… and stubborn as a damn mule about it. The country runs a disgraceful state university system, but won’t give equal rights to private universities because it knows a monopoly when it sees one.

Many of the private schools are better than the state schools.

This is not hard to accomplish.

“The way [the private schools] operate reveals to Greek parents the ills of universities,” [the head of a group of private colleges] said, referring to the crowded classes and lax monitoring of student attendance often complained about in the state sector.

… “No other public sector university environment in the E.U. is as self-centered as Greece’s,” said Jens Bastian, a senior fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

He said lack of competition had hindered innovation and led to many outstanding students and academics continuing their careers abroad.

“When did you last hear of a stand-out Greek research paper?” he said.

The EU has had it. They just sent the Greeks a letter saying they’re going to sic the European Court of Justice on them if they don’t join the rest of the world.

Kaplan [has a] sprawling network of for-profit “universities”…

Scathing Online Schoolmarm dislikes quotation marks, but these work.

[The Washington Post, whose parent company owns Kaplan, is now] in the business of profiting off of lower-income students who pay for diplomas, often obtained via online classes… [C]orruption and abuses … pervade the for-profit education industry in general and Kaplan in particular (saddling poor people with debt in exchange for nothing of real value).

Since Kaplan gets virtually all of its money from federal dollars, it’s got to suck up to the government. Greenwald points out that this need doesn’t do much for claims of journalistic independence:

How can a company which is almost wholly dependent upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. Government possibly be expected to serve as a journalistic “watchdog” over that same Government? The very idea is absurd.

We’ve seen this before, at Caltech.

Caltech, like this school, also featured a professor’s suicide.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

[T]he Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, one of the most academically-challenging and prestigious universities in South Korea, is in the media spotlight after the suicides of four students since January, with the fourth occurring last week. And over the weekend, a KAIST professor also killed himself.

All of the Caltech students were Asian Americans.

A commenter in the Cornell University newspaper welcomes another name to the pantheon.

… Pretty.

Every time they’re near me I just can’t get enough.

Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychoanalyst, died in Scotland (he’d been invited to lecture there) in 1937. His family traveled to Aberdeen for his funeral, but didn’t bring his ashes home.

The Honorary Consul of Austria for Scotland has, with great effort, tracked them down, and is having them brought back to Austria.

UD finds his explanation of Adler’s fate well worth pondering.

“In a sense he wasn’t lost because he was where he had always been, it’s just that no-one knew he was there.”

Qualifications:

1.) Must be a man.

2.) Must have played football for Auburn.

3.) Must be willing to take orders from Bobby Lowder.

… that there are universities where riots and assaults do not occur every weekend.

Here’s my favorite part:

In 1997 … Kaplan executives negotiated a pay package so large that it significantly reduced the bottom line in some years.

For instance, in 2002 the company recorded an expense of $34.5 million associated with the Kaplan compensation plan, an amount equal to the entire higher-education division’s profit that year. By 2010, Kaplan executives had cashed in $291 million of stock options.

… [One Kaplan executive who resigned] received his base salary, which was not disclosed, plus incentives and $46 million from the Kaplan stock option plan. There was also an agreement that if [he] didn’t go to work for a competitor, The Post Co. would pay him an additional $10 million in 2009 and $20 million in November 2011.

From the Taipei Times:

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei assured the public on Tuesday that all its exhibitions followed legal and safety regulations in the wake of a controversial show on Sunday in which sleeping pills were reportedly handed out.

Local artist Su Hui-yu (蘇匯宇) staged a sleepwalking exhibition entitled Stilnox Strolling, in which he appeared to be handing out Stilnox…

Archaeologists at the University of Wales follow the trail of Batty’s Travelling Menageries.

The New York Times reviews David Orr’s book about the experience of really seriously loving poetry. The reviewer notes the universal opiate pull of Philip Larkin’s poetry …

Regular UD readers know that UD was hooked on Larkin decades ago… She likes both of his modes — the timid depressive realist, harshly self-appraising and defensively cynical; and the supremely sensitive lyricist, singing an insinuating cosmos.

Everybody can recite lines from the first mode (They fuck you up, your mum and dad…), but UD prefers the second — which is, in fact, quite druggy, since it’s about evoking haunted, depleted, distorted forms of consciousness… Consciousness trying and trying and failing to assimilate a fugitive, enigmatic world.

Out of a sheaf of life-is-but-a-dream poems by Larkin, look at two: Absences, and Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel. Here’s the first:

Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

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

A person stands on a beach on a rainy day and ponders the immensity of nothingness that is the earth, a nothingness whose most striking feature is its indifference, in its massive heedless workings, to the absence of the speaker. There are no ships, no shallows – there are no objects at all in this view. And yet there is a world, tirelessly at play in a kind of autistic redundancy. All of the play of the world goes on without me — all of it, and all I’ve got to say for myself is my consciousness of it.

My consciousness of the earth seems in itself a massive thing, though.

After all, it’s the only thing, for me. I may be insignificant like hell, but my human mind is a power, and a power that matters, since the world can’t be said to exist self-consciously, as it were, without my thinking self at work on it, giving it words, meanings, understandings…

The speaker shifts his perspective from the sea to the sky, and here things are even emptier. At least the ocean has a shore, a sandy point of definition, a boundary that offers a shape of some sort; up there, it’s a yet more shoreless day (there’s an echo of even less sure day).

Just as the water is chaotically tumbled by enigmatic forces, so enigmatic (riddled) forces tumble the day into chaos and disintegration. We can trace a certain narrative – of disintegration – by watching clouds which, like evaporating ships, reveal galleries, and then ribbing, and then nothing at all.

The ribbing evokes the body of the speaker as well – his at best skeletal presence in a churning, self-consuming, reconstituting drama.

Now the second poem.

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

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

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

From her travels through Europe with her parents and siblings when she was eight, UD has retained an image eerily similar to this poem’s image. She recalls being in a large empty hotel in the evening. She recalls glancing into its empty dining room – many white clustered curtained tables, weak ceiling lights, a frightening and depressing atmosphere.

I suppose it’s the atmosphere, above all, that UD has retained with such emotional and even visceral clarity – the tense, hopeful, hopeless expectation of that room, its existence as an elaborated space meant to be filled. Forks meant to be lifted sat flat on linens. This place should have been filled with life, with people — not with the fraught waiting-for-something that now permeated it.

I suppose UD sensed the extraction of the human – such absences! – from that room… Maybe it was her first encounter with her irrelevance, even in some horrible sense her invisibility… The startle of nothing – I encountered this phrase in a poem ages ago. I’ve never been able to recall who wrote it. The phrase haunts me.

So in the Royal Station Hotel poem it’s not nature that prompts a sort of lucid dreaming about life as mere dream; it’s culture. The almost-extinguished traces of the human – ashes in the ashtrays – left in the abandoned hotel prompt the poet to feel our exile, our having-been, our occasional presence in the corridors of the world, but mainly our flickering transience in regard to it. We are elsewhere, exiled from fullness of being.

And always we are menaced by death (Waves fold behind villages…).

The poet confers a kind of life on the objects left in the dining room; they, not we, have solidity, agency, existence. The dining-room declares. The lights burn.

Several business schools have approached him, he adds, and asked him to work on ethics courses. He likes that idea; Harvard and Northwestern are in his sights.

… has written an attack, in the Princeton paper, on the domination of formal method over theory and normative work in that department. It has generated an immense number of comments, and has been featured on the Arts & Letters Daily site.

[W]hy choose regions, why travel to places, why learn the language? Politics, after all, fits into grand narratives that can be woven by cross national regressions sitting in [the department’s] basement. Why deal with the vagaries of power when generalizable truths are only a click away? … If asked to produce something “relevant,” political scientists will shrug that this is the job of public policy or journalism. Our job, they will condescendingly argue, is to get tenure at top universities. And when we do, we will hire students who will be shaped in our own image. This decadently self-indulgent world will also self-perpetuate.

Alaska and Hawaii – already among the nation’s friendliest diploma mill states – are set to become the go-to places for the for-profit schools to set up business too.

More and more states, appalled by the scummy, exploitative methods of the for-profit tax siphons, are passing restrictive laws against them (UD‘s proud to say that her home state of Maryland has been one of the first to do this). As the list grows to include almost every state (forget waiting for the federal government to do anything), watch for Hawaii and Alaska to be the two hold-outs, corruption in those states being beyond your ability to imagine it so don’t try.

And watch, therefore, as all of the for-profits rush to those states to set up business — in close proximity to their diploma mill cousins.