The weather is glorious – sunlight everywhere and a soft wind. But UD is under the weather, stuck in bed and mainly sleeping.
Unless the head of the NCAA announces he’s had enough of the farce and is dismantling the organization, UD will lie silent until she regains her strength.
A review in Slate of the collapsing market in law degrees makes the opening of new law schools at UC Irvine and the University of Massachusetts (and they’re not the only ones) all the more disgusting. All of these schools come equipped with the standard current law school package of extremely highly paid professors and under-employed, debt-ridden students.
Law school professors are beginning to look très Marie Antoinette.
Some people have called for the ABA, which accredits anything with a pulse, to be replaced by an actual accrediting agency. That would certainly be a good start.
Once you’ve run a charter school into the ground, it’s time to retreat to your campus cubicle.
Coggins has ignored calls and e-mails seeking comment from the Orlando Sentinel. When a reporter visited Coggins at Stetson last week in attempt to discuss his role with Imani, he slammed his office door and said he was calling campus police.
Coggins specializes in cultural competence, and I gotta tell you that this behavior seems at the very least culturally insensitive.
As I follow the unnerving news out of Fukushima, I think of James Merrill’s Prose of Departure, a late, morbid poem, describing a visit of his to Japan. (The poem isn’t available in its entirety online. Here’s another excerpt from it.)
Radiation – both remembered, from Hiroshima, and felt in every afternoon’s sun – is the black and blindingly white, the despairing and the appalling, correlative to the poet’s dread about friends back in the States who are dying.
The recognition of life’s “date line,” impending death, “comes flashing up” on the poet, like “the next six-foot wave in an epic poem.” He needs “a form of conscious evasion,” a “composure like the target a Zen archer sees through shut eyes.” Watching a Noh play, the poet embraces the evasion of art, in the form of an actor who “will relive moonlight, storm and battle, and withdraw, having danced himself to peace.”
*******************************
Later that night, as he observes the moon cloud over, spiritual and aesthetic composure fail the poet; he cannot evade “A dark thought that fills the psyche, leaving a bare brilliant cuticle, then nothing, a sucked breath, a pall.”
The next day, at a shrine, when he “place[s] incense upon [a] brazier already full of warm, fragrant ash,” the poet
tries vainly
to hold back a queer
sob. Inhaling the holy
smoke, praying for dearlife —
Burning, the burning of the body and the soul, the holy smoke of what was once the holiness of a beloved friend – for the poet, there’s absolutely no evading this. From now on, each section of the poem will feature counterpoints between exotic immediacies and homeland premonitions. With brilliant wordplay, Merrill will twist his perception of a painting (in this instance, View of Fuji) to fit his fatal mood:
Syringe in bloom. Bud
drawn up through a stainless stem…
Not spring, but syringe; and syringe, with the proximity of bloom and bud, will have us read bud as blood… drawn up… a pipetting syringe… The stainless stem suggests not purity so much as hospital sterilization.
****************************
As the poem concludes, the poet makes explicit not only death, but the irradiating evisceration of our humanity:
The prevailing light in this “Hiroshima” of trivial symptoms and empty forebodings is neither sunrise nor moonglow but rays that promptly undo whatever enters their path.
This killing radiation is the worst form of energy in existence; all of the Proustian nuance, the artful evasive beauty, we give life in order to give it life, is knocked out. The poet imagines the x-rays his friends are undergoing, rays which, “in their haste to photograph Truth… eat through” all of their cultural apparel, all of their existential theatricals. (“[B]eing enchanted by the magic of experience provides a reason to live. Rather than being an aid to survival, consciousness provides an essential incentive to survive. Enchantment is itself ‘the biological advantage of being awestruck.'”)
“What’s the story, Doc?”
— dark, cloud-chambered negatives
held to the light.
Prose of Departure ends in a kimono shop, with the poet and his lover enchanted by “the most fabulous kimono of all: dark, dark purple traversed by a winding, starry path.”
Dark and light again, then, with a benign and storied lightness applied, generated, made up, by the artist, as a kind of defiance of both radiation’s momentary flash and death’s permanent darkness.
Dyeing. A homophone deepens the trope. Surrendering to Earth’s colors, shall we not be Earth, before we know it? Venerated therefore is the skill which, prior to immersion, inflicts upon a sacrificial length of crêpe de Chine certain intricate knottings no hue can touch. So that one fine day, painstakingly unbound, this terminal gooseflesh, the fable’s whole eccentric
star-puckered moral —
white, never-to-blossom buds
of the mountain laurel —may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.
You can read the university president’s crap [see post below]; or you can get the real deal. Here.
… is writing colorless, anonymous, committee-generated nothingness. You’d think a university president would know this.
… Thug U, but the University of Miami – the original Thug U – still shows you how it’s done.
University of Miami linebacker Ramon Buchanan, who was arrested early Friday morning in Coconut Grove, allegedly told a Miami police officer, “I’m a UM football player and I don’t give a [expletive] what you do. I’ll get out of it. [Expletive] the police.’’
And after all, writes a fan, putting it in perspective, “Very different from a confirmed AK 47 shooting.”
…. is this year’s Mellon Lecturer. Beard has been a great advocate of University Diaries — many of my British readers got here via her links and kind words.
Beard’s own blog is an outgrowth of her interest in classical studies — and in everything else.
Who must answer this call and begin the reform? That’s easy – college and university presidents. They must take a stand and expect severe, unjustified criticism. They must summon courage to defend the best part of the academy and return athletics to a wholesome place in American higher education. And those of us who love college competition and want to restore it to health must encourage them, support them and take on their critics. While they do the right thing, we must cover their backs!
There’s a sweet, dreamy, retro feel to the prose of John A. Roush, president of Centre College. When the subject is big-time university sports, “metaphors of illness are apt,” he writes; and the only cure is presidential courage. He ends with this defensive play where we all huddle around the presidents and keep them safe while they expose their rears to severe criticism…
Shouldn’t that be the job of the stupendously rich NCAA? Don’t they have the money and the power to protect university presidents as they defend what’s left of their schools against the plague?
Well, of course the NCAA has that power.
UD proposes that we all write opinion pieces in which we dream aloud about their using it.
Where else would he be a professor but at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, mother ship of corruption in one of our most corrupt states? Scroll down to find your guy, and strap yourself in for one hell of a ride as Srinivasan adds thousands to your bill with each passing minute!
Others need a cockatoo.
Thanks, Bill.
Yikes! Let’s get this guy off our backs, pronto! Just a volunteer appointment; didn’t teach; didn’t see patients… In fact, he was the first Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Toledo to do nothing! Nothing! Never heard of the guy!
Oscar Linares is now on trial for having “operated a large-scale prescription mill out of the clinic on Laplaisance Road, prescribing OxyContin and other painkillers to up to 250 patients a day, and [having] fraudulently billed Medicare for more than $57 million.”
At the Linares clinic, “employees were given $25 bonuses if the clinic processed more than 200 patients a day.” “Parking attendants were hired to help direct traffic.”
His faculty affiliation at the University of Toledo is featured in the first paragraph of the Toledo Blade article about him, as well it should be. That university gave the guy respectability and cover. Other universities are doing the same thing with other pill mill owners. This blog will provide coverage of each of these professors – as the government catches up with them.
An English professor, writing in the Times Union, chronicles SUNY Albany’s intellectual disintegration, and, in the process, comes up with a fitting new motto for the school (see my title).
UD has only one editorial suggestion:
EDUCATING DRUNK, UNCRITICAL HALF-LITERATES BY DESIGN