Nadal has turned down the University of the Balearic Islands doctorate because of the murky controversy to which its angry president alludes.

What possible basis could there be for a faculty and student body hesitating to award an honorary doctorate to a 27 year old who “left conventional schooling after he turned pro at 15″, and who is famous for “his habit of biting the trophies” he wins?

Mark Cuban has thrown quite a missile into the stupidhappy world of American football. He predicts the greedy NFL, which seems to be moving toward 24/7 televised football games (and what a noble physical spectacle football is; one player, anticipating yet another weekday game being added, says that for him it would be like “getting in a car wreck Sunday then getting hit by a train Thursday.”), will implode in ten years via saturation bombing.

And what (ahem!) are the implications of this possibility for American universities – many of whom are already largely given over, financially and academically, to the game? I mean, in all the responses to Cuban’s argument, no one mentions that it’s not only national saturation via professional football. Most of the people staring at NFL games are also staring at university games… SO much football, my fellow Americans…

Before UD offers an analysis of the higher ed implications of Cuban’s thing, she reminds you that attendance at university games (as well as professional) is down across the country and will probably decline more over the next few years. Even the state god of Alabama has warned the little people they’d better start showing up at games (and staying at games – these university things are televised too, and it looks pathetic when after the first half the stands are empty) or else. Add to this picture continuing huge expenditures for bigger stadiums (Take the University of New Hampshire for a sample of the sort of thinking university administrators are doing on this issue. Its spokesperson explains that “it attracts about 750 students to [its current stadium], which seats about 6,500 but would grow to 10,000 under the new plan. UNH said a new stadium would attract more students to games and to the university as a whole.”), continued high-profile team criminality (Cuban talks about this as a factor in the decline of NFL too), continued reputational damage due to cheating scandals, etc.

Okay, so what should universities do at this point, if Cuban is in any way correct in his description of the future of the game?

If the NFL implodes, someone’s gonna have to be there to pick up the shards of what’s left. When American public opinion is so disgusted with the corruption and greed of professional football that people abandon it, there sits the sweet innocent university, ready to give our people the true unadulterated game again! Football played by uncompensated scholars who play for the love of the game… Who play whenever their academic schedules permit… It’s inspiring, it’s about clean-living, it’s what this country very badly needs. It’s a winner.

Taxpayers subsidize a school in Chapel Hill that embodies the athletic dreams of their great state, and it has always been the responsibility of its board of trustees (The trustee page includes nicknames for each of the trustees. Haywood Cochrane is “Haywood,” Peter Grauer is “Peter,” Kelly Hopkins is “Kelly.”) to retain faculty who understand the foundational values of the institution.

A one-paragraph final paper for a recent course at the mill – a paragraph plagiarized from the first page of a reader designed for third graders – has gone viral and why not. Why the hell not. Its grade was A minus.

People – especially the people footing the bill, which is to say the citizens of North Carolina – have every right to know why they paid for that minus, what the fuck that itty bitty tail is doing trailing that A like some pointless right offensive guard just standing there along the side of things taking up room on the field. Whenever you give a revenue athlete a grade, you’re sending one of two messages: We love you, and ever since we debased ourselves beyond belief to recruit you, our love has only grown; or We take it upon ourselves to judge you. To actually judge you and give you a minus.

Which one will it be, Tar Heels???

Vaunted:

often spoken of or described as very good or great : often praised

Uh, I guess. UD graduated from Northwestern University, but she married a Harvard graduate and … well… you know how that goes. She understands that NU’s intellectual currency and its university-market-hotness (always pretty high) has zoomed forward in the last few years, and she’s happy to hear that.

She herself, a ‘thesdan, knew little of NU’s prestige or whatever when she decided to go there. She went there because she thought she might want to be a journalist, and NU’s school of journalism was a good one. It took a semester for her to realize she didn’t want to be a journalist. After a quick chat about it with Erich Heller (“If you are unhappy doing that, why continue to do that?”), she transferred to the literature department, where she did indeed get a good education, and where she was very happy.

She went to one boring absurd football game which NU lost by (she seems to recall) sixty or so points, and gave no thought to the world of bigtime athletes and whether they were getting said vaunted education.

