UD began university life, as some of her readers know, at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

She hadn’t been there long before she felt the seductive pull of simply making up people and quotations for her stories. Listen to any radio call-in show to grasp how dumb and halting most real people are. Much better to use your literary talents to fashion Wildean bon mots in the mouths of unique and deeply moving human specimens.

Journalists who do this long enough, like this one from the Cape Cod Times, may eventually get caught. She has been fired.

“He hasn’t felt the need for our advice,” Allan Stam, a political science professor and [University of Michigan Advisory Board on Intercollegiate Athletics] committee member, said of [UM athletics director Dave] Brandon. “We don’t have a role, in that if our role is simply to provide advice for the athletic director when he chooses to ask for it.”

Well, it’s a tricky formulation as expressed, but you can understand Stam’s difficulty. He sits on an advisory committee that does nothing and knows nothing. Its function is to give institutional legitimacy to Michigan’s rancid sports program. And most of the committee members are happy to play along:

“It’s not our job to micromanage the athletic department,” offered Michael Imperiale, a microbiology professor and committee member. “Really, this is an athletic department. It’s not an academic unit.”

I mean, it doesn’t have students or anything; it has no impact on the academic life or reputation of the university… It’s just, you know, an athletic department.

That being the case, though, why is Imperiale on the committee? Shouldn’t he be working to abolish it?

A good reason to take up smoking.

Serbia’s ambassador to NATO had reportedly been “chatting and joking with colleagues” at Brussels Airport when he “suddenly strolled to a barrier, climbed over and jumped over, one diplomat said.” Apparently no one saw any evidence of depression or anxiety.

In “The Judgment,” George Bendemann has an upsetting conversation with his elderly father, after which

He leapt out the front door, driven across the roadway to the water. He was already clutching the railings the way a starving man grasps his food. He swung himself over, like the outstanding gymnast he had been in his youth, to his parents’ pride. He was still holding on, his grip weakening, when between the railings he caught sight of a motor coach which would easily drown out the noise of his fall. He called out quietly, “Dear parents, I have always loved you nonetheless” and let himself drop.

The suddenness, and of course the phrase the way a starving man grasps his food, account for the disturbing surreality of the passage. With his other story, “The Hunger Artist,” in mind, one is brought to consider the possibility that it’s death after which one hungers. Paul Valery, in his poem, “Graveyard by the Sea,” talks about “the wild addiction not to be.” There are more of these seemingly motiveless suicides than you might think.

In the case of Branislav Milinkovic, as in many other such cases, something will perhaps emerge: A hopeless alcohol addiction; looming bankruptcy or other even worse legal problems; the recent loss of someone deeply loved; having recently been told that you’re suffering from a terrible disease… Or a sudden overwhelming psychotic break, whatever that might mean…

There’s one other possibility, and this goes to the way he chose (if we can speak of choosing) to kill himself: In front of his colleagues, including senior colleagues. Had one of them just told him he was fired?

Obviously, to traumatize the people you’re standing with suggests hostility, vengeance…

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UPDATE: He had just been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.

… law professor.

Those who know him well say that he weighs his words carefully before he speaks.

I’ll say.

It’s official: Big-time sports are the most corrupt, most expensive, and most stupid division of the American university.

No one goes to the games. The team teems with miscreants. Tons and tons and tons of them, so that the coach just presses this template each time shit goes down — really, always says pretty much verbatim the same thing: We are aware of the charges against X and Y and Z and A and we’ll you know handle it appropriately don’t worry…

So last night two of the guys got drunk and stood in the street shouting fuck this shit and getting arrested and all…

It’s really odd. I mean, maybe UD isn’t getting something here, but — the coach gets millions of dollars to stage games without spectators and, increasingly, without players.

… for having understood what Columbia University’s Sudhir Venkatesh was long before the New York Times got wind of it. Her post about Columbia’s adorably rogue sociologist appeared way back in April 2009, and her attack on his book about living in a Chicago housing project tells you a lot about the power of the singular, agile, independent blogger to get out ahead of issues (look how long – with a few exceptions – it took everyone else), and about the power of a true education in the methods and ethics of particular scholarly fields.

