… is sort of like being Oscar Pistorius’s defense lawyer over and over again. For years, Blaguszewski’s role as spokesperson for the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been to, uh, yes, acknowledge that some of the lads at the school are a mite violent. They riot; they throw beer cans at the police; they assault and batter with dangerous weapons; they pick spectacular fights.

And they have for years; vicious drunken rioting is a long tradition at the school, and things are getting worse. The latest riot – today’s riot – has so far produced 46 arrests.

And poor Ed Blaguszewski keeps getting wheeled out to say the school is appalled at these bad apples but most of the students are great and hey I’ll bet a bunch of the troublemakers aren’t even really U Mass students …

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

UPDATE: There’s Got to Be a Morning After…

Arrests are now up to 73.

Collecting bottles and cans around the scene of the mayhem Saturday night, Amherst resident Raul Colon told the Gazette that the day’s events looked like “a revolution, like in the countries that have revolutions between the students and the government.”

And there’s this intriguing tidbit about what you pay for in Pennsylvania when your taxes pay for public universities:

Other colleges across the country have gone on high alert around St. Patrick’s Day to deal with alcohol-fueled students. At Penn State, the school paid licensed liquor establishments to stay closed this month during the unofficial drinking holiday known as State Patty’s Day for the second year in a row.

Your higher education taxes at work!

Well, at Penn State they’ve been paying for (cough) all manner of things for a couple of years now.

La Kid, Rufus Wainwright,
and La Kid’s friend Molly.

Kennedy Center Honors,
December 2013.

(Click on photo
for a bigger view.)

… everything’s topsy-turvy. The spokesperson for a Los Angeles school board candidate who boasts a degree from “America World University” says the city’s “children deserve better.” He doesn’t mean they deserve better than a bogus PhD holder in charge of their education. He means they deserve better than to live in a district where people have the gall to point out that someone who wants to be in charge of their education has a bogus PhD.

And not just a bogus PhD. On her cv, the candidate renders America World University American University. Classic diploma mill holder move. Mess with the name a little and everything comes out all right.

… by which university professors could exploit their students for personal gain.

All of the strategies she mentions are… strategies, whereas Georgia Tech’s Joachem Teizer runs rings around all of those strategists simply by using the most direct approach imaginable: He tells his students to hand over their money to him. Teizer basically holds up his students.

The one complexity in Teizer’s approach comes at the very beginning: He only targets students who don’t speak English very well.

Allegations against Teizer came from about 10 Asian graduate [engineering] students he supervised. [An investigator] learned the students are not fully fluent in English.

The first allegation, made in October 2013, notes that one student told school officials he paid more than $10,000 in cash to the professor in 2011.

Auditors estimate the total payments are double that sum.

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

In a detail that I know you will like as much I do, Jochem Teizer specializes in “resource detection.”

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

UPDATE: And Georgia Tech not long ago got rid of Bonnie and Clyde!

What is it about Georgia Tech?

… to the sexual harassment charges against him. (Background here.)

The general idea is that the student was the sexual aggressor throughout.

Some of it’s a bit shaky.

Ludlow further denied that he knew the student was underage, believing she was 22 at the time.

“Because of this, he believed her to be older than a traditional freshman would be,” the document states.

Admittedly this is a newspaper quoting from a document, but huh? Because he believed she was 22, he believed she was 22? On what was he basing that belief?

Ludlow says that when NU’s investigation began

he even offered to obtain and provide security video from his building’s elevator and receipts from the restaurant and bar showing how many drinks had been ordered.

I’m not sure what any toing and froing on camera would tell us, unless the camera captured the student hurling herself on Ludlow and Ludlow sternly escorting her to a cab. Similarly, the number of drinks wouldn’t tell us much, since Ludlow and the student are likely to have had drinks earlier in the evening as well.

UD has followed benighted Yeshiva University closely on this blog, since the school embodies many of the wrong things you can do with a university. Yeshiva’s downfall (literally – Moody’s just lowered its rating yet again, to an abysmal B3) has mainly to do with corrupt trustees – a motley, incestuous (in terms of investing the school’s money in one another’s funds) crew until recently dominated by none other than Bernard Madoff and his partner in you-know-what Ezra Merkin… But even with one of them in jail and the other busy fielding twelve trillion lawsuits against himself, there’s still Zigi Wilf (“The bad faith and evil motive were demonstrated in the testimony of Zygi Wilf himself,” [the judge ruling against Wilf in a recent fraud case commented.] and a whole bunch of his buddies… Yeshiva is the ultimate example of what UD characterizes as the provincial, good fellas university, brought low by long-established oblivious dumb insidery ways. At the very least Yeshiva needs to dump its overpaid and useless president. But there’s no talking to Yeshiva. It’s just going to tank.

Yeshiva University’s bonds are the most traded in the $3.7 trillion U.S. municipal market today after Moody’s Investors Service lowered the New York City school deeper into junk status.

