The report says the investigative team planned to make public its complete findings on sexual and physical abuse but was directed by a special committee of the Yeshiva board of trustees, “as a result of the pending litigation,” to describe the findings “in summary fashion.”

This direction, as the Yeshiva student newspaper points out, “[casts] doubt on the true independence of the investigation.”

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UD decided to pay a visit to those honchos, with their impressive legal delicacy. What manner of man (they’ve recently put some token females on the board), now that it’s lost Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, sits on Yeshiva University’s board of trustees?

UD decided to choose one name on the list and find out all about him. She chose an unusual name because she wanted to be sure she was getting the right guy. She chose Zygmunt Wilf. How many Zygi Wilfs can there be out there?

Here’s the latest, as of August 5, 2013, on Zygi:

[New Jersey Judge Deanne] Wilson found that Zygmunt Wilf, along with his brother, Mark, and their cousin, Leonard, committed fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty and also violated the state’s civil racketeering statute, or RICO…. Discussing the Wilfs’ misdeeds, Wilson said they failed to meet the “barest minimum” of their responsibilities as business partners. “I do not believe I have seen one single financial statement that is true and accurate…”

Zygi got an honorary doctorate – for “philanthropic values” – from Yeshiva.

Good to know that as Yeshiva University begins the process of dealing with its faculty’s misdeeds, it will have people like Zygi at the controls.

… that the British legal establishment supports a judge’s insistence that a woman accused of a crime remove her burqa in the courtroom.

Michael Turner QC, chairman of the criminal bar association, insists Judge Murphy made the correct decision. He told Radio 4: “The public are entitled to see an individual who is entering their plea.

“If you carry it forward to the trial process and a person in a full burka intends to give evidence, is it right that the jury cannot see the person giving evidence?

“Our whole courtroom is set up so that a jury can see a witness give evidence and the reaction of that witness is very important in terms of the jury’s thinking.”

A similar principle applies in the university classroom. Professors who cannot see their students cannot teach them very well, since they have lost one important way of knowing whether students are understanding them. We rely on facial expressions – among other clues – to tell us how we’re doing.

My aunt, who loved and wrote poetry, lives, post-stroke, in Brooke Grove. UD has inherited her poetry collection – three boxes of hardbacks which UD‘s cousin delivered to Rokeby Avenue yesterday afternoon. Today – a very quiet Sunday – UD unpacked them, glancing at their spines and setting them in little piles on the dining room table.

In the background as she worked, Philippe Jaroussky sang, repeatedly, Sposa Son Disprezzata — a song UD has fallen for and is trying to learn. Can she become a brilliant countertenor by listening to Jaroussky night and day? She’s giving it the old college try.

She’s got the music (follow along here) and has spent a lot of time, this weekend, at the piano, desperately seeking the calm lyrical mastery she notices Jaroussky and, among females, Cecilia Bartoli, have hold of. In place of the sustained, emotionally intense line, the subtle and thrilling lift from piano to forte and back down to piano on raaaaaaaaaaaaanza, and the poignant catch in the voice as the plaint picks up, UD cannot help noticing that her own performance features a paint-by-numbers pedantry. Hers is a patchy stomp-through in which the singer struggles under the weight of musical signage in this after all quite easy to play piece (at least in my version).

I try to slow myself down – part of my lack of calm lyrical mastery is my anxious tendency to speed things up – but it’s not working. I remind myself to be a Buddhist about it for God’s sake, to get over myself and get in there and be in the moment and let the fucker unfold etc. But it’s like I’m a thirteen year old doing a piano recital.

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Anyway, my brain runneth over with this music, which I guess is reward enough – the swirl of its sounds as I mow the lawn… as I wake from a midday nap…

When I’d piled all the books, I went out to the deck with The Oxford Book of English Verse.

With my weary-of-life aunt in mind, I found myself reading aloud Swinburne’s Garden of Proserpine.

… I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.

… There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.

And then, toward the end, there was the stanza Richard Rorty found himself repeating as he lay near death. He was, he said, “oddly cheered” by this verse, which he “had recently dredged up from memory.”

