… that they really cannot think of anything besides athletics for their universities to do.

I know you have trouble believing this; you will point to the existence of professors and administrators on all public university campuses. You will point to the baseline definitional truth – unmissable even to the most doltish – of universities as places of learning.

But the mere existence of professors and administrators at any campus of, say, the University of Hawaii system, proves nothing. You need to look at the fact that schools like UH do virtually nothing, decade after decade, but throw money down a sports hole. It is clear that no one in the state can think of anything else a university might be for.

Except for kickbacks from contractors.

Those are the two things:

1. Staff makes money via bribes.

2. Football games are staged.

Here’s the latest:

[The chancellor] cleared the department of a nearly $15 million deficit last summer and gave the department three years to balance its $30 million budget or face cutting sports offerings.

Dat’s right. He just up and used funds, available to educate people, to erase the athletics department’s fifteen million dollar deficit.

Since then, they’ve lost all their games, no one attends the games, they already have another two million dollar deficit, and UH is going to raise the student athletics fee.

One observer, complaining about the ten million dollars in athletics bailout money from Hawaii taxpayers the university looks likely to get, notes that even in this grim situation there is something for which to be thankful:

[N]o one was present when the ceiling in a classroom on the third floor of Moore Hall collapsed inward due to a leaking pipe.

UD presumes no one was present because, well, physical campuswise… no one’s ever present… There’s no there there as ol’ Gertie put it…

Again, UD would suggest that states like Hawaii actually cannot conceptualize university. And there’s no cure for that.

I’ve tried all number of ways to [educate my writing students] outside of class meetings – marking papers extensively, using Track Changes, real-time online collaboration– and it never, ever works. Most them don’t look, and most of them don’t care, unless there’s the basic human accountability of sitting down with them at a table and going through the changes together. That’s how I drag them to the skills they want.

… [With the move to online education,] not only will we be erasing the very notion of individual instructor attention, we’ll be particularly targeting the most vulnerable, most difficult to educate students, the ones who now either never make it to college or drop out at huge rates. This is the perfect expression of an educational discourse that has no connection to the reality of what most schooling is like for most students.

… I’m dedicated to the task of getting as many marginal students in and through as possible, and I think that’s an absolute moral need for our colleges and our society. But … online models are precisely the opposite of what’s likely to work.

… We can build a vast edifice of online higher education where, as happens with for-profit online schools now, we all agree to juke the stats, grading and graduating students who lack even basic skills, and degrading the very notion of higher education. That’s an option.

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UD would add two things to this.

1. It’s not merely the “basic human accountability” that only takes place face to face; it’s students witnessing and talking to, week after week, a human being they respect being serious about something. Wanting in some sense to be like your professor is not a contemptible desire; on the contrary, many people who become serious, reflective citizens probably got there in part through having been inspired by engagement with a serious, reflective teacher. Remember what Tony Judt wrote about one of his professors, who

broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history. He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect. That is teaching.

Which leads me to my second thing:

2. What good professors are ultimately serious about is their students. That is, this human mutual accountability or whatever you want to call it goes both ways. In the classroom, you are looking at me, and I am looking at you. I am looking at you as a young, smart, promising human being wanting to clarify aspects of human life. This sight moves me; and I want not only to talk to you about human complexities but to exhibit to you what one older person (me) who has had a reasonably disciplined exposure to some of those complexities looks like, sounds like, acts like. I want to do exactly what Judt’s professor did: Listen with great care to what you say and how you say it; and then analyze what you have said in a way that maybe moves you forward in your relationship to it. Maybe makes you less emotional, more analytically neutral; maybe makes you aware that other people before you have formulated things in a way similar to yours, but somewhat more nuanced, etc., etc. That is teaching.

On the up side, the person who died was only a woman.

… the University of North Carolina continues – it should be remembered – to feature people like Charles van der Horst on its faculty.

van der Horst was recently arrested.

… He was arrested along with other Moral Monday protesters on May 6 in Raleigh for trespassing, violating building regulations and illegal gathering in the Capitol Building. The day before, he ran a relay race in California and grabbed a red eye flight back to North Carolina.

… Police slipped plastic restraints around van der Horst’s wrists and led the protesters to a bus that took them to Wake County jail where van der Horst was booked and fingerprinted.

“The attached arrest documents shows that I was arrested for my ‘singing,’ something I am sure my family would say was completely justified,” he wrote in his journal…

He marched with his father during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, worked in the Vietnam anti-war movement in high school and appealed to the N.C. General Assembly in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic… Van der Horst’s father was a member of the NAACP in New York, and his mother was a Holocaust survivor.

