… enters Westminster Abbey; and on the occasion, here’s one of his poems, “The Harvest Moon.”

You can hear it recited here, at 3:35.

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The Harvest Moon

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry `We are ripe, reap us!’ and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.

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Note first the soft rolling sounds of the first three lines, not a hard letter among them, except for those three almost hidden little Ts: harvest, gently, vast. Ts hidden inside, or dropped lightly at the end, of their word. So the language will follow the smoothness of the moon as it softens the earth’s “stiff wheat” and petrified sheep, and melts the earth’s hills, making us ready for gathering up as if at “the end of the world.”

And how strange that we want to be taken – ‘We are ripe – reap us!’ We’ve kept “a kneeling vigil,” “a religious hush,” in front of the ravishing moon. Like the moon, we “sink upward,” melting into the earth in hope of transcendence. Our deep earth-drum resonates with the moon as it comes to cast a final calm over all of our laboring as it takes us.

she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.

So don’t watch this if you plan to see the film, but the final Wagnerian scene of Melancholia comes to mind here, the planet Melancholia sailing closer and closer and it is the end of the world…

But this is no disaster movie: For at least one of the characters, the heaven-filling swell of the planet Melancholia is a kind of fulfillment, something sought after as beautiful and true.

… but since then has not been running the classiest of practices. The FBI has just raided one of his numerous, er, pain management facilities; and then there’s the matter of Medicare fraud as well.

Sanjoy Sundaresan seems to have attained positively medieval levels of sadism, withholding drugs from addicts unless they let him impale them with needles in order to bill the federal government for the impaling.

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UD thanks Bill for telling her that the link up there no longer works. Here’s an earlier story about Sundaresan. The details about the needles are taken from the later article.

… this. His priorities are totally screwed up. “Shirtless Boys” Mead will set him straight.

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A commenter on Craig Long’s article in the Iowa State paper says:

Want to know where this funding is going? Here’s a clue.

Every time an athlete sustains a minor injury they wrap the limb in an ice pack and plastic to hold it. Look closer and you see that the plastic has the Iowa State logo plastered on it.

Seriously? Iowa State plastic wrap? Tuition gets raised and athletes still need their Iowa State plastic wrap?

Again, what the commenter needs to understand is (quoting Mead here):

It is about competition, drama, intensity, about hope and fear, collective celebrations or collective disasters, seared into young and impressionable hearts where they will never be forgotten — and where they will be annually renewed as each sport in its season produces new highs and lows, new hopes and fears. Alumni watching their schools’ games on TV, or celebrating or mourning their schools’ results each week with friends, family and colleagues are renewing their ties with their alma maters affirming that being an “Aggie” or a “Tar Heel” is an identity, not a line on the resume.

You don’t sear things into people without searing things into people. Without ink from the Iowa State logo literally bleeding into the athletes’ flesh, they and the people around them will never achieve an identity with the school so total, so intense, that it will bond them fiercely to it every day of their lives.

A scene from Japan today, taken directly from Nevil Shute’s post-nuclear war novel On the Beach.

In the novel, people waiting to die from fallout stage an ultimate car race in which Ferraris crash with abandon.

The Japanese drivers were on their way to Hiroshima.

…. as pathetic as this dog.

You need a special sort of athletics director, special boosters, and (something people sometimes overlook) a local press willing to get just as excited as Fido when it looks as though there might be some goodies in the fridge.

The University of Memphis – arguably America’s stupidest university – has all of these things in profusion.

HOLIDAY CHEER! blasts a local headline, and the reason is plain to see!

Tiger Nation is buzzing because of big changes on the horizon. Not only is the university looking for a splashy hire to pull its dismal football program from the dregs, but it also seeks a visionary athletic director …

What’s in the fridge? (Slobberslobber.) New coaches?! (To pay off the last two losers Memphis is now out millions for years to come, but let’s not mention that.) (Oh and the program’s also hemorrhaging millions because no one goes to the games.) (Oh and don’t forget the full scholarships for the guys! Graduation rate of African American basketball players in 2009: 44%.)

But here’s the best holiday news of all! Memphis has just hired a public relations firm to tell it how to run a sports program! Yummy treats!

… story UD lives for.

It’s got a dab of diploma mill and a pinch of plagiarism…

The longtime CEO of a behavioral-health agency in El Paso that receives millions annually in government grants holds a doctoral degree from an institution the federal government has called a diploma mill… [Cirilo] Madrid was paid about $100,000 over 13 months for the work he performed under the contract with [a firm under investigation for corruption]. The primary product of his work is a 20-page document, which included information he says in the deposition he lifted from other documents and did not give proper credit or attribution.

