… and a few posts ago she began to look at Sylvia Plath’s Berck Plage, which places the poet on that broad strand beside “the sea… this great abeyance.”

Already, in this first line, you see and hear her genius, the way great and abeyance share the long A, and the way the word abeyance has bay in it… And as for its meaning: The poem will mourn and rage at the way we manage our hideous human fate by living always in abeyance, indeed by being drawn in particular to places like beaches because there our effort to put a damper on thoughts of our barely pulled together lives moving toward disintegration is eased. We go to the beach because at the tranquilizing seaside world we find a living objective correlative of our efforts to pacify ourselves, to infantilize ourselves out of fear of debility and death. It’s as if nature itself, beside the ocean, wants us to calm down and easefully lie to ourselves about our harsh fate.

Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?
I have two legs, and I move smilingly..

Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.
Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?

What Philip Larkin, in an uncharacteristically upbeat poem, calls the miniature gaiety of seasides, is in Plath a sinister “hiding,” a mere front. What’s being hidden behind the soft small setting of the shore? The wearing of sunglasses there only underlines the hidden sinister aspect of a location where we’re lulled into lying about the suffering misshapen existence in which we’re actually stuck.

Yet at Berck Plage all we have to do is look up at the vast hospital complex fronting the strand to know our precise status:

On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
Things, things—-

I am not a smile.

She’s looking not at hotels but at the hospitals of Berck, many of which specialize in traumatic physical injury. Jean-Dominique Bauby found himself in one of those buildings among “broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department.” So at Berck Plath found her perfect coincidence: the ultimate sunlit palliative for our condition, and an immediately adjacent anguish.

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To be continued.

Am about to go out to dinner with our crowd.

… is a time-honored effect of big-time sports recruiting on the university level, of course… You’re after the most aggressive person you can find, and you don’t much care whether he’s aggressive off the field as well as on…

I mean, University of Oregon, naturally… And naturally an occasional victim will write to the campus newspaper…

I am angry with the culture that appears to exist in our athletic department that prioritizes winning over safety of our students. I cannot fathom how our basketball coach recruited someone who was in the middle of a suspension for another sexual assault to come to Eugene.

But this woman – who was allegedly raped by Oregon basketball players – needs to understand that the occasionally raped or killed university student is pretty much the cost of doing business if you want to win games. With time, she can perhaps be made to see that she has, in her own way, made a huge contribution to her school’s winning efforts…

But it takes a football-crazed state like Texas to bring the recruiting of perilously violent people to high school.

The Dallas Independent School District is run by people who illegally (of course – the local rags mention this part as scandalous, but really…) recruit violent people to their secondary schools… And one of these illegally recruited guys killed another illegally recruited guy.

What’s especially impressive about this story is that it took the murder of a teenager by another teenager to spark the investigation that led to the oh so shocking revelation about not just the illegal recruiting but all sorts of other violations among top ISD people.

UD would call the whole thing depraved beyond belief if it weren’t Texas, where what you call it is business as usual. If a few kids have to lay down their lives for football, big deal.

[Jonathan] Turner led the Madison Trojans to the 2013 and 2014 Class 3A state championships and was selected to the all-tournament team this year. But while his classmates were celebrating the last day of the school year on Friday, he was in the Dallas County jail, where he’s being held in lieu of $250,000 bond. He’s accused of killing [Troy] Causey during a fight over a video game.

After the killing, Causey’s mother, Tammy Simpson, said that Burley improperly recruited her son while he was at a residential facility for young offenders on an assault charge. [An IDS administrator] arranged for Causey to attend [a local school] even though he lived in Richardson ISD, she said.

The investigation found that Causey and Turner were not eligible to play for those teams, sources said.

… (its real name is Personal Wellness, but the clever students call it Hellness), is the sort of school that just… you know… does things, and chumps – i.e. students – can take it or leave it. Students will learn personal hygiene in their personal hell class whether they like it or not; and students will keep getting hit with increased athletics fees whether they vote for them or not. YOU VILL PRACTICE PERSONAL WELLNESS. YOU VILL HAVE FUN. VEE HAFF WAYS OF MAKING YOU GO TO GAMES.

If you expect anyone in a position of authority at the university to answer your calls about this, let alone talk to you, forget it.

