Colm Tóibín remembers him.

UD writes about one of his poems here.

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Heaney’s charming translation of a ninth century Irish poem reminds UD of Auden’s translation of the poem, set to music by Samuel Barber.

The Jewish Daily Forward, which broke the Yeshiva University sex abuse story, is rightly disgusted by that school’s paltry response to the absolutely damning independent report about decades of disgusting behavior by that university’s rabbis and administrators.

Yeshiva’s punishment is – however much that institution tries to avoid it – inescapable. With fewer and fewer people applying to the school, and with its credit rating in the toilet, Yeshiva is certainly going to remain historic; but it will, in not too long a time, cease to be at all important. Between Madoff and Macy, it has sealed its fate. No smart, self-respecting person wants to go there.

But everybody can easily afford it. It’s like when you make Glaxo pay out three billion. No biggie.

How bizarre to find this sentence in a review of a new book about big-time university football. The reviewer recounts (and the book recounts) a routinely sordid chapter in the life of a routinely sordid sports whore – the University of Tennessee – and then the reviewer suddenly offers that phrase: unbecoming of a university.

UD was pulled up short by it, since never in her long athletics-blogging life has it occurred to her to consider more than a handful of the sports factories about which she writes universities. She doesn’t write about them because they are universities. She writes about them because they are illegitimate recipients of state and federal tax dollars and tax breaks because someone thinks they are universities. She writes about them because maybe if enough people realize they are not universities they will be shut down and we won’t have to keep paying for them.

… y’all.

I guess they get “green” points too – being driven a few blocks in a stretch Hummer.

… has responded to the lawsuit against Trump University…

Meanwhile, David Halperin points out that TU is just one of many for-profit schools for scandal in the United States.

While none of the major predatory for-profit college companies — University of Phoenix, EDMC, Corinthian, Kaplan, CEC, etc. — have a frontman as publicly odious as Donald Trump, their abuses and harms go much deeper than those of Trump University.

That’s because they’ve entrapped far more people, and because our taxes continue to pay for them.

… featured a smart classroom in which you write on the walls! Dat’s right – no black or white board — just take the marker on the podium and scrawl all over the walls! What’ll they think of next.

… this good.

That’s ESPN.

The same thing’s coming to a university near you.

… that the NCAA will be looking to hire around ten thousand lawyers in the next couple of decades. Cases like these are going to be a steady source of employment.

… you get a wonderful shot of the University of Hawaii athletic director leaning comfortably back in his office chair and wearing one of those relaxed Hawaiian shirts and drawling about how firing someone you’re paying more than your state’s governor… firing that person after only a few months… and giving that person a huge buyout to go away… and giving no reason why you’re doing all of that is utterly routine, no biggie, a real yawn. Happens every day in the business world~!

Well, number one, no, it doesn’t happen every day in the business world.

Number two, the University of Hawaii is a public, taxpayer funded, institution.

And while we’re at it, number three: The AD casually mentions that there’s no scandal here because after all the position was budgeted anyway, so why be upset that UH is paying the budgeted money for no one to do anything in the position?

I mean, let me be understood here about exactly what the AD is saying. He is saying that we quickly fired the highest-paid public employee in the state of Hawaii for reasons we’re not sharing (UD‘s been at this game long enough to know that quick secretive firings like this one almost always involve the discovery of an alcohol problem, or criminal misbehavior of some sort), and we’re going to keep paying this person as if he still worked here (I mean, he will physically be here until the end of the year; he just won’t do anything), and that’s your tax money, but nothing in this picture is amiss.

… when barbarians attacked, America’s own university Don is fast-becoming martyr to the protection and dissemination of knowledge: He must now fight on two fronts.

Yeah, GW offered the same deal to English professors but we turned it down. Too showy.

… featured in a recent YouTube that went way viral, you know your school has a lot to be proud of. Dave Christensen remains the coach at the University of Wyoming because… well, you saw the video. You don’t let a man like that go. Precious. Plus, under Christensen, Wyoming “struggles finding victories against opponents with a pulse”!

With all that as background, you can understand why Wyoming’s president has just gone public with his love of Wyoming football. In a heartfelt column in the “news” section of the university’s website (UD is unsure why the president’s love letter is “news”), President Number One Fan says nothing about Coach Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You, Opposing Coach, for Beating Us and nothing about the team’s problem with pulsating opponents. What excites him instead is the way football at Wyoming inculcates a

drive to succeed, good work ethic, sense of responsibility, knowing how to win and how to lose, skill in planning, understanding the rules of a game, treating others including competitors with respect, ethical behavior toward others, knowing how to work with teammates, and so forth.

Is President Sternberg being ironic?

UD doesn’t think so.

… OSU still has Gee-like Chief Financial Officer Geoff Chatas:

While traveling to an OSU fundraising event in February 2012, Chatas flew to Florida on OSU’s private jet and stayed at the five-star Ritz-Carlton Naples, which features clay tennis courts, two golf courses, stunning views of the Gulf of Mexico, a pure white sand beach and pool-side cabanas. The bill was 1,264 for two nights.

The Plaza Athenee on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where OSU spent 2,235 to accommodate Chatas in July 2011, is a five-star luxury hotel with high-end amenities including personal yoga and pilates instructors.

Chatas was a Gee hire, after all.