… Plus it’s got a whole lot of crony capitalism.

A local journalist thinks there’s something wrong with the severance pay Washington State University’s just-fired football coach (his record: 9 – 40) is getting:

At the risk of stating the obvious — this seems like a particularly bad time to pay Paul Wulff $600,000 not to coach Cougar football.

The money spent on college sports is mind-boggling enough. In the most recent survey of state salaries, UW football coach Steve Sarkisian came out on top, with $1.98 million in gross pay for 2010.

UW basketball coach Lorenzo Roma was paid $1.14 million last year, making him the second highest paid state employee.

But at least they draw their astronomical pay for coaching. Wulff’s salary is small by comparison, but next year he’ll be paid to not do his job.

… there’s this remarkable bit of writing on the subject of the American university.

The author glances at the latest sports scandals and writes

[This blogger] deplores the deplorable as much as anyone else, and only wishes readers could see how elegantly we wring our hands as each sad new story appears on our screens. Wring, wring, wring. Alas, alas, alas. Deplore, deplore, deplore. Repeat until Moral Seriousness is fully established.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm felt a frisson of sophistication reading this.

Allow her to reread it.

Yes. Again the frisson.

This writer has crouched down and taken a crap on Moral Seriousness. He has summited Mount Serious and crapped.

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SOS finds his debonair cynicism irresistable. The success of whatever argument he’s about to make about university sports is close to guaranteed.

The polemic announces itself in the title of his post: It All Begins with Football. The author argues that the very basis of our rich, globally dominant universities lies in the “tribal” appeal of their games, at which “shirtless boys” covered in warpaint whoop their way to abiding love of alma mater.

No naked tits, in other words, no money. Take away the tits and what’s a university? Buttoned up Mr Wizards, men incapable making the alumni cash register go DRRINGGGG.

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And you know, he’s right. Thinking back, SOS can date her decision to give money to Northwestern University to the first home football game there, at which she peeled off her sweatshirt and whipped them out.

The good news just keeps coming for the biggest baddest football schools, with Oklahoma State students responding to a victory by storming the field in a riot that critically injured two and less critically injured several more.

Some students were spared injury by their university’s clever expedience of pricing tickets so high many can’t afford them. The Oklahoma State newspaper’s editorial board complains:

It’s not as if the [OSU] athletic department is broke. It made a profit of more than $16 million from 2009 to 2010, and we know seats aren’t exactly selling like flapjacks on final’s week. One can notice that from looking at all the empty seats at midfield (a costly $832 per seat donation requirement is likely the reason for the lack of a sellout, but that is a discussion for another time)… Fielding a great football team does not require ripping off the students.

Better an empty luxury box than some jerk in the stands with no money!

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And if you think nobody does it better — How ’bout Florida and Florida State??

Authorities ejected 167 people from the stadium for violations. And in what police say was a first, a fight broke out among people in an elevator outside the pricey skyboxes.

Violence also occurred outside the stadium. In two of the more egregious incidents, a man was beaten and his head stomped, and two people doing FSU’s tomahawk chop while walking along West University Avenue were accosted.

You can understand people getting violent in the vicinity of the luxury suites. Not only are those fans drunk (alcohol is only allowed in the skyboxes… imagine how many more than 167 people would have been ejected if the whole stadium could drink!), but if their team is down a point or two it’s like I paid $87,000 for this box and SHIT MAN I’M PISSED.

Gail Collins does a little sniffing around the online education trash heap. She notices that better-off kids get physical schools with human teachers and other students in them, while poor kids get for-profit onlines with grading done God knows how and by whom. One program outsourced its grading to India.

Does full-time online learning really work for disadvantaged kids who may be alone at home all day?

Dig: Full-time online doesn’t work for anyone, least of all, obviously, poor kids home alone. But let’s dump online on poor kids whose parents don’t know any better and let’s make a mint by trashing their education.

K12 Inc. is a big private online education business. It was founded by a former Goldman Sachs banker and by William Bennett, the Republican writer and talk-show host, with an infusion of cash from the former disgraced junk-bond king Mike Milken. Its teachers generally work from their homes, communicating with their students by e-mail or phone.

What teachers? Who are they? Are you sure they’re the people teaching the course? Are you sure the student is the person signed up to take the course? No. You have no idea, and there’s no way you can know. But you don’t care, do you? Here’s the deal: “[C]ompany profits have been soaring.”

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Here’s the skinny on for-profit online education for American kids:

As long as customers don’t care about learning anything, the model will work well. Profits will soar, and students will appreciate not having to go to school. As word gets around that you can get a high school diploma while doing jackshit in the comfort of your own home, the thing will grow like wildfire.

