilarious.  Note the calm use of the word “unpleasant,” when what the critic obviously means is sickening, unwatchable.]

As for mania, “Rodin” is one of those expressionist ballets (there are examples going back to the 1930s) in which the dancers aim long, wide-eyed stares out front at the audience. (Often the head hangs plaintively on one side, to indicate psychological distress.) Most gestures are reiterated forcibly. To show disturbance of a more advanced kind, you take one hand and clutch the opposite side of your body. (Try, for example, passing your left hand behind your back to grip your right elbow. Now hold this while staring at the audience as if in misery or anger and with your head tipping to one side.) No small gestures are permitted.  [His transformation of the deep deep profundity of the performance into a Jane Fonda Video Workout is complete, and completely wonderful.]

[It] is amazing to find how indifferent Mr. Eifman is to making his story clear. The historic record of the Rodin-Claudel relationship does not always coincide with the program synopsis, and neither version helps you to decipher the stage action.

… Some artists are bad because they so obviously fail to achieve what they intend. Others are bad because what they intend is rotten in the first place. [Note the careful return to the word bad which opened the piece.  He has called it bad, explained meticulously why it’s bad, and now reiterates that it’s bad.] Mr. Eifman fits right into both categories, to a spectacular degree. And his audience loves him all the way.

 

Sarah Brightman was a huge hit too.

… is the title of UD‘s first column at Inside Higher Ed about her experience putting together a lecture series on poetry for Udemy’s Faculty Project. MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course. She’s writing a series at IHE about this new form of teaching.

… takes a close look at an instance of superior writing. Superior not only in its displaying higher verbal skill than most other pieces of prose display, but also in its having the effect of elevating us, ethically and emotionally, as we read it.

Jennifer Homans, Tony Judt’s widow, wants to clarify, for readers of his last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, “the conditions under which it was written.” These were profoundly dark, and “the darkness shaped the book, in its form but also in its ideas.” For Judt, ideas were personal as well as public; abstract laws were about bettering the living conditions of not at all abstract people, and as he gradually, humiliatingly, miserably died of ALS, he became very intimately enraged at the way people less fortunate than he were suffering with it:

[M]any of these people were younger than Tony and destitute or medically uninsured, with narrow if not ruined life possibilities. They needed help — practical social and medical services. Humiliation was a terrible feeling, but, as he felt strongly, it was also — and should be treated as — an ugly social fact. “Night,” his essay describing his “imprisonment without parole,” was partly for these new friends, and so, in another key, was the end of Thinking the Twentieth Century, where Tony mounted as fierce — and felt — a case as ever he had for our need to “think socially”: to make human rather than monetary gain the goal of social policy. This was not the politics of disability or special interest; it was about collective responsibility and the duty of us all to each other.

So that’s the basic thing, the thing Homans wants to convey as people open Judt’s book – its particular intensity about injustice and the social good derives from his having felt, viscerally, a certain unjust endgame. “Tony’s own physical hardship, and his sense of the fragility of human dignity, if anything increased his worry for the world he was about to exit.”

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But there’s so much more in this essay than its basic point…. Phrases like the fragility of human dignity, for starters, fragility and dignity having a nice brittle uncertain assonance… When interrupted by the smooth word human the phrase generates an almost graphic sense of the shaky balance we try to maintain between the ideal of dignity and the reality of, well, shakiness.

Or take the way Homans conveys the always peculiarly intense nature of Judt’s intellectuality:

For Tony, ideas were a kind of emotion, something he felt and cared about in the way that most people do about feelings like sadness or love.

This is odd – hard to understand, perhaps. How can concepts be sad or happy or passionate? Maybe one can think about it in a couple of ways. Judt spent his life raising, rearing, if you’d like, ideas – he loved to gestate ideas, expand them, argue them; and in this thinking and molding and arguing he was cherishing, maintaining, defending, growing, his sense of the world, his sense of the best ways to think about the world. Like a lot of intellectuals, he seems never to have outgrown the excited erotic fun of the adolescent bull session. So ideas were emotions in this sense, that they were always an intense part – perhaps the most intense part – of his affective life.

And in another way Judt was simply a materialist thinker, in the left tradition …

And yet that is an abstraction, and it doesn’t take into account the emotionality involved here, which I think has to do with the pathos of his lifelong effort to feel the reality of human suffering — to feel the link between that suffering and certain settled political and social ways of doing things. Think of an excerpt like this one from Orwell’s essay, Down the Mine:

Here am I sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just ‘coal’– something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.

You sense in this paragraph the same emotionally intense “mental-effort” to connect political abstraction with human suffering. One reason Judt’s brief autobiography (I reviewed it here) is so beautiful is that it breathes life into the all but moribund ‘lost illusions’ plot of so many lives — so many politically engaged lives. Judt recalls, as he lies dying, his several youthful attempts toward ideologically charged collective life – kibbutz Zionism, for instance – and how they all failed, all brought him to where “Fierce unconditional loyalties – to a country, a God, an idea, or a man – have come to terrify me.”

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As he grew sicker, he became understandably more fearful. There was too much he couldn’t control in the outside world: everything from electrical outlets for the breathing machine (batteries fail) to his wheelchair (power-operated but he had no way to steer it) and — not least — the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand. He took grim refuge in his study, his sickroom, his closed, safe prison-cocoon that would house his deteriorating body and entrapped mind.

Grim refuge is something of a cliché, but never mind; the phrase that hit me here was “the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand.” For a couple of reasons. Since Homans has already made vividly clear how much lucidity, clarity, and understanding meant to Judt, we now feel with a special ache just how hideous this incomprehensible, incommunicable condition must have been for him.

And then too, the writing here is so personal, I’m receiving it so strongly, she’s been able to place me so powerfully in his sickroom (“thick air and layers of dust impossible to clean, smells that seemed almost visible, of antiseptic, flowers, morphine, and the burn and buzz of electricity from the amplifier that projected his ever-weakening voice; windows thrown open for air and light and hastily shut against the unnatural chill in his static and stationary bones”), that I absolutely see myself there understanding. And then I absolutely recognize that although I want to see that – want to idealize that – the reality is that like almost everyone else I would have brought into that study an unbearable goodwill… Which has me musing yet more deeply on my empathy generally, my… humanity — a very big abstraction, but this great writing has fitted it to one particular prison-cocoon.

Ultimately this is great writing because Homans regenerates in me a powerful and immediate sense of what an abstract phrase like the life of mind really means. The life of the mind.

For Tony the incentive behind the book — and it had to be a powerful one to overcome the discomfort and depression that were his constant companions — was primarily intellectual, a matter of clarification. [W]hen his dialogue with his co-author] worked, as it usually did, Tony was transformed. Sick Tony, frustrated and anguished Tony, unable to eat or scratch or breathe properly, his body aching from inactivity, was able, with Tim and through sheer mental and physical exertion, to find some relief and exhilaration in the life of the mind… To hell with the disease, with fate, with the body, with the future and the past. He would keep the conversation going and raise the stakes; his public would fight back — and when you fight, you feel alive. Engagé. He needed that to keep going. Which is why he kept going with Thinking the Twentieth Century; it was part of the fight, from his withering comments on intellectuals who supported the Iraq war right down to his ever-prescient defense of the role of the state in public life. He had a soldier’s discipline and even though he was miserable he fought on, saying what he had to say and refining and honing his every word. That was the only kind of public intellectual he knew how to be.