… anti-nihilism.

Miss Ole Miss gets it said.

Some wag placed a recent official Ole Miss ad just below her YouTube. LOL.

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(“Sweetheart, William Faulkner drank enough whiskey to float Oxford.” — From the article’s comment thread.)

Tom Bartlett’s review of a big new biography of liar, thief, bigamist, and fascist symp Paul de Man brings back memories, for UD, of her time in his classroom when he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.

The truth about him wasn’t yet known, and indeed UD had been instructed to find him a demigod.

She recalls her puzzlement, watching him lecture about the language of Yeats and Rilke, at this haughty reptilian man, scarcely aware of the students sitting behind him as he trailed his chalk from one language group to another on the blackboard.

The New York Times limned the grieving after his death, and UD again said huh? “In a profession full of fakeness, he was real,” mourned one of his followers. And UD thought Well yeah real but really nasty. She didn’t know why he felt so removed from human emotion, from any authentic human setting… She figured it was snobbery, that his real life, his warmth, lay somewhere (his home institution?) but had been put on ice while he was in Hyde Park…

… de Man was … a convicted criminal. In 1951 a judge in Belgium sentenced de Man in absentia (he had fled to the United States by then) to six years in prison for theft and fraud related to Hermès, the publication house he created and ran. De Man had looted the funds of the company to cover his own lavish expenses. In one case, Barish writes, de Man engaged in a “deliberate swindle” of a family friend, fooling him into making a loan that was never repaid. All told, more than a million Belgian francs disappeared — and, before he could face creditors and courts, so did de Man.

His conduct in his personal life was similarly irresponsible. The most heart-wrenching example is the abandonment of his three young sons from his first marriage (a marriage he didn’t end before marrying a second time, adding bigamy to his résumé). He did not support or even see the boys — even refusing to take a phone call from one of his sons years later.

Harold Bloom despised de Man’s “serene linguistic nihilism,” and UD was I suppose privileged to witness that nihilism – that confidence game, really – in action in a classroom in Chicago in 1979.

But why did this repellant man, this obvious fraudster, capture Yale? The author of the biography speculates:

“Most of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. When someone comes along and seems to have it right or to be very clear and very intelligent and immensely seductive, intellectually and personally, we say ‘Right, let’s go that way.'”

This can’t be quite right. Yalies are hardly know-nothings. And de Man was as seductive as … Rush Limbaugh. Joseph McCarthy. Huey Long. Ted Cruz. He was just like those guys. Not at all physically attractive, and immediately identifiable as an easily irritated narcissist. But – also like those guys – de Man was excitingly wildly himself, a big old nasty old way out there unto the breach POS.

I think intellectuals as much as anti-intellectuals are susceptible to serene – which is to say, sociopathically rockhard-confident – nihilism. Bloom called it for the bullshit it was, but a lot of other people fell for its brass balls come and get me coppers Nietzscheanism.

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UD finds it intriguing that today’s nihilists – the group of people in this country everyone’s calling nihilists – are the Ted Cruz-run tea partiers, and that their party shares de Man’s abiding impulse: secession. As his biography makes clear, de Man was always running away – from countries, marriages, crimes, children, and of course meaning. The impulse de Man embodied and appealed to was toward withdrawal from a messy world full of all sorts of incorrect people and the embrace of a pure cult of just a few correct people. Yale was the cult of de Man.

[A]lthough we were all supposed to act shocked and appalled when a Confederate flag showed up in front of the White House during a [recent] Tea Party protest …, nobody actually was.

de Man’s Yale was the functional equivalent of Tod Palin’s Alaska – a fantasy island just for us.

The Paul de Man story should remind us that anti-democratic dreams, and the dreams of unreason, are perennial, and widely shared.

[Y]ou can’t just kill someone’s revolutionary nihilism. The Ted Cruz “filibuster” is a great example: it served no actual legislative purpose, and at the end of his idiotically long speech, Cruz ended up voting yes on the very bill he was trying to kill. That’s zombie politics, and the problem with zombies is that — being dead already — they’re incredibly hard to kill.

The point here is that the zombie army, a/k/a the Tea Party, is a movement, not a person — and it’s an aggressively anti-logical movement, at that. You can’t negotiate with a zombie — and neither can you wheel out some kind of clever syllogism which will convince a group of revolutionary nihilists that it’s a bad idea to get into a fight if you’re reasonably convinced that you’re going to lose it.

Felix Salmon is right. In the case of serene political nihilism, we can only do what people have been doing with de Man. We can only unmask it.

[Michelle] Crawford was hired [as a business professor] despite the fact she [had been] disbarred as a lawyer and faced criminal prosecution. [Crawford is the sister-in-law of an ASU trustee.]

Crawford was a licensed attorney in North Carolina before she was disbarred in about September 2008 “for misappropriation of entrusted funds and failure to reconcile her trust account,” according to [a] report. She was hired as a business professor at ASU in 2011 and was retained through August or September 2013 (different dates have been reported). She was indicted April 19, 2012, in U.S. District Court in North Carolina… Crawford, also known as Michelle Mallard, pleaded guilty July 10 to “mortgage fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and embezzlement in violation of the wire fraud statute.”

She faces a sentence of up to 70 years in prison.

It’s never too soon to start learning. If tradition means anything to you.

Legendary tradition.

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Duke pays Coach K, the genius who thought this photo-op up, ten million dollars a year. By some standards, he’s the highest paid college coach in America.

Expect him to earn twelve or thirteen million next year.

… can be found here, at Inside Higher Ed.