Years later, she got to thinking about universities as such, and this thing kept sticking in the university’s craw, as it were, this billion dollar revenue sports thing. As in the latest case — Julius Nyang’oro’s University of North Carolina — everyone knows you cannot under any circumstances reconcile the vast both-wings billion dollar media conspiracy university football has become with anything other than no college education (the player plays the game, takes no classes, goes pro after a year) or bogus college education (Nyang’oro plus the Academic Assistance Center whores keep the ball rolling).

Everyone’s excited about Northwestern’s players having made progress toward unionization, and of course it is a good thing. Few beyond the truly depraved find the NCAA millionaires and the hapless no ed/bogus ed players anything other than a repellent couple. And with a union the guys will get good medicare care after they bash their brains in. Plus they’re asking for shorter practice hours, the lazy bums.

It’s the practice hours that’s really going to piss off the NCAA, not the medical thing. The whole point is that this is professional football, not wussy college football. Take a look at the University of Oregon’s new practice center, its walls plastered with KILL THE ENEMY propaganda. You have to take the trouble to get to know this culture, I’m saying. There’s no reason it is located on university campuses. It is in fact wholly at odds with universities (drunken tribes cheering on violent bulk smashing up against violent bulk – not exactly the life of the mind, kiddies). Recall life at Nebraska and Oregon when Mr Football, Richie Incognito, studied at those schools. As long as sports factories who don’t give a flying fuck about educating the bulk keep the practice hours long, other schools aren’t going to shorten them.

What I’m trying to say is that, union or not, you can’t make it work. University football is always going to be the same. It’s always going to be disgusting and it’s always going to destroy universities. It makes too many icky people too rich.

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

This, by the way, on our rapidly onlining colleges and universities, is what’s left (what may soon be left) of face-to-face, in person experience on campus. Hulk v. Hulk.

… was the last headline on this blog under the subject heading University of South Florida. At pathetically sports-obsessed, disablingly restless, mentally challenged USF it’s all about hiring and firing coaches… Hire, fire, hire, fire, hire, fire. They fired their last football coach because the head of the board of trustees texted the president from the stadium as a losing game came to an end that he found what he was just forced to undergo “disgusting and unacceptable.”

You pick up on the rage, on the intensity of this, no? … You pick up on the need of this man to talk with medical professionals about why he finds the end of a football game so personally unmanageable that he has to, right away, right away, tell mommy about how it’s all so disgusting. Mommy has to know right now that I’m finding this disgusting! Where’s Mommy. GET MOMMY. It’s like Bloom in this scene from The Producers – take blanky away and he’ll have a meltdown.

This is USF – this is the head of their board of trustees. This is why USF is all about overpaid severances, and buyouts, of dumped coaches – the latest of which is their basketball coach:

[He] received a contract extension in July 2012 and was fired with four years remaining on his deal, leaving USF liable for a $1.5 million buyout payment.

Then there’s the tens of thousands of dollars USF just spent on a search firm to tell them that this guy’s replacement lied on his resume about having graduated from college.

I mean, fine. You’re a university. What’s money for?

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

UD thanks M, a reader.

Here are a few that have appeared in the last couple of weeks.

“April is the cruelest month,” the poet T.S. Eliot famously wrote. Could it be he suffered from allergies?

April is the cruelest month, as they say, and you can expect problems to ensue when Microsoft is expected to cease supporting the nearly 20-year-old operating system.

It was T.S. Eliot who said “April is the cruelest month.” But then, he probably never got a tax refund.

TS Eliot thought April the cruelest month, though it is possible the American-born poet had never heard of squeaky-bum time, which this season seems set to take place in March. At least that is true at the top of the Premier League, where Chelsea and Tottenham reach 30 games at the weekend.

Recent efforts to try online education have shown that [weaker] students are the ones who most need a teacher or professor in the classroom to help them, said [Janet] Napolitano…

The president of the University of California says the obvious: In almost any form, online ed ain’t much good. It’s especially pointless (and expensive) for the people the for-profit tax syphons go after most aggressively: Those most in need of a good in-person education. Our most vulnerable, most badly-served, remedial students.

But Napolitano goes beyond this.

The courses are also proving difficult for those trying to meet lower-division college requirements. Online courses may indeed prove to be useful, she said, but more as a way to augment upper-division work for students who are already deeply engaged in their subject matter.

And franchement, if you’re deeply engaged in a subject, you’ll just feel insulted by the online treatment. By definition there’s no intensity, so real interaction, no subtlety, available in this format. That’s why in many courses almost everyone drops out:

[A] study released late last year by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education showed that only about 4 percent of those who register for an online course at Penn complete it, even though the courses are free.

