… lines of poetry.
Joe Biden is a fine vice-president; UD‘s glad to have him. She enjoyed listening to him just now, while she fixed evening tea (Creme de la Earl Grey from TeaLuxe. A generous pinch of it between my first two fingers and my thumb. Dropped into a scalded bright red teapot and flooded with just-boiling water.), addressing military people at an inaugural ball.
In honoring the families of the deployed, he quoted the line They also serve who only stand and wait. He attributed the line to Keats (even worse, he said his wife attributes the line to Keats), but it is from Milton.
318. On His Blindness
WHEN I consider how my light is spent
E’re half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.
… just outside my bedroom window! Perched on a honeysuckle limb, it’s got a sharp eye on our bird feeder, which overflows with nuthatches.
It looks like this.
UD‘s feeling a bit unsettled about having created the killing ground for the hawk by hanging a bird feeder…
… UD was entering a blue line train at Foggy Bottom, and a woman with lots of luggage sat down next to her. The woman apologized for taking up so much room with the luggage, and UD commiserated. “No fun dragging lots of stuff from one car to another.”
The woman explained that she commuted twice a week to a lectureship at GW University’s school of business. “I teach a class in business ethics.”
Readers of the UD category Beware the B-School Boys know that UD has what to say about that.
In her shy, tongue-tied way, UD took advantage of the three minutes they had before they went their separate ways at Metro Center to tell this woman all about her area of specialization.
The woman was a good sport, and she came right back with a defense of the enterprise, and UD came back from the defense, etc., etc.
I swear it was all very amiable, with the woman (they exchanged names on the platform, but if you think UD remembers swiftly exchanged names on noisy platforms, you don’t know UD) insisting that “in the long run” unethical behavior destroys shareholder value, and UD insisting that short-term profit seems to suit a lot of people perfectly well, thank you, and that for instance insider trading – both unethical and illegal – seems absolutely rampant — you might say even structural to the economy — and even after the feds finally drag in Steven Cohen it will continue to be a practice many business people defend and engage in…
UD‘s hastily attempted point (swaying train, unsteady luggage, crush of commuters) was that business schools are hopelessly up against a humongous cognitive dissonance between moral scrupulousness and the nature of competitive financial markets. She was not saying, she yet more hastily hastened, that free marketeering was the work of the devil. She merely pointed out that mild to extreme cheating was endemic to the project, and the business school that fails to take this into serious account runs the risk of having its ethics component be a laughingstock.
You see, the rhetoric of university business ethics courses always looks like this. This Globe and Mail article begins, as most on the subject do, with the rampant reality:
Over the past decade, a succession of high-profile corporate crimes has spurred business schools, globally, to infuse business ethics and leadership into course content.
Not just the last decade, of course; corporate misbehavior and crime has been massive for decades. And business schools have been offering tons of ethics courses through all of those decades. But, you know, check out this category, Beware the B-School Boys. Just read the latest entry in it, about the dean of Columbia University’s business school.
Anyway, the Globe and Mail story goes on to announce that this new guy is really going to turn things around at Ryerson University…
Yet the language he offers his interviewer is dead jargon city. Leadership is a process, not a position… Let’s talk codes of conduct…
Faithful UD readers know what she proposes. Toss the courses. Initiate a lecture series featuring business cheats who got caught. These guys are often articulate, charismatic… Incentivize them by taking a bit of time off of their sentences for each speech.
A professor of rhetoric gives Armstrong an F.
… a few hours ago.
… administrators are choosing to spend millions on sports programs with only the faintest hope that they’ll one day see a return on their investment other than the dubious intangible benefits of having a few second-rate sports squads around to keep up school spirit. Moreover, they’re spending more on those programs every year.”
Jordan Weissmann does the numbers.
… seconds ago, loping comfortably across UD‘s back field into the woods. But BIG! Not like your long low to the ground delicate fox – high, broad-shoulded…
Well-fed. And why shouldn’t it be. Longtime readers know UD‘s heavily-wooded Garrett Park land is a predator’s paradise. Yesterday, an eagle, scared by a train whistle, whooshed down from one of her trees.
Later this morning, UD and her sister go to Rehoboth Beach for a few days. Blogging continues as always.
… I guess. When we were at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland decades ago, UD‘s then-boyfriend, David Kosofsky (brother of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), took it into his head that we should pretend to be Israelis. Little UD must have passively gone along, but the evil genius was David; and UD remembers how horrified and trapped she felt when she realized that the inane scheme was working all too well — that people at the school indeed assumed he wasn’t lying (what kind of a freak would lie about such a thing?) and in a kindly way inquired about their backgrounds, asked if there were special foods they should prepare for them at dinner, wondered if they’d been traumatized by that country’s difficult history, etc., etc.
UD felt shame. She insisted that David figure out a way to stop the game.