We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Rorty writes that

neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

In point, rather, and even comforting, were

those slow meanders and those stuttering embers. I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose. Not just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythm were needed to do the job. In lines such as these, all three conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.

The slowly shaped charges of the baroque aria (if you’ve read this blog for any time at all you know of my Purcell fandom) possibly have the same sort of function for UD – compressed comfort.

New York’s attorney general sued Donald Trump for $40 million Saturday, saying the real estate mogul helped run a phony “Trump University” that promised to make students rich but instead steered them into expensive and mostly useless seminars, and even failed to deliver promised apprenticeships.

Flaunting? The writer flouts all standards of good writing by flaunting his ignorance.

And doesn’t the Washington Post have editors?

People are scandalized by the obscene post-game meltdown of Indiana University’s softball coach; but UD is much more scandalized by her very public dark-night-of-the-diamond moment, in which her rock-hard faith (shared with virtually all university coaches) that God takes a personal interest in the games she coaches suddenly collapses into skepticism.

God. Doesn’t. Care??????

Violent spectacle encourages manliness, and manliness ensures a nation’s capacity to defend itself and its values in organized warfare. Max Boot, defending football in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (against those who want to shut it down or make it less violent so that players avoid brain injury), clarifies the nationally sacrificial function of the players:

[T]hough football can be a violent sport, those who watch it are, on the whole, peaceable and tolerant — especially as compared with foreign fans of soccer (“football” to the rest of the world), who make up for the relative lack of violence on the field with melees in the stands.

It’s an either/or: You either sublimate man’s intrinsic violent anarchism by allowing him regular staged access to it; or you end up with compensatory chaos. (A milder version of this argument, by Walter Russell Mead, defends university football’s firing up of male atavism as crucial to the continued survival of universities.)

It’s a delicate balance; you want a culture that makes men capable of violence; you want that capacity stoked by violent sport; but you want always to be able to control the violence. That’s why Boot stresses the comaraderie, teamwork, and discipline, at the core of football, even as he anxiously echoes Teddy Roosevelt’s worry that if you outlaw football you’ll turn out “mollycoddles instead of vigorous men.”

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What sort of person would be a mollycoddle?

Well, let’s say some guy impugns your honor. If you’re a mollycoddle, you say I’m gonna tell Mom! You say I’m gonna tell my lawyer! If you’re a vigorous man, you challenge the guy to a duel. Or if you want to be civilized and sublimate that violence, you challenge him to go public with his impugning, to go one-on-one with you in a public forum, where he can repeat his charges and you can defend yourself.

But all that football watching hasn’t made Boot himself particularly vigorous. Just as he uses a research assistant to do the grunt work on his columns, he plans to use a lawyer to do his fighting against a fellow writer who claims Boot plagiarized him:

“I will defend my hard-earned reputation with legal action if necessary if you decide to print these scurrilous and unsubstantiated allegations.”

Take that, you naughty, naughty boy!

… fourth dumbest state.

Twenty-eight percent [of Louisiana Republicans] said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible.

… about MOOCs.

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More attention.

… Adderall-dependent lumps watch this.

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Update: Okay, so he plagiarized it.

A university football team four of whose members are alleged to have raped an unconscious student, videotaped the rape, and sent the videotape to friends. They will go on trial soon, as will yet other players, named as accessories.

What to do?

The coach has already announced – before the trial, before we all get to see the film and read the text messages, before everything – that his non-raping players have “dealt with this, and we’re trying to heal and move forward.”

It’s all over, see, and now it’s just about the wounded – his players – somehow finding healing and turning the page. So that’s what to do.

But there are already indications that the poor lads are trying to heal approach might not work.

Take this open letter to Vanderbilt University, written by a recent graduate who, post-rape allegations, is having “a hard time feeling good about my allegiance” to the university.

If a Vanderbilt football player dropped out after his freshman year to go free Tibet, I’d be proud. When they’re kicked out for revolting crimes, I’m ashamed. It’s that simple.

This alumnus

proposed to the administration of the Women’s Center that they partner with athletics for some sort of… anything. Fundraising. Volunteer drive. A patch on players’ uniforms. Whatever, as long as it shows real public support for survivors of sex crimes, or works to prevent future incidents. The point was to give fans who are depressed by recent news something to be proud of, morally. The point was to show that Vanderbilt football stands with survivors of sexual violence.