… Van der Horst said the state’s decision not to expand Medicaid pushed him to join the Moral Monday protests. He believed that decision was based on politics, not on what would be best for the state.

… He also protests voter ID laws, anti-abortion legislation and low teacher pay.

“For God’s sake, I think South Carolina pays its teachers more,” he said.

… yet another of his employees (the career fraudster Michael Martoma) has been found guilty of insider trading? That’s the question on everyone’s mind.

“From a public perception, how do you go after all of the subordinates, but stop before getting to the guy on top,” asks trial lawyer Thomas Rohback, a partner and chairman of the litigation group at Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider. “If somebody is a billionaire, and you’re sending other people that have worked for him to prison, isn’t there something lacking if you don’t bring the possibility of a jail sentence against that person,” continues Rohback.

… Under Dodd-Frank, the statue of limitations for financial crimes was extended to six years, from five previously, meaning Bharara and his team still have time to bring criminal charges against Cohen.

Board of trustees meetings at Brown must be awfully… awkward lately…

“So Steve any inside scoops on potential donors for the new arts center? …Ahem! … I mean… haha! … Any ideas…?”

Brown just can’t let him go yet. His fellow trustees sit across from him at that big ol’ conference table and whenever they look at him, whenever he opens his mouth, they’re all thinking the same thing:

NINE FUCKING BILLION DOLLAR PERSONAL FORTUNE! F-U-U-U-CK…

It’s just too much. They’ll hold onto him because they figure he will never go to jail because they figure there MUST be a law in the United States that says something like once you’re worth seven or more billion dollars you cannot be jailed because your legal status is no longer person. Something like that. You’re like a Gross National Product. Your legal status has actually changed and you’re actually too rich to go to prison. It’s like at some point you’re too rich to die. What’s that line from White Noise?… Babette says, of the very rich: “I have trouble imagining death at that income level.” It’s like – if Madoff hadn’t had to give it all back, he’d have been too rich to go to prison… Yeah, good ol’ Steve! He won’t go to jail. And if we hold onto him some day he’ll give Brown say one billion say…

I know one is supposed to be anguished and perplexed; but when you’re a veteran hoax-lover like UD, there’s such a merry, almost over-full, feast in the Samuragochi saga. Pardon me for laughing.

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

Okay, some good article titles are beginning to appear… Ode To Fraud is good… I have one (she said, blushing becomingly):

Die Fraud Mit Schatten

Ja, ja, it’s extremely convoluted, and you have to be extremely cultured to get it…

Okay, here.

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

An earlier musical hoax.

UD laughed so much reading that, her stress incontinence problem almost acted up.

… when you’ve got Wongene Daniel Kim?

A spokesman for La Trobe University said the research was of community interest as many Australians used complementary medicines and that the research would allow consumers to make better decisions.

Yes, and because many Australians check their star charts every day in the newspaper, La Trobe will be taking fifteen million dollars from the Association of Australian Astrologers to research their claims. This will allow consumers to make better decisions.

And because many Australians believe crystals cure cancer, La Trobe University will be taking fifteen million dollars from the Australian Association of Crystal Manufacturers to research their claims. This will allow consumers to make better decisions.

La Trobe University encourages other businesses to approach it with research funding ideas.

Bravo, students at Pristina U. The place is run by unspeakable hacks, and you’re doing something about it.

All UD can do from here is pay attention to you, write about you, and of course write a limerick.

There’s the sort of research that is splashy.
There’s the sort of research that is trashy.
But if you want to go
To the lowest of low
Then you need to read Ibrahim Gashi.

For details on where the hack got his stuff published, go here.

Only 33, and already so adept at fudging conflict of interest for his own gain!

Well, you’d expect such a wunderkind on the faculty of Harvard Business School.

And it just goes to show the strides universities like Harvard – which has had you don’t wanna know from conflict of interest scandals! – have made in dealing with the problem. Really getting the message down to younger faculty.

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OTOH: This guy’s mom must be so proud! Look what sonny boy did! Still a pisher and he wrote something and the stock in that company just fell like a rock!

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All UD can say is: When your models at Harvard are COI giants like Andrei Shleifer and Joseph Biederman (search their names if you dare), the sky’s the limit.

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Oh, one more thing UD can say – and she always says it: Beware Beware Beware the B-School Boys.