Of course TR couldn’t know, when she wrote, that Venkatesh’s financial ethics are apparently as shaky as his scholarly; she couldn’t have read these 2010 accounts of his teaching (missing many classes; making highly-selected, immense-tuition-paying Columbia students watch YouTubes when he was too busy to show up); but no one reading her devastating review of his book can miss the larger picture of this man as another in the lengthening line of Jonah Lehrers, Marc Hausers, and Johan Haris.

All of these men, when cornered, said a version of what Venkatesh has said:

I was overwhelmed, I was working both at Columbia and at the FBI, and I struggled to keep up.

In all of these cases, we’re supposed to sympathize with people making up research (Hauser) and quotations (Lehrer, Hari), misusing funds (Venkatesh), and lying to pretty much everyone — because they’re so destructively ambitious that they’ve taken on more than they can handle.

When Tenured Radical went after Sudhir Venkatesh in 2009, several of her readers, in the comment thread, accused her of envy. One of his friends, quoted in the New York Times story, accuses his detractors of envy.

Envy’s a beaut. UD‘s all-time favorite use of it has to be Greg Mankiw’s and Eric Cantor’s, as they labor away against new tax policies. People who aren’t rich envy rich people and want to hurt them — that’s what changes in taxation are about.

Envy’s a real human emotion, to be sure. A biggie. But just because everyone’s susceptible to it, and just because it’s so low, cynical argumentative opponents realize it can be a hell of a good button to push. Instantly it distracts people from the intrinsic legitimacy of your arguments; it makes it all about you, and your grubbiest motivations. It is the quintessence of ad hominem technique.

Bravo to TR, then, not merely for having seen Venkatesh before others saw him, but for standing up to the you’re envious folk.

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A statistics professor at Columbia recalls:

When Sudhir was in charge of Iserp, he told us that they were out of money and would not be able to honor existing commitments. Or, to be more precise, that things that I considered commitments were not actually so because they had only been transmitted orally, and that more generally Iserp was broke and could not support research in the way that we had expected. I was pretty angry about that, but when Sudhir informed me that he was suddenly stepping down as head of Iserp to work on a project with the Justice department, I assumed that he was better suited to be a researcher than an administrator and I offered him statistical help with his DOJ project if he ever needed it. I figured he was back on the research track and that this was better for all concerned. I don’t think I’d be a very good administrator myself, so I just figured Sudhir had been over his head. I’ve only seen him once since, it was a year or so ago at a sociology seminar, but we were sitting in different areas of the room and I had to leave early, so we did not get a chance to speak.

When I later heard that hundreds of thousands of dollars were missing, that put a different spin on the story. I had heard rumors of an investigation but I’d never known that there was an official document, dated Aug 4, 2011 (nearly a year and a half ago!) detailing $240,000 of questionable expenses including $50,000 for fabricated business purposes. If, as Sudhir is quoted as saying in the news article, he’s only paid pack $13,000 of this, I assume more will happen. It’s not clear why the university would pay a salary to someone who still owes them over $200,000.

… How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown, talks about how doctors diagnose personality disorders.

The most recent edition of the DSM series, DSM-IV in 1994, had a whole slew of personality disorders, including histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, and so forth. The editor of DSM-IV, Allen Frances, was a psychoanalyst, and the list is a kind of last gasp. The problem is that patients who qualified for one, tended to qualify for almost all of them. The individual “disorders” were quite incapable of identifying individuals who had something psychiatrically wrong with them; the “disorders” had become labels for personality characteristics that are found in abundance in the population.

Moreover, who needed labels? Psychiatrists had a seat-of-the pants definition of a PD: “If your first impression of your patient is that he is an asshole, then he probably has a personality disorder.”

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You begin to see the basis of Steven Cohen’s defense.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm reads the sports news.

At this event. She sang in the chorus. UD is a soprano. “You have the high notes,” says her friend Barbara, an actual true trained soprano who goes for the high A‘s and hits them. (She goes way above high A too.) But UD doesn’t really have the high notes. UD is okay if you’re talking G, but she doesn’t trust herself very much on the high A. Sitting next to Barbara at the concert, UD sort of let her own voice dissolve when the A‘s appeared; she let Barbara take them.

UD suspects that technically she can do the A‘s (that is, she does them pretty well when she’s home alone at the piano), but she has a confidence problem. UD has many weird complexes about her voice.

But anyway she and Barbara had a blast at the Messiah. Extremely rousing moment when the audience suddenly stands up at the end and we all belt out the Hallelujah Chorus. I believe it released quite a few endorphins in me.