George Washington University’s just-hired Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Public Health is Lawrence “Bopper” Deyton which made UD laugh… I mean, quote Bopper unquote? No mention of Bopper’s childish moniker appears in this totally straight account (Harvard education, community outreach, etc.) of his executive entry into GW… But UD wonders… Would… I dunno… would, say, Sheila “Boom-Boom” Fitzgerald retain, in her public documents, her nickname?

Extensive research reveals the unlikelihood of this:

… Frank Nuessel, a professor of language at the University of Louisville and editor of NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics [says,] “Interestingly, female CEOs appear to prefer to use their full names and not nicknames, which could signify that they want to be taken more seriously and want co-workers to think of them in a more professional light.”

Of the women leading the 1000 biggest companies in America, Patricia “Pat” Woertz of Archer Daniels Midland is one of just a few to use a nickname…

“Pat.” Far out.

What’s the good of majoring in English? Reading Austen will put you on a fast track to understanding the world to come, the world, according to the hottest book out there at the moment, that we are already beginning to see emerge. The concentration of unimaginable wealth in private hands, coupled with remarkable and increasing rates of income inequality, is producing Austenland.

And – to stay with the university for a moment, since it is after all the subject of this blog – we can, relatedly, see emerging … call it The Benefactor Quandary… or call it less formally the Madoff Mess… the Milken Mess… the… Firtash Mess?

Dmitry Firtash is a tragic figure, a harmless well-meaning oligarch caught up in the cruel tides of history. After quietly amassing billions and billions of dollars for himself and his loved ones through massive corruption, he made the mistake of simply being Ukrainian… And here comes the US government after the dude because he’s a friend of the Russkies and we’re pissed with the Russkies! So now he’s been arrested and he’s gonna be extradited to New York or Washington or someplace near UD‘s house so we can make mock of him and take all his money and throw him in jail.

But meanwhile, what interests us here at University Diaries, is this:

A Ukrainian energy tycoon who has made considerable donations to the University of Cambridge has been arrested, with campaigners saying the university must review its ethical investment and donations policy as a result.

Yes, Cambridge fell for Firtash’s oily (if you will) charm and now it’s official knowledge that he’s a crook whereas when they took his many millions in donations it was only privately bruited about that he was a crook.

What to do?

The guy’s been washing his rep via big bucks to Cambridge exactly the way so many somewhat crooked one percenters do at various academic institutions – remember, Steven A. Cohen is still a trustee in good standing of Brown University – and now Cambridge looks like an enabler. This for that – twenty million dollars in exchange for we shed our sweetness and light upon you…

Expect to see more of this as our wealthy rentiers go restlessly in search of legitimacy.

Andrei Zubov gets fired (no tenure in New Imperial Russia?) for criticizing the motherland’s action in Crimea.

Meanwhile Mr UD (a Pole) is excited about Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s letter to Poland inviting it to join the fun and take whatever part of Ukraine it wants. Mr UD has been rubbing his hands together gleefully. He has taken out maps and put big red lines down the middle of Ukraine. “Here!” he says, and then redraws the line. “No. Here!”

… Georgia-style.

… D. Ripper. Though I doubt Chizhov shares his feelings about the communist conspiracy.

At a riveting session Friday before the annual Brussels Forum, the Russian ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, appalled the audience of international officials and national security specialists by brazenly spouting the Moscow line: Russia was compelled to annex Crimea because Ukraine was in danger of becoming a chaotic “failed state” — as though the audience was unaware how much Russia’s own manipulations helped bring about this very chaos.

… [T]he former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, [responded:] “I have no respect for Ambassador Chizhov. He reminds me of a character from ‘Dr. Strangelove.’”

That’s from the New York Times obituary for Maxine Kumin, who died last month. And here you’ve got – at least from where I’m sitting – your basic glorious early spring evening, the sun casting a green glance back at the deer paths in the garden, and the look couldn’t be less elegaic. But give it to a poet – give an evening like this to a great poet – and there’s likely to be elegy at the core.

Babette Deutsch said Delmore Schwartz was “haunted by the noise time makes,” and time makes quite a rumpus in transitional seasons.

Perhaps no poet of his period so skillfully depicted the threat of change in humankind and what he termed “the wound of consciousness.”