At least $41 million of fixed-rate Yeshiva debt traded as of 11:30 a.m. in New York, the most of any issuer, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Tax-exempt bonds due in July 2034 traded at an average price of 93.4 cents on the dollar, up from 92.3 cents when they last traded Feb. 24. The exchange of at least $25 million for that maturity is unprecedented since the revenue-backed securities were issued in 2004.

… sues New York’s Attorney General for…

ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS!!!!

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

… OK then… ONE HUNDRED… BILLION... DOLLARS!!!!!!

UD‘s own University of Chicago seems to have decided that Fabrice Tourre — America’s current poster boy for defrauding investors and failing to get away with it — will not after all teach its undergraduates how money works. The U of C has clearly been hemming and hawing about this decision for some time, and UD can imagine how that went.

Well, he’s a bright articulate young man with many years of malfeasance in front of him… Yes, and he’s currently unemployed and needs a job and we can provide one… But on the other hand what if all his students cheat and then explain to the administration that he cheats so why can’t they… Plus can’t you already see the Sunday New York Times Magazine feature Dropping in On Fabulous Fabrice’s University of Chicago Seminar…

… who wrote How We Die, has died. The book is full of great prose passages, including this one at the beginning, which recounts his comic/horrific initiation into doctoring:

I had just begun my third year of medical school, and it was my unsettling lot to encounter death and my very first patient at the same hour.

Only in his twenties, he was “eager to the point of zealousness” for patient contact, and when the busy intern on duty asked Nuland “to do the admission workup on this new coronary that’s just going into 507,” he was thrilled.

After a small heart attack, the patient – a hard-charging construction executive in his fifties who loved “smoking, red meat, and great slabs of bacon [and] butter” – seemed to have stabilized.

McCarty greeted me with a thin, forced smile, but he couldn’t have found my presence reassuring. I have often wondered over the years what must have gone through the mind of that high-pressure boss of large, tough men when he saw my boyish (I was then twenty-two) face and heard me say that I had come to take his history and examine him. Whatever it was, he didn’t get much chance to mull it over. As I sat down at his bedside he suddenly threw his head back and bellowed out a wordless roar that seemed to rise up out of his throat from somewhere deep within his stricken heart. He hit his balled fists with startling force up against the front of his chest in a single synchronous thump, just as his face and neck, in the flash of an instant, turned swollen and purple. His eyes seemed to have pushed themselves forward in one bulging thrust, as though they were trying to leap out of his head. He took one immensely long, gurgling breath, and died.

Yes, this is conventional straightforward first-person past-tense narration. No emotional fireworks. But precisely because of the fireworks he’s describing, because of the astounding sudden break in the fabric of life he’s about to witness, the correct prose medium is indeed cool. The dry, wry, after-the-fact feel of the piece (the best line in the paragraph is Whatever it was, he didn’t get much chance to mull it over.), combined with unsparing clinical detail in his description (synchronous is good) gives us all at once the complex scenic elements we want: James McCarty’s instantaneous unfathomable transformation from a man to a bellowing dying beast; the rarin’ to go young doctor’s almost farcical, equally instantaneous, plunge into futility; the seasoned, self-amused, self-pitying narrator. The narrator who exhibits the peculiar brief sharp empathic curiosity about other human beings (what must have gone through the mind) doctors must so often feel…

At Case Western Reserve, a law school dean facing charges of harassment, and facing a retaliatory behavior lawsuit filed by one of his colleagues, has stepped down. He remains on the faculty.

At Northwestern (where UD was an undergraduate), Peter Ludlow, a high-profile philosophy professor who certainly seems to have harassed a student (a freshman!), and whose punishment for that harassment seems to many there insufficiently severe, cancelled a class today because a sit-in was planned in his classroom.

Ludlow is in even more extensive legal difficulty than the Case Western guy… Let’s see — he’s suing various media outlets for having used the word “rape” in their coverage of the case, when in fact no rape occurred. He might have to sue Rutgers University to get back the job they just offered him (this was to be his escape from NU) if they decide – now that the harassment mess is all over the papers – that they don’t want him after all. He’s being sued by the complaining student, and for all I know he may countersue her (he claims she was the sexual aggressor). Petitions and protests against his continued presence at NU are making it difficult – maybe impossible? – for him to hold class.

UD‘s finished reading about Oscar night. It’s too complex (Lyle and Pammy, the couple at the center of Don DeLillo’s novel Players, constantly worry that they’re “becoming too complex”).

UD has moved on to the other Oscar – Pistorius – and she’s not reading. She’s watching. The conventions of South African courtrooms are intriguing. The accents, the costumes, and the way everyone addresses the judge as “my lady” put things strangely in the way of a Gilbert and Sullivan performance. And there’s no question that plot-wise the story is a page-turner.

UD will be shocked if he’s found not guilty, so this isn’t really about who done it and why and how. It’s actually (I blush to admit) about watching to see if Pistorius’s lawyers are agile enough to maneuver around vast shuddering peaks of damning evidence.

UD is enjoying following the latest Salvation Stadium story. In an earlier post, UD quoted a spokesperson at the University of New Hampshire using impeccable logic in defense of millions the university’s president wants to spend on a stadium expansion at a time when fewer and fewer university students around the country are attending football games, and when, at UNH in particular, almost no one attends:

UNH said it attracts about 750 students to Cowell 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.