See now here’s a whole article about how exceptionally morally reflective Mathew Martoma was in college and graduate school.

One of his friends calls him “very smart and ethical,” and wonders: “Did the situation and SAC push him over the edge?”

Brown University’s highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, does run a strikingly … aggressive hedge fund, but if you allow people to blame Martoma’s insider trading indictment (he’s accused of the most lucrative insider trading in history) on his environment, you’re allowing them to blame the bad behavior of everyone (and everyone here means everyone from a less wonderful, less gloriously privileged environment than Martoma’s, which is to say everyone) on their environment. If you blame Martoma’s downfall on the misfortune of his having been hired by the most powerful, prestigious hedge fund in the world, I mean boooohoooo. Fuggedaboutit.

This guy isn’t your average impressionable morally middling guy. He’s described by lots of people as keenly knowledgeable and sensitive in the moral realm. There’s Dr. Rieux over there risking his life every day to save Oran from the plague, presiding stoically at the bedside of a child dying in appalling agony; and here’s Martoma bringing to that novel acute insights on the capacity of human beings to empathize with and sacrifice for one another. How can a guy able to reason about morality at that level cheat and steal like a son of a bitch?

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Er, is this really a problem for you? Do you really think there’s a puzzle to work out here? Have you read Dr. Faustus, Notes from Underground, Hamlet, or almost any serious work of literature?

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We can go back and forth, and I’m happy to go back and forth, about the utility of ethics courses in business school. Say we appoint David Petraeus to lecture in such courses, along with other people we think of as moral paragons. If we’re lucky, the focus of his lectures will be the very complex vulnerabilities and blindnesses and compulsions that lie within all of us.

Not that understanding this, even on a very high level, will tend to make you, personally, more ethical. Ask Michael Martoma, and many other insider traders who share his excellent upbringing, his excellent education, and his exquisite moral reasoning, about that. If anything, the staggering good fortune these people have enjoyed all their lives, their easy entry into elite settings, their great wealth, even their great intellect, tends to make them feel removed from the common suffering humanity that Dr. Rieux found so compelling. These days, Americans are wealthy in ways unimaginable in the past. Steve Cohen’s personal fortune is close to ten billion dollars, and Michael Martoma moved very much in Steve Cohen’s world. The power, and the almost absolute removal from common human life, this sort of wealth — or a life lusting after this sort of wealth — yields, has — obviously — for many people — disastrous moral consequences. No business school is going to talk honestly about this, because no business school wants to be in the business of saying Come to study here, and we’ll teach you all about limits.

… steal!

In its small way, Hofstra exemplifies the glory of university basketball and football (Well, they recently dropped football, since no one went to the games. This has allowed them to concentrate all their attention on fantastic basketball!). A recent coach, minutes after he was hired, was found drunk out of his mind, asleep in his car at a traffic light. Last month two players were suspended; the university didn’t say why. Now four players are accused of extensive campus thefts. For weeks they’ve apparently been taking money, electronics, you name it.

And according to this, they stole from the coach. LOL.

So who recruited these guys? You never hear about that, oddly. You never hear from the recruiting coach, and the recruiting coach never seems to take a fall, even when part of his team turns out to be a criminal conspiracy aimed directly at the fan base.

I guess if they also stole from the recruiting coach… well, that’s a kind of funny thing too… Like, the guy went to a lot of trouble to invite his thieves to his goods… Bent over backward to recruit the guys who lifted his credit cards and all his Apple products.

As UD is fond of saying, you can’t put a price tag on the good university sports does for a school’s reputation.

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I wonder what student attendance is like at the games. I bet it’d go up if the university guaranteed that students could make direct appeals to the players to return their stuff.

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As always, and again hilariously, the sports press only cares about what this means for win/loss.

The team is off to a 3-4 start and is no doubt trying to come together for some semblance of harmony and turn the season around. Before the season gets going, the head coach is robbed and a good portion of the team is arrested for the crime.

LMAO.

Someone’s been shooting on the campus of Casper College, a public community college in Wyoming.  One person is confirmed dead, and the shooter is either injured or dead.

The incident is still going on.

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This report says it’s over – one dead, and the injured shooter in custody.

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Apparently the person killed was an instructor at the college.

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And apparently guns weren’t involved, as originally reported. Stabbing, it sounds like. And now three deaths are reported.

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Bow and arrow?