To this day, UD can’t enjoy the whole Sacha Baron Cohen thing, where you laugh at the efforts of well-meaning people to be polite and understanding toward some fake identity you’ve made them believe in. The word for this is cruel, and it’s not exactly news that everyone has the capacity to be cruel, and that some people have a large capacity.
As to the Manti Te’o hoax at Notre Dame, UD can only say what she’s said for so long in this blog category (hoaxes are so common, they’ve got their own category on University Diaries): The world is full of vaguely sociopathic game-players, and, you know, let the buyer beware. Walk down your street of dreams – don’t let me stop you – but do yourself a favor and wonder occasionally if the uncannily exact match between certain inspirational stories on offer (see also Lance Armstrong) and your desires in regard to inspiration is just too close for credibility.
I’m a sap too – I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But as an inveterate hoax-watcher, I do begin to see patterns.
Here’s Tulane’s provost, commenting on Tulane’s business school having for years made up US News and World Report numbers.
In a statement, Tulane Provost Michael Bernstein, the university’s chief academic officer, said: “I sincerely regret that these events occurred and that one person could so negatively impact how others see us as a place of learning. I am, however, proud of the manner and rigor by which Dean Solomon, Tulane and Jones Day took to get to the bottom of this concern and create an even stronger framework for future reporting.”
The first sentence simply stitches cliches together – including the hideous “negatively impact.” “Negatively impact” is precisely the wordy vacuous pomposity Orwell went after so long ago in Politics and the English Language.
The second… Read it again.
I am, however, proud of the manner and rigor by which Dean Solomon, Tulane and Jones Day took to get to the bottom of this concern and create an even stronger framework for future reporting.
Basic grammar seems beyond this man, the highest-profile voice for a “place of learning.” This man has failed to write a simple, correct sentence. Tulane seems to have no one in its administration to scan official statements and edit them.
Nevada, our most mentally challenged state, is about to spend eight hundred million dollars on a 60,000-seat stadium for one of the losingest university sports teams around: University of Nevada Las Vegas football.
In an era where it’s been proven time and time again that building new sports and entertainment facilities doesn’t necessarily immediately create a return on investment — in fact, it often does the opposite — there is still no hesitation to go with the bigger is better model of property development.
It will feature a 100-yard long Adzillatron – the entire length of the field. It’s one thing to hurl shrieking sixty-yard long ads at captive audiences; at one hundred yards, there’s really no getting away from them.
The best commentary UD has so far seen on this comes from a reader of SB Nation:
It’s pitiful.
But we’re Vegas and we do stupid shit like this all the time.
And one fewer professor teaching grammar.
… avoid mixed metaphors.
Southern Cal has always struggled to gain a competitive foothold in the world of college basketball while playing second fiddle to its crosstown arch-rival UCLA, coming close on several occasions only to have it torn away by scandal or impatience.
They create confusion. And note the connection between mixed metaphors and cliches (playing second fiddle). They often appear together. Avoid cliches.
Things get worse in a later paragraph:
The institutional decline of Southern Cal, as business consultant and educator Jim Collins would put it, came like a staged disease; an initially unknown cancer that ate away silently at USC fed by its own gluttony for success. At first, it was almost impossible to detect but easily correctable. If the powers that be could have saw the writing on the wall and slowed the bleeding, the program might have been saved. Yet USC sunk deeper and deeper into the quicksand of its own arrogance, until it realized that all it had accomplished had only come about because of broken rules and scorched earth.
Let’s unpack.
The institutional decline of Southern Cal, as business consultant and educator Jim Collins would put it, [Would put what? What in the first words of this sentence does the “it” here refer to?] came like a staged disease; an initially unknown cancer that ate away silently at USC [The reader feels a sense of dread as this overused analogy gets going.] fed by its own gluttony for success. At first, it was almost impossible to detect but easily correctable. If the powers that be could have saw [Wow. Forbes, we have a problem.] the writing on the wall and slowed the bleeding, [Again, note the combination of cliche – writing on the wall, stop the bleeding – and mixed metaphor.] the program might have been saved. Yet USC sunk deeper and deeper into the quicksand of its own arrogance, [The final stage of this staged disease is quicksand.] until it realized that all it had accomplished had only come about because of broken rules and scorched earth. [Can’t resist throwing yet another image – scorched earth – onto his pile of words.]
… got filmed – it’s alleged – by the director of media for that university’s athletic department – coming out of showers after games.
[He] made the recordings by positioning the camera at waist level and placing a piece of tape over the red light to conceal that it was recording. [Authorities] “quickly discounted” the possibility of that having been done accidentally.
He accidentally placed a camera at waist level hundreds of times?
Yes, I think we can quickly discount that.
So here’s UD in today’s George
Washington University Hatchet,
upholding herself.
Read all about it.
(Click twice on photo
for larger image.)
(Front page. On which
I upstage Lloyd Elliott.)