Now the president himself has emerged to explain to the local paper why this is a great idea, a win/win for UNH, and there’s yet more impeccable logic.

There’s his statement in my headline: Since we’re obviously going to make big bucks on this idea (thousands of students will flock to the games because…), don’t you worry your pretty little head about our repaying the whopping loan we’re going to take out.

And if that’s not enough to convince you – twenty years ago we built another athletic facility and some people were opposed but now everybody really likes it!

“But it now has become a beloved fixture not only on our campus but arguably for the whole state. And I think the same thing will happen when the stadium gets renovated.”

And if you’re still not convinced, remember how we all peed our pants ’cause we got to some semi-final?

“I think the kind of excitement that I felt around here this fall when (the Wildcats football team) was making that incredible run to the semi-finals was palpable throughout the entire state,” Huddleston said.

Once we spend $25 million on a bigger stadium, get ready to pee your pants every day!

… to Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the Academy Award nominated documentary, The Act of Killing. (You know how your friends say My kid makes films. and you nod vaguely and move on to something else? UD isn’t going to do that anymore.)

Les UDs will probably not watch the awards show tonight, even though they’d maybe get glimpses of their friends the Oppenheimers in the audience. Both UDs are too distracted to watch (UD‘s under a deadline: A press approached her about publishing something UD‘s got cooking – The Electronic Burqa: Women, the Internet, and the Public Realm – and she promised a sample chapter by tomorrow morning; Mr UD is riveted to the news out of Ukraine), but UD will follow events online.

The jolting – perhaps ultimately morally awakening – surreality of Josh’s film (in which mass murderers gleefully, meticulously, theatrically, re-enact their killings) was the perfect backdrop for UD‘s discussion, in her Modernism class last week, of Dada and surreality. The blithe amusing infantile conscienceless bestiality on view in Josh’s film has its aesthetic origins, for UD at least, in Alfred Jarry’s surrealistic farce Ubu Roi (1896).

“We are all Ubu,” writes Roger Shattuck, “still blissfully ignorant of our destructiveness and systematically practicing the soul-devouring ‘reversal’ of flushing our conscience down the john. Ubu, unruffled king of tyrants and cuckolds, is more terrifying than tragedy.”

The shock, hilarity, and unsettledness that violent surrealistic art can sometimes provoke does seem to have its political purposes (Josh’s film has apparently provoked a national conversation in Indonesia.)

Ubu Roi was the basis for Jan Lenica’s animated film Ubu et la grande gidouille (1976) and was later adapted into Jane Taylor’s “Ubu and the Truth Commission” (1998), a play critical of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission formed in response to the atrocities committed during Apartheid. Ubu Roi was also adapted for the film Ubu Król 2003 by Piotr Szulkin, highlighting the grotesque nature of political life in Poland immediately after the fall of communism.

Inspired by the black comedy of corruption within Ubu Roi, the Puerto Rican absurdist narrative “United States of Banana” by Giannina Braschi, dramatizes, with over-the-top grotesque flourishes … the fall of the American Empire and the liberation of Puerto Rico.

… on a story I’ve covered on this blog; and now, courtesy of Philip, a UD reader in Texas, I can do that.

I bitched back in 2012 that a high school in Texas had just built a $60 million dollar football stadium.

A high school! I was shocked. I was contemptuous of any state whose taxpayers would agree to this – I was incredulous that Texas in particular, with its pathetic secondary schools, would …

Blah blah blah. You know the drill. So what. No one cares. Let them bash their kids’ heads in. Forget about it.

But Philip wanted me to know that a mere two years after it was built, this stadium has been closed because of cracks in the concrete, and no one knows when it will reopen.

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

So now UD feels comfortable about the whole thing. Now we’re in her beloved Dada territory, where Tristan Tzara and his surrealist pals gave us exactly this sort of instruction in how to do Dada:

1. Build a sixty million dollar football stadium for a high school.

2. Immediately close it.

Absolute Dada!

Here’s how Ben Rohrbach describes it:

The voters in Katy, Texas, who recently rejected a $70 million high school football stadium proposal, must be breathing a sigh of relief after what has become one of the most expensive prep athletics facility in U.S. history built just 18 months ago by another football-crazed town four hours north on Route 45.

To put it mildly, the $60 million tax-funded Eagle Stadium that is home to the two-time defending Class 5A, Division I state champ Allen (Texas) High football program just became a disaster.

According to numerous reports out of Dallas, the state-of-the-art 18,000 seat facility has been closed to address “extensive cracking” in the concrete. The news comes less than two years after the stadium, which features a $1.3 million scoreboard and other extravagant features, opened to national fanfare.

But what about the voters in Deepshit Texas who are about to approve an $80 million high school football proposal? Stay tuned, y’all.

… I watched two barred owls fly from one bare tree in my backyard to another. They lit for awhile on each limb, scanning the ground, and then lifted their big wings and flew off to the trees across the railroad tracks. I can still hear their call.