This last year, UNI President William Ruud approved an additional $25 to the Student Services Fee for athletics without the recommendation of the Student Service Fee Committee. The student body also recommended against the additional fee, according to a survey that University Relations has not released despite multiple requests… Why did Ruud approve the $25 even though students didn’t want it?

… What is the point of having a survey and a committee if the opinions of them are not acted upon and the final decision is not explained?

YOU VILL NOW SHUT UP PLEASE.

And no, it doesn’t matter whether students are connected to the internet during class or not. Research was done with

the laptops … not connected to the Internet. This means the results are not due to students spending time checking e-mail or surfing the Web. In most settings, such distractions will only impair performance even more. Indeed, prior research has found that laptop multitasking impairs learning and can even have negative effects on non-laptop users sitting nearby.

If you ask UD, who has been railing against classroom laptop use for years (see some of her posts here), this activity is on the face of it obviously any idiot can see plain as the nose on your face socially as well as intellectually destructive. A lot of professors – for murky reasons – have been sitting on their asses waiting for the research we all knew would come out to come out… But even with insane amounts of research confirming what anyone with common sense would have known a decade ago, plenty of professors will cleave to the laptop. Why?

(And by the way don’t even think about fully laptopped/online degree programs and their capacity to teach people anything. There’s a reason UD calls online programs cheesy.)

Well, the reasons aren’t pretty. Let’s see.

Do whatever you want! I’m afraid of you… I want a good course evaluation… The university is worried about attrition rates and has decided to give in to all of your demands… You pretend to be taking a class, and I’ll pretend to teach. This won’t put a strain on either of us… Lecturing is authoritarian. The last thing you want is some Hitlerian up here talking to you as if she has something to impart that you don’t already know or can’t find on your computer… You’re all too timid to look up from your screens and contribute to a discussion… Thank God for the laptop, which allows you to hide behind your screens and keep to yourself during class rather than be challenged in the unpleasant way of the seminar!…

And if you have a professor with a fully laptopped classroom who also depends almost exclusively on PowerPointed lectures where she (head down, monotonally) reads from each slide? Yikes.

… of a sham.

In the wake of the latest details about the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Scathing Online Schoolmarm can’t hold back her excitement. Rampant pointless pretentious bloviating – her favorite kind of writing!

The charges against [Coach Roy] Williams will be difficult to prove conclusively. Despite that, it’s now time for the NCAA to send an investigative team to UNC and find out what happened. Otherwise it’s willful ignorance, a sham of an enforcement process for a sham of a student-athlete dynamic. The entire system may be ridiculous. Some rules may be laughable. But it’s much more difficult to be dismissive or cynical about academic fraud — universities do exist to educate — and this is the sort of corruption that poisons the whole idea. If the NCAA won’t act on that, why bother acting on anything?

UD, as longtime readers know, lives in Munro Leaf’s house in Garrett Park, Maryland. She is honored to do so, and has two bull topiaries in the front yard, a little engraved sign near the front door that says FERDINAND HOUSE, and images of bulls inside her house.

A Jessye Norman fan, UD was delighted to read that she loves Ferdinand.

… Schuster.

Having been turned down by Cambridge University Press – her longtime publisher – for fear of libel actions against it by the corrupt Russian oligarchs her book features, Karen (who UD knew when she was at the University of Maryland) will now have to settle for being published by Simon and Schuster, whose publicity department sent UD, this morning, an announcement that the book will be published this September.

I’ll re-post Karen’s response at the time to Cambridge:

Last week the EU and the US Government issued a visa ban and asset freeze on the very inner core that is the subject of my book. Many works will now come out on the makeup of the list and why each individual was placed on it. The answers to these questions are in my book. Isn’t it a pity that the UK is a ‘no-fly’ zone for publishing the truth about this group? These Kremlin-connected oligarchs feel free to buy Belgravia, kill dissidents in Piccadilly with Polonium 210, fight each other in the High Court, and hide their children in British boarding schools. And as a result of their growing knowledge about and influence in the UK, even the most significant British institutions (and I think we can agree that CUP, with its royal charter, 500-year history and recent annual revenues in excess of $400m, is a veritable British institution) cower and engage in pre-emptive book-burnings as a result of fear of legal action…. [Perhaps some day we] can once again turn to CUP with the knowledge that it is indeed devoted to publishing “all manner of books” and not just those that won’t awaken the ire of corrupt Russian oligarchs out to make a further mockery of British institutions.