The model’s risk lies only in the possibility that more than a few online customers will at some point after they graduate sense a connection between their failure in life and their lack of an education. It’s not just that they can’t think. They don’t know how to be in a work setting, having spent the last ten years in their pajamas.

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A good summary of the scandal. With links. If you have any predisposition toward depression, do not go there.

Yes, and this blog has always been very upfront about what it is. It’s called sado-masochism.

People the world over wonder about American university sports. They wonder why professional sports exist at universities at all, let alone run and corrupt them, turn them into places devoted to the exact opposite of what universities are for: the search for truth in a civilized setting. Big-time university sports have made our universities southern Italian villages, dominated by padrones and omertà and mindless violence. All in the name of money.

People who like to live under these conditions – who do nothing to change them and much to celebrate them – are masochists. People at sports universities love their brutal unstable coaches, men who abuse their players and get rewarded for it with million dollar bonuses. They love the freaks-on-steroids players who get hopped up on the weekends and beat people up in bars. They love the local moneybags tyrant who, because he gives tens of millions of dollars to the sports program, controls the team and the university president.

Yes, Joe Nocera is right – there’s something really askew here, and anyone surprised that it features literal as well as figurative rape is an idiot.

… is written by a high school student.

She’s not very happy.

Wait until she gets to a university.

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This year, most teachers here at Joplin High are having a hard time motivating their students to complete and turn in assignments. Hour by hour, I sit down, open my computer, turn into a zombie, shut the lid, and head to the next class. Some periods there is hardly a need to even look at the teacher. To many students, beating a high score in Tetris sounds a lot more productive than wasting time doing an assignment that can easily be downloaded at home. If someone were to ask me a year ago if I would prefer a paperless campus, I would say that our current situation sounds like a dream come true. Who wouldn’t want to ditch heavy textbooks for sleek laptops? In reality, I question the value of technology in the classroom on a daily basis.

The absence of all human interaction all day long enters you into a Michael Fassbender-intensity trance. Get ready to learn!

Don’t we already spend too much time staring at screens instead of physically interacting with our families and friends? According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, it’s estimated that, on average, young people spend up to 7.5 daily hours in front of a TV, computer, or video game. These hours are outside the school day.

Au contraire: Education should be as much as possible an extension of whatever daily shit you’re doing outside the classroom.

Simply dumping more information on students through technology by advising them to visit numerous websites and watch tutorial videos, as many of my teachers do now, will not make for a smarter, more creative student body.

But it will make for a much happier teacher!

Unlocking the ingenuity, drive, and enthusiasm within a student tends to become virtually impossible when they all become Internet-absorbed zombies. If this is what 21st-century learning looks like, then maybe there’s no reason for students to attend school. After all, there’s not much to learn from Tetris.

Oh puleeze. Do it yourself! It’s all about self-directed now, baby! Just do what you want. Follow your bliss.

And on the not attend school bit — Where have you been? All your friends are home onlining their high school years.

Nothing that 11 million dollars couldn’t fix.

All naughty creative writing professors are naughty in their own way.

B-School Boys, as you know from reading my Beware the B-School Boys category, are all about extortion of very large sums of money. In their world, it’s just straight down the line fraud.

Creative writing professors deal in smaller currencies, and tend to get involved in lame, convoluted, one-man get-rich-quick schemes. (Clubby B-School Boys always have partners in crime.)

Poète maudit Ravi Shankar, currently placed on administrative leave, has been rather on the loose wig lately. We know from his RMP page (He missed 5 out of 15 classes (yet if you miss 3 you fail) & had us buy 100 dollars worth of books which were barely used (money down the drain)… Great class, when he shows up. Had to meet online a few times, poetry is not the kind of class where online classes are really helpful…) that Shankar is copacetic but kind of out of it. His two recent arrests – one of which found him hiding from the cops in the woods – also speak to some problems.

[Shankar was] arrested …in November after allegedly crashing into a vehicle on Route 40 in North Haven [Connecticut] and fleeing the scene, state police said. State police say Shankar was driving east in the shoulder when he rear-ended a parked vehicle and then drove away. A police dog helped troopers find Shankar in a wooded area.

Shankar was charged with driving under the influence, evading responsibility, failure to drive in the proper lane and operating a vehicle without insurance.

That was his second arrest. His first was much more complicated. You can read the details at the article, but the main point is

[Shankar ordered] more than $22,000 worth of tickets to a soccer game in New Jersey in the hopes that he could sell them to make a profit and pay off his more than $70,000 credit card debt.

Things went terribly wrong.

… seasoned to perfection here, in response to Microwave for One.

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Via Andrew Sullivan.