For Moody’s it’s tricky to rate
The train wreck that’s Alabam State.
“It should be a D
But our lowest is C.
We’ll need to revise the whole slate.”

The now-legendary three Saudi med students who sued the University of Ottawa for $156 million dollars because it dismissed them from its neurosurgery program (poor performance, though the Saudis claim discrimination) have now had their latest appeal rejected by Ontario’s highest court. I assume there are still other places they can go to keep appealing; and I assume with each appeal they will raise their ransom demand by a few hundred million. It’s one to watch.

From William Galston’s review of Tyler Cowen’s book, Average Is Over:

There’s nothing we can do, says Mr. Cowen, to avert a future in which 10% to 15% of Americans enjoy fantastically wealthy and interesting lives while the rest slog along without hope of a better life, tranquilized by free Internet and canned beans.

Bread and circuses is not the policy of a republic, but rather of an empire entering moral senescence. Nonetheless, Mr. Cowen seems untroubled by his hyperpolarized vision.

The kindest description of his stance is moral indifference: “It will become increasingly common to invoke ‘meritocracy’ as a response to income equality,” he writes, “and whether you call it an explanation, a justification, or an excuse is up to you.” While allowing that some might consider extreme socioeconomic inequality unjust, he revives the neoconservative canard that relatively well-off academics lead the charge against such inequality because they envy the status privileges of the wealthy. He seems not to have considered the possibility that his depiction of our future might fill them with justified revulsion.

Over the course of writing this blog about universities and professors, UD has encountered the neoconservative canard about envious academics again and again. A few years ago, Jonathan Chait gathered a few of many examples in a Los Angeles Times column titled Envy Them? No. Tax Them? Oh Yeah. Greg Mankiw, Chait noted, thinks that academics concerned about staggering personal wealth in the context of rising inequality are simply caught up in “the politics of envy.”

What’s depressing is that even highly credentialed conservatives such as Mankiw equate any discussion of class inequality with “envy” of the rich. The accusation is actually bizarre. Liberals want to make the rich pay higher tax rates not because they hate them. (In fact, as conservatives love to point out in other contexts, many liberals are rich.) It’s because somebody has to pay for the government, and the rich can more easily bear higher rates.

Paul Krugman echoes Chait.

To show concern over the growing inequality is to engage in the “politics of envy.”

But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970’s have nothing to do with envy. The fact is that working families aren’t sharing in the economy’s growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there’s good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society – and more likely to be a functioning democracy – than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.

Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won’t be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let’s try to do something about the politics of greed.

Krugman and Chait were writing in 2005. That Cowen can happily continue the canard suggests that it will be very difficult to kill. You can call it a canard; you can call it bizarre; you can call it a straw man. It will keep coming at you.

What UD has tried to do in some of her writing here is, as Krugman suggests, look in a different direction: the politics of greed. She has been intrigued by this statement from Robert Hughes about the art market:

[T]he present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.

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A certain amount of envy toward the rich is normal. It is to be expected. Indeed, that envy can be an engine, a motivator, a thing that helps our economy of entrepreneurs hum along. The politics of envy crowd, however, wants to scare us into believing that this emotion is becoming pathological, even violent, a threat to the republic. Lawrence Kudlow writes that the envious are really saying

“How dare they be successful earners and investors… Should we go out and shoot [the super-rich] for their success?”

Eric Cantor also seems to have in mind French revolutionaries using envy of the rich to trigger civil war:

There are politicians and others who want to demonize people that have earned success in certain sectors of our society. They claim that these people have now made enough, and haven’t paid their fair share. But, pitting Americans against one another tends to deflate the aspirational spirit of our people and fade the American dream.

I believe, with Galston and Krugman, that the greater menace lies in the “moral senescence” of a country of “great extremes.” Senescence, not riots. As Robert Reich remarks, “If you give up on democracy, you are basically saying to the moneyed interests, the powerful people and institutions of society Take it all… Then we are a hundred percent plutocracy.” This is why, on the subject of universities, I dwell on obscene endowments and the universities who pay each of their money managers $35 million a year to make their endowments grow toward… what? They are already in the tens of billions. The hundreds of billions? It’s why I talk about universities who honor trustees like Steven Cohen, a man with a personal fortune of nine billion dollars, and a man in constant trouble with the SEC.

The name of the firm doing the pumping for the new science building project across from UD‘s office is Putzmeister.

… nihilism. Everyone’s calling the Tea Party nihilistic. Do a TEA NIHILISM Google search and see.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm is thrilled. She loves the word, its soft insidious feel… The middle H adds a dying breath to its barely-there sound…

A beautiful mysterious letter-set, n-i-h-i-l-i-s-m. The movement of the mouth in saying the word maps the regress of nihilism itself —

A strong initial sound at the outset as if you’re headed somewhere: NEE…!

(Note: You can do it NIGHilism if you prefer.)

Then a catch of the breath on the H as you remember it’s pointless.

A final collapse into the enervated quietude of LISM..

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Europeans (Nietzsche, Dostoevsky) long ago cornered the market on nihilism. Finally America – perennially dismissed as too youthful, optimistic, and pragmatic for nihilism – gets its chance. You go, girl.

Body of article:

[One LSU student and] many of her friends skipped the game to study for midterms that started Monday.

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Well, now at least we know what the problem is.

Solution: Stop giving midterms.

And this was Florida-LSU! This is a huge rivalry game that holds major SEC implications each season.

I guess HDTV and air conditioning wins out but that just makes me sad.

Words of wisdom from a colleague of UD‘s.

… territory.