Response from the Vanderbilt administration? Fuck off.

This annoyed the letter writer. That’s why he wrote the letter.

In making the decision to hold its breath until this thing blows over, the administration decides to be among those (many) institutions that contribute to a culture of quiet enablement.

Vanderbilt begins to look like Yeshiva University.

Excerpts from an obituary in The Telegraph:

… On the afternoon of November 3 1944, as [his unit] assaulted a series of batteries set in the dunes which ring [an island near the port of Antwerp], the leading troop came under sustained heavy fire that killed 15 marines and wounded 21 . With mortar shells bursting all around him, Forfar attended to the wounded. The troop commander, Major JTE Vincent, was not found until Forfar went on another 50 yards under a rain of mortar bombs. It was the first time that Forfar had come under mortar fire, and each time he saw a shell coming he threw himself flat on the sand behind the wooden groynes before rushing forward once more.

He found Vincent lying grievously wounded, and as he was treating him, five Germans appeared over a sand dune and opened fire with a machine gun, killing one of the stretcher party who had crawled forward to join Forfar and wounding another. Forfar coolly continued to treat his patient, who had been shot through the eye and pleaded with Forfar: “Don’t leave me here, sir.” Forfar, who was a small and wiry man, picked the casualty up, put him over his shoulder and carried him to safety.

… It was largely thanks to Forfar’s tireless lobbying — in the teeth of considerable opposition — that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health was established in 1998.

Forfar’s commitment to medical education was expressed in the long-running course in Saudi Arabia which was run by him and his some of his colleagues in Scotland. Theirs was the only course in that country which taught male and female students together, and one of Forfar’s first tasks was to dismantle the barrier in the lecture theatre which the security police had set up to separate the genders.

In 1973 Forfar was the driving force behind the production of Forfar and Arneil, a 2,000-page textbook of paediatrics which is used throughout Britain, and recently went into a seventh edition.

… In June 2009 the mayor of Port-en-Bessin-Huppain unveiled a memorial plaque on the Allée Professeur John Forfar, a walk which links the two villages…

Tressel will be the first of many. Given current circumstances, nothing is more logical than handing the presidency of many of our universities to football coaches.

In one of the many bracing annual rituals surrounding university football – a newspaper article recounting the most recent and most heinous player arrests around the country – Nick Saban offers this intriguing analogy: The big-time university football coach is like a professor who can do everything right but still experience cheaters in her classroom.

Let’s examine the analogy.

In the same article, reporters ask rape-ridden Vanderbilt’s coach if he is “recruiting more players of questionable character in an effort to win.” The guy draws himself up and puffs out his chest and gets way huffy about the question… They all do this when the question gets posed… All of the coaches who recruit criminals to win games employ the patented area woman offended for fourth time in one day method in response to this oft-posed question. Gentlemen, how dare you! The gall!

It’s the same thing for UD, a professor. UD searches high schools all over America in pursuit of evil geniuses, Leopolds and Loebs and Kaczynskis and infant hedge fund managers … all the most brilliant and original sociopaths, so that her school can win the annual Shanghai List Championship. Has she, in her zeal, recruited a few bad apples? No, because you can never know how a person is going to be in advance… And everyone deserves a chance… And you talked to their mothers and their mothers insisted they’d behave… How dare you insist that UD‘s desire to win a contest overrode any sense of morality?

… where the former chief of transplant surgery is on trial for attempted manslaughter.

He also faces three charges of causing bodily injury resulting in death for transplanting livers to unsuitable patients, who subsequently died.

This guy – absurdly not named because of German laws, but so precisely identified in all the articles that everyone must know who he is – has apparently killed quite extensively, in a variety of directions: If the allegations are true, he has killed inappropriate recipients who (one assumes) bribed him to push them up the waiting list; he has also killed non-bribers patiently and legitimately waiting their turn for a liver.

Because this is part of a wider scandal involving medical abuse of the transplant system in Germany, Germans are now refusing – in droves – to donate their organs. As I say, sickening.

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Update: All the yummy details.