So here, in “Calmly We Walk Through this April’s Day,” he strides through the present – a spring present – tormented by the future. Outwardly calm with his lover along the streets of New York City —

Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away…

— he could almost be Frank O’Hara, except for that “fugitive,” a word, early in the poem, suggesting a world of time “running away” from him even as he tries to capture it. The year, he reminds himself, is 1937, and this is a poem of numbers – how long people lived before they died; how long it’s been since people died. So there’s a fine bumping springlike world out there and he’s walking in it, but his mind, his wounded consciousness, is altogether elsewhere, in being-toward-death. His parentheses alone at first carry the morbidity, the thoughts that torment him. Gradually, though, these thoughts escape the brackets and spill out onto the April street:

(This is the school in which we learn …)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn …)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(… that time is the fire in which they burn.)

My early naive schooling had me a theodicist, finding a transcendence that eluded the blaze in which time burns the self. Now when I look at children I see them as heedlessly brief, entirely engrossed in play even as time’s flame heightens around them.

His final stanza:

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

He can’t believe it; he can’t understand it… It’s so bizarre that he has to perish, and that every voluptuous New York City April moment is really a tutorial in believing it. The more intensely life flashes, the more intensely that flash shows itself to be the fire in which we burn. So he ends with a faint prayer that as long as he subsists he may do so with a restorative memory at least able to retain the reality of his having been, his having had a past.

So much the same sort of language appears in poems that describe, like Schwartz’s, moments of intense beauty, of emotional intensity, shared between two people. In Louis MacNeice’s The Sunlight on the Garden, things don’t flame; they freeze. The sunlight fails.

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Same elegy at the heart of intensest being; same intrusion of despair into joy. MacNeice is more stoical, more tight-lipped, than Schwartz, but it’s the same being-toward-death he’s sharing with his companion. We cannot stop the mortal process.

The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

Ted Hughes’s September teases us at the beginning with a passionate love that maybe does suspend time and the awful reckoning with fire or ice.

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.

It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.

In our own heedless bliss, the dark comes on “slowly,” and indeed “there is no telling where time is.” Infinity lies within us: behind the eye a star / under the silk of the wrist a sea. Time is nowhere. Great!

But now the long embrace is over; they stand up.

We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads

Like an unfortunate King’s and his Queen’s
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.

Pretty ugly, that. Not just some abstract flame or frost, but a double beheading, a vicious wiping out of what’s going on in their excited skulls right now. They are making memories, and they know it; each minute kissing and embracing and watching the slow dark is a minute retained in memory… This/that marvelous evening… Remember that marvelous evening? It’s the same memory for which Schwartz prays at the end of his poem. It’s all we have.

Nature of course couldn’t care less – the trees will quietly, efficiently, as they have forever, cast off these two.

Regular televised “exposés” of the already fully exposed academic reality of big-time sports schools (the latest such broadcast is available for viewing on Tuesday, when HBO will tell you what you already know about what universities do to keep many of their revenue-sports players academically eligible) will, UD has long predicted on this blog, eventually disappear. Eventually most sports factories will make their head football coaches president of the university (Jim Tressel’s a candidate at Akron, from which he’ll make a move back to Ohio State; I think Nick Saban or one of his assistant coaches will be Alabama’s next president, etc.). The idea is a no-brainer: When you’ve got even a vaguely respectable academic at the helm, she’ll have enormous difficulty dealing with the SAT cheating, the fake classes, the hilariously named academic advising centers (“[A]cademic advising centers “operate as ‘schools within schools’ and are responsible for enabling student-athletes with elementary educations to graduate from big-time universities.”), and all the rest. But once it’s clear that your university really is just a sports factory, there’s no scandal to expose. The curriculum is all sports-specific; the trustees and administration are all former college athletes; there’s not a scintilla of pretense to intellectual activity, let alone intellectual respectability. It’s the wave of the future. It’s the only way to go.

Illinois State University President Timothy Flanagan resigned Saturday after just seven months in the job.

Authorities are investigating a claim that Flanagan hit a former campus employee during an argument…

The complaint against Flanagan accuses him of assaulting a former employee while complaining about the care of the lawn at the university-owned president’s residence.

Then-superintendent of grounds R. Patrick Murphy claimed that Flanagan’s saliva hit him in the face, that Flanagan’s arm hit his torso and that Flanagan yelled at him on Dec. 5 outside the home, according to a police report.

Murphy told police he was supervising a crew working on the lawn when Flanagan ran out of the house and complained about the work.