Just thinking out loud here about the theory that certain actors have no self – which makes them brilliant at playing other people, but leaves them dangerously empty at the end, as it were, of the day. These people – parasitically, I guess – use their successive roles to assume, to inhabit, an identity, but eventually their sense of emptiness draws them toward heroin as another (more reliable) filler…

See, first, druggy Peter Sellers:

[Jonathan] Miller — who had been a member of the “Beyond the Fringe” team, another 60s quartet influenced by Sellers and the Goons — called the actor “a receptacle rather than a person. And whatever parts he played completely filled the receptacle, and then they were drained out. And the receptacle was left empty and featureless. Like a lot of people who can … change their characters, he could do so because he hadn’t any character himself.” (Kubrick famously said, “There is no such person as Peter Sellers.”) [Peter] Hall adds this cogent caveat: “It’s not enough in this business to have talent. You have to have the talent to handle the talent, and that, I think, Peter did not have.”

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Then see these thoughts on Philip Seymour Hoffman in the New Yorker:

[Sometimes] the price of remarkable creative vitality is a wasting away of mortality. Or, to put it another way: without the need to flee from pain by transfiguring it, you would not have the energy to endure the suffering, the solitude, and the uncertainty that are part and parcel of artistic expression.

This comes dangerously close, I know, to the banal romantic notion that all genuine artists must suffer, which is accurate only in the sense that people are by definition gregarious and that making art, even if you are an actor plunging, in public, down into your depths, is solitary, even asocial, in its untrammelled freedom. Still, the link between suffering and creativity seems less romantic than pragmatic. There is something to Aristophanes’ satiric parable in which humans were once whole and were then split down the middle, and thus spent their lives seeking their other half. We would not love or desire if we had everything we needed. Some artists, like Hoffman, would not escape into their creations if art did not mend what life had painfully shattered.

It’s a different model, I realize. Sellers, we hear from his friends (and he said it himself) had no self at all; Hoffman, by this account, had half of one.

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

UPDATE: Russell Brand:

In spite of his life seeming superficially great, in spite of all the praise and accolades, in spite of all the loving friends and family, there is a predominant voice in the mind of an addict that supersedes all reason and that voice wants you dead. This voice is the unrelenting echo of an unfulfillable void.

Without access to clean needles, users are suspectible to deadly infectious diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis B and C.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm shares a rather charming writing error.

… notorious GlaxoSmithKline enabler Professor Martin Keller, now tries its hand at legitimate research in the form of an article that actually cautions against polypharmacy.

[B]ecause no clinical trial of bipolar medications has ever tested more than two drugs in combination, prescribing three or four exceeds practices supported by the field.

“By definition that’s not evidence-based treatment,” [the article’s lead author] said.

No prior studies had looked at the total medication burden, rather than just that of pyschotropics. It’s important to do so, Weinstock said, because cardiometabolic diseases, in particular, are often concurrent with bipolar disorder. Among the 230 patients in the study, for example, about half had such medical problems.

… “[The] increased reliance on polypharmacy does not appear to be contributing to decreased rates of illness chronicity or functional impairment in [bipolar disorder].”

I guess Brown faculty can do market-depressant research now that Keller (he was a honcho) has retired.

… as long as we’re all thinking about it in the wake of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. This is from a review of a biography about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker:

In this book, heroin, as it takes over one musician after another, one scene, one city, one country (Gavin quotes the pianist René Urtreger estimating “that by the midfifties, 95 percent of the modern jazz players in France — himself included — were hooked”), is more than a plague, more than an endless horror movie, the reels running over and over, out of order, back to front (“It was like the Night of the Living Dead,” one fan tells Gavin of a Baker show in Paris in 1955. “Dark suits, gray faced, stoned out of their minds. Everything seemed strange to me, unhealthy. They were playing the music of the dead”). By the end — “Baker filled the syringe, then held it up. ‘Bob, you could kill a bunch of cows with this,’ he said. He plunged the needle into his scrotum.” – ”The man was a walking corpse,” the Rotterdam jazz hanger-on Bob Holland told Gavin. “He was living only for the stuff. Music was the last resort to get it” — it’s as if heroin itself has agency, and seeks out bodies to inhabit, colonize, and use up, not a substance but a parasitic form of life whose mission is to destroy its host, knowing that it can always leap to another. But the essential humanity of the host — his or her actual reality as someone who planted a foot on the planet before he or she left it, to be forgotten along with almost everyone else — is, in these pages, never reduced, whether it is that of Baker, or any of the musicians, friends, wives, or lovers trailing in his wake, those he knew and those he didn’t (from one dealer’s client list: “Bobby Darin, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Anita O’Day, Lenny Bruce, and the rock star Dion”), by 1981 “a growing trail of corpses.”