As The Economist wrote, “In the light of the news from Ukraine, and the resulting sanctions recently imposed on some of what America now officially calls Vladimir Putin’s ‘cronies,’ …[Dawisha’s book] could hardly be more timely and important.”

WAY big shocker. Maybe I’m reading this wrong. You’re telling me basketball players – not just football players – at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill took bullshit classes? I mean, football, okay. But basketball? What’s next? Badminton?

Who knows why Rashad McCants suddenly felt the need to confess. Maybe he’s spent the last nine years trying to figure out how you can make Dean’s List at Chapel Hill by not attending any classes.

But see this is the thing – in the annals of crime – this is the thing that often trips people up. If his professors had simply passed McCants through with the B grade that’s considered … plausible… for athletes taking bogus courses, all would probably have been fine. But they made a mistake. They got a little cocky. They got pleasantly shitfaced together one night – his professors, his tutors, his coaches – and began giggling about how I mean you know long as it’s all made up why don’t we make him a goddamn Dean’s List student? And ever since then it’s been rankling McCants… he feels a little put-upon… because it’s one thing to pass a guy through, and another to, uh, sport with him like that…

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You can just hear the conversation in the president’s office this morning at UNC:

Where’s that guy who ruined Mary Willingham’s life? Get him on the phone!

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UD thanks Ralph for sending her this article, which includes a soon-to-be-famous statement from McCants:

“I thought it was a part of the college experience, just like watching it on a movie from ‘He Got Game’ or ‘Blue Chips… [W]hen you get to college, you don’t go to class, you don’t do nothing, you just show up and play. That’s exactly how it was, you know, and I think that was the tradition of college basketball, or college, period, any sport. You’re not there to get an education, though they tell you that… You’re there to make revenue for the college. You’re there to put fans in the seats. You’re there to bring prestige to the university by winning games.”

And in a similar way, professors are all – er, let me get the language right –

“liberal[s] [who] sit in the rarified environs of academia in the ivory towers of a college campus with no accountability and no consequence … [and who] throw stones at those of us who are working every day to make a difference.”

It doesn’t matter to Eric Cantor that the guy he’s talking about is his tea party challenger, a man who has won endorsement from a raft of reactionaries. It doesn’t matter to Eric Cantor that David Brat works every day, at the marvelously titled BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism Program, to make a difference. It doesn’t matter to Eric Cantor that Brat’s very list of alma maters fairly reeks of God and country:

Hope College
Princeton Theological Seminary
American University

Cantor, famous for his you’re just jealous analysis of income inequality in America (scroll down), is letting his own propensity to envy slip through here, I’m afraid. Unpack his attack on useless liberal Brat and you discover a hard-bitten man of the people (given their respective positions on the ideological spectrum, I think you’d have to say a hard-bitten man of the left) resenting a “rarified” leisure class that leans back in its ivory loungers and pitches missiles at the working class (“those of us who are working every day”).

Could’ve been written by Marat.

That’s how far back you have to go to get a grip on Tuam, Ireland, in the mid-twentieth century.

During January, February, and part of March, the deep snows, and, after their melting, the almost impassable roads, prevented our stirring beyond the garden walls, except to go to church; but within these limits we had to pass an hour every day in the open air. Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from the severe cold: we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes and melted there: our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet: I remember well the distracting irritation I endured from this cause every evening, when my feet inflamed; and the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw, and stiff toes into my shoes in the morning. Then the scanty supply of food was distressing: with the keen appetites of growing children, we had scarcely sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid. From this deficiency of nourishment resulted an abuse, which pressed hardly on the younger pupils: whenever the famished great girls had an opportunity, they would coax or menace the little ones out of their portion. Many a time I have shared between two claimants the precious morsel of brown bread distributed at tea-time; and after relinquishing to a third half the contents of my mug of coffee, I have swallowed the remainder with an accompaniment of secret tears, forced from me by the exigency of hunger.

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“Madam, allow me an instant. You are aware that my plan in bringing up these girls is, not to accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence, but to render them hardy, patient, self-denying. Should any little accidental disappointment of the appetite occur, such as the spoiling of a meal, the under or the over dressing of a dish, the incident ought not to be neutralised by replacing with something more delicate the comfort lost, thus pampering the body and obviating the aim of this institution; it ought to be improved to the spiritual edification of the pupils, by encouraging them to evince fortitude under temporary privation. A brief address on those occasions would not be mistimed, wherein a judicious instructor would take the opportunity of referring to the sufferings of the primitive Christians; to the torments of martyrs; to the exhortations of our blessed Lord Himself, calling upon His disciples to take up their cross and follow Him; to His warnings that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; to His divine consolations, “If ye suffer hunger or thirst for My sake, happy are ye.” Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!”

… where, if reports are right, a student at the scene, in an act of great courage, disarmed the gunman.

One student is dead; three others are injured, and one of them is in critical condition.

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UD thanks Dirk.

You’re about to get a pious jock for your president. Your school is so horribly in debt that it’s laying off tons of people. Your job, as student, is to pay

$810 per student (roughly 10 percent of overall tuition), [which] goes from our tuition through the general fund to athletics.

This is from a 2012 article titled AS YSU CUTS ITS BUDGET, ATHLETICS GETS MORE.

The general fund of the university transferred nearly $8.8 million in 2012 to the athletics department, 5.5% more than in 2011, and in 2013 the general fund will transfer $9.06 million, an increase of 5.8% above 2012.

So YSU is set up nicely. A coach for a president. Students whose main function is to feed the sports program. Good set up for an athletics facility.

If on the other hand you’re talking university, nothing could be shabbier.

Serbia’s Interior Minister, a Megatrend grad, is accused of having plagiarized his doctorate.

So what. Academic plagiarism’s endemic in much of the world. Let’s not get too excited about brave little Serbia’s borrowings.

Let us instead extract what pleasure we can from their new megatrendy university that – taking a page from Benjamin Barber’s book – celebrates dictators.

A squalid stream of vice does nicely to describe the now-released details of Harvard’s Marc Hauser, one of a number of naughty psychologists whose misdeeds keep hitting the newspapers.

It’s rather heartbreaking to read this email exchange, revealing as it does what happens when a person of integrity blunders into the lab of a powerful, crooked scientist.

In 2007, a member of the laboratory wanted to recode an experiment involving rhesus monkey behavior, due to “inconsistencies” in the coding.

“I am getting a bit pissed here. There were no inconsistencies!” Hauser responded, explaining how an analysis was done.

Later that day, the person resigned from the lab. “It has been increasingly clear for a long time now that my interests have been diverging sharply from what the lab does, and it seems like an increasingly inappropriate and uncomfortable place for me,” the person wrote.

This of course is the way in which dirty labs get dirtier and dirtier. Legitimate people leave, and even schools as burnished as Harvard find themselves harboring high-profile fraud.

Honesty is such a lonely word!
Everyone is so untrue!

But not this guy, this Harvard finance professor who honestly complained to Amitai Etzioni that if Etzioni was going to be so … unseemly as to teach business ethics at Harvard, this guy would be outed as teaching his students to be greedy amoral sons of bitches…

Oh but no! Don’t put yourself down! Business schools aren’t teaching people to be amoral and greedy! In fact, business schools graduate people just like you and me. God knows where the excesses in the business world come from:

Thomas Donaldson …thinks that “the ‘greed’ explanation for Wall Street excesses” is “unhelpful.” He says, “I want to believe it too, but no serious study has shown that greed is higher on Wall Street than in other industries, or for that matter higher in any one industry than in another, or in any time period than in another. Greed no doubt varies by time and place, but it is notoriously hard to measure and is a persistent feature of the human condition.”

So complex, so persistent a feature of the human condition … forget it! If it’s ever occurred to anyone to wonder whether insisting on a sixty-seven million dollar bonus for a year spent undermining Americans’ faith in capital markets is greedy, forget it! Point One, every single one of us, under the same circumstances, would do it, because we’re all exactly like Mr Everyman Blankfein. Point Two, whether our industry is hedge fund or Red Cross, no serious study shows that any of our pursuits is less about the personal accumulation of huge amounts of money than any other.

In a way, it’s kind of wonderful. Under our differences, we’re all the same. We’re all greedy amoral sons of bitches.

So you can’t accuse b-schools of teaching greed, because it can’t be taught. Greed is Us. Indeed we should thank b-schools for saving civilization, because they’re teaching people to sublimate and channel their greed. Instead of killing their relatives for their life insurance money, Goldman Sachs employees have learned how to drive a “highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.”

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UD